DING DING.
As a consultant and account manager for Network Storage, I travel across the Midwestern states of
In addition to that experience set - I have the added pleasure of working for one of the best firms in the business when it comes to information management. The team assembled here has an amazing wealth of experience and education. (More on these guys later.)
We're connected into some of the most respected and innovative companies in this space. Firms such as EMC, VMware, Sun, CommVault, Data Domain, Symantec, Nexsan and Spectra Logic are a few of the resources upon which we draw daily to solve the real world problems our customers face.
So I figured it was finally time for me to take my step into the Blogosphere ring. Being in the world of IT - everything is an acronym: SAN, NAS, CAS, SATA, JBOD, IO, LOL; So I knew this blog had to have an acronym in the title. I finally settled upon JAB - Just Another Blog. Boxing seemed to me like the perfect analogy: Quick, direct and to the point; JAB and move.
The first part consisted of a lightning panel which consisted of 5 self-selected "cloud computing experts" who answered twenty or so questions from the audience. The questions ranged from things like, "How does the move to the cloud impact my business?" to "How do I reboot my server in the cloud?"
After the lightning panel we had breakout sessions. Anyone could come up with a question or a topic they wanted to discuss which would form a session. I lead a session on app scalability in the cloud. Some of the points I discussed:
- Virtualization is changing how you deploy your apps
- Horizontal scaling apps do better in the cloud
- Developers benefit from knowing their app's impact on the underlying infrastructure (Is my app read or write intensive? Does it cache well?)
- Caching is a cheap way to improve database performance
- Database replication (master/slave) or sharding is another way to scale
- The cloud changes how you buy and manage your resources but not *what* you'll need to run your app
- Have at least two providers if you need disaster recovery capabilities
- Products like VMware's vCenter AppSpeed will make scaling out an easy automated process
I want to thank Pat O'Day, Doug Karr and others in the session who contributed a lot of different perspectives.
As server consolidation and virtualization continues to expand in
It’s a zero client because unlike most thin clients, there is no O.S. running on the Pano. Because there is no O.S. running, Pano continues to make advancements in functionality such as direct console access instead of console over RDP which greatly enhance the video performance. All previous generation Pano’s under support now support this feature. The Pano also works with virtually all USB devices. In case you are wondering the Pano software sits inside the guest. (It’s like a keyboard, mouse, and monitor with really long legs.)
So, a product that improves backups, helps you consolidate storage (no more storage at the desktop needed) and improves data storage management is a good idea in an economy where saving money is a must.
Call me or e-mail me so we can help you understand the possibilities even more. Oh, and by the way, they are small and sleek which doesn't hurt when you are replacing a users personal computer.
EMC has made great strides with VMware and they have taken a true leadership position regarding virtualization and networked storage. In 2009 we will see EMC announce even more capabilities to tightly integrate VMware with EMC CLARiiON and Celerra. For instance, EMC has announced a third-party multipathing compatible with VMware Infrastructure through integration with EMC PowerPath. This functionality will greatly increase performance on VMware servers optimizing the network connectivity and will be available with the next major release of VMware Infrastructure virtualization platform. And there is more to come in 2009.
IDC’s market share report indicates EMC has a strong lead (43% market share) for the primary brand of networked storage attached to virtual servers. The solutions and support are solid from EMC, the functionality will only get better and the pricing is as competitive as any tier 1 or tier 2 networked storage available today.
Call me or e-mail me (mgraham@networkstorageinc.com) if you’d like to know more.
Before: Microsoft does not allow licenses to transfer between different physical pieces of hardware sooner than 90 days. If it happens prior to 90 days, an additional license must be purchased. For example, if you have 2 Hyper-V or ESX hosts and migrate or Vmotion 1 Exchange 2007 VM running on Windows 2003 Server from one of those hosts to the other, you must have 2 licenses for Exchange and 2 licenses for Windows. It costs you double in OS and App licensing to Vmotion or migrate between hosts.
After September 1st, 2008: Microsoft removed the 90 day restriction from 41 Microsoft Applications. What this means is that you wouldn't need 2 Exchange licenses anymore. The change however does NOT affect OS licensing or CALs. Also, you must have an Enterprise License Agreement and it does not apply to OEM licenses.
In my opinion, this does not go far enough. It won't apply to a lot of SMB customers who don't have ELA's and it also doesn't affect OS licensing which is probably the biggest pain point. For now, a lot of customers save money if they purchase Datacenter edition and have more 5-6 VM's.
The case that I make is that even if you're not doing virtualizing today, it's not too late and you're going to get a lot of other benefits in areas like backup and disaster recovery. So what are they?
VMware HA - High availability. If one physical server goes down, the other server (s) in the cluster automatically bring those virtual machines back up.
VMware Vmotion - Live migration of machines (e.g. Exchange) from one physical server to another. Perfect for server maintenance.
VMware DRS - Dynamic Resource Scheduler. Performs load balancing VM's between physical ESX servers.
Snapshots - A snapshot of a box at *any* point in time you choose.
VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) - Backup via proxy machine that offloads the burden from the physical host.
The hypervisor (or traffic cop) is the base component. VMware's hypervisor software, ESXi, is now free to anyone. This means you don't have to buy anything extra to start consolidating. It's also easy to upgrade to Foundation (VCB), Standard (Foundation plus HA) or Enterprise (Standard plus Vmotion and DRS).
What's the basic bill of materials for a redundant VMware cluster? One copy of Virtual Center and 1-2 copies of ESX Standard or Enterprise.
Why would you pick it over Microsoft's Hyper-V or Xen? Because you can typically consolidate 2x the number of machines because VMware has Shadow Page Tables which deduplicate memory.
Think of new servers costing less than $740 per server *and* having high availability for free. That's what started singing to my ears when I started to toss out some rough numbers.
Email is without a doubt one of the two or three most important applications for any organization. It is how “business gets done” and without it, business shuts down. When a disaster hits an organization, it is the e-mail system more often than not that is the tool used to communicate with employees and customers.
Our customers in Illinois and Indiana like to talk about and all agree on the benefits, but the majority don’t implement for various reasons.
E-mail Archiving has three solid benefits any of which can justify the implementation.
1. Mitigate risk both internally and externally for any organization - The Federal Rule of Civil Procedures applies to nearly everyone, but again few act on it.
2. Better IT Operations - Reduced risk by shrink the mail store and giving data center managers a better ability to create full backups each night for better data recovery.
3. End-User Productivity – No longer do end users have to manage their mail box size and their PSTs. Their search capabilities also are greatly enhanced when trying to find that e-mail from last month or last year.
I’ve attached a one-page document that we share with customers when explaining the reasons why you should consider email archiving.
Please let me know if we can help you.
Just like gas prices dominate many discussions and ultimately have begun changing our behavior to buy differently, energy-efficient storage should be no less important for Infrastructure Managers as they plan and architect for their data center.
A couple key technologies not only make good business decisions, they also make good environmental decisions.
Server Virtualization (VMware) is a no-brainer and I don’t need to explain the power savings of 1 server versus 10 or 12. Suffice it to say, if you are big enough to consider VMware (10+ Servers), it should be in your plans.
What people don’t seem to understand is that Data De-Duplication technologies have a greater impact on backup to disk utilization than VMware has on server consolidation. Five TB’s of De-Duplicated backups is equivalent to 100TB’s or more of traditional backups. That’s a 20X or more power savings regardless of the type of disk drive. Data De-Duplicaiton also has a great benefit of solving some diaster recovery requirements.
Speaking of disk drives, it’s time to start slowing down when you can! Five years ago you bought a V8 when the same car had a V6 option because it was “better”. Same goes for disk drives. 15K is always the preference over 10K drives. But, do you realize that 1TB of 146G 15K drives uses 33% (need to check this stat) more power than 1TB of 146GB 10K drives and they cost more! Switching to 300GB 10K drives will further reduce the cost and will reduce the power consumption by more than 2X. (3,048 kW/yr vs. 1,434kW/yr).
SATA drives are even more energy efficient than SAS or FC Drives and recently manufactures have begun offering 5.4K SATA drives in stead of the 7.2K standard SATA II drive. If SATA drives are used for file shares or archiving for your organization, check out the slow drives next time you get a chance.
If you’d like to read some other’s ideas regarding “going green” please check out Jeff Nick’s article from his keynote address at the 19th Annual IT Infrastructure Conference at the United Nations.
In the wake of the recent flooding in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana any and all organizations that can’t afford an extended time to restore data need to consider some form of disaster recovery to minimize the impact of any disaster.
Data De-Duplication and IP Based Storage Systems are simple and affordable technologies that give any organization the ability to replicate data off-site. You just need to consider the distance and the bandwidth requirements and how quickly you’d like to have your data on-line and the rest falls into place.
Data De-Duplication can occur in band at the server level, it can occur out of band at the appliance level. But either way it is implemented, it dramatically reduces the bandwidth needed to replicate your data off-site.
IP based storage (iSCSI) allows organizations the ability to utilize its existing WAN and easily transports the data. Storage manufactures such as EMC have integrated FC and IP on a storage controller that provides the benefits of both local performance and remote replication.
We created a high level presentation discussing the multiple options to replicate data and I’ve posted it for your review. If you have any questions or would like to know more, please post a response or send me an e-mail and we can get you more information.
As our Indiana native John Mellencamp wrote and sings, “Now more than ever, the world needs love” (and better data protection!). Let us know if we can help you.
