When Big Data Meets Cloud Meets Infrastructure

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says: 

In the past, almost all context was able to be deduced from the transport (connection) and application layer. The application delivery tier couldn’t necessarily “reach out” and take advantage of the vast amount of data “out there” that provides more insight into the conversation being initiated by a user. Much of this data falls into the realm of “big data” – untold amounts of information collected by this site and that site that offer valuable nuggets of information about any given interaction. 

"Because of its expanded computing power and capacity, cloud can store information about user preferences, which can enable product or service customization. The context-driven variability provided via cloud allows businesses to offer users personal experiences that adapt to subtle changes in user-defined context, allowing for a more user-centric experience."

-- “The power of cloud”, IBM Global Business Services

All this big data is a gold mine – but only if you can take advantage of it. For infrastructure and specifically application delivery systems that means somehow being able to access data relevant to an individual user from a variety of sources and applying some operational logic to determine, say, level of access or permission to interact with a service.

It’s collaboration. It’s integration. It’s an ecosystem.

It’s enabling context-aware networking in a new way. It’s really about being able to consume big data via an API that’s relevant to the task at hand. If you’re trying to determine if a request is coming from a legitimate user or a node in a known botnet, you can do that. If you want to understand what the current security posture of your public-facing web applications might be, you can do that. If you want to verify that your application delivery controller is configured optimally and is up to date with the latest software, you can do that.

What’s more important, however, is perhaps that such a system is a foundation for integrating services that reside in the cloud where petabytes of pertinent data has already been collected, analyzed, and categorized for consumption. Reputation, health, location. These are characteristics that barely scratch the surface of the kind of information that is available through services today that can dramatically improve the operational posture of the entire data center.

Imagine, too, if you could centralize the acquisition of that data and feed it to every application without substantially modifying the application? What if you could build an architecture that enables collaboration between the application delivery tier and application infrastructure in a service-focused way? One that enables every application to enquire as to the location or reputation or personal preferences of a user – stored “out there, in the cloud” – and use that information to make decisions about what components or data the application includes? Knowing a user prefers Apple or Microsoft products, for example, would allow an application to tailor data or integrate ads or other functionality specifically targeted for that user, that fits the user’s preferences. This user-centric data is out there, waiting to be used to enable a more personal experience. An application delivery tier-based architecture in which such data is aggregated and shared to all applications shortens the development life-cycle for such personally-tailored application features and ensures consistency across the entire application portfolio.

It is these kinds of capabilities that drive the integration of big data with infrastructure. First as a means to provide better control and flexibility in real-time over access to corporate resources by employees and consumers alike, and with an eye toward future capabilities that focus on collaboration inside the data center better enabling a more personal, tailored experience for all users.

It’s a common refrain across the industry that network infrastructure needs to be smarter, make more intelligent decisions, and leverage available information to do it. But actually integrating that data in a way that makes it possible for organizations to actually codify operational logic is something that’s rarely seen.

Until now. 

Data Center Equipment: Getting Rid of Decommissioned Gear

 – Terry Fockler, Silicon Valley Engineering/Solutions (terryfockler@sbcglobal.net), says: 

One of the most over-looked issues for any data center manager going through a refresh or upgrade (and the last thing they tend to consider), is what to do with the decommissioned equipment. Equipment typically sits in a closet until someone gets tired of tripping over it.

But recovering that gear and moving it quickly can be a reality (with the right vendor). The longer it sits, the more it loses value, so repurposing and tracking is very important along with data mitigation. The last thing a data center manager wants or needs is to expose data to the public and improperly disposing of gear -  this can come back to haunt anyone. The chain of custody is very critical to the security of data and the safety of the corporate environment. The EPA is constantly evolving the rules on disposition and tracking of decommissioned/used data center equipment, and they are seriously increasing the penalties.

If you have an upcoming upgrade or refresh, recovery should be an up-front issue: How do we dispose of the decommissioned gear; How can we maximize the return? How will this impact our taxes and depreciation schedules, and how do we avoid EPA and federal negative issues and requirements? In the secondary market, timing is critical to maximize your return, the secondary market is extremely fluid and volatile.

The date mitigation and chain of custody are two areas that can cause major headaches, not only in the immediate future, but also have long lasting potential dangers. That equipment may change hands and ownership several times.

Choose your vendor carefully and you will rest in knowing your data is erased and you have maximized your return, and that your company name will not also end up in a land fill somewhere.

Rethinking Virtualization Strategies

Q&A with Kent Christensen, practice manager with Datalink (http://www.datalink.com/):

Chris MacKinnon (DCP): Why are unified virtual infrastructures useful in today's enterprise data centers?

Christensen: A dramatic transformation in the way Information Technology (IT) departments operate has put their directors and managers at a crossroads. On one side, IT administrators are under pressure to deliver higher levels of service and be more responsive to enabling competitive business objectives. On the other side, IT departments are equally pressured to limit budgets, “do more with less,” and show positive ROI from optimization initiatives.

Savvy IT leaders are beginning to resolve both sides of this conflict by rethinking their virtualization strategies. Virtualization was originally a way to improve utilization of physical servers. Now it’s being expanded to turn entire data centers into dynamic, agile, services-oriented architectures — ones that accelerate business objectives and competitiveness.

Data center virtualization is a rare opportunity for IT. The potential cost savings are tremendous. The efficient sharing of physical server, storage, and network resources translates into far lower capital purchases and operating expenses. Wasteful application “silos” are eliminated. Data centers can support more applications, implement them faster, and maintain higher service levels. Data center virtualization also gives IT managers and admins powerful new tools for resource scheduling, data protection, and disaster recovery. And while the prospect of low-cost, no-fuss cloud computing from outside vendors is tempting, it’s not ready for prime time due to serious performance and security issues.

Instead, an IT department can use data center virtualization to build its own private cloud, delivering the same economies and efficiencies to the organization. Then, once the public cloud matures, IT can buy resources from third parties as needed to meet unexpected demands or offload resource-intensive tasks.

MacKinnon: Why should data center and IT managers care about  unified virtual infrastructures ? How can they benefit from them?


Christensen: Virtualization across the data center can provide notable savings on floor space, power, and cooling costs, as well as utilization of existing assets across servers, storage, and networks. While the financial benefits alone are compelling, the largest gains can be obtained by reducing complexity and streamlining the speed at which IT accelerates the business.

Instead of building separate infrastructures according to the needs of individual applications, data center virtualization lets you build a dynamic platform of infrastructure that supports all applications. Abstracting applications from physical resources gives you managed capabilities that you can’t get from physical hardware. These include:

- The ability to migrate live applications from one physical server to another without disruption
- Increased availability for applications during hardware failure
- Resource scheduling and load balancing across existing infrastructure
- Improved backup and disaster recovery
- Increased performance, scale, and security
- Integration with storage and network infrastructures

The result is a platform that will support many—if not most—IT applications. The availability, performance, and security are provided by the platform, which reduces the need to build those services into each individual application. The resulting common infrastructure is much more flexible and agile. This is also the framework for expanding to an internal private cloud infrastructure.

MacKinnon: Where should unified virtual data center infrastructures rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

Christensen: A recent survey (Source: Gartner Executive Programs - January 2012) by Gartner called out that cloud computing ranks #3 on a list of top ten priorities for CIOs in 2012.

What are the biggest challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to unifying and virtualizing their data centers?
There can be a lot of obstacles to building a virtual data center. Virtualization is still new in many ways and not fully understood outside of the core IT group. There can be disagreements due to the number and complexity of solutions, and the fact that they cross multiple disciplines. As you map out your virtualization strategy, consider the barriers to adoption, both inside and outside your organization.

Internal barriers fall into two groups: politics and culture, and new ways to think about IT. Most organizations use a variety of applications running on different platforms. Each has its own requirements for networking and storage resources and may have different requirements for access and availability. Multiple applications and technologies can lead to isolated islands of data and potential interoperability issues. In addition, the stakeholders who helped build those applications likely have entrenched policies and attitudes that are not easily changed. As a result, many organizations have a number of different virtualization initiatives directed by different groups within the company. Server teams may not be in sync with application administrators, and storage or networking teams may take a completely different and uncoordinated approach. A unified approach may disrupt the “corporate culture” and can create some internal conflict where decisions could potentially be based on relationships and alliances rather than sound business principles.

Virtualization also requires new skills. Many people need time to think it through. But thinking is good because building an internal cloud requires a lot of planning based on an understanding of exactly what the business needs. It’s an incremental process, taking the time to think through where you want to go and how you will accomplish it.

External barriers largely come from disagreement within the industry on how to proceed. No two storage or network virtualization vendors agree on how to design and deploy a virtualization strategy. Reliable interoperability standards have not yet emerged. That’s why it’s prudent to work with a vendor-agnostic consultant such as Datalink. Whereas many manufacturers can only push their products and services, we look at a plethora of options, making our customer’s success our first priority.

MacKinnon: How can data center and IT managers overcome those challenges?

Christensen: The first and most important step is to create a vision and lead to that vision. As a board or CEO considers outside service providers (or cloud providers) as experts at delivering IT services internal IT organizations are challenged with creating a competitive operation. The opportunity for IT leadership is to think and act like a service provider to the organization. What are the services the organization needs not only maintain existing operations but gain a competitive advantage? And how can IT most efficiently deliver those services to the organization reliably and efficiently.

If you look at a cloud service provider as an example, many IT organizations come to the logical conclusion that they can provide services more reliably and at a reduced cost by building a highly efficient internal or private cloud that is designed to support the organization.

Armed with a goal to create a highly competitive and efficient operation IT leaders need to provide leadership to break down existing silos or thought, design and even procurement and raise the bar of IT to what is required to holistically deliver the services the organization requires. This is where a unified data center architecture can accelerate the mission to create unified orchestrated data centers that are both highly efficient and agile to drive business needs.

MacKinnon: What advice can you give to IT and data center managers that have a plethora of similar solutions to choose from?


The challenges with building an internal private cloud are threefold. One is that no single vendor or solution delivers complete unified private cloud architecture. As a result, organizations either need a partner that can assemble a complete solution or IT has to continue to sort out the solutions themselves. An integrator like Datalink with experience in delivering complete unified architectures and helps align best of breed solutions against the organizations requirements.

The second is that a pre-defined private cloud architecture in most cases will not fit a particular organization’s objectives. Many times, IT will determine they do need agile unified resources with which are elastic and measures but chose, for example, to limit the use of self service or charge back. So working with an integrator that can align objectives is important.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that most organizations cannot simply stop existing operations and transform over night. A flexible solution should be able to both leverage existing infrastructure and grow as the business objectives dictate. Working with a solution that can migrate you toward an IT as a Service private cloud vs. selling you a complete solution all at once is the most common approach.

Improving System Availability By 20 Percent

- Steve Yellen, vice president segment marketing at Emerson Network Power (http://www.emersonnetworkpower.com/), says:

Ranked as one of the top 50 safest banks in the world and the best bank in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) has more than 110 branches and more than 450 ATMs in the UAE. With NBAD’s data centers powering those critical financial services, they require high levels of availability, efficiency and performance from their data centers. In order to meet these needs, NBAD deployed a full range of Avocent technologies for its data centers, including power management and planning software to power distribution units (PDUs) and service processor managers for proactive monitoring and maintenance of server health.

NBAD is already seeing a number of benefits from the deployment of Emerson Network Power’s Avocent infrastructure management technologies, including:

• 20 percent increased system availability
• Centralized and remote management of all data center systems
• Improved cooling by two degrees during extreme conditions
• Reduced power consumption
• Increased lifespan of data center systems
• Faster and more effective response on strategic projects
• Elimination of accommodation and employment cost for four engineers for two to three months of design and planning due to the ability to access the data center from a remote location

“Emerson Network Power delivers all the data center management tools and features we need in a unified solution,” said Ayman Al-Qudsi, data center group leader for the NBAD. “The products provide a centralized vision of data center management, including power management, remote access, security, data center design and planning. This all-in-one solution enables us to be more efficient and effective, while eliminating the headaches associated with having to manage, maintain and learn multiple products.”

Emerson Network Power’s Avocent technologies have brought an array of benefits to NBAD, including the elimination of the need for the team to have physical access to the data center. The solutions have provided the data center team with greater manageability, control and visibility into the data center and processes, enabling a quick turn on strategic projects.

Information Security: Do More With the Right Stuff

- Michelle Johnson Cobb, vice president of worldwide marketing, Skybox Security (http://www.skyboxsecurity.com/), says:

I was in a meeting recently with the CISO of a Fortune 500 company as he was describing his organization’s 2012 plans for virtualized architecture roll-outs including, mergers, growth in their international operations and the rampant addition of cloud services -- among other major network projects. Each of these projects individually creates major network and security architecture changes – the kinds of changes that can shatter operational performance and security policy compliance. Pile them together and you have a recipe for disaster, leading one to surmise this CISO has a stockpile of antacids on his desk.

When asked whether his information security team was going to grow in 2011 to help secure all these new initiatives, the wry answer was: “We get to do more with less.” Doing more with less seems to be a common trend in information security these days, so what’s a security leader to do when faced with the “do more with less” edict?

There are a few key steps that information security executives can take to get the most from their existing security infrastructure, while keeping a keen eye on their network security as they navigate major updates and changes to the network.

Show and tell
The first step is to gain an accurate picture of the network environment as it looks today, using tools that enable executive teams to see the network, visualize threats and quantify risks. By taking this step information security officers can reduce the chance of service disruptions or security breaches, automate network compliance audits and enhance visibility and oversight of the network management process.

Maximize current investments
Catalogue your current security controls and investments and ensure that they are being used accurately and consistently. For instance, ensure that all of your firewalls are configured properly and all critical vulnerabilities have been addressed. Deal with the known issues proactively to reduce the “what if” stress.

Manage ‘pre-attack’ instead of ‘post-attack’Once an accurate network topology is completed it must be checked regularly for security gaps and assessed for new threats so that action can be taken before it’s too late. Conducting this step regularly is critical for preventing security breaches, and let’s face it, nothing will send you over budget faster than a breach, and if it’s your responsibility to explain the expense and loss of brand to the board of directors, I hope you also have a supply of antacids on your desk.

Delegate routine security to IT operations
One way to ensure regular network security check ups are taking place is to link automated security management tools with operational processes, allowing the security team to bake routine security checks into every day processes. For example, setting up regular audits when configuring a firewall management system, with ticketed alerts to the team when a problem is flagged, saves the time and manpower wasted looking for the problem, ultimately saving time when a formal audit is necessary.

Shift spending
Last, but certainly not least, is to swap funds to more effective technologies, leading to reduced time spent on ‘routine’ tasks that can be automated, enabling them to be performed as often as needed with minimal management time. Avoidance of time wasters that have minimal impact on the security level of an organization is also critical to being able to successfully “do more with less.”

Ultimately it’s up to the C-level executives in an organization to make sure the network security strategy meets the needs of the business, because at the end of the day the topic isn’t just about network security – it’s about business security.

Retaining Data At The Lowest Possible Cost And Efficiency Scale

- Deirdre Mahon, vice president of marketing at Rainstor (www.rainstor.com), says:

Probably the single most challenging part of proactively managing the data center is the strategy and planning around IT infrastructure and how much capacity is required to retain existing enterprise data in addition to future storage capacity requirements. Most organizations today retain enterprise data for many years and in fact many never actually delete the data – once transacted, it is retained from “now on.” This places burden on IT that requires data to be online and available for continuous query and analysis in addition to providing fast access to external regulators that govern how long data be retained.

Typically, IT keeps the data in the systems it was originally transacted until such a time where that system is no longer used and becomes legacy but where the data still needs to be retained and accessed. Increasing demands from the business to query this data enforces IT to keep it in expensive systems that require costly DBA resources to maintain over time. However, more diligent information life-cycle data management is required which enforces policies around how long data is retained in enterprise production environments that will ultimately make IT much more efficient and satisfy both the business needs and additionally the IT budget. Offloading large volumes of transactional data from production to a dedicated online archive is key to enabling Big Data to be retained at lowest possible cost and efficient scale.

IT needs to be more rigorous with data management and infrastructure technology choices and the resultant expenditures. Gone are the days where traditional relational or analytical environments are the only option to keep data secure, available and online for business query. There is no longer a one-size fits all approach to managing enterprise data. In the last decade, there has been tremendous innovation in the world of data management and we have witnessed rapid adoption of NoSQL, In-memory, Columnar and Hadoop/MapReduce as ways to corral the ever-growing volume of multi-structured enterprise data. Whilst IT is struggling to transform this data into actionable information for the business, it is very important to not lose sight of the overall cost of storing and retaining this data, which will become even more pronounced as volumes continue to escalate.

A right-tiering approach to how data is managed and stored is required and deploying best-of-breed purpose-built technologies to satisfy the specific business need is what IT needs to focus on.

Analysts continue to report that Big Data is on the rise. IDC says the amount of data will grow 44 times by 2020, and the amount of digital information created and replicated rose by 62 percent in 2010 to nearly 800,000 petabytes, which would fill a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back. By 2020, that pile of DVDs would stretch halfway to Mars.

In terms of RainStor’s rank in overall data center priorities, it’s high, given the speed of enterprise data growth. As our world continues to become more digital, the Big Data deluge will drive an increasing need for additional data center storage across all industries, including communications, healthcare, financial services, SmartGrid utilities, security, etc. This will place new levels of stress on our data centers, systems and infrastructures.

Central to RainStor’s unique product capabilities is the ability to compress and de-duplicate large data sets, enabling reduction ratios that are typically 40:1, rising to 100:1 with some data, through the use of four distinct, yet complementary, techniques. With RainStor’s data reduction capabilities, organizations can significantly reduce overall storage costs and enable a data center to run much more efficiently.

The four techniques include field level de-duplication, pattern level de-duplication, algorithmic and byte level compression. These don’t result in any loss of detail; instead, RainStor stores each record as a series of pointers to the location of a single instance of data value or pattern of data values.

RainStor offers a new class of Big Data repository, focused on long-term Big Data retention with continuous query access. With RainStor, data centers can go on a “Big Data Diet” or in other words, reduce the storage capacity and cost to keep large volumes of data online. For example, you can offload 180-day-old+ data from production to RainStor for your online archive, and retain query and analysis capabilities via standard SQL and various BI tools. RainStor achieves this at a much lower cost per terabyte stored. By having virtually unlimited amounts of data online and available, you eliminate the need for tape archive and therefore the time delay and manual effort to retrieve data from tape, which is risky especially if data sets are large and schemas have changed since the time the data was offloaded.

Data center and IT managers should carefully consider a tiered infrastructure and data management strategy to retain and store critical enterprise data for both business and external regulatory requirements. RainStor’s patented technology is primarily focused on reducing the amount of data stored, which also significantly reduces overall storage costs, and you can run on low-cost commodity hardware enabling you to lower overall total cost of retained data. Let’s look at the key benefits to RainStor’s unique capabilities.

RainStor benefits enterprise data centers in the following ways:

• Dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of storing large volumes of historical structured and semi-structured data compared to traditional databases
• Provides continuous access to historical data, which enables organizations to meet compliance regulations and to give business users access to broader data sets for ongoing analytics and BI
• Allows organizations to retain historical data, on-premise, via public or private cloud and hybrid storage
• Enables you to better control your data assets by auto-deleting records based on compliance retention rules.

Most large organizations today retain data for many years, and a 2011 DBTA survey reveals that data is retained forever. They will benefit from the following capabilities:

• Specific use-cases would include compliance data retention, query and reporting and situations where you need to archive legacy application data on systems you are retiring due to consolidation or modernization efforts.
• Continuous online access to larger and broader data sets that are query-able through standard SQL or BI tools whereby you can re-instate older data into production analytics environments for better results
• Ability to compress or reduce data sets to a smaller, manageable footprint (~40 to 1 or greater) in order to reduce overall storage costs and scale as data volumes inevitably grow
• Ability to retain specific data sets by pre-configured business rules, which allow organizations to easily purge data at exactly the right time. (Keeping data longer than required makes little sense and can in some cases be risky so automating this keeps data retention costs down.)
• Ability to run on a broad range of hardware and operating systems, which ensures future flexibility
• Compressing and reducing data to 95 percent means less storage footprint and provides not only significant savings for on-premise data center deployments but is even more economically attractive with cloud deployments.

Big Data presents a challenge for IT and is particularly pronounced in key industries including communications, financial services, utilities and healthcare because they are governed by external regulatory requirements for retaining and providing quick access to historical data for audits, reports and business analysis. IT must select the best technology solutions available to keep data for extended periods of time and more importantly, in the most cost effective way.  For large global organizations, keeping and storing large volumes of data is a sunk cost, and doing so in the most efficient way is critical to staying ahead of the competition.

Investing in technology that compresses data at a high rate, satisfies stringent compliance and government regulations, provides ease-of scale and the fact that it’s query-able is critical for these organizations. RainStor solves this problem by delivering a unique technology capability that ultimately reduces the data footprint and makes the problem 10x less cost, when compared to a traditional database approach. Often operational systems become bloated over time with historical data sets, which can be offloaded to a RainStor archive for continuous data access. Additionally, instead of putting data on tape which is risky because you will have challenges with re-instating the data to the original system especially if it is voluminous. Data warehouse repositories can also be offloaded with large data sets to RainStor where that historical data can later be pulled back into the core BI system if deeper analysis is required in the future.

RainStor’s IP is on its unique compression capabilities where it uses a tree-based structure or a “binary tree” to store data that links the various instances of patterns together to establish data records. This means that the original records can be reconstituted at any time. This de-duplication process also means that the bigger the data set, the higher the probability that values and patterns will be repeated, and the greater the level of compression that can be achieved when loaded.

Take a look at this video by RainStor’s Chief Architect, which explains how extreme data compression is achieved to deliver significant reduction in storage footprint for cost-efficient Big Data retention:

Cloud is an Exercise in Infrastructure Integration

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (www.f5.com), says:

When you get down to the architectures involving cloud – whether on or off-premise or hybrid – it’s really all about integrating infrastructure.

It remains to be seen if network and operations are better off never using the word “integration” given the nearly violent negative reasons one sees in the development and architecture sides of IT to the word. Integration, even after the introduction of SOA and the nearly messianic view of the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) in saving us from the horrors of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI), remains problematic for IT. Standards weren’t, interoperability didn’t and reuse was a concept that was thrown under that bus by developers reluctant to trust or simply unaware of existing services.

But integration also remains necessary. The dominant web 2.0 model leverages APIs instead of endpoints, but ultimately it attempts to do the same thing that every integration model in the history of IT has done: share data and enable business processes to span applications.

What cloud computing is doing is forcing infrastructure –network, storage and application delivery – models to adopt many facets of development. A services-based approach to provisioning as a means to enable IT responsiveness through the application deployment process. Multi-tenant models of management to support fault-isolation and self-service. And integration to support sharing of data and enable operational processes to span components. The data is different, the processes have a different focus, but the concept is exactly the same. Applying the web 2.0 model of API integration to infrastructure enables the sharing of data (context) as well as automation and the ability of infrastructure systems to instruct and be instructed by the management frameworks that drive automation and orchestration.

Today there are very few examples of “public only” cloud computing deployments. Even those that might at first appear to be “public only” such as a SaaS are not; those applications are ultimately integrated with systems and applications and, in many cases, infrastructure that still resides within the physical data center because the data housed in SaaS is only part of the big business picture. It needs to be correlated and integrated and analyzed and warehoused somewhere, and all that requires integration of some sort via APIs to pull the data out of the cloud and put it into systems internal to the data center where they can be used.

Cloud bursting or cloud extension or cloud-what-have-you models that leverage cheaper compute and storage resources from public cloud providers require integration at the infrastructure layers. Using storage resources from the cloud as part of a larger tiering strategy mean that some piece of infrastructure – storage virtualization likely – is integrating those resources via an API. Similarly, compute resources must be integrated – included – in architectures in the data center if they are used as part of a dynamic capacity extension strategy. That requires some integration via an API or infrastructure capable of natively managing those resources in public cloud environments (which, if we peer close enough, we’ll see is enabled via .. an API).

Integration means including, to make part of the whole and to do so – hopefully – seamlessly and automatically. Even if an application is completely deployed in a public cloud computing environment it is almost a Heisenberg certainty that its data will be integrated back into some warehouse or application in the data center or that it will ultimately need to participate in some larger process that requires spanning both public cloud and private data center. Or the cloud-deployed application will become so critical to business that it must be managed in the same way as other business-critical applications – it must use corporate identity stores, it must be monitored and managed via existing enterprise application performance management systems, it must be integrated with the rest of the business and operations.

Which means infrastructure integration. Let’s hope we’ve learned enough from the trials and travails of enterprise integration that we get it (mostly) right the first time. I’d also suggest investing heavily in turkeys. Because if enterprise application integration required sacrificial chickens, we’re probably going to need something a bit bigger to meet the challenge of integration efforts that will span environments, models, and architectures.

In-Store Tablet Usage on the Rise. Retail Bandwidth Shouldn't Be.

- Paula Polei, director of marketing at SuperLumin Networks (www.superlumin.com), says:

The increased use of tablet devices is evident, and it has triggered a dramatic change for retailers. From customers using their own tablets to purchase products not available on store shelves, to in-store tablet kiosks used to browse visual catalogs or product videos, a new era of shopping is now taking place.

According to the State of Retailing Online Report, tablets account for 21 percent of a retailer’s total mobile traffic. While once an emerging trend for tech-savvy shoppers, in-store tablet browsing is now a shopping tool that everyday consumers are using to research products, check inventory and redeem coupons.

That being said, retailers typically have limited bandwidth that can’t accommodate spikes in Web traffic accompanied by use of these devices. In the past, retailers have simply added bandwidth as new applications filled and superseded current network capacity. However, with the advent of high-definition applications and videos, bandwidth no longer solves the problem. The extra external bandwidth becomes saturated almost immediately when multiple viewing options exist.

Recently, SuperLumin Networks, a leading provider of scalable, high-performance media proxy and application acceleration solutions, announced the launch of its Nemesis Store Proxy. Designed to improve in-store browsing when using iPads, tablets and other devices, the Nemesis Store Proxy is ideal for retailers with limited bandwidth looking to improve the customer experience and enhance network performance.

Instead of purchasing more bandwidth to support these network challenges, retailers now have the option to utilize the Nemesis Store Proxy to cache frequently accessed content, so customers have an enhanced browsing experience. Copies of popular retrieved Web objects are stored locally on the proxy, so subsequent requests for the same objects are delivered directly from the Nemesis Store Proxy, thus minimizing response time and bandwidth consumption, and ultimately improving customer satisfaction.

Those interested in more information about SuperLumin Nemesis can download the ISO, documentation and a 45 day trial license here.

A Picture Paints A Thousand Words, A Video Displays A Thousand Pictures

- James Donovan, director of channel development and training for CommScope Enterprise Solutions (http://www.commscope.com/), says:

Video is the element most often associated with the term multimedia, and also widely touted as the ‘bandwidth cruncher’. Applications, such as desktop video teleconferencing and Internet radio/TV, require that sound (e.g., voice, music) and moving images (e.g., video, animation) be sent in real time. In order to preserve the appearance of continuous sound or image, such applications are delay-intolerant, providing real challenges for network equipment developers and network designers. For network infrastructures, the medium simply must carry data at an adequate rate.

Digital video appears on a screen in a digital format made up of many individual dots or pixels. To digitally display true, photo-realistic color, each pixel requires three bytes of data – one each to describe the red, green, and blue (RGB) color components of each pixel. Using the example of a UXGA display showing full screen video that is uncompressed, it would require 5,760,000 bytes (1600 pixels x 1200 pixels x 3 bytes/pixel) of information to display one frame of video.

The perception of motion occurs when a series of frames are displayed in rapid succession known as the refresh rate. For example, standard analog television displays use a refresh rate of 30 frames per second (25 frames per second in many parts of the world). Higher resolution applications require refresh rates more than double that, in the order of 72 frames per second. To achieve this digitally uncompressed over a data network would require a data throughput of 8 bits/byte x 5,760,000 bytes/frame x 72 frames/second = 3.3 Gb/s.

At 3.3 Gb/s, it is clear that constant digital video traffic would rapidly cause most networks to struggle due to congestion, especially if document sharing and text/image file transfer are added and occurring at the same time in real-time. Gigabit networking is fully justified for these applications.

In reality, most video is transmitted compressed using standards based encoding schemes such as MPEG2 (Motion Picture Entertainment Group) that require a fraction of the digital information required for uncompressed, but there are a growing number of applications such as medical CAT scans, X-Rays and entertainment formats that require more uncompressed capability. Data compression techniques reduce the bandwidth requirements by an order of magnitude but the degree of compression that is acceptable depends on the quality desired for the sound or image. Various algorithms are available that allow developers and end users to tune the degree of compression to an application’s requirements, but there is always a cost in terms of quality. The other penalty is latency – sophisticated compression schemes increase latency that can be burdensome for real-time 2-way video interactions.

But this is theory, what is the reality.

What are your experiences with deploying and/or using video on networks and devices whether they be wired or wireless?

2011 Momentus Hybrid HHDD Moment

- Greg Schulz, Founder and Sr. Advisor of The Server and StorageIO (StorageIO) Group (http://www.storageio.com/), says:

It has been a several months now since applying the latest firmware (SD25) which resulted in even better stability that was further enhanced when upgrading a few months ago to Windows 7 on all systems with the Seagate Momentus XT HHDD installed in them. One additional older system was recently upgraded from a slower, lower capacity 3.5 inch form factor SATA HDD to a physically smaller 2.5 inch HHDD. The net result is that system now boots in a fraction of the time, shuts down faster, work on it is much more productive and capacity was increased by three and half times.

Why use an HHDD when you could get an SSD?
With flash SSD devices continuing to become more affordable for a given price capacity point, why did I not simply install some of those devices instead of using the HHDDs?

With the money saved from buying the 500GB Momentus XT on Amazon.com (under $100 USD) vs. buying a smaller capacity SSD, I was also able to double the amount of DRAM in that system furthering its useful life plus buying some time to decide what to replace it with while having extra funds for other projects.

Sure I would like to have more and larger capacity SSDs to go along with those I already have, however there is balancing budget with needs and improving productivity (needs vs. wants).

To expand more on why the HHDD at this time vs. SSD, want some more SSD devices to coexist with those I already have and use for different functions. Looking to stretch my budget further, the HHDDs are a great balance of being almost and in some cases as fast as SSDs while at the cost of a high capacity HDD. In other words Im getting the best of both worlds which is a 7,200 RPM 2.5 inch 500GB HDD (e.g. for space capacity) that has 4GB of single layer cell (SLC) flash (e.g. SSD) and 32MB of DRAM as buffers (for read and write performance) to help speed up read and write operations.

Given for what Im using them for, I do not need the consistent higher performance of an SSD across all of my data which brings up the other benefit, Im able to retain more data on the device as a buffer or cache instead of having to go to a NAS or other storage repository to get it. Even though the amount of data being stored on the HHDD is increasing, not all of it gets backed up locally or to my cloud provider as there is already a copy(s) elsewhere. Instead, a small subset of data that is changing or very important gets routinely protected locally and remotely to the cloud enabling easier and faster restores when needed. Now if you have a large budget or someone is willing to buy or give you one, sure, go ahead and get one of the high capacity SSDs (preferably SLC based if concerned about endurance) however there are some good MLC ones out there as well.

Step back a bit, what is an HHDD?
Hybrid hard disk drives (HHDDs) such as the Seagate Momentus XT are, as their name implies, a combination of large- to medium-capacity HDDs with FLASH SSDs. The result is a mix of performance and capacity in a cost effective footprint. HHDDs have not seen much penetration in the enterprise space and may not see much more, given how many vendors are investing in the firmware and associated software technology to achieve hybrid results using a mix of SSDs and high capacity disk drives along with the lack of awarness that they exist.

Where HHDDs could have some additional traction is in secondary or near-line solutions that need some performance enhancements while having a large amount of capacity in a cost-effective footprint. For now, HHDDs are appearing mainly in desktops, laptops, and workstations that need lots of capacity with some performance but without the high price of SSDs. Before I installed the HHDDs in my laptops, I initially used one as a backup and data movement device, and I found that large, gigabyte-sized files could be transferred as fast as with SSDs and much faster than via my WiFi based network and NAS. The easiest way to characterize where HHDDs fit is where you want an SSD for performance, but your applications do not always need speed and you need a large amount of storage capacity at an affordable price.

SSDs are part of the future, however HDDs have a lot of life in them including increased capacities, both are best used where their strengths can be maximized, thus HHDDs are a great compliment or stepping stone for some applications. Note, Seagate recently announced that they have shipped over one million HHDDs in just over a years time.

I do find it interesting though when I hear from those who claim that the HDD is dead and that SSD is the future yet they do not have SSDs in their systems let alone do they have or talk about HHDDs, hmmmm.

The Infrastructure 2.0 - Security Connection

- Lori MacVittie, senior technical marketing manager at F5 Networks (http://www.f5.com/), says:

You’ve heard it before, I’m sure. The biggest threat to organizational security is your own employees. Most of the time we associate that with end-users who may with purposeful intent to do harm carry corporate information offsite but just as frequently we cite employees who intended no harm – they simply wanted to work from home and then Murphy’s Law took over, resulting in the inadvertent loss of that sensitive (and often highly regulated) data. “The 2009 CSI Computer Crime survey, probably one of the most respected reports covering insider threats, says insiders are responsible for 43 percent of malicious attacks.” (The true extent of insider security threats, May 2010)

And yet one of the few respected reports concerning the “insider threat” indicates that the danger comes not just from end-users but from administrators/operators as well. Consider a very recent case carried out by a disgruntled (former) administrator and its impact on both operations and the costs to the organization, which anecdotally backup the claim “insider breaches are more costly than outsider breaches” (Interesting Insider Threat Statistics, October 2010) made by 67% of respondents to a survey on security incidents.

"The Feb. 3 attack effectively froze Shionogi's operations for a number of days, leaving company employees unable to ship product, to cut checks, or even to communicate via e-mail," the U.S. Department of Justice said in court filings. Total cost to Shionogi: $800,000.
Cornish had resigned from the company in July 2010 after getting into a dispute with management, but he had been kept on as a consultant for two more months. Then, in September 2010, the drug-maker laid off Cornish and other employees, but it did a bad job of revoking passwords to the network." (Fired techie created virtual chaos at pharma company, August 2011)

Let us pause for a moment and reflect upon that statement: it did a bad job of revoking passwords to the network. Yeah. The network. See, a lot of folks picked up on the piece of this story that was directly related to virtualization because Mr. Malicious leveraged a virtualization management solution to more efficiently delete, one by one, critical operational systems. But what’s really important here is the abstraction of the root cause – failure to revoke access to the network – because it gets to the heart of a much deeper rooted and insidious security threat: the disconnected way in which we manage access to data center infrastructure.

INFRASTRUCTURE IDENTITY MANAGEMENT

Many years ago I spent an entire summer automating identity management from a security perspective using a variety of tools available at the time. These systems enabled IT to automate the process of both provisioning and revocation of access to just about any system in the data center – with the exception of the network. Now that wasn’t a failing on the part of the systems as much as it was the lack of the means to do so. Infrastructure 2.0 and its implied programmatic interfaces were just starting to pop up here and there throughout the industry so there were very few options for including infrastructure component access in the automated processes. For the most part these comprehensive identity management systems focused on end-user account management so that wasn’t as problematic as it might be today. But let’s consider not only where IT is headed but where we are today with virtualization and cloud computing and how access to resources are provisioned today and how they might be provisioned tomorrow.

Are you getting the sense that we might need something akin to identity management systems to automate the processes to provision and revoke access to infrastructure components? I thought you might.

The sheer volume of “services” that might be self-service provisioned and thus require management as well as eventual revocation are overwhelming*.Couple that with the increasing concentration of “power” in several strategic points of control throughout the network from which an organization’s operational posture may be compromised with relative ease and it becomes fairly clear that this is not a job for an individual but for a systematic process that is consistent and adaptable.

What needs to happen when an employee leaves the organization – regardless of the circumstances – is their access footprint needs to be wiped away. For IT this can be highly problematic because it’s often the case that “shared” passwords are used to manage network components and thus all passwords must be changed at the same time. It’s also important to seek and destroy those accounts that were created “just in case” as backdoors that were not specifically authorized. These “orphan” accounts, as they are often referred to in the broader identity management paradigm, must be eradicated to ensure illegitimate access is not available to rogue or disgruntled operators and administrators.

None of these processes – revocation, mass password changes, and orphan account discovery – are particularly sought after tasks. They are tedious and fraught with peril, for the potential to miss one account can be disastrous to systems. A systematic, programmatic, automated process is the best option; one that is integrated and thus able to not only manage credentials across the infrastructure but recognize those credentials that were not authorized to be created. The bonus in implementing such a system is that it, in turn, can aid in the evolution of the data center toward a more dynamic, self-service oriented set of systems.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE 2.0 CONNECTION

Thus we arrive at the means of integration with these identity management systems: infrastructure 2.0. APIs, service-enabled SDKs, service-oriented infrastructure. Whatever you prefer to call these components it is the ability to integrate and programmatically control infrastructure components from a more holistic identity management system that enables the automation of processes designed to provision, manage, and ultimately revoke access to critical infrastructure components. Without the ability to integrate these systems, it becomes necessary to rely on more traditional, old-skool methods of management involving secure shell access and remote scripts that may or may not themselves be a source of potential compromise.

The ability to manage identity and access rights to infrastructure components is critical to maintaining a positive security – and operational – posture. It’s not that we don’t have the means by which we can accomplish what is certainly a task of significant proportions given the currently entrenched almost laissez-faire methodology in data centers today toward access management, it’s that we haven’t stepped back and taken a clear picture of the ramifications of not undertaking such a gargantuan task. The existence of programmatic APIs means it is possible to incorporate into a larger automation the provisioning and revocation of credentials across the data center. What’s not perhaps so simple is implementation, which may require infrastructure developers or very development-oriented operators capable of programmatically integrating existing APIs or architecting new, organizational process-specific services that can be incorporated into the data center management framework.

More difficult will be the integration of operational process automation for credential management into HR and corporate-wide systems to enable the triggering of revocation processes. For a while, at least, these may need to be manually initiated. The important piece, however, is that they are initiated in the first place. Infrastructure 2.0 makes it possible to architect and implement the systems necessary to automate infrastructure credential management, but it will take a concerted effort on the part of IT – and perhaps a highly collaborative one at that – to fully integrate those systems into the broader context of IT and, ultimately, the “business.”

* This is one of the reasons I advocate a stateless infrastructure, but given the absence of mechanisms through which such an architecture could be implemented, well, it’s not productive to wish for rainbows and unicorns when what you have is clouds and goats.

Separating Hype From Reality About High-Efficiency or “Eco-Mode” UPSs

- Pedro Robredo, product line manager at Eaton Corporation (http://powerquality.eaton.com/Default.asp), says:

If you have dealt with UPSs for any length of time, you have no doubt heard plenty of hype about high-efficiency or “ecomode” UPSs in the past. Those terms generally referred to UPSs that switched between modes to improve efficiency. Some form of multi-mode capability has been available on UPS products for years.

But, those conventional multi-mode UPSs have their limitations. They can be ineffective against many types of power problems, slow to respond to transient power conditions and vulnerable to high surges, downstream shorts and other electrical system conditions.

So, can you entrust your mission-critical data centers to multi-mode power protection?

The answer is yes, if you choose wisely and ask the right questions of a UPS vendor, here are five examples of questions you should ask before selecting a high-efficiency, multi-mode UPS:

Does the UPS sacrifice protection to gain high efficiency?
Some high-efficiency UPSs force a trade-off between power savings and power quality.

Internal design—topology—profoundly affects efficiency and protection levels. Line-interactive UPSs are efficient, but they only offer limited voltage regulation, surge suppression, and battery backup. Premium, double-conversion UPSs do the most processing to deliver clean power, but at a cost to efficiency.

New multi-mode UPSs offer the best of multiple topologies in one UPS. As mentioned earlier, these UPSs flash between different modes to match the conditions of the moment:

• Under normal conditions, the UPS is in a high-efficiency mode that includes surge suppression and voltage regulation.
• When input power is poor, the UPS uses double-conversion technology to deliver cleanest output power for equipment.
• When power quality is very bad or goes out altogether, the UPS draws on internal or external batteries or a standby generator as needed, just as a typical UPS does.

How does the UPS achieve its high efficiency?
Models vary in how they switch between operating modes.

Conventional multi-mode or eco-mode UPSs usually operate in one of two ways. They either:

• Run in standby mode under normal conditions, powering the load from a utility input source that bypasses the internal circuitry of the UPS. Whenever major power disturbances occur, the UPS has to start up and charge those internal components, synchronize the electrical waveform, and then transfer to double-conversion mode. During short power disturbances, critical loads are left exposed to potentially damaging conditions.

• Run in line-interactive mode, with an inverter or some sort of power stage running all the time, to provide some surge suppression and voltage regulation when in high-efficiency mode and enable faster switchovers to double-conversion mode.

The first type of UPS takes too long to respond to power conditions. Damaging surges or transient power problems could still reach your valuable electronics. The second type of UPS is faster to jump into action but consumes more energy. This type of UPS tends to be no better than 96–98 percent efficient.

New multi-mode technology resolves both issues. In this newer type of UPS, the inverter is continuously charged but not processing power. The inverter remains connected, running all controls and synchronized with the input power, so the UPS can transition to double-conversion mode without delay and without compromising efficiency. Inverter filtering components are connected to the load all the time, providing surge conditioning comparable to that present in double-conversion mode.

How efficient is the UPS when lightly loaded?
Average efficiency in the real world can be quite different from stated efficiency.

Manufacturers usually state UPS efficiency ratings at full load, but most of today’s UPSs are markedly less efficient under lighter loads, which is how they are likely to be used. Since so many IT systems use dual-bus architecture for redundancy, the typical data center loads each power bus (and each corresponding UPS) at less than 50 percent capacity, often as little as 20 to 40 percent.

As a result, it is important to know UPS efficiency across the entire load range, not just under theoretical ideal UPS operating conditions. While many UPSs drop off markedly in their efficiency under light loads, others can perform at 99 percent efficiency even when lightly loaded, as much as 15 percentage points better than a traditional UPS.

Just how quickly does the UPS detect and respond to power events?Electronic equipment can only tolerate brief, sub-second interruptions.

Look for a UPS that is very quick to detect and respond to power problems—ideally, within two to four milliseconds (1000ths of a second)—for two key reasons:

• Minimizing inrush current. After even a brief disruption in power, IT equipment draws a surge of energy to recharge its capacitors. The longer the interruption, the greater the inrush current. Even if the disruption was only 10–15 milliseconds, the surge current could be 10 times higher than normal draw. If hundreds of servers were all drawing inrush current, the UPS could be overloaded or circuits could trip. For this reason, you want a UPS that switches between modes with the least possible interruption in power—ideally, 2 ms or less.

• Preventing disruption to downstream static switches. If a data center has A and B side power systems for redundancy, it probably has static switches in the power infrastructure to extend this A/B redundancy to single-corded loads. If an upstream UPS takes too long to change state— either from high-efficiency mode to double-conversion mode or back again—these downstream static switches could mistakenly perceive a disruption in power and switch between A and B power sources. To prevent these unwanted and unnecessary transfers from occurring, the UPS must have a faster detection/transfer time than the static switch.

Look closely at a vendor’s claim that a UPS changes modes in a stated number of milliseconds. The stated figure sometimes does not include all the steps involved. Transition time is a function of two factors: (A) How fast the UPS can turn on its inverter, and (B) How fast it can turn off the static switch, which opens the door for power to flow through the UPS internal circuitry. Only when both activities have been accomplished is a UPS truly online in double-conversion mode.

What extras does the UPS offer for maximum protection?
How does the UPS handle storms, overloads and load faults?

New high-efficiency UPSs have been proven reliable under prolonged and repeated power problems far greater than the typical commercial site would experience. Even so, some data center managers and facilities managers will still feel more comfortable knowing the UPS is fully in double-conversion mode at times, such as during thunderstorms or rolling brownouts. Some multi-mode UPSs offer options for locking in double-conversion mode under user-specified conditions.

Also look for a UPS that knows the difference between an upstream and downstream fault. The UPS should respond differently depending on the origin of the power problem.

Closing thoughts

Until recently, there were significant trade-offs to increasing energy efficiency. To offer the highest efficiency, the UPS had to expose downstream equipment to potentially harmful surges and could create other problems due to slow reaction times. New advances in high-efficiency UPSs eliminate these sacrifices. You can have it all in a single UPS—99 percent efficiency and premium protection.

This is the kind of relief data center managers have been looking for as they face intense pressure to reduce energy consumption and meet environmental regulations—without compromising uptime.

Optimizing The Cost Per Bit Per Meter

- It is clear that our insatiable appetite for bandwidth, whether over a wired or wireless network, is fed only at the right price. However let’s be clear it is not a choice of price alone, but a decision on what bandwidth or capacity one gets for the price or the ‘cost per bit’ of the solution.

Remember what information technology was like 20 to 30 years ago? A cross-country telephone conversation would often start with “please hurry, I’m calling long distance”. Documents were read over the phone when content was urgent. A “fast” PC connection was one where the ASCII text would display faster than you could read it. Electronic typewriters with memory were hot items! How drastically things have changed, but through the changes one thing has been apparent, optimizing the cost per bit has been a factor in technology adoption whether you have been aware of it or not.

In my opinion, decisions made on high performance infrastructure solutions should be no different. The impact an infrastructure solution has on facilitating a better cost per bit is a simple yet effective measure of the solution’s value.

In both wired and wireless voice and data networks, disrupting technologies are having a big effect on the cost structure of transporting a bit over any distance. Three basic technologies – microelectronics, storage, and photonics – are disrupting the communications market place.

Microelectronics – or chips – are continuing to follow the famous Moore’s curve and are doubling in processing capability roughly every 18 months. As dramatic is the Moore’s curve, it is the slowest of the technology curves.


Storage capacity – the amount of storage capacity on a given chip is doubling every 12 months driving increases in Storage Area Network, Direct Access Storage, and Network Attached Storage connectivity and demand for access to the network

Optical transmission capacity is doubling every 9 months – by increasing the capacity of a single wave length of light and by putting multiple wavelengths of light on a single fiber. Presently, 1 Terabit systems are already available. 1Terabit is enough capacity for all the voice calls that take place around the world at any point in time. Developers know how to build 10 Terabit systems. The underlying technology will allow at least 100Terabits.

These technology changes along with the introduction of IP networks are driving the march to next generation networks, and I believe only the infrastructurally enabled will survive.

Now that’s a great question to ask – ‘Is your network infrastructurally enabled?’

Network owners need to put in the most coverage, capacity and bandwidth they can justify, knowing it will quickly be consumed. Our imagination of how it will be consumed is only limited by our wallet. The statement “I want it” gets balanced with “can I afford it”. Once the degree of need overcomes the price/affordability hurdle, the purchase is made.

Network designers are seeking to rid network architectures of costly and increasingly unnecessary hierarchies, while optimizing their networks to eliminate delay. Like the virtually free transistors on a microprocessor, latency-free networks and virtually free bits will spur the development of new applications. When transport costs are no longer a barrier to market adoption, the demand for these applications mushroom – resulting in a second order impact of increased capacity demand.

What has this to do with network infrastructures? Well, it is clear that increased bandwidth is emerging in the wide area and access networks, both fixed line and mobile, and at a low cost per bit. The hardware at home, at work and on the go will continue to increase its capability with a reduced cost per bit, and the electronics that link this hardware to the network are increasing in performance with a reduced cost per bit. So surely the trend for network infrastructures is no different. The right choice of infrastructure should take into account it’s ability to optimize the cost per bit of the network.

I believe CommScope’s infrastructure solutions have the ability to optimize the cost per bit per meter in the new era of being ‘infrastructurally enabled’. This ability has to be one of the foundations and business drivers for the adoption of any infrastructure technology.

Simplifying Data Center Management with Converged Network Fabrics

- Matt Theurer, senior vice president, solutions architecture for Virtustream (www.virtustream.com), says:

Two disruptive trends have recently dramatically increased the data protection challenge: massive growth of digital data and the adoption of virtualization technologies that are driving server consolidation. Massive growth in data storage and processing and a decrease in physical server counts with virtualization technologies.

With the amount of data ever-increasing, the storage target and storage fabric (together, traditionally known as a Storage Area Network or SAN) is exploding in an almost exponential fashion. This massive increase in storage requirements, along with the need to access, manipulate and backup the data in ever shrinking time windows is stressing the SAN – putting data at risk and creating pressure on IT budgets.

Implementing a virtualization layer is now the norm. The high compute densities fostered by virtualization have placed similar stresses on the Local Area Network or LAN similar to the stresses placed on the SAN. Before virtualization the LAN traffic generated by a physical server was measured at a few hundred kilobits per second (Kbs) up to a few tens of megabits per second (Mbps). Modern physical hardware can have tens of processors processor cores and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. This hardware supports tens and hundreds of virtual machines (vms) running on a single physical server with the concomitant network traffic now being measured in hundreds or even thousands of Mbps .

Fortunately, a new type of data center networks is emerging –converged networks – which shows great potential for handling scaled-up IT environments and streamlining data center operations.

Benefits of Convergence

Most traditional IT environments consist of two separate infrastructures – SAN and LAN – each with its own distinct architecture. This type of environment can be difficult to manage when scaling up and often requires two separate administrative groups to maintain. However, there is an alternative type of environment that is ideal for streamlining storage in data-intensive environments: a Converged Network Fabric. By merging SAN and LAN into one infrastructure, Converged Network Fabric merge can increase throughput, reduce cabling and redundant switches and adapters and lower administrative costs.

Because of their ability to simplify data center management, Converged Network Fabrics are ideal for enterprises considering migrating to a cloud computing environment. Data centers in traditional IT environments often have complicated communication networks, underutilized capacity and too many resources dedicated to managing both SAN and LAN infrastructures. But with a converged network, managers can strategically align SAN and LAN under one single administrative group, reducing management oversight and costs. In addition, converged network fabrics greatly reduce the number of physical connections per host. By reducing the physical infrastructure and simplifying data center management, converged network fabrics can help position enterprises for a smooth transition to the cloud.

Steps Toward Convergence

Prior to implementing a Converged Network Fabric it is important to understand the workload requirements of the existing communications and storage networks. You must assess the data transfer rates (typically measured in Kbps) for both storage and traditional network communications and you must understand the packets per second on the communications side and the input/output operations per second (IOPS) on the storage side.

Once you understand the storage and network traffic that will be crossing your converged fabric you must examine both the transit devices and the end point devices to verify that they can handle load. Your transit devices (switches) must be able to provide full point to point bandwidth as well as handle all of the packets traversing the interfaces. You will experience a larger mix of packets sizes from the traditional 1500 byte Ethernet frame to 2148 byte Fiber channel frames to 9000 byte Jumbo Ethernet frames. You absolutely do NOT want the ASICS in your switches to be oversubscribed. Beware of the inexpensive switch; it may cost you more in the long run.

Storage devices especially can put “back pressure” on the fabric and source load devices. By calculating IOPS (I/O per second) and the read/write ratio of those IOs, you can accurately design your backed storage system. Ensure your backend storage system(s) have sufficient I/O capacity to support the I/O being generated by the host(s). All of this data will help you determine the end benefit for your particular IT environment.

Avoiding Missteps

The most common mistake when implementing this type of convergence is not understanding the underlying traffic patterns. It is vitally important to size not only for bandwidth but also for packets per second on the communications side and IOPS on the storage side. Understanding how these types of traffic flow and interact is key to a successful implementation.

Another common mistake is not designing for high availability. On a converged fabric all data is flowing through a relatively small number of devices. Ensuring a sound, redundant design is critical.

The third most common issue is not sizing for growing workloads. This is especially true in virtualized and cloud infrastructures. Virtual server sprawl compounds this issue. Even in cases where the virtual infrastructure was properly sized and configured for network and disk I/O during the initial deployment, most organizations see dramatic growth in their virtual infrastructure over time. Typically additional network and storage resources are not added as new virtual machines are deployed. As new virtual machines appear, they are placed on existing disk pools and network volumes – often without consideration for the current communications and storage loads. Virtual machines use the same resources for a given workload as a physical server. It is important to have a good understanding of your requirements for both network and storage capacity and plan for growth accordingly.

Conclusion

Every day businesses are faced with massive data growth and flat IT budgets. Data centers in traditional IT environments often have complicated communication networks, underutilized capacity and high management costs. Converged networks, however, have the ability to increase data center efficiency and reduce management costs. By consolidating data center administration and streamlining throughput Converged Network Fabrics can help be a valuable solution for enterprises preparing for a move to the cloud.

For Additional Information

Two YouTube videos are available taking a closer look at Converged Fabrics:

Converged Fabrics



Converged Fabrics: Part 2 - Calculating IOPs –

Private PaaS: Highly Beneficial To Enterprises

- Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda (http://www.apprenda.com/), says:

Public PaaS, for a variety of reasons, is not accessible to a majority of enterprise IT use cases. However, PaaS in general is highly beneficial to enterprises as it automates typically mundane and long running tasks such as application deployment and provides a foundational architecture for guest application scalability. Private PaaS allows enterprise developers to access the value of PaaS without the accessibility problems of public PaaS since it is offered to them by their own IT department. By deploying private PaaS enterprises will experience significant value including faster time to market, increase agility, reduced costs and complexity and streamlined application management. Being the best of both worlds, private PaaS enables significant cloud-based improvements in the enterprise IT experience without the adoption hurdles associated with public PaaS.

The past decade of enterprise IT has been driven by SOA and virtualization. While these technologies have brought great value to the enterprise they have not provided a universal remedy to all that ails enterprise IT strategies. Significant issues still exist but the recent emergence of PaaS has been touted as the newest technology to promise to revolutionize enterprise IT. With PaaS enterprise software developers can write applications using traditional programming languages and modern architecture patterns, and deploy those applications in the cloud. In addition to providing commoditized platform services, the PaaS model also allows developers to bypass internal infrastructure and to avoid becoming entangled in cumbersome internal procedures required to deploy and manage their newly developed app.

Private PaaS should be a top priority for all enterprises as it provides the full benefits of public PaaS without the outsourced infrastructure hosting which both builds and operates the PaaS and whose tight coupling can be awkward and counterproductive.

The biggest challenge is cultural. Enterprises are accustomed to much more friction in interactions between their developers, data center, and IT managers because there is no common layer that they all agree on. Developers write applications that get “thrown over the fence” to other teams for deployment and management, and typically, this is mired in process and bureaucracy. Private PaaS enables a self-service model. Through the PaaS software, data center and IT managers define strict parameters and boundaries for how infrastructure can be used – “the playground” where anything goes since proper controls are in place – and developers can log in to the private PaaS and “publish” applications to the infrastructure in a mouse click or two. The private PaaS defines a common layer that all parties can agree on, so learning to operate without red tape will take some time.

A second challenge would be that all parties would be operating in an environment where the application (rather than the infrastructure) is the “first class citizen.” Although infrastructure is typically deployed in support of applications, applications are rarely the common currency. Recognizing and managing an IT department that is PaaS-based means changing processes and mindset to be application oriented, which would be a first for most managers.

Overcoming these challenges can best be tackled via two strategies. The first strategy involves working with a vendor. Over the past few years, some early adopters within the Fortune 1000 have done a phenomenal job of building their own PaaS layers. Now that PaaS has been productized, vendors have the ability to evolve PaaS faster than any in-house project. Probably more important than the technology evolution, however, is the experience that private PaaS vendors accumulate across multiple projects where they help organizations roll-out internal private PaaS offerings. A private PaaS vendor can bring their experiences in implementing dozens of internal PaaS offerings to enterprise IT organizations that have never deployed PaaS, which could have a tremendous impact on cultural adoption. Those who build their own PaaS have to learn everything from the ground up, and can’t rely on the experiences of others the way they can through working with a PaaS vendor.

Second, taking an active role in evangelizing the service to developers internally would help significantly in overcoming the aforementioned challenges. It would signal to all parties involved in IT that the offering is well understood and a preferred choice for building apps going forward, building significant confidence to adopt the service.

Strategically, I would urge IT and data center managers to focus on solutions that can truly deliver on the key value drivers of increased agility, increased utilization and increased productivity. Private PaaS is a relatively broad area, and some technologies may not represent a true end to end PaaS, leaving one or more of these value propositions out of the picture. This means that IT managers should scrutinize the product and have the vendor prove that the platform can, in fact, deploy applications within minutes, that the infrastructure is abstracted away from applications, and that the PaaS provides APIs that expose access to complex architectural patterns and platform services. It is unlikely that a given solution can deliver on the organization’s goals without fulfilling a vision that equips IT and developers to:

1. Build better applications faster
2. Simplify the management of infrastructure and applications to a set of autonomic workflows
3. Make better use of infrastructure than virtualization can, thereby boosting utilization

Tactically speaking, test the private PaaS. Engage in a pilot with the vendor to verify that the platform can run on your infrastructure and that applications can be deployed to it. This “rubber meets the road” analysis will weed out imposters and cloud-washed solutions in short order.