The cloud provides an easy onramp to building and deploying Big Data solutions. Transitioning from initial deployment to large-scale, highly performant operations may not be as easy.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will discuss the benefits, weaknesses, and performance characteristics of public and bare metal cloud deployments that can help you make the right decisions.

read more

Achieve continuous delivery of applications by leveraging ElasticBox and Jenkins. In his session at DevOps Summit, Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, will demonstrate how you can achieve the following using ElasticBox and the ElasticBox Jenkins Plugin: Create consistency across dev, staging, and production environments Continuous delivery across multiple clouds to handle high loads Ensure consistent policy management across environments: tagging, admin boxes, traceability Spin up machines and environments quickly Deploy applications to any cloud Enable real-time collaboration between developers and operations

read more

Cisco entered the blade server market in a big way five years ago with its Unified Computing System (UCS) environment, taking on IBM, HP, and Oracle in the heart of the cloud computing hardware business.
Now it is extending UCS “introducing significant innovations,” in the company’s words, by expanding its offering and addressing Big Data and the IoT. Mobility, video, and a continued focus on cloud are all part of the strategy, according to Paul Perez, VP & General Manager of Cisco UCS.
The new offering encompasses Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers for “cloud-scale applications,” according to Perez, and the Cisco UCS Mini “for small-scale and enterprise-edge environments.”.  
“Additionally, an expansion of the current UCS portfolio brings new levels of power and scalability for a wide range of data center workloads by unveiling new fourth-generation UCS Rack and Blade Servers for application performance,” according to a company statement, “and new UCS Director solutions to manage Big Data infrastructure workloads.”
The M-Series systems can eliminate up to 95% of the system components duplicated in a traditional server design, according to Cisco, delivering as much as 36% combined TCO savings, the company reports.
On the edge, the UCS Mini is delivered as an “all-in-one solution” to deliver servers, storage, and networking in a compact form factor. The system is also said to bring a savings of as much as 36% in TCO.
A recent IDC report says Cisco is now leads the X86 blade server market in the Americas market, and has seen revenue growth of 39% worldwide on a cumulative four-quarter basis ending Q1 2014.

read more

Enterprises build applications with the latest tools, people and processes yet failures riddle the headlines. If state of the art fails us, it means we need a “New State of the Art.” In his Opening Keynote at 2nd DevOps Summit, John Michelsen, CTO of CA Technologies, will discuss how DevOps hopes to instill a new culture that defines the new way of managing application delivery. It’s time Enterprise IT learns from every other industry and begins to use simulation, supply chain governance, continuous delivery and feedback loops to build better products.

read more

Logentries, the most connected log management and analytics service built for the cloud, today announced new Anomaly Detection and Inactivity Alerting to help Dev and IT Ops proactively monitor, troubleshoot and resolve production system issues in real-time.

read more

Planning scalable environments isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will broaden your views to think on an Internet scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, attendees will able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.

read more

By Chris Ward, CTO

Another year, another VMworld in the books. It was a great event this year with some key announcements and updates. First, some interesting stats:

The top 3 strategic priorities for VMware remain unchanged (Software Defined Datacenter/Enterprise, End User Computing, and Hybrid Cloud).  Some interesting numbers presented included on premise infrastructure is increasing at a rate of 4% year over year while off premise (primarily SaaS and IaaS) is growing at 25% year over year.  However, the overall market for on premise today is about $2 trillion while off premise (cloud) is about $45 billion, and most analysts are saying that even in the year 2020 that 75% of infrastructure will still exist on premise. 

The key takeaway here is that Hybrid will be the ultimate winner with most customers ending up with a mix of both on and off prem, and the secret will be getting the integration right.

Monday’s opening keynote contained several announcements outlined below.  I’ve categorized them into the three primary focus areas for VMW (SDDC, Hybrid Cloud, and EUC).

SDDC:

• There was some fun new naming of the management toolsets.  vRealize will now be the prefix to all management tools so vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) now becomes vRealize Automation, vCloud Operations Manager (vCOPS) now becomes vRealize Operations, etc.  There will be new suites of the management tools as well, known as the vRealize Suite, which replaces the vCenter Operations Suites.  There are a few versions/editions of the new vRealize Suites including….
  • vRealize Automation (formally vCAC), vRealize Operations (formally vCOPS), Log Insight, and ITBM Standard)
  • vRealize Operations Insight will include the vRealize Advanced Suite along with Log Insight.  This is targeted as an Upgrade Path to existing vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) customers who want/need additional functionality.
  • vRealize Air Automation – As the ‘Air’ name implies, this is a service hosted in the public cloud and is essentially vCAC as a Service consumed via SaaS vs traditional on premise.  This will be released in Beta very soon and should be GA by Q1 2015.
  • Expect to also see vRealize Air Operations (vCOPS as a Service) around this same timeframe as well.
• vCloud Suite 5.8 was announced with major updates. These updates included tighter component integration, enhanced support for next generation applications, and proactive support.  On the integration front, this is mainly focused on tighter vCAC (now vRealize Automation) supportability with SRM and NSX.  The next gen app support is focused around Hadoop and containers (Docker), and the proactive support is really just the inclusion of the support assistant vCenter plugin.
• VMWare continues to join and support open source initiatives including joining OCP (Open Compute Project). They formally announced their own distribution of OpenStack.  The OpenStack announcement is pretty significant as VMware will now formally have their own supported distribution as they have seen numerous customers adopting OpenStack in the Enterprise.  The OCP announcement is important as well and is tied to the next announcement from the show……
• VMware is entering the hyper-converged infrastructure space with the introduction of EVO.  This is essentially a packaged software stack which will run on OEM hardware from vendors such as Dell, Fujitsu, Supermicro, etc. The key thing here is fast deployment. VMWare claims that once the systems are racked and cabled that it only takes 15 min to get a full software stack deployed (vSphere along with management capabilities and vSAN for storage).  EVO will come in two flavors, EVO Rail and EVO Rack.  The primary difference between them is scale. Rail starts at about 100 VM support scalable to 400 and Rack scaling is targeted more to enterprise level deployments.
• Other announcements on the SDDC side of the house include vSphere 6 Beta and vSAN 2.0 Beta along with vVOL Beta.  On the vSphere 6 side, major new functionality will include SMP enabled Fault Tolerance for up to 4 vCPU VMs, Cross vCenter vMotion and enhanced Long Distance vMotion.  Not much news on the vSAN 2.0 Beta but expect to see major storage manufacturers begin to release vVol support pretty soon.

Hybrid cloud: 

• There were more naming changes here as vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) will now be known as vCloud Air.  Any and all cloud based offerings from VMwrae going forward will have ‘Air’ in the name.
• The latest release of vCloud Connector has L2 overlay capabilities to extend a subnet across the WAN into vCloud Air.
• Launch of GOV cloud within vCloud Air to support federal government compliance.  Very similar to Amazon’s Gov cloud offering.
• On average, VMware is launching 1 new datacenter per month along with partnering with the existing 3,500 worldwide VSPP service providers.  Data sovereignty was brought up as a major point for the EU, and the fact that VMware has the VSPP partners means that they don’t necessarily have to make large CapEx investments in datacenters across all of the EU countries.  Additionally, any service that VMware makes available on vCloud Air will also be made available to the VSPP providers should they want to offer the same sort of service.
• Some new services to keep an eye out for include API level integration to existing DevOps toolsets, Database as a Service (DBaaS) with MS SQL and MySQL with Oracle coming down the road, object based storage utilizing EMC ViPR, and mobility tools via Airwatch running in vCloud Air. As mentioned above, we’ll also see the management toolsets being offered ‘as a service’ in early 2015 as well with Automation and Operations being the first two.
• Finally, the launch of vCloud Air ‘On Demand’ will be coming by end of year. This is essentially a way to consume the service via a quick credit card swipe and provision in as quickly as 30 seconds with Amazon style billing by the minute.

End user computing:

There’s a lot going on in this space since VMware had a big leadership change last year.  In 12 months we have seen the acquisitions of Desktone, Airwatch, and CloudVolumes along with expanded partnerships with F5, Google, and Nvidia.

• There was an announcement around doing not just Desktop as a Service (DaaS) but also Apps as a service in vCloud Air. There weren’t a lot of details here, but I assume it would be similar to what Microsoft is doing in Azure – essentially presenting individual apps via terminal services (but I need to do more digging on this one).
• With the release of vSphere 6, we will finally see true vGPU support with VIEW and the Nvidia GRID solution. The demos shown at the conference were impressive and on par with what we’ve seen from the XenServer/XenDesktop integration with GRID.
• The two most interesting things I saw were the CloudVolumes integration along with what VMware is calling ‘Project Fargo.’  I have looked at CloudVolumes in the past, and the technology is very slick from an application perspective.  The promise/vision is that you can get a persistent desktop experience in a non-persistent environment because you can dynamically deliver apps without the traditional ‘packaging’ required. Project Fargo is all about the concept of ‘forking’ whereby you can take an instant clone of a running VM without the overhead and scaling issues we typically see with Composer/Linked Clones.

All in all, another great VMworld. Obviously, this is a quick summary. If you would like to discuss in any more detail, shoot us an email at socialmedia@greenpages.com

The 3rd International Internet of @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo – to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – announces that its Call for Papers is now open.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the biggest idea since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.

read more

In a very real way, everything they do at iXsystems helps the cause of open source. From the engineers who write code they contribute back to FreeBSD, to the testers who give feedback on open source drivers back to vendors, to the marketers who travel around the world to promote FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and FreeNAS, to the salespeople who educate every client about how open source software can save them money and do more than they ever imagined… the list goes on. iXsystems engineers and leaders hail from everything from top-500 websites to Fortune 500 powerhouses.

read more

Enterprises require the performance, agility and on-demand access of the public cloud, and the management, security and compatibility of the private cloud. The solution? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Simone Brunozzi, VP and Chief Technologist(global role) for VMware, will explore how to unlock the power of the hybrid cloud and the steps to get there. He’ll discuss the challenges that conventional approaches to both public and private cloud computing, and outline the tough decisions that must be made to accelerate the journey to the hybrid cloud. As part of the transition, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model will enable enterprise IT to build services beyond their data center while owning what gets moved, when to move it, and for how long. IT can then move forward on what matters most to the organization that it supports – availability, agility and efficiency.

read more