Join us for an exclusive briefing with Gartner where they will talk about how IT Executives are modernizing data centers and transforming operations to focus resources on business value.
During the session they will discuss how innovative IT solutions are needed to help IT deliver against rapidly changing business expectations, where the converged infrastructure market is heading and how it can establish a foundation for organizations to capitalise on new revenue opportunities.
Engage with other industry executives as well as leaders from Cisco, EMC and VCE at this invitation-only event and consider how you can focus on your business, not your infrastructure.
Cloud Expo New York: Harnessing APIs to Deliver Competitive Applications
With the rapid rise of open cloud services, organizations face a future of sourcing and integrating functionality from multiple open APIs. But harnessing this API-centric ‘cloud of clouds’ to deliver competitive applications is not simple. You will need to understand and adopt new disciplines, processes, and technologies – like service analysis, cloud brokering, process orchestration, service integration, agile development, accelerated testing, devops collaboration, continuous delivery, and of course, API management and security.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, vice president of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, will explain how the new digital enterprise can take advantage of this API-centric ‘cloud of clouds’ to deliver new competitive applications faster, cheaper, and safer. Aimed at an architect-level audience, this session will include multiple case studies, implementation advice, execution best practices, and other practical lessons.
The Who, What and How of Selling Cloud to SMBs
Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how.
In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMBs are through market segmentation; understanding what cloud services they will consume; and understanding how best to sell to SMBs and from which channels.
Speaker Bio:
Manjula Talreja is Vice President Global Cloud Business Development for Cisco, where she is creating new business models and partnerships with technology vendors, SPs and SIs in cloud. In addition to her focus on key customers and partners, she is helping shape the next phase of Cisco’s enterprise cloud strategy. She is a highly sought-after industry thought-leader, and was recently named to CableFAX Magazine’s ‘Most Powerful Women in Cable 2012’.
Big Data, IoT, API – Newer Technologies Protected by Older Security
Nowadays every single CIO, CTO, or business executive that I speak to is captivated by these three new technologies: Big Data, API management and IoTs (Internet of Things). Every single organizational executive that I speak with confirms that they either have current projects that are actively using these technologies, or they are in the planning stages and are about to embark on the mission soon.
Though the underlying need and purpose served are unique to each of these technologies, they all have one thing common: they all necessitate newer security models and security tools to serve any organization well. I will explain that in a bit, but let us see what is the value added by these technologies to any organization.
Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Architecture and Engineering
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Tony Shan, who was one of the key drivers inside IBM for the cloud reference architecture, and also helped coin “Cloud Engineering,” will discuss lots of valuable best practices and lessons learned in designing cloud architecture and applying cloud engineering disciplines in real-world projects as case studies.
It was Shan who created the first version of the term Cloud Engineering in Wikipedia. Some of the works are shared in his blog – cloudonomic.blogspot.com.
Cloud Boom Continues as Quarterly IaaS/PaaS Revenues Exceed $2B
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 service revenues from IaaS and PaaS exceeded $2 billion, having grown by 56% from the first quarter of 2012. Amazon (AWS) remains in a league of its own with a 27% market share, while a group of IT heavyweights have so far failed to close the gap on the market leader despite an increasing number of service launches and marketing initiatives — Amazon’s share of the market for the whole of 2012 was also 27%.
Cloud Boom Continues as Quarterly IaaS/PaaS Revenues Exceed $2B
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 service revenues from IaaS and PaaS exceeded $2 billion, having grown by 56% from the first quarter of 2012. Amazon (AWS) remains in a league of its own with a 27% market share, while a group of IT heavyweights have so far failed to close the gap on the market leader despite an increasing number of service launches and marketing initiatives — Amazon’s share of the market for the whole of 2012 was also 27%.
Convergence and Interoperability Will Define Next-Gen Cloud Architectures
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the critical architectural considerations and success factors organizations must internalize to successfully implement, optimize and innovate using next generation architectures.
Cisco Buying JouleX for Cloud-Based Energy Software
Cisco is spending $107 million in cash and retention incentives to buy JouleX, whose cloud-based software is supposed to help companies reduce energy costs.
It monitors, analyzes and manages the energy use of all network-connected devices and systems through a set of policies derived through analytics tailored to the enterprise.
The widgetry, which provides policy governance and compliance as well, works across global IT environments.
The company was started in Munich in 2009 and is now based in Atlanta with R&D in Kassel, Germany. It’s gotten at least $17 million in venture funding from such companies as Intel Capital.
Questions Around Uptime Guarantees
Some manufacturers recently have made an impact with a “five nines” uptime guarantee, so I thought I’d provide some perspective. Most recently, I’ve come in contact with Hitachi’s guarantee. I quickly checked with a few other manufacturers (e.g. Dell EqualLogic) to see if they offer that guarantee for their storage arrays, and many do…but realistically, no one can guarantee uptime because “uptime” really needs to be measured from the host or application perspective. Read below for additional factors that impact storage uptime.
Five Nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, or 25.9 seconds a month.
Four Nines is 52.6 minutes/year, which is one hour of maintenance, roughly.
Array controller failover in EQL and other dual controller, modular arrays (EMC, HDS, etc.) is automated to eliminate downtime. That is really just the beginning of the story. The discussion with my clients often comes down to a clarification of what uptime means – and besides uninterrupted connectivity to storage, data loss (due to corruption, user error, drive failure, etc.) is often closely linked in people’s minds, but is really a completely separate issue.
What are the teeth in the uptime guarantee? If the array does go down, does the manufacturer pay the customer money to make up for downtime and lost data?
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There are other array considerations that impact “uptime” besides upgrade or failover.
- Multiple drive failures, since most are purchased in batches, are a real possibility. How does the guarantee cover this?
- Very large drives must be in a suitable RAID configuration to improve the chances that a RAID rebuild will be completed before another URE (unrecoverable read error) occurs. How does the guarantee cover this?
- Dual controller failures do happen to all the array makers, although I don’t recall this happening with EQL. Even a VMAX went down in Virginia once, in the last couple of years. How does the guarantee cover this?
The uptime “promise” doesn’t include all the connected components. Nearly every environment has something with a single path or SPOF or other configuration issue that must be addressed to insure uninterrupted storage connectivity.
- Are applications, hosts, network and storage all capable of automated failover at sub-10 ms speeds? For a heavily loaded Oracle database server to continue working in a dual array controller “failure” (which is what an upgrade resembles), it must be connected via multiple paths to an array, using all available paths.
- Some operating systems don’t support an automatic retry of paths (Windows), nor do all applications resume processing automatically without IO errors, outright failures or reboots.
- You often need to make temporary changes in OS & iSCSI initiator configurations to support an upgrade – e.g. change timeout value.
- Also, the MPIO software makes a difference. Dell EQL MEM helps a great deal in a VMware cluster to insure proper path failover, as do EMC PowerPath and Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager. Dell offers a MS MPIO extension and DSM plugin to help Windows recover from a path loss in a more resilient fashion
- Network considerations are paramount, too.
- Network switches often take 30 seconds to a few minutes to reboot after a power cycle or reboot.
- Also in the network, if non-stacked switches are used, RSTP must be enabled. If not, and anything else isn’t configured correctly, connectivity to storage will be lost.
- Flow Control must be enabled, among other considerations (disable unicast storm control, for example), to insure that the network is resilient enough.
- Link aggregation, if not using stacked switches, must be dynamic or the iSCSI network might not support failover redundancy
Nearly every array manufacturer will say that upgrades are non-disruptive, but that is at the most simplistic level. Upgrades to a unified storage array, for example, will involve disruption to file system presentation, almost always. Clustered or multi-engine frame arrays (HP 3PAR, EMC VMAX, NetApp, Hitachi VSP) can offer the best hope of achieving 5 nines, or even greater. We have customers with VMAX and Symmetrix that have had 100% uptime for a few years, but the arrays are multi-million dollar investments. Dual controller modular arrays, like EMC and HDS, can’t really offer that level of redundancy, and that includes EQL.
If the environment is very carefully and correctly set up for automated failover, as noted above, then those 5 nines can be achieved, but not really guaranteed.