In the storage industry, we hear the term «migration» all the time – almost every day. One of the first visuals that comes to my mind whenever I hear that word is a neatly formed «V»-formation of geese or ducks flying south for the winter. The «V» formation is a very efficient way to fly long distances. One bird’s wing-flapping causing a vortex, giving the bird directly behind effortless lift. The group works together in this way to migrate vast distances in a short amount of time while expending as little effort as possible.
Just as bird migration is inevitable, so to is data migration – no matter what form it’s in. In the storage world, this might mean you need to migrate older tape formats to a more current one to support the new tape drive you’ve just bought, or migrate data from an older storage array to a new one.
Too often, storage strategies are developed without migration in mind. The reality is that regardless of the storage solution you’ve deployed, migration is a normal part of the lifecycle, and you need to design and incorporate a migration strategy into your storage environment.
Responding to a New Breed of Services
Cloud computing is enabling services transforming many industries and every CIO needs to be ready to respond to new competitive threats.
Benefits from cloud computing are often focused on infrastructure optimization, but one disruptive change occurring across a variety of industries are a new breed of commercial services delivered through the public Internet. The common themes these services share include ease of use, accessibility through a wide range of devices and always targeting inefficient business processes. I will focus on two examples of such services that I believe show promise of future success and growth.
How cloud services usage is rising in the Middle East and Africa
In the third annual Global Cloud Index, Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data center traffic, is expected to grow 4.5-fold — that’s a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) — from 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012 to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017.
The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2012–2017) was developed to estimate data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol (IP) traffic growth and trends. The Index serves as a complementary resource to existing network traffic studies, providing new insights and visibility into emerging trends affecting data centers and cloud architectures.
The forecast becomes increasingly important as the network and data center become more intrinsically linked in offering cloud services. Overall global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017.
Approximately 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end …
The DevOps Way to Solve JVM Memory Issues
The killer in any IT operation is unplanned work. Unplanned work may go by many names: firefighting, war rooms, Sev 1 incidents. The bottom line is that Operations must stop whatever planned work it was doing to manage this drill. This means little or no normal work is being accomplished. It is a scenario most of you will be familiar with: your application servers are humming along happily until suddenly, without an obvious reason, memory usage starts to increase, soon followed by longer garbage collection suspensions that finally force you to restart the application. The operations team is typically unaware of the actual impact on end users (other than a service being down), and it additionally lacks data and time to further investigate the issue. As communication between the traditional silos of operations, testing and development teams is often less than ideal, a scheduled restart in a “low impact” timeframe is often the easiest solution and turns into something resembling a “Production Best Practice” over time. This adds to the workload of an operations team because unplanned work becomes unnecessary preventative work. It also becomes a suspect every time there is a problem with the application. Wouldn’t it be better to actually fix the issues instead of just working around them? Shouldn’t there be a general understanding across all teams responsible for an application to fix the problem as fast as possible and make sure that it’s prevented in the future?
OpenStack Fundamentals: Replacing Nova-Network with Neutron
If you’ve had an OpenStack deployment for any length of time the chances are very good that you are still using nova-network. With the planned deprecation of nova-network right around the corner with Icehouse it’s time to start planning your transition from nova-network to Neutron.
Nova-network is a single monolithic process, that while complicated, handled all your networking needs. Neutron is very different system from nova-network with numerous components. It can be hard to understand how all the different components fit together to replicate the functionality you’ve come to rely on from nova-network.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Chet Burgess, Senior Director, Engineering at Metacloud, will take a look at some of the core functionality in nova-network and show you how it maps to Neutron. He will start by describing a multi-project nova-network setup that utilizes fixed IPs, security groups, floating IPs, and VLANs for project isolation. Over the course of the session he will describe the Neutron components that provide this functionality. By the end he will have a complete Neutron-based architecture that replicates your existing nova-network deployment. Finally he will cover the gaps between nova-network and Neutron today as well as what pitfalls you might encounter during your transition.
Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie: Legacy data vendors should learn from history
With Oracle, SAP and IBM fighting for precious market share on the in-memory relational database market, and the likes of MongoDB, Couchbase and DataStax putting together momentum in the NoSQL space, it almost feels like whoever wins the battle will win the war of database customer buy-in.
Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold told CloudTech his company’s position was that the market was going to move to the “disruptive” NoSQL technologies that “ultimately are going to dominate.”
This, of course, may not be a hugely surprising admission – although the tone of it raised eyebrows – yet according to Matthew Finnie, CTO of cloud service provider Interoute, the incumbent legacy vendors should definitely be looking over their shoulders.
“For the incumbents of this world, they have a recognised revenue stream that they have to maintain and retain,” Finnie, who is speaking at Apps World Europe next week, explained in a call. “And they …
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: How to Manage Your Heterogeneous Cloud
Hybrid cloud sprawl is making life challenging for IT admins. Different environments, different functionalities and capabilities, different interfaces.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Kit Colbert, Chief Architect and Principal Engineer with the Office of the CTO at VMware, will discuss how the next generation of management tools will abstract over differences in heterogeneous environments to allow for a consistent approach to private, public, and hybrid cloud management.
Cloud Expo Launches DevOps Journal
Cloud Expo has launched DevOps Journal on Ulitzer.com featuring over 1066 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries. DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing.
SYS-CON CEO Carmen Gonzalez is founder and publisher of DevOps Journal. Long-time IT editor/analyst Roger Strukhoff, who is currently Executive Director of the Manila-based Tau Institute, has been named Editor.
«We’ve seen explosive growth in web traffic for our Cloud Computing content, and in the number of attendees and exhibitors at our Cloud Computing Expo,» said Gonzalez. «We also have an outstanding group of speakers focused on DevOps at the upcoming 13th International Cloud Expo, November 4-7 in Santa Clara, CA. Launching DevOps Journal at this time demonstrates our commitment to maintain our industry leadership and provide valuable contributions to the global enterprise IT community.»
Cloud Expo Announces 2014 DevOps Fundamentals Event Calendar
Upcoming Cloud Expo Silicon Valley [Nov 4-7] has a special emphasis on DevOps. In 2014 Cloud Expo will be presenting three DevOps Fundamentals Events, which will take place February 18-19, 2014, in New York City, NY, April 22-22, 2014, London, and June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. DevOps Fundamentals at Cloud Expo® will feature three full days of intense educational sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players.
DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals.[1] DevOps Fundamentals will bring valuable information to DevOps professionals who are transforming the way enterprise IT is done.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Continuous Deployment Using the Cloud
Continuous Deployment is helping companies become more responsive to changing business needs without major disruptions or downtime.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Ed Leafe, Developer Advocate at Rackspace, will cover some of the issues when moving to a Continuous Deployment model, and how different cloud architectures can make managing application changes much simpler and more reliable.
Ed Leafe has been a developer for over 20 years, and is one of the original developers of OpenStack. After leaving the Microsoft world over a decade ago he has been primarily a Python developer, and has spoken at several PyCons around the globe. He also throws a mean Frisbee.