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?
{Register for our upcoming webinar on June 12th ”What’s Missing in Hybrid Cloud Management- Leveraging Cloud Brokerage“ featuring guest speakers from Forrester and Gravitant}
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.
Nick Carr’s 2003 Rules for IT Management: An Open Nerve?
If an article, 10 years after its initial publication date, is featured in several look backs, reviews, Q&As and still gathers reactions and emotional analysis, it can be concluded it must have struck a chord – or in this case – more an open nerve.
In May 2003*, the Harvard Business Review published «IT Doesn’t Matter» , an article by then still largely unknown editor «at large» Nicholas Carr.
Environmental Pressures Driving an Evolution in File Storage
Stagnant budgets, overwhelming data growth, and new user and application demands, are just a few of the many challenges that are putting IT organizations under more pressure today than ever before. As a result, a new approach is required. The session being given by Hitachi Data Systems’ Jeff Lundberg at next month’s 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013] will discuss why object storage based private cloud is necessary for evolving into a next-generation of IT that supports a new world of applications and storage service delivery models.
Hadoop and Big Data Easily Understood – How to Conduct a Census of a City
BigData (and Hadoop) are buzzword and growth areas of computing; this article will distill the concepts into easy-to-understand terms.
As the name implies, BigData is literally «big data» or «lots of data» that needs to be processed. Lets take a simple example: the city council of San Francisco is required to take a census of its population – literally how many people live at each address. There are city employees who are employed to count the residents. The city of Los Angeles has a similar requirement.
How much data is generated in one minute? [infographic]
We’ve all heard and understand big data issues: volume, velocity, and variety. But when breaking it down into simple terms, how much data do you think is generated every minute across common platforms?
The answers may shock you. Just remember when reading through that all of these transactions occur in one minute, every day.
(Thanks to Domo for the infographic!)
The Rise in Popularity of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Guest Post by Paul Vian of Internap
Organizations are increasingly choosing to outsource business-critical applications and content to third-party providers. But, with it comes a long list of questions in order to determine the right mix of IT infrastructure services to meet specific scalability, control, performance and cost requirements. Although a shared public cloud can offer the convenience of easily scaling infrastructure up and down on-demand, many organizations are still hesitant due to concerns around privacy and security within a shared tenancy arrangement. Another complication is that the virtualization layer typically takes around 10 per cent of the resources. Accordingly, dedicated, physical infrastructure is often ideal just for performance purposes.
Which cloud environments are businesses considering?
If a business has a fluctuating workload that has ever-changing demands and requires more resources in the short term, a cloud environment is often still the preferred choice, but this does tend to become more expensive for applications that are always on, such as databases or other highly resource-intensive applications. The reality is that organizations often require something in between, which is driving demand for flexible, hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions that can easily adapt and scale to meet a wide range of use cases and application needs.
What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure?
Taking a tailored approach can enable businesses to scale their infrastructures ‘on demand’. It is also now possible for companies utilising physical servers to gain the flexibility and benefits they have been enjoying within a highly virtualized cloud environment in recent years. We are in an age where physical servers can be instantly spun up or down as global demand dictates, so there is no reason why organizations can’t gain the convenience and agility of the cloud with the reliability and performance of physical servers.
How can companies achieve a hybrid cloud infrastructure tailored to their specific needs?
Ideally, companies should look to work with a third-party provider that can provide access to a broader mix of services to meet these emerging demands around scalability in particular. Through working with a provider that takes a consultative sales approach, businesses can benefit from a tailored service that allows them to seamlessly mix, provision and manage both their virtual cloud and physical IT infrastructure – whether this is legacy hardware or back-up equipment. With this approach, businesses can not only meet their diverse application requirements, but also easily address changing global business needs.
We are now seeing things coming full circle; from physical networks, through to virtualization and the cloud, to today’s move towards a hybrid approach. This is in response to the ever-growing sophistication of automation and self-service capabilities, and is the way forward for any forward-thinking organization with a complex list of requirements.
Paul Vian is Internap’s director of business development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa
Employees Accessing the Cloud
For many organizations, cloud computing has become an integral part of their everyday business. Many companies are relying on cloud applications for fundamental operations such as CRM and email and are looking to increase utilization of the cloud for other functions. For others, adoption of the cloud along with internal communication about proper protocols for usage has perhaps been slower to evolve or implement.
As recently highlighted in this article in Forbes, it’s been widely observed that employees are experiencing the benefits of cloud computing at home and are often times transferring this personal use into the workplace. Popular applications employees are using both places include Gmail, Skype and Dropbox.
Is Hybrid Cloud a Realistic Destination?
We’ve all heard it. Security and regulatory compliance are issues in the public cloud. And building a private cloud many say does not pass a cost/benefit analysis. Given these hurdles, what is an enterprise to do? Well, according to Datamation, 47% of enterprises are going to implement some sort of private cloud in 2013 regardless of perceived challenges. And Gartner’s latest report on public cloud computing adoption, finds that global spending on public cloud services is expected to grow from $76.9B in 2010 to $210B in 2016.
It’s become increasingly clear that every enterprise will have at least one internal cloud and at least one external cloud in use. As every enterprise architecture will be hybrid and multi-vendor, the better question is how to properly assess the enterprise portfolio to determine which applications and services are best delivered by public and private clouds.