Friday, January 10th, 2014

Time	Event
1:30p	Selecting the Right Storage for Development and Testing Sachin Chheda is the director of product and solution marketing for Tintri.  SACHIN CHHEDA Tintri Virtualization is a natural fit for software and application development/test environments. Providing software developers and test/quality assurance (QA) teams with their own complete virtual environments results in more efficient development and testing. This in turn leads to significant improvements in application quality and time to market, a critical advantage in highly competitive markets. Developing, testing, and deploying software solutions quickly and efficiently are the goal of every software development organization. But to provide adequate performance for these compute-intensive processes, many organizations end up over-provisioning storage and then spend thousands of hours annually managing storage for their virtualized development environments. Having the right storage platform that complements virtualization is essential to fully realize the efficiency benefits for software and application development and testing. To be successful, test and development teams need storage solutions that will enable them to: Optimize their software and application build environments Improve storage utilization and VM-density Quickly create multiple, efficient development and test environments Simplify deployment and management while streamlining troubleshooting Selecting the Right Storage for Development and Testing Here are some of the areas that you should consider when selecting the right storage for development / testing environments. Performance Performance is the most visible and immediate challenge that engineering and application development teams face with their virtualized development/testing environments. This is driven by the I/O-intensive needs of development/testing: Software builds require low latency storage for random I/O patterns across numerous small files in a VM. QA testing requires high throughput for random I/O patterns to handle multiple test VMs being run simultaneously. Flash as a storage media can help alleviate both latency and throughput challenges for development/testing environments. Flash alone can be quite expensive for most engineering and IT organizations to use. One way to get the performance of flash with the economics of disk is to consider storage solutions that use a hybrid FlashFirst approach. In this architecture, I/O is served from flash and disks are used as a content storage for cold data. This approach can remove storage as the bottleneck by delivering low storage I/O latency and high throughput for software builds and QA/testing. It is also important to make sure that the overhead around performance tuning and ongoing optimization of storage for virtualized development/testing environments is manageable i.e., it does not require substantial investments of time or specialized skilled sets. Storage Utilization and VM Density Optimizing development/test costs is a key goal for every engineering and IT organization. Unfortunately, relying on outdated storage platforms can result in poor storage utilization and low VM density. This can translate into excessive capital and operations costs and consume valuable rack space – especially in engineering and development labs. Consider storage solutions that can support thousands of virtual machines, including development and test-type VMs with high performance and consistent sub-millisecond latency without requiring substantial management overhead. By keeping real-world VM density as a goal when selecting a storage solution for their development/testing environments along with performance, organizations can proactively tackle cost and space concerns. Standing up New Development/Test Environments Development and QA/test team users need to be able to quickly and automatically create high-performance complete development/test environments with test data in seconds all by themselves. Setting up a new development/test environment using a traditional storage approach requires the time-consuming process of creating physical copies of the development/testing VM. Leveraging VM-level clones through the virtualization management layer can solve the problem of creating separate copies, but it may not have the performance needed for large-scale testing. When selecting storage, consider how easy it will be to deploy new development/test environments and if those environments will have the right mix of performance, and potentially QoS functionality, so that the storage IO of any one VM will not impact any other VM. Data Protection and High Availability Data protection and high availability of the software development and test environment are key goals for all engineering organizations. Safely storing copies of the “golden image” of the completed code is essential for protecting the enterprise’s valuable software assets. In addition, system uptime is critical for keeping software developers and testing/QA teams productive. When choosing the right storage system, make sure teams are able to take or schedule instant, space-efficient snapshots of individual development and test VMs without any performance impact. As a bonus, see if these snapshots can be efficiently replicated over the WAN for business continuity. These capabilities can enable easy, automated data protection and higher service levels for developers and QA efforts. Simplifying Management and Trouble Shooting Software development and QA teams need the ability to easily access application performance metrics to identify bottlenecks and issues with their virtualized environments when testing the newly developed code. They also need granular reporting capabilities to make troubleshooting easier in the QA environment. Consider solutions that can provide easy, instant visibility into the storage environment for virtualized development/test environments. Ideally, these solutions should cover per-VM or per-vDisk latency at any infrastructure layer, enabling users to identify the source of performance issues and take immediate action. Questions to Ask Storage can play a significant role in enhancing virtualized software or application development / test environments. With benefits such as improved time-to-production / market, improved software/application quality, and lower costs, it is important to choose the right storage solution to support your development / test deployments. The following questions will help you identify the right storage solution for your environment: Can this storage solution help us quickly deploy new dev/test instances? Will this storage solution be able to improve software build times and shorten QA/test cycles? Is this storage solution smart enough to manage itself? How efficient is this storage solution for my virtualized dev/test environment? Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
2:28p	Citrix Acquires Framehawk for Mobile VDI Delivery Citrix (CTXS) announced it has acquired Framehawk, which delivers a solution that optimizes the delivery of virtual desktops and applications to mobile devices, will be combined with HDX technology in the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop products. Leadership and engineering teams from Framehawk will be brought  into the Enterprise and Service Provider division of Citrix. The integration of the Framehawk solution with HDX technology will further extend the Citrix position in application and desktop virtualization user experience. “With enterprises increasingly enabling mobility for their employees, the ability to deliver apps and desktops with the best user experience to any of the billions of devices on the market is of paramount importance,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise and Service Provider. ”As a company, we are focused on delivering the best user experience on any device, over any network. The addition of Framehawk’s technology to the HDX portfolio enables Citrix to continue to lead the industry in delivering a powerful virtual desktop and application experience.” Netscaler now Vblock Ready The company also announced that the Citrix NetScaler platform is Vblock Ready certified, delivering key functionality to VCE Vblock Systems. Citrix, also now a member of the VCE Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program, is working with VCE to give customers the ability to seamlessly incorporate the NetScaler platform into VCE Vblock System deployments. Powered by Citrix TriScale technology, the NetScaler SDX service delivery platform, can now deliver multi-tenant L4-7 services offering 80:1 ADC consolidation on a single Vblock System. Through its partnerships with Cisco and VCE, Citrix brings additional value to VCE customers in two distinct areas. The NetScaler functionality found in the Citrix NetScaler 1000V platform announced earlier this year and available from Cisco, tightly couples the capabilities of Citrix NetScaler with Cisco’s virtual networking framework to provide superior network service provisioning and performance. Enterprises adopting private and public cloud require an application-delivery infrastructure that is dynamic, responsive, and inherently service oriented,” said Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure at IDC. ”With the integration of Citrix NetScaler into VCE’s Vblock, customers get a pre-integrated ADC solution that seamlessly delivers cloud-centric elasticity and scalability while dramatically simplifying the deployment process.” (Comment on this)
3:24p	Friday Funny: What’s the Best Caption? Happy Friday! As we really gear up for the New Year, let’s take a minute and vote for the best caption from the cartoon, Robots, by our fav artist, Diane Alber. Diane is the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary - and there’s a new calendar available for 2014 if you want to hang Kip and Gary in your workspace. Scroll down and vote for the best entries. The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion. The winner will receive his or her caption in a signed print by our artist Diane Alber. Take Our Poll For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more Kip and Gary humor, visit their website. (Comment on this)
5:00p	Apigee Acquires InsightsOne Apigee bolsters big data intelligence by purchasing InsightsOne, MapR helps IDEXX scale with Amazon Web Services, and health-care big-data analytics firm Zephyr lands a $15 million venture capital round. Apigee acquires InsightsOne.  Apigee announced it has acquired InsightsOne, a technology company that provides big-data predictive intelligence to help businesses understand consumer preferences. Adding InsightsOne will allow Apigee to expand its big data analytics portfolio to deliver the only platform that integrates the power of APIs with the agility of predictive big data analytics, enabling digital business leaders to anticipate and quickly adapt to business changes. InsightsOne will be offered as a stand-alone product today and part of Apigee’s integrated digital business platform for mobile apps, APIs and data analytics by mid-2014. “Success in today’s mobile-first digital world requires a single vision that spans and connects business and technology,” said Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO. “In this new world, the business intelligence and context gleaned through the massive amount of big data available about customers, products, developers – every part of a digital business – must be tightly integrated with technology infrastructure to effect real change. InsightsOne dramatically expands Apigee’s big data predictive analytics capabilities, and we welcome the accomplished InsightsOne team to Apigee.” MapR selected by IDEXX.  MapR Technologies announced that IDEXX Laboratories, Inc., a provider of diagnostics and information technology solutions for animal health, is using the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop via Amazon Web Services (AWS) to flexibly scale its business at lower cost, and gain access to critical customer data instantly for rapid response times.  As the IDEXX businesses continued to grow, its primary data store, a relational database hosted on AWS, could not keep pace. The growing size of this database meant that daily jobs to aggregate and summarize data were taking too long to run and consuming database resources that were impacting online operations. “We needed a solution which could offload this processing, easily scale to support the growth of the existing product and could be leveraged for future data intensive projects,” said Terry Schutte, IDEXX senior systems administrator for software R&D. The new solution had to be compatible with existing systems, which included the AWS infrastructure and Java 7. “Our primary reason for choosing MapR M3 on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) was the ability to run Hadoop under Java 7 against Java 7 compiled applications,” said Schutte. Zephyr Health raises $15 million for big data analytics.  Big data analytics company Zephyr Health announced it has raised $15 million of venture funding.  Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Jafco Ventures co-led the round, with members from each joining Zephyr’s board. The funds will help build sales and marketing. Zephyr CEO William King is a pharmaceutical industry veteran, building the company’s software that helps drug developers and marketers manage a wealth of data generated by clinical trials, published research, and drug sales. Zephyr leverages technologies to help companies improve their research and development efforts and bring new treatments to the right physicians in the healthcare funnel. (Comment on this)
6:41p	Schneider Electric Acquires AST Modular A look at an AST Modular installation for Opera Software at a data center in Iceland. AST, a Barcelona-based specialist in modular designs, has been acquired by Schneider Electric. (Photo: AST) Schneider Electric has beefed up its position in the market for pre-fabricated data centers with the acquisition of AST Modular, the company said today. AST , which is based in Barcelona, has deployed containers and modular data centers in more than 450 projects in 30 countries around the globe. The AST deal reflects Schneider’s growing focus on modular solutions, coming just three months after it rolled out a new line of 15 modular enclosures and reference designs. With AST, Schneider adds a major global player in the modular market. “AST Modular’s capabilities and experience complement Schneider Electric’s strategy to provide global prefabricated solutions and support to meet customer demands in this fast growing segment” said Kevin Brown, Vice President, Data Center Global Offer and Strategy, Schneider Electric.  “The acquisition of AST Modular strengthens our regional capabilities in Latin America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, with factories and custom engineering staff located in Barcelona, Spain and Miami, Florida. We look forward to expanding our library of reference designs and integrating AST Modular’s solutions into our portfolio to create the most comprehensive offer in the industry.” AST’s client base ranges from large tech players like IBM and AOL to banks and energy companies. It has deployed its modular units in remote areas and unique situations, ranging from the deserts of Iraq to Haiti to Russia to Iceland. The company is also a participant in a large modular data center park planned near Barcelona. AST Modular’s portfolio have included non-ISO modules, multi-module designs, and modular data center rooms, as well as a broad portfolio of cooling options optimized for the prefabricated IT space. AST is the latest in a series of modular specialists to move beyond standard ISO sizes for shipping containers and develop more versatile designs using several modules to assemble a data hall. “It has always been AST Modular´s goal to offer the best and most innovative prefabricated data centers,” said Henry Daunert, CEO of AST Modular. “Schneider Electric´s global presence, world class power, cooling and Data Center Infrastructure Management solutions, backed up by an excellent service network, will be a major benefit for our customers.” Schneider also has worked closely with Datapod, an Australia-based modular specialist. (Comment on this)

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