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Friday, August 28th, 2015
- Pooling and abstracting storage. It’s pretty much SDS here, which stands for software-defined storage. But the big point is that both hardware and software vendors are releasing their own versions of SDS. You can now pool and abstract storage resources at both logical and physical layers. For example, a physical system could pool all storage into an EMC ViPR platform or into the software- layer by using Atlantis USX. Other technologies like NSX let you integrate directly with the hypervisor to create complete storage abstraction and VM control.
- IO acceleration. Creating intelligent policies around data and workload optimization is the way to go. Both software and physical systems now offer caching and coalescing solutions. You can turn an older SSD array or a flash card into a caching engine via a simple policy.
- vVOL. This is a pretty big one. vVOL basically becomes the single container for storing the entire contents of a VM, including all metadata associated with it. That kind of granular control allows you to have very specific levels of policy management around the VM. There was another challenge. Creating and managing 50 or 100 LUNs was one thing. However, organizations quickly ran into vSphere’s limit of mounting 256 LUNs to a vSphere cluster. VAAI and vVOL support help eliminate this issue and create more LUN and VM management. Already Atlantis Computing, DataCore, EMC, HDS, and HP are creating next-gen designs around vVOL capabilities.
- Data mobility and DRBC. Replicating files and data is one thing, but what about creating active-active HA platforms. New software features allow you to teleport data and allow it to reside at a certain location based on an application, a user, proximity, or an event. Don’t overlook this one.
- Policies, features, and built-in optimizations. Do you know what your storage system is capable of? Have you looked at QoS policies or even data compression optimizations? Today, vendors are building in a number of features both on the hardware and software side to help you better control your data. Oftentimes these native features are overlooked or not properly configured. You can create auto-migration policies not only to optimize your storage architecture but to help with space and data archival. Storage automation can help lift a lot of the burden away from some daily management tasks.
- Encryption and security. Why not add a bit of security on top of your storage array? When moving files internally or through the cloud, working with new levels of security is a must. The other big aspect is how storage security now integrates with the cloud. Integrated DLP solutions and advanced data correlation give you a deep understanding of the information in your storage array. For example, DataGravity, a new storage appliance maker, has a unique unified storage platform that offers insights at the same richness of intelligence regardless of whether the data is block or file. The software architecture lets IT teams, as well as security, compliance, and line-of-business users unlock the value in their data by automatically analyzing information as it is ingested without impacting production operations.
- REST APIs. Another big one. More organizations are looking at ways to integrate their storage platforms with the cloud. APIs are the way to do it. By being able to directly integrate with vCenter, vCAC, OpenStack, CloudStack, and even the IBM SmartCloud organizations get a lot more flexibility around their data. Furthermore, this kind of integration then allows for automation to happen and even event-based management.
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Seven Ways to Optimize Your Storage We’re really getting caught up in the whole software-defined storage, flash, converged architecture conversation. When looking at storage platforms, take the time to look at ALL of the features, optimizations, and add-ons storage platforms have. Do you need direct API integration for OpenStack? Are you looking for specific types of compression technologies? How cloud-ready do you want to be with storage? There are a lot of often overlooked software tools that can really go a long way. We’ve talked about commodity systems here already. Now, more storage vendors are looking at better ways to optimize, deliver, and control data. The reality is that this goes far beyond deduplication or thin provisioning. Let’s look at some really cool storage features to keep an eye on. As mentioned earlier, it’s much more than just simple software-based add-ons. The movement toward better storage control is really picking up pace. With commodity systems and a lot more data to control organizations are finding new ways to be creative with their data. Ultimately, this benefits the overall infrastructure, the business, and the users. |
| 3:00p | Friday Funny: Floating Data Center Who said a data center must be built on dry land? Here’s how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Congratulations to Peter, whose caption won the “Liquid Cooling” edition of the contest. Peter’s caption was: “How’s this for a new ‘in-row cooling’ concept?” Lots of submissions came in for last week’s “Data Center Cabinets” edition – now all we need is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below! Take Our PollFor previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 5:57p | Assessing the State of the Cloud and Containers at OpenStack Silicon Valley
This article originally appeared at The WHIR At the OpenStack Silicon Valley event this week, cloud professionals are discussing an OpenStack ecosystem that’s drastically different than when the event first launched five years ago. The software has considerably matured, but it’s also taking on even greater roles including this year’s hot topic: containers. Currently, OpenStack is becoming not just the open-source alternative to cloud software like VMware, but it’s actually becoming the preferred software to build and manage private clouds. And with this role, it will undoubtedly shape the way application containers are adopted and managed. Finding the Right Tool for the Job As Jonathan Bryce, executive director of OpenStack Foundation noted, OpenStack benefits from the dozens of active projects dealing with issues such as object storage, network functions virtualization and monitoring. “There are many OpenStack projects now,” Bryce said, and organizations are able to find the “right tool for the right job”. He said there is a progression among certains projects from “experiments” where there is low adoption and maturity, but with a high potential for innovation. Over the past five years, many of these projects have become more widely adopted and very mature. Even some of the less mature projects can still be useful. “It just might require more effort,” Bryce said. A Variety of Management Tools Craig McLuckie, original product lead for Google Compute Engine, said he found that people didn’t like Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS). Customers risked tying themselves to a platform that makes it difficult to add new functionality if the platform can’t accommodate that. Google’s container cluster manager, Kubernetes, McLuckie said, is designed to extract the best of PaaS orchestration in a similar way to how Docker extracts the best of PaaS packaging, essentially creating a PaaS environment that provides flexibility. However, there are several competing options. Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm currently occupy different niches in the broad area of container orchestration and management. Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of Mirantis, notes that while many of these projects say they’re supporting of each other, there’s some significant competition to be the prefered platform. OpenStack, on the other hand, can be thought of as a glue that binds the different modules of a cloud together so that you can more easily sub in different technologies. OpenStack helps with the integration of different technologies that are in direct or indirect competition. It essentially provides a foundation for swapping out different technologies, making it a good bet when experimenting with containers. Rethinking Organizational Roles to Make Way for Innovation James Staten, Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise chief strategist, said it’s not technology that’s holding IT departments back from taking full advantage of cloud technology; it’s organizational psychology. And most IT departments aren’t ready. Developers and other people in the organization are buying public cloud solutions, and they don’t care if IT supports the solution. Unable to keep up and unable to force employees not to use public cloud services, IT starts to be seen as irrelevant. But, in fact, they’re carrying out important procedures around security and customer privacy. So, when employees go to public cloud services for the IT they need, he said, admin teams shouldn’t get angry, but instead “try to understand why your employees are trying to circumvent what you provide.” IT could be putting unnecessary barriers around services or providing the wrong services. IT needs to rethink its role in the organization, and learn how they can help the company provide services more effectively. And this might even mean employees being reassigned to different roles. They may go from being a developer to engineering and DevOps, or from statistician or analyst to data scientist, or from database architect to information architect. He said the only people in IT who seem content with using yesterday’s environment are people who are close to retirement. And even then, it’s not particularly appealing. IT staff need to be sold on the idea that they’re helping innovate and help the company transform through technology, which should help motivate employees to make the transition. In Time, People Will Learn the Strengths and Weaknesses of Containers (as They Did with Cloud) Hype around containers over the past has been reaching a fevered pitch, making many people believe they can be anything and everything to an organization. However, as Gartner’s theory around hype cycles notes, the “peak of inflated expectations” is nearly always followed by a “trough of disillusionment,” when the limitations of the technology becomes known. For instance, McLuckie says that containers offer good resource isolation, but that virtual machines are still needed for security isolation. However, organizations are learning how to build and manage clouds and leverage containers in ways that improve service levels and economics, but that also still address persistent concerns such as security and privacy. DirecTV, which AT&T acquired last month for $49 billion, is using OpenStack and is even exploring containers. It’s role going forward will be helping AT&T provide new video services over-the-top and on mobile devices, and its experiments in architecture will be necessary to deal with the new ways Americans consume media, and will provide valuable experience into how to rollout services at this massive scale. Other broadcasters such as Comcast are also cautiously experimenting with containers. Bryce notes that while there’s a great deal of interest in containers, very few people are using it in production. “The next phase is operational models that tie it into enterprise environments,” he said. With greater adoption, it’s expected that the community will start to rally around tools that are needed, and maturity will grow. The Frontier of OpenStack and Containers Last month, Rackspace and Intel announced a collaboration on an OpenStack Innovation Center (or OSIC) in San Antonio. It has been recruiting and training open source developers, and fostering collaboration between Intel and Rackspace engineers who will be working to improve the scalability, manageability and reliability of OpenStack. A key part of OSIC is its two 1,000-node OpenStack hybrid cloud clusters that the OpenStack community can use for testing applications at enterprise scale. Rackspace runs one of the world’s largest OpenStack-powered clouds, and further research, involving different industry players, will help enable OpenStack run larger and more diverse workloads, and test out new container-oriented architectures. Renski notes that one of the big challenges ahead is making OpenStack more capable of dealing with hybrid clouds with the growth of orchestration that allow services to cross data center boundaries. Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems, said he’s excited for the Magnum project, which basically aims to deliver containers “as a service” on an OpenStack Platform, as well as Kolla, which provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds. Diane M. Bryant, an executive with Intel’s data center group, noted that getting the industry to set focus on a common set of goals is also a challenge – one that the community has been able to meet in the past with OpenStack but could also achieve as container architectures come into focus. Given the expansion of the OpenStack community to smaller organizations, she envisions that OpenStack could bring the efficiencies of hyper-scale architectures to the masses, not just a few major companies with massive clouds. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/a |
| 7:50p | Record-Breaking 75 Million Install Windows 10 in First Month Although Microsoft hasn’t experienced the rate of adoption of its new Edge browser by Windows 10 users that it hoped for thus far, the Redmond, WA company is thrilled about the number of installations for its new operating system. In just its first month of availability to the general public, there were a record-breaking 75 million upgrades or installations of Windows 10, of which 1.5 million are running Windows 10 Enterprise, reported our sister site Windows IT Pro. Adoption of the Enterprise version is key to the overall success of Windows 10 because licensing for the product represents a large portion of Microsoft’s bottom line. When Windows 8/8.1 was released, the enterprise community largely ignored it so the company is encouraged by the current momentum. Learn about other Windows’ announcements in the full post at: http://windowsitpro.com/windows-10/micro
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| 9:10p | Lenovo to Fold Smartphone Business Into Motorola When Lenovo bought Motorola’s smartphone business from Google in early 2014, the move had investors questioning the decision to sink $2.91 billion into a flailing company. After all, even under the direction of the Internet behemoth, Motorola experienced several consecutive quarters in the red. The company reported at the time of the sale that it would turn that business around and make it profitable in four to six quarters. Its goal: to sell more than 100 million mobile devices – smartphones and tablets – in 2014 by leveraging Lenovo’s booming market in China and emerging markets and Motorola’s strong positioning in the U.S. That never happened, and according to Lenovo’s latest earnings report, the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Motorola’s shipments fell 31 percent from a year ago to 5.9 million units. And, while Lenovo’s own brand of smartphones posted a sales increase of 2.3 percent over a year after shipping 16.2 million units, its market share fell 0.5 percentage points to 4.7 percent. Since the merge, the two companies have been operating separately. However, that’s about to change. As reported by our sister site, The VAR Guy, as part of a restructuring plan, Lenovo will now run all of its smartphone operations under the Motorola umbrella and eventually shutter Lenovo Mobile. Management’s new goal for Motorola: to return to profitability within a year and potentially as soon as six months from now with its former company president at the helm. “Effective immediately, Rick Osterloh, formerly president, Motorola, will be the leader of the combined global smartphone business unit,” the company told NDTV Gadgets in a statement. Motorola will handle all product design, development and manufacturing, Lenovo said.
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