Bladewatch.com

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-oakhills-netapp-11-15.11.html

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Helps Oak Hills Deliver “Anytime, Anywhere” Learning to Students and Manage Explosive Data Growth

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif. —Nov. 15, 2011—Public schools today must deal with increased student enrollment, ongoing state budget cuts, and limited resources, which require them to do more with less. Additionally, they need to figure out how to manage the explosive growth in mobile device and personal laptop usage by students and faculty. Oak Hills Local School District in western Ohio was faced with these challenges and realized that smart decisions made about its IT infrastructure would enable it to deliver anytime, anywhere learning to each of its high school students in light of ongoing budget and resource constraints. As a result, Oak Hills made the transition to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to centrally manage and deliver desktops to students and educators from its data center, which is built on a NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), VMware (NYSE: VMW), and Cisco® foundation.

It’s always great to see how end users are benefiting from next the technology, not only in terms of cost (in this case approximately $1 million), it’s the agility in the end user experience and the ability to deliver services and functionality that might not previously been available due to both operational and technological barriers removed. An interesting read, do check it out.

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http://flashsoft.com/flashsoft-ceo-present-server-design-summit

Server Design Summit — SANTA CLARA and SUNNYVALE, Calif. — November 17, 2011 — FlashSoft Corporation, the Flash Virtualization™ company, today announced that FlashSoft Founder and CEO Ted Sanford will present “Why Your Next Server Will Have a Solid State Cache” in a tutorial on Increasing Storage Performance at the Server Design Summit. The event is being held at the Santa Clara Marriott Hotel in Santa Clara, California, November 29-30, 2011. In his session, Sanford will explain how and why a solid state cache will rapidly become a standard component for almost any server, as well as the implications for business and technology strategy.

Solid state, non-volatile memory—“flash” memory—has driven a revolution across consumer technologies: cameras, phones, music players, printers and tablets. Now, as large-capacity flash devices with high-speed interfaces are ready for use inside servers, the technology will have a similar impact on enterprise computing. This year, a number of technology firms, including leading manufacturers of solid state devices, have announced plans to provide flash-based caching capabilities for servers. Even storage systems vendor EMC announced a server-tier flash device, dubbed “Project Lightning,” to extend its storage technology to the server.

Check out this announcement from FlashSoft talking about how solid state cache is going to power the next generation servers and what this will bring in terms of evolution of the platform.  I’m off to check it out, we’re seeing some exciting developments in the server and flash technology space, anything we can do to improve the server offering, the scalability and performance has to be a good thing.

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Just over a year ago (yesterday) we announced FindMyFirmware. It was always meant to be a simple concept, making end user information more accessible in this case about servers.

It was never meant to earn money, it was an illustration if you will of what could be achieved with a little thought and with a little effort from one of our development team.

We launched it on the Apple store and got some initial feedback a little bit of interest from the vendors, but nothing serious. I saved up a little bit more money, got the accountant to sign off the investment from our reserve fund and have had our development team update the app somewhat to make it easier on the eyes and port it to Android and the iPad.

You can download the Android version from this URL.

You can download the iPad version from the Apple store shortly.

You can download the iPhone version from the Apple store at this URL.

I remain quite proud and strangely protective of the application, there are of course many further things we could do but for the time being the ongoing development is funded by me financing permitting. If you have any ideas on taking the app to the next level or reporting errors, do email me: martin237@gmail.com and I’ll get them fixed by the development team as a priority.

In the interests of openness, I got asked about development costs of the application, to date it’s been about $4,000 including development time, managing and researching updates, porting the application to new platforms. The other question I get asked regularly is when I will be adding more servers, and more vendors, this is a work in progress, you would be surprised how long it takes to gather and verify the information. Again, if you have a specific requirement do get in touch.

So what’s new in this new version 2.1?

• Well the main things are a nicer cleaner look (all white background)
• The about us text has been cleaned up
• The iPad version quite simply rocks in terms of interface

So what’s coming in future versions?

• Hopefully features requested by users
• On going development of the interface

But for the moment we’re working on our next application, which I am genuinely even more excited about than FindMyFirmware.

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https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2010/events/discover/vienna/index.php

Your organisation’s journey to becoming an Instant-On Enterprise starts in Vienna.

Join us in November!

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We’re launching our FindMyFirmware application to the iPad and Android platforms in the next few days. We’ve improved the user interface and the Android includes the ability to read PDFs natively so you don’t have to download anything complicated. Its been tested on all platforms and we remain very proud of it.

The application allows you to type in a server model and display product information on screen without having to go the vendor site or vendor support site.  The application as ever has been written without involvement of the vendor.  I’m still debating about charging for the application, we have spent over $2000 getting it developed, tested and validated for these platforms in an effort to extend it’s reach and help fellow engineers, sales guys or people that are interested in server models and specifications.

If you have any recommendations about the application do get in touch.

I’m hoping to start work on version 2.1 shortly to make it a more interactive experience, and we are looking to engage the vendors to see if they have any suggestions to help the user experience, but we need to finish our virtualization app first.

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I got an email from a number of people in reference to my post http://www.bladewatch.com/?p=10339, about Vendors requirements for their applications. Never one to shy away from debate, the following is in response, it’s been developed on the train home without prior research or specific thought.

What technological considerations in the enterprise space would there be:

• There will be a range of ‘supported operating systems’, therefore specifying rigid operating system versions and patch revisions makes life difficult
• There will be default RAID configurations defined as production ready, RAID 1+0 for the OS drive for example and SAN for data drives – specifying RAID5 or RAID 6 might cause debate
• There will be typically standard offerings or configurations, a range of available X86 and UNIX servers, a DL380 G7 or Dell R710 for example, therefore ratifying an application only on DL365 G7′s might cause debates, does that mean it can’t run on a Dell R515?
• Application and database might be hosted on separate servers or virtual machines
• Clustering options and solutions might be deemed a requirement for tier one or client facing applications

In summary:

• Applications should not be installed on the OS drive (C:) this includes log files
• Applications should not be validated on only one browser or middleware – Oracle client 9, does that mean it doesn’t work with 11 or is it just that you haven’t tested it?
• Applications should not be linked to the hardware – how can the application tell what kind of RAID it is, or whether it uses SAN storage
• Applications and database should not be expected to run on the same server in order to work, that tends to go against standards and create ownership issues
• Applications should not have operating system dependencies to the nth degree – the vendor who asked for Windows 2003 32 bit, only 32 bit standard edition but not R2

I’ve not doubt missed things and will add more comments at a later stage, any suggestions are welcome.

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Got this by email from ‘Chris’ who I tend to see more regularly since I relocated to Canary Wharf (East London) outside of the City.  Chris has been tasked with deploying this application from a vendor with tight deadlines, his email goes on in quite some detail as to how he has been wronged and unfortunately mentions them several times, needless to say we don’t name names here when being negative, so I’ve abstracted the best bits and summarized below.

• They vendor has no concept of standards – it’s written for Windows 2003 32 bit, what about 64bit or Windows 2008? That requires sign off internally as I am not allowed to deploy Windows 2003 32bit servers.
• There is no concept of a service account – a what, no we just log in and install using Nigel’s account and then run as local system – service accounts are mandatory when implementing in production.
• The application is not supported on SAN, needs to be RAID 5 – how and why was it designed like this and as an application how would it know?
• The application has been signed off for use on these three types of rack servers – but we don’t buy from either vendor, so does that mean it won’t work on my server even though the specs are identical?
• The application is supported on virtual servers with a range of strange requirements – SAN storage support issues, cpu GHz specific ratings etc

Needless to say that Chris has been rather busy and will not be sending them a Christmas card.  He was supplied with a biscuit and a cup of tea in my attempt to reboot him.  Vendors are offering a service which is based on a set of standards which they have ratified against, that said it would be nice if they could have what I would call the standard and the enterprise offering.

• The standard offering would be the all rules concept, it only works on a DL380 G7 with 48GB of RAM with 2 Xeon Processors and disks plugged in by an engineer called Gary.
• The enterprise offering would be more fluid and concept based. The application requires a 2 socket industry standard server with 48GB RAM with SAN Storage. RAID settings, spindle types and everything else should not come into it. Of course the ultra low latency or platform/role specific applications might have such requirements but when it comes to something a bit more atypical, being this specific and what could be perceived as being disengaged could so be perceived as being unhelpful.

We need to appreciate that you cannot please everyone, but those little efforts go a long way. Simple things like responses to typical questions make the onboarding activities smoother and reduce time to deployments, is it cluster aware, can the application be installed on the shared drive and not the OS drive, can we use service accounts and what level of access does it need, what would you recommend and what is deployed in the real world.

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http://www.bocada.com/

Kirkland, Wash. – November 2, 2011 – Bocada Inc., the world’s leading provider of data protection management software and the creator of the Data Protection Service Management (DPSM) model, today announced another industry first — Bocada Vision, the first and only solution on the market that provides insight into the data protection operations of virtual environments.  From a single pane of glass, users will be able to monitor backup methods, performance, success and failures, problem and resource management, virtual environment recovery, configuration and storage utilization reports and errors to help minimize the  complexity that virtualization adds to backup and recovery operations.

Bocada Vision, groundbreaking software technology, addresses issues of VM recoverability by providing insight into whether backups are successful and where recovery points are.  It tells users what resources are being used to protect VMs and whether they are optimized while detailing the performance impact of protecting VMs.  A standalone solution for managing data protection in virtual environments, Bocada Vision can also be fully integrated with Bocada Prism to provide total physical and virtual protection of a user’s entire backup infrastructure.

Bocada has teamed with leading virtualization companies Quest, Veeam and VMware to integrate Vision into their product offerings and enable support for users.  Bocada Vision is integrated with VMware vCenter and supports vDataRecovery.  Vision also supports Quest vRanger Pro, Veeam Backup & Replication and Symantec NBU 7.1, with plans to add additional support for applications with enhanced virtual backup support.

It’s always great to see what technologies and solutions there are in order to aid in systems management, I got emailed this about Bocada’s Vision tool which delivers a single pane of glass solution to monitor and manage your virtual environments from a data protection standpoint. Anything we can do to help with systems stability, with transparency and reporting or management has to be a good thing, I’m off to read up more about their offering. That it integrates with VMware vCenter does sound encouraging, I’m off to check it out.

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I’ve been reading up and discussing changes in the industry recently with colleagues, this has meant a bit of a break from my beloved Bladewatch blog. So what’s going on, a lot of things really, there seems to be a state of flux of parallel running across sectors and industries with common themes in two main opposing movements.

Commoditize and reduce complexity which allows us to concentrate on really adding value where it counts

Build best in class solutions based on the business need with a focus on delivery and through that illustrating value

Both can co-exist. Both are equally valid, but the commodity discussion is compelling and equally troublesome for colleagues across the technology stack. There are three main problems, ‘the business’ want to remove delays to excellence, reduce costs and are approaching technology as a service. With the technology as a service model, I’m not interested in the detail to the nth degree, I do not wish to discuss which model of server it is and what version of Windows is going to be used I want a Risk Analytics platform and I wand it next Tuesday with these operational constraints (budget/application code compatibility for example).

This results in an interesting problem. For years we have been telling technologists to be customer facing, to identify the requirements, to offer choice and therefore empower the business, an admirable concept but less so as you scale up the enterprise, with a global enterprise with operational complexity, introducing choice even with a business aligned best intention can create opportunity for debate and discussion. It also leads to that strange situation, “I want a server”, ok what would you like, “well what’s the standard, just give me a server”, ok but what OS, how much memory, how much storage? “the standard”.

Therefore the prevailing wind for the moment seems to be moving to commodity. Commodity can be perceived as an emotive subject, ‘those architect boys’ in their design studios mandating standards that might not be appropriate but what I am talking about is a rationalisation of the standard tools covering the hardware, the os, the middleware and database through to the applications.  A scenario in which packaging, and common deployment technologies can be used for automated delivery, decommission and re-deployment on demand can be defined and implemented.  A situation where as a user I can say I wanted a Tier 1 web farm and like the ever so impressive BladeSystems Matrix presentation shows us, I press submit and it knows it’s going to build me a load balanced web farm comprised of web, application and database using the capacity and standards already defined in templates.

So what do I mean when I talk about commodity and rationalisation. Colleagues differ wildly when we talk of it, but let me summarise:

Server – three platforms (Unix/Linux, Virtual and Windows) / three blade and three rack server configurations (typically dependent on complexity involved)

Operating system – a common operating system offering comprised of UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms, Windows 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise for example

Middleware – common middleware applications with specific versions per platform which change with the platform

Application – common applications for monitoring, database and solutions

Network – common defined network standards based on standard offerings, 1GB Ethernet for Virtual machines, teamed network cards for physical Windows servers, heartbeat for clusters etc

Storage – common standards combining the most effective forms of de-duplication, tiering and marginal cost – sometimes buying the cheaper storage costs the same as the expensive equivalent

Operational standards – production tiers and understood configurations for optimal resilience

Investment – this is often the emotive topic when speaking with management – this involves the concept of pre-provisioning and investing to avoid those common scenarios in which we are ‘always running out of storage’ or facing those unexpected infrastructure type issues half way through a project or as a result of a business requirement.

The fundamental principles as follows:

• The infrastructure is commodity and therefore abstracted from the underlying hardware
• The application never gets embedded and locked into the infrastructure because it is economically, operational and from a revenue/cost base inefficient to do so
• The infrastructure is funded, cross charged and operated on the basis of lowest operational cost – it is 9 times out of 10 quicker and easier to replace a desktop than it is to have an engineer sit and discuss the issue with the vendor and order new parts to do so. The same can be said of the server. Do we want to be paying £800/£1200 per server per year for hardware maintenance or increasing our spend on warranty to 24/7 4 hour response and replacing the x86 commodity servers every three years so that we do not need a hardware support contract?
• Constant analysis so that the capacity is being optimized, that I deploy a new platform on new x86 servers in six months if the utilization is remaining constant at 17%, we virtualize and re-allocate the hardware to the next project, and do the same analysis to it in six months. Two streams, one translating business needs into delivered projects and solutions, the other optimizing what we have and allocating capacity on demand in line with the business need.
• Taking a high level and low level analysis. Where is it as CIO we need to be (agile, low cost/best in class), combined with where are our core spends, what percentage of the budget is on legacy platforms, what are the quick wins, what is a standard offering and why is it set that way, what operational decisions and rules of engagement have been set. Is Nathaniel walking around the data center reclaiming and re-deploying DL380 G3′s because he’s been told that there’s no budget eating my data center space/power, my hardware support contract budget and resulting in outages for the sake of £2500?

Therefore a change of focus to:

• Delivery on time
• Delivery to budget
• Delivered once. Configured once. Templated once. and redeployable on demand.
• Right sized infrastructure with scalability, reliability and best in class out of the box.
• A change from component thinking to big picture thinking – standard offerings, common configurations, interoperability, reduced complexity resulting in best in class performance, operational cost and agility.

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http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19240331

Breaking from its longstanding reliance on computer chips from Intel (INTC) and AMD, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) said Tuesday that it’s developing a new line of servers using energy-efficient processors based on designs from an upstart company better known for technology used in mobile phones.

The new processors take up less space and consume only a tenth of the electricity needed to power the more commonly used models of server chips, according to the manufacturer, Calexeda of Austin, Texas, which uses designs licensed from the British firm ARM Holdings.

It will be interesting to see what products are announced based on this announcement and what usage cases might be appropriate for these processors, are they going to be industry standard for multiple markets and application scenarios or aimed at specific target markets and usage cases. We’ll have to see.

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