IT and Business hopefully a little different way..

EMC today announced the their latest entry into the Software Defined Storage (SDS) market, VIPR. They’ve coined it the “World’s first Software Defined Storage Platform” (http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130506-03.htm). I have to say, I am a little put off by this initial push and need to be first when they are clearly not. I could list a few that have claimed to be a SDS platform first, DataCore, Nexenta, and when looking at some of the capabilities, I think IBM beat them out with the SVC Director.

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Performance and scale testing of virtual desktop infrastructures has always been a challenge.  The known standard has been the testing suite from LoginVSI, and today they released their 4.0 product.  I have used LoginVSI quote a bit in the past and was given the opportunity to try a pre release of the product and I have to say that as always it has not disappointed.  I thought about a nice long description but they provided a nice bullet list that I did not have to write, so heres the plagiarism part of my post.

• Improved ease of installation

The test image footprint of Login VSI has been reduced by almost 90%. This makes the tool not only easier to install, but also easier to integrate and deploy. Centralization of management, updates and logging makes the use of Login VSI more efficient than ever. Direct Desktop Launch (DDL) mode enables large-scale testing with minimal infrastructure.

• Improved ease of test creation

The new intuitive and workflow oriented user interface of Login VSI 4.0 offers step-by-step test creation and wizard based test configuration for all important brokers and languages. The new workload editor introduces a new meta language which makes the customization of workloads very transparent and efficient. The new benchmarking mode enforces strict testing standards, providing industry standard results that are objective, comparable and repeatable.

• Improved test realism

The duration of the standard workloads has been increased from 14 to 48 minutes loops. Also the way in which segments and applications start has been improved to better reflect real world user behaviour. The datasets used in the workloads now offer 1000 different documents per type, more and larger websites, and a video library in every format, all to ensure a real world variety in data usage. The execution of the workloads is improved through the introduction of phasing, allowing for real world production user scenarios.

• Improved test insight

The new dashboard offers real-time test feedback, including progress, launched and active sessions, elapsed time and time left of the test in progress. The industry standard index VSImax has been further refined, enriching scalability results (max number of users), with objective baseline performance results (independent of tested load). Automated reporting with out of the box report ready graphs for all used settings, response times, and other data enhances the level, and choice, of information generated by the Login VSI analyzer.

Heres a nice gallery of screenshots for you as well..

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Every year we see survey results posted by Gartner and just about every known trade rag that says what the next year will hold.  What will be hot, and what will be relegated to the trash bin.

This year , I haver been asked to pass along a survey to my readers in conjunction with Ivy Worldwide.  I vy is a social media firm that I have worked with for the past few years.  The great part of the survey is that I get to publisht he results right here when I get them back, not just from my readers but from readers of many blogs around the world, but also you get a chance to win $250.  Who doesn’t like free money?

Click ont he graphic to be taken to the survey and i look forward to sharing the results.

Sure the title was meant to be inflammatory, but at the same time I am seeing one of the most dramatic shifts in enterprise storage in the last 10 years. Some history would probably help here. I began my career in IT 15 years ago, in 1997 major companies ran their entire businesses on either a mainframe or a midrange system and green screens ruled the world. We barely had email, and it was surely not a collaboration suite. At the time, I was a systems admin and spent days and often nights working with the large direct attached storage systems for either the mid range or the windows environments. We slowly moved into shared storage, often for a single system. Our exchange server had a shared set of disks for the cluster, same goes for SQL, but we didn’t dare move the mid range systems(as/400 at the time) to a shared storage solution. Around 2001, I was insistent with my management that we should have a shared solution for both open systems (windows and Linux) and our iSeries but got amazing pushback. The more we virtualized the more traction I was able to get. Probably helped that many of the mid range systems were being replaced by monolithic sun and windows boxes, the IBM purists had less traction. About this same time, you saw IBM itself start to transform itself into a services and software company, the move that Sun never realized it needed to do. With the vast growth of virtualization, came the rise of EMC and then startups like NetApp. Over the next 5 years you would see shared storage become the go to accepted platform. As our data growth has exploded so has the size of the arrays we use to store the massive amounts of data
So if we have massive data growth, how can I say that storage has died? The answer is simple, I can’t, but what I can say os that the way we address storage has changed. We are reverting back to the direct attached storage days, with a few exceptions. In the direct attached days, the big reason for keeping the drives local was that the data was all controlled by the software. Software defined storage, just no one called it that. Today we are seeing the same back to software defined storage. The major cloud players have all found that users want the choice of where they data goes. VCloud Director now has storage profiles. OpenStack had already let you have tiers of storage. Object based storage is leading a way to move data between entities without the need for a set structure. Hadoop and Gluster are saying that the data does not matter and you should concentrate on how we process the data.
So where does that leave us? We need to look at hardware vendors right? After all they control the drives and we want to make sure our data integrity stays high and we can control where we place our data. I argue that we should be only looking at the hardware vendors to give us a place to put data but not a way to control it. The software defined storage of today allows for me to add data integrity, portability, and speed with what ever hardware I want. We have 4TB drives spinning faster than most personal computer drives, solid state drives that will give us 5 year warranties and in sizes approaching a TB. Now we need the likes of HP, Dell, and IBM to press on the manufacturers, the Sanmina and Quantas among others to produce for density, and environmental factors. HP announced with the Gen8 servers that their hardware RAID controllers on their servers could hold more disk and process at a faster speed. But what about when I want to control the data? Where is my dumb JBOD at density? Dell has started to trend towards higher density with the 3020 60 drive JBOD. Well almost, they say you have to have the 3260 to manage the JBOD. Seems like a conflict to me.
If we can start to get all our data controlled by software, on the hardware we want, with the best density rates we can keep moving forward to a point when storage as we know it may very well die.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a side project with one of the Nexenta partners to prepare for the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco this week. The partner Cirracore based in Atlanta works with Equinix and Telx pretty heavily and offers a few managed private and public cloud solutions. One of these solutions is based on the Intel Modular Server Chassis(IMS). If you have not checked out this chassis, it is probably one of the most engineered but least publicized piece of hardware I have seen in years. First to give you an Idea of what the chassis is made of, then two solutions we release this week, vCloud in a Box and VDI/SMB in a Box. Read more

I am hosting a live podcast in a few weeks (blog announcement upcoming) and I wanted to find a way to let people add the date and time to their calendars with just a simple click instead of having to enter the information themselves.  After alot of searching, all the post seem to say you had to add the event calendar plugin and then it would be a new plugin to the wordpress page and things like that.  Not exactly what I was looking for.  I wanted something as simple as

Heres a reminder to read TheSolutionsArchitect.net when the podcast announcement comes out:

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Working as a solutions architect, I get to do presentations on a regular basis for lunch and learns or small groups.  In two weeks though I will have to step up my game.  First is the Washington DC VMware User Group.  Bookended by Tintri and Veeam, two of the hottest players in the virtualization space I had to come up with a pretty good topic for everyone to enjoy.  I am going with Enterprise Application Presentation.  Might not sound overly interesting, but I get to do a comparison between Citrix Xenapp and the new VMware Horizon App Manager.  With a limited presentation time I plan to limit it to presenting applications to machines onsite in an enterprise domain.  By no means the full scope of either product but one of the largest use cases.  Make sure to come by if you will be in DC on January 17th.  We will be at the Washington Nationals Stadium.

Want to Register for the DC VMUG – Info Here

Then comes the second presentation.  Over the last year or so I have gotten to know a few of the guys in the New England and have been selected to present for their VMUG also two days later.  Will be the same presentation (although probably a little more polished, sorry DC) The New England Winter Warmer is one of the largest VMUG meeting in the country.  Being held at Gillette Stadium, home of the Patriots, this full day event can bring upwards of 1100 virtualization professionals.  I will be in one of the breakout sessions.

If you want to join us in New England – Info Here

Hope to see many of you there.  If we have not met face to face, make sure to come say hi.

VMware announced today at VMworld Europe the vCenter Operations Management Suite. Those of us who are familiar with the product set will see lots of significant changes including the addition of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.0 and a new user interface. vCenter Ops Suite delivers an integrated performance capacity and configuration management solution for your vSphere environment. You are able to continuously monitor for compliance and health. This release is the first integrated suite and allows seamless upgrades between Standard(Ops Manager Only), Advanced(includes Chargeback), and Enterprise(includes Configuration Management). The suite is scheduled to be available for deployment in Late 2011 or Early 2012. Read more

First off I have to send out a big thank you to HP for sending all the contestants in the VMworld Blogger Reality Show a great new toy to test out.  I was pleasantly surprised when I got home on friday from work to a good size package.  As I opened it I found a HP Touchpad bundle(includes the sleeve), a bluetooth keyboard, and a TouchStone Charging base.  As many of you know I have been a iPad user since v1 and have really come to enjoy using it when I don’t need to open up my laptop.  I added the Clamcase to it when it was first released and the ipad became one of my primary tools. The big question now is will this new Touchpad join my repertoire. Read more

I have hated traveling to the west coast, not because of it being the west coast.  The weather is beautiful normally and people seem nice enough, but my calendars on my phone seem to be messed up all the time with the time zone changes.

I keep multiple calendars on my iPhone, my corporate exchange calendar and my GMail one being the most used.  It seemed as though everytime I would travel my time zones were off but only on some appointments.  I have found a few reasons for you to check.  You might need to try some or all of these and depending if you have “fixed” some appointments, you may need to put them back to the original. Read more