Yearly Archives: 2011
What’s the “Big Deal” about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 Fabric?
What's the "big deal" about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 fabric? Two words: bandwidth and flexibility.
Cisco recently expanded the UCS product line to include an additional Fabric Interconnect (model 6248), an additional Chassis IO Module (model 2208), as well as software release 2.0 with many new features. The new 2.0 components support existing chassis and server blades, and are back-compatible to inter-operate with existing first-generation UCS hardware (in original modes of use.)
Although the new models need not obsolete the original hardware, many of the recent Cisco UCS deployments by Ahead have opted to take advantage of the benefits of the new components.
The new 6248 Fabric Interconnect packs 48 Unified Ports into a 1 RU form factor. Any of the base Unified Ports may be configured to ...
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What’s the Forecast? Storage…
In this second to last post in this series, I'll review my thoughts on the near term future of the storage industry, technology adoption, and challenges faced by the incumbent storage array manufacturers. The next and final post will lightly touch on End User Computing and evolution of application development and delivery. If you have thoughts, comments, or would like to see more on any of what I have published in this series, I welcome all comments / questions / requests. Thanks for reading! - Brett
Storage Forecast:
As they have over the last 3-5 years, enterprise storage requirements will continue to grow at accelerated rates over the next 3-5 years. Information and intelligent access/use of that information is already a critical differentiator for companies in most ...
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VMware updates Horizon and ThinApp to allow for self-service Windows app delivery
This morning VMware announced updates to ThinApp and VMware Horizon to allow for Windows application delivery via the Horizon portal. In case you are wondering what Horizon is, it's a web based portal for application delivery. Before today it was only able to delivery access to SaaS based or Web applications. With the latest updates you can now deliver ThinApp packages to users with the Horizon agent on their PC. This provides a self-service option for application delivery.
So some of you may be asking how is this different than assigning ThinApp packages within VMware View? Below is a quote from VMware on the two processes.
Entitlement to Horizon-enabled ThinApp packages can be based on Active Directory groups or on groups that you create within Horizon. With ...
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Forecast – Server Virtualization and Compute (x86)
Second post in the series about where I see things going - this is a brief synopsis of my views on near term futures for Virtualization and Compute.
Virtualization
x86 virtualization will continue at a rapid pace. Over the next 3-5 years, compute and memory capabilities will continue to grow. Hypervisor technologies will continue to increase their ability to handle workload on both consolidated and non-consolidated basis. Rapid and massive server consolidation for cost savings alone will no longer be a core driver for virtualization. The focus of virtualization will shift as enterprise organizations begin to virtualize all Tier 1 applications as a driver to increase availability through virtualization attributes including scalability and portability. Most organizations will be challenged to identify any applications that will not be ...
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What’s the Forecast? Network…
Without the network - it really wouldn't matter what applications, servers, storage, or virtualization technologies are deployed. The network is by definition, what brings everything together and ensures that systems and users can interact to run business. I figured this would be a good place to start with my observations on what's coming...
Network virtualization will continue to the point that traditional models of distinct location or geographic-based network topologies will in many cases no longer be sufficient to support applications. In order to provide high availability, location independence, and application portability, many organizations will look at a massive flattening of the network infrastructure and the expansion of Layer 2 networking across datacenter locations.
Traditional three tier designs and the approach of extending L3 as far as ...
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What’s the forecast?
One of my customers was recently challenged by his CIO to come up with a vision for datacenter infrastructure technology trends for the next 18-36 months. The focus was not on any one technology, but more about how changes in many traditional datacenter technologies would change the way that technology is applied, how it interacts, and what that means for application development and deployment. This customer, like many, is distantly intrigued by the "sometime future" promise of public cloud, but is significantly more interested in what they can do today to increase datacenter efficiency and otherwise prepare for taking advantage of new and coming technologies to make their current and near future datacenter infrastructure the best it can be.
During the process of reviewing various parts ...
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H108: Lab Launch – Experience a True Hybrid Cloud
This Wednesday will be a big day at Ahead as we launch our second-generation lab. Those who have been reading our blog probably know we have been architecting and building this for the last two quarters.
I’m often asked why we spent the time and money on such a state-of-the-art facility when so many of our partners and clients have their own labs. Well, Ahead's goal is to help our clients plan, design, and deliver complex solutions within the data center. We can only do this by getting hands-on with the technology to educate our clients and ourselves. In addition, the lab lets us demonstrate the integration between different layers of the data center stack. Too often the aforementioned labs look at one piece of ...
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OpenFlow Networking
Odds are that you've heard the buzz about OpenFlow. Lets take a quick look at what it is, how it works and a few benefits and challenges of the new technology.
What It Is
OpenFlow is a method to allow the traffic-forwarding behavior of an Ethernet switch to be controlled by an external software program. It was created by researchers at Stanford University (and others) to share physical networks between production use and experimental research use. The researchers needed a way to test new networking protocols at large scale without effecting normal user traffic. OpenFlow was developed to allow the production network to be carved into virtual segments - some segments for production use and other segments for experimental use. The production segments use traditional techniques to ...
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VMworld 2011: Day 4 (Thursday)
VMworld 2011 - Thursday
This is going to be my second to last update on VMworld 2011 – I’ll write up one more summary with a glossary to help easily find things next.
Today I attend the keynote followed by three sessions. Today’s sessions included NetApp’s solution to metro distance HA/DA (disaster avoidance), HP CloudSystem Architecture, and a vCenter Ops deep dive. So – to jump right in:
BCO2863 – Using Distance to your advantage to create a Unified Data Protection Strategy
Maybe because it was the last day of the conference, maybe because it was the first time slot, maybe it was the topic – not sure, but there really weren’t a lot of people in this session. Felt a little sorry for the presenters at the light ...
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My brush with the brightest minds of VMware at a private CTO event
I was one of a lucky group of 100 people that received a private invite to attend a reception with VMware CTO and many other great and high ranking VMware executives. You probably are asking how did I get such an exclusive invite. Well as a recipient of the VMware vExpert award for 2011 my name was placed in a random drawing of the 332 vExperts and I was one of the lucky one hundred people.
So the event was held at the Wynn hotel next door to the VMworld conference. There was a huge list of people that are well known in the VMware and Virtualization industry. This was all made possible by Stephen Herrod the CTO of VMware. He put on the event and ...
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