Yearly Archives: 2012
Ahead at EMC World
I just wanted to give you all a quick preview of what Ahead is doing at EMC World this year, and provide some opportunities to meet some of us in person.
Booth
Ahead is again sponsoring a booth in the solutions pavilion. It will be staffed by some of our executives, as well as members of our engineering staff.
Magazine
Ahead has published a magazine that will distributed as part of the conference materials. It has some of our recent solution briefs, as well as some commentary by engineering on the state of the industry.
Partner/TC Conference
A number of our engineers will be attending the partner conference this year, as well as sessions in the EMC TC conference. We also have several NDA sessions set up with product management as ...
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Creating a Highly Available VEUC Storage Design
One of my clients is in the peak phase of deploying about 1200 virtual desktops across the organization, and they have placed a premium on desktop uptime. There are always tradeoffs when we do VEUC strategy and design. What can you afford vs. what performance/availability metrics would you like to achieve?
Luckily, we were able to design a solution that met their needs, at a pretty reasonable cost. They already had a VNX array dedicated to the VDI workload, so rather than do something like double the spindle count and switch to RAID6, we decided to look at EMC VPLEX. The added benefits were just too good to pass up. They could achieve their uptime requirements, and gain independence from underlying disk subsystems, while also avoiding ...
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VMware, Microsoft, and the Future
The on again, off again speculation about VMware's future has recently resurfaced, notably in a post by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols here and a follow on post by Scott Lowe here. I have a slightly different take, but overall I'm concerned about VMware as a company. There are several disturbing indicators about the company's future, and they keep reappearing in my conversation with customers. And the core, underlying driver of all of this concern is Microsoft.
VMware has been concerned about Microsoft since Hyper-V was initially announced. I think the concern over Microsoft was a key driver in the appointment of Paul Maritz to VMware's CEO role, as he would fully ...
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The Increasing Importance of VMware vCenter
It seems that with each generation of VMware products, the importance of vCenter (formerly Virtual Center) elevates from a central administration point to a keystone for full functionality. While a number of features in the vSphere suite are able to survive without vCenter, such as High Availability (HA) and virtual networking, many other pieces of the stack rely on vCenter for some or all of their ability to carry out tasks.
One example that emphasizes this is the VMware View product for virtual end user computing (VEUC) to host desktops. During a vCenter outage, you can still connect to any fully available desktop. However, both types of desktops, Full Clones (sometimes referred to as Thick Clones) and Linked Clones, are affected by ...
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Profiling Tier 1 Oracle Performance on vSphere
Welcome! To begin my blogging efforts with Ahead I wanted to go back and post an older entry from my own blog that was pretty interesting. I'm seeing a lot of effort beginning lately around virtualizing tier 1 apps, especially now that most customers have successful virtualized their Tier 2/3 apps. This testing was done on vSphere 4.1, but I hope to update with performance results based on vSphere 5 soon! Ask questions and let me hear about your own experiences virtualizing Tier 1 apps in the comments!
From June 2011:
Profiling Oracle 11g Performance on vSphere with vscsiStats
One of my larger projects recently has been to virtualize a Tier 1 Java application on vSphere for the State of Wisconsin. This application previously ran on WebSphere 5 and Oracle ...
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The cost of Cisco UCS?
Lately I have been having a lot of discussions around Cisco UCS and the common theme of these meetings tends to be "My traditional servers cost much less."
A lot of times there is a misconception of what's included with Cisco UCS compared to what's included when purchasing traditional servers. UCS is more about a server architecture and less about just your typical server blade, so you need to factor in more components when comparing it to a traditional servers.
Below is a summary of components that you should consider when comparing the cost of Cisco UCS to traditional servers.
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The Death Of RAID Groups?
Introduction
Almost anyone reading this post that has experience with servers and storage over the past 20 years understands the basic concept of the RAID group. RAID, or "Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks", is a data protection scheme that was invented in the late 1980s to prevent data loss and maintain availability in a time when hard disk drives were both small and unreliable. Remember when a hard disk drive shipped with a known bad sector map? I'm dating myself…
A great site explaining the basics of RAID along with some history is on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_Arrays_of_Independent_Disks
Since the 80s, many technological and manufacturing advances have led to a parabolic increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a single hard disk ...
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On Transformation
My customer interactions seem to come in thematic waves. The current wave of customer initiatives I have been working on seem to all revolve around IT transformation. In the case of four separate clients over the past few weeks, I have encountered the following situation:
IT Centralization, or a move to a shared service model for internal or external consumers
Challenges with optimization of data center processes to support this new scale
Challenges with reporting, chargeback, and consumption forecasting to be able to run these new models
Competition with shadow IT or a resistance to change
In each case, the challenges and desires were consistent, even though the customers were in different industries and at different phases in the maturity of their projects.
What each organization is dealing with is a ...
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EMC VFCache the new face of “EMC Project Lightning”
EMC debuted VFcache today, which was codenamed "Project Lightning." So what is this thing they call VFCache? VFCache is a server Flash caching technology that reduces latency and increases throughput by moving the active dataset up to the server-side PCI-e cache. It accelerates block I/O reads and also protects data by using a write-throughcache to the back-end storage.
First thought is how is VFCache different from similar products currently in the marketplace? Well let’s first look at how it compares to a DAS based cache solution.
DAS-based PCIe Flash technology stores the application directly on the Flash card, so in this architecture it doesn't provide protection if the card were to fail. With VFCache write-through cache, you have protection against data loss as it ...
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Chargeback Realities
I've been involved in probably a dozen conversations with IT organizations over the past three months regarding various phases of the development of an internal cloud/private clouds/ITaaS instance. In every single one of those discussions, chargeback has become a hot button of debate, and I feel the need to add some external perspective to what I've been hearing.
The Way it Has Always Been
When I bring up the concept of chargeback or a rate card for internal ITaaS consumption, I almost invariably encounter the pushback that "the business" won't accept chargeback, that it's never been done there, and that it's a non-starter of a conversation. If there is a manufacturer in the room, they will typically default to the "next best thing" approach of saying "of ...
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