Posts by: amattson
Packing my bags and heading to Vegas.. And a brief lab update.
I haven't been posting with much regularity lately, but it's not for lack of trying. We've been so busy lately with performing demonstrations and putting some finishing touches on components with the lab. From a hardware perspective, we added a NetApp 6080 HA pair complete with Flash Cache and Unified Adaptors, which we're using to host both native NetApp storage and also virtualize additional storage behind it.
Over the next few weeks I will be adding much of the ancillary management products in the OnCommand family that will extend the functionality of the NetApp to areas including application integration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery.
As you might have gathered from the subject line on this post, I'm also headed off to VMworld next week. Certainly I ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 8 – What a difference a day makes.
For those of you that have read my blogs with any regularity, I suppose I should start off with a bit of an apology. I’ve not written in quite some time, and because of that you are probably a bit out of sync with the tremendous progress we have made in our own lab.
Over the past few months, I’d blogged occasionally about products we had been installing and evaluating, but more than that, I spent a lot time outlining our future plans with regard to the lab, and waxing lyrical on some of my designs.
Well, to bring you up to speed, my peers and I are in the midst of a strong push to implement and configure all of the goodies I’ve been talking about. ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 7 – Tintri
It has been a busy few weeks in the Ahead lab, and for me personally, so I'm a bit behind in getting the latest and greatest info on to this space. I'm finally feeling a bit back to normal after last week's EMCworld. Some pretty cool announcements from EMC, but I actually enjoyed some of the incoming tech from the partner ecosystem. I'd recommend checking out John Cole's blog as he details some of the bigger announcements from the conference.
With at bit out of the way, let's get back to the topic of this entry. I made a disclaimer a few months back regarding the fact that our lab is a constantly evolving environment, marrying bits of gear that our customers are using today, and ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 6 – Networking Double Vision
The only thing better than one Cisco Nexus 7010 is…. You guessed it – two Nexus 7010s. As I’d mentioned months ago in this space, the lab equipment is never going to be entirely static; we’re always try to build an environment that represents both what customers are doing in their environments today, but also represents what they might start thinking about for tomorrow.
The initial round of diagrams I had put together indicated a sort of “OTV-in-a-box” (with an external L3 10GE switch to provide our L3 "cloud") approach to networking, where we were going to leverage the virtualization functionality of the Nexus 7000-series to partition 4 Virtual Device Contexts (VDCs) to parcel up the networking elements for both Data Center 1 and Data Center ...
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Storage Pool Design Notes for VNX & CX4/NS4 Storage Arrays
For a few years storage admins have had the ability to pool disks on CLARiiON-based storage arrays. First, you could do it manually using striped metaLUNs, creating LUNs across multiple RAID groups. Then virtual provisioning was released, which permitted an admin to create a pool of a single type (EFD solid state drives, FC, or SATA) of storage media, and the array would automatically wide stripe LUN data across disks in the pool.
Flare 30, released in the latter part of 2010, added the ability to create pools of storage comprised of multiple media types. Now, instead of being forced to create a storage pool of a single media type, an admin can create a pool of any combination of EFDs, FC, and SATA. Assuming the ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 5 and a half – More Isilon
This is a follow up to my previous blog post outlining our experiences getting basic Isilon functionality up and running. As part of our installation process, we did some recording of the unboxing, rack and stack, and cluster building. That video can be found here. Now, we don’t usually move that fast in real life, unless of course it’s the end of the quarter :)
Part of the reason we wanted to get the Isilon up and running some quickly was so I could present and demonstrate on the Isilon platform for our annual March Madness event, which took place last Thursday. In addition to providing an introduction to the Isilon platform, I went in to detail around specific model offerings, data protection mechanisms, and ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 5 – Isilon
After months of planning and architecture, we’re finally starting to get some of the new stuff up and running in our lab. First item we took down was our Isilon cluster. I wanted to take a few minutes to give you guys a feel for what the install process is like, and what my thoughts were. I will get in to a few technical points on the Isilon platform, although a deep dive in to all of the model and protection offerings (like snapshots and remote replication), are beyond the scope of this post and probably will be something I cover at a later date (or at our March Madness event this month on the 17th!).
Fortunately, I wasn’t alone for this install. I had our ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 4
After spending the bulk of the blogs on the storage devices and their role in our new data center lab, I wanted to write a bit more on the networking configuration we plan on implementing. Networking, in the context of this article, is specific to traditional LAN networking; I've left the fibre channel element out, for the most part, except where necessary. As always, our lab is in a fluid state from a configuration perspective, so some of this is subject to change. It's how we need to be to ensure that we're able to provide a dynamic and scalable environment for our customers to come in and work on.
With all of that said, there are a couple of designs I've been building out, in ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 3
Happy Friday folks! Lots of goings on in the Ahead lab planning world. This entry has us firmly entrenched in the exercises we've been going through to get the physical components nailed down, and in what order.
The good news is that the storage components have been finalized. Data Center 1 (or the data center formerly known as Primary) will house a VMAX/SE, a FAS3240, a VNX5500, and a cluster of Isilon 10000-series nodes. Additional storage technologies will be present in the form of EMC Recoverpoint, vPlex, Symantec Netbackup, a Data Domain DD580, and some Avamar.
On the other side, Data Center 2 will house a FAS2040 and an NS-120. It will also mirror the RecoverPoint, vPlex, and Avamar configurations house in Data Center 1.
Naturally, with all ...
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VMware School Days
In preparation for taking the VCAP-Design exam, I have been attending the VMware Design Workshop along with a few of my coworkers. The course is reinforcing my belief that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be an effective VMware architect without having a solid background not just in VMware, but server, storage, and networking. Just being the “VMware guy/girl” isn’t good enough these days, particularly as we see the product set from VMware as well as its virtualization ecosystem partners expand.
Case in point is the Nexus 1000V (or even the native distributed virtual switch available with vSphere 4.x+). It’s not as simple as creating a few port groups and off you go; good planning and design is a critical part of a ...
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