Category Archives: Ahead Lab
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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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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VMworld Updates – Monday Mid-day – “Best Laid Plans”
In the effort to keep these posts short(er) - I am going to try to knock them out after every couple of sessions. This one focuses on:
Well, there is no such thing as a perfectly executed maneuver – especially when it comes to attending technical conferences. My schedule today got hi-jacked by a recommendation and some back-top-back cross location scheduling.
As I wrote in my VMworld intro – one of the points of interest that I wanted to really dive into this week is how VMware vSphere treats storage – now and in the future, and specifically – how vSphere continues to take storage function out of the array and move it into the hypervisor stack.
Examples of this go back to vSphere 4 technologies like Storage ...
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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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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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