Hello everyone! It has been a while since I have posted. My new job role is completely focused around Splunk these days. Splunk’s annual conference is next week in Washington DC. I will be posting news and announcements throughout the week so stay tuned for some Splunk goodness. Sometime after the conference I will work on some Splunk related posts such as installing, how to use it and some good use cases. Stay tuned!!
Netapp ‘s Soldifire HCI Overview at VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra.
Netapp ‘s Soldifire HCI Overview. I had a chance to get a overview of Netapp’s new HCI Product while at Tech Field Day Extra while attending VMworld 2017.
I’ve long been a fan of the Solidfire Technology. From the early day’s to after the purchase and the re-branding of the product into Netapp.
Solidfire has always been built on Guaranteed Performance, flexibility & scale, and automated infrastructure and the Netapp Solidfire HCI product is no different.
With Netapp’s HCI Architecture, you see standard services that you would across all Netapp Products.
1
Here is the appliance and the new Netapp Solidfire look!
The idea is to indepentily scale the compute or storage nodes.
One OS across the entire Solidfire Platform.
Built on a open storage model.
Grow as needed.
Node Information
Great Stuff! Looking forward to learning more!
Here is the link to the Tech Field Day Video
Thanks
Roger Lund
Pluribus Networks Netvisor & Adaptive Cloud Fabric @ VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra
I had the chance to get a Netvisor And Adaptive Cloud Fabric Overview by Pluribus Networks at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2017.
White box Networking has been main stream in the service provider world for some time. Plurbus has been strong in that space, but now more and more enterprise’s are looking for SDN, and exploring the White Box Networking Space. Pluribus Netvisor and Adapter Cloud Fabric is a product that can sit on these devices.
Below are the slides, and below that the video.
EDIT : Updated Slides.
Video of the Presentation.
Thanks
Druva – Infrastructure Data Protection
Druva – Infrastructure Data Protection
I had a chance to have a overview with Druva at Tech Field Day Extra while attending VMworld 2017.
Druva , on demand , at scale, and cloud-first.
Druva is a as a service offering that includes the AWS costs.
Thanks
Roger Lund
Kingston – NVMe Overview at VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra.
Today I’m at Tech Field Day Extra at VMword. I had the chance to sit in on a presentation by Kingston.
Overview of NVMe by @kingstontech at #TFDx #VMworld #vmworld2017
Kingston has developed and released a couple NVMe products with a read focus. Below are the slides highlighting the products.
These products are focused on Read Intensive use cases like VDI.
Below are the Slides from the Presentation. Edit : Updated Slides. Videos are below.
Kingston can be found on:
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/kingstontechmemory
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kingstontechnology
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingstonTech
Instagram: https://instagram.com/kingstontechnology/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/kingston
Thanks
Roger Lund
Uila – A view into your data center.
I recently had the chance to get a product overview of Uila.
What product does Uila have?
“Uila’s Application-Centric Infrastructure Monitoring Monitoring helps align business and IT Operations goals in a single product by providing IT Operations with the application visibility and correlated network, compute and storage insights for Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud-based Data Centers (such as VMWare, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Docker Container, etc.). “
Ever need to see why your developer or application owner are indicating your virtual environment is causing performance issues to their application?? Of course, it’s not VMware, but it couple be something between the virtualization layer and the application layer causing performance issues.
Sounds Great. But what does that mean? How does it work?
How do I see into my environment ?
Uila Shows real time, and backwards in time so you can click and dig in.
Then you can dig into Application Analysis to see what is causing the problem.
Once you find the problem, in this case Oracle_11g-n1 looks suspect.. You can dig farther in.
Of course you can do a root cause view.
And find the problem.
For more information on Uila.
Videos
Tech Field Day Presentation by Uila – Company Overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgzx14PRpOs
http://vimeo.com/202704462
Tech Field Day Presentation by Uila – Application Visibility and Root Cause
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1PeWccQZ5g
http://vimeo.com/202698494
Tech Field Day Presentation by Uila – Infrastructure Monitoring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjH2CPdFT0s
http://vimeo.com/202701527
Tech Field Day Presentation by Uila – End User Experience Monitoring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-1ExHbRGgI
http://vimeo.com/202702132
Tech Field Day Presentation by Uila – Virtual Network Monitoring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufqMYFVBlMA
http://vimeo.com/202702496
Data Sheet
http://uila.com/download/datasets/920/Uila_Datasheet_FullStack_Virtualization_Apr_2017.pdf
Check them out.
Thanks
Roger Lund
Big Switch – Big Cloud Fabric
A overview of Big Cloud Fabric
Big Switch labels Big Cloud Fabric, the ” Next-Gen Data Center Switching Fabric”
From the above Link.
”
Big Cloud Fabric™ is the next-generation data center switching fabric delivering operational velocity, network automation and visibility for cloud-native applications and software-defined data centers, while staying within flat IT budgets.
Enterprise data centers are challenged today to support cloud-native applications, drive business velocity and work within flat budgets.
Network layer is often cited as the least agile part of data center infrastructure,especially when compared to compute infrastructure. The advent of virtualization changed the server landscape and delivered operational efficiencies across management workflows via automation. Emerging cloud-native applications are expected to demand even greater agility from the underlying infrastructure.
Most data centers are built using old network architecture, a box-by-box operational paradigm that inhibits the pace of IT operations to meet the demand of modern applications and software-defined data centers. Click here for more information on the challenges.
Software-defined data center is demanding network innovation. With virtualization going mainstream, networks are required to provide visibility into virtual machines, east-west traffic across VMs, and deliver network service connectivity easily. Networks are expected to not adversely impact software-defined data center agility by mandating manual box-by-box network configuration and upgrades. Emerging cloud-native applications require rapid application and services deployment. This demands network operations to be more automated instead of relying on manual CLI and limited GUI workflows. Lastly, infrastructure budgets trends have flat-lined in most organizations. This demands an innovative approach compared to the legacy network based on proprietary hardware that increases costs.
These network demands are met by software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. Leveraging a centralized controller, the SDN networks overcome the box-by-box operational paradigm to deliver business velocity. As applications become more distributed, SDN approaches are required for networks to become agile and automated via orchestrated workflows using RESTful APIs. By leveraging open industry-standard network hardware, SDN solutions provide vendor choice and drives down costs in a flat budget environment. This cycle of innovation has been witnessed before in the server infrastructure, driven by virtualization and containers. More recently, storage infrastructure is getting transformed as well with various software-enabled architectures.
”
Lets Dig in. Below is a overview of the Clos Fabric.
What are my use cases? What type of deployments support the fabric?
Who uses the product today?
How do I deploy this with my existing data center, do I need to worry about my legacy network working with Big Switch?
What has defined customer success?
API’s are key, how do you leverage them for automation?
How do you enable me to out scale my competitors?
How do you allow me to see inside my network?
How do you support multi tenancy?
Thanks
Roger Lund
Big Switch – Container Integration
I had a the opportunity of a Big Switch and Containers overview.
From the Big Switch Page above.
”
Single SDN Fabric for Multi-Container Ecosystems.
Big Cloud Fabric delivers network automation, deep visibility and rapid container-to-container troubleshooting in multi-container environments.
Containers are a new atomic unit of computing that is ideal for emerging cloud-native, distributed applications. Data center operators are evaluating various container technologies, including Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Red Hat OpenShift.
Containers offer a layer of abstraction, not unlike to what virtual machines offered when virtualization first arrived on the scene. However, Containers are lightweight in using the host footprint because they share an underlying operating system unlike a VM which hosts its own guest OS.
Containers enable micro-services based distributed applications where an application is decomposed into multiple network-connected micro-services, with each micro-service packaged in its own container. This highly-distributed application architecture leads to tremendous increase in east-west traffic compared to monolithic applications.”
What about Bare-Metal networking Support?
Container Fabric Automation, Network visibility, and Operational Simplicity, what does that mean?
What about a example of container visibility?
How do I troubleshoot?
How about event monitoring, and logging?
Additionally watch the Big Switch Kubernetes Demo
Thanks
Roger Lund
Big Switch – Overview and Design
What is Big Switch Networks? Why did they set out to re invent the way data center networking is done?
Big Switch designs and implements their product for Intent-based networking.
Legacy vs Intent-based Networking.
Traditional Networking is feature bases. Big Switch drives forward towards a Autonomous Network platform.
Big Switch is inspired by the hyper scale network designs of Google , Facebook and Microsoft.
The simplicity of a single logical chassis across your data center.
A single Logical chassis allows them to focus on innovation and features quickly, with a Zero touch fabric. What does that mean?
Examples:
Portfolio
Use Cases.
Leveraging SDN Fabrics.
What do the experts say?
What about Customer Adoption?
Keep in touch to see more on Big Switch Technologies, Including Big Cloud Fabric, and more.
Roger L
DellEMC World 2017 Wrap Up
I attended DellEMC World 2017 this past week in Las Vegas courtesy of the DellEMC Elect program; but all thoughts below, short of any quotes, are my own for better or worse.
One of the highlights for me, as with many conferences, was the community aspect. From vBeers Sunday night, being invited to Howard Marks’ traditional Lotus of Siam meal on Tuesday, or the various official and unofficial get togethers put on during the week the opportunities to network were plentiful. And it was great to meet those coming into the DellEMC Elect program from the EMC side.
Continue reading…