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Shawn Cannon

Hello! I am Shawn Cannon and I have been dabbling in IT related things officially since 1996. I am our Executive Senior Blogger with experience in VMware, Microsoft, EMC storage, Veeam and Dell servers. For the past 3.5 years I have been working with Splunk. I am a VMware vExpert as well as a SplunkTrust member. I lead the Splunk user group in Atlanta. I am a proud father of two grown girls and in my spare time I like to go bowling, fishing and love to read.

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Press Release – Natural Gas Agency Lights Up Transition to Cloud Backup with iland

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

The Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia was looking to replace its tape based backup with a could solution. They chose  iland Secure Cloud Backup with Veeam Cloud Connect. See the full press release below.

Natural Gas Agency Lights Up Transition to Cloud Backup with iland

Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia Replaces Physical Tape Backups with iland Secure Cloud Backup with Veeam Cloud Connect

Houston – August 13, 2020 – iland, a leading VMware-based cloud services provider for application hosting, data protection and disaster recovery, today announced the Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia has selected iland Secure Cloud Backup with Veeam Cloud Connect to backup its workloads, transitioning from years of relying on physical tape libraries.  

The Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia (the Gas Authority) is the largest non-profit natural gas joint action agency in the United States, serving 79 members in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee who meet the gas needs of more than 245,000 customers. Natural gas has become more important to many communities and customers and the Gas Authority is safely and reliably delivering gas supplies every day. Their team is dedicated to growing natural gas sales through multiple markets.

Senior System Administrator Jason Espinales-Osorio explained that as the company grew it was also expanding its physical tape libraries at a data center several miles from their office. Tape storage is one of the oldest and most difficult to access backup methods. Espinales-Osorio spent valuable time retrieving old tapes and preparing them for pickup by their tape backup vendor. Unfortunately, this time consuming task meant their tapes and data sometimes sat at the offsite location for weeks at a time.  

It became evident that tape backup, with its limited amount of space and high level of maintenance, was quickly becoming cost prohibitive. Espinales-Osorio decided to proactively seek several cloud backup vendors and quickly discovered iland to be a leader in Backup as a Service (BaaS).  

“We were using physical tape and retention that was clunky. I had to drive to our offices, take them out and prep them for our vendor. It was getting painful,” said Espinales-Osorio. “It was definitely time to explore cloud backups and iland was a natural fit for us.” 

“An easy, cost-effective backup solution has never been more important for growing businesses, especially those with tight IT budgets and increased data availability needs,” said Brian Ussher, iland president and co-founder. “iland prides itself on being able to seamlessly transition organizations like Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia away from legacy hardware, while also providing the resources and proven technology necessary to scale and succeed.”

In iland’s Secure Cloud Backup integrated with Veeam Cloud Connect technology, Espinales-Osorio found an easy, cost-effective solution, allowing him to replace cumbersome tapes permanently. He quickly implemented a backup strategy that had direct integration and 100 percent compatibility with Veeam’s industry-leading backup and replication software supported by iland’s award-winning Secure Cloud Console.

“iland really allowed us to get ahead of the curve,” said Espinales-Osorio. “For the longest time, we were stuck in those old ways of doing things. iland has gotten us moving forward.” 

Espinales-Osorio praised the ease of the iland Secure Cloud Console, which allows him to manage his backups and expand his retention from anywhere. He now has much more time to work on his day-to-day system administrative and network tasks without worrying about physical tapes. 

“I spent so much of my time dealing with those physical tape backups because that was a priority for us. We needed to make sure that data was there. Now I’ve got more time to do more of my regular day-to-day tasks because we can automate and leverage the cloud to handle backups,” said Espinales-Osorio. “The ease of the console and expandability is critical. Now we can expand our retention policies with just an email, it’s amazing.” 

About iland

iland is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). They are recognized by industry analysts as a leader in disaster recovery. The award-winning iland Secure Cloud Console natively combines deep layered security, predictive analytics, and compliance to deliver unmatched visibility and ease of management for all of iland’s cloud services. Headquartered in Houston, Texas and London, UK, and Sydney, Australia, iland delivers cloud services from its cloud regions throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Learn more at www.iland.com.

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Big DataGeneralSplunk

Splunk Blog Series – Deploying an App Via Deployment Server

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

In the previous post in this series, I described how to setup an app for deploying HEC to multiple heavy forwarders. The best way to do this is via a deployment server. This is not a “deployer server”; a deployer is used to push apps to search head clusters. A deployment server is used to push apps to Splunk Universal Forwarders (UFs) and non clustered Splunk servers, like heavy forwarders. All Splunk Enterprise instances can be a deployment server. A universal forwarder cannot be a deployment server. To make a Splunk Enterprise server a deployment server, change into the /opt/splunk/etc/delpoyment-apps folder. In this folder, copy in the app you want to deploy out to servers. Here are the steps to create an app. I am going to show you the method of using the GUI so you can then see the resulting folder structure for a Splunk app.

On the server that will be the deployment server, go to Manage Apps. If you are on the launcher page, that will be the gear icon.

This will take you to the apps screen.  Once there, click on the Create App button at the right.

The following screen will appear.

Enter a name for the app (Ex:  Splunk HEC)
Enter a folder name (Note:  cannot use spaces.  Ex: splunk_hec)
Enter a version number (Ex: 1.0.0) – this is optional
Mark the app as visible or not.  If there is going to be dashboards and such for your app, make it visible, otherwise set this to No.
Enter an author name – this is optional
Enter a description – this is optional
Leave the template at Barebones and click Save at the bottom.

Now lets check out the app folder structure.  Go to the CLI and go into /opt/splunk/etc/apps (this is where new apps default to).  Change into the folder of the app you just created.

As you can see, 4 folders are created.  The Splunk best practice when creating a new app is to add your settings into the default folder so lets change into that folder.  In this scenario, we are going to create an inputs.conf file and paste in the HEC settings from the previous post.

Once the inputs.conf file is saved, move the app folder into the deployment-apps folder.

mv /opt/splunk/etc/apps/splunk_hec /opt/splunk/etc/deployment-apps

Now we will go into the Splunk GUI again on the server that will be the deployment server.  Click on Settings – Forwarder Management

Now you will get a screen similar to below.

Before moving that app into deployment-apps, this screen would have been blank.  As you can see, there is 1 app [Apps (1)].  There are no clients though.  Easy!  We need to tell the server we want to push the app to how to find the deployment server.  Normally you would set this in a template build of a new Splunk server (to automate it) but for this example you can run the following command:

/opt/splunk/bin/splunk set deploy-poll <deployment server name or IP>:8089

You are likely to be prompted for a username and password.  Enter a Splunk username/pass that has admin rights.  Once the command is complete, restart splunk.

/opt/splunk/bin/splunk restart

Once Splunk comes back up, in the Deployment Server page, this server should show up within a few minutes.

And there it is!  But we are not done!  There is another piece to this.  We need to create a server class.  A server class is how you assign clients to apps.  Click on Server Classes.

This server does not have any server classes yet to click create one.

Choose a name for the server class.  In this case, I used Splunk, HF for heavy forwarder and HEC since this will be for the new HEC app.  Click Save.

Lets add the server into Clients.  Click Add Clients.

Under the include section, you type in the server names that you want to be in this server class.  Once the servers are there, click Save.

Don’t add the app yet as we may want to make sure that Splunkd restarts are part of the app deploy.  Click on apps and Edit the app.

Check the box Restart Splunkd if you want Splunk to restart on deploy. I recommend checking this since this app will not go into effect without a restart of Splunk.  Under server classes, pick the server class we just created.  Click Save.

That’s it!  The app will deploy on the next poll from the client that was added into the server class.

You can force the client to check in and pull the app by using the command below.

/opt/splunk/bin/splunk reload deploy-server -class <server class name>

Oh, let’s check the server to see if the app now shows up

There it is!  You have successfully deployed an app using the deployment server!

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Press Release – Leaseweb Global Achieves Double the Market Average in Growth

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Leaseweb Global announces that it has doubled the market average in its growth.  The full press release can be found below.

Leaseweb Global Achieves Double the Market Average in Growth
 
Leaseweb Global announced a five-year growth in its global hosting infrastructure and related network capacity that is twice the market average. Through focusing on growing the company’s global presence, Leaseweb has seen a 22% increase in worldwide data center locations, a 55% increase in network capacity, and been able to leap in bandwidth from 5.5 to 10Tbps – all within the last five-years.
 
Following the launch of new locations in London and Sydney at the end of 2017, Leaseweb opened a data center facility in Miami last year, providing a springboard into South America, and bringing to 20 the total number of data center locations operating globally, with 80,000 servers under management. Most recently, Leaseweb completed the network expansion of its Amsterdam data center, enabling further growth and paving the way for applications that benefit from 100Gbps connectivity. Additionally, the acquisition of US-based managed hosting services companies, ServInt and NOBIS Technology Group, has given more end-users access to Leaseweb’s portfolio of solutions via its existing data centers.
 
As well as growing its data center location and services portfolio, Leaseweb extended its IaaS platform into Asia via Leaseweb Cloud, completing the full spectrum of its public and private cloud products available in the region. The company also enhanced its cloud backup and protection offerings, allowing the delivery of an easy-to-use, fast and reliable data protection solution for cloud and internet professionals. Moreover, Leaseweb began offering All Flash FAS storage across its cloud portfolio, reducing latency and increasing reliability for business-critical cloud applications.
 
“Businesses that operate worldwide, which take pride in their competitive edge, seek the kind of global hosting and infrastructure provider who can deliver best-in-class user experiences locally and reliably,” said Alexander Kalkman, CMO at Leaseweb. “This need feeds directly into our goal to grow globally as the first provider businesses turn to for the provision of cloud infrastructure that not only meets local requirements but offers a footprint to reach customers across borders. Looking forward, we are committed to a continued growth trajectory and delivering superior cloud hosting technology globally, engaging with our customers in a personalized, human-to-human manner—an approach unmatched by industry giants and highly valued by our customers.”
 
Leaseweb has seen success in the Adtech and March sectors, with customers such as Adjust, a mobile attribution and analytics company, leveraging Leaseweb’s ability to provide multiple private racks of dedicated servers across the globe, and Algolia, a distributed search-as-a-service API, chosing to work with Leaseweb due to its customer-centric and global mindset.

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Press Release – Zerto Recognizes KIND Snacks as the Inaugural ‘IT Resilience Innovator’

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Zerto announces KIND Snacks as its first ‘IT Resilience Innovator’.  See the full press release below.

New IT Resilience Innovators Program Highlights Projects That Inspire Others to Think Differently About Disaster Recovery, Data Protection, and Cloud

 

Zerto Recognizes KIND Snacks as the Inaugural ‘IT Resilience Innovator’

 

Boston, June 30, 2020 – Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, has today announced that KIND Snacks, one of the most famous and fastest growing healthy snack brands, is the first organization to be recognized by Zerto as an ‘IT Resilience Innovator.’ This new program has been created to highlight organizations that seek to build a world of uninterrupted technology, move beyond traditional IT, and push the boundaries of digital transformation.

 

The IT Resilience Innovators program focuses on organizations and IT professionals who are adopting resiliency projects and initiatives to drive digital transformation and inspire others to think differently about legacy approaches to data protection. Through these projects, IT Resilience Innovators are ushering in the future of IT and setting their business up for success. They are leveraging new techniques and technology and leading the IT industry in the areas of disaster recovery, data protection, and cloud with the ultimate goal being to protect their business from any disruption.

 

KIND Snacks is being honored for its approach to resilience and disaster recovery, which it views as a strategic priority to keep its 24/7 business running. In 2019, the company reengineered and redesigned its ecommerce platform with a modernization initiative that has enabled them to remain agile and resilient in the face of COVID-19. From operations, to reporting, to packaging, their ability to quickly pivot in the changing market and accommodate shopper needs in real time during an unprecedented pandemic makes them stand out as an IT Resilience Innovator.

 

“On our journey to IT resilience we learned we can’t just protect one application – we need to protect the whole company from our ERP to everything else,” explained Joe Jbeily, senior manager, infrastructure and security operations at KIND Snacks. “We have one of the best teams available, and they’re putting us in a position to rely on our own tools to protect KIND and build a truly resilient organization.”

 

“To keep up with the changing demands of their customers, companies need to offer 100% uptime, and, to get there, they will have to look outside of traditional backup capabilities,” explained Avi Raichel, CIO at Zerto. “Unlike many other organizations that wait for a disaster to strike before investing in a disaster recovery solution, KIND has been prioritizing DR for years as a way to stay up and running in the event of a problem. It’s an approach that deserves recognition as an example of best practice.”

 

In an effort to continue teaching the IT industry about best practices and set standards around what it means to be IT resilient today, Zerto is opening the program to accept nominations from other companies that are demonstrating resilient operations. To see if your company qualifies and to find out more about the program, visit this link.

 

About Zerto

 

Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.

 

Contact:

Derrick Shannon

Touchdown PR

[email protected]

772.475.1027

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Big DataDatacenterSoftwareSplunk

Splunk Blog Series – Setting up HEC on multiple Splunk Heavy Forwarders

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Hello everyone!  This is the first post in a series I plan to do around Splunk.  One of the things we wanted to do in our Splunk environment was have the Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) setup across multiple Heavy Forwarders (HFs).  This way we could have all the same inputs setup once and deployed to all other HEC enabled HFs.  There are two ways to do this (NOTE – This document assumes an on-premises Splunk deployment):

  1. Setup your deployment server so that if you add or edit the HEC settings on that server, it would save these changes into $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/deployment-apps/splunk_httpinput/ instead of in the apps folder.  This app can then be deployed to the HEC enabled HFs. See this link for more details: HEC_on_HFs
  2. Create a custom app to hold all the HEC settings and deploy that to the HEC enabled HFs.

We chose the latter option for a very important reason:  Some of our HEC enabled HFs also had Splunk DB Connect installed.  DB Connect uses the HEC config that is stored in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/splunk_httpinput/.  If you use option number 1, when the app is deployed, it will delete the splunk_httpinput folder you already have on the DB Connect HF and you will lose connectivity to DB Connect.  I learned that lesson the hard way.  Luckily we had a git server that recorded the changes that were made so I was able to roll it back.  The rest of this post will show you how to create the app on the deployment server, use another instance of Splunk to create your HEC entries to create your tokens, copy those inputs from inputs.conf into the app and then deploy that app to the HEC enabled HFs.

First, lets show you how to create the app.  As this is going to hold just an inputs.conf file, here is what I did.  Get into the CLI of your Splunk Server and change into the $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/deployment-apps/ folder. Create a new folder using whatever name you want the app to be.  In this example, lets use HECinputs.  Go into the HECinputs folder and create a local folder.   We will come back to the CLI in a bit.

Next, open up the Splunk GUI on one of your other Splunk instances.  I have a locally installed copy on my laptop that I use for this. After you login, click settings and Data inputs

On the data inputs screen, click HTTP Event Collector

On the HEC screen, click New Token at the top right:

On the Add Data screen, enter the name for this HEC token and click the green Next button at the top of the screen:

On the next page, you need to either pick an existing source type or click New and type in the new sourcetype name.  In the app context drop down, pick an app to store this config in.  Remember this app as you will need to go there in the CLI to get the inputs.conf file.  Choose the allowed indexes for this input and also choose a default index.  In most cases, this will be a HEC input for one index so you would choose that index for allowed and default. Click the green Review button at the top.

Review your settings and click the green Submit button at the top.

You have created the HEC input.  The token value is auto generated and you can see it in the GUI or in the inputs.conf file.  Since we are going to copy the contents of inputs.conf from this server to the app on the deployment server, lets go to the CLI for the server you just created the input on.  In my example, this is on a Linux server.  Once you are logged into the CLI, go into $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps folder.  Next, do you remember the App Context setting?  That is the folder you want to go into.  I put the Test HEC input into the Search App so I need to so into the search folder ($SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/search).  Go into the local folder under search.  In this folder, there will be an inputs.conf file.  Show the contents of the file:

[http://Test]
disabled = 0
index = main
indexes = main
sourcetype = _json
token = 3396a456-a09d-484e-bb08-ec82086479b8

As you can see, a HEC input will start with http:// and have the name you specified.  See the token?  This is what you have to provide to the person who needs to send data to this HEC input.  Copy this entire section and paste it into an inputs.conf file in the app you created on the deployment server.  Save the file and your app is ready to deploy.

This post will not cover the aspects of the deployment process. Refer to Splunk Docs link below for deploying apps to HFs (Deploy Apps From Deployment Server)

Do you have some Splunk things you would like for me to blog about? Please reach out to me and let me know!

 

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NewsStorage

Press Release – WekaIO Appoints Ken Grohe as President and CRO

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

WekaIO Appoints Ken Grohe as President and Chief Revene Officer.  Read the press release below:

On Growth of 600%, WekaIO Appoints Ken Grohe as President and Chief Revenue Officer

Campbell, Calif. – June 18, 2020 – WekaIO™ (Weka), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced the appointment of Ken Grohe as President and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Ken will lead the company’s global go-to-market organization and report to CEO and Co-Founder Liran Zvibel.

Grohe comes to Weka from Samsung’s Stellus Technologies, a leading data systems company that addresses the way companies capture, store, access, and process the unstructured data, where he served as CRO and drove the company’s overall go-to-market strategy. A highly seasoned veteran of the industry, Grohe previously served as President of SignNow, SVP and GM of Barracuda Networks, and CRO of Virident, a Western Digital Company. Grohe also had an impressive 25-year career at Dell EMC, finishing as VP and GM with a focus on the global flash business.

With over three decades in the SaaS and storage industry, Grohe has deep experience and possesses a rare dedication and passion for winning that is based on a customer-centric perspective. In addition to his roles at major tech companies, Grohe is an advisor and board member of many Silicon Valley fast-rising companies.

WekaIO saw 600% revenue growth in 2019 and continues to accelerate its growth in 2020. This meteoric trajectory is fueled by a unique ability to impact businesses by helping them to modernize AI workflows with software-defined storage systems optimized for NVMe and the hybrid cloud. Weka empowers companies to solve the most difficult IT infrastructure problems so they can extract maximum value from their data and expedite time-to-market. WekaFS™, the world’s fastest parallel file system and Weka’s flagship product, maximizes CPU and GPU performance and ROI by eliminating I/O bottlenecks to accelerate the data-intensive applications commonly found in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning, life sciences, and financial analytics.

“Ken’s expertise in this market and keen understanding of the customer journey will be the catalyst that drives the next phase of growth for Weka,” said Liran Zvibel. “We welcome him to the leadership team at a key time when we are realizing rapid customer adoption, significant revenue growth, and major strategic partnerships. Ken’s role will be influential in executing the company’s vision to become the de-facto solution for enterprise storage on premises and in the cloud.”

“I have known Ken for decades. He is a fantastic Go To Market executive with a proven successful track record that will absolutely help move Weka to the next level,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “His leadership, customer centricity, energy, and enthusiasm combined with Weka’s killer technology can’t help but be a winning combination.”

“We’ve been a proud partner in the Weka Innovation Network (WIN) for some time now, and we are excited to see the growth in the Weka leadership team,” commented Stan Wysocki, president at Mark III Systems, a WIN Leader partner. “We look forward to working closely with Ken and the extended Weka team on our AI/ML, HPC, and analytics solutions offerings for our joint clients.”

“We are delighted to see the Weka leadership team grow with strategic appointments such as Ken’s,” said Mike Thompson, CEO of Groupware Technology, a WIN Leader Partner. “Weka provides a modern storage infrastructure that accelerates performance and solves big problems. With Ken’s strength of industry experience and sincere drive to steer the company forward, the future looks bright for Weka.”

“I have watched Weka’s incredible growth since its launch from stealth in 2017, and I have a great appreciation for the work of the team to date. Time and time again, Weka has proven they are delivering a highly differentiated and disruptive storage technology—with epic performance at any scale for customers with data-intensive workloads. Therefore, I am grateful to join the leadership team and to have the opportunity to leverage my experience and proven success in this industry to help Weka grow exponentially and soar to new heights,” added Grohe.

In addition to being an international best-selling author, Grohe holds a degree from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a BS, cum laude, in Management from Boston College.

 

On the wave of this growth trajectory, Weka also recently announced hires in other strategic positions including chief financial officer and head of AI and strategic alliances.

 

For more information on the Weka leadership team, go to: https://www.weka.io/company/about-us

To find a partner in the Weka Innovation Network, go to: https://www.weka.io/partners

For more information on the Enterprise Strategy Group, go to: https://www.esg-global.com/

“Leveraging NetSuite & Your Mobile Device to Make More $$$: Closing the Last Mile on Business Consumption with Customer Centricity,“ by Ken Grohe, is available on Amazon. 

About WekaIO

Weka offers WekaFS, the modern file system that uniquely empowers organizations to solve the newest, biggest problems holding back innovation. Optimized for NVMe and the hybrid cloud, Weka handles the most demanding storage challenges in the most data-intensive technical computing environments, delivering truly epic performance at any scale. Its modern architecture unlocks the full capabilities of today’s data center, allowing businesses to maximize the value of their high-powered IT investments. Weka helps industry leaders reach breakthrough innovations and solve previously unsolvable problems.

Follow WekaIO: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

WekaIO, WekaIO Matrix, WekaFS, Weka AI, Weka FabricX, Weka Innovation Network, Weka AI logo, WIN logo, and the WekaIO logo are trademarks of WekaIO, Inc.

 

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Press Release – StorCentric’s Nexsan Announces the E-Series 32F Storage Platform

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon
StorCentric’s Nexsan Announces the E-Series 32F Storage Platform – the Most Compact, High Density QLC SSD Solution on the Market
 
Combining Enhanced Performance with Unbeatable Economics for the Most Demanding Enterprise Environments
 
Nexsan, a StorCentric Company, and a global leader in unified storage solutions, today announced the general availability launch of the E-Series 32F storage platform, the most compact, high density QLC SSD solution on the market, offering 245TB of storage using QLC SSD drives in just 2U of rack space, and up to 491TB if configured with TLC SSD drives.
 
Designed to deliver enhanced performance and unbeatable economics for the most demanding enterprise platforms, the E32F delivers extremely fast random read performance to analyze the high capacity, performance-sensitive workloads that fuel business. These include real-time analytics, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), big data, media content delivery, user authentication and more.
 
Robust connectivity options (FC, iSCSI) deliver seamless interoperability along with a qualified OS support matrix. The E32F also supports Nexsan’s E-Flex Architecture, which allows users to select up to two of any of four expansion systems available and expand to over 2PB. This gives organizations the flexibility to size systems exactly as required within their rack space requirements.
 
QLC (quad-level cell) NAND packs 33% more data into every memory cell compared to its TLC (triple-level cell) equivalent at a much more reasonable price point. QLC storage delivers seven times the performance over 10K HDDs. This makes the E32F an ideal replacement for HDDs in performance-sensitive workloads.
 
“The Nexsan E-Series storage arrays give customers the capacity and performance needed for their data workloads, along with the ultra-reliability Nexsan is long known for,” commented Mihir Shah, CEO of StorCentric, parent company of Nexsan. “Hard working, ultra-reliable and offering market-leading performance, the E32F delivers storage without worries.”
 
For further information about the Nexsan E-Series 32F, please visit: https://www.nexsan.com/high-density-storage/
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Press Release: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Launches S3 Compatible APIs

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

BACKBLAZE B2 CLOUD STORAGE LAUNCHES S3 COMPATIBLE APIs, WITH PARTNERS IBM ASPERA, VEEAM, QUANTUM

San Mateo, CA (May 4, 2020) — Backblaze, the cloud provider beloved by storage professionals, announced it now supports the massive S3 ecosystem with the release of new, S3 Compatible APIs.

In practical terms, this means millions of software vendors, developers, and content creators—many stuck with legacy cloud providers before today—can now instantly plug into Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage by doing little more than pointing their data to a new destination. There’s no need to write new code, no change in workflow, and no downtime. Customers meanwhile get all the benefits of Backblaze B2: infinitely scalable, durable offsite storage at ¼ the price of other options.

More than a dozen software companies committed to support this Backblaze B2 launch, including:

● IBM Aspera, for fast data transfers and streaming across any distance

● Veeam, for backup, recovery, and management of virtual and physical infrastructures

● Quantum, for capturing, creating, and sharing digital content

The S3 Compatible APIs are new, yet the company is already a well known-innovator within the world of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)—Backblaze has a devoted following and more than an exabyte of customer data under management from organizations including American Public Television, Patagonia, and Verizon’s Complex Networks.

“For years, businesses have loved our astonishingly easy-to-use cloud storage for supporting them in achieving incredible outcomes,” said Gleb Budman, Co-Founder and CEO, Backblaze. “Today we’re excited to do all the more by enabling many more businesses to use our storage with their existing tools and workflows.”

Additional software companies committed to making Backblaze B2 a compelling new option for their users, starting with the S3 compatibility public beta, include: Cinnafilm, Igneous, LucidLink, Marquis, Masstech, Primestream, Scale Logic, Storage Made Easy, Studio Network Solutions, Venera, Vidispine, Xendata. These ISVs join a list of more than 100 others, plus hardware companies, already offering Backblaze B2 to support their customers’ cloud storage needs.

More information can be found here. Organizations that seek to get started immediately—for themselves for free, or for their software platform users—can contact Backblaze here.

About Backblaze

Founded in 2007, Backblaze provides award-winning cloud storage to businesses and consumers. It has more than an exabyte of customer data under management. The company’s B2 Cloud Storage is purpose built to provide simple, reliable, and affordable object storage—meaning customers can escape the cloud oligarchy and enjoy quality storage priced so they don’t have to choose between what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to their backup & archive, data organization, workflow streamlining, and more. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Backblaze employs 150 people.

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Top 10 virtualization strategies of 2019

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Top 10 virtualization strategies of 2019 (shared from searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com)

Top 10 virtualization strategies of 2019

As virtualization technology continues to advance, admins must use different strategies to manage their complex data centers, such as vCenter maps, hybrid cloud and more.

VMware Social Media Advocacy

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The Kemp Application Experience (AX) Fabric

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Kemp (formally KEMP Technologies) recently introduced a more robust way to make sure your applications are highly available to your customers!  This is called the Kemp Application Experience (AX) Fabric.  What exactly is this?  Here is what Kemp states on their web site

The Kemp 360 Application Experience (AX) Fabric is an elastic and infinitely scalable application delivery and load balancing interconnect. The Kemp 360 AX Fabric combines best-in-class load balancing, centralized management and predictive analytics to enable customers to deliver an optimal application user experience while maintaining the centralized insight required to be in total control of the application environment

Sounds pretty impressive!  Being able to scale resources on demand and centrally manage the process is ideal.  Let’s look into the features!

Advanced ADC – Best-in-class load balancers that can be deployed easily as hardware, virtual or natively in public cloud environments

Kemp has always been known for great load balancers so it makes sense that this would be a key feature in the AX fabric.  The ADCs can be anywhere you need them to be, on premises as hardware or virtual and also in public cloud.  Being able to serve all type of deployments is very important and Kemp delivers.

Management & Control – Centralized automated load balancer provisioning and simplified day-to-day management of application experience

As I said before, centralized management on the AX is the best way to deliver the best application experience for your users.

Predictive Analytics – Intelligent data correlation provides early detection of AX issues with actionable insight to resolve issues before they occur

Predictive Analytics is on par with Artificial Intelligence in my opinion.  This feature is very important if you want to deliver a top-notch application experience to your users. Being able to resolve potential issues before they occur is how this experience can be delivered.

Metered Licensing – Unlimited ADC instances, Monthly billing, Subscription tiers from 1Gbit, Deploy on premises or in the Cloud

I am seeing more and more products charge by the throughput used which is how Kemp licenses the AX Experience Fabric.  This allows you to deploy unlimited instances of the ADC no matter where they reside.

Scalability – Metered licensing means that traffic is never restricted due to a license limitation allowing deployed ADC instances to scale down, up and out as demands change.

Scalability goes right along with the licensing.  Being able to deploy unlimited instances of the ADC allows you to scale down as demand decreases or scale up as demand increases.

Simplified Cloud Migration – No cost overhead on having multiple ADCs on-premises and in the cloud means that Kemp 360 Central provides cross platform management with a single point to control all ADC resources (including 3rd party) and simplify cloud transition with single click migration of virtual services.

As stated, if you want to migrate ADCs from on premises to the cloud, this can be done with one click. Kemp has made this process super easy!

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud – The Kemp Application Delivery Fabric ensures application resilience and total flexibility in where ADC resources are deployed. Because the fabric is licensed based on overall measured throughput, ADC resources are not tied to any application or platform.

This is one of the best features in my opinion.  You can have your ADC resources running anywhere, even in multi-cloud instances.  There may be business reasons for using more than one cloud provider so being able to run ADCs in both is amazing!

Maintaining AX with Predictive Analytics – Kemp 360 Vision is a proactive monitoring and remediation service that ensures the availability and performance of the application delivery fabric by identifying emerging issues and providing pre-emptive remediation using a combination of machine and human analysis.

As touched on before, to keep AX up and running and performing optimally, Kemp 360 Vision help identify issues that it believe are about to occur and remediate them before a problem arises.  This is the future of application availability.

Check out these videos to learn about some of these features:

Kemp 360 | Vision – How predictive analysis prevents service outages

 

Metered Licensing – An overview of metered licensing (MELA) from Kemp

Learn more about the Kemp Application Experience (AX) Fabric here!

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. Kemp compensated me for my time but any opinions given are my own.

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