Shawn Cannon
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.
Press Release: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Launches S3 Compatible APIs
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.
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.
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.
Harlingen WaterWorks System Implements VDI with Scale Computing HC3
Scale Computing just announced that Harlingen WaterWorks System in Texas has chosen their HC3 system for their new VDI solution. Check out the press release below for more information.
Harlingen WaterWorks System Transforms VDI Performance and Reliability with Scale Computing, Leostream and Liquidware
Texas-based utility company experienced a 30 percent increase in infrastructure time management and major efficiency gains
INDIANAPOLIS, August 6, 2019 – Scale Computing, a market-leader in edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, today announced that Harlingen WaterWorks System (HWWS), a Texas-based regional utility company, has implemented a new business-wide virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution based on Scale Computing HC3. Working with Scale Computing, and its partners Leostream and Liquidware, HWWS has reported major improvements in performance, reliability and security across its customer-centric IT environment.
With 27,000 customers and a major emphasis on the effectiveness and availability of its 24/7 consumer billing and support services, HWWS was looking to solve a range of VDI performance and service challenges. The company now runs 52 virtual machines across three Scale Computing HC3 appliances, using them to deliver a range of mission-critical applications. These include financials, utility billing, cash receipts, inventory and a number of other operational functions, such as general ledger and human resources.
With an IT team of just four people, HWWS has seen major efficiency gains, with infrastructure management time reduced by 30 percent over their previous solution. In addition, HWWS carries out synthetic backups every night and takes a snapshot of their environment on the Scale Computing HC3 once per hour. With the utility sector a frequent target of criminal malware attacks, this capability has become extremely significant to the business in protecting against technology failure and the potential risk of ransomware.
“We run a 24/7 environment and downtime is not an option for us,” explained John McKenna, IT director at Harlingen WaterWorks System. “We take payments over the Internet, via kiosks and IVR phone payments, so if we are down even for a short time, it impacts our customers tremendously. With Scale Computing, we are at a huge advantage with their exceptional reliability. It’s not even a thought in our mind as to whether or not we’re going to have our computing assets available or not, since with Scale Computing, it’s easy to expand as our business does, and that’s a major benefit.”
Scale Computing has streamlined VDI for the distributed enterprise, and all those for whom VDI was unaffordable or unrealistic in the past. With their combined expertise of Scale Computing HC3, in combination with Leostream and Liquidware technology, provides a complete VDI solution that is simple to set up, easy to manage, cost-effective, while still offering all the same great features you’ll find from a legacy VDI solution.
“IT teams know the necessity of having a highly reliable, high performing IT infrastructure. Specifically, the HWWS team, who delivers an absolutely critical set of IT services, needed a technology and support solution that is strong in all areas,” commented Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “By working with Scale Computing, Leostream and Liquidware, they have a solution which meets perhaps the most sought after, but under-achieved objective in the technology industry – it just works, extremely well.”
Until September 30th, 2019 Scale Computing is offering a 25% discount on a VDI solution that includes a minimum of four HC3 appliances with a two-year support and maintenance extension and 50 virtual desktop licenses from Leostream with a three-year support and maintenance extension. To take advantage of this limited-time offer (the last day you can claim this offer is September 30, 2019), contact us at [email protected].
With Scale Computing, Leostream and Liquidware, VDI is not only achievable for any size IT department, but available without complexity or prohibitive cost. The joint VDI solution works exceptionally well in VDI environments across various verticals, for a wide range of use cases from task workers to power users requiring a simple, secure and low-maintenance option to traditional desktop PCs.
About Scale Computing
Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. Scale Computing HC3 software eliminates the need for traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, the HC3 self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in real-time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime. When ease-of-use, high availability, and TCO matter, Scale Computing HC3 is the ideal infrastructure platform. Read what our customers have to say on Gartner Peer Insights, Spiceworks, TechValidate and TrustRadius.
Zerto recently announced their latest release, Zerto 7.0 IT Resilience Platform. Zerto is already well know for its backup/recovery product. They have taken the next step with this release, replacing periodic backup with continuous data protection combined with powerful journaling technology for both short-term and long-term data retention. This release converges disaster recovery, backup and cloud mobility into a single platform that allows organizations to combine historically siloed operations.
Some of the key features are detailed below:
A unique Elastic Journal that combines the granular journal technology with long-term repositories, providing a continuous stream of recovery points with intelligent index and search – for recovery across data, files or VMs from any point in time.
Being able to recovery from any point in time and not just from the last backup? I would love to be able to do that. Think about being able to be that granular to recover what is needed.
Data protection workflows that automate recovery from numerous points in time, across multiple VMs, ensuring application consistency across short- and long-term data retention
Being able to automate recovery, across multiple VMs? I don’t know of a backup/recovery product that let’s you do this today.
Built-in support for Purpose Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) such as Exagrid, with new on-premises support for NFS and SMB targets
Retention policy settings for daily, weekly, monthly and annual cycles to copy the recovery data to cost-efficient LTR repositories
Support for PBBA is a nice new feature. Also, being able to have retention policies to send older recovery data to long term repositories automatically is ideal.
Scale-out architecture designed to further accelerate the application recovery process for Microsoft Azure
Automatic encryption at rest upon the recovery of EC2 instances when protecting workloads on Amazon EC2
Support for Azure and Amazon EC2 just make sense as they are two of the most popular cloud platforms today.
Robust resource planning and ‘what-if’ scenario modeling within Zerto Analytics which continuously monitors and analyses compute, storage and network resources across on-premises environments and public, private and hybrid clouds
Who doesn’t want to be able to be proactive with their infrastructure? Being able to have ‘what-if’ scenarios to stay on top of your compute, storage and network resources is something that I feel everyone should want.
My final thoughts: As more and more infrastructure is located in the cloud and uptime is important, having a product that allows you to pick a point it time for recovery quickly is important. Being cost effective is always important so being able to utilize long term repositories for older recovery data just makes sense. Finally, being able to stay on top of your compute, storage and network resources with Zerto Analytics is tops on my list.
Check out the following video for some great info on why DR and Backups are Better Together!
Find out more about Zerto 7.0 by clicking here!
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. Zerto compensated me for my time but any opinions given are my own.
VMware is having their latest online vForum on October 9 2018. If you have never been to one of these, I come to think of it as a mini VMworld online. You have a virtual exhibit hall where you can see offerings from vendors and even chat with them. There are breakout sessions and even Hands On Labs! It is a great way to connect with the latest VMware news and technology without having to physically attend an event. Did I mention that it is free? Here is a quick breakdown of what you can expect:
· Listen to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s keynote presentation: “Technology Superpowers: Pushing Through the Boundaries of What’s Possible”
· Chat live with IT experts in NSX, vSphere, Horizon, Workspace ONE, and many more VMware solutions
· Choose between 28 unique technical breakout sessions on VMware products and solutions
· Take part in 8 expert-led Hands-on Labs
Please use the links below to view a PDF of the agenda as well as register for the vForum! I hope to see you there!
I have been given the opportunity to blog about a new product from Unitrends. The new product is called VM Backup Essentials, or vBE for short. Certain bloggers were provided a blogger release which I am going to post below. I will add my comments under each section as I downloaded the product into my lab to install and test out the features of this product.
vBE (short for VM Backup Essentials), converges enterprise-grade backup software, ransomware
detection, and cloud continuity into a powerful, easy-to-use, all-in-one platform priced 30% less than
comparable products. An “All-in-One Solution” vBE provides a disruptive approach to backup – with complete vertical integration (including the cloud), fast time to value and an all-in-one solution provided by a single vendor with industry-leading customer service. vBE includes all the software and features you would find in an enterprise-level data protection and recovery solution.
vBE includes operating system, security, backup software, WAN acceleration, replication, cloud integration, and archiving.
With an easy to use interface lost file recovery is one of the most common tasks performed by IT on an
emergency basis and can chew up many hours of your time. vBE ensures easy file recovery. It takes less than five minutes to recover a lost file with vBE, from login to full restoration. The UI is easy and intuitive enough that any member of IT can recover a lost file without having to consult a manual or receive special training.
Easily set all aspects of protection using an advanced, intelligent feature called SLA policy automation.
vBE’s SLA Policy automation intelligently sets your backup schedule based on your RTO and RPO goals.
Built-in one-glance, one-click dashboards and reports keep you fully up-to-date on the health and status
of your backup and continuity strategy.
The UI is fairly easy to navigate. I was able to easily add my lab vCenter instance so I could select any of the VMs for backup. I chose to backup one of my Windows VMs once so I could test file recovery as mentioned in the section above. After the backup was complete, I deleted the downloaded files in my Downloads folder. I selected the server from the Recover tab and clicked the Recover Files option. This will mount the backup for use in the File Level Recovery tab. This will mount them as a CIFS share that you can visit to download the files back to the server they were deleted from. You can also use iSCSI to mount the backup into the server if preferred for file level recovery. It would be nice to choose the files in the mounted job and tell it to restore back to the same server so you can do it from one interface
vBE comes with Deep Cloud Integration. The cloud is an ideal way to ensure geographic resilience,
especially those without a secondary location that need to protect copies of their data. vBE easily
manages protection for your VMware workloads in hyperscale clouds such as Google or AWS. However anyone that has worked with hyperscale clouds knows it can be complex and very expensive. vBE has its own purpose-built continuity cloud designed for long-term retention and DRaaS, as well as great integration with AWS and Google. Offloading cloud backup and recovery to experts gives you 100% confidence you will recovery when you need to and let’s you focus on those tasks only you can do – work with your business partners to improve company performance.
As I have no cloud options to test, all I can verify are the options in the UI. Under the Configure tab, you can add Cloud based storage as a target for backup and recovery. Currently the options ads Google Cloud Storage, Amazon (S3) and Rackspace Cloud Files.
Licensing to rival all other vendors!
vBE is licensed for $105 per socket and covers VMware virtual machines only. Base prices include one
year of 24x7x365 support with an annual renewal available.
Support terms of 3 or 5 years can be chosen at the time of initial purchase or support plan renewal.
My only comment on this claim is that this pricing is much cheaper than what I have seen out there for comparable products. I do not use these products on a daily basis anymore but I remember the pricing from one vendor I used to use was in the $700 to $1,000 price range per socket. If the performance of this Unitrends product matches up to the other backup vendors then this pricing will be a game changer, in my opinion.
Points of note:
- Total Protection – No limits on the number of virtual machines that can be protected on a host
- No License Tiering – No tiering of licenses based on the number of cores in the CPU socket.
- Only License what you need! – Only occupied sockets require a license, but ALL occupied
sockets of the host must be licensed to protect its virtual machines. - Infinite retention! – Retention is directly proportional to the amount of storage that can be
provided by the customer for backup. The license has no limits on retention. - Replication to the Cloud – Site-to-site replication is not supported at this time. vBE does support
replication to the cloud – both hyperscale clouds such as AWS, Google and Rackspace as well as
clouds purpose-built for DRaaS services. - Advanced Ransomware Protection – New ransomware variants are emerging every day and
your ransomware protection needs to evolve to keep up.30-Day FREE TRIAL!
A 30-day free trial is available from https://www.unitrends.com/products/vm-backup-essentials
Simply download, deploy, and quickly start backing up all VMware workloads as it includes everything
required for data and application protection and advanced features.
As my lab is small I am not able to fully test every feature of this product but my overall impression is very positive. Being able to test it out for 30 days for free is a great way to see if it will work for protecting your VMs.
WhereScape Announces WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake
WhereScape has released a product to help companies migrate existing data warehouses, vaults and marts to Snowflake. The name of the product is WhereScape® Migration Express™ for Snowflake. Their goal is to make this migration fast and easy for organizations. For more information, check out the press release below.
WhereScape Announces WhereScape® Migration Express™ for Snowflake
New automation offering helps Snowflake customers fast-track data infrastructure migration projects with fewer resources and faster time to value
PORTLAND, OREGON – June 7, 2018 – WhereScape, the leading provider of data infrastructure automation software, today announced the availability of WhereScape® Migration Express™ for Snowflake. This new offering enables organizations to simply, rapidly and efficiently migrate existing data warehouses, data vaults and data marts from legacy data platforms to Snowflake – the data warehouse built for the cloud.While traditional approaches to data infrastructure migration demand months of effort by development teams,
WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake puts the delivery of successful migration projects within the reach of individual developers in weeks or even days. By automating the repetitive, time-intensive tasks associated with migration, organizations can increase developer productivity, standardize efforts with best practices, compress timelines, limit project risk and lower overall cost.
“WhereScape’s automation capabilities combined with Snowflake’s built-for-the-cloud architecture enable any organization that wants to be data-driven,” Snowflake’s Chief Technical Evangelist, Kent Graziano said. “By automating the migration of data and data models, WhereScape reduces the complexity, effort and cost for organizations with legacy data and data infrastructure to consider when moving to Snowflake. WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake makes it possible for these organizations to reap the benefits of Snowflake sooner.”
With metadata and development and data mapping wizards, WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake automates the migration of existing data and data infrastructure from other data platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata and others. These automation capabilities reduce project complexity and the database knowledge needed by developers. WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake also includes many advanced capabilities to manage and optimize data transfers, and the ability to easily refresh data intermittently throughout the migration period.
WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake is part of the WhereScape® automation for Snowflake offering, a collection of automation solutions to help Snowflake customers fast-track the design, development, deployment and operation of Snowflake projects.
“While IT executives recognize the advantages of moving data infrastructure to the cloud, and moving to Snowflake specifically, the migration of existing data and data infrastructure can seem like a herculean task to consider,” WhereScape CEO, Mark Budzinski said. “WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake provides IT leaders with an executable roadmap that doesn’t demand extensive staffing or contracting and greatly reduces the risk involved in choosing to evolve.”
As part of the Snowflake Data for Breakfast tour, WhereScape co-hosted an event in Minneapolis, MN, and shared the results organizations are achieving through automation. The tour brings IT leaders together with cloud thought leaders, experienced analytics practitioners and innovative technologists for insights on today’s cloud architecture and technology.
You can learn more about WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake and the entire WhereScape automation for Snowflake offering here.
About WhereScape
WhereScape helps IT organizations of all sizes leverage automation to design, develop, deploy, and operate data infrastructure faster. More than 700 customers worldwide rely on WhereScape automation to eliminate hand-coding and other repetitive, time-intensive aspects of data infrastructure projects to deliver data warehouses, vaults, lakes and marts in days or weeks rather than in months or years. WhereScape has offices in Portland, Oregon; Reading, UK; Auckland, New Zealand; and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.
All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
OK so this may seem like a stupid thing to post about but I have been out of the VMware game for a little over a year now. I have been dabbling in it a bit again as we are building a lab at work. I installed the vCenter Appliance today and I needed to shut it down to move it to a different host (No vMotion license for the work lab). I just went into the built in web client on my ESXi server that had VCSA on it and chose to shutdown the guest OS. It did power it down so when I brought it up on the other ESXi host it did not come back up as I expected it to.
Yes, I did it wrong as I had forgotten about the management interface of the VCSA, which is located at https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>:5480. Once you login as the root account for the VCSA, there is a nice SHUTDOWN button on the far right at the top. Isn’t that nice?
The moral of the story? Don’t just shutdown your VCSA from the vCenter client, use the management console on the VCSA itself to shut it down. Lesson learned!