The first is that WAN acceleration just isn't a good solution for write-intensive applications. At first glance, bank branches would seem to be a WAN acceleration win. However, since tellers scan images of every deposit, there is a large amount of unique write data that overwhelms the small amount of cache in a typical WAN acceleration appliance.

The second obstacle is that most organizations have some applications that don't use protocols that WAN acceleration devices can sufficiently optimize. If all you need to do is provide a low-performance file server and allow users to access the Exchange server via Outlook, a Riverbed Steelhead, the company's core WAN acceleration technology, might be a great solution. However, if you have to run some legacy application that the Steelhead appliance can't compress, deduplicate and accelerate, the users are going to have an unhappy experience.

Then there is the third and perhaps biggest obstacle: Most WAN acceleration solutions don't provide access to your data if the WAN link is down. Personally, I never trusted my telco providers enough to be willing to live with the no-win, no-work scenario.

Granite is an iSCSI storage device that acts as a cache to storage in your data center. With Granite you can run a domain controller, file server and the like in the branch office. Granite will provide storage for the servers, and it will synchronize the data to iSCSI storage in your data center through a Granite core appliance. Since this is a Riverbed product, the data will be compressed and deduplicated using Steelhead.

In some ways, Granite is the enterprise version of an iSCSI-based cloud storage gateway like those from StorSimple or TwinStrata drop. While those appliances provide a cache-to-front-end-to-object-based cloud storage, Granite uses block storage in your data center for its ultimate repository. Unlike the cloud gateways' logical volumes, or LUNs, Granite appliances' aren't limited to access by a single server. The folks at Riverbed tell me that Granite supports SCSI bus resets so servers at the branch office and servers in the data center can be part of a single cluster, or LUNs can be pinned to the Granite to enable off-line access.

Granite would be cool if it was a dedicated storage appliance, but the best part is that Riverbed has implemented it as an application on its new Steelhead EX appliance line. Not only does this mean that a single appliance can handle storage and other WAN acceleration tasks, but since the Steelhead EX runs VMware, that appliance can also host the servers you need in the branch. Riverbed has Steelhead EX appliances with up to 4 Tbytes of storage and 64 Gbytes of RAM, which should allow most branch offices to run their entire operation from a single appliance.

Riverbed's Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure (E-VSI) is just one of the innovative solutions I've seen recently for simplifying the process of managing data in remote offices. With cloud and other virtualization technologies advancing at a rapid clip, there's no excuse for five physical servers and a tape drive for backup in your branch offices anymore.

Disclaimer: Riverbed is not a client of DeepStorage, but Riverbed reps have bought me lunch occasionally.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/wan-optimization-and-application-acceleration/232600280 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wan-optimization-and-application-acceleration/232600280 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wan-optimization-and-application-acceleration Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00 EST DocuSign is the global leader in electronic signature technology, and it first hit the mobile world in November 2011. DocuSign Ink for Apple iOS caught on fast, and was picked as a Top 5 iPad productivity app by Apple. DocuSign knows it has a good thing going on, and the company is now taking aim at a market of Android users that it believes is some 60 million strong.

Being an Android user, I recently took the Ink app for a spin. A lightweight download gives way to quick application setup, and first-time DocuSign users will get their accounts squared away in seconds. Pull a document from your local files or have one sent to you, and you're in the e-signing business just like that. It's free, and has the power of the law behind it. Depending on what you do for a living or how you'd like to improve your business processes, DocuSign can be transformative.

Another recent DocuSign announcement makes the point. Cartavi is a cloud-based real estate document management platform. If you've ever bought or sold a home or property, you know that there can be a tremendous amount of paperwork involved, and getting involved parties together can be a scheduling nightmare. But when those same documents can be accessed online in Cavarti's virtual "transaction rooms," the process can be much smoother and involve far less stress.

DocuSign has recently been integrated with the Cartavi platform. Gone are the days of driving to the office to close the deal, and now DocuSign Ink support for multiple mobile devices means that agents can do business more efficiently from their choice of device, from anywhere. DocuSign claims that more than 4 million real estate transactions have been closed to date through its e-signing capabilities.

Given the acceptance of DocuSign by industry biggies like Salesforce.com and its compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements, there's little doubt that e-signing will only get more prevalent as mobile devices displace desktop workstations. DocuSign did well to add support for both of the major mobile platforms, and this is will continue to be an exciting space to watch.

As of publication, Lee Badman has no business relationship with DocuSign.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/232600281 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/232600281 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00 EST I've long found the Federal Communications Commission to be a curious body. With a track record of commissioners coming from or going to high positions in industry, it's hard not to wonder about impartiality and whether commissioners are always acting completely in the interest of the public good. On occasion, the FCC comes across as a cheerleader for a specific technology or company, while at least partially turning blind eyes to strong technical evidence that counters the viability of some of the agency's pet initiatives.

Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) is a recent example, where the FCC wasn't very serious or consistent about enforcing its own regulations on interference that was disruptive to a range of licensed radio services. While the agency was out busting low-power community "pirate" radio stations, they often bordered on being a free advertising agency for BPL, regardless of the significant problems related to the technology in certain common configurations, as proven repeatedly by qualified experts. BPL as an initiative now is somewhere between death and life-support, having not survived its own flaws, despite the FCC's efforts to champion it.

Back to Lightsquared, and yet another weird vibe from the FCC. Lightsquared is an LTE broadband startup that employs technology that has been proven by a number of qualified groups to interfere with GPS signals. We're talking consumer, scientific, and military GPS applications at risk from Lightsquared's emissions. Typically, new technologies have to prove themselves to be non-problematic before the FCC will approve them going forward. Lightsquared however, was given conditional approval by the FCC's Democratic commissioners early on, with technical validation to follow. And here's how we got to the mess things are in today.

One prevailing version of the story (greatly simplified for brevity) has Phil Falcone, head of Lightsquared's owning company Harbinger Capitol, donating large amounts of money to the Democratic Party in advance of the FCC giving the go-ahead to Lightsquared in advance of the company actually proving its ability to be a radio good neighbor. But sooner or later the testing would come, and the results were not pretty. At least nine government agencies and the GPS industry have shown evidence that Lightsquared's approval would be devastating to a wide range of civil, consumer, and defense applications that that use the long-successful GPS system. The FCC (having little choice) has had to slow down the momentum of Lightsquared's unusually fast approval process in response, while the company attempts to address if and how they are going to get around the interference issues.

In the inevitable back-and –forth, Lightsquared has countered it's critics with a few well-publicized arguments. Talk of an inexpensive filter that could be added to high-end GPS receivers to mitigate the effect of Lightsquared's signals didn't go very far, as no real examples of the solution were offered and the strategy wouldn't help the millions of consumer-GPS-equipped products in use. Lightsquared has also claimed that the GPS system itself is problematic, and operating outside the tolerances of its approved frequency ranges. Whether this has been independently verified is unknown to me, but the GPS landscape is so entrenched at this point, Lightsquared's argument is almost moot.

And now the latest. Sprint is the biggest-named partner to sign on with Lightsquared, having done so early on. Sprint had originally given Lightsquared until February to get final FCC approval, which was derailed because of pushback by all of those who will feel the impact of a performance-compromised GPS system. Now, as Lightsquared (again with FCC cooperation) throws a Hail Mary pass by actually challenging whether GPS is legally entitled to protection from interference, Sprint has extended Lightsquared's approval deadline into mid-March. The FCC is gathering public comments on a fundamentally idiotic question, and we'll have to wait a few weeks to find out if this circus is finally over or whether this is just another turn along a very strange road paved by the FCC.

Anyone who follows the goings-on with spectrum-related issues and broadband growth in the US would agree that we have to have an eye to the future and look for new technologies. But if the FCC is going to be the agency that helps the country move forward, they are going to have to de-politicize their playbook, leave the technical decisions to experts, and start doing what's right for a change.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/232600279 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/232600279 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Leaving aside the irony that competitor Hitachi Data Systems used Thunder and Lightning as code names for its high-end disk arrays that were a thorn in the side of EMC's Symmetrix sales, EMC seems to be building a comprehensive portfolio of flash-based technologies. Its arrays can use flash as dedicated volumes, sub-LUN tier with FAST, and use flash as a cache with FASTcache. VFCache extends caching, at least read caching, to the server, and Thunder promises all-flash arrays delivering millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS).

VFCache is an off-the-shelf PCIe flash card from Micron (the P320) or LSI (not, as rumored, Intel), with EMC's special-sauce caching software. The software, which is available for Red Hat Linux and Windows, with support for VMware and Hyper-V, installs as a filter driver in the server's, or virtual server's, operating system and uses the flash it's been allocated as a write-through cache. Since all writes are forwarded to the back-end storage immediately, snapshots and other functions that access data directly on the back-end storage will work properly.

However, because it's a write-through cache, VFCache will speed only reads. Since many mainstream applications like database servers do two to five times as many reads as writes, just caching reads can still result in a significant performance boost--as much as 80% for Oracle in some EMC benchmarks. In the VMware environment, system administrators can slice and dice the 300 Gbytes of SLC flash on the card and allocate it to VMs to use as cache. Since the cache is local to the host, when admins want to vMotion a virtual machine to another host, they have to manually disable caching before moving the workload.

EMC promises "a rich roadmap of VFCache technologies," including deduping and compressing data in cache to increase its effective size; MLC-based PCIe cards; mezzanine cards for blade servers; SSD formats; and, of course, the array integration that made Lighting more interesting than stand-alone caching solutions like those from Flashsoft, Fusion-IO's IOturbine or Nevex. With array integration, a host could tell the back-end array not to use its valuable flash to cache data that's already in the local server cache, or specifically to cache to flash as the VM is about to be vMotioned to another host. EMC also promises to address clusters and vMotion by making the cache in multiple servers coherent, although only time will tell if that's worth the CPU and network overhead.

This announcement highlights one of the limitations of Cisco's UCS blade servers that's always bothered me. The standard UCS blades have only one mezzanine slot per blade and no LAN on motherboard, so the mezzanine slot has to be used for network and storage I/O, which means converged networking is required. That's opposed to other blade systems, where it's just a good idea. More significantly, it means UCS blades, other than the double-wide blades that take two of the eight slots in a UCS chassis, have no available I/O expansion. I would guess that one of the primary drivers for making the VFCache software work with SAS/SATA SSDs is that they can be used in UCS blades, though the disk interface bottleneck will mean SSD VFCache will never be as quick as PCIe flash.

As the EMC guys said, after the Lightning comes Thunder, so EMC previewed a new all-flash storage system as Project Thunder. The system holds several PCIe flash cards and connects to multiple servers. To keep latency to a minimum, the server-to-storage connection is via RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over InfiniBand or 40 Gbps Ethernet. One Thunder can deliver millions of IOPS to the kinds of customers now considering solutions from the likes of SolidFire, Nimbus and Pure Storage.

EMC would not comment on price, but said that it would be competitive with solutions from Fusion IO.

Disclaimer: EMC is not currently a client of DeepStorage, although it has been in the past and may be in the future, if it doesn't mind me picking on Lightning.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600342 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232600342 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Product differentiation can be tricky. Recall the words from a Carly Simon song: "What has she got that I haven't got?" When one vendor makes a claim, another will claim the same capability (checklist marketing, anybody?), even though there may be fundamental, inescapable differences. So please bear with me while I lay a foundation for dinCloud's story.

dinCloud offers just about everything in a set of cloud-based services that you would find in a regular data center, but the gem of its empire is its virtual desktop solution. One way of thinking of the dinCloud offering would be VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) in the cloud, but the company disavows that term because it is too limiting. Instead, dinCloud provides what it calls the hosted virtual desktop (HVD) service--"hosted" because the service can be provided on premises (private cloud), off premises (public cloud) or in combination (hybrid cloud).

Now, HVD is not all that clouds can be, obviously, since there are other important uses of the cloud, such as test and development and disaster recovery as a primary service. (In fact, dinCloud does perform data protection and disaster recovery for its HVD and other services.) So how is HVD different from VDI, and why is that difference important?

VDI is a variant of the longstanding client-server model where a desktop operating system is hosted on a virtual machine (VM) that runs on a centralized server. All processes, applications and data are kept on and run on a central server. Although there are variants, one view is that PCs and laptops would be replaced by thin clients (which in the past would be called dumb terminals, but the name was changed to be a more marketing-friendly and less pejorative--dumb vs. intelligent--term). The primary benefit to IT includes reduced administrative burdens, since trying to upgrade, provision and manage thousands of desktops can be a real hassle. The challenges of VDI from an IT perspective are security, downtime (if not running a clustered file system), and just the general complexity and high initial costs of VDI purchase and deployment.

Fundamentally, the physical infrastructure of a data center with servers, such as blade servers, networking, such as Ethernet, and storage, such as the use of Fibre Channel SANs, is not designed to handle VDI deployments that can easily run into thousands of users. Trying to apply VDI software tools on an existing infrastructure runs into a wide range of technical issues that essentially make scaling of VDI untenable within its necessary performance requirements. For example, a single LUN on iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN storage can handle only up to 64 virtual machines/users. Moreover, a key question to ponder is whether the infrastructure can handle the I/O demand patterns that VDI requires. Hint: The answer is likely no.

The requirement then is to create a separate, purpose-built VDI infrastructure--which is what dinCloud has done--that can be deployed as either a private or public cloud. A key part of dinCloud's success is InfiniBand. It has much lower latency than Ethernet, it virtualizes all of the network connectivity, it doesn't require a hypervisor reboot when provisioning/de-provisioning I/O to the host, and it doesn't involve the same sheer mess of cables. This is only one of many, many changes that dinCloud (in conjunction with its 20-plus dinStack coalition partners) has done to optimize for virtual desktops.

Quite frankly, IT organizations could try to roll their own, but they would have to reinvent the wheel where both the learning curve and the cost could very easily be too high. Moreover, individual organizations are unlikely to be able to have all the skills, resources or time to do the job as well. dinCloud's intellectual property (IP) is its secret sauce--allowing the company to embrace a new generation of cloud-oriented data center requirements and also making it unlikely that the company's solutions will be replicated by individual enterprise efforts.

In its purpose-built cloud, dinCloud provides the key elements of a central service for all processes, applications and data, but does not require the users to change their current way of working. But how does dinCloud provide the necessary infrastructure at an affordable cost?

The virtual desktop concept requires a bit more of an explanation since it, too, often has more than one connotation. Typically, virtual desktop infrastructures or interfaces refer to network or Internet-connected devices in which a partial or substantial amount of processing is performed or data resides in a central data center. Thin- or zero-client devices are used as endpoints to utilize these centralized resources. Yet, dinCloud doesn't use either--citing the high cost yet inability of most such devices to equal, much less surpass, the physical desktop experience many users enjoy today.

dinCloud expands the virtual desktop concept to include any personal computing device a worker uses to access information from/for his or her employer. That could be a desktop located in a company office, but it could also be a mobile device, such as a laptop or tablet, or even a smartphone. (Android support is available today, with Windows and Apple support coming.) It could also include public computers that an individual uses for a short period of time, such as those at a library or a hotel. Note that one individual may use multiple devices, and that the company may not own or control who has access to many or even most of the devices that any individual employee uses. Note also that not only do users expect to use a device at any geographical location, but they also want to enjoy an experience that reflects their needs.

In fact, user experience is critical to the overall value of any VDI solution. Recall that each device has physical (such as screen size), software-hardware (mouse vs. touch screen) and software (user interface functionality) characteristics that distinguish it. That does not mean that all issues have been solved; standard business apps such as Word and PowerPoint can be easily displayed on an iPad, but many common video capabilities (such as Adobe Flash support) available for Windows clients are not natively available on Apple's iPads or iPhones. In addition, devices must allow users to securely access information meant for them alone, such as some email (and that can be commingled between business and personal e-mail communications). Users must also be able to share common internal data (such as HR forms and documents) as well as information that is company-external, like communications with partners or customers.

The user may also make use of public communications and collaboration services (such as Twitter and LinkedIn) and information sites (such as Google searches) that may be commingled, as employees often use business devices for private use. Finally, the user should be able to personalize the look and feel of the device (what icons are displayed, what size they are, and so on). The bottom line is that each individual worker has unique requirements that must be preserved (no master clone will be allowed). Failure to respect those requirements may find users chafing at the constraints at first, but will eventually (if not much sooner) result in the business equivalent of an immune system "rejection" of the proposed system.

Obviously, dinCloud respects and preserves mandatory and inevitable requirements for uniqueness as it provides the HVD cloud-based services for businesses. If it didn't, the company wouldn't stand much of a chance. That gets us to the second connotation of the company's HVDs, where the "desktop"--including corporate data, personalized preferences and so on--actually resides securely in the cloud. Since an individual device may be lost, stolen, suffer from irreparable hardware failure, be confiscated either temporarily or permanently by customs officers, or suffer any number of other common and exotic fates, workers must to be able to quickly and seamlessly access business information using a new device. This is possible if the information is stored on a central system somewhere in the "cloud."

The only way to manage, control and provide support to all those devices is centrally in what is called a cloud. This HVD approach (not just for dinCloud, but in general) is not a nice-to-have; it is a must-have. Why? IT-as-a-service (which is often seen as the end stage of the cloud) is a chimera unless end users can have access to applications and data that they need when they need it on any device, any time and anywhere. This view of end user computing may be seen as the tail that wags the IT dog, but so be it.

Although enthusiastic in general, I still tend to be a bit conservative, so you know I have strong feelings when I say that this approach is a killer app for the cloud. Note that this is not the only use of the cloud (as previously mentioned) nor the only possible killer app. Nor does it mean that dinCloud is perfect and has all the answers or that others might not have or be able to come up with attractive solutions. What it should say is that dinCloud has addressed an issue that is of critical importance and that others would do well to do the same.

Rather than businesses and employees having to adjust their habits and expectations according to the limitations of a given technology/device, dinCloud offers a common infrastructure that allows multiple classes of technology to seamlessly support the needs of the business and its employees.

The dinCloud solution may be easy to describe, but it conceals the need for a rich and robust infrastructure to deliver end user-centric computing as a service. The dinCloud architecture looks somewhat like a next-generation data center with all its various virtualized servers, networking and storage capabilities. The architecture deals with security, data protection and disaster recovery issues in a way that dinCloud feels provides a very secure (solving common concerns that otherwise cloud the cloud) solution, as well as one that is highly available (because the infrastructure has to provide a mission-critical, enterprise class level of reliability).

How in the world is a young company like dinCloud able to do all this? Because it has facilitated the creation of an ecosystem called the dinCloud Coalition. For example, NetApp provides the storage infrastructure that supports data, information and storage management capabilities, including snapshots and disaster recovery. Trend Micro provides its security capabilities. Microsoft is another close partner that is working closely with dinCloud and with other partners in the coalition (such as Cisco and NetApp) to improve existing technologies, including cloud protocols, that can further improve performance.

Now, you can see the benefits to dinCloud from working with established (and sometimes much, much larger companies) in that it doesn't have time to invent all of the infrastructure technology wheels on its own and it can use the enterprise-class capabilities of its partners in the ecosystem. But the question might be why would the larger partners, such as Microsoft, want to participate (in more than an "I'll lend you my name so that you can say that you work with me" partnership)? The reason is that dinCloud's solution preserves the Microsoft hegemony as Microsoft Exchange (and other Microsoft products) can be used in the central cloud just as before and there is no incentive to switch to competing applications. Moreover, dinCloud can run Windows apps on non-Windows devices, such as Apple's iPad and Android tablets.

An ecosystem works well if each partner clearly sees its self-interest today and no threats to that self-interest in the future. For the other partners, dinCloud provides a valuable service in facilitating and gluing a very complex infrastructure together. These partners will ride the rising tide if the dinCloud solution takes off. Note that dinCloud works with service providers to provide its service rather than trying to manage all clouds themselves, and the company states that even at this early stage, 98 data centers in 39 locations use the dinCloud service.

Still, even if the infrastructure works as advertised, could there not be some other problems? The answer is yes, but, if so, they are not obviously intuitive. dinCloud feels that its solution scales as needed, but the question of latency arises. When a user is working with data and applications that may be physically housed thousands of miles away, are there any latency delays that might range from simple annoyance (noticeable delays in response time to response time sensitive requests) to total frustration in not being able to perform a given task? dinCloud emphatically states that latency is not an issue. Coast-to-coast latency over the Internet is only 120 ms, so connecting the purpose-built dinCloud to the public network known as the Internet is not a problem. (For example, recently I downloaded an iPad2 app from another company that demonstrated the use of medical images over the Internet from a distance of thousands of miles, and there was no apparent latency issue.)

A key remaining issue is price. Given the breadth and depth of the infrastructure required and the players involved, how much does the service cost? dinCloud offers the HVD service for $65 per month per user for use of the full infrastructure. By doing so, a customer's IT investment changes from a capex (capital expense) model to an open (operating expense) model, which makes life easier for IT in the budgeting process.

Is that a good price? The answer is that this is a much lower price than is typically quoted. So how can dinCloud do it? Economies of scale (where quantity discounts are obtained for larger volumes) and the famous Boston Consulting Group's learning curve model (where costs per unit supplied go down because of learning how to do things better) applies, but there is more than that. The price of computing and storage is still plummeting. Wouldn't $65 for a single month be enough to pay for protected storage for a single user for a long time? So there are ways to cut costs, and dinCloud has apparently found them.

Many (if not most) of us may feel about the cloud similar to how Mark Twain felt about the weather: "Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it." While we shouldn't go to that extreme (as there is a lot of action happening in cloud), we might wonder if there can be any way to inspire more action and less talk. Well, dinCloud has shown some action in an unexpected area.

On the surface, one might not consider the subject of HVDs as being a primary candidate for the cloud, and while I don't want to indulge in hyperbole, it could very well become a killer cloud application. That is because the raison d'etre of the cloud is IT as a service, and that is not possible if the user cannot access the same applications and data whenever and wherever necessary across multiple computing devices. And that is possible only if a public cloud (a central data center available via multiple networks) is part of the deal.

dinCloud's solution is of value to three key constituencies: to IT, which can't cost-effectively manage the end user computing revolution on the way to providing IT-as-a-service in the cloud without a purpose-built solution like this one; to end users, who need this type of solution so that they can have it their own way, using their own computing devices anywhere at any time; and to CFOs (that is, the bean counters), who have a solution that saves the company money while users have smiles instead of complaints about what they had to give up.

Now, dinCloud may not have the only solution (as it is unlikely that any company offers anything totally unique) for personalized employee computing, but with HDV it has thrown down a gauntlet competitors will have to take seriously.

At the time of publication, dinCloud was not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600243 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232600243 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00 EST Juniper's QFabric, in a nutshell, distributes the traditional chassis switch into discrete components. The top-of-rack (ToR) switches, called QFNodes, are line cards. The QFinterconnect, which the QFNodes are connected to via OM-4 or OM-5 fiber, is the back plane, and the QFdirector(s) are the supervisors (in Cisco parlance), or managers. Each QF node is connected to between two and four QFInterconnects via 40-Gbit links, and there are two QFDirectors that are connected to QFNodes and interconnect via an out-of-band 1-Gbit link.

Greg Ferro, who does network design and consultation for large organizations and also contributes to Network Computing, has written a nice explanation of QFabric and explains some benefits.

Here's why I like it. It's operationally simple. The distributed chassis metaphor is apt and means that multi-switch management is greatly simplified. You can manage up to 128 switches as if they were a single switch, which for all intents and purposes, they are. Think about that for a moment. You don't have to maintain credentials across 128 switches or authentication configuration if you are using RADIUS or some other authentication server.

You don't have to integrate 128 devices into your network management system (NMS), hypervisor management system or other IT systems. Even with scripting or an NMS, making sweeping changes to 128 individual switches in a network is dicey. Granted, you can aggregate multidevice management to simulate a single pane of glass, but that means introducing more servers and management protocols that can get in the way or breakdown. As the number of things you need to manage grows, the simpler your management framework needs to be.

Traffic-wise, you don't have to worry about multiple paths, spanning tree, building N-tiers, or deciding where to set-up routing since QFabric also routes (although Juniper is quick to point out that you likely wouldn't replace your edge or core router with a QFabric, just like you wouldn't replace them with a 1U ToR L2/L3 switch). Any two points in the QFabric is a mere 5 microseconds away. Unless your company requires ultra low latency, anything below 1 millisecond (typically, the granularity that latency is measured and reported in enterprise switches) is probably fine. But, hey, less is better in any case. If you need more capacity at the edge, you can add additional switches fairly cost effectively, as Ferro points out.

Bear in mind that, currently, each QFNode 3500 can be oversubscribed at 3 to 1, based on 48 10-Gbit ports facing the access devices and 4 by 40 gigabit uplink ports facing the QFInterconnects. 480 Gbits inbound going into a 160-Gbit uplink makes 3-to-1. However, engineers at Juniper said the limitation today is the interface speed of the uplink ports. There is no limitation to the QFInterconnect, so speeds can increase in the future provided Juniper ships QFInterconnect cards and QFNodes that support higher capacities.What gets interesting with QFabric is the migration path to and from QFabric, and how QFabric can fit into the data center. In a fit of whiteboard craziness, we mapped out some scenarios. A couple of things come clear:

• To the rest of the network, QFabric is just a L2/L3 switch. It's one bridge in a spanning tree, and outside QFabric, it's just Ethernet. That means you can plug a QFfabric into the rest of your network and it will be loop-free.
• All the rest of your L2/L3 network will behave just fine, and you can run any other network equipment, like a Cisco Nexus side-by-side.
• Any requirements such as reaching hosts defined by routes on an external router or passing traffic through a load balancer mean traffic many have to pass out and back in to QFabric.

If you have already invested in Juniper's QF 3500s, the EX line is not supported and you want to migrate to QFabric, you need a QFInterconnect and a QFDirector, although Juniper recommends pairs for redundancy. You can cable to your existing QF 3500s and they become part of the Qfabric. Take them out of the QFabric, and they become l2/L3 switches. Pretty nice investment protection.

I like it. QFabric is a fairly simple design—simple is good. No need to worry about mutlipath Ethernet protocols like TRILL, SPB, LAG or MLAG. It only scales to 6,144 10-Gbit ports with over subscription, 2,048 if you want non-blocking (that's 16 10-Gbit ports per QFNode). If you dual-home your servers, that only 3,072 servers. I say only tongue in cheek. That's a lot of servers for most organizations, and I will go out on a limb and assume that if you're looking at that kind of scale, it's either a special-purpose computing center or a hosting or cloud provider.

The other elephant in the room is cost. That's a topic I will take up later, as well as digging a little deeper into the design scaling issues. Of course, there are a number of other things to consider, like distance limitations of the OM-4 cable, cable layout and designing the L2/L3 network within QFabric. But if you are looking at upgrading from a 1-Gbit to a 10-Gbit network and you want to take advantage of the new features that network fabrics such as Brocade's VCS, Cisco's Fabricpath and Juniper's QFabric offer, it's worth a long hard look. And I bet the proprietary features will be less important the deeper you look.

Disclosure. I traveled to Sunnyvale on my company's dime. Juniper fed me a hamburger, chips and a soda, and gave me a pen. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600061 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232600061 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00 EST While it's always fun to be able to drive the conversation deep in the interactive briefings that are the core of tech days, I was already familiar with most of the HP storage lines, having worked with several of them. However HP did manage to bring out a few products that piqued my interest.

HP has decided to focus most of its storage development on what it's calling "converged storage," which primarily means that products from Lefthand iSCSI arrays to iBRIX scale-out NAS and StoreOnce backup appliances are implemented as applications running under a common Linux kernel on x86 server hardware. This approach combined with HP's broad server portfolio lets HP offer systems with an interesting mix of packages, like the P4800 Lefthand that combines blade servers and HP's high-density MDS600 shelf that crams 70 3.5-inch drives in just five rack units by using pull-out drawers.

The storage guys even have a neat little package all their own. The X5000 G2 NAS runs a Windows Storage Server cluster in a 3U package that holds two BL460 blades. The blade's SmartArray controllers are connected to 16 internal drives on a pull-out drawer, and maintain cache coherency like a modular SAN array to provide shared storage for the Windows cluster. Since WSS can host virtual server guests with Hyper-V, the X5000 chassis could be all the compute infrastructure a branch office needs.

The bloggers in the room all agreed we'd like HP to offer this server package for additional applications, such as SQL Server clusters or VMware hosting. Personally, I think there's a market for a Proliant version of the X5000 chassis.

We also took a deep look at the StoreOnce B6200 backup appliance. Holding up to 768 Tbytes of disk and ingesting 28 Tbytes per hour, the B6200 is HP's home-grown entry into the heavyweight ranks of the deduplicating appliance market that HP's been using OEMed Sepaton VTLs to address. The B6200 combines StoreOnce's deduplication engine with the iBRIX file system and data distribution technology. Up to four redundant pairs of controllers can be managed as a single system, but backup targets, and therefore deduplication realms, are constrained to a single two-node cluster. While StoreOnce may not have the mindshare of some of the other deduping appliances, it's No. 2 in the market, in no small part because of HP customer loyalty.

For me, the best part of the event was the lab tour--not just because it's the biggest data center I've been in for a long time, at 50,000 square feet with racks of servers and storage as far as the eye could see, but because it's an HP Labs test site dedicated to exploring how to reduce data center power consumption.

As you would expect for a green data center, HP has kept the cold aisles at 72 degrees and used hot aisle containment to keep hot air from recirculating back into server inputs. While one would assume that free air cooling would be a good solution high in the Rockies, it turns out that the dry air year-round makes evaporative cooling a better bet. When we were there, the outside temperature was about 50 degrees and the chillers weren't needed at all.

HP also manages to avoid the 10% to 30% overhead of power conditioning equipment like UPSes. Since this is a lab, not a production data center, the HP folks have made the decision that the projected outage costs of downtime don't justify the additional cost of backup power. They've even built cool vented tiles for their raised floor that have remotely controlled motorized dampers. When the computer that monitors the whole place, through a 3D interface that frankly gave me a momentary CA Unicenter flashback, sees a hot spot, it can open the dampers further--a better solution than just adding more vented tiles and running the blowers faster to move air everywhere.

HP's tiles are a project of HP Labs and not commercially available. The closest I've managed to come is Tate's SmartAire.

Our host, Calvin Zito, made a video of a previous lab tour that's on YouTube.

While HP is a client of DeepStorage.net, the trip was not conditioned on my blogging, tweeting or otherwise mentioning Tech Day. HP paid all my expenses for Tech Day, including airfare, hotel and meals. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232500761 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232500761 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:45 EST IMT-Advanced warps off to hyperspace at an impossibly crazy velocity. Speeds in the mobile data world are about to get quite exciting.

To read the various analyses of what the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has recently approved in its IMT-Advanced announcement is to be schooled on what 3G and 4G really are, and are not, as well as to get a look at where mobile wireless is heading. And where it's heading is impressive.

Where a present-day good 3G connection will yield a respectable few megabits-per-second connectivity (if you’re not moving), IMT-Advanced will make 3G feel like a dial-up modem. Current LTE networks that claim 4G-ness measure and market their speeds in the double-digit megabits per second, but there is a lot of variability across carriers and conditions required to get to top speeds.

Regardless of the current marketing campaigns and the decent speeds that the carriers are giving us on their "4G" networks, the ITU says that we have yet to see true 4G networks by its technical definition. To really be 4G, a network must deliver speeds of 100 Mbps when in motion at vehicle speeds and 1 Gbps (yes, gig speeds from mobile networks) when not moving. Marketing being what it is, nothing we have in the United States from LTE or WiMax comes close to these lofty requirements, despite of all of the 4G hype taking root. So far, 4G isn't really 4G. But when we get there, it will be ludicrous.

So what did the ITU do for the mobile network space during its meeting in Switzerland that commands so much interest? The communications governing body approved two technologies--LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2--as the path forward to mind-blowing mobile networks under the heading of IMT-Advanced. Now that the declaration has been made, development and manufacturing can proceed. Though it will likely take a couple-few years for IMT-Advanced network and handset build-out, it stands to reason that IMT-Advanced will stay on people's minds as they contemplate their future mobile strategies.

All guesses about how IMT-Advanced will truly impact the mobile network space are on the table. As more individuals and businesses alike make mobile data a priority, carriers today are using strategies like data plan terms and WiFi offload to prevent network saturation, which also gets interesting through the lens of IMT-Advanced. Though network speed is easy to get excited about, you can’t get blazingly fast without modulation and antenna techniques that make for better cells and higher capacity for everyone, even legacy non-IMT–Advanced users. Higher speeds and better cells mean better general traffic-handling capability, which has to have some impact on how service plans will be structured.

There is little doubt that IMT-Advanced will certainly come to be recognized as a disruptive technology and will likely challenge notions of traditional networking in many areas yet to see broadband. Testing with early IMT-Advanced components is already well under way in Europe and China, and Internet videos showing beta efforts and results for IMT-Advanced are simply captivating if you follow mobile network development.

Gigabit mobile broadband? Even Dark Helmet would approve.

At the time this was written, I was not being paid by any vendors or organizations mentioned. ]]> IMT-Advanced warps off to hyperspace at an impossibly crazy velocity. Speeds in the mobile data world are about to get quite exciting.]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/232500667 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/232500667 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:30 EST Scale provides enterprise-class storage based on IBM's General Purpose File System (GPFS) at SMB prices for smaller IT organizations made up of IT generalists and not specialists. These organizations can be either SMBs or departments, such as a developer group or research team, in a larger organization.

Scale's architecture builds on the concept of self-contained yet unified storage nodes, where each includes four disk drives and the associated processing power required to integrate into the larger storage architecture. The nodes can be clustered, allowing them to act together as if they are one. This means that capacity and performance can scale as more nodes are added. It's a unified approach because iSCSI, CIFS and NFS protocols can be accommodated in one storage pool. Scale supports valuable storage management capabilities, including thin provisioning, snapshots and replication.

IBM's GPFS gives Scale built-in features such as high-availability/reliability, which translates into the elimination of production outages and enables non-disruptive maintenance and capacity upgrades, improved performance and added functionality such as seamless capacity expansion and an extensive management and monitoring infrastructure to simplify file system administration.

One problem that mid-market customers might encounter with a powerful clustered file system is having far more capabilities available than they would ever need. After all, most users of storage software use only a fraction of the available functions, although some may use a particular function or feature that few others use. Although ease of use is welcome by all, IBM GPFS clients typically have specialized knowledge, whereas Scale's users are typically generalists. Scale's value-add is in making GPFS easy to use for mid-market generalists.

Putting a Data Center in a Storage Array Box
Each of the company's storage nodes is powered by an Intel general-purpose CPU running Redhat Linux-based software. The storage system demands on the CPU use only a fraction of its overall capacity, so Scale lets you run a KVM server hypervisor with guest operating systems and associated business applications. As such, Scale's storage node CPUs can be used for both storage processing and general-purpose computing.

Downscaling GPFS is a useful way of providing key enterprise capabilities for the SMB market while also providing computing resources. Scale Computing takes innovative advantage of the unused CPU capacity in each storage node to provide general-purpose computing (including server virtualization) in the storage box. All in all, Scale Computing is giving mid-market storage customers and enterprise vendors like IBM a lot to think about.

At the time of publication, Scale Computing was not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232500562 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/232500562 http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:30 EST Of course, the whole thing brought back the early days of the LAN industry when we installed ARCnet and Cheapernet LANs so users could share expensive peripherals like hard disks and laser printers. The I/O virtualization vendors from Apruis to Xsigo all promised to give us access to peripherals from Ethernet and Fibre Channel ports to RAID controllers, and of course their storage and GPUs, while sharing the cost across multiple servers.

These vendors were trying to bring the promise of the PCI SIG's I/O virtualization standards to market. The PCI SIG developed standards for how multiple processes, or even multiple servers, could share resources on I/O cards. SR-IOV, the standard for sharing resources between multiple processes on a single server, has gotten lukewarm reception in the industry, with important players like VMware still not fully supporting it. MR-IOV, which allows multiple servers to share I/O cards, never took off because the I/O card vendors realized supporting MR-IOV could mean selling fewer cards.

Virtensys, Aprius and NextIO all worked on building a solution that would let users put any PCIe I/O card into their I/O concentrators. Virtensys and NextIO used low-cost ($200) PCI extension cards to connect to their concentrators, where Apruis moved to 10-Gbps Ethernet for the server-concentrator connection, which was neat but raised the cost of each connection.

The last I/O virtualization vendor, Xsigo, kept its focus on what most customers actually needed--scalable, manageable 10-Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity at the right price. While it may be cool to share a RAID controller and allocate its logical drives to a group of servers, SAN technology does that and allows multiple servers to access the same volume at the same time to support clustering and VMotion.

By using 40-Gbps InfiniBand and/or 10-Gbps Ethernet for the connections to its I/O Director, Xsigo can put IB or Ethernet switches between the I/O Director and the servers. One I/O Director can support 250 servers, and a cluster four IO Directors can support 1,000 servers. That's a significant number of servers over the 16 servers Virtensys could support with a single system. NextIO similarly concentrated on just making IOV work at rack scale.

Virtensys was founded in 2006 as a spinoff from Xyratex and burned through about $40 million in venture funds over its short life. In October, Virtensys and Micron announced plans to share Micron SSDs over the Virtensys systems. Last week Micron picked up the assets, primarily intellectual property, and staff of Virtensys. While details of the deal are being kept secret, word on the street is that the purchase price was more on the order of a sack of magic beans than the $160 million the VCs would have considered a win.

Rumors also indicate that Aprius has been absorbed by Fusion-IO for a song. I tried contacting the folks I've worked with at Virtensys and Aprius, but have gotten no response.

While losing two or four players isn't good for the remaining players, there is a market for their gear at telcos, hosting providers and other organizations that run large, highly virtualized environments with a high rate of change. Hopefully Micron will come up with a PCIe SSD sharing system. Till then, it's 10-Gbps Ethernet and iSCSI for me.

Disclosure: I've followed all the companies mentioned here for a few years. I'm sure drinks, meals and promotional tchotchkes were involved, but that is the extent of business I have done with them. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/232500423 http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/232500423 http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00 EST As mentioned before in this blog, I am a single-site Meraki customer. Though my main wired and wireless networks are built on Cisco gear, last year I opted to run with Meraki in one of my overseas locations for a campus deployment that features site-to-site VPN back to our main campus, routing and 35 access points in a framework that is all-Meraki except for the handful of Cisco edge switches that handle Layer 2 duties. The Meraki deployment has been rock-solid and reliable, but soon will be even better.

Meraki has just announced new hardware and features that bode well for existing and prospective customers, and for the industry in general as a sign of things to come. In my own little corner of the Meraki cloud-managed world, I manage wired and wireless networks via a common dashboard on the Web. Though this has been effective, I have found areas where Meraki could do better by its customers. One of these minor pain points is in managing my site-to-site VPN, as the current UI is pretty sparse on relevant information for this important function. Thankfully, the latest incarnation of the Meraki cloud-based management system rectifies this with two-click site-to-site VPN configuration and welcome details on each tunnel's latency and status.

Even bigger to me, no-extra-cost WAN acceleration has come to the Meraki MX series. Legacy customers like me who use the MX 50 or 70 will see modest gains in WAN acceleration after our free and automatic code upgrade, but customers who get in on the latest MX hardware series also get the benefit of increased processing, memory and a 1-Tbyte hard disk cache for what Meraki estimates to be "up to 197 times improved" WAN transfer times. As enterprises like mine continue to globalize, squeezing the most from site-connecting over-the-Internet WAN links is of paramount importance. That you get WAN optimization as part of the MX purchase without additional licensing is huge.

Also part of the latest release, Meraki is introducing its new cloud-managed Layer 2/3 switches with Power over Ethernet. In my own current deployment, I can manage my Meraki MX appliances (routing, security, DHCP, traffic classification and control, guest access, etc.) and wireless APs, but not my Cisco switches through my cloud-based dashboard. When I rolled out my environment, Meraki did not offer an edge switch. The new MS series switch comes in branch and campus network flavors, and other than not having redundant and field-replaceable fans and power supplies (hint to Meraki), it seems to have good feature parity with the big expensive competitors and some nice trouble-shooting value-adds not typically found in other switching products. The beauty here is that wired and wireless users alike are identified, classified, controlled and supported through the same administrative dashboard, regardless of whether they use a patch cable or wireless adapter to connect.

Given that wireless networking is fast coming to equaling or even surpass Ethernet in terms of criticality for user access across different business networks, it's not surprising that vendors are moving into even deeper "whole solution managed under single pain of glass" waters. Meraki may not be the biggest fish in the networking pond, but I can speak first-hand about its effectiveness at providing a turn-key, cloud-managed solution that makes managing a network easy. (And, in my case, it's a network on another continent that tightly integrates with my main network.) I'm tickled that a good thing is getting even better with Meraki's latest announcements, and am hopeful that others in the networking space are working on similar strategies.

Gone should be the days of thinking of wired and wireless networking as unique spaces, and needing racks full of appliances to gain VPN and enterprise-class security capabilities. Meraki has proven that for the right environments, a tremendous amount can be done with minimal box requirements, and that installation and management don't need a team of IT pros to accomplish. Here's hoping we see more of the same from the competition.

Disclaimer: I am a single-site Meraki customer. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232500270 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232500270 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:10 EST Let's work through this together; it may be a tough one. Many of us have been trained to make all IT-related decisions based on ROI. Some of this is self-induced, some may come from vendors with ROI spreadsheets utilizing amazing formulas, industry data and handfuls of pixie dust to show how much money you'll save over the next three years with widget X.15. For whatever reason, ROI is a big part of most IT-related decisions.

IT decisions weren't originally made this way. Instead, they were made based on the business value that would be gained from an IT system. IT was purchased based on how it would enable the business to increase profits, build better products or better service its customers. That's really what the technology should be about.

The decision to move to private cloud should be based on the competitive advantage it can provide. If we can justify that private cloud can give us the ability to do something better, faster or at lower cost than the competition, we're halfway there. Let's take a look at gaining competitive advantage with private cloud.

Let's start with some example numbers for the time it takes to bring a new service online:

1 week - Design and validate a BOM (bill of materials)

1 week - Receive approvals and submit PO

2 weeks - Wait on required gear

1 week - Rack, stack, cable and configure

3 weeks - Build service, test and validate

2 months - Total time

This is just an example; some of these times may be laughably short or long depending on your organization. Using these example numbers you have a two-month period between identifying a new service that will enable your business and having that service online. This doesn't take into account rollout of and training on the service once online. If you could cut that time in half, would that provide competitive advantage?

By using a private cloud model for delivery of IT services, this process can be trimmed to three weeks (using the same example numbers.) The infrastructure would be in place, carved into flexible pools and the tools to automate deployment of the required subset would be available to IT staff, developers or both. Through a self-service portal the first four steps above can take place in minutes.

Additionally, scale is simplified through standardized infrastructure components. Rather than deciding on which server, storage or switch is required per project, pre-defined components are purchased and plugged into the resource pools as capacity is required. Is your network at capacity? Add a switch to the mesh. The hardware itself becomes nothing more than CPU, RAM, storage and I/O capacity for the delivery model you've built.

The flip side of the above model is removing old or under-performing services. When an application or service is removed from the cloud, the resources are returned to the pools. In a legacy data center build, it is difficult to repurpose hardware when a service is no longer needed, and as such often doesn't happen. Scaling down occurs, and services are eventually retired. This model allows for seamless return of the underlying hardware resources to the cloud.

The last piece of competitive advantage is of course cost. Any reduction in cost without a reduction in revenue will inherently increase profits. This is why the ROI model persists so strongly. Private cloud can, and does in many cases, reduce costs, but this depends on how mature your IT organization is at the onset. Much of private cloud's cost reduction comes from the virtualization of the underlying hardware; automation and orchestration are not required for that, but help provide the business value shown here.

While cost is always quite important, it should not be the first or most important criteria. Cost is more easily modeled and budgeted for once the end goal has been defined. If you begin with an attempt to show ROI, you end up with models of very subjective soft costs showing savings over time. These are not solid foundations for such a large change. Define the advantages private cloud can provide your organization, decide whether they provide enough value to embark on the journey, and then model the costs into your budget. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232500268 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232500268 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:50 EST But some adapt to not only survive, but thrive. One of the latter is Dell, which seems to be successfully navigating numerous transformational challenges. An example: Dell's evolving storage efforts include a recent forum in London where the company articulated the new Fluid Data architecture, which Dell believes will help it become an increasingly important presence in the storage market.

Dell's Fluid Data architecture, which is designed to enable customers to effectively manage growing volumes of information, finds the company appearing to heed the advice of the classic Fleetwood Mac song "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." But at the same time, at least so far as storage goes, Dell appears to be following another of the band's hits: "Go Your Own Way."

Dell has long had its own PowerVault line of entry-level disk storage systems, and while those solutions meet the basic needs of business customers, the company long ago recognized that the line was not functionally rich enough to attract the enterprise customers it was pursuing. As a result, Dell turned to EMC as a primary storage partner, OEMing or reselling the company's CLARiiON, Celerra and Symmetrix platforms. While the relationship has been beneficial for both, it seemed unlikely to last forever, especially considering Dell's strategic focus on developing a broader set of end-to-end systems solutions.

Now, for years Dell's business model eschewed a large investment in R&D in contrast to competitors such as EMC, HP, and IBM. That made economic sense given the company's focus on commodity components and systems, but the approach made it more difficult to differentiate Dell solutions from competitors' offerings. That issue is even more pronounced in complex areas like storage which are particularly sensitive to rapidly evolving features and functionalities.

However, Michael Dell's return to the company in 2007 resulted in a marked change in attitude toward corporate acquisitions that, along with a plethora of innovative start-ups, has allowed Dell to successfully buy its way into storage success. The company's first major storage splash was the acquisition of EqualLogic in November 2007, which resulted in it becoming a leading player in the burgeoning iSCSI SAN, an increasingly important technology for many of Dell's target customers. Then in July 2010 came an under-the-radar (for the most part) move with Dell acquiring Ocarina Networks which provided some sexy new technologies, including compression and deduplication.

The company's biggest storage deal was the acquisition of Compellent Technologies in December 2010 for $820 million. A few months earlier, Dell was outbid by HP in a highly public pursuit of 3PAR (which HP eventually won for $2.35 billion), leading some to suggest that Compellent was a second choice. Dell would argue that point, as well it should, because Compellent brought a lot to the table, both in its portfolio of highly scalable enterprise solutions and as an early pioneer in thin provisioning and volume management, both keys to enhanced storage efficiency (and efficiency has always been a must-have value at Dell).

Overall, the EqualLogic, Ocarina and Compellent deals all demonstrate how a vendor with a clear vision of where it wants to go and a willingness to spend its cash carefully can acquire the assets required to compete effectively against players with larger R&D investments.One criticism that could be leveled at most if not all large IT vendors with strong storage portfolios is that they have multiple, overlapping product lines that can result in customer confusion, as well as inefficiencies. However, this criticism is misplaced. Large vendors typically work with a broad range of customers with often radically different requirements for storage performance, capacity, software and management functionalities. For these businesses, one-size-fits-all storage architectures are neither economically nor operationally feasible. What they need, however, is for vendors to articulate how all the disparate product lines play as a whole and fit into the vendor's vision of a storage future.

Dell's storage vision is clearly illustrated in its Fluid Data architecture, a schema that emphasizes efficiency and agility through intelligent data management. Let's make that abstract statement real with a pair of concrete examples from the company's recent announcement that illustrate the point:

Dell's new Compellent Storage Center 6.0, its next-generation architecture for the Compellent storage array systems, is built on a 64-bit operating system instead of a 32-bit operating system. What does that mean? Recall that storage controllers have CPUs built-in that manage the array. Obviously they have an operating system. In the case of Dell Compellent, that is a Linux-based operating system that can be non-disruptively updated, allowing customers to more easily gain the advantages of future improvements. The use of a 64-bit OS also gives significant performance and ability to scale capacity advantages. That coupled with storage management software as in copy and thin provisioning unmapping capabilities supports storage efficiency that Dell feels gives them a good story vis a vis competitors. Dell is also pushing server consolidation, so improvements in VMware integration with Storage Center 6.0 is another example of the new Compellent architecture's agility.

The Dell DR4000 disk backup appliance emphasizes built-in deduplication, compression, and replication using technology acquired in the Ocarina deal. According to Dell, the DR4000's ability to eliminate redundant files can reduce disk capacity requirements by up to 15 times, and deliver similar reductions in bandwidth requirements. Along with lowering backup storage costs to as low as $0.25/GB (list pricing) the DR4000 can also significantly reduce the footprint of backup in the data center, thus delivering significant power and cooling savings. The DR4000 gets Dell into a major competitive area of the storage market while leveraging its Fluid Data architecture strategy and emphasizing storage efficiency (TCO improvements over the existing architecture) and agility (both local and remote replication).

So how does Dell's Fluid Data Architecture and its related announcements position the company during what is, to put it mildly, a highly evolutionary time in the enterprise storage market? Pretty well, overall. The company has put together a solid line-up of proven and cutting-edge solutions that should appeal to existing customers and allow Dell to compete effectively in still-growing and emerging markets.

To be honest, though, Dell's offerings don't fill absolutely every customer need. In EqualLogic and Compellent, the company made big bets on cost-effective alternatives to the traditional SAN platforms, including EMC's CLARiiON and Symmetrix. However, while we expect Dell to be a strong contender, especially in green field opportunities, displacing existing enterprise SAN systems seems less likely.

That said, Dell today has done something that many have tried and few have accomplished. Its creative approach to acquisitions has, in relatively short order, allowed Dell to assemble end-to-end storage solutions that will be attractive to many if not most businesses. At the same time, Dell's exceptional eye for innovative value means that the time required for those investments to start paying off for company shareholders should be considerably shorter than it is for many traditional storage and system vendor competitors.

Overall, we find much to like about Dell's Fluid Data architecture strategy and solutions. Over time, we expect that storage customers will find much to like in Dell's offerings, as well.

David Hill of the Mesabi Group wrote this piece in conjunction with Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.

At the time of this publication, Dell is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232500207 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232500207 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:32 EST Having spent much of my career bringing order to the chaos of mismanaged SME data centers, I've been excited by the idea of FANs ever since I saw a demo of the Z-Force switch, which not only distributed files across multiple file servers but distributed data RAID-like across multiple filers so a dozen little one-drive SNAP servers could deliver 1,000 IOPs.

After all, a FAN would let me transparently migrate data from an old NAS to a new one, even as users access the data. Without a FAN, migrating several million files from one NAS system to another, especially if the new NAS is from a different vendor, is a major project involving late nights running ROBOCOPY while the users are locked out of their stuff.

Even better, a FAN can consolidate files from multiple departmental file servers to a new file store while preserving their UNCs. That way, all the embedded links in the spreadsheet from hell that accounting uses to close the quarter will still work even though we've long retired the file servers called HAN and CHEWIE. The FAN's global name space also means the FAN can spread data across multiple file stores while it looks like a single big filer.

Finally, I can run a policy engine in the FAN that puts the low-value data, like the home directories of all the folks that no longer work at FunCo, on a low-cost tier device that won't need to be backed up as frequently as the active data stores.

Despite all those advantages, sales of FAN systems have been exceptionally unsuccessful. Even if we don't count data classification/ILM vendors like Abrevity and Scentric, the graveyard of FAN companies is well populated. Several tried the hardware approach, building server/switches that sat in front of file stores--Z-Force, Attune, which was built from the ashes of Z-Force, NeoPath Networks, which was bought by Cisco and immediately shut down, and Acopia, which was acquired by F5 to create its last-man-standing ARX file virtualization platform. EMC bought Rainfinity and basically gave it to its professional services group to use during migration projects. Rainfinity's tech recently reappeared in EMC's Cloud Tiering Appliance, which FAN-like migrates data to a storage cloud. AutoVirt isn't the first FAN software vendor to go to boot hill, either. NuView's StorageX was snapped up by Brocade in one of its early attempts to diversify beyond Fibre Channel, but it lasted only about a year as a Brocade product.

In AutoVirt's short life (the company was founded in 2007), it used its reported $25 million in venture money to develop AutoMigrate, a migration tool, and AutoManage, a full-blown policy-driven FAN implementation. Unfortunately, the company never sold enough software to make money and is going to the FAN graveyard.

ESG's Steve Duplessie blogged that AutoVirt's crucial mistake was targeting Windows file servers and their data. That meant that their tools made life easy for the Windows admins, and no one in management was going to spend money for that. He may be right.

Have you considered a FAN? If so, what kept you from pulling the trigger?

Disclaimer: Josh Klein and Klavs Landberg of AutoVirt spent a few of those VC dollars to buy me meals and drinks. Brocade and EMC are clients of DeepStorage. The rest of the companies mentioned are dead.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232400435 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232400435 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:00 EST Nearbuy Sytems is a relative newcomer to the technology world, and is interested in the sweet spot where retail can benefit from the proliferation of smartphones across the private consumer space. I've talked with Nearbuy CEO and co-founder Bryan Wargo in the past about his company's location-based mobile shopping apps (including ridiculously accurate in-store device tracking that presents various sale offers based on where a shopper is standing on the sales floor), but Nearbuy's new Captive Portal offers functionality to both large retail environments and those too small to be interested in location services.

The premise behind Nearbuy's new in-store guest wireless offering is simple. I log into the store wireless network through a simple captive portal, and as I use my smartphone while shopping, my activities are being logged. Add that data to my activities on different days or in a merchant's other branches, and trends can be gleaned. Combine my usage information with that of other shoppers in an easy-to use analytics UI, and large data sets will hopefully yield valuable information about what consumers are actually buying or not, and what websites are being used for comparison shopping from the store's own network.

Citing predictions from Forrester Research and Deloitte, Wargo believed that about 25% of all North American big-box retailers were offering free Wi-Fi access to consumers by the end of 2011. Wargo also noted that through 2014, 90% of all retail transactions are still expected to occur in-store, but with more than half of these being influenced by what multichannel consumers see on the web about their intended purchases. Considering that smartphone sales continue to skyrocket and that pending family data plans may get even more consumers into the Nearbuy target demographic, things get interesting in this unique space.

After explaining the why, Wargo took me through the how of Nearbuy's analytics framework. One of Nearbuy's major selling points is that it leverages a store's existing WLAN, whether it be a one-access-point Starbuck's or a big building supply house with many APs. Nearbuy provides an add-on captive portal appliance (or a software enhancement to existing Motorola NX appliances) in each store. The Captive Portal is shoppers' front door to free wireless in the store. They can typically log in with an email address or social media credentials, and once terms of usage are accepted, the Nearbuy-enabled consumer connectivity experience is off and running.

While Wargo says that no sensitive consumer data or credit card information is passed through or stored on Nearbuy servers, target offers and other enticements specifically aimed at store wireless users can be leveraged to get shoppers to opt in. Each store pipes a range of analytically significant data off to Nearbuy's data center for aggregation, including types of devices used, activity history, Web traffic volume, top products browsed and purchased both in store and online, dollar values of items purchased, and more.

Nearbuy Systems certainly taps an interesting opportunity with an impressive utility suite, but there are a couple of points that Wargo yielded as we discussed the merits of his new baby. Some smartphone users simply leave the Wi-Fi side of their devices off most of the time in favor of their data plans. And then there are hit-and-run consumers who simply don't want to fish their phones out of their pockets while they shop, as it can lead to more time in a store than they might really want to spend. (I consider myself to be somewhere in the middle of both of these.). Then there are the feature-phone-only folks who simply can't get online from their device. Nearbuy has nothing to offer any of these groups. Regardless of those who can't, or by choice, won't use Nearbuy-enabled wireless, Wargo knows that the retail space is certainly evolving.

Will enough merchants and consumers buy in to make Nearbuy viable? Time will tell. Meanwhile, you can get a demo of the Nearbuy System's Captive Portal and a peek at the company's analytics capabilities at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG05jJIatWA

Disclaimer: Lee has no business relationship with Nearbuy Systems ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232400431 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/232400431 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:00 EST The first question I get from users about the drive shortage is how did monsoon season flooding in a country that gets monsoons every year cause the price of a 2-Tbyte disk at Amazon.com to triple? Well, while we users continued to enjoy disk drives whose capacity doubled every 18 months or so while the price remained basically the same, Seagate and Western Digital have engulfed and devoured their competitors, leaving the power pair with more than 80% market share.

At the same time they, and their suppliers, moved much of their production facilities to Thailand to take advantage of low-cost labor. While Seagate and WD managed to save some money when they moved production from Singapore and Malaysia to Thailand, we're now paying the price.

The first place many of us saw the impact was a shortage of drives in the retail channel and on the spot market. The 2-Tbyte drives I bought for $70 in August spiked to $165 around Christmas and are now down to $140, which is still twice the earlier price. Many retail outlets also imposed one- or two-per-customer limits around the holidays.

As all this was going on some of my compatriots in the chattering class wrote that large OEMs had long-term prices built into their contracts, so EMC and NetApp users shouldn't worry about price hikes. Well, they were wrong, as EMC, NetApp and HP have all announced 5% to 25% price hikes for disk drives during the next few months.

Long disk drive warranties have been another victim of the changing hard disk market. Both Seagate and Western Digital have announced that they will no longer offer three- to five-year warranties on their retail products. Some have suggested that this is an indication of a reduction of quality control standards, and that the vendors are offering only one-year warranties as they expect their drives to last only that long.

The truth is, as Hyundai has proven in the auto market, warranties are at least as much about marketing as they are about actually repairing or replacing failed products. With a worldwide shortage of drives, and an essential duopoly in the market, Seagate and WD have realized they can sell every drive they make without the additional cost of repairs for 2- to 5-year-old drives. The warranties drive vendors provide to OEMs are very different than the retail warranties and are spelled out in their OEM agreements.

I expect that smaller vendors like Overland Storage and Nexsan will be squeezed by higher disk prices. Vendors that make bring-your-own-disk arrays like Infortrend, Promise and Drobo should also take a hit as the 100% price hike in the spot market where BYOD array buyers would buy their drives is bigger than the 20% hike the big boys are charging. The guys at Drobo tell me their sales are good as users can start by loading their Drobo with older, smaller drives and upgrade later when prices should come down.

On the other hand, a 100% price boost for spinning drives means that SSDs are now only about 10 times the cost of a spinning disk; they were 20 times the price a few months ago. I'm seeing more folks put SSDs in their laptops. Similarly, I expect an SSD for cache and high-capacity disks will continue to put a hurt on the 10K and 15K RPM drive markets.

I don't expect 2-Tbyte drives to be available for less than $75 again until late this year. Until then, we'll just have to suffer.

Disclaimer: Overland Storage and NetApp have been clients of DeepStorage; Seagate, Western Digital and Drobo have provided hardware for DeepStorage Labs over the years. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks/232400429 http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks/232400429 http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:00 EST The IT industry loves to give trends labels ("cloud," anyone?) and "big data" is the buzz label for one recent trend. Three distinguishing characteristics that are often noted with respect to big data are volume, variety and velocity. Volume is the quantity of data. Variety describes the fact that big data is not merely structured information (the familiar SQL type found in relational databases) but also includes semi-structured data (which is content-searchable) and unstructured data (which is bit-mapped data, such as video surveillance files). Velocity relates to the speed required to both capture big data and analytically process it.

Now, big data is nothing new. Large data warehouses have been around for quite a while, and specialized vertical market information, such as seismic data, has been captured and analyzed for years. But large volumes of new sensor-based information (such as more utility readings captured with "smart" meters) and new sources of semi-structured and unstructured information (such as that generated by and stored on the Web and the Human Genome Project) have led to big data being added to the IT lexicon.

But big data is highly complex for a number of reasons beyond volume, variety and velocity. Sometimes the data is transient (meaning that it is captured, analyzed and deleted quickly, such as with very frequent RFID sensor information, where the value of the information is quickly extracted and there is no ongoing value or need for storage or archiving), but sometimes it is persistent (where the data is kept for a long period of time, such as with historical sales information). Note that this variety of continua has serious implications for how value is derived from big data through processing (such as the speed of processing and when it needs to take place). This also impacts how the data is best stored. Standard relational data warehouses were not designed to handle many of the new big data workloads or analytical processes; this is why the term "virtual data warehouse" is coming into vogue.

Another major problem in working with big data is the "I/O gap." Essentially, while server performance has continued to evolve, storage performance has remained essentially flat. For example, while the capacity of disk drives has increased dramatically, the rate of revolutions per second of disk drives has remained essentially constant. What this means practically is that when servers can process more I/Os than the storage can deliver, the speed of processing is slowed because the servers cannot process data that they don't have.

This I/O bottleneck is a performance problem that is not exclusive to big data--increasingly, robust enterprise applications run into the same problem. Additionally, because SSDs promise to solve this problem (since they have no mechanical parts that impact I/O) they are also a generally hot topic across enterprise storage. For its part, GridIron Systems focuses on the big data aspects of the I/O gap. Let's see what it has to offer.

GridIron Systems targets businesses' need to accelerate the processing of big data workloads and requisite high bandwidth and/or IOPS. A workable solution must also enable highly concurrent data access since there may be a large number of both users and applications active simultaneously. In addition, volatility is a big issue, as the queries that access the data may be rapidly changing, and there is often a high data ingest rate.

This concurrent access requirement and increasing volatility render traditional caching and tiering solutions, even those utilizing SSDs, ineffective when dealing with performance-constrained big data stores. Traditional caching is designed for read/write production systems and makes certain assumptions, such as a relatively fixed size data set, which benefits uniformly from lower latency.

GridIron recognizes the different requirements of big data workloads and has designed its algorithms to take advantage of the differences. Traditional tiering works best with large, stable data sets, where taking some time to move data from one group to another is reasonable. Many big data workloads require concurrent bandwidth to process data more quickly (which GridIron delivers) than traditional tiering can handle.

GridIron Systems' solution is the TurboCharger, an SSD-based (primarily flash, but with as little RAM as necessary) appliance that resides in storage area network (SAN) between servers and storage arrays. GridIron's objective is to provide solid state performance to data in the SAN without requiring IT administrators to have to change a thing--no software, database, server, storage or process changes of any sort are required. This is important not only in that the GridIron TurboCharger can be deployed without administrative burden, but it also lets IT feel comfortable in knowing that they could remove the TurboCharger if necessary (although performance would revert to the pre-TurboCharger state).

GridIron currently offers two models of the TurboCharger appliance--the GT1100 with an SSD capacity of 2.5 Tbytes and the GT1100A with an SSD capacity of 6.5 Tbytes. Each has a bandwidth of 1.6 Gbps and 100K IOPS.

Note that since the GridIron TurboCharger is entirely separate from servers and storage, current arrays can still be used; the TurboCharger is designed to complement existing systems and does not have to hold all the big data simultaneously. This means that the current storage array itself could have a tier 0 SSD layer, a Tier 1 FC/SAS layer, and a Tier 2 SATA layer. This external SAN-based approach frees up server and storage system processing from the complexity and mechanics of SSD operation and management.

So how can simply having additional SSDs as a front end in an appliance lead to GridIron's claims of speeding up applications two to 10 times and reducing read latency from 10 times to 100 times? There are some hardware advantages in GridIron's approach, as the appliance can add concurrent bandwidth, enabling multiple applications to concurrently access the same array without interference. But GridIron's secret sauce lies in proprietary software algorithms and heuristics that enable better caching for performance enhancing data.

Obviously, GridIron does not make a lot of details available, but basically the TurboCharger appliance allows big data to be read cached (as big data analyses are on data that has been captured, or already written to disk). The TurboCharger examines I/O patterns quickly and sees what, when and how big data is actually used. This can be done in real time, which is important because tiering in an array often examines patterns that occur over a day or more and this is simply too slow to be effective for many big data applications.

In addition, GridIron provides the concurrent bandwidth among applications to prevent "thrashing," which occurs because of resource contention (that is, a storage bottleneck), meaning that less work gets done as servers spend more time waiting for those resources. The effect of this concurrent bandwidth capability is conceptually equivalent to maintaining a real-time DBA whose sole function is to continuously relay out data sets to match server processing demand, at no performance cost, and that is continually responsive to changes in usage or data growth.

Among the benefits of a GridIron deployment are that both CPU and storage utilization are maximized. Moreover, the same storage array can be used for both production and data warehousing applications. Even though GridIron does not cache writes, it can improve write performance indirectly by offloading the read I/O work that the array would have had to perform otherwise, thus allowing the array to process the writes more efficiently.

GridIron cites a number of client examples. In one, an Oracle data warehouse for an online comparison shopping site was able to reduce the production of critical reports from six hours to about 30 minutes. In the process, GridIron says, about $2 million was also saved from storage and server consolidation. In another case, a financial services hosting provider was able to triple improvement in response time as well as double its overall hosting capacity, leading to savings of more than $1 million.

I/O bottlenecks are a very real problem that does not allow servers to exploit all of their capabilities while trying to process information from storage. That is why so many vendors are rushing in with SSD-based solutions to try and solve this problem. GridIron Systems does not try to solve every I/O bottleneck problem, but instead focuses on simply addressing the problem as it relates to the analysis of big data.

GridIron seeks to accomplish this through its TurboCharger line of appliances. On the business side, the advantage of faster analyses is the ability to take advantage of the results of the analysis faster (and, in some cases, that may be the difference between the data being of material value since late-arriving data may be worthless). On the IT side, better CPU and storage utilization leads to better IT investments. That can include savings, which makes GridIron's approach to enhancing big data acceleration and analysis worthwhile.

At the time of this publication, GridIron is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232400231 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/232400231 http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:27 EST Along with various announcements by U.S. carrier execs in 2011 on this year’s long-anticipated arrival of shared data plans, a fair amount of hope and speculation on what these plans might amount to has also been afoot. Will my department be able to get a single pool of data that our iPhones and Android tablets alike can all draw from? How about a single contract that covers all of the smart devices that my family uses? And wouldn’t rollover data be sweet--if I don’t use the device all this month, it adds to next month’s plan? Details on what is actually coming from each carrier are scant, but we can hope for a good range of options.

To get a sense of what shared plans in the United States might eventually feel like, we can look at Canadian provider Rogers Wireless and its Data Share Plan (www.rogers.com/web/content/dataSharing). With Rogers, as many as five devices can access a shared data allotment with a variety of monthly pricing tiers available. It is interesting to picture similar offerings in the colors of American carriers.

From the personal device angle, I’m all in favor of family plans. I’d love to replace the non-smart "feature phones" that my kids currently have. Because I can’t/won’t spring for multiple pricey data plans, three bright and social teens are relegated to the world of non-smartphones. Will a "big" plan for multiple devices be any cheaper than several individual plans? We’ll see. My dream plan would also come with control mechanisms sophisticated enough to allow good parental control over the youngsters’ mobile connectivity (at no additional fee, of course) while restricting nothing for the older members using the plan.

Contemplating the corporate mobile realm, it’s harder to know if the impact from shared data plans will be direct or indirect. Though shared data plans would also help sell more smart devices to businesses, it remains to be seen whether such plans will be offered to corporate customers. But even if shared plans are relegated to the consumer space, their impact on enterprises will certainly still be felt.

Anything that fuels the mobile device explosion has ripple effects on the corporate WLAN. The increase in clients seeking Wi-Fi offload will bear on WLAN design and support, as wireless worlds continue to collide wherever smart devices pop up. And if the WLAN admin has to worry about the added devices, so does the enterprise security team because the "D" in BYOD is proving to mean drama, dilemma, disaster and a number of other unpleasant descriptors as we all get used to the new paradigms of highly mobile personal devices being hosts on the corporate network.

Cable TV and business telephony systems are feeling the impact of smart device popularity. Sales of laptops and specialty devices like GPS units are already losing ground to smartphones and tablets, and this effect will only get more pronounced with the advent of shared data plans and more sophisticated mobile platforms. (I know I’m not the only one who pitched my automotive GPS when my Droid came to town.) Technical evolution is always a game of winners and losers, and while some device markets fall off, the world of paid applications and smartphone accessories will be further ignited by pooled data plans that put more devices into more hands.

Finally, shared data plans and added users on those plans will hasten and amplify many of the societal changes that an always-on, Internet-portal-in-your-pocket brings. In countless ways, we all actually get a bit smarter with these gadgets on hand. And ruder. And more resourceful. And less attentive. And more productive. And less engaged. The dichotomies are many, and are simply becoming a way of life for those who have smart devices.

For those who haven’t been able to ride the mobile smart device wave for financial reasons, the pending arrival of shared data plans should end up getting more clients into our very, very connected world, for better and worse. How it all shakes out remains to be seen, but the mobile network carriers have a chance to deliver yet another disruptive blow to the networked world. Let’s see what they do with it.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/232400017 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/232400017 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:01 EST private cloud deployment is the service catalog. In many cases, a great deal of time is spent architecting and discussing infrastructure, virtualization and automation processes with little thought of the actual service delivery. Service catalogs are key to successful private cloud deployment, as well as the overall usability of the services your cloud delivers.

A service catalog serves two major purposes: informing your customers (IT resource consumers) of service capabilities and offerings, and abstracting those offerings from the underlying technology. Without a properly designed catalog, the technology is tied too closely to the service provided. For example, a user requiring high-performance storage may state a requirement for Fibre Channel storage on FC disks using a specific array. You may be able to deliver the same performance/reliability at a lower cost with other technology, but the user's request for a Fibre Channel-attached array is what they know or are used to.

A very basic service catalog will abstract the underlying technologies and provide service-level options such as silver, gold and platinum with definitions of what those provide in latency and reliability terms. This allows you to change the underlying infrastructure based on cost, performance and technology improvements without changing the way services are requested.

The catalog should be designed so that the desired service is emphasized while abstracting the technology used to provide that service. Take mobile security as an example. A service catalog could be designed with a list of software and security options to lock down a mobile device, allowing the customer to choose applicable requirements. While this would work, it requires additional knowledge from the resource consumer and complicates changing out underlying products. Instead, a catalog could offer the option for mobile device security and implement all required products and services on a uniform basis.

With a well-defined catalog in place, it's time to apply costing to the offered services. The service consumers should be aware of the cost differences of each option, even if the departments are not directly charged back. This provides not only a means for those consumers to make cost-effective decisions, but also a means to track back costs to departments, which helps in budget discussions.

Providing visibility into the services being offered and the costs of those services assists in allowing your end users to streamline what they consume and provides justification from big spenders when IT purchase requests must be made for capacity increases.

An additional benefit of the service catalog is the visibility it provides to IT consumers. It allows the consumers to know of all of the offerings and capabilities provided. Especially in large organizations, departments may not be aware of one another's tools and applications. Providing visibility via a service catalog can allow departments to identify overlapping services that can benefit the business or mission.

Service catalogs are a valuable tool of a private cloud and are key to overall success. They are another step of abstraction between the technological widgets and the business demands that allow a private cloud to thrive.

Disclaimer: In my primary role I work with several products and vendors that provide the software and services mentioned here. This article is not an endorsement of those, or any, products or vendors. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232301316 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232301316 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:05 EST On the outgoing pile for Cisco wireless management is Wireless Control System (WCS), and the new kid on the block transforms WCS to Cisco Prime Network Control System, or NCS for short. If you didn't catch it, "wireless" has been dropped from the name, and there is purpose behind that change. Cisco sees bigger things for its latest network management system than just the wireless side of the network, but we'll get to that in a bit.

As a WCS customer since 2006, I've been a bit disappointed with the management solution at times. How disappointed? Let's just say that when Cisco wireless competitor Aruba Networks bought the Airwave management product line back in 2008, I was seriously bummed out. Having used both Airwave and early WCS back in the day, I fantasized that Cisco would scrap its own solution early on and purchase Airwave instead of continuing development on WCS. But, alas, WCS soldiered on as Cisco's wireless management offering. It did get better through the years, but it was still frustrating in some important ways.

Long before my environment grew to its current scale of 3,000-plus access points and 10,000 daily peak client devices, WCS would occasionally grind to an almost unusable crawl. Reporting has been problematic in that it was easy to ask for "too much" data, like several months' worth of this or a year's worth of that. Information lookup that did give what I asked for could be painfully slow or inconsistent, and TAC cases invariably confirmed that our config and available resources were adequate. There were also many more annoyances along the way, but WCS' little character flaws simply became a fact of life and my team learned how to squeeze as much as we could out of it while frequently petitioning Cisco for relief. Meanwhile, the system did an overall adequate job during the five years we kept it in service.

With NCS' arrival, I can say first-hand that some improvements over WCS are obvious. I have yet to query the new Oracle-powered NCS database in a way that isn't responded to quickly, and the overall pep of the UI is much appreciated compared with my WCS experiences. I can actually get the data that I need to evaluate a number of decision points going forward with network expansion and upgrades. I have found no report too big to be run, and run quickly. This is a capability that in many ways I have been waiting years for. A big fat thumb's up to Cisco for this. A word of caution, though: There are specific browser requirements for anyone using NCS, and they can trip you up, so read the release notes if you go down the NCS road.

Pretty much all of the configuration, monitoring, and alerting stuff is familiar enough in NCS. The news in this regard is that Cisco now includes limited functionality for network switch monitoring and the ability to use the Mobility Services Engine (MSE) to track wired users along with wireless clients throughout the network. The overall switch support is on the thin side in this incarnation of NCS, but you can guess where this might be going. Cisco's "Borderless Networks" campaign and the growing importance of wireless as a network component that's every bit as important as Ethernet means that common management is likely inevitable.

There is a modest upgrade cost to NCS, which I must admit to finding offensive. WCS was so problematic for so long that, in my opinion, NCS should be a free upgrade for Cisco customers that didn't abandon WCS. Here's hoping that as Cisco begins melding wireless and wired management into a tighter integration, none of WCS' baggage has carried over to the wireless giant's latest management suite. And to Cisco's credit, I do have to say that so far I very much like what I see in NCS. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/232301253 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/232301253 http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:00 EST Research: Outlook 2012 report--and the hard data behind them.

Not all IT budget news is bleak.
Do more IT organizations expect budget increases of more than 10% or decreases of more than 10 percent? In our Outlook 2012 survey, 18% of those polled say their budgets will increase by more than 10%--and just 6% say they'll be hit with a decrease of the same amount. However, the largest faction, 28%, see flat budgets on the horizon. It's long, slow recovery out there, folks.

Cloud services are increasingly being used for disaster recovery.
In 2010, 34% of IT pros said they were using or considering cloud-based services as part of their business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategies. In 2011, that number climbed to 43%. The biggest reason not to do DR in the cloud remains security, respondents say. The number of respondents citing this concern in our research continues to rise, despite all the efforts vendors are making to calm fears.

It's been a banner year for data analytics.
For the first time, less than half of respondents cite data quality problems as the biggest barrier to business intelligence/analytics adoption. However, 46% of you say quality is still your leading concern--followed closely by ease-of-use worries, in the face of complex analytics packages.

Cloud progress will slow down a bit in 2012.
At this time last year, our cloud survey found 60% more IT organizations reporting using cloud services: 31% vs. 18% the previous year. This year, there was a measly two-point gain, with 33% of respondents saying that they're using cloud services (look for our new report, coming in January). The easy stuff has been done. Integration challenges and security concerns are as real as they ever were.

Windows 8 Server's prospects are good. Win Mobile's, not so much.
Already, 63% of you say you'll run Windows 8 on at least 50% of your servers. Only 30% of respondents say they'll run the phone/tablet version on that fraction of these devices. Frankly, we're surprised the number is that high.

It's still not the year of unified communications.
It's been a long, slow slog for UC. Two years ago, 30% of you reported having UC deployed. That number has now risen to 36%. Why so little traction? Today, as was the case two years ago, other projects just have a higher priority.

IT's prevailing attitude toward tablets has flipped 180 degrees.
For three years, we've asked IT pros whether tablets would be a "non-event." In 2010, you were convinced that they would be. In 2011, you still kinda thought so. Finally, for 2012, IT pros are somewhat disagreeing with the "non-event" statement--though you're still on the fence as to whether tablets will be the chosen tool of road warriors, and whether you'll provide support. Our bet? They will be, you will support them, and you'll do so in pretty substantial numbers during the next few years.

Server memory configurations are way up.
Remarkably little changed in our annual State of Servers survey--except memory configurations. We saw a 50% increase in the number of servers configured with 33 Gbytes to 64 Gbytes of memory, and a whopping 100% increase in the number of boxes configured with 65 Gbytes to 128 Gbytes. No wonder users revolted against VMware's 2011 move to price its software based on server memory used.

IT no longer leads the charge to monitor social networking.
In 2010, 44% of you reported that IT was on the hook for monitoring activity on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In 2012, just 32% of our respondents will be doing the monitoring. That 12-point drop is offset by a 13-point increase in the number of respondents who report that their marketing departments now take the lead in monitoring these sites. The good news: Only 25% say that their companies have no formal plans for monitoring social networking; that figure was 43% back in 2010.

You're serious about server virtualization.
If you don't plan to virtualize the majority of your servers by the end of 2012, you'll be firmly in the minority. The largest growth came in those respondents who say they'll virtualize 75% to 90% of servers. Just 13% planned to do that back in 2010: This year, the number almost doubled, to 25% citing that goal. Server consolidation was the top driver, by far, for virtualization efforts in 2010. Now that's tied with desires for high availability, better disaster recovery, and improved flexibility and agility.

Read the entire Research: Outlook 2012 on Network Computing Pro. (free, registration required).

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232301214 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232301214 http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:30 EST position on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)—its reversal notwithstanding—was the nudge that pushed me over the edge. Frankly, GoDaddy has been acting poorly during the last few years, and I decided to move my domains elsewhere. So far, the transfers have gone well, with nary a hiccup.

I don't have a problem with trying to curb piracy. Enforcing copyright is good for content creators, publishers, advertisers, stores—anyone involved with the creation and distribution of creative works. If you want to charge for your work, give it away for free while disallowing modification, give it away and let others modify and redistribute it, then you, as copyright holder, should be allowed to do so. For all the benefit of giving away the things you create, there are economic incentives to charge for work, and if you are offended by that, too bad. Some of us want to get paid for our work, but a bad law is worse than no law, and neither SOPA nor the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) are good laws. I made a personal choice to not support companies that support bad laws. Leaving GoDaddy is just one recent example.

Regardless, if you want to transfer your domain now or at any point in the future (and there are many reasons why you might want to do so), there are some things you can do to ensure that the transfer will go smoothly.

• Make sure your contact information is current and correct. Sorry, kids, but DNS is a public service, and you have to provide accurate contact information—if, for no other reasons, than if someone wants to contact you, like a lawyer or law enforcement before, during or after taking action such as a DMCA takedown or notifications required under SOPA and PIPA, they can always find you through whois. If you are worried about leaking private information, use addresses, email accounts and phone numbers not associated with your personal or professional contact information but that still allow you to be reached. Alternatively, you can use privacy services offered by your registrar to hide behind. Frankly, in the 10-plus years I have had DNS names, I haven't received any spam or solicitations. Your mileage may vary.
• If you are using your registrar's privacy services, you will need to uncloak during the transfer process. The receiving registrar needs to get your whois data, and it can't if it is locked. Unlocking your whois data may require extra steps with your current registrar, so check first. It may delay the transfer, but you signed up for privacy, so don't blame the registrar for executing on your wishes.
• Your authoritative DNS servers will not be affected by the transfer unless you are using your registrar's DNS servers for your domain names. In other words, if your domain name is registered through Acme Registrar and your how names like www and mail are managed through Acme Registrars service, then Acme will likely remove your domain name from its DNS servers after the transfer is complete. Set up secondary DNS servers and ensure they have propagated before you initiate the transfer.
• Give it a few days to let the transfer complete. You will have to authorize the transfer (which is why you need a valid email) and wait for the registrars to handshake. Once it is started, you shouldn't need to do anything else unless there is a problem
• While you are transferring your domains, make sure you establish a strong password for your registrar. Make it long and complex, write it down, and put it somewhere safe. That will keep attackers from guessing your password. Oh, and remember to lock your domains after the transfer is complete.

Update. The first of my domains are completing transfer. It took me about 2 minutes per domain, and about 5 hours for two registrars to do their thing. No blocking from GoDaddy. No phone calls pleading for my business. No drama. Maybe I am not important enough. Or maybe I am too important. I'll go with the latter. (Ha ha) Have a great New Year. ]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/232301132 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/232301132 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:28 EST In fact, iWave highlights another fascinating thing about IT: that innovation is not the exclusive province of big IT vendors; small IT vendors have the opportunity to play major roles, as well. Now, big IT vendors have larger financial resources that enable them, if they wish, to tackle any number of projects simultaneously. Those with ongoing research capabilities may tackle larger projects and those that last for a long time (that is, many years) without delivering a real product. Moreover, large companies can risk failures as long as those projects that hit it big more than compensate for all the ones that failed to deliver sufficient value.

However, even though smaller companies cannot engage in a similar wealth of projects, and failure of a product development project may mean their own failure, they still have at least one advantage: They can tackle innovative projects without worrying that they might cannibalize existing profitable products or businesses. Moreover, smaller companies may be more nimble, as they are not encumbered by the organizational constraints and restrictions that often exist in larger vendors.

Now, storage automation, which iWave is targeting, is an especially important area. But before we see what iWave is doing, let’s review what automation is all about.

IT goes through terminology fads that represent (sometimes) major trends. ("Cloud" and "big data," anyone?) Another of the fashionable terms that is bandied about in what seems to be an indiscriminate fashion is "automation." As an industry analyst, I take briefings from vendors large and small (and these briefings often serve to provide information for my writing). An executive from a large, well-known vendor recently used the word automation as if he and his company had just created the term and as if his company's products delivered all of the benefits of automation. Unfortunately, he could not explain how his products were automated and what benefits they actually delivered.

The word automation as it pertains to IT has been around for many years. In fact, 2012 marks the 60th year since the term was reinvented in a book entitled simply "Automation" by John Diebold, an early IT management guru whom I am happy to say that I knew personally (although many years after he had written "Automation"). As John talked about in a later book, "Making the Future Work":