Malaysia VMware Communities » Data Center

Is Public cloud ready for enterprise application such as Office Applications?

craig — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:37:21 +0000

Microsoft had pushed very hard for the office 365 to all their existing client doesn’t matter they are SMB or Enterprise. Personal opinion, I had tried out the office 365, the experience is useable but it doesn’t meet the requirement of my expectation for office use. Anway, this is just 1 of the down side. When you look at the infrastructure readiness and dependancy, I think enterprise may putting too much risk as now to adopt to office 365.

If the office 365 are able to be dedicated connectivity and resources with robust infrastructure behind, it could make a lot of different for many users to be considered.

Recently there are many outage happen on the cloud provider, which alert many of the users start to re-think to the strategy of cloud to minimize the business impact in the event of unexpected outage. A right strategy for Cloud can bring benefits to the company, but a wrong strategy of cloud could end up create disaster to the environment too. Those major outage top news had forced the service provider to further enhance the infrastructure uptime.

This report explain the uptime been claimed by Google and Microsoft both.

Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

craig — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:28:13 +0000

Interesting announcement from Cisco and VMware during the VMworld 2011 which was regarding the VXLAN capability. Both company had invited a group of product principle together to submit the VXLAN to IETF for approval as a standard for future.

Let’s talk a little bit more about what is VXLAN and why do we need that. As of today, DR solution are commonly deploy by every enterprise environment. Did you realize 1 of the biggest challenge which always happen on the DNS record, hard coded IP segment, subnet and VLAN which always require human interaction to manually change it, to allow a success fail over of the DR scenario? Well, I think this is just 1 of the major issue commonly face. With Cisco Nexus 7000 come with OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) which allow you to stretch the Layer 2 traffic over Layer 3, with minimal bandwidth requirement. Cisco had done a great job to the enterprise to address this, which now you can have both side learning the same VLAN, Subnet and ip address. A DNS and ip changes is no longer require as both end are transparent with similar VLAN.

What about Cloud? I always think the major challenges on cloud are Network. VXLAN created are mainly to address to concerns of the public cloud provider. That was mainly due to the limitation on the current VLAN architecture, which only allow 4000++ VLAN to be created in the single manage environment. Imagine you as the public cloud provider, you will easily hit the maximum number and you do not want to build another new infrastructure due to this limit too. According to the Cisco Expert during VMworld, the additional header is been added to the bit and byte to enhance the additional number of VLAN could be deploy in the single environment. At the same time, it deliver the similarity of OTV from private to public cloud, which bring the Hybrid Cloud to the reality of tomorrow.

I will try to find out more technical information about this area with my counterpart back to Malaysia, and share again in details with another post. From the intention of both Cisco and VMware, they are pushing hard for VXLAN on this and I do believe this is 1 of the key area need to be addressed before the hybrid cloud environment could continue scale especially on the public cloud provider perspectives.

You can view the full details of the IETF submission from Cisco and VMware from HERE.

Federated hybrid cloud with vCloud director 1.5

craig — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:47:51 +0000

VMworld 2011 had focused a lot on private and hybrid cloud computing environment which address the concerns from enterprise over the public cloud offering in the market today. One of the key highlight during the event was the new capability over vCloud director version 1.5.

With vCD 1.5, you can now manage both private and public as a hybrid mode from the administration with secure federated. It allow you to subscribe, manage, relocate and provision anywhere you prefer, could be internal infrastructure or public cloud provider you choosen and manage in same console. I went through the hands on lab session for this topic and found the setup was great.

It took me sbout 1.5 hours to complete the lab and the lab instruction is clear and no customization required. I would like to thank the folks from vmware who creted the lab and allow me to try it out. Every configuration is web base and wizard base, which allow the administrator to setup and configure easily. Hybrid cloud no longer a concept, whih I believe is real and many users will seriously consider it in the future.

Excited Vmware View 5 launched during Vmworld 2011

craig — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:32:12 +0000

VMware CTO had officially launched the vmware view 5 yesterday at the general session which covered quite a numbers of new stuffs.

With view 5, vmware emphasize a lot on the security, mobility and application delivery to any end point that could be used by the users today.

On the security, you can now offload the security scan from vm to hypervisor level, which able to prevent IO storm and further harden to secure VDI environment. you could now persue with vshield end point with 3rd party antivirus integration such as trend micro to provide agentless end point protection. This will transform the way how antivirus to be deployed in the future for end point protection on enterprise desktops.

Mobility is always important for enterprise desktop, and vmware have the solution to address this area with the code name HORIZON. In the presentation by the vmware CTO, it showed the capability to support multiple device with single environment wih mobile virtualization on the phone to run multiple environments. Users can now combine the work and personal mobile devices whithout sacrifice the privacy. If the users lose the device, the system will able to remove the accesss to the corporate data to prevent information lost. All changes on the vdi on will be synchronized across to your mobile devices automatically.

The last part of the presentation, vmware demostrated the capability of application delivery via html version 5 which you can now edit the office document file on 3rd party devices without worry on the compability issue anymore. I was very impressed with this new capability which meant a lot to the mobile devices. The code name on this is call Appblast.

Overall of the session, VMware view 5 had make a significant change compare to previous version and I am excited to test it out when I back to Malaysia after the vmworld.

Cisco UCS added new Fabric Interconnect to the Product Line

craig — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:05:12 +0000

Cisco had recently added new Fabric Interconnect to their product line up which provide more choice to their client to be consider for their deployment. Previously there were only 6120XP and 6140XP in place for the Fabric interconnect architecture as part of Cisco UCS. The new Fabric Interconnect 6248UP which provide 32 ports FCoE with additional 16 ports expansion module on unified port available which support FCoE, LAN and SAN FC with appropriate module.

While introduce new Fabric Interconnect, the IO Module for UCS Blade Chassis had been further enhance with 2208XP which provide 80Gbps throughput per IO module, and allowed up to 160Gbps per chassis. This option will allow users to provide higher throughput to the blade infrastructure which require more than 80Gbps per chassis.

In the official document from Cisco, the 6248UP is ready with Layer 3 capability which will require additional L3 daughter card to be added in to enable the Layer 3 function from the switch. This is similar to the current Nexus 5548 and 5596 which is offering in the market today with L3 capable. The daughter card are currently not available which will only release in future. This is a good move for Cisco as we had feedback many times about the L3 capability in Fabric Interconnect could benefits to many deployment we have today.

I am absolutely excited with the announcement been made on the new line up for Cisco UCS.

For details information, please refer to the official link from Cisco here.

Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market

Arista Network for Virtualization vEOS vs Cisco Nexus 1000V

craig — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:32:55 +0000

Arista could be fairly new in this region, but they had been proven to be 1 of the reliable and high performing low latency switches in the market today. The main market for them are mainly focus on trading, FSI and high performance environment. Lately, I had noticed Arista start to move into cloud & virtualization market aggressively. While Arista is very aggressive on this, there are some changes or option been brought into the market by them.

10Gbps Ethernet no longer as a dream to most enterprise environment. It had become affordable, and realistic to be adopted while users decided to build the virtualization or private enterprise cloud. I had always highlighted that network had become major component of the success for cloud or virtualization, therefore the manageability on the virtual switch had become equally important as well. Previously, Cisco Nexus 1000V is the only choice to perform virtual switch layer management. If you do not want to go for it, you have another choice here. Arista had a similar offer which is vEOS, that allow virtual traffic direct integrate and visible over to the Arista Physical Network switches.

Below are some table comparison within vEOS VS Cisco Nexus 1000V. There are some similarity but will not be the total same approach been taken.

Here is the table shown that some details functionality Compare to Cisco Nexus 1000V.

If you are planning for large scale deployment on 10G environment for production network and IP base storage network, you may also consider Arista as a good fit which they offer low latency and work well with most IP base storage vendor in the market. For more information, please refer to the official link here.

More Cautious on IT after Japan Earth Quake

craig — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:45:58 +0000

Everyone is closely follow up the news after the Japan Earth quake last week, not just because the impact to the country, environment and also the people who are suffering from the incident. As from IT perspective, I am strongly urging all of us to reconsider many of the activity which been carry out there 24×7 today, to re-look into the strategy which could improve and save the environment. The Heat, e-waste and green issues been created due to IT is HIGH and we could not deny it. Therefore the latest solution and technology are very emphasis to reduce the necessary foot print & energy consumption which could harm the environment.

I am absolutely an IT users who always try to keep the environment green by reduce the energy consumption as much as possible. How about you? Had you done enough in your environment to assure this? There are more countries planning to introduce nuclear power reactor due to high demand on power and energy. Do we really that amount of energy for our IT infrastructure or even personal use? Can we think out the box to reduce the energy consumption by half? Especially in the data center area, there are way more advance thing we could do to reduce the total energy consumption, but it had not happen many way due to short term vision, selfish mindset, which users just do not care too much about the environment.

Let’s urge the peoples around all of us and help to reduce the unnecessary footprint and energy consumption by re-look into the infrastructure from time to time.

Data Center Facilities Considerations

Data Center Facilities Considerations

craig — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:45:03 +0000

I had been busy with numbers of Data Center Projects recently. All of these projects are referring to Data Center Expansion or new Data Center Build up requirements. There are number of interest discussion we had with multiple clients and exchange technical knowledge and opinion from each others. Does a data center efficiencies or success measure by the size, usable capacity, density or etc? Everyone should had a different opinion about this topic.

Traditional Data center were built by M&E or facilities management, mostly without IT department involvement. This had been transformed in most enterprise organization as IT has the better understanding what will be deployed into the data center after it build. There are always conflict from Facility and IT, as both KPI been measure separately and conflict to each other. Let’s assume a 5000 SFts data center, the facility guy may require to fill up the max capacity with the lowest budget. It may physical fill up with few hundred of racks and look nice at the end, but the usability could be question due to the density and capacity per rack which impact the data center life cycle. A physical 42U rack doesn’t mean it allow us to fully mounted any physical devices into it, as we need to consider about the power and cooling pieces. From IT perspective, they will prefer to use less space into the data center, and reduce the power, cooling & cabling to achieve green IT environment. This had been part of IT main goal with storage consolidation, virtualization & I/O virtualization. If the power and cooling capacity are not proper plan, IT will not able to optimize the data center facilities.

Both facility and IT team should communicate and plan together to achieve Data Center efficiency. We had been talked about cloud, modular & scalable in infrastructure, why don’t we apply the same methodology in the physical facilities today? A scalable solution allow users to have better management in term of capex and opex. It does help IT to reduce the carbon foot prints and energy waste. A data center should able to scale on demand up to certain extend, if planning were done properly at the earlier stage. The data center facilities today should independent design, build and operate by the IT department which they will have better understanding and greater responsible to optimize the Data Center.

Unified Storage is the way to move forward for Enterprise IT

craig — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:33:44 +0000

Unified Storage………Sounds new to you? or sounds familiar to you? No right or wrong answer here, but it had become the dream of every storage vendor to offer this to their client especially in mid range, enterprise and virtualization environment. I remembered Netapp was the 1st started this, follow by other competitors in the market.

What is unified storage?

A single platform support multi-protocol such as FC, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE and etc. It also support file, volume and block level data access.

You will able to get the unified box from either Netapp, EMC and HDS in the market now.

Well, seems like all the major storage players are aligned and agreed with the Unified Storage architecture now. Let’s share some of my personal experiences here. For my pass experience as an end users, I had met up with numbers of Storage experts from different principle. I often received those comments as Unified storage will slow down the performance, not efficient and they are not block base solution from multiple experts. No right or wrong for what they had commented, but with the storage trend today, they may need to reconsider the statements they had put in front to the customers previously.

Personal opinion, the storage transformation majority are caused by Virtualization and cloud computing as you could easily decide the protocol or methodology for different deployment, which had forced the storage vendor to re-consider their approach for SAN offer to support unified protocol in single platform.

Cisco offer R series Rack for UCS

craig — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 03:13:07 +0000

This morning when I woke up, I receive an email from my counterpart regarding Cisco UCS R-Series. At first, I I thought it was just another model of blade or rack mount system Cisco had added to their product line. Once I open up the official link and found that is nothing related to the blade or rack mount base UCS machines. Is a RACK!!!! after years of Cisco UCS come into the market, there had been number of users asking why Cisco UCS does not come with their own rack? Finally, I think Cisco has the answer to the customers who had asked the similar question before. Not a bad idea to add the R series as part of the offering, which may looks cool to deploy the full set of UCS & Cisco solutions in Cisco Rack itself now.