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.
Read more information from the official link here
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Adoption to both virtualization and cloud computing, network become the important component of the success to both solutions. For many of the mature deployment and operation in virtualization, network become the uncontrolled piece in the virtual infrastructure which allow administrator to breech the change control management from the production network without proper authority from the network administrators. Some of you may not been agreed with this statement but it does impact the production environment.
The traditional vswitch or dvswitch did not provide control, manage as the physical switching environment in the data center. It allow administrator to provision new virtual machine and connect to network without proper request and change management in place. Let’s imagine, the effect will be the same as unauthorized persons connected a server to the production LAN without a change approval. In physical environment, we can shut off all the unused network ports in data center, in virtual, you will not able to perform this while using vswitch or dvswitch from vmware. Technology limitation for the past previous years does not allow network operation to be fully integrated until the Nexus 1000V from cisco & VMware join develop products come to place. This will allow administrator to manage and control the access level on the virtual environment as it does in physical switch. Transparency and Manageability is possible on virtual layer now. Network performance analysis and troubleshooting become easier compare to previous.
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I had gone through numbers of interesting discussions with the users I met in the past which talk about the disaster recovery plan in their current and future environment. DR is not a new topic for every enterprise environment, but it is always important for the enterprise environment to have DR in place due to business critical and compliance purposes. While virtualization continue penetrate into enterprise environment by taking mission critical workload, Disaster Recovery solution become a must to be consider which may require users to redesign their DR solution.
Traditional legacy or standalone environment, we often realize there are many solutions perform replication from primary data center to DR center via host base, storage base or image base replication. All of them has the pros & cons depend what is the objective of the specified DR project users are looking at. DR consistency and usability during DR scenario & practices always the biggest challenge in every IT department today.
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Private Cloud computing had become a key focus in our region started from early this year. Many of the enterprise users are looking into providing IT as a Service to the business unit by adopting to Private cloud computing in their existing IT infrastructure. While Cloud computing become very efficient by offering on demand & utility base computing, self service management and others offering, some of us may had forgotten about the Internal IT operation compliance such as Incident, Problem, Change & Release management as an example. Are we going to revamp the entire process to bring private cloud computing into the environment? I am doubt about this, at least most of the users or client that I met, they will definitely require the compliance to stay on even the move to private cloud computing environment today or tomorrow.
Prior to the cloud computing solution roll out in the enterprise environment, we should spend more time to understand the road map and methodology to ensure the success roll out for the entire solution. Some features or functionality may or may not require to certain environments.
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Storage de-duplication is not a new term in the IT industry. It had been a while since few years back. Many users are confused with this term. Same goes to the Cloud Computing. Every Storage vendor will claim they have the de-duplication solution today, but they are different from each others as we know.
General de-duplication solution:
- Primary SAN de-duplication
- Appliance target base de-duplication
- Host base de-duplication
- Software base de-duplication
I may had missed out some of them, but these should cover majority of the de-deduplication solution in the market today.
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