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Matthew McGarity—Day 28: Light (hayfield) #janphotoaday


Matthew McGarity—Ignite Dallas 4: The Art of Caregiving

My wife has an incurable & devastating neurological disease which affects the lives of her and everyone she loves. I serve as her primary caregiver. Come to hear my advice on how her condition is one of the best things that could ever happen to us — or you.

That was my synopsis for the above video, which records my 5 minutes as an Ignite Dallas speaker. I can’t begin to tell you how hard it was for me to speak about the subject, and for my wife to graciously share her story with me — and the world.

Several people approach us afterwards to express their own stories of dealing with chronic disease. I’m glad to have met these people and that we mutually touched each other’s hearts! Hopefully, I fulfilled the Ignite missing by enlightening you and being quick about it.

Permalink to the video is here.

Be sure to check out the other videos from Ignite Dallas 4, as I was privileged to share the stage with some very fascinating people. My favorite of the night was Bill Holston’s video about his human rights work.

Matthew McGarity—Day 27: Lunch (chili with crackers) #janphotoaday


Bob Ganley—Reduce your taxes part 4 – a solution

In the first blog of this series I discussed how some organizations are over-provisioning their server resources in order to balance performance and data protection SLAs. Parts 2 and 3 showed examples of actual SQL Server database configurations being tested to measure the impact of backups and snapshots while maintaining application performance.

Those tests showed around a 40% tax rate for data protection, meaning that 40% of the server processing headroom was sitting idle so that performance SLAs could be met during data protection operations.

Reduce your taxes – So how can you reduce those taxes? This is where storage comes in to the picture. The reason that meeting service levels requires over-provisioning of your database servers in these scenarios is that server resources are being used for tasks that are best managed by a SAN. SAN-based snapshots have several advantages:

  • They are quick to create – taking under 10 seconds instead of the 10 minutes it takes to create native SQL server snapshots for the same workload use-case.
  • They have a very minor performance impact that is of no consequence to server provisioning.
  • Snapshots can be used as the source for an off-host backup, eliminating backup tax.

Here is an example of actual testing of the performance impact of SAN-based snapshots for the same SQL Server database load tested in parts 2 and 3 of this series.

As you can see, CPU utilization and transactional performance are minimally impacted by the SAN-based snapshot operations. The “Smart Copy” terminology refers to the fact that these are application-consistent snapshots which have been created by momentarily quiesceing the database and flushing buffers so that a completely valid recovery point for the database is created. This is done with Microsoft VSS, and took between 4 and 8 seconds for the configuration tested.

Conclusion: By using the capabilities of your SAN, you can ensure more efficient use of your IT resources and reduce your taxes to achieve IT Efficiency.

For more information on the testing that was done please refer to:  http://dell.to/w35fsv

Now it is time to hear from you, what is your “Tax” reduction strategy?


Bob Ganley—Reduce your taxes part 3 – The SQL Server Snapshot Tax

In the first of this series I propose that some organizations are over provisioning their server resources in order to balance performance and data protection SLAs. In part 2 we examined the “backup tax”. Now let’s look in detail at another example of this, “the snapshot tax” for establishing on-disk recovery points by doing native SQL Server snapshots.

The Snapshot Tax – The following graph shows the results of testing snapshot processing on a transactional workload running in SQL server. It illustrates a 40% tax associated with establishing on-disk recovery points with the native SQL Server snapshot capability.

There are several observations from this data that should cause concern to those of you who would like to reduce your taxes:

  • Creating recovery points impacts performance – average response times and transactions per second see a significant negative impact.
  • Creating a recovery point takes a long time – in this scenario around 10 minutes. So if you want to keep one recovery point per hour (RPO), around 1/6th of that hour will be spent with degraded performance.
  • The impact becomes cumulatively worse as more recovery points are kept.

Conclusion: Simultaneously meeting service level agreements for performance and data protection by establishing and keeping 5 hourly recovery points with native SQL server snapshots requires at least 40% over-provisioning of database server resources. This is an exorbitant 40% tax rate that you shouldn’t have to pay.

For more information on the testing that was done please refer to:  http://dell.to/w35fsv

Let’s hear from you. Is a one hour RPO a reasonable number? What rate do you pay for snapshot taxes?


Bob Ganley—Reduce your taxes part 2 – The SQL Server Backup Tax

In the first of this series I propose that some organizations are over provisioning their server resources in order to balance performance and data protection SLAs. Let’s look in detail at one example of this, “the backup tax” for doing native SQL Server backups.

The Backup Tax – The following graph shows the results of testing of backup processing on a transactional workload running in SQL Server. It illustrates one example of a tax rate of 40%.

The graph of the results shows that around 40% of the CPU cycles provisioned for SQL server must be reserved in order to make sure that service levels for performance are met during backup with the SQL Server native backup utility.

Conclusion: Simultaneously meeting service level agreements for performance and data protection when using native SQL server backup requires at least 40% over-provisioning of your database server resources. And this assumes that you’re willing to run your database server at 100% utilization during the backup window. This is an exorbitant 40% tax rate that you shouldn’t have to pay.

For more information on the testing that was done please refer to:  http://dell.to/w35fsv

Let’s hear from you, what rate do you pay for backup taxes?


Bob Ganley—Reduce your taxes to achieve IT efficiency

Yes it is that time of year again; we all start thinking about taxes. I know what you’re thinking; “What does this have to do with enterprise efficiency?”

It comes down to SLAs. As you design your IT environment you need to be cognizant of Service Level Agreements. What are the expectations of your users for performance? What is the agreement you have with them about response time? Also what is the agreement you have with management about data protection, what are your Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives?

Databases are a great place to explore this balance.  Databases underlie most of our business systems. As you size your database servers, you must ensure that SLAs for performance are met while at the same time making sure those SLAs for data protection are met. It turns out that this usually results in database servers being over-sized to deliver acceptable performance AND accommodate for the processing load of establishing recovery points. This is a “tax” that almost every IT organization is paying, and with the right storage strategy you can reduce, and even eliminate most of this tax.

In this series we’ll look at some actual testing of transactional database systems under different scenarios to determine what that tax rate might be.  I think you will be surprised.  The data shows on the order of a 40% tax rate being paid by IT departments. I mean by that on average servers must be sized so that 40% of their headroom lies dormant in order to make sure that performance and data protection SLAs can be met. And this assumes that IT departments are willing to use all available headroom and run their servers at 100% utilization during data protection operations, which is rarely the case in the real world.

It is time to hear from you. Have you seen this issue? Are you paying these taxes? Would you like to reduce your tax rate? Can you share any specific examples?


Matthew McGarity—Day 26: Color (red firetruck x 2) #janphotoaday


Bill Johnston—Announcing “Community Secret Sauce”: a Panel Discussion Feb 1st in SF

Join me next Wednesday, February 1st, in San Francisco for the “Community Secret Sauce” panel discussion. The event is part of the #OCTribe  meetup series that Susan Tenby hosts, and these events are always a fun and informative time.

Joining me will be Thor Muller from Get Satisfaction, Rachel Luxemburg from Adobe and Gail Ann Williams from Salon.com & The Well. We will each be sharing “Secret Sauce” examples for online community success. The first part of the discussion will be panel-based, then we will shift gears and solicit the best secret sauce ingredients from the participants in the session. Our goal is to walk away from the evening with a nice list of ingredients for Community Managers and Strategists to use in their day to day practice.

More details on the #OCTribe Meetup site: RSVP here (Registration Required).


Tagged: Community Management, octribe, Online Community, social business, Strategy

Matthew McGarity—Day 25: Something I made (comics) #janphotoaday


James Downey—Harmonic: A MongoDB Success Story

After writing my last post on MongoDB, I attended a meet-up at the Mozilla office in San Francisco to hear the tale of a real company in the process of migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to MongoDB.

The company, Harmonic, sells enterprise software for managing workflows around video. Videos come in, go through checks, conversions, and other processing, and get distributed over multiple channels.  (Ok, vast simplification, but that’s the gist of it.) The architecture consists of a GUI and other management tools on the front-end, a set of services for processing videos on the back-end, and a workflow engine that orchestrates the process. The workflow engine stores its state in a database, and that database had been Microsoft SQL Server.

The marketing staff demanded that engineering reduce complexity for customers, increase scalability, and keep costs low. Nick Vicars-Harris, who manages the Harmonic engineering team, experimented with MongoDB. It took just a few days to tweak the data layer, written in C# and utilizing LINQ, to work with MongoDB rather than SQL Server. According to Vicars-Harris, Harmonic removed code that had been needed for object relational mapping, refactored, and produced more intuitive code. Rather than normalizing workflow state across over twenty tables, Harmonic could now store each job and its related tasks in a single document. In addition to removing complexity, the solution passed the test for scalability.

Harmonics also took advantage of the MongoDB simplified deployment model to create what Vicars-Harris calls smart nodes, nodes that communicate with each other and self-configure, a solution that met the requirements for simplified deployment and maintenance.

After listening to the presentation, I was impressed with the ease of transition from SQL to NoSQL. Clearly, the workflow use case fits in well with document-oriented databases.


Ravikanth Chaganti—VTD Session: Windows PowerShell 3.0 – A first look – Session recording

The session recording for my Microsoft Virtual Tech Days session on Windows PowerShell 3.0 - A first look is not available on Microsoft Showcase. There is no direct download possible but this can be watched online.

Matthew McGarity—Day 24: guilty pleasure (chocolate licorice) #janphotoaday


James Downey—Exploring NoSQL: MongoDB

MongoDB is one of the most popular of open source NoSQL databases. Supported by 10gen and boasting a long list of deployments including Disney, Craigslist, and SAP, MongoDB has a remarkably simple application programming interface (API) and all the tools necessary for massive scalability.

MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL data store, but the word document might mislead. Really, MongoDB stores objects much like an object database. More technically, MongoDB stores BSON documents, which stands for Binary JSON. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, which is a text-based format for storing structured data, much like XML but less verbose, with more colons and curly braces than angle brackets.

MongoDB stores each object as a document, which might be thought akin to a record in the relational world. While there is no schema in MongoDB, that is no defined set of columns, developers would normally store like objects (objects created from the same class) together in a collection, which might be thought of as a table. A database would typically consist of several such collections. And while there are no relationships between collections, a JSON object can itself contain a hierarchy of other JSON objects or fields that link to objects in other collections, so it is possible to model a variety of relationships.

Developers access MongoDB through a driver, which maps a MongoDB document to a familiar construct in the developer’s language of choice. JSON objects, as the name implies, map easily to JavaScript objects. In Python, a document maps to a dictionary. In C#, a document maps to a specially defined class called a BsonDocument. Regardless of the language, the API is quite straight forward.

Object databases remove the grunt work of mapping classes to relational data models. But object databases never caught on, perhaps because of the difficulty of ad hoc queries. MongoDB does provide a variety of query mechanisms. It allows for queries by object properties, queries based on regular expressions, and complex queries using JavaScript methods. Whether any of these approaches satisfies requirements for ad hoc queries depends on the specific application scenario.

MongoDB achieves scalability through sharding, which divides objects in a collection between different servers based on a key. If the developer defines zip code as the shard key, for example, a customer object with a New York City zip code might be stored on a different server than a customer object with a San Francisco zip code. MongoDB handles the work of distributing the data. Note that sharding is quite distinct from replication. Each shard in a MongoDB cluster could be configured to replicate to one or more slave instances, a process that uses logs in much the same way as relational databases. And while applications could read from these slaves to improve performance, the primary purpose of replication is reliability.

Reliability brings to mind transactions. Relational databases support transactions across multiple records and tables; MongoDB restricts transactions to single documents. While this might appear overly restrictive, it could be made to work in many scenarios. Recall that a document can include a hierarchy of objects. If an application’s data is modeled such that all of the data requiring all-or-nothing modification resides within one document, the MongoDB approach would suffice.

However, this restriction on transactions calls attention to the design objectives of MongoDB: speed, simplicity, and scalability. Expanding transactions to encompass multiple objects stored across shards would significantly impact performance leading to complex dead-lock problems. Indeed, by default, a save function call to the MongoDB returns immediately to the application without waiting for confirmation that the save was successfully persisted. If a networking or disk failure prevents the write, the application continues without awareness of the error. However, the MongoDB API does provide options for safe writes that wait for a success response. There are even options to specify how many replication slaves must get updated before the save is considered a success. So while speed is the default, reliability is a possibility.

While I mentioned earlier that MongoDB provides drivers for a variety of languages, it holds particular appeal to JavaScript devotees. JSON documents were designed to store JavaScript objects. JavaScript is the MongoDB language for complex queries. And the command line tool for managing MongoDB is built on top of the JavaScript shell. So if you have mastered JavaScript for the coding of dynamic web pages, MongoDB provides an opportunity to expand its use.

I recommend visiting MongoDB.org and trying out the online shell. In a few minutes, you’ll get a sense of the API. Then take a look at the tutorial. And to experiment further, download and install MongoDB for yourself. (I managed to install it on Windows 7 in a few minutes, but somehow got stuck installing the package on Ubuntu.)

(This is the first in a planned series on NoSQL databases. See NoSQL: The Joy is in the Details.)


Barton George—Web Glossary part three: Infrastructure tier

This is the last in my three-part Web Glossary series.  As I previously explained, in compiling this I pulled information from various and sundry sources across the Web including Wikipedia, community and company web sites and the brain of Cote.

The idea behind the glossary is to help our teams get a better understand of the wild and wacky world of the Web and Web developers as we move forward with our Web|Tech vertical.  I figured I might as also share it with a few friends.

Today’s focus, having worked our way down from the top, is the infrastructure tier (with a short catch-all bucket at the end , “Misc.”)

Infrastructure

General Terms

  • DevOps:  The goal of the DevOps movement is to drive out inefficiency in web shops by bridging the gap (and lessening conflict) between traditional development activity and operations activity.  It seeks to address this issue by providing tools and practices to bring these two groups closer together and provide for greater automation of processes.  Key tools in this effort are Opscode’s Chef and Puppet lab’s Puppet which automate the set-up and management of infrastructure.
  • PUE: Power Usage Effectiveness is a measure of how efficiently a computer data center uses its power; specifically, how much of the power is actually used by the computing equipment (in contrast to cooling and other overhead).   PUE is the ratio of total amount of power used by a computer data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.  The closer to 1.0, the better the PUE.
  • Distributed management: refers to the setup, provisioning, maintenance and management of the scale-out infrastructure (either physical or virtual) that has historically been characteristic of web firms and is increasing typical within traditional enterprise customers.  This includes players like Chef and Puppet for provisioning and configuration, New Relic and Splunk for monitoring and management, and Loggly/Eucalyptus/OpenStack/ VMware for management monitoring.

Projects/Entities

  • Crowbar:  Crowbar is a Dell-developed open source software framework designed to speed up the installation and configuration of open source cloud software onto bare metal systems.  By automating the process, Crowbar can reduce the time needed for installation from days to hours.  The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, “barclamps” sit on top of it to allow it work with a variety of projects.  There have been barclamps built for OpenStack, Hadoop, CloudFoundry and Dreamhost.
  • Ubuntu:  The most popular desktop linux distribution.  On the server side they are supporting OpenStack and have an offering called the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.   Backed by the commercial company Canonical.
  • Puppet: a configuration management tool designed to automate the set up and management of infrastructure.  A key DevOps tool.  It is produced by Puppet labs
  • Chef: a configuration management tool designed to automate the set up and management of infrastructure.  A key DevOps tool.  It is produced by Opscode, who hosts a cloud-based version of Chef called the Opscode Platform.
  • Nagios: a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better.
  • Ganglia: an open source scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids.

Misc

  • LAMP stack:  Open source stack that provides a viable general purpose web server.  The name comes from the first letters of its components: Linux, Apache web server, MySQL and PHP (or Perl or Python).   LAMP has become a de facto development standard and is an excellent example of how open source software has made its way into enterprise environments through unofficial channels.
  • Apache Software Foundation: A decentralized group of developers that produce open source software under the Apache license.  Notable projects include: Apache web server, Hadoop, CouchDB, Cassandra, Tomcat, Subversion
  • Nginx: an open source web server that recently has been gaining considerable traction
  • Recipes:  They encapsulate collections of software resources which are executed in the order defined to configure a system.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Bill Johnston—Reflections on Community Manager Appreciation Day

Today was the third annual Community Manager’s Appreciation Day, or #CMAD. The intention of #CMAD is to raise awareness about the role of the Community Manager, and to recognize the hard working women and men who support this role for their organizations. Jeremiah Owyang originally proposed the idea for #CMAD, and has been very active in evangelizing and supporting it since launching 3 years ago.

I was had the privilege of joining Connie Bensen, a colleague on the Dell Community team, for a fantastic Google+ hangout today to talk about the evolving role of the Community Managers. the following folks participated and the video follows below:

+Bill Johnston, Director of Global Online Community, Dell;  <that’s me :)
+Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Altimeter;
+Connie Bensen, Sr. Manager Community, Dell;
+Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger, Dell;
+Amy Muller, Chief Community Officer & Co-Founder, Get Satisfaction;
+Mark Harrison, Community Manager, Google Earth & SketchUp;
+Patrick O’Keefe, Author of Managing Online Forums / iFroggy Networks;
+Jim Storer, Principal/Founder of The Community Roundtable; and
+Vanessa DiMauro, CEO, Leader Networks.

Based on the G+ hangout, and subsequent conversations, I was encouraged by a number of things today:

  • The global community of community managers is alive and well. I saw hundreds of CM’s participating in the #CMAD hashtag via twitter and on Google+, and had Community Managers from all over the world reach out today.
  • The spirit of the day was generous and inclusive, with lots of shouts out to CMs all over the world.
  • The day surfaced a lot of great questions that the industry is struggling with, including where and how the Community Manager role (and related team roles) should evolve, how community management changes by online touchpoint, and how to deal with burnout in a very high-touch and sometimes emotional role.

My key hopes for next year (#CMAD 2013):

  •  That there is a more integrated approach to Community-building, as part of most organization’s social business efforts. Specifically, I hope that Community Management is seen as a role, as well as an intention (to form and nurture a network of relationships).
  • That we (as a community) will have developed mature social team structures, with specific roles and resources, robust enough to support a range organization types.
  • That we will see rich and diverse educational opportunities for Community Managers (and other social team members), coupled with mentoring opportunities.

As someone who has championed the value of Online Community building for most of my career (at least the last 12 years of it), I am very proud of where we are as an industry… but I also feel that we have much work ahead to fully realize the opportunities that online communities present to our respective organizations and stakeholders. I look forward to continuing the conversation with you all every day, including Community Managers Appreciate Day 2013.


Tagged: change agent, CMAD, community, Community Management, roles, social media

Matthew McGarity—Day 23: Something old (my ChampionChip) #JANphotoaday


James Downey—NoSQL: The Joy is in the Details

Whenever my wife returns excitedly from the mall having bought something new, I respond on reflex: Why do we need that? To which my wife retorts that if it were up to me, humans would still live in caves. Maybe not caves, but we’d still program in C and all applications would run on relational databases. Fortunately, there are geeks out there with greater imagination.

When I first began reading about NoSQL, I ran into the CAP Theorem, according to which a database system can provide only two of three key characteristics: consistency, availability, or partition tolerance. Relational databases offer consistency and availability, but not partition tolerance, namely, the capability of a database system to survive network partitions. This notion of partition tolerance ties into the ability of a system to scale horizontally across many servers, achieving on commodity hardware the massive scalability necessary for Internet giants. In certain scenarios, the gain in scalability makes worthwhile the abandonment of consistency. (For a simplified explanation, see this visual guide. For a heavy computer science treatment, see this proof.)

This initially led me to assume that NoSQL makes sense only for the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The rest of us who seek something less than world domination and who associate consistency with job security may as well stay within the safe and comfortable realm of relational database, which have certainly passed the test of time.

However, I’m starting to question that assumption. Clearly, relational databases still make sense for many applications, especially those requiring strict transactions and complex ad hoc queries. Relational databases will certainly remain the backbone of financial and ERP systems. But I’m now wondering whether NoSQL might fit quite well for many other applications.

When I say NoSQL, however, I’m not really saying anything. Once computer scientists freed themselves from the principles of relational databases, an astounding creativity burst forth. The only thing that NoSQL databases have in common is that they are not relational. So it is not a choice between SQL and NoSQL, but rather a choice between SQL and a wide diversity of other options.

Wikipedia does a good job categorizing the many NoSQL databases now available. But that should just be taken as a starting point. The only way to appreciate the range of choices is to explore each one, looking over its documentation, playing with code, and experimenting. The value of NoSQL is not in the theory, but in the specific character of each NoSQL database.

And so I plan to spend time this year exploring and posting about some of the many NoSQL options out there. I’ve already started a post on MongoDB. Stay tuned for more. And if you have any suggestions for which database I should look into next, please make a comment.


Matthew McGarity—Day 22: My shoes (#inov8 f-lite 195s) #janphotoaday


Matthew McGarity—Day 21: Reflection (my shaving set) #janphotoaday


Matthew McGarity—Day 18: Something I bought (playing catchup with kase) #janphotoaday


Matthew McGarity—Day 20: Someone I love (Zachary) #janphotoaday


Andi Abes—To Be (HA) or Not to Be

Or, what does it really mean to be highly available in the cloud


Good IT practices try to maximize SLA conformance, especially around availability. Lessons learned from a disk failure in the Exchange server leading to mail outages and the inevitable fire drills have been deeply embedded into minds. REDUNDANCY EVERYWHERE. power supplies, network connections, disks - if you can put 2 of them suckers in there, you do. Just to keep that machine running. That machine should never fail.

The web has mitigated things somewhat. Rather than a relying on hardware redundancy (where you don't use half your equipment), deployment strategies have evolved. A large pool of web servers can sustain SLA's with some servers failing by utilizing load-balancers to only direct traffic to live web servers. This scheme brings with it worries about session state availability and other share information (e.g database) but nonetheless its progress. Since hardware is now allowed to fail, software developers came up with schemes to work around the failures.  Distributed clustered session stores, MySQL clusters or just replicas gained lots of traction  (circa 2000). Shared Nothing became a new mantra.

The Shared Nothing revolution got to a full swing, and formalized in various best-practice architectures that span the whole application stack, not just the web-server front end. These architectures rely on distributing both load and risk of failure; rather than a single big, expensive server, many small cheap and coordinated ones are used. If more capacity is required, more (small & cheap) servers are added, to match the load.  If one machine fails, the load is redistributed among the surviving. If data is persisted, its never on just one node, it's replicated to a redundant one.
These principles obviously add various complexities (e.g. the CAP Theorem, which captures succinctly the available trade-offs.  Consistency, Availability or Performance - you can have any 2, but not all 3 in any solution). But they provide benefits too (below)

Enter cloud.
If your application has followed the architecture evolution curve, the cloud is your friend. You can scale out as load increases, and obviously, pay for just the capacity you need.  Amazon goes so far as providing  guides (pdf) on how to optimize both your architecture and your cost.

But what if your application is still in the stone age? What if you're application is designed to run on a single server, but you still want to use the cloud?

  • If you need more capacity, you need to resize your server to the next size. Based on published pricing, every step up is pretty painful ($/hr) 0.5, 1.00, 2.00 and on. If your app was scaling out, you'd go from 1$ to 1.5$ rather than 2$.
  • If your provider decided to reboot your instance, you'd be scrambling to stand up another server, where they're not being rebooted (andyou probably didn't really build deployment automation, did you?) and then take care of the plumbing (move IP's or update DNS and all that fun). With an evolved architecture, you'd care about a few of your instances, but just to the extent that not all of the instances for the same function will be restarted at the same time. Your auto-scaling infrastructure could potentially just make magic happen
  • That availability figure (99.95% for amazon) could actually get put to practice and you hit that 0.05% chance. Those 3.6 hours a month or that day and a half a year hits and you're server goes puff....together with your app. The refrain is probably familiar by now, so I won't repeat it a 3 time.
While these are obviously risks present in your own data center, not just in the cloud, they're out of your control in the cloud.
The take away is probably pretty clear - but I like to be explicit. To be happy and prosperous in the cloud, you have to evolve, and forget about your traditional notions of HA.







Jason Boche—How to properly remove vSphere datastores

Right click on the datastore object and choose Delete, right? Wrong.

Following are two good VMware articles outlining the correct procedure for removing datastores in a vSphere environment:

 

Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist

Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republished on another web page or web site without prior written permission.

How to properly remove vSphere datastores

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Mark Cathcart—Customer service – You’ve been Zappos’d

When I first ordered from Zappos.com and they screwed up with the packaging, craming a $200+ dollar jacket in a shoe box, so much so I had to have it professionally steamed to get the creases out, I was prepared to forgive them. After another order they put me on their VIP list, free shipping both ways[read shipping included in the price, since they are anything but cheap.] Zappos is an Amazon.com business.

My 3rd order was for some shoes, I ordered a 12, they shipped an 8. I returned them free, instead of a refund, I got a credit note. I’d have happily accepted the right size, but they didn’t have them. I did do at least one more order, but have backed off recently.

Then late last week I got an email telling me they’d been hacked, some of my data and my password had been compromised, they’d reset my password and I should logon and change it. So I tried. Their system responded “”We are so sorry, we are currently not accepting international traffic. If you have any questions please email us at help@zappos.com”.

Here is my summary email sent back to them today. What’s clear is that their customer service, average under normal circumstances, is less than what I’d expect, VIP or not.

“No wonder you got hacked. Let recap, please read carefully…

1. You got hacked
2. You write to me telling me to change my password
3. Your system won’t let me change my password because I’m overseas attending my father’s funeral.
4. I ask you to remove my account and ALL my data
5. You write back telling me to change my password
6. I write back telling you that wasn’t what I asked, and to delete my account and remove all my data
7. You write back telling me to deactivate my own account
8. I can’t. See #3
9. I write this email back pointing out how useless you are.”


James Downey—Cloud Foundry Evolves

Cloud Foundry, the open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution from VMware, continues to gain community support and evolve toward a more diverse, enterprise-ready platform. Last night at the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group meet up in Palo Alto, VMware engineers and representatives from several community partners spoke of recent progress and future plans.

Building on Cloud Foundry’s extension framework for languages and services, Uhuru Software has added .Net support to Cloud Foundry, enabling .Net developers to create applications in Visual Studio and deploy them directly to a Cloud Foundry-based private or public cloud. AppFog has added PHP support, and ActiveState has added Perl and Python support. Jaspersoft has extended Cloud Foundry with BI support, including user-friendly wizards for building reports and dashboards and direct support for the document-oriented MongoDB as a data source.

Scalr, whose founder, Sebastian Stadil, organizes the cloud computing group, demonstrated tooling for deploying a Cloud Foundry cluster. The graphical, web-based tool builds up a configuration for each server and calls web services to spin up the instances.

And VMware itself continues to make major contributions to Cloud Foundry. Patrick Chanezon and Ramnivas Laddad from VMware demonstrated Micro Cloud Foundry, a Cloud Foundry cluster with all components running on one virtual machine. This capability makes it possible for developers to spin up a PaaS instance on their laptop, deploy an application, and debug. Using an Eclipse plugin, Laddad gave a demo of debugging a cloud application that mirrored the experience of debugging traditional applications.

During a closing panel, VMware and partner representatives clarified the distinction between CloudFoundry.org and CloudFoundry.com. CloudFoundry.org hosts the open-source software development project, which enables organizations to run their own private or public PaaS cloud. This codebase will grow to support multiple languages and services. CloudFoundry.com is a public instance of Cloud Foundry run by VMware. Like other hosted instances of Cloud Foundry, CloudFoundry.com supports only a subset of the languages and services provided for by the open-source Cloud Foundry code. Despite the expansion of the code base, hosting providers must limit their offerings to services that they have the operational expertise to support.

In light of the rapid growth and expanding ecosystem, Jeremy Voorhis, a senior engineer at AppFog, suggested that VMware create an independent governance body to direct the future development of Cloud Foundry and to mediate potential conflicts between contributors. A few meet-up participants supported the suggestion. While all agreed that VMware has done a fabulous job of starting the project and building an ecosystem, those who raised the suggestion were concerned that conflicts were inevitable and that it would be better to build up a governance system in preparation. Representatives from VMware responded that they did not oppose the idea but did not consider governance a priority given the platform’s early stage of development.

The meet up made one thing clear, that extensiblity (see my post from last May) has made Cloud Foundry into a dynamic platform that has caught the attention of the open-source community.


Rob Hirschfeld—Concerns about SOPA

Joining in the blackout; however, I’ll defer to more articulate bloggers on this topic.


Barton George—Web Glossary part two: Data tier

Here is part two of three of the Web glossary I complied.  As I mentioned in my last two entries, in compiling this I pulled information from various and sundry sources across the Web including wikipedia, community and company web sites and the brain of Cote.

Enjoy

General terms

  • Structured data: Data that can be organized in a structure e.g. rows or columns so that it is identifiable. The most universal form of structured data is a database like SQL or Access.
  • Unstructured data:  Data that has no identifiable structure. Unstructured data typically includes bitmap images/objects, text and other data types that are not part of a database. Most enterprise data today can actually be considered unstructured. An email is considered unstructured data.
  • Big Data: Data characterized by one or more of the following characteristics:  Volume – A large amount of data, growing at large rates; Velocity – The speed at which the data must be processed and a decision made;  Variety – The range of data, types and structure to the data
  • Relational Databases (RDBMS) Management Systems: These databases are the incumbents in enterprises today and store data in rows and columns.  They are created using a special computer language, structured query language (SQL), that is the standard for database interoperability.  Examples:  IBM DB2, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle RDBMS, Informix, Oracle Rdb, etc.
  • NoSQL: refers to a class of databases that 1) are intended to perform at internet (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) scale and 2) reject the relational model in favor of other (key-value, document, graph) models.  They often achieve performance by having far fewer features than SQL databases and focus on a subset of use cases.  Examples: Cassandra, Hadoop, MongoDB, Riak
  • Recommendation engine:  A recommendation engine takes a collection of frequent itemsets as input and generates a recommendation set for a user by matching the current user’s activity against the discovered patterns. The recommendation engine is on-line process, therefore its efficiency and scalability are key,  e.g. people who bought X often also bought Y.
  • Geo-spatial targeting: the practice of mapping advertising, offers and information based on geo location.
  • Behavioral targeting: a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.  Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual.
  • Clickstream analysis: On a Web site, clickstream analysis is the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting aggregate data about which pages visitors visit in what order – which are the result of the succession of mouse clicks each visitor makes (that is, the clickstream). There are two levels of clickstream analysis, traffic analysis and e-commerce analysis.

Projects/Entities

  • Gluster: a software company acquired by Red Hat that provides an open source platform for scale-out Public and Private Cloud Storage.
  • Relational Databases
    • MySQL:  the most popular open source RDBMS.  It represents the “M” in the LAMP stack.  It is now owned by Oracle.
    • Drizzle:  A version of MySQL that is specifically targeted the cloud.  It is currently an open source project without a commercial entity behind it.
    • Percona:  A MySQL support and consulting company that also supports Drizzle.
    • PostgreSQL: aka Postgres is is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.
    • Oracle DB – not used so much in new WebTech companies, but still a major database in the development world.
    • SQL Server – Microsoft’ s RDBMS

    NoSQL Databases

    • MongoDB:  an open source, high-performance, database written in C++.  Many Linux distros include a MongoDB package, including CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo.  Prominent users include Disney interactive media group, New York Times, foursquare, bit.ly, Etsy. 10gen is the commercial backer of MongoDB.
    • Riak: a NoSQL database/datastore written in Erlang from the company Basho. Originally used for the Content Delivery Network Akamai.
    • Couchbase: formed from the merger of CouchOne and Membase.  It offers Couchbase server powered by Apache CouchDB and is available in both Enterprise and Community editions. The author of CouchDB was a prominent Lotus Notes architect.
    • Cassandra: A scalable NoSQL database with no single points of failure.   A high-scale, key/value database originating from Facebook to handle their message inboxes. Backed by DataStax, which came out of Rackspace.
    • Mahout: A Scalable machine learning and data mining library. An analytics engine for doing machine learning (e.g., recommendation engines and scenarios where you want to infer relationships).
  • Hadoop ecosystem
    • Hadoop: An open source platform, developed at Yahoo that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.  It is particularly suited to large volumes of unstructured data such as Facebook comments and Twitter tweets, email and instant messages, and security and application logs.
    • MapReduce: a software framework for easily writing applications which process vast amounts of data (multi-terabyte data-sets) in parallel on large clusters of commodity hardware in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner.  Hadoop acts as a platform for executing MapReduce.  MapReduce came out of Google
    • HDFS: Hadoop’s Distributed File system allows large application workloads to be broken into smaller data blocks that are replicated and distributed across a cluster of commodity hardware for faster processing.
  • Major Hadoop utilities:
    • HBase: The Hadoop database that supports structured data storage for large tables.   It provides real time read/write access to your big data.
    • Hive:  A data warehousing solution built on top of Hadoop.  An Apache project
    • Pig: A platform for analyzing large data that leverages parallel computation.  An Apache project
    • ZooKeeper:  Allows Hadoop administrators to track and coordinate distributed applications.  An Apache project
    • Oozie: a workflow engine for Hadoop
    • Flume: a service designed to collect data and put it into your  Hadoop environment
    • Whirr: a set of libraries for running cloud services.  It’s ideal for running temporary Hadoop clusters to carry out a proof of concept, or to run a few one-time jobs.
    • Sqoop: a tool designed to transfer data between Hadoop and relational databases.  An Apache project
    • Hue: a browser-based desktop interface for interacting with Hadoop
  • Cloudera: a company that provides a Hadoop distribution similar to the way Red Hat provides a Linux distribution.  Dell is using Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop for its Hadoop solution.
  • Solr: an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Backed by the commercial company Lucid Imagination.
  • Elastic Search: an open source, distributed, search engine built on top of Lucene (raw search middleware).

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Matthew McGarity—Day 17: Water (roses from wife) #janphotoaday


Michael Coté—Cow Management – Basic Software Business Model One

20120117-180153.jpg


Barton George—Web Glossary part one: Application tier

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the ways we are helping our teams get a better understanding of the wild and wacky world of the Web and Web developers is via a glossary we’ve created.  In compiling this I pulled information from various and sundry sources across the Web including wikipedia, community and company web sites and the brain of Cote.

Over the next several entries I will be posting the glossary.  Feel free to bookmark it, delete it, offer corrections, comments or additions.

Today I present to you, the Application tier.

enjoy

General terms

  • Runtime: A programming language e.g. Java, .NET, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby…
  • Application framework : Provides re-usable templates, methods, and ways of programming applications. Often, these frameworks will provide “widgets” and “libraries” that developers use to create various parts of their application – they may also include the actual tools to create, deploy, and run the final application. Some application frameworks create whole sub-cultures of developers, such as Rails which supports the Ruby programming language.  Most application frameworks are open source and free, though there are also many closed source, not-free ones.
  • Continuous code development lifecycle: releasing software at more frequent intervals (30 days or less) by (a.) doing smaller batches of code, and, (b.) using tools and processes that enable a more lean approach to development. Software released in such a cycle tends to release many small features instead of, in contrast, “traditional” development where 100s of features are bundled up in one version of the software and released every 1-2 years.

Programming languages

  • Java/.NET:  The incumbent enterprise development languages.  Very powerful but relatively difficult to learn and take time to program in.
  • Dynamic languages: e.g. PHP, Perl, Python, JavaScript, and Ruby.  They are popular for creating web applications since they are both simpler to learn and faster to code in than traditional enterprise standards like Java. This offers a substantial time to market advantage, particularly for smaller projects for which the benefits of Java are less applicable.
    • PHP: a server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.  WordPress is written in PHP, as well as Facebook and countless web sites. PHP is infamous for being very quick and easy to get started with (which it is) but turning into a mess of “spaghetti code” after years of work and different programmers.   PHP is open source, though Zend, the patron company behind PHP, and others sell “commercial” versions.
    • Perl:  One of the original programming languages of the web, Perl emphasizes a very “Unix way” of programming. Perl can be quick and elegant, but like PHP can result in a pile of hard to maintain code in the long term.  While Perl was extremely popular in the first Internet bubble, it has sense taken a back-seat to more popular development worlds such as PHP, Java, and Rails. Perl is open source and there are few, if any, commercial companies behind it.
    • Python: Like all dynamic languages, Python emphasizes speed of development and code readability. Its an object-oriented language. Python is something of an evolution of Perl, but it not that closely tied to it. Python emphases broadness of functionality while at the same time being a proper, object oriented programing language (not just a way to write “scripts”). Python enjoys steady popularity; Google uses Python as one of its primary programming languages.
    • JavaScript: once a minor language used in web browsers, JavaScript has become a stand-alone language on its own known and used by many programmers. Most web applications will include the use of JavaScript.
    • Ruby: Ruby and Python are very similar in ethos: emphasizing fast coding with a more human-readable syntax. Ruby became famous with the rise of Rails in the mid-2000s which was a rebellion against the “heavy weight” practices that Java imposed on web development.  Ruby is still very popular.  Ruby can also be run on-top of the Java virtual machine (via JRuby), providing a good bridge to the Java world.  Salesforce’s acquired PaaS, Heroku, uses Ruby, and most modern development platforms use Ruby.
    • Ruby on Rails: a popular web application framework written in Ruby.  Rails is frequently credited with making Ruby “famous”.
    • Scala:  A somewhat exotic language, but it has quite a buzz around it. It’s good for massive scale systems that need to be concurrent (lots of people changing lots of things, often the same things, at the same time).  Erlang is another language in this area.  Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine and Common Language Runtime.  In April 2009 Twitter announced they had switched large portions of their backend from Ruby to Scala and intended to convert the rest.  In addition, Foursquare uses Scala and Lift (Lift is a framework for Scala much in the same way Rails is a framework for Ruby.)
  • R:  a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.
  • Node.js:  (aka “Node”) What’s interesting about Node.js is the idea that it is taking JavaScript which was originally designed to be used in web browsers and using it as a server-side environment.  It is intended for writing scalable network programs such as web servers.  It was created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, and its growth is sponsored by Joyent, which employs Dahl.
  • Clojure: A recent dialect of the Lisp programming language and is good for data intense applications.  It runs on the Java Virtual Machine and Common Language Runtime

Runtimes and Platforms

  • Common Language Runtime (CLR):  is the virtual machine component of Microsoft’s .NET framework and is responsible for managing the execution of .NET programs.
  • Java Virtual Machine (JVM) – the underlying execution engine that the Java language runs on-top of.  It controls access to the hardware, networks, and other “infrastructure” and services outside of the main application written in Java. Of special note is that many languages other than Java can run on the JVM (as with the CLR), e.g., Scala, Ruby, etc. There are many JVMs and ISVs (IBM, Oracle, etc.) will use their custom JVMs as key differentiators for middle ware, mostly around performance, scale-out, and security.

Projects/Entities

  • Openshift: Red Hat’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.  More specifically, OpenShift is a PaaS software layer that Red Hat runs and manages on top of third party providers – Amazon first with more to follow.
  • Heroku:  A Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that was acquired by Salesforce.com.  It supports development of Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP and Python.
  • CloudFoundry: A Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering and VMware-led project. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using the Spring Framework for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM languages/frameworks including Groovy, Grails and Scala.
  • Joyent: Offers PaaS and IaaS capabilities through the public cloud.  Dell resells this capability as turnkey solution under the name The Dell Cloud Solution for Web applications.  Joyent also sponsors the development of node.js and employs its creator.
  • GitHub: a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Gitrevision control system. GitHub offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects.

But wait there’s more…

Stay tuned for the next couple of entries when I will cover first the Database tier and then the Infrastructure tier.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Jason Boche—StarWind Releases iSCSI SAN Software Enhanced by VM Backup Technology

Press Release:

New StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper Backup Plug-in are a New Level of Data Protection

SnagIt CaptureBurlington, MA – January 13, 2012 – StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of SAN software for iSCSI storage and VM Backup technology, today announced the release of new StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in. The iSCSI SAN software is enhanced by the powerful VM Backup technology that is included as a plug-in.

Backup plug-in is built specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines. The backup solution delivered by StarWind performs all operations on the Hyper-V host level thus it requires no backup agents to be installed on virtual machines (Agentless Architecture).

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in makes fast backups and allows quick, reliable restore of both virtual machines and individual files. It utilizes advanced technologies for maximum disk space saving (Global Deduplication). This backup tool is integrated with StarWind Centralized Management Console that enables managing backup and storage from a single window.

Additionally, a new version of HA plug-in is presented in StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 that allows use of raw basic images to create HA targets. A new replication engine based on own technology instead of MS iSCSI transport creates higher performance and reliability. This new engine permits use of multiple network interfaces for synchronization and heartbeat.

To simplify the replacement of equipment and recovery of fatal failures, StarWind Software has implemented the ability to change the partner node to any other StarWind server without any downtime and on the fly. Synchronization engine is improved, and this version allows both nodes to sync automatically even in the case of a full blackout of both servers.

“With the release of StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 our company is happy to provide our customers with highly available storage and fast backup software developed by the same vendor,” said Artem Berman, Chief Executive Officer of StarWind Software. “Now small and medium-sized companies have an opportunity to achieve higher performance and absolute data protection.”

About StarWind Software Inc.
StarWind Software is a global leader in storage management and SAN software for small and midsize companies. StarWind’s flagship product is SAN software that turns any industry-standard Windows Server into a fault-tolerant, fail-safe iSCSI SAN. StarWind iSCSI SAN is qualified for use with VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer and Linux and Unix environments. StarWind Software focuses on providing small and midsize companies with affordable, highly availability storage technology which previously was only available in high-end storage hardware. Advanced enterprise-class features in StarWind include Automated HA Storage Node Failover and Failback (High Availability), Replication across a WAN, CDP and Snapshots, Thin Provisioning and Virtual Tape management.

Since 2003, StarWind has pioneered the iSCSI SAN software industry and is the solution of choice for over 30,000 customers worldwide in more than 100 countries and from small and midsize companies to governments and Fortune 1000 companies.

For more information on StarWind Software Inc., visit: www.starwindsoftware.com

Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist

Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republished on another web page or web site without prior written permission.

StarWind Releases iSCSI SAN Software Enhanced by VM Backup Technology

Related Posts

Gina Minks—Content cost and creation – and how it relates to community building

During a meeting at the Dell Storage Forum in London Hans De Leenheer, one our invited bloggers, told me something to this effect:

You are Miss Social Media. You have to make it so we are able to keep connecting. You have to make it so we can grow this community. That is your job!

My first reaction was – hey wait I can’t single-handedly build a vibrant community. I may be able to architect an environment where people can connect. I may be able to find influencers who want to connect and create a community, and I may be able to create a space online where that can happen. But I rely on those influencers to invite other members to the community, and to create relevant content that can serve as the glue that binds individuals together in a common interest and communion (see this post for more on the technical definition of community).

Why will people join a community?

People initially come to a community to fill a need for information. If it is a business-based community, the business can create some of the content that will fill the information needs of their customers. But the danger in only relying on content created by the business is that the information tends to get stale very quickly. The information offered to the community will probably be subject to the same internal processes as press releases and website content. The content will be what the business wants to project, what it wants its customers to know and believe.

Many times, content created by community members is much more current. Community members aren’t bound by corporate policy on communication.They can say it how they see it.They may be fans of the products the business creates, but they can also call out all the warts and blemishes of the products. If the community is positive, community members will offer solutions to problems they encounter. This is the type of content that people look for when they are trying to fill an information need.

If the community is being managed well, the business will interact with the content created by the community. This forces the business to create current, up-to-date content. The kind of content that fills the information needs of their customers. The kind of content that moves people from visiting because they are interested in information about the company’s products to developing an attachment to the individuals creating the content about the products (employees and other customers). It is this kind of content that facilitates the creation of community.

The cost of content

Yesterday I saw Marcia Connor tweet this from the IBM Connect conference:

There is a real cost to storing content (after all, I do work for Dell Storage!). But I think the idea behind this tweet goes even deeper than the financial cost of storing the data. For me this brings up so many questions….

Is there a way to architect things so content is always fluid? There is only so much that can be done from a technical architectural standpoint to make the data – the 1′s and 0′s fluid. How do you make the content fluid? What organizational barriers (dams?) prevent content from being in motion? How can we architect communities so that the content flows and everyone is able to extract the value from that content?

Things I’ll be pondering….but would love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

Rob Hirschfeld—CloudOps white paper explains “cloud is always ready, never finished”

I don’t usually call out my credentials, but knowing the I have a Masters in Industrial Engineering helps (partially) explain my passion for process as being essential to successful software delivery. One of my favorite authors, Mary Poppendiek, explains undeployed code as perishable inventory that you need to get to market before it loses value. The big lessons (low inventory, high quality, system perspective) from Lean manufacturing translate directly into software and, lately, into operation as DevOps.

What we have observed from delivering our own cloud products, and working with customers on thier’s, is that the operations process for deployment is as important as the software and hardware. It is simply not acceptable for us to market clouds without a compelling model for maintaining the solution into the future. Clouds are simply moving too fast to be delivered without a continuous delivery story.

This white paper [link here!] has been available since the OpenStack conference, but not linked to the rest of our OpenStack or Crowbar content.


Matthew McGarity—Day 16: Morning (Z’s last days in the crib) #janphotoaday


Barton George—The World of Web and Developers, getting to know it better

A couple years back, on the Public side of the house, Dell set up specific marketing teams  to focus on customer needs in three areas: Healthcare, Government and Education.  This vertical approach turned out to be a great way to get to better know our customers and their pain points and ultimately meet their needs.

Based on this success, a little while ago we kicked off a similar effort in our commercial business.  The first six verticals we are setting up are: Retail, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Web|Tech, Energy and TME (Telco, Media & Entertainment).  Web|Tech is the group I belong to (I lead marketing for the group).

Developers, Developers, Developers

In the Internet space we have already had a fair amount of success through our DCS group.  The idea with the new Web vertical is to learn even more about the customer set, companies that use the internet as their platform, and take this knowledge along with our accumulated experience, to a wider audience.  Two of the key areas of focus of this new vertical will be developers and open source software.

Look it up

One of the ways we are helping our teams get a better understand of the wild and wacky world of the Web and Web developers is via a glossary we’ve created.  In compiling this I pulled information from various and sundry sources across the Web including wikipedia, community and company web sites and the brain of Cote.

The glossary is organized into the following sections:

  • Application tier
  • Data tier
  • Infrastructure tier

Over the next several entries I will be posting the glossary.  Feel free to bookmark it, delete it, offer corrections, comments or additions.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Matt Domsch—FUDCon Blacksburg videos

I shot videos of several of the presentations at the Fedora User and Developer Conference yesterday.  For your viewing pleasure:

  • “State of Fedora” from the Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith [ogg]
  • Mike McGrath, team lead for OpenShift, demoing OpenShift [ogg]
  • Jon Masters and Chris Tyler, on the ARM architecture in Fedora [ogg]. ARM is a secondary architecture today.  By Fedora 18, with your help, it needs to become a primary architecture.
  • David Nalley presented on CloudStack, which is aiming for Fedora 17 inclusion. [ogg]
  • Dan Prince and Russell Bryant giving an introduction to OpenStack [ogg]
  • Mo Morsi presenting the Aeolus cloud management project [ogg]

[Update 1/18/2012] I was able to upload all the videos to YouTube.  http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2BAA7FF83E6482C2
is a playlist with all 6.

Matthew McGarity—Day 15: Happiness (post-bottle) #janphotoaday


Matthew McGarity—Day 14: Something I’m reading (to my kid) #janphotoaday


Matthew McGarity—Day 13: In my bag. #janphotoaday


Barton George—Mark Shuttleworth part two: Developers, DevOps & the Cloud

As I mentioned in my last entry, Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame stopped by Dell this morning on his way back from CES.  Between meetings Mark and I did a couple of quick videos.  Here is the second of the two.  Whereas the first focused on the client, this one focuses on the Cloud and the back-end.

Some of the ground Mark covers

  • The cloud, Ubuntu and OpenStack involvement
  • The developer story: connecting the dots between app work on the client and testing and then deployment on the other end.
  • The world of DevOps and how JuJu fits in
  • Apple’s iOS as a developer platform and where Linux might have the edge going forward

Extra-credit reading


Barton George—Mark Shuttleworth part one: UbuntuTV

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and Chairman of Canonical the commercial distribution behind Ubuntu, stopped by Dell for a bunch of meetings this morning.  Mark was visiting Austin on his way back from CES in Las Vegas where he and the team just unveiled Ubuntu TV.

I was able to grab a few minutes with Mark between meetings and get his thoughts on a bunch of topics.  Here is the first of two videos we did.  You’ll notice that this one ends a bit abruptly, that’s because we got booted out of the conference room we were squatting in.  You’ll also notice when I post the second video that we found a much better location for round two.

Some of the ground Mark covers

  • How was CES and how was Ubuntu TV received?
  • What is the secret sauce behind Ubuntu TV and how is it different than Google TV
  • What is Ubuntu One and how is it different than Apples iCloud or Microsoft’s skydrive?
  • What is Unity an how it ties together the client experience together across devices.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Michael Coté—Smart Lock-in

iPhone, Samsung, Dell VenuePro

To read most of the coverage from afar, Microsoft did an excellent job of messaging that 2012 could be a big year for WindowsPhone 7. As one piece puts it:

There’s a curious thing happening in the smartphone space at this year’s CES. Two Windows Phone devices — the HTC Titan II and the Nokia Lumia 900 — are the most hyped, talked-about phones at the show. Yeah, that’s right: Windows Phones.

From what I can tell, I’m one of the few people who’s used two WP7 phones over the past year: a Samsung Focus (sent to me by Microsoft for reviewing while I was RedMonk) and a Dell VenuePro (my current “work phone”). They’re both beyond just fine: they’re good phones in hardware and operating system. The core problem they have is a lack of apps, specifically, the apps I already use and like in iOS-land.

Anchored by Apps

There are, it should be said, lots of apps for WP7 (30,000+ back in August…but, compare that to 500,000+ in iOS-land). The problem is that they don’t have the apps I want to use, specifically, all those iOS apps I’ve spent money on over the years. As Ed pointed out to me awhile ago, the annoying catch here is that, even if the pay apps I wanted were in WP7…I’d have to pay for them again. And, with estimates of 60 apps downloaded per iOS device, that’s a lot of apps people need to take with them. Of course, this is just the case when you switch between Windows and Mac (or Mac and Windows): a license for Office or Creative Suite in Windows won’t translate from Windows to Mac.

Thankfully, most mobile apps are cheap – much cheaper than desktop Office ($119) or Creative Suite (from $280 to $1,500, or so). In reality, I make enough money that I’d pay for the apps twice. But, they don’t always exist in the first place. Indeed, many of the apps I depend on in iOS land aren’t (or weren’t last time I looked) available in WP7-land: Flipboard (hands down my most used app), EchoFon, even an official tumblr app.

Ooogling WP7 phones at CES

For WP7 to be successful, Microsoft needs to ride all of those app authors to create WP7 versions of their apps. The same is true for Windows 8 – where, at least, Microsoft already has one of the world’s most important “apps,” Office (important as in “the [army|company|etc.] runs off [PowerPoint|Excel]“). App vendors like Evernote have a good track record of going balls out here, and I’ve seen a handful of apps developed for WP7 that are more than just quick ports: they take advantage of the tiles, integrating into the sharing functionality through-out the phone, and so on. It’s got to be tough for an app vendor, though: supporting iOS, Android, and WP7 is a hefty bought to sign up for.

HTML5 is good for who exactly?

Arguably, “HTML5 fixes this,” but I’d argue that each platform vendor (Apple, Google, Microsoft) is just barely incented to make HTML5 as good as their native app frameworks. What we’re discussing here is a major point of customer lock-in, thus, a major element of any mobile/tablet strategy. Each of these “post-PC” platforms (iOS, Android, WP7, and Windows 8) needs to differentiate on the entire platform experience – HTML5, really, takes away the ability of any OS to be different. If I can simply take all my “apps” (written in HTML5 so that they’re really web apps or web apps that I download a la Tiddlywiki to my mobile “desktop”) with me when I go…there’s little reason to stick to one mobile platform: I just skip around to the one that has the beast hardware and network. (Imagine if you actually selected a device because of the carrier’s QoS!)

Don’t get me wrong: as a user, I’d love my apps to be cross-platform and achieve that HTML5 nirvana existed and I could just take my apps with me from platform to platform. But that’d make these “smart phones” into “dumb phones,” which is definitely not anything the mobile platform creators are looking to do. On the other hand, I’d suggest that the cross-platform dreams of HTML5 suite just about everyone else’s interests: the app makers would be available on everyone’s devices, the handset makers would avoid this whole app lock-in problem, and the carriers could differentiate on service instead of platform exclusiveness. Historically, the platform providers tend to win out because they’re willing to play the long game of locking users into awesomeness, while the other parties go for quick wins quarter to quarter. We’ll see if it pans out differently this time.


Ravikanth Chaganti—PowerShell ISE v3 (CTP2) addon: Go to Input

This short post shows yet another ISE addon to quickly move to the ISE v3 combined pane input section.

Michael Coté—Cloud Chat with Ernest Mueller

I caught up with Ernest Mueller recently at lunch, and we decided to record a podcast episode tonight talking about the usual cloud, IT, DevOps, and other fun stuff we usually chat about. Take a listen:

Or, feel free to download it directly.

We’ll be back in a few weeks, hopefully with a title and fancy podcast feed for those who car.


Matthew McGarity—Day 12: Closeup. #janphotoaday


Ravikanth Chaganti—PowerShell ISE Addon: Go to cursor

I have a few scripts that are thousands of lines long. When working with these scripts in ISE, I often start modifying some part of the code and then use scroll bar to move up and down to refer to other parts of the code. In this process, I naturally lose track of the cursor position. This happens quite often and started frustrating me. So, I wrote a simple addon that takes me back to where the cursor is and re-focuses editor window at the cursor position by scrolling back to that place

Rob Hirschfeld—Early crop of Crowbar 1.3 features popping up

My team at Dell is still figuring out some big items for the 1.3 release; however, somethings were just added that is worth calling out.

  1. Ubuntu 11.04 support!   Thanks to Justin Shepherd from Rackspace Cloud Builders!
  2. Alias names for nodes in the UI
  3. User managed node groups in the UI
  4. Ability to pre-populate the alias, description and group for a node (not integrated with DNS yet)
  5. Hadoop is working again – we addressed the missing Ganglia repo issue.  Thanks to Victor Lowther.
For items 2 – 4, I made a short video tour: Node Alias & Group

Also, I’ve spun new open source ISOs with the new features.  User beware!


Rob Hirschfeld—Austin OpenStack Meetup (January Minutes) + OpenStack Foundation Web Cast!

Sorry for the brevity… At the last Austin OpenStack meetup, we had >60 stackers!  Some from as far away as Portland and Boston (as in Oregon and Massachusetts).

Notes:

  • Suse introduced their OpenStack beta and talked about their Suse Studio that can deploy images against the OpenStack APIs
  • I showed off DevStack.org code that can setup the truck of OpenStack (now Essex) in about 10 minutes on a single node.  Great for developers!
  • I showed an OpenStack Diablo Final deployment from Crowbar.  I focused mainly on Dashboard and used our reference architecture (see below) as illustration of the many parts.
  • Matt Ray suggested everyone watch the webcasts about the OpenStack Foundation (Thurs 6pm central  & Friday 9am central)
  • We planned the next few meetups.
    • For February, we’ll talk about Swift and Dashboard.
    • For March, we’ll talk about Essex and DevStack to prep for the next design summit (in SF).
    • For April, we’ll debrief the conference

Thank you Suse and Dell (my employer) for sponsoring!   The next meetup is sponsored by Canonical.


Matthew McGarity—Day 11: Where I sleep. #janphotoaday


Converged Infrastructure—Dell EqualLogic Storage Area Network

EqualLogic™ storage area networks, coupled with Dell PowerEdge™ servers running in a virtualized Exchange environment, enable quick provisioning, scalability and dynamic deployment of devices.

Michael Coté—Opscodes Matt Ray

Check out Barton George‘s quick interview with Matt Ray while he was visiting yesterday. See the original post for some notes and links.


Jason Boche—Path Set for Dell Storage Forum 2012 London

Snagit Capture

In just a few days, Dell Storage Forum 2012 kicks off at the Grange St Paul’s Hotel in London. I will be in attendance and I hope that you will have the chance to join myself and the rest of the Dell staff and of course an array of storage customers, channel partners, enthusiasts, and analysts. At DSF your appetite will be satisfied with Executive lead Keynote sessions, Breakout sessions delivered by Technical Experts, Instructor lead training, and Hands-on/Self-Paced labs covering Compellent Storage Center, Dell EqualLogic, and PowerVault storage.

This venue won’t be an exact carbon copy of past DSF events. Dell Storage will be showcasing an updated product roadmap and we’ll also see new product announcements. One of the announcements you’ll hear about is the availability of Compellent Storage Center 6.0. As a Technical Marketing Product Specialist who spends all time working on the VMware integration points, this is a release I’ve been looking forward to since starting my career at Dell Compellent in May of last year. This is a significant launch for Dell Compellent from an architectural perspective. SC 6.0 now leverages the FreeBSD 64-bit platform. The 64-bit architecture is the springboard for new features launched this week (such as multithreading opportunities and 12GB memory per Series 40 controller) and will serve as a key enabler for future scalability, integration, and feature enhancements.

If you’re a current Dell Compellent customer with vSphere 4.1 or newer in your datacenter, you know that through SC 5.5.x we supported one VAAI primitive: Zero Blocks or Write Same. Storage Center 6.0 supports additional VMware vSphere VAAI primitives:

  • Copy Offload
  • Hardware Assisted Locking
  • Of course we still support Block Zeroing

On a side note, VMware also released a 4th VAAI primitive in vSphere 5 focusing on Thin Provisioning for block storage arrays.  However, shortly after the release, VMware pulled support on this primitive (applies to all storage vendors) to work out some kinks.  I wrote about that here.

VAAI excites me because of the performance and scalability gains it brings to the vSphere virtual datacenter in addition to vSphere bolt ons such as VMware View and vCloud Director.

Snagit Capture

Snagit Capture

Compellent SC 6.0 VAAI support:

  • 41% faster block cloning operations on Eager Zeroed Thick and Lazy Zeroed Thick virtual disks
  • 98% faster Eager Zeroed Thick disk creation
  • Up to 100% reduction in Block Zeroing data traffic from host to storage
  • Offloaded operations result in significantly reduced copy traffic between host and storage
  • Offloaded operations result in reduction of ESX(i) host resource and storage fabric utilization

Find more details about VAAI at VMware KB 1021976 vStorage APIs for Array Integration FAQ.

This should be a really great week.  Personally, it will be my first Dell Compellent focused conference.  I do hope to see you there and look forward to some good discussions.  If you’re not able to attend in person, you can use these links to follow the action remotely:

Event Links:

Twitter/Social Media Links:

Other Links:

Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist

Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republished on another web page or web site without prior written permission.

Path Set for Dell Storage Forum 2012 London

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Matthew McGarity—Day 4: Letterbox (playing catchup) #janphotoaday


Barton George—Opscode visits

This afternoon Matt Ray, Technical Evangelist for Opscode, stopped by Dell’s Round Rock HQ to brief a gaggle of folks on what they are up to.  Cote arranged the visit as well as one last month with Puppet labs, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to make.

After Matt, with some help from teammates on the phone, briefed the Dell gang I grabbed some time with him to get the 5 minute Reader’s Digest version.  Here is the result.

Some of the ground Matt covers:

  • What are Opscode and Chef?
  • How did they come to be?
  • The hosted version of Chef (moving from EC2 to Rackspace)
  • Crowbar: lending a helping hand
  • What’s next for Opscode and what do they have up their sleeve for 2012?

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…


Matthew McGarity—Day 10: Childhood. #janphotoaday


Gina Minks—Dell Storage Forum 2012 London – the day before

Today is the first day of the Dell Storage Forum in London. Yesterday lots of people started to arrive, and I was amazed at how many people wrote pre-show blog posts:

Let me know if I missed your post!

Someone asked me about pictures and videos. Check out this set on the Dell Flickr page, we’re working on the updates right now.

Keep the twitter questions coming! We’ll try to get to more during the keynotes tomorrow, and we are tracking all of them.

OK, here’s what’s up tonight. We have an official sponsored Dell event at the Anchor Bankside Pub. There are buses available to take you there. This event is from 6-8.

Immediately after, there is a #storagebeers scheduled at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub on Fleet Street. From 8 – whenever. We walked it last night, and its not that bad of a walk, maybe 10 minutes (we got lost so it took us about 20 minutes). Maybe we can all meet up and leave at the same time. Who knows, maybe we can commandeer a bus to drop us off right at #storagebeers.

The event officially starts today for partners. Keep an eye on the #DellSF12 hashtag on Twitter!

 

 

 

Matthew McGarity—It is what it is. You just gotta let it go and tur…

It is what it is. You just gotta let it go and turn the page. You gotta keep working. What else can you do?

— Ron Washington

Barton George—Cloud Computing: A high-level how-to

Here is the last in a series of three short videos around cloud computing put together by Dell and Intel.  As I mentioned in the last two entries, these videos are part of larger series around key topics like IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc.

This last video features myself, Dell’s former CIO Robin Johnson, VP of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions and Strategy, Praveen Asthana and Donna Troy, VP and GM of Solutions Marketing and Sales at Dell.

Some of the ground we cover

  • How we define cloud computing
  • How quickly can you evolve to cloud?
  • How do you balance your current environment with cloud
  • Starting your cloud building from a basis of virtualization

Extra credit reading

Pau for now…


Jason Boche—StarWind Webinar – Storage & Hyper-V VM Backup

Webinar Announcement:

What: New StarWind V5.8 – Storage & Hyper-V VM Backup from one vendor!

When: Tuesday, January 10, 4:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST

Where: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/562126034

Details: StarWind iSCSI SAN V5.8 introduces a new powerful backup technology designed specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for virtual machines.

The key to protection of your virtualization investments is one solution with a rich feature set developed to help you achieve your IT goals easily. It is ONE ultimate answer to all your storage and data managing needs.

StarWind iSCSI SAN 5.8 provides:

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in

- Agentless Architecture

- Backups stored in VHD format

- Global Deduplication

- Single-click Backup

iSCSI Storage

- 100% stability and uptime

- High Availability / Automatic Failover

- Network Centralized Management

- Synchronous Replication

Register now to learn more!
Here is the link for registration:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/562126034

Post from: boche.net - VMware Virtualization Evangelist

Copyright (c) 2010 Jason Boche. The contents of this post may not be reproduced or republished on another web page or web site without prior written permission.

StarWind Webinar – Storage & Hyper-V VM Backup

Related Posts

Footnotes