Like “API” Is “Storage Tier” Redefining Itself?
Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:45:00 EDT
There is an interesting bit in high-tech that isn’t much mentioned but happens pretty regularly – when a good idea is adapted and moved to new uses, raising it a bit in the stack or revising it to keep up with the times. The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the progression from “subroutines” to “libraries” to “frameworks” to “APIs” to “Web Services”. The progression is logical and useful, but those assembler and C programmers that were first stuffing things into reusable subroutines could not have foreseen the entire spectrum of what their “useful” idea was going to become over time. I had the luck of developing in all of those stages. I wrote assembly routines right before they were no longer necessary for everyday development, and wrote web services/SOA routines for the first couple of years they were about.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:00:00 EDT
This past week I spent a few days in San Francisco attending the VMworld 2010 event which included a Wednesday evening concert with the Australian band INXS.
Despite some long lines (or queues) waiting to get into sessions, keynotes or lunch resulting in delays reminiscent of trying to put too many virtual machines (VMs) onto a given number of physical machines (PMs) in the quest to drive up utilization, the overall event was fantastic.
While at the event, I had a chance to meet up with fellow vExpert Eric Siebert whose new book Maximum vSphere made its debut. I was honored when asked by Eric to help out with his chapter on storage, learn more about Erics new book here.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:00:00 EDT
As much as information technology has changed in the last 10 years, the next decade promises even more significant change. And as cloud technology becomes more prevalent, IT enterprises will be driven to reconsider the status quo around just about everything we know, including Physical Infrastructure, Virtualization, Automation, Service Management, and Security.
Cloud technology and virtualization of virtually everything means rethinking the economic models around physical infrastructure, the emergence of a new class of providers as well as a greater degree of standardization around virtualized OS & Middleware configurations. In his general session at Cloud Expo Prague, David Milot, Unisys Managing Partner, discussed what you need to consider to ensure your enterprise’s foray into cloud computing successfully and securely meets the needs of your enterprise, today and tomorrow.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EDT
The last decade saw the growth of Virtualization from its humble beginnings as a developer tool to its increasing adoption in data centers worldwide. It dramatically improved resilience, scalability, portability and utilization, and became one of the key foundations of the Cloud. But the story is only just beginning...
In his keynote at Cloud Expo Prague, Pete Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo, discussed where you will learn about the next chapter in the Virtualization story. What it is, what it means, why open standards are key, and, most important, how it will revolutionize the way your organization manages IT.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:45:00 EDT
You really can’t have the one without the other. VMware enables the former, F5 provides the latter. 
The use of public cloud computing as a means to expand compute capacity on-demand, a la during a seasonal or unexpected spike in traffic, is often called cloud bursting and we’ve been talking about it (at least in the hypothetical sense) for some time now.
When we first started talking about it the big question was, of course, but how do you get the application in the cloud in the first place? Everyone kind of glossed over that because there was no real way to do it on-demand.
OVERCOMING the OBSTACLES BIT by BIT and BYTE by BYTE
The challenges associated with dynamically moving a live, virtually deployed application from one location to another were not trivial but neither were they insurmountable. Early on these challenges have been directly associated with the difference in networking and issues with the distances over which a virtual image could be successfully transferred. As the industry began to address those challenges others came to the fore. It’s not enough, after all, to just transfer a virtual machine from one location to another – especially if you’re trying to do so on-demand, in response to some event. You want to migrate that application while it’s live and in use, and you don’t want to disrupt service to do it because no matter what optimizations and acceleration techniques are used to mitigate the transfer time between locations, it’s still going to take some time. The whole point of cloud bursting is to remain available and if the process to achieve that dynamic growth defeats the purpose, well, it seems like a silly thing to do, doesn’t it?
As we’ve gotten past that problem now another one rears its head: the down side. Not the negatives, no, the other down side – the scaling down side of cloud bursting. Remember the purpose of performing this technological feat in the first place is dynamic scalability, to enable an elastic application that scales up and down on-demand. We want to be able to leverage the public cloud when we need it but not when we don’t, to keep really realize the benefits of cloud and its lower cost of compute capacity.
FORGING AHEAD
F5 has previously proven that a live migration of an application is not only possible, but feasible. This week at VMworld we took the next step: elastic applications. Yes, we not only proved you can burst an application into the cloud and scale up while live and maintaining availability, but that you can also scale back down when demand decreases. The ability to also include a BIG-IP LTM Virtual Edition with the cloud-deployed application instance means you can also consistently apply any application delivery policies necessary to maintain security, consistent application access policies, and performance.
The complete solution relies on products from F5 and VMware to monitor application response times and expand into the cloud when they exceed predetermined thresholds. Once in the cloud, the solution can further expand capacity as needed based on application demand. The solution comprises the use of:
- VMware vCloud Director
A manageable, scalable platform for cloud services, along with the necessary APIs to provision capacity on demand.
- F5 BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM)
One in each data center and/or cloud providing management and monitoring to ensure application availability. Application conditions are reported to the orchestration tool of choice, which then triggers actions (scale up or down) via the VMware vCloud API. Encryption and WAN optimization for SQLFabric communications between the data center and the cloud are also leveraged for security and performance.
- F5 BIG-IP® Global Traffic Manager™ (GTM)
Determines when and how to direct requests to the application instances in different sites or cloud environments based on pre-configured policies that dynamically respond to application load patterns. Global application delivery (load balancing) is critical for enabling cloud bursting when public cloud-deployed applications are not integrated via a virtual private cloud architecture.
- VMware GemStone SQLFabric
Provides the distributed caching and replication of database objects between sites (cloud and/or data center) necessary to keep application content localized and thereby minimize the performance impact of latency between the application and its data.
I could talk and talk about this solution but if a picture is worth a thousand words then this video ought to be worth at least that much in demonstrating the capabilities of this joint solution. If you’re like me and not into video (I know, heresy, right?) then I invite you to take a gander at some more traditional content describing this and other VMware-related solutions:
A Hybrid Cloud Architecture for Elastic Applications with F5 and VMware – Overview
Hybrid Cloud Application Architecture for Elastic Java-Based Web Applications – Deployment Guide
F5 and VMware Solution Guide
If you do like video, however, enjoy this one explaining cloud bursting for elastic applications in a hybrid cloud architecture.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:00:00 EDT
Verizon, which is really into this cloud business – against the day when phones as we know them evaporate into the ether – and so means to have clouds for everybody eventually, has added to its very high-end, mission-critical, totally handheld public cloud of last year.
It’s taken VMware’s Datacenter widgetry and built a somewhat lower-end hybrid cloud on its own far-flung global IP network that’s gonna be cheaper than its initial offering and is more for enterprise folks that are already VMware-virtualized internally and can manage the virtual machines themselves, folks who want to export and import images between their private cloud and Verizon’s public cloud less dynamically than with vMotion.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:15:00 EDT
I get some analyst insight during this informative interview with Zeus Kerravala, Sr. VP of Research, of Yankee Group. Zeus discusses virtualization, networking, VMworld, F5 Networks and many other topics surrounding Cloud Computing. ps Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, virtualization, vmware twitter: @psilvas
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EDT
You may be reluctant to move your enterprise application workloads to the cloud, fearing a lack of security, compliance issues such as data location regulations, and having to rewrite your applications.
In his keynote at Cloud Expo Prague, Sam Gross, Vice President of Global IT Outsourcing Solutions at Unisys Corporation, discussed the latest technologies and approaches that help knock down these barriers, creating the opportunity for attendees to consider cloud managed services as part of their data center journey to secure "IT as a Service." He also discussed what you must consider to ensure your enterprise's cloud computing strategy successfully and securely meets the needs of your business, today and tomorrow.
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:45:00 EDT
Nokia will be canning its free 10GB mobile cloud-based file-sharing service Ovi Files come October 1 for lack of popularity apparently.
Its 1.5 million registered users will have to find other accommodations like maybe Nokia Ovi Suite, which requires a wired connection.
Meantime nobody will lose anything because, it says, “Ovi Files simply creates an ‘online mirror’ of the files saved on your Windows PC or Mac, so your original files will remain intact. The files on your computer are always treated as the master version, even if some are selected as ‘Anytime Files.’”
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:59:00 EDT
So Cloud Computing it is. And now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their enteprise, with a Cloud-Computing strategy that will enable them to maintain competitive advantage through seamless end-to-end interoperability while keeping their most important assets—their customer relationships and employees—first and foremost in their thinking.
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