Virtualization for Service Providers

Don't Vote For Me, Vote for These People

2012-01-25T15:07:31-05:00

Last year, when vLaunchPad kicked off the voting for the 2011 Top 25 VMware Blogs, it was a goldmine for me. As someone who had recently moved from the customer side of the game to a vendor, it was a great way to get exposure to all of the incredible content being generated by some of the smartest people in the business. Now that the voting for 2012 has begun, it’s another chance for me to check in on some of the new people involved in the industry, while acknowledging the people who have provided me the most value in the past year.

There are a bunch of new posts going up this week, with people encouraging voters, listing out their top blog posts of the year, and (of course) suggesting politely that a vote for them would be appreciated. I’d imagine that the traffic bump seen by inclusion on the list is pretty significant, and Eric Siebert has done a great job of making this kind of community feedback process valuable.

That being said, I don’t want your vote. More importantly, I don’t think I’ve earned your vote. Yet.

2011 was easily the most interesting year of my professional career. The move to VCE has been outstanding in almost every way. I’ve met more customers, gotten more perspective, seen more technology, been closer to the leading edge and had more opportunities open up than I ever would have had in my previous job.

I’ve also struggled to stay focused on my blogging efforts. I don’t think I did poorly, but based on the number of blog posts that I currently have in some state of completion (11) I could have done better. I need to go back to setting aside time for research, reading and all of the other parts of the process, if I’m going to continue to improve. I really do the act of creation, and I think I’m doing better finding my voice and my personality on the blog, I just need to put in the hours needed. Like anything, repetition is the key to improvement, and I need more reps.

So rather than listing out my most popular post or pitching you on why you should vote for me, here’s a quick recap of the blogs that got my votes, and why.

First, I think the blogs that you gravitate towards are a personal thing. Not everyone has the same likes and dislikes, and especially when it comes to content consumption, everyone has their own taste. It’s not unlike preference in music when you think about it. Everyone hears things slightly different, and that’s what makes it beautiful. These are my preferences and opinions, but that certainly doesn’t mean yours aren’t valid!

I also made some basic rules for my voting. Quantity and quality are not necessarily related, for sure, but I believe that if you are going to stand out from the enormous pack of content creators you need to have both. If you go three months at a time without posting, even if every post you put up is brilliant, I probably didn’t vote for you. I also think that it’s important to have at least a few posts over the course of the year that really stand out. No one is going to hit a homerun every time, but you need to have cleared the fence a couple times.

My next preference is sure to make me few friends, but I’m also partial to people who work for the companies who make the technology that serves as the basis of our community. Partially that’s because I don’t always understand this niche that exists where people can live in the margins between companies, and partly because I don’t think I understand the concept of “independent” very well. It may mean “unaffiliated with a vendor” but it certainly can’t mean “unbiased”, and if the bias is going to be there without the 1st-hand knowledge of the technology and the roadmap, I think you may run into context issues. The other possibility is that “independent” means “looking out for yourself first” in which case your bias runs towards the people, vendors and projects that pay you, which is the worst possible interpretation of the word, in my mind. Also, I know how hard it is to be objective and provide good content within the structure of NDAs, roadmaps and partner relationships, and I respect those who can do it well. There are lots of people who just end up being shills for their respective companies, but those people seem to get marginalized pretty quickly.

In my opinion, the design of the blog itself matters too. Is it easy to read? Does it have a decent mobile version? Is it easy to comment on posts? Is it searchable? Is there an archive where I can look back by date and topic? I’m sure there are plenty of people out there supplementing their income with ad revenue from their sites, but having your side covered with the same ads from the same companies as everyone else doesn’t do anything for your readers, does it?

Like with music, you need to play the instrument well. Sentences have beginnings, middles, and endings. Punctuation and spelling matter. The voice you use to present your content should be consistent. The content itself needs to be accurate and well researched. It needs to be topical. These are the basics, but they really do matter.

Finally, the only rule is that there are no rules, and some of the people who I respect the most definitely don’t always fit inside my rules. :-)

So without further blathering from me, here’s my Top 10.

#10 – Nick Weaver (http://nickapedia.com/) – A person I wish had more time to blog. Nick isn’t the most prolific, but he’s definitely worth waiting on. He’s all over the board technology-wise, which I can relate to, and from .NET front-ends for customer labs to node.js deployments to UBER tools to Kinect magic to evolutionary modeling of VMs, Nick has written about it all. One day I’ll get him to post the best techniques for opening bottles with rental car door handles, and the his blog will be perfect.

#9 – Chris Colotti (http://www.chriscolotti.us/) – Chris has quickly become one of my go-to resources for anything regarding vCloud technologies. From design to performance to gotchas to implementation, this blog has it all. He also drives Mopar vehicles with large engines, and gets bonus points for that. Chris has really started to find his writing voice, and I’m interested to see how he does in 2012.

#8 – Kendrick Coleman (http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/) – While I’m not the biggest fan of the design, Kendrick’s content more than makes up for it. The free vSphere tools is a long-time favorite, but his VMware-related postings in general over the course of 2011 were top-notch. His posts about vSphere network design and vCloud director were among the best of the year.

#7 – Scott Lowe (http://blog.scottlowe.org/) – My biggest complaint with Scott’s blog is that he doesn’t have more time to stay down in the weeds. When Scott gets rolling on a topic, like he did with FCOE and VxLAN, it’s must-read content for everyone involved in those technologies. The Short Takes are a great collection of links, but Scott’s commentary is equally valuable. The well-written content meshes nicely with the clean design, making this one of my favorites. If we can only find a way to make him write less about Macs… :-)

#6 - Andre Leibovici (http://myvirtualcloud.net/) – I think Andre has progressed more in his blogging in 2011 than anyone else I follow regularly. His content around VDI is well researched, well explained, not afraid to buck convention and as authoritative as anyone out there. In addition, his calculators (View, XenDesktop, Protocol) are must-have references for anyone who deals with VDI technology on a regular basis. I’m very interested to see where some of his less….supported….View projects are going to take him in 2012.

#5 – Christofer Hoff (http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/) – It’s hard to think of this as a “virtualization” blog, because the topics are so wide-ranging. I think of it more as a “shit smart people think about” blog, and that helps me put it in context. In addition to the high-quality of the content, it’s the sense of humor that really makes this blog stand out. Being serious and respectful to the content without being overbearing is no small feat, and really, how can you not like someone who decides that facing off (literally) with Vint Cerf is a good idea?

#4 – Cody Bunch (http://professionalvmware.com/) – The Brownbags are genius. I mean that. Of all the podcast/videocasts/whatever-casts that are out there, none is as practical, applies to as many people or as well executed (even if he does use GoToMeeting) as Cody’s. It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the non-Brownbag content is solid as well, and it really establishes Cody as one of the few “independents” that I read regularly.

#3 – Simon Seagrave – (http://www.techhead.co.uk/) – It’s possible, although unlikely, that Simon’s creation of vBeers would have gotten him on my list regardless. Of course, there’s way more than that. Way, way more. Simon’s blog has so much content, that the lack of a good archive page is almost a benefit: it keeps you from spending too much time browsing. One of the first people in the home vSphere lab discussion, Simon is also a great resource for that topic as well, and one of the people I leaned on most where building out my own lab.

#2 – Eric Sloof (http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/) – It seems like almost every time I need to do a Google search for something regarding virtualization, Eric’s blog comes up. With some of the best videos and walkthroughs in the business, this is another site that you can spend way too much time on. It’s obvious that Eric has deep knowledge of the VMware space, but he also does an excellent job of communicating that knowledge to people.

#1 – Chad Sakac (http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/) – It was hard getting my top 10 selected, it was not hard to figure out where Chad needed to be on the list. I don’t know where he finds the time to write, nor how he finds the time to stay in the weeds of the technology up to his elbows, but he consistently drops posts that are unique, timely and incredibly valuable. If you are interested in the storage and virtualization technology ecosystems at all, Chad is the place where you hear about the direction the biggest players are headed first. His excitement for his job and the tech comes through loud and clear, and I can’t wait to see what he comes out with in 2012.

Honorable Mentions:

Duncan Epping (http://www.yellow-bricks.com/)

William Lam (http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/)

Tommy Trogden (http://vtexan.com/)

Josh Atwell (http://www.vtesseract.com/)

Clint Kitson (http://velemental.com/)

Matt Brender (http://itechthereforeiam.com/)

Jay Cuthrell (http://fudge.org/)

There are so many (SO MANY) smart, talented, community-minded people out there, I’m sure I forgot someone. If so, and if you are that person I forgot, please accept my humblest apologies, and I promise to pick up the tab next time we are in the same place. The thought that there are people out there who look at me the same way I look at the people I’ve listed above, and the realization that I WANT people to look to me that way, are what drives me to be more, and try harder. Thank you all, and go vote!

A "How To" Series, Converged Infrastructure Style

2012-01-24T11:58:59-05:00

For the next three weeks VCE is starting off 2012, and celebrating a pretty impressive 2011, by holding a series of sales/technical kickoff meetings in Dallas, Boston and London. These three day gatherings include a number of breakout sessions for the different teams, and include all new collateral, presentations and a first look at some new 2012 secret sauce around the Vblock platforms, where they are going and what we are releasing.

One of the more interesting comments that came out this week was after our CTO, Trey Layton, presented the 2012 “Vblock Value” deck for the assembled crowd. One of our friends from VMware stood up and said the following:

Having sat in on presentations with Dell, HP and IBM, I can tell you that every one of them is presenting this exact same story. You could cut and paste their names over yours, and it would be identical. The difference is that you can actually back up those claims with substance and execution, and they can’t. The trick is helping customers see that, and helping them understand the questions to ask when considering converged infrastructure.

The truth is, as we’ve entered a competitive landscape where there are really only four companies that can offer a true converged infrastructure (VCE, IBM, HP and Oracle), we see more and more how our original talk track from 2010 and early 2011 is being incorporated into the messaging that we see from those competitors today. Partly, that’s awesome: how better to judge the impact you are having on a market than to watch your (much) larger competitors reuse your marketing. Partly, it’s a sign that we need to continually move up and to the right. We aren’t flying under anyone’s radar anymore, and there are sharks in these waters.

To illustrate this point, let’s play a game we played during Michael Capellas’ keynote on the first day of kick-off. We call it: “Who IS That Masked Machine?”

Each of the paragraphs below is an exact cut-and-paste from publicly available sources, which I’ll cite below with the answers. Read the description, think about the messaging that VCE has been putting out for the last two years, and then guess which vendor is involved.

Masked Machine #1

Cloud computing offers many potential benefits, including improved service delivery and reduced operating costs. Yet the challenges of installing and configuring a private cloud platform can be overwhelming. [redacted] provides a preintegrated and preloaded system with software, servers, storage, networking and…services to help you take the guess work out of establishing a private cloud computing environment. [redacted] can help you get up and running in days, not months.

Preintegrated, service delivery infrastructure accelerates deployment of private cloud

Sophisticated self-service portal, service catalog and automated workflows to save operating costs

High-performance and resilient architecture maximizes virtualization efficiency and return on investment

Automated management and superior reliability minimizes complexity, lowers risk and maintenance costs

Designed to scale easily to match resources to changing business needs and adapt to new requirements

Masked Machine #2

[redacted] is designed to simplify the deployment of infrastructure, applications and cloud services by delivering IT capacity through pools of readily deployed resources. The goal of [redacted] is to accelerate provisioning, optimize IT capacity across physical and virtual environments and to ensure predictable delivery and service levels.

Ideal for...

Dynamic infrastructure provisioning

Faster time to business value by provisioning services within minutes instead of months

On-demand storage provisioning in minutes during the deployment of a service

Improve utilization by enabling users to check out and return resources from a central pool

Streamline test and development processes by easily converting servers from virtual to physical and back

Masked Machine #3

[redacted] is a complete hardware and software platform for Enterprise applications delivered by [redacted] as pre-assembled building blocks that are easy to buy, deploy and operate.

[redacted] is an Engineered System: an assemblage of best-of-breed storage, compute, network, operating system and software products that are integrated, tested, tuned, optimized, delivered and supported by [redacted] as a single factory-assembled unit.

[redacted] is designed to provide extreme high performance, reliability, ease-of-use and versatility without being a proprietary, closed system with high total cost of ownership and vendor lock-in. [redacted] is everything enterprises love about both mainframes and open systems with none of the stuff they don't. [redacted] is the realization of a new way of looking at the role of IT in the modern enterprise.

Fully integrated compute nodes, storage and networking

Fully integrated…network attached storage appliance with 40TB of SAS disk storage

…IO Fabric, with 40 Gb/second throughput and microsecond latencies

Data center service network integration with 10 GbE

Wow. I understand that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I think some people need to send flowers to the VCE marketing team. At least a thank you would be nice. So who are our masked machines? Were you able to guess? I left some clues in there to give you a few hints.

Masked Machine #1: IBM Cloudburst™ On System X

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/solutions/cloud/cloudburst/index.html

The use of the word “services” multiple times definitely gives this one away, I know. Let’s give IBM credit where it’s due: they were very, very early out of the gate (June, 2009) with the concept of a converged infrastructure, largely based on the strength of their services arm. With Cisco announcing their entry into the x86 server market in March of that same year, and with the first of the V+C+E implementations starting to roll out, IBM reacted far quicker than the rest of the industry to the coming threat. Their ace in the hole is now, and always will be, their services arm which is the class of the world. Understand that the acquisitions of Perot Systems and EDS by Dell and HP respectively were intended to try and balance the scales that were tipped heavily in IBMs favor because of the Global Services organization.

Masked Machine #2: HP CloudSystem Matrix

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/ products/blades/components/matrix/index.html

HP was particularly late to the converged infrastructure game, and they arguably needed to do the most catching up from a technology standpoint. Rocked by the Cisco entry into their backyard, HP responded by buying 3COM in April, 2010. Most of us questioned the idea of HP paying $2.7B to acquire a networking vendor who had once famously exited the core router/switch market because they couldn’t get any traction, just so that they could offer an alternative to Cisco, a company who dominated that same market. I’ve heard claims that HP is 100% 3COM in their data centers, and I can tell you that they are the only company I’ve ever heard of who make that claim. After declaring war on Cisco, HP went to work replacing other parts of their portfolio that needed refreshing. In October of 2010 they replaced the aging, underwhelming EVA storage line with the acquisition of 3Par, and using the previous acquisition of Opsware, started putting together a converged infrastructure of their own. Finally, in June of 2011, HP released the Converged Systems portfolio that we know today.

Masked Machine #3: Oracle Exalogic

http://blogs.oracle.com/exalogic/entry/what_is_oracle_exalogic / http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/exalogic/

Oracle, looking to lock customers into more support dollars than just the application stacks they already owned, bought Sun Microsystems in January of 2010. Using that acquisition they pulled one of the most drastic flip-flops in the history of technology and went to market with Exalogic in September of that same year. Sun hardware? Sun STORAGE? Interesting. Oracle, to their credit, is able to build hardware that services the exact performance needs of the application stack (because they ARE the application stack), but as customers look more and more to a multi-use infrastructure, having to manage hardware that is limited to a single platform use-case is challenging. In contrast, Oracle on VMware in general and Oracle on Vblock specifically are two of the fastest growing segments of the VMware/VCE business.

In my opinion, these are the only three companies that are, today, providing offerings that are competitive with VCE, and they will be the ones we discuss in this series going forward. Dell may enter into this space at some point (I expect them to), but there are too many holes in both their product offerings and their go-to-market to spend a lot of time on them now. Reference Architecture-based products are similarly discounted, since building something on your own is exactly what we are getting away from with the concept of a converged infrastructure.

If you look at the timeline, there has been a tremendous amounts of partnering and acquisition since VCE was formally introduced in late 2009. It’s very fun to be on the leading edge of something this big, and it’s gratifying to see our efforts moving the needle across the industry, but I know there are a lot of moving parts. Especially for companies whose core competency isn’t IT, and who don’t want to make a huge investment in that space, there’s a opportunity for us to better explain the landscape, the challenges and the opportunities.

So with all that said, the plan is to write a series of blog posts helping customers figure out how to move forward. Everyone focuses on the management aspect, but I think there are many companies out there who don’t understand the complexity of choosing a platform, streamlining a business model around a platform, building a team to support the platform and leveraging that platform across application teams. So in the spirit of education, we’ll go through the following topics together:

How To: Choose the Right Converged Infrastructure
How To: Use a Converged Infrastructure to Generate Revenue
How To: Maximize Operational Efficiency with a Converged Infrastructure
How To: Build a Converged IT Operations Team
How To: Optimize a Converged Infrastructure for Multiple Workloads
How To: Choose a Management and Orchestration Strategy

Are there other topics that need to be covered? Let me know in the comments below, and if there’s enough interest we can add them. The goal here is for everyone to better understand the lay of the land in order to make better decisions going forward. With some of the announcements that VCE has queued up for the first half of 2012, I’m very much looking forward to walking through these topics and more!

What do you think? Is the idea of a converged infrastructure a fundamental shift in how hardware is managed, consumed and acquired? Or is it simply a part of the larger business cycle in an environment where capital availability has its highs and lows? Comments are always welcome (with company disclosure if appropriate) below!

Are You Leading, Or Just Talking Loudly?

2011-11-25T18:57:27-05:00

I think it’s because of the many, many years that I spent playing and managing baseball, but I’ve always been interested in the concept of teams, and the art/science behind building them. Much like a baseball team, where different positions require different skillsets and personalities, enterprises today also require a mix of people with different perspectives to be successful Determining what you want the framework of that team to look like, deciding how the people you already have are going to fit (or not fit), putting together a process for finding the right combination of personality and talent to round out the group and getting everyone to mesh and become more than the sum of their parts is a process I’ve had the opportunity to undertake a number of times in my career and I love it. As much as I enjoy my position now as an individual contributor and I appreciate VCE giving me the time I asked for to recover from my last job, I can’t wait to have the chance to move back into a position where team building is required.

Of course, for every good team, comprised of good teammates, there are bad teams and bad teammates. Nothing can hurt the overall success of a company, team or project more than a lack of teamwork, and it’s important to look around at where you are and try to figure out if you are part of the problem or part of the solution. No matter where you are, or what you do as an individual contributor, your responsibility is to make the people above you successful. I don’t care if you don’t like your boss, I don’t care if you are more qualified than your position demands, your job is to ensure that you are doing everything you can to make your team successful.

In “Rounders”, Mike McDermott says “If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.” I say the same thing holds true for teams: If you can’t see the part of your team that needs improvement, it’s possible YOU are the part that needs it! Luckily, improving yourself as a teammate is something we should all be doing ALL the time, so there’s no shame in seeing, or being told, that you have work to do.

In my opinion there are two kinds of teammates you need to watch out for. The first is the guy who confuses talking loudly with leading. You know this guy: it’s all about him. Regardless of his role it’s always “his” team. It’s always about what project he’s working , or what customer he’s engaged with. He uses the word “I” incessantly in internal communication. He’s probably not a bad guy, and he’s definitely smart, but he doesn’t make the whole team better because he isn’t leading them anywhere, he’s just yelling about where he’s been, and where he’s going.

The other kind of teammate that worries me is the malcontent who acts like a cancer, hurting the team from the inside out. You know this guy too: he’s the one who’s always putting the team, and his teammates down, sometimes without even realizing it. “You know what, I’ll just do it myself” may be the single worst thing that a teammate can ever say. There are many reasons why one of your teammates could be unhappy, but ultimately few of them matter. If you can’t come to the group prepared to leave your individual issues at the door and further the cause of making the people above you successful, you aren’t helping the cause.

I’m an optimist, so I think even these kinds of teammates just aren’t self-aware enough to know they are causing a problem, so how can you help them? Here’s some rules I’ve learned throughout my team-building career that may help:

Make a rule limiting the number of times you use the word “I” in internal communications. If everyone is doing their job right, there’s no place for “I” inside the group. Use “we”, “us” or “the team” instead. Hold yourself accountable and hold the rest of the team accountable on this one. If you are going to succeed, do it together. (this one came from Monty Blight, my boss at Peak 10, and it's one I like the most!)
You can never have enough internal communication! Whether it’s in person, phone, e-mail, social media or IM, you can’t know who your teammates are and what they are capable of doing without keeping the lines of communication open and using them often!
Go out of your way to understand the structure of your team: what role are you there to fill? How are you supposed to interact and with who? The more you understand the dance steps, the better you will be able to dance!
Understand what your immediate manager needs to be successful, because that’s your first priority. Look, I’ve worked for my share of managers who didn’t have any idea about how to organize a team. They weren’t ever going to be successful because they didn’t communicate what they needed to the group! If you find yourself in that situation, go up the ladder another rung, and find out what your manager’s manager needs to be successful. At some point you are going to find someone who understands how to leverage a team well enough, and when you do, get as aligned as you can. I’ve had times where I was aligned with someone two or three levels above my manager, and that’s OK. Be tactful in how you do it, but success can roll downhill too, and as long as you stay focused on being aligned with what the people above you need, good things will happen!
If you find you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Every job has a timeline, and the better you are a recognizing that you are nearing the end of yours, the easier it will be to keep the team headed in the right direction. Know when it’s time to start looking for something new, communicate that fact to your manager and work to stay challenged!
Know when you are oversharing. Especially for those of us (and I include myself in this group at times) for whom business travel is a part of the job, it’s hard to remember how much of a privilege that it. Sure, we fly a lot, and sure we get some of the perks that come with that (airline status, upgrades, etc…) but there are a lot of people out there who would love to be in our shoes. Spend too much time sharing where you’ve been, or what status level you are and you risk overshadowing the reason you got that job in the first place: how good you are at it! Especially distressing can be the complaints! Yes, it’s a pain when you only have status on one airline and you need to start flying another one. Yes, not getting that upgrade on an international flight can be an inconvenience. Sure, we’ve all been stuck in an airport, or had weeks where we lived in them. Yes, sometimes it’s hard being away from our families for extended amounts of time. But we have been entrusted with a job that many people aspire to, and sometimes we need to remember how all that complaining looks to the outside.

How about for you managers out there, new and old? Well the ability to have a successful team begins with you! Here are some things I’ve learned about building teams that may help:

Have a plan, have a plan, have a plan! Good things happen on accident, but not often, so sit down with your stakeholders and figure out what role your team needs to play. Put together a plan for the skillsets needed, and how the team needs to be laid out.
Hire with a purpose. Target skillsets or abilities that your team needs, and at the level your team needs. Don’t settle! Both the “he’s so brilliant we need to hire him even though we don’t know where he’ll fit” and the “he’s such a great guy that he’ll be great for the team” hires will get you in trouble. Be disciplined in putting the right people in the right places, since these are the people who you are going to make you successful!
Be careful of hiring people with whom you have a pre-existing relationship, and make sure you understand and acknowledge the impact that can have on the team. Listen, who you know can be more important than what you know, and all of us have relationships that have helped us find and take advantage of opportunities. That being said, even a good plan and a good team and a good manager can be undone by hiring someone for the wrong reasons. Even more importantly, the presence of a relationship can make hires that were done in good faith look bad when things don’t go well. If you are going to hire someone you are close to, understand that they will (fairly or not) have to over-deliver for a time until they are fully a part of the team!
Fire people when necessary. As a manager, the grown-up pants come standard, and sometimes you have to wear them. People change and goals change, and sometimes that means that teams have to change too. No one revels in the process, but for the good of the team sometimes you have to make changes, and that involves firing people who aren’t being part of the solution. Of course, this is always tricky: fire too soon or too often, and it becomes a reflection on your ability to hire the right people, and wait too long and you hurt the team. Again, the key here is communication, communication and more communication.
Be prepared to pivot. Every team will be asked to head in a new direction at some point, be ready for it. Maybe the challenge will be to take a small group and scale it. Maybe the challenge will be to take a local group global. Maybe it’ll be to take a team of people and use them to solve a whole new business challenge. Embrace these situations, because they will be the ultimate validation of your team and of your ability to lead it.
Know what kind of manager you are. Some managers excel at “managing up” and making sure that the team has the right level of exposure to the upper management group. Some manager excel at “managing down” and taking care of the tactical job of delivering on goals. A few managers can do both equally well. Understand which kind of manager you are and build the team to balance your strengths.
Don’t be afraid to lead, as well as manage! I’m a huge believer in leading from the front, In most organizations there’s no longer a place for the traditional middle-manager, and moreover those kinds of managers are hard-pressed to sustain the respect of a team, especially in technology companies. Best case, in my opinion, is a manager who can lead the team by example, helping the rest of the team become better at their jobs and able to jump in and help out when things are busy, or the team is short. If you are a manager and you can’t do the core job of the people you are managing, you are at a severe disadvantage.

What do you think? How does your team stack up? What are the best and worst teams you’ve been part of? Are you a good teammate or manager? How can you help your team be better? Feel free to join the discussion in the comments below, and for all of you in the US enjoy the rest of your long holiday weekend!

CA World 2011: Perspectives

2011-11-17T10:47:37-05:00

Much like my trip to Copenhagen for VMworld 2011, it was very interesting to be able to support the VCE event marketing team at CA World to see how different groups of people respond to the VCE story. Most of the events we go to are, for obvious reasons, infrastructure focused, so it was very interesting to meet and talk to people who live further (sometimes MUCH further) up the stack than that. The takeaways were surprising.

First, both the CA team and the CA World event were absolutely top notch, The general session on Sunday evening with Bill McCraken (CA CEO), Michael Capellas (VCE Chairman), Vivek Kundra (First CIO of the US) and Randi Zuckerberg was outstanding. The level of discussion and the collective knowledge on the panel was excellent. I’ve never attended a kick-off keynote on a Sunday evening before, but this one was definitely worth it.

VCE occupied a very interesting place in this conference. First, we were the only infrastructure company to have a full converged stack on the floor, and thanks to our Platinum sponsorship we were right up front and center. The irony was that it seemed like most of the attendees were a little intimidated by the racks on display. Where as at EMC World, VMworld and Cisco Live there are people crawling in, over and around the cabinets asking questions, almost every question we got at CA World was about how the infrastructure fit into a larger picture. I loved it. People wanted to know about the solutions that were supported, the intersection with the CA product sets and how both could be leveraged together. We did a ton of VDI sessions as well as a lot of orchestration and management demos, all of the running right on the Vblock in the booth. It was a very different audience and experience than the other shows, but it had a rhythm and pace all of its own, and it was a welcome change.

Of course, it’s always fun to talk to customers when you have such an incredibly compelling story. The CA/VCE partnership is in many ways a model for how a converged infrastructure can enable the business processed that the customer needs to maintain without forcing a greenfield approach. In the slide on the left we see how core (and relatively small) a role the actual infrastructure plays in the overall framework here, and that’s as it should be. We aren’t doing IT for the sake of IT, we are doing it for the end users and their applications, and anything that takes the focus away from that isn’t needed or relevant. From security, performance and SLA monitoring and alerting, automation and orchestration and business service modeling and management, the integration between CA and VCE is top-notch and I’m very excited to see where we go from here, and how we can help make each other better.

I also got a chance (finally!) to be part of the Cloudcast podcast series, and Aaron Delp and I got to sit down with Andi Mann from CA and talk about consumption models, trends that are starting to show and a good bit about Andi’s background and career. What a cool, smart guy. Totally enjoyed it and I’m hoping I get invited to do the podcast again at some point. If you are interested, you can check it out here.

To put it bluntly, VCE has kicked ass at all of the events that we’ve attended this year. With it being our first year in the ring, so to speak, we did a lot of learning, a lot of guessing and hoping, and a lot of busting our butts to make sure the story got out to the people. VCE exceeded every single metric we set as a target for those events, and there’s a fantastic group of people who’ve made that happen. Most of the credit goes to Mary Martinez, Jeff Siteman and Tina McNulty from the marketing team. They had a vision for these events and have worked tirelessly to make it happen. There’s also an incredible core group of vArchitects who volunteered to be in the foxhole together, and have been able to react to any situation and pull off what sometimes seemed impossible. Tom Chatham (Mr. Vblock), Jae Ellers, Jay Cuthrell and Aaron Delp are all complete rock stars, and getting to watch them work with customers at these events is awesome. Our booth is ridiculous. Rarely is there anyone on a conference floor who can match the functionality of the VCE setup with the awesome visuals. Having a fully functional, live Vblock in the middle of the booth has become a staple of the setup, and the customers love it. If you are a competitor who is handing out collateral at a tiny booth at these shows, we have been, and will continue to eat your lunch. Fair warning, it only gets more awesome for us from here.

Of course no good deed goes unpunished, and so we’ve been given an even higher bar to clear in 2012. The team will more than triple the number of events we participate at, and VCE is making a huge investment in that. More Vblocks, more staff, more demos, more [redacted]. It’s going to be awesome, and I can’t wait to see how it unfolds. The 2012 year will start in London with Cisco Live, and we are working furiously behind the scenes to roll out a couple surprises for everyone. Stay tuned and I hope to see you at one of the events in 2012!

Could AWS Have Been Built On A Vblock?

2011-11-09T11:31:06-05:00

Listen, I’ll acknowledge right up front that the premise of the title of this post is ridiculous. But considering some of the other more outlandish and dogmatic arguments I’ve seen around the topic of AWS and it’s position in the IaaS market lately, maybe it’s not that out of place. Let’s all take a deep breath and see what’s going on here…

Part of why I love Twitter is because it’s an organic place where a conversation can unfold, either in real-time or after the fact. You can catch a snippet of a thread, dig through the multiple conversations that got the discussion to that point and watch the multiple players as they respond. Last night, somehow, the topic was how every IaaS provider and customer was somehow competing with AWS, whether they liked it or not, and as part of that thread the following statement was made by George Reese, CTO of enStratus:

While this was one of the more sound-byte worth comments in the thread, the basic premise (as I understand it) was that AWS has become the defacto standard for all IaaS deployments anywhere, and in achieving this milestone they have set the bar for business model, features, price and functionality in many ways. Here’s another good quote from the thread from Randy Bias over at Cloudscaling:

Now, I’ve never met Randy (and I hope to), but from what I’ve seen he’s possibly the biggest AWS fan on the face of the planet, at least that I’ve ever met. Whether it’s calling them a “runaway train” and predicting $16B in revenues or calling them a “game changer” and “the primary measuring stick for all IaaS”, Randy obviously likes what he sees. Every option, has at it’s core an assumption (or many), and I think that’s where my thinking about AWS and IaaS in general diverges from Sirs Reese and Bias. This notion that the buyer of technology services is shifting from IT to application developers just isn’t one that I see regularly as I talk to both enterprises and service providers. I even forgive Randy and George for picking on VCE and the Vblock specifically, since I’ve learned that’s just what happens when you are the most recognizable and successful entry into any marketplace.

In every one of these discussions, I see the same names brought up as proof-points: Amazon, Google, Netflix, Salesforce.com, Facebook... What I don’t understand is how some of these companies even end up being part of the discussion, especially when the topic is a comparison to enterprise IT. How many times do we have to rehash the fact that Facebook isn’t representative of IT, at least not it’s massive, public-facing side? It’s a single application, scaled to incredible size, ditto for Salesforce.com and Netflix. That’s not IT, where there can be dozens of applications sitting side-by-side, some developed in-house, some bought off the shelf, each one having it’s own development and maintenance cycle. You can’t, I repeat, CAN’T, put that kind of workload footprint in the cloud. And for anyone who says “legacy is shit, you need to start developing your way out of that hole” I tell you to wake up and look at the reality of today.

Would it be great if every enterprise had every application they needed developed in-house and/or on a common platform with all of the resiliency, redundancy and availability built in? Abso-frickin-loutely. THAT would be a game changer. It would change the basic premise under which the concept of application delivery would run, and (finally) put all of the focus on the apps and the customer experience, where it belongs.

HOWEVER, even that drastic a departure from reality wouldn’t change either the overall IaaS market, or the opportunities that exist for the service provider community. Some people are going to want/need to run the infrastructure inside their own firewall, some people are going to want to outsource it. Some people will need to build data centers, some people won’t. Hell, some people will be good at building enterprise-class, “cloud-ready apps” and some won’t, and those that won’t will want help. Hopefully, most enterprises will stay as close to their core competency as they can, and give away those functions that don’t need to be part of the business model.

So with all of that said, could one of these magic unicorn clouds, internal or external be hosted on a Vblock (or any other converged infrastructure stack)? Of course it could. Would a service provider choose to host their magic unicorn service on a Vblock? Of course they could. How is this possible? Because I dispute the basis of the argument that AWS and their disciples put out: limiting functionality, putting the onus for availability and driving the cost of resources to the lowest possible point by using commodity hardware with a high rate of failure isn’t what the enterprise market demands. It just isn’t. Yet. Now, you could (and should as a good skeptic) argue that Randy and George are pushing a business model that ultimately meshes with their respective companies, and that I am pushing one that meshes with mine, and that would be very fair. After all, if you don’t know any of us how do you trust our motivations? In return I’d ask you this: what are YOU seeing in YOUR enterprise? What are you hearing about in others? What are you seeing out of the Federal government space? What are you hearing from your security and compliance teams? At the end of the day, however unwelcome it may be, reality is what it is, and the reality where IT is even MOST of that way towards a completely programmatic consumption mode is just fiction. Chris Hoff with Juniper Networks summed it up well later in the conversation when he said:

I certainly agree, AWS has had an impact on the market mostly because they introduced the world to a new way of consumption, one that didn’t necessarily exist before. For those enterprises who needed it, AWS was a great new answer. You can’t ignore their growth or their level of innovation, and I can’t help but be impressed by both.

Of course, in my heart of hearts, I lament the fact that we live in this reality. Having been an end user, service provider, and infrastructure vendor, I hate that we have to abstract and virtualize our way around the legacy limitations of our collective IT past. No application user has ever cared about the brand of fabric switch or server that was used. They want a good experience with the applications they need, and that’s it. Everything else is secondary to them, but unfortunately it will take some time for the enterprise to catch up and be able to focus the lion’s share of their attention and resources in that direction. Reality is what it is, not what we wish it to be.

What do you think? On a continuum from legacy to fully public cloud where is your company? Where are you moving to be? Does the term IaaS need to have some additional context to it so that we don’t conflate one kind of consumption model with another? Disclosure of affiliations and common courtesy is always appreciated in the comments!

VMworld Europe 2011: Perspectives

2011-11-01T18:19:07-04:00

As much as I love talking to customers, whiteboarding solutions and doing booth presentations, I miss the days of being able to attend VMworld as a fan, and as a user. Despite having been to both 2011 VMworld events, I have yet to sit in a session, work through a lab or participate in any of the panel discussions. Luckily the community is doing a great job of keeping everyone aware of the major announcements, but it’s hard to feel very plugged-in to the event when all my time is spent at the Solutions Exchange. I’ll have to talk with our marketing team about making the schedule a little more friendly to allow for more participation.

All my whining aside, it’s been a great show so far! There’s a very different vibe (as expected) to the event, with Copenhagen and Las Vegas being very different places (to say the least). The weather hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t put a damper (ha!) on the event at all. Copenhagen is a very interesting place, even if we didn’t get much of a chance to explore. Luckily my co-worker Tom and his wife Jenny played chauffer and tour guide for a little while, so we did get to see some of the sights!

You may have noticed that I was absent from almost all social media for the first couple days of the event, and there was a very good reason for that! I jumped in to help out the VCE Sales team and took a meeting with a customer on short notice. The only challenge was that the customer happened to be in Paris. It was a long day of plane rides (one of which had a fire on board, necessitating a quick evacuation and moving to a new plane), car rides (Paris isn’t all that pretty in the rain and on a highway…) but in the middle was a fantastic meeting with Orange Business Systems. I got to meet their head of cloud computing marketing and one of the business and product development executives, and we had a great lunch. The conversation ranged around a bit, but we talked about the philosophy of product development, the future of cloud-focused M&O and even dove a little into the VCE roadmap covering the next few quarters. Like most SPs they are very, very aware of the amount of time between purchasing infrastructure and when that infrastructure starts generating revenue. The Vblock and VCE solution focus are both things that meshed well with them.

From a VCE standpoint, the event was another in a string of successes in getting our brand, the value of the Vblock and the ever-growing stack of solutions developed on top of it out to the public. Over the course of the show, more than 40% of the attendees of the conference had their badges scanned at the VCE booth, and the list of follow-up tasks I have with people who had questions or asked for more in-depth discussion after the show is insane. Thank goodness I can scan business cards in with my phone! The entire event marketing team outdid themselves (again) and really pulled everything off. Mary Martinez knows how to rock an industry event, that’s for sure. One thing that was commented on a couple times is that we typically don’t bring any of the sales team to these events, choosing to staff the booth with members of our field enablement team. These guys are incredible, able to talk solutions, business value, partnerships, channels or tech with equal ease. Jae Ellers and Spencer Critchlow both presented breakout sessions on our recently announced VDI solutions (FastPath and AlwaysOn), Steven Bryen and Grant Bailey presented on topics including vCloud Director and GRC solutions and Aaron Delp walked customer after customer through the Vblock components and options. I think the highlight of the week had to be having a customer ask about the process by which customers upgraded from UIM2.1 to the (almost) newly released UIM3.0. Rather that pull out a demo video or a presentation, Tom Chatham brought in a member of the EMC Ionix team for support and proceeded to upgrade the live Vblock that was in the booth supporting all of the demos, on the fly and without affecting any of the running workloads. We showed off the new vCloud Director integration as well as the new elastic provisioning live and without a net. It was one of the most ballsy things I’ve seen done at a trade show, because if it hadn’t worked like we said it would, the booth would have been down and everyone would have known about it! Kudos to Tom for knowing that product in and out and being able to pull it off. I know I haven’t named all of the vArchitects who helped make this event awesome, but their efforts were all stellar.

The relatively quick turnaround between the two VMworld events really prevented there from being any blockbuster announcements, but it was still a great event to meet new people and catch up with old friends. To everyone I met in the booth, shared a meal or raised a glass with, thank you for a wonderful week. Until next time!

FAST and FAST Cache for the Service Provider

2011-11-01T11:17:38-04:00

I had almost the exact same conversation with three customers over the last few weeks, and one of them ended with the EMC vSpecialist who had invited me to the call telling the customer “Keep an eye on his blog, I’m sure he’ll have more up there soon!” With pressure like that, who needs deadlines? ;-)

The conversation was around whether the storage workload profile of an IaaS offering would differ from a normal virtualized, enterprise workload, and if so how, how could an SP leverage FAST and FAST Cache to the best effect? EMC has some great general design guidelines for these features, and there have been some great posts on the interwebs, but to my knowledge there hasn’t been anything specifically targeted at Service Providers. Since, in my experience, the workload profile is significantly different in an IaaS environment I thought it might be a good idea to collect some data and write down my thoughts. We’ll do FAST Cache in this post and FAST VP in a subsequent one.

To be clear, I’m not your EMC TC and none of these opinions or observations are endorsed by EMC or VCE. They are my opinions only and your mileage may vary! I’m going to make some generalizations based on my experience and what I’ve seen, but I understand that there are always going to be exceptions to any rule. If you want to discuss your particular configuration or I/O pattern, please throw something in the comments and I’ll do what I can to get the right resources engaged for you.

First, let’s do a quick recap of the two technologies that we are talking about here for those of you who aren’t familiar with them. VNX FAST VP is a policy-based auto-tiering solution. The goal of FAST VP is to efficiently utilize storage tiers is to lower the overall cost of the storage solution by moving “slices” of colder data to high-capacity disks and to increase performance by keeping hotter slices of data on performance drives. In an IaaS environment, FAST VP is a way for the provider to offer a blended storage offering, reducing the cost of a traditional single-type offering while allowing for a wider range of customer-use cases and accommodating a larger cross-section of VMs with different performance characteristics.

FAST Cache is supported by all 300- and 700-series Vblock platforms, and is designed to extend the VNX array’s read-write cache and ensure that unpredictable I/O spikes that would normally result in cache misses can be serviced at EFD speeds. FAST Cache mitigates the effects of these I/O patterns by extending the DRAM cache for both reads AND writes, dramatically reducing the overall number of dirty pages and cache misses.

Now that we know the tools we are working with, let’s look at the I/O patterns that are found most often in an IaaS environment. The basic challenge is that while it is difficult (impossible?) to predict the types of workloads that are going to be running against the array when you open it up to a public audience, it’s also a business model that doesn’t easily support over-building to provide buffer space. If you contract pools of CPU, RAM and disk to customers for them to partition into VMs as their business requires, you are going to see workloads all over the map. Especially in a cloud environment (private cloud?) where you are hosting production servers, you may have write-heavy databases next to read-heavy file servers next to RAM-hungry Exchange servers next to AD servers doing almost nothing. The architecture between the array and the VMs can also complicate the issue: multiple VMs running multiple applications/workloads, on multiple VMFS datastores spread across multiple hosts can generate a very random I/O pattern, placing stress on both the storage processors as well as on the DRAM-based cache.

FAST Cache is essentially a no-brainer here, and the IaaS use-case is one that sees an almost immediate benefit from it. In our (non-VCE affiliated) design document for vCloud Director on Vblock we actually called for doubling the amount of FAST Cache that is normally recommended by EMC on the VNX platforms, and there was a good bit of conversation around simply recommending the maximum amount the systems would take. There are a number of reasons for this:

As discussed earlier, the variability of the workload pattern requires a “buffer” of some sort to account for the spikes generated by customers on both the read and write side.
Despite the impressive $ per I/O numbers that today’s generation of EFDs show, most every SP I talk to struggles to find out how to work the cost into the overall business model. The truth is that when given the option of SATA, SAS and EFD to support their workloads in an IaaS environment, customers will gravitate towards the bottom two tiers regardless of the cost. FAST Cache gives the SP the ability to market EFD speeds to their customers for the most frequently accessed data without requiring the customer to explicitly commit to the cost of an EFD tier.
By providing read and write cache SPs have the option of extending out their existing IaaS infrastructure to support additional lines of business. You don’t need to have multiple arrays to handle your different offerings if your primary array can handle multiple types of workloads, and this lowers the cost of entry and initial capital outlay of those offerings.

The general rule of thumb is to start with 5% of the total capacity as FAST Cache, and make sure to plan out your disk layout to ultimately support as much as the array can handle. For the VNX 7500 that lives in the Vblock 300GX, that’s a whopping 2.1Tb of cache spread out over 20 200GB EFDs so it’s important to account for those disks during the design phase. For IaaS workloads, I’m recommending increasing that to 10%-12% of the usable capacity of the array due to the nature of the workload as well as the average I/O footprint that we see. Again, every environment can be different, so LISTEN TO YOUR TCs! These are general guidelines, and it may make sense for your ratio to go up or down based on how your customers are using the platform!

In fact (and this probably won’t make the sales guys at VCE happy) I’d prioritize FAST Cache over having an EFD tier in your array for almost ALL customers, but especially for service providers. We’ll talk about tiering in the next post, but even if you wanted to include an EFD tier for your offering the amount that needs to be installed in order to make it viable and useful to customers is fairly low. In my opinion, FAST Cache is the single most important thing to include in your design to extend capacity, protect the tenants and create flexibility in the platform.

Hopefully this has been helpful, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below. As always, professional disclosure and common decency is appreciated! In my next post we’ll talk about storage tiering and how that can help differentiate a service provider’s offering and make the cost of high performance disk more palatable to customer.

What's in a Reference Architecture?

2011-10-03T09:28:29-04:00

Over in the Twitter-verse there was a question asked by @aneel:

It got me thinking, especially since Cisco (@aneeI’s employer) tends to leverage them to a significant degree and VCE (partially owned by Cisco) has traditionally been the opposite side of that coin. Personally, I think both are valid ways to go to market, I think it’s more a matter of how do you leverage your delivery options to provide your customers with the most value? Is one better than the other? Is there a place for both? Is there a NEED for both? While this typically ends up being a religious discussion, does it have to be?

It’s actually an interesting time to have this discussion because while it’s been a hot topic for some time, the release of the VCE VDI product and the EMC reference architecture have focused attention on the situation. EMC’s Chad Sakac did separate blog posts on both the EMC reference architecture and the VCE product during VMworld, and has some great points about the difference between the value for the customer. Pulling in part from his comments and from my experience, let’s make a list:

Reference architecture:

Value
- Help reduce risk…a little.
- Infinitely flexible, nothing to “break”
- The more you diverge the less value it has
- Moderate/limited acceleration of deployment time
- Protection of existing investment
- Allows leveraging of existing skillsets and staffing strengths
- Did I mention infinitely flexible?
Costs
- Cost of developing business requirements
- Cost of technology “discovery” (the “beauty pageant”)
- Cost of matrix compatibility/testing
- Cost of ancillary equipment (racks, cables, PDUs, etc…)
- Cost of implementation (rack & stack, cable, configure, certify)
- Cost of go-live testing/acceptance
- Staffing/Professional Services Costs as needed
- Cost to business of increased “time-to-market”
- Cost of support overhead (paying for multi-vendor support management or having to do it internally)
- Cost of third-party tools acquisition, integration and maintenance to manage
- Subset of all above costs when purchasing capacity to grow/scale
- Overall, includes a significant amount of “Non-Recurring Engineering Time”
Risks
- Slow time-to-market
- Very dependent on internal employees and their availability/competencies for success
- QA both for initial deployment and as capacity is expanded is very complex
- Documentation of as-built configuration is additional project/cost
- As core elements get upgraded, some subset of the initial tasks have to be redone to allow for upgrades to be incorporated into design

In the end, I feel like a reference architecture is all about the people involved. The better they are, the more organized and informed they are about the needs of the organization and the less biased they are towards where they’ve been while evaluating where they are going, the more likely the project is to succeed. This kind of focus CAN (but doesn’t always) detract from the business side of things, because it’s asking a lot of siloed infrastructure engineers to keep the big picture in mind. This process succeeds or fails based on the management of the project and on how the balance between speed and thoroughness is maintained. Partners and systems integrators play a very key role here, since maintaining that balance is what they are good at, and they can make sure that the right mix of staffing is available. There’s an additional cost, of course, but it’s cheaper than the cost of letting the project fail!

Productized solution:

Value
- Help reduce risk…A LOT
- Quantifiable level of business value (ROI/TCO)
- Extreme acceleration of deployment time/time-to-market
- Testing and validation of components is included
- Component upgrades are included in pre-testing and validation
- Best practices and logical limits are in place from day one in order to avoid performance issues and component misalignment
- Ordering process, both initially and when additional capacity is needed is streamlined and focused
- Logical build and local delivery included
- One-call support to handle all components included
- Integrated management/orchestration stack
Costs
- Costs of developing business requirements
- Costs of go-live testing/acceptance
- May force realignment of internal infrastructure silos
- Coupling/convergence of components may limit the reusability of existing gear
- New management tools can introduce training costs
Risks
- Since the value derived increases with scale, these purchases are seen as commitments that need to be followed through on over time, not just one-time purchases
- Choosing your partners/vendors is critically important: this is who you will do business with for years
- Promise of “converged” doesn’t reduce inherent complexity. Setting internal expectations properly can be challenging when the core premise is “it just shows up and works”
- Design is more rigid in places where standardization and supportability are affected

For a product, I feel like everything revolves around the technology included, and in how much effort the provider has put into integration, delivery and orchestration of the core components. The basic requirements from a strategic standpoint still rest on the customer, as does the responsibility for managing the requirements and application stacks, but much of the burden of the design, regression and interop testing, manufacturing, implementation and delivery are taken off the customer from a tactical standpoint and are rolled into the value proposition of the product. The more committed and prepared the platform provider is to providing a complete offering, the more value the customer will realize.

As someone who has worked in the industry for a long time with a number of companies and industries, I can certainly see the value of both offerings. For customers who have an existing investment, using a reference architecture can keep you from having to strand invested capital. For some service providers who haven’t been able to sync their technology refresh cycles, a reference architecture can be valuable, so long as the cost of deployment/testing and the delay in generating revenue doesn’t outweigh the capital being saved. For customers who are ready to move NOW, and who want to accelerate their deployment without needing to staff up internally or contract for a large amount of professional services on the hardware side, having a product ready to order is the way to go.

I recognize that my stance here goes against the expected response from VCE. I’m expected to say things like “No one needs just a PDF and a sticker” and other nonsense. Want to know the truth? The Vblock not only started out as a reference architecture, but it’s still delivered as one in certain circumstances today! The open house event for EMC’s New Center Of Excellence And Cloud Data Center was a good example, where the Vblock architecture is being used to host 350 applications and 6 PB of storage. They definitely don’t live inside Vblock cabinets, and the staff on the data center tours shared publically that in order to fit into the cooling strategy of the facility they used the base Vblock reference architecture (pssst: the original 0/1/1U/2, 700MX and 300-series reference architectures are available publically from the vce.com and vcepartnerportal.com sites) to build the platform in a way that fit their infrastructure requirements. There are even countries where, for many reasons, it’s required to deliver the components separately rather than ship a completed Vblock from manufacturing. Does this mean we don’t have customers using Vblocks there? Heck no, it means we use the reference architecture and our incredible partner and parent company ecosystems to deliver what the customer wants.

Does VCE offer a pure reference architecture design where partners are responsible for 100% of the delivery and support of the infrastructure? Nope. Will we ever, in a Vblock of any/every size? I don’t know. But here’s an important question to think over: If, as has been stated by myself here, Chad and others elsewhere, there is a legitimate need in the market for both a product and a reference architecture, which will be easier to accomplish: VCE augmenting their existing world-class product with a less formal reference design, or any other company trying to build a formal product with a true, integrated single support model across all of the relevant component vendors? To go one step further, which would be more easily accepted by existing customers? If the only option you had in order to use the components you wanted was to build it from scratch (or pay a partner to do it for you), and you were told that a “product” was too inflexible for what you needed, and then your vendor released a product with enhanced support, how would you feel? AT THE LEAST I’d want my deployment re-certified to get the same benefits as people who were buying the new productized version. Trust me, I know how expensive that certification/remediation process can be on both the customer and the vendor.

On the flip side, all of the EMC customers for whom the Vblock product wasn’t a perfect fit, they have been getting V+C+E solutions that can track to the Vblock reference architecture all along. Formalizing that, and handing out stickers to go with the PDF wouldn’t be painful at all. In fact, it would allow VCE to level the competitive landscape somewhat and start to recognize all of the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of V+C+E deployments as Vblocks. Even counting the way we are now it’s pretty clear that VCE is more than holding it’s own on the revenue generation side of things, so I wonder what will happen if the playing field gets leveled on that front. Oh boy.

Will a VCE reference architecture ever happen? I have no idea. I’m part of the field-facing team at VCE, so strategic decisions like this happen well over my head, but I think it would be good for our customers and the market in general. Since it’s already used in places today, and since it would be a way to help EMC by giving them a standard to design V+C+E implementations to, I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t happen. There would definitely be differences in the value proposition; for example I can’t see our traditional single-call support working in a pure reference architecture model, although we could still leverage the joint ticketing and escalation process for customers who build to the reference architecture. The value there would still be higher than it would be if you’d purchased the components separately or through a reseller partner, but not as much as if you’d purchased a single product. Of course I think customers would understand that as part of choosing their acquisition model.

The big picture is that customers want to consume in a way that is most beneficial to their business. With VMware View, EMC and VCE are offering both a productized and reference model version, with VCE being the only company on the market offering View as an integrated part of a converged, multi-vendor infrastructure. Why not take it one step further and have VCE continue to lead the market by becoming the only company to provide both a productized and reference-based infrastructure? Time will tell.

Up and To the Right: A Blogging Milestone

2011-09-27T08:12:36-04:00

Just a quick post to share with you a milestone that I’m pretty excited about. I made my first post to this blog on February 13, 2010 and what started out as a way for me to help organize my thoughts and share things with my internal team has turned into one of the best parts of my professional life. I started strong, detailing my involvement with a Vblock POC, but quickly got mired down in political wrangling and marketing nonsense. By August and September of that year, I was down to no more than a couple posts a month. I was writing a ton of content, but for many reasons (including my own stubbornness) a fair amount of it never got posted, or was posted and then removed.

In late September, after the acquisition of Peak 10 by Welsh Carson was announced, I started looking at other opportunities in the market. It was becoming obvious that my desire to continue innovating on the services side wasn’t going to mesh well with the new outlook and personality of my employer, but my time there had exposed me to a ton of great people and there were opportunities out there.

As I was discussing opportunities with various people, one of the things that I brought up regularly was the blog. I didn’t want to end up in another place where something that I loved doing conflicted with my employer. There were companies I interviewed with where the blog was a take it or leave it kind of thing, and I could see that some of them had no idea what I was talking about. There was one interview, however, where the subject of the blog was actually brought up as part of why they were interested in having me join the team, and that was VCE. Jonathan Donaldson was very straight forward that I was not only allowed to continue the blog, but that I was encouraged to use it however I saw fit to interact with the community at large. From day one, VCE, and to an even greater extent our parent company EMC, has given me more access, more encouragement and more support than I ever expected. They have always allowed me to be as independent as I wanted to be, and even when I’ve crossed the line Jonathan has been there to watch my back.

So with that, September is the first month where I’ll have over 2,500 unique visitors combining for more than 4,000 pageviews.

Both of those numbers have climbed steadily over the last year, and I’m very grateful for your continued participation, and very excited to see that people are getting value out of the content. I’ve posted 44 articles (43 of which are still available…) over that time, averaging around a post a week, which is much closer to where I want to be. With luck, I intend to keep this level of output (or slightly higher, if possible) for the foreseeable future.

Big picture, I have a long way to go, a lot of work to do and much to learn.

4,000 pageviews a month is impressive to little ‘ol me, but there are a lot of bloggers out there that I respect a lot who dwarf that number. I have to keep working, I have to keep learning, I have to keep finding ways to get to the truth of things and find ways to provide value to all of you readers. Luckily, there are a good group of people out there who have been very willing to spend their time and experience with me. While the whole list is too long to name, Chad Sakac, Tommy Trogden and Chuck Hollis are three who have gone above and beyond for me. Tommy is my partner in crime, and he proof-reads and gut-checks almost everything that I write. I’m amazed at the amount of enthusiasm he brings to the table. Chuck has invested a fair amount of time and attention to helping me on the strategic side of the blog. I’m (slowly) learning how to play in the sandbox with the other kids (especially the competitive ones) and how to stay on message. Chuck has forgotten more about blogging and social media in general than I’ll ever know, and I’m lucky to have him as a resources to lean on. Chad was the person who suggested I start blogging in the first place in the run up to our Vblock POC at Peak 10, so for better or for worse, this is all Chad’s fault. He’s also incredibly generous with what little time he has to give, and when I’d gotten into some hot water because of a blog post I’d written he was the first (and only) one to leave me a voice message telling me it was going to be alright, that everyone gets called into the principal’s office sooner or later. Gentlemen, thank you for all you’ve given me. If' I’m getting any better at this over time it’s you three who deserve the most credit.

I have no idea where this blog will end up. I’m toying with the idea of starting a second blog just for my personal use, as sometimes the fairly narrow focus of this forum doesn’t let me run with all of the ideas that I have in my head. I’d like to find a way to generate more discussion on the site, since I typically don’t see a lot of commentary or discussion on most posts. What I do know is that it’s become a very important part of my professional life, and as long as there are people who enjoy reading it, I’ll keep writing it. Thank you all, this has been a lot of fun and there’s definitely more (and hopefully better) to come!

Cisco MDS FC Port Oversubscription Details

2011-09-26T16:59:09-04:00

While working with a customer last week on a multi-site, production virtualization design using the 700-series Vblocks, a question came up over the scalability of the Cisco MDS switches. The customer has MDS 9222i switches in use now, and each Vblock included a pair of MDS 9506 switches for FC connectivity. Specifically, the customer is using multiple 8Gbps FC connections to connect the blades to block storage, in addition to multiple 10Gbps connections for NAS and CIFS. They asked if there were any architectural caveats that needed to be taken into account, and based on my experience as a customer of the MDS switches, I knew that a discussion about oversubscription was going to be needed.

First a little recap if you aren’t that familiar with the Cisco storage networking product set. Cisco has two separate lines of fabric switches, the “Director” line which includes the MDS 9500-series of modular switches and the “Fabric and Blade Switch” line which includes the 9100- and 9200-series devices as well as the blade switches for the HP c-Class BladeSystem. Each device which is capable of using an 8Gbps SFP (with one exception which we’ll get to later), whether it is a line card used in the MDS 9500-series products or a stand-alone fabric switch, has some level of oversubscription in place either locally on the card or on the backplane that connects the cards in the case of the Directors. Knowing where and how this oversubscription takes place is a key part of architecting a design, so here are the basics.

The first thing you need to know is how the individual ports are “grouped” on the switch. I assume (although I haven’t been able to find any documentation to confirm it) that each port group corresponds to a physical hardware stack, maybe an individual fabric services ASIC, which is what actually creates the oversubscription matrix. For example, on the MDS 9222i, which is a 4Gbps FC switch, there are 6 ports per group. On the 4/44-port 8-Gbps Host-Optimized Fibre Channel switching module for the MDS 9500-series there are 12 ports per group.

The next thing to know is how much bandwidth is available per port group. For both of the afore-mentioned devices, the total is 12.8Gbps. In fact, with the exceptions of the MDS 9124 and the MDS 9148, every 8Gbps-enabled MDS device has a total of 12.8Gbps of bandwidth available.

By using the total number of 8Gb ports, the number of ports in a group and the amount of bandwidth per group, you can figure out how far you are going to be able to scale the switch at full line rate, and at which point the over-subscription is going to kick in. If you’d like a handy chart to reference all of the values we just discussed, you can find it here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/sw/5_0/configuration/guides/int/nxos/gen2.html#wp1698506

On the chart, you’ll notice the exceptions I referenced earlier: The MDS 9124/9134 switches (4Gb FC only) and the MDS 9148 (8Gb FC) all require no oversubscription to run full bandwidth through each port on the device. Incidentally, the MDS 9148 is the FC switch included with all 300-series Vblocks in part for this specific reason.

Now you know what your switches/blades are capable of, so what? Is this really a big deal? To me, yes and no. Yes, it’s a design consideration that needs to be accounted for, or at least communicated as part of an architecture since there’s always the possibility that a customer could ramp up FC usage to the point where the oversubscription comes into play. No, because the chances of saturating 100Gbps of backplane with FC traffic is remote at best. Add in that Cisco has included an entire set of NX-OS/SAN-OS commands specifically to be able to control where and how oversubscription happens on a switch/blade and you have a lot of tools at your disposal to prevent an issue. Worst case, Cisco offers both 4Gb and 8Gb FC switches that require no oversubscription at all, so if your design is looking to stress FC bandwidth to the max, that’s the best direction to take. Even before I came to VCE I’ve been a big fan of the MDS line of products, and hopefully this information will make it that much easier for you to utilize them in your own environment.

Thanks to Jason Nash (@nashj) and Tyler Britten (@VMTyler) for keeping me straight with this one. Tyler in particular confirmed that my dusty, hazy memory of bandwidth oversubscription was accurate, and he and Jason both helped me dig up the Cisco documentation to confirm it. I wish I was one of those guys who could keep all of this information in his head, but I’m definitely no Andy Sholomon. It’s good to have friends out there who can help me when I need it. Thank goodness (again) for Twitter!