Data Center Post

WordPress Hosting Optimized by Datagram

2013-05-24T16:28:00.000-03:00

- Ilissa Miller, CEO, iMiller Public Relations, says:

Datagram, Inc. offers a variety of proven services including Managed Server Hosting, Managed Services, Colocation, Data Backup, Disaster Recovery Solutions, Hosted Email, and Internet Access. A renowned and trusted provider of Web Hosting, Datagram has been offering the service as a part of its comprehensive service portfolio since 1995. Unlike most other Web Hosting companies, Datagram provides clients with a truly custom solution that fulfills their specific business needs. Its Managed Server Hosting services include high-demand offerings such as Dedicated or Virtual Private Servers, Advanced Monitoring, Content Delivery, and WordPress Hosting.

One particular specialty that Datagram is known for is WordPress Hosting. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging platform in use on the web and powers over 60 million websites worldwide. It was first released in 2003, and since then, a vast number of plugins, themes, and other features have been added to its expansive offering. These additional features have created a significant level of complexity when it comes to WordPress implementation, deployment, and ongoing management. Today, there are almost 25,000 plugins available to WordPress users. The sheer number of plugins available can significantly complicate resource allocation and raise a multitude of security and vulnerability concerns. Every application requires its own tailored solution. Key considerations include plug-in utilization, nature of content, expected traffic patterns, and infrastructure requirements. Overlooking any one of these criteria will likely cause you heartache in the future.

How does Datagram make a client’s WordPress experience even better? WordPress requires significant resources to efficiently tune the implementation and performance of the service. The company offers individualized, consultative support in helping to identify specific, underperforming areas of the application. To best accomplish this optimization, Datagram partners with Sound Strategies, an application development, SEO, and web design company based in New York. Together, the organizations help customers achieve the best possible custom outcomes for their applications by offering a consultative approach and proven expertise.

Datagram offers WordPress Hosting with 24x7x365 support, managed CDN service, server monitoring and tuning (if required), and NGINX and APC support. Data content types that are cached on CDN include static and dynamic web objects, live streaming media, database queries, and downloadable objects such as media files, software, and documents.

For more information about Datagram and its WordPress Hosting solution, please visit www.datagram.com.

Data Center Remote Management Gets the 4G LTE Treatment

2013-05-23T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Rick Stevenson, CEO of Opengear, says:

3G cellular networking has been integrated into out-of-band management systems for some time now. But until recently, no one had successfully integrated 4G LTE support into remote management gateways. When it comes to remote management, 4G LTE would represent no small improvement: latency can be up to 20 times lower in networks that use 4G than those that rely on its predecessor.

As our customers' networks have spread across the globe via data centers, edge networks and public and private clouds, speed has become paramount (and in high demand). Add to that 4G LTE’s ability to increase overall network capacity and efficiency for carriers and the value of the technology really comes into focus. But so far, industry hasn't been able to take advantage of the increased speed and capabilities promised by integrated 4G LTE for remote management.

We’re hoping to change that, however, thanks to some hard work by our Opengear development team. I'm proud to announce that we have succeeded in incorporating 4G LTE into our out-of-band management solutions, and we are now offering built-in 4G LTE support for our ACM5500 line of remote management gateways. It's true that 4G LTE has made its way to the marketplace as a (less reliable) plug-in solution, but as far as I know Opengear is the first in the industry to fully integrate 4G LTE into a remote management gateway.

The increased speed promised by 4G LTE comes without sacrificing any of the other features that make the ACM 5500 line such a standout in the field. The product offers secure in-band and out-of-band access that enables remote configuration, monitoring and repair of all types of IT and networking equipment. It allows faults to be repaired remotely or automatically, reducing the need for expensive on-site technical visits and minimizing network downtime.

Incorporating 4G LTE also increases the reliability of our products, extending their reach to areas where 4G networks may be the only ones available. And when 4G networks are unavailable, our management gateways are capable of falling back to 3G and even 2G networks to ensure continuity.

Furthermore, just as the 3G version did, our 4G LTE management gateway allows users to access devices at all sites that are behind firewalls, or sites where the primary network connection is impaired.

Perhaps most crucially, Opengear's 4G LTE gateways accommodate 4G LTE network bands worldwide, enabling enterprise to link up infrastructure across the globe seamlessly and efficiently.

Our engineers worked long and hard to bring this technology to fruition. We're very pleased to be able to bring it to market, as we believe this represents a major advance for remote management gateways.

Where in the World is my Data?

2013-05-22T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Dave Ruede, VP Marketing at Temperature@lert, says:

Siting a Data Center: Dilemma or Opportunity

Recently, much has been written and discussed in both professional social media sites and IT journals about locating a data center, particularly as it relates to the issue of energy and cooling. The discussion has raised several options including siting facilities in countries where cooler temperatures are normal and geothermal and other environmentally friendly forms of energy are more common. That being said, it takes a long, large, robust data hose to make such sites viable. Other interesting options are also coming to the fore. This piece discusses Nordic and other options for businesses to consider.

Go North, Young Man….

A 2012 Bloomberg Businessweek article titled Iceland, Data Center Hub? describes Iceland, with a population of 320,000, as “waiting to host the world’s information.” (Link to BW article) A former NATO air base is the site of Verne Global, a $700 million data center where, “You have 100 percent renewable energy. We can do 100 percent free cooling.” The piece also notes, “Iceland faces competition from its Nordic neighbors. In southern Finland, near Helsinki, Google has converted a former paper mill into a data center; Facebook’s first site outside the U.S. will be built close to the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden.”

Krafla geothermal power plant in Iceland (Source: Link to Wikimedia.org)

In Iceland, The 100 percent free cooling is from the country’s abundant geothermal sources coupled with low ambient temperatures. Most Nordic countries have abundant hydroelectric power, a source not without its own environmental concerns. Still, the economics are compelling for energy efficient operation.

Why Not in My Back Yard?

For some, Nordic and Arctic regions may be too remote to consider. How about next door? Siting data centers in large population centers can make a lot of sense. High speed communication is easier because data transmission infrastructure is in place and many users are local. Knowledgeable and experienced staff can be abundantly available. But what can be done about data center power and cooling demands in modern urban environments where electrical grids are often strained and getting rid of heat not always easy?

Creative data centers are taking two paths, sometimes in combination. One is to use heat produced for internal cost reduction. Intel published a 2007 Brief titled Data Center Heat Recovery Helps Intel Create Green Facility. (Link to Intel Brief) In this piece a new data center was able to provide a 1.7 month ROI by installing special heat recovery equipment instead of conventional boilers for the facilities hot water and heating needs. NREL’s new HPC Data Center in Golden Colorado uses such an idea. Opened in early 2013, the facility uses heat capture and reuse to save a projected $200,000 in annual operating expenses, which combined with other energy savings, can bring the site’s total energy savings to $1,000,000 per year.

NREL HPC Data Center waste heat recovery system (Source: Link to NREL)

A second path is to use the exhaust heat for local businesses and residences. Like many older complexes, my university had a central boiler plant with steam pipes to the campus buildings. Data centers may be the new “central heating system” for surrounding buildings.

Website ecoBuilderToday described Canadian telecommunications company Telus’ latest project, a $750-million residential and commercial complex in downtown Vancouver, BC. (Link to ecoBuilderToday Website) The Telus Garden development will use waste heat from its own data center to heat and cool the 24-story office tower and a 53-story residential tower with more than 425 homes plus retail space. Waste heat will also supply domestic hot water for both towers. While power from the grid is needed, capture and reuse of the waste data center heat is expected to reduce the development’s energy demand from conventional sources by up to 80 percent. Many eyes will be watching this project to determine if the economic projections live up to expectations, but there is reason to believe that this design concept will be useful for many large urban infill projects.

Telus Garden data center, retail and residential complex design concept

Too Many Choices, Too Little Time

Which location is best for a particular data center? Businesses will need to assess their strategy and priorities. Considering the Verne Global Iceland based location, Bloomberg Businessweek authors cite an industry competitor who notes, “Iceland may be too remote to become a true data hub. The location would be useful for backup data rather than live traffic that’s needed on a trading floor.” Certainly the infrastructure for seamless, reliable high speed communication is paramount. Still, the arguments and economics may be compelling for those who can afford to build and enlist high quality staff in such remote locations.

For the urban infill projects, large commercial and industrial cities will have future challenges for electrical grid capacity and reliability. The 2012 hurricane Sandy certainly showed even data centers that planned for such outages were at risk of flooding in their below grade generator rooms. So assessing the businesses service reliability guarantees will be an integral part of the siting decision.

As I write this article I am in a friend’s beautiful wooded New England pond side cabin in early April, and winter’s grip is still evident. Despite this, crocuses are beginning to emerge through the leaves, beavers are actively taking down trees for new projects, and giant blue herons and Bufflehead ducks forage for food. It’s nice to have the time to relax and catch up on reading and writing, but my ADD is whispering to me that it’s time to get closer to civilization. Iceland or Vancouver, two interesting choices, ones businesses may want to consider in their search for cost-effective data center options for their current and future customers.

Author: Dave Ruede is VP Marketing at Boston based Temperature@lert (www.temperaturealert.com), a leading developer and provider of low-cost, high-performance temperature monitoring products. Professional interests include environmental and energy issues as they relate to data centers, clean rooms, and electronics. Contact: dave@temperaturealert.com

Base station's ‘headlights,’ often neglected factor

2013-05-21T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Bo Jonsson, Senior RF expert at CellMax Technologies, says:

We have had antennas since the days of Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian scientist who invented the radio a little over 100 years ago. So by now we should all know how to use antennas. But do we? With data replacing voice as the ‘killer application’ in the networks, antenna tilt – the angle in which the antennas are directed – becomes a serious issue and an area where many base stations today are clearly suboptimized.

The long narrow form of the typical array antennas gives them a fan-shaped radiation pattern, wide in the horizontal direction and relatively narrow in the vertical direction. There is usually a downward beam tilt, or downtilt, so that the base station can more effectively cover its immediate area and not cause radio frequency interference to distant cells. For good coverage and call quality, the signal must be strong in the desired radiation area, but drop of sharply where it is not needed or where it interferes with signals from other base stations.

You can compare with a car’s headlights: you want to see everything as clearly as possible in the direction you are travelling, but don’t want to waste energy by illuminating something irrelevant.

The most common antenna in a three-sector base station is the 18 dBi antenna with 65° of horizontal beamwidth and around 6.5° of vertical beam width. The 15 dBi antennas are still quite common, especially on the lower frequencies, with a vertical beam width of around 14°. Most of the planning experience and rollout methods for mobile networks are based on these two antenna types. They are built on the assumption that there are interfering signals not in the adjacent cell, but further away. But in 3G and 4G systems, there is the interference mainly coming from the next cell; there are no longer any “transition zone” between service area and “disturbance area”.

So what does that mean in practice? Well, with data surpassing voice in new 3G and 4G mobile networks, interference is different and so must the antennas be to stay effective. The efficiency of a cellular network depends on its correct configuration and adjustment of radiant systems: their transmit and receive antennas. One of the more important system optimizations task is based on correctly adjusted tilts, or the inclination of the antenna in relation to its axis. When the antenna is tilted down, we call it 'downtilt', which is the most common use. The tilt is used when operators want to reduce interference and/or coverage in some specific areas, having each cell to meet only its designed area.

With data being the networks’ new “killer application” instead of voice, a high carrier-to-interference ratio (C/I) is the key parameter for efficiency, data rate and general success. Carrier-to-Interference ratio (C/I) is the ratio of desired signal power in an RF carrier to the unwanted interference power in the channel. In voice, it was a waste to have very high C/I. But with data replacing voice in the networks we want to have high data rate all the way to the cell border. Basically, we would like to have a coverage that provides a constant signal level all the way to the cell border and there, suddenly, magically, drop to zero. This is of course not possible, but antennas with sharp roll-off can help us to get a lot closer to that ideal situation.

In most sites a sharper upper roll-off will provide higher C/I and less soft handover load. Both of which will increase performance and release capacity, often by over 10 dB in C/I improvement can be seen if the tilt is properly optimized with an antenna having a sharper roll-off curve and high efficiency.

This sounds too good to be true! Can you really improve network efficiency by just swapping the antennas and tilting them differently? Yes, you can. But it comes at a price. It requires both a very accurate tilt setting and a better understanding of how to use the very sharp cell border that these antennas give. Basically, it means that setting tilt after the scale on the tilt bracket is history. Half a degree makes a lot of difference. So, use a good digital leveler.

The conclusion is that most sectors would benefit significantly from an antenna with higher gain and a sharper upper roll-off curve than the standard 18 dBi can offer. Almost every site can perform better if the tilt is optimized better and more often. That is an easy and inexpensive way to improve the networks’ efficiency.

Delivering Highly Reliable SQL Database Using Dell’s Cloud On Demand

2013-05-20T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Frank Huerta, CEO, TransLattice, says:

The new version of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED) can now be deployed on Dell Cloud On Demand. Enterprises around the world are looking to mitigate the risks of outages, data location compliance and vendor lock-in. These enterprises need cost-effective, resilient cloud solutions that bring corporate data closer to remote users, resulting in improved response time for those users. TransLattice’s new version 3.0 of TED effectively solves these issues.

TransLattice has developed the world’s first geographically distributed Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that enables distribution across multiple Dell Cloud data centers while appearing to the end-user as one cohesive database. Running databases in the cloud, in multiple regions, remote users experience exceptional response time and due to the additional redundancy, the organization achieves unparalleled database availability.

TransLattice Elastic Database 3.0 provides numerous advantages to Dell’s users:

Creates a highly available, fault-tolerant database fabric comprised of all-active nodes and capable of being administered from anywhere on the Dell network
Positions mission-critical data closer to the edge of the network for improved response time for customers, partners and employees
Scales easily by adding nodes on demand with no downtime
Spans multiple Dell data centers, enabling global visibility
Controls location of data by policy, enabling simple data location compliance
Costs far less than traditional SQL databases

Dell Cloud on Demand is an enterprise-class, multi-tenant public cloud solution that is hosted in Dell’s secured data centers. By deploying TED on the Dell Cloud, multi-national organizations achieve truly distributed and scalable databases for their global applications while minimizing capital and operational expenses. TED 3.0 is the first and only RDBMS to span Dell’s multiple public cloud networks, while retaining the ability to control data location via policy, and acting as one cohesive database to the end user.

FiberMedia’s Director of Sales Engineering Discusses the Company’s Key Service Offerings and How FiberMedia’s Solutions Help Enterprises Succeed

2013-05-17T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Greg Nares, Director of Sales Engineering for FiberMedia Group, LLC, a leading data center services provider with facilities throughout the New York metropolitan area and Cleveland, OH, recently sat down for an interview to discuss industry trends and how their service offerings provide a competitive edge.

Explain the types of solutions that FiberMedia offers?

FiberMedia provides Intelligent Data Center Solutions to enterprise customers. Intelligent Data Center Solutions seamlessly deliver both the resiliency and security of physical infrastructure and the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the Cloud. The company’s data centers are strategically located in six markets offering both primary and disaster recovery/business continuity services. Locations include Secaucus NJ, Westchester NY, Manhattan NY, Brooklyn NY, Jersey City NJ, and Cleveland OH.

FiberMedia’s services are tailored to our client’s specific needs. Whether the client is looking to take an existing colocation environment and wants FiberMedia to take care of physical environment or a client has a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment and wants FiberMedia to run the OS and database layer, FiberMedia has a tailored solution to meet those needs. FiberMedia’s offerings can be as simple and straightforward as colocation with metered power or as comprehensive as a fully managed offering. This flexibility and focus on client needs is what makes FiberMedia a partner you can rely upon.

How are your solutions different from other offerings available in the market?

There are a wide range of offerings in the market from purely hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to companies that offer just colocation services. Along this spectrum, FiberMedia is ideally positioned to be able to offer the types of services and capabilities that allow our clients to maintain control of the applications and functions they deem necessary and offload those functions that aren’t a core competency.

Our hybrid solutions have the ability to provide a current colocation customer, whose equipment may be End Of Life (EoL), a migration path to the Cloud by providing an on ramp from our SSAE 16 certified data centers. At the hardware’s EoL, the client can create a virtual machine in the Cloud and seamlessly continue to have compute power. This can be done through a single contract and single bill and the services are tailored to our customer’s exacting requirements.

What enhancements, if any, will be made to FiberMedia’s offerings?

We continually seek ways to enhance and upgrade our existing platform, and it will remain at core of our offerings. FiberMedia will continue to add the data center facilities and capabilities that its clients need to succeed.

Portal Enhancements

Self-Management - We currently offer support and management from our existing customer portal and are looking to introduce self-management capabilities such as the ability to increase or decrease committed bandwidth, vCPU, vRAM, and increase storage. Subscribers will also be able to add/remove additional VM's for bursting. We also plan to provide a catalog of standard VM images that clients will be able to access through the portal to implement for specific deployment needs. Finally, we plan to allow clients to create their own VM images, based on their specific requirements.

Enhanced Visibility - We are looking to provide clients with enhanced visibility into their environment via a “single pane of glass” viewing capability. This is a capability that many business customers are looking for and a capability we believe will benefit our clients. It will provide a bird’s eye view into both the client’s internal and external platforms - all done through a single tool.

In January of this year, we launched our Accelerate Partner Program, and since then the response has been great. Our partners will now have access to a turnkey solution that will allow them to brand our IaaS portal management, and we at FiberMedia will take care of the back end support, billing. This will allow our partners to seamlessly offer high quality Cloud services to their end users with the confidence of knowing that these services are backed by FiberMedia’s years of experience.

What trends are you seeing in Cloud services, data center colocation and hybrid solutions?

From the technology perspective, the sector has matured in many ways, and we’re seeing that instead of proprietary ways of working with a Cloud provider or platform, the industry is starting to open up and share. Whether OpenStack or CloudStack, there is a lot of activity in normalizing and using a common language on the platform side, which is allowing adoption of the Cloud to grow and extend rather than creating silos.

While we are still seeing growth on the Cloud and colocation side, we aren’t seeing a lot of providers taking advantage of hybrid capabilities. You see many Cloud providers allowing for cross connects, but they haven’t opened their doors. While that is a step in the right direction, it is not as effective as having your servers physically colocated in the same place as the Cloud. When it comes to the hybrid solutions, we want to push ourselves because we have the ability to offer the compelling solutions that benefit mid-sized to large enterprises. We are looking to put smaller nodes out in more locations.

On the colocation side, we are seeing that it is becoming somewhat commoditized. However, options such as our FlexColo service are continuing to gain traction in the market. We’re seeing more and more requests for metered power from customers, especially from those customers requiring less than 10 cabinets. This is fueling our growth.

We hear a lot about “Cloud”. From your perspective what is the Cloud and what are the benefits of a Cloud-based Solution?

Many service providers use the term “Cloud” and that has created a lot of confusion in the market as to what “Cloud” really is and what services are part of the Cloud. FiberMedia provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). From our perspective, the Cloud is more of a utility type offering where you are turning up services through an online portal, and we view that as a “low touch” means of service. With that type of approach there is not a lot of hand holding, and perhaps not a lot of support provided to the client. FiberMedia provides our client base a trusted partner to work with and more of a consultative approach to design. We provide more hand holding from a solution perspective and our designs are backed by years of experience offering these types of solutions. Our clients confidently trust us to manage their environment, and that trust is not misplaced.

What are some important factors that should be considered when sourcing data center colocation, Cloud, and hybrid solutions?

Some things to consider include asking the following questions:

· Are you working with a partner that you can trust?

· Is the provider working with you towards a common goal?

· Are the people you are interacting with in the pre-sales process going to be the same ones you work with post sale?

· Can this provider adapt and evolve as your needs change, and do they offer the breadth of services you need to efficiently operate your environment?

· Can the provider offer you a custom tailored solution designed to support your needs?

At FiberMedia, we take the time to understand your needs and business challenges and design a custom tailored solution that will support your organization today and into the future. We don’t build out cages and power in advance and force fit our clients into a standard configuration. Because of this approach, we have the ability to build a custom hybrid environment dedicated to a client. The solution could encompass colocation, Cloud with dedicated hardware and virtual machines and dedicated storage components. Our approach is all about flexibility and customization that provides our clients with the infrastructure necessary to succeed.

Another key factor is data center location. FiberMedia’s data centers are strategically located throughout the New York Metropolitan and Cleveland areas making FiberMedia an attractive choice for businesses. From a backup perspective, our Cleveland data center is an ideal site to support our northeast footprint, and we have strong connectivity between our data centers to ensure a seamless transition should it be required.

What would you say to companies interested in the types of solutions FiberMedia offers but haven’t yet contacted FiberMedia?

FiberMedia has been the one-source infrastructure support solution for mid-sized and large enterprise clients in financial services, healthcare, media and IT for more than a decade. Our clients rely on our highly secure, redundant network of strategically located data centers offering geographic diversity and enhanced protection, each one designed to function as both a primary and disaster recovery site.

If you are looking for a trusted provider that will put your interests first as well as one that is capable of providing a full breadth of managed services, and if you are looking for a provider that is offering a solid data center environment backed by high quality service and support, then look no further FiberMedia is the data center provider for you.

Working with FiberMedia, you are not going to get “lost in the in the shuffle”. At FiberMedia, we take a consultative approach and work with you one-on-one to understand your needs and design a solution best suited to support your organization.

Taking a consultative approach, providing high quality service and support and earning your trust - that’s what FiberMedia is all about.

What’s next for FiberMedia?

Today FiberMedia is a regional company with great financial partners. We plan to build on this solid foundation to expand our physical footprint nationally and continue to grow our suite of services either organically or through partnerships with best-in-class providers. From colocation to managed services as well as on the Cloud side, you’ll see enhancements throughout 2013 and beyond. The team is focused on getting to the next level, and that growth is right at our door step.

Where can prospects learn more about FiberMedia?

For more information on FiberMedia, please visit our website at www.fibermedia.net or by following FiberMedia on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Pica8 Open Data Center Framework Simplifies SDN Deployments

2013-05-16T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Steve Garrison, Vice President of Product Marketing at Pica8, says:

Pica8 Inc. has announced its Pica8 Open Data Center Framework. The framework is designed to provide the essential building blocks toward an eventual transformation to programmable and agile data center networks, including OpenFlow 1.2 and Open vSwitch. This framework will enable cloud providers and web services companies to drive down the costs of application services provisioning in response to customer demands.

In the Open Data Center Framework, Pica8 is extending its Open Networking vision, blending the conceptual benefits of the server and conventional networking worlds. The framework is designed for cloud and data center service providers looking to fundamentally change how they operate and manage their network. It enables the use of white box switches for lower Capex.

Using white box switches simplify the planning and execution of upgrade processes, creating a plug-and-play environment. According to Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, “Pica8’s framework for a programmable network strives to lay the foundation for an improved way to upgrade network devices, paralleling what is coined a “rip and replace” model on the server side.”

By leveraging the Open Data Center Framework for more granular application flow management, Pica8 technology enables customers to personalize and abstract the OS from the hardware, which enables service providers to utilize commoditized switches in a similar rip-and-replace fashion to swapping out a white box server.

Pica8 top-of-rack switches have been deployed in several reference architectures running OVS (Open vSwitch) with RYU, an OpenFlow 1.2 controller from NTT Laboratories. The integrated deployments provide distributed intelligence along with the orchestration needed to provision services to meet specific application needs.

To deliver a personalized data center experience, the Pica8 Open Data Center framework will continue to leverage SDN to develop components needed to manage and provision the network. OpenFlow 1.2 and OVS bring capabilities such as: GRE tunneling for overlays, traffic engineering to optimize network resources and SDN-based network taps for ensuring application flow performance. These capabilities enable network architects to better understand how to best deploy SDN solutions and leverage the idea of managing individual flows.

Steve Garrison | Vice President of Product Marketing
Steve Garrison is a networking systems veteran with nearly 20 years of technology marketing experience. At Pica8, he leads go-to-market and brand development strategies. Prior to joining Pica8, Steve has held global marketing positions at public and venture-backed companies, including Infoblox, Force10 Networks (acquired by Dell, Inc.) and Riverstone Networks (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). He holds a MS in Materials Science Engineering from MIT and a BS in Ceramic Science and Physics from Alfred University.

Compuverde Sees Fusion-io’s Acquisition of ID7

2013-05-15T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Stefan Bernbo, CEO and founder of Compuverde, says:
As the demand for virtual data storage is rapidly growing, service providers are quickly realizing that software-defined storage is becoming a necessity and not an option. Flash memory leader Fusion-io recently acquired software-defined storage

pioneer ID7, citing the significant data storage efficiency and performance benefits a software-defined storage approach delivers.

Service providers and telcos are seeking ways to scale rapidly and efficiently, while simultaneously reducing costs and downtime. The acquisition of ID7 by Fusion-io is a clear indicator that service providers aren’t closing their eyes to the idea of switching from appliance infrastructure to software-defined storage options that allow them to choose less expensive, more energy-efficient hardware.

“Software-defined storage is the future of the data center,” said Stefan Bernbo, CEO and founder of Compuverde. “Major enterprises, service providers and telcos are seeking ways to accommodate a tidal wave of storage demands, and Fusion-io’s acquisition of ID7 signals that the market is shifting to anticipate these trends by adopting the flexibility, efficiency and cost savings that software-defined solutions can offer.”

This trend illustrates the growing dominance of software over hardware as the driver of performance in the data storage market. Fusion-io, along with other storage solution providers, like Compuverde, will continue to push the software-defined storage market with the goal of providing cost-effective, energy efficient, storage options.

As virtual machines become more popular, software-defined storage becomes an ideal method for scaling storage capacity and performance because it can be easily altered and improved upon in keeping up with user needs.

It’s clear that the challenges facing data centers will continue to grow. To keep up with these challenges, significant breakthroughs in modern storage architecture will need to take place. Utilizing software-defined storage will be the key to delivering peak performance and efficiency for data centers in the future. Those making the shift now to software-defined architecture will find the transition much more pleasant.

Business Leaders and IT Teams: Bridging the Thought ‘Gap’ on Cloud Computing

2013-05-14T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Paul Lidsky, President & CEO, Datalink, says:

A lot has already been written about cloud computing. This includes early success stories (Salesforce.com, e-mail, HR in the cloud among them), common pros and cons of the cloud, and examples of the many “as-a-service” cloud computing flavors du jour (like SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS).

This is all for good reason. A view of one of the most popular cloud models, software-as-a-service (SaaS), reveals SaaS spending already poised to grow from $14.5 billion in 2012 to a predicted $22.1 billion by 2015, according to Gartner 2012 estimates.[1]

Such findings dovetail with our own experience working with enterprise and mid-size organizations to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud. Many continue to explore, experiment and talk about cloud computing in all of its iterations, whether that be public cloud services, the development of private clouds (those operating on a company’s own IT infrastructure from behind the IT firewall), or the move toward an ultimate, hybrid cloud scenario that mixes elements of private and public clouds.

When it comes to talking about the cloud, however, we’ve noticed a growing gap in cloud thinking. Specifically, cloud perceptions, concerns and conclusions tend to be quite different when voiced by a company’s executive management team versus its IT team.

To ensure a company’s cloud efforts don’t get summarily derailed, we have found it pays to explore this gap in cloud thinking and look for ways to help close the gap.

Executives and Business Unit Leaders See the Promise of Quick Reward

In the wake of such great success stories, it’s hard for most executives to turn a blind eye to the potential of cloud for their own organizations. They certainly don’t want to get left behind the competition who may be able to gain a faster edge by executing this transformational IT model.

After all, leading cloud providers are quick to offer successful use cases with rapid ROI. They are also quick to provide ready answers to many of an executive’s or business unit leader’s most pressing challenges. What’s more, they seem to be able to offer a cloud service that’s available now, for what appears to be a reasonable, variable per-use cost. When service rollouts can occur in 8 minutes (Amazon, anyone?) versus their own IT organization’s often protracted 8-week cycles, it’s hard for executives not to take notice and want to act quickly. Their motivation is around increasing the speed with which deployments occur and reducing the cost to do so.

Some business unit leaders, tasked with ever-growing initiatives, have been known to take a flyer on cloud services— without consulting IT in the process—in a bid to reap fast business results. Often going under their company’s internal IT radar armed with a credit card and an expense account, many have already embarked on public cloud service projects. This effectively creates its own “BlackOps” or “Shadow IT” functions in the process and potentially leaves the door open to a number of challenges when it comes to compliance and risk management.

In fact, a research survey on the role of the CIO commissioned by Brocade in 2012, showed over one-third of respondents confirming that cloud services had already been deployed by business units without IT involvement.[2]

In this case, does the end justify the means? Many business unit leaders seem to think so, choosing instead to ask for forgiveness later.

IT’s Dilemma: Reigning in the Cloud’s Wild, Wild West and the Potential of Data Run Amok

From an IT team’s perspective, there’s a good dose of cloud fatigue already setting in. Sure, many have read a lot of the stories. They’ve also heard the hype from vendors trying to get their company’s business. Many are also interested in incorporating what makes the cloud so powerful into their own internal IT delivery models: The ability to be agile, to respond quickly, to scale easily for new business needs, and the ability to offer services that are easy to quantify from a cost perspective. Many even think there’s much to be learned from the emerging cloud model, including the ability to automate business processes in a way that makes them very agile for today’s new digital, virtualized economy.

But, in reality, many IT teams are also so short-staffed and embroiled in maintaining their company’s day-to-day IT operations (i.e., just trying to keep the lights on!), that they don’t always have the time they’d like (and need) to devote to strategic cloud thinking.

Such IT teams are also the default gatekeepers of their company’s sensitive and confidential IP and customer data assets. They see the moves of business unit leaders and others not versed in IT as risky. They’ve been trained to look carefully at the risk/benefits of any new projects. They’ve also been trained to consider issues that ensure their company’s data and applications remain highly secure, compliant and protected against loss or disaster. And, their best practices include evaluating and anticipating potential repercussions that could come from future upgrades or changes to existing business or technology processes. When it comes to embarking on cloud services, they want to apply this background and best practices to any third-party cloud service and ensure it’s been evaluated for:

Proper access/security protocols to limit access
Adherence to corporate and government compliance rules
Proper backup/recovery procedures to protect company data
Effectiveness of the vendor’s service level agreement (SLA), including a predefined Exit Plan if the cloud vendor’s business fails or the company wants to move to another cloud vendor.

Unfortunately, many IT teams want to explore cloud but may find themselves too busy to transition to the ultimate role they want to play in the new world of cloud: That of aiding the company in the brokering and engagement of IT cloud services (whether those services ultimately come from an external third-party or from their own internal infrastructures).

How to Close the Gap Between Business Leaders and Internal IT

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to closing this gap in thinking between business leaders and IT teams. But, we’ve found the following general guidelines can help:

Focus First on What Both Parties Want: Meeting the needs of the business quickly and effectively. More specifically, focus on the desirable aspects cloud computing brings to the table: Agility, cost savings, fast deployment, fast resolution to a current challenge, fast ROI. Explore ways to take the best of cloud and incorporate that into your on-going IT operations.
Focus on the “I” in IT first, and the “T” later. This means working together first to define top-of-mind needs and processes. Then, look at the various service delivery models (including public and/or private/internal cloud services) to meet these needs and processes.
Use IT Employee Strengths. Don’t leapfrog over IT’s very real ability to plan IT projects for ultimate success. The business can benefit from IT employees versed in offering business use case analyses, common methodologies for risk/reward and TCO assessments of prospective cloud service offerings.
Get Help and Advice from Expert Advisors. Look to consulting organizations and impartial cloud experts to help bridge this gap. Here, prudent investment in internal IT can also pay off, as loyal IT employees learn more about how to effectively evaluate and broker cloud services for the enterprise, and how best to transition their current internal IT model into one that’s more agile.
Virtualize the Data Center. IT has likely started to lay the foundation for a transition to cloud by virtualizing storage, networks, and/or servers. Now is the time to fully virtualize the data center to realize near-term benefits and position your organization for a migration to cloud when the time is right.
Design Short Cloud Test Periods with the Best, Low-Hanging Fruit. Here, as well, advisors can help identify the most compelling use cases for cloud services that offer the best chance of success with the smallest risk of failure. Development and testing can be one area where we’ve seen a company reap large returns in very short order.
Meet in the Middle: Begin cultivating and rewarding a corporate culture of innovation and rapid change across all departments—from executives to IT employees monitoring daily backups.

Cloud represents one of the most transformational IT movements that organizations will face. Successfully migrating to cloud—whether public, private, or hybrid—involves an evolution of processes, technologies, and people. And, it requires extensive collaboration between business leaders and IT. Done well, organizations stand to gain competitive advantage and propel their business forward.

Paul Lidsky is President and CEO of Datalink, a publicly-held data center solutions and services provider. Paul meets extensively with leaders of mid- and large-size enterprises regarding data center optimization best practices.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/saas-pros-cons-and-leading-vendors-7000011500/.

[2] http://newsroom.brocade.com/press-releases/the-cio-is-dead-long-live-the-cio-the-cloud-rede-nasdaq-brcd-977455. See also Brocade survey results slides at: http://www.slideshare.net/DawnMorris/future-of-the-cio-15888849.

Gold Strike vs. Striking Out – Extracting Unstructured Data from the Enterprise Backyard

2013-05-13T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Kon Leong of ZL Technologies, says:

A “Big Data” gold rush is sweeping the enterprise world, complete with the hype and anything-goes attitude of the original 49ers. Information is increasingly described as the new currency of business, and companies are driven into a frenzy when it comes to staking their claim and “mining” it. But just like the prospectors driven West with the promise of easy fortune, we are often mistakenly overlooking the value of materials that have been in front of us all along. Software and services that claim to instantly process and mine data are flying off the shelves before the companies buying them even bother to assess their own internal data landscape. And as it turns out, there’s quite a bit of valuable business information to be unearthed right in the enterprise backyard.

Why haven’t corporations been quick to leverage data that’s been available for years in knowledge management (KM) systems? The digitization of communications means that the internal business process is driven by an endless effluent of documents, emails, IMs, and other forms of “unstructured” data that are potentially rich in human insight but poor in the polished nuggets of traditional BI outputs. In the race to numerical data veins, we’ve just been trampling over equally valuable deposits of human information that are simply more difficult to refine. The raw ore of communications may take more processing, but it promises to yield additional information we need to drive businesses forward, especially as the benefits from traditional “structured” analytics start to reach an upper limit.

Internal sources can offer a treasure trove of information that rivals anything collected from customers or “outside” sources such as data brokers. Regulatory and legal requirements already mandate that unstructured data of emails and documents be archived and managed, and yet today this information often sits unused or filed away. We hoard unstructured data defensively rather than for proactive analysis. But just like those early prospectors, our methods of extracting value are improving with time.

The next frontier of KM is to refine the information right under our noses, and to add a uniquely human perspective to strategy. Our business communication patterns reveal workflows, strengths, weaknesses, efficiency, and even collective sentiment. With the rapid advancement of text analytics, the possibilities of mining human-generated material have staggering potential. The challenge is having centralized architecture capable of processing an entire corpus of unstructured information in one platform: “silos” of information irreparably hinder the aggregation required for true “Big Data” analytics. Moving forward, the infrastructure used to handle enterprise unstructured data will largely determine whether the business will obtain true glimmers of insight or simply end up with fool’s gold.

Mobile Cloud Computing: A Big Change for the Business World

2013-05-10T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Deney Dentel, CEO at Nordisk Systems, says:

The advent of the cloud has had profound effects on the computing world. With businesses moving their IT resources to various cloud-based services, the door has been opened for mobile app developers to embrace cloud computing as a platform. The cloud has evolved from its early days of providing anywhere access to documents. Its become an entirely new way of storing, processing and distributing data.

Mobile app development is beginning to embrace the cloud computing movement as a method for delivering content. The majority of mobile apps still involve installing separate apps on each device, much like computers. If a user wants an app, they buy it, install it and run it. However, just as cloud-based applications have rendered this practice obsolete for most business apps, mobile app developers now have the ability to use the same system to deliver their product to consumers.

The advantages of delivering mobile applications through the cloud are similar to the benefits enjoyed by cloud-based computer software. There’s only one instance of the application to manage. All mobile users access the same set of data, eliminating issues with multiple versions of the app or broken features because the user didn't download the new update. Developers can now roll out the newest version of their app instantly and every user will benefit from the enhancements without having to download and install an update.

Users will benefit from these same features. They’ll no longer need to download and install updates. New content will be available to them the instant it is released by the publisher. Users will enjoy seamless integration with their favorite social media platform.

Cloud computing mobile apps can also offer smoother integration with other cloud-based content, particularly social media and other sharing platforms. Multi-user features are can be easily implement within the app itself, as all users are already accessing the data simultaneously.

The future development potential of mobile cloud app is limitless. As new web technologies emerge, like HTML5, developers will move away from traditional methods of app development. They’ll no longer have to compile and distribute platform-specific executable to users. Mobile apps will become more seamless with other cloud-based content.

Author Bio:

Deney Dentel is the CEO at Nordisk Systems, Inc. Nordisk Systems is the only local Nexenta certified partner in Portland, Oregon delivers enterprise class storage with the amount of physical space that your data center possesses.

TransLattice Unveils First Cross-Cloud Database

2013-05-09T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Frank Huerta, CEO, TransLattice, says:

As enterprises move to the Cloud, many are looking to mitigate the risks surrounding outages, data location compliance and vendor lock-in. TransLattice’s new version 3.0 of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED) effectively solves this issue. TransLattice has developed the world’s first geographically distributed Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that enables deployment on multiple public cloud provider networks at the same time, as well as on virtual machines (VMs), physical hardware or any combination thereof.

TransLattice Elastic Database 3.0 provides numerous advantages to its users:

· Spans multiple public clouds simultaneously

· Creates a highly available, fault-tolerant database fabric comprised of all-active nodes and capable of being administered from anywhere on the network

· Scales capacity easily by adding nodes on demand with no downtime

· Positions mission-critical data closer to the edge of the network for improved response time for customers, partners and employees

· Controls data location through simple-to-configure policies, thereby reducing the need for federation of data and streamlining compliance management

· Costs far less than traditional SQL databases and includes geographic distribution capabilities that others don’t have

Using TED 3.0, organizations can minimize the risk of moving databases to the cloud by taking advantage of more than one cloud provider, knowing that they can add or change providers at a later date. TED 3.0, can cross multiple public cloud and on-premises infrastructure, providing organizations with more flexibility as they make use of the cloud. It addresses the challenges that multi-national organizations face of running truly distributed and scalable databases for their global applications. In addition, TED 3.0 helps these organizations optimally deploy cloud applications, and shields those organizations from individual cloud service provider outages. TED 3.0 is the first and only RDBMS to span multiple public cloud networks, while retaining the ability to control data location via policy, and acting as one cohesive database to the end user.

Why Replication and Erasure Coding is the future for Cloud Storage and Big Data

2013-05-08T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Paul Carpentier, CTO and Founder of Caringo, says:

In the course of IT history, many schemes have been devised and deployed to protect data against storage system failure, especially disk drive hardware. These protection mechanisms have nearly always been variants on two themes: duplication of files or objects (backup, archiving, synchronization, remote replication come to mind); or parity-based schemes at disk level (RAID) or at object level (erasure coding, often also referred to as Reed-Solomon coding). Regardless of implementation details, the latter always consists of the computation and storage of “parity” information over a number of data entities (whether disks, blocks or objects). Many different parity schemes exist, offering a wide range of protection trade-offs between capacity overhead and protection level - hence their interest.

Erasure coding:

As of late, erasure coding has received a lot of attention in the object storage field as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to content protection. This is a stretch. Erasure coding is a solid approach to storage footprint reduction for an interesting but bounded field of use cases, involving BOTH large streams AND large clusters, but at the cost of sacrificing the numerous use cases that involve small streams, small clusters, or a combination of the two.

Most readers will be familiar with the concept of RAID content protection on hard disk drives. For example, the contents of a set of 5 drives is used to compute the contents of what is called a parity drive adding one more drive to the RAID set for a total of 6 drives. Of the total set of 6, if any single drive fails, the content that is lost can be rebuilt from the 5 remaining drives. Aside such a 5+1 scheme, many others are possible, where even multiple drives can fail simultaneously and yet the full content can be rebuilt: there is a continuum in the trade-off between footprint and robustness.

More recently, the same class of algorithms that is used for RAID has been applied to the world of object storage: they are commonly called Erasure Codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_code). The concept is similar: imagine an object to be stored in a cluster. Now, rather than storing and replicating it wholly we will cut the incoming stream into (say) 6 segments in a 5:1 scheme each with parity information. Similar to the RAID mechanism above, any missing segment out of the 6 can be rebuilt from the 5 remaining ones, hence the 1. This provides a mechanism to survive a failed disk drive without making a full replica: the footprint overhead is just 20% here rather than 100% with comparable data durability.

Beyond this “5+1” scheme, many more Erasure Coding (EC) schemes are possible. They can survive as many disk failures as their number of parity segments: a 10+6 scheme can survive 6 simultaneous segment failures without data loss, for instance. Here the overhead will be 60% ((10+6)/10).

Erasure coding comes with trade-offs

The underlying objective is clear: provide protection against failure at lower footprint cost. However, as usual, there is no such thing as a ‘free lunch.’ There are trade-offs to be considered when compared to replication. The key is to have the freedom to choose the best protection for each particular use case.

When chopping up objects to store the resulting segments across a number of nodes, the “physical” object count of the underlying storage system is multiplied (e.g., for a 10:6 scheme, it’s multiplied by 16). Not all competing object storage systems handle high object count well. It is also clear that the granularity (i.e., minimum file size) of the underlying file system or object storage system will play a role in suggesting how small an object can be to be economically stored using erasure coding. It doesn’t really make sense from an efficiency perspective to store, say, a 50K object using a 10:6 erasure coding scheme if there is a file system at the core of a storage system. This is because file systems still segment files into blocks with minimum block sizes. A common threshold for this block size for a Linux file system is 32K so the resulting storage needed for a 50K file using a 10:6 erasure coding scheme would be would be 512K (32K * 16 segments) or a 10X increase in footprint. As we will see replication is a much better approach for small files.

Replication:

The simplest form of protective data redundancy is replication, with one or more additional copies of an “original” object being created and maintained to be available if that original somehow gets damaged or lost. In spite of the recent hype around erasure coding, we will see that there still are substantial use case areas where replication clearly is the superior option. For the sake of the example, imagine a cluster of a 100 CPUs with one disk drive each, and 50 million objects with 2 replicas each, 100 million objects grand total. When we speak of replicas in this context, we mean an instance - any instance - of an object; there is no notion of “original” or “copy.” 2 replicas equal a grand total of 2 instances of a given object, somewhere in the cluster, on 2 randomly different nodes. When an object loss is detected a recovery cycle begins. Data loss only occurs if both replicas are lost which is why it is important to store replicas on different nodes and if possible different locations. It is also important to have efficient and rapid recovery cycles; you want to ensure that your objects are quickly replicated in case of an overlapping recovery cycle which may lead to data loss. If there are three replicas per object, three overlapping recovery cycles (a very low probability event) will be required to cause any data loss.

Replication and Erasure combined is the answer

As so often in IT, there is no single perfect solution to a wide array of use cases. In object storage applications, cluster sizes run the gamut between just a few nodes built into a medical imaging modality to thousands of nodes spanning multiple data centers, with object sizes ranging between just a few Kilobytes for an email message and hundreds of Gigabytes for seismic activity data sets. If we want to fulfill the economic and manageability promises of the single unified storage, we need technology that is fully capable of seamlessly adapting between those use cases.

To deal with the velocity and variability of unstructured information, organizations are increasingly turning to cloud storage infrastructures to manage their data in a cost-effective, just-in-time manner, while others may need the robustness of Big Data repositories to handle the volume that today’s boundless storage requires. A combination of both replication and erasure coding, combined into a singular object storage solution, will provide the best option to access and analyze data regardless of object size, object count or storage amount while ensuring data integrity aligned with business value. Traditional file systems simply cannot provide the ease of management and accessibility required for cloud storage, nor will they provide the massive scalability and footprint efficiency required for Big Data repositories. The future of both cloud storage and Big Data remain firmly entrenched in an object storage solution that incorporates both replication and erasure coding into its architecture to overcome the limitations of either one technology.

To see an in depth paper on “Replication and Erasure Coding Explained” please visit http://www.caringo.com/

FrontRange’s HEAT 2013 Delivers Unparalleled Flexibility to Customers with Hybrid ITSM

2013-05-07T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Kevin J. Smith, Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Business Unit, FrontRange, says:

FrontRange is by no means a new contender in the IT Service Management (ITSM) industry. A pioneer in the Service Desk and Service Management markets, founded in 1989 and currently managing millions of service interactions a day for more than 15,000 customers around the world, we’ve witnessed many key changes in the industry with one of the most recent—and most disruptive—being the rise of cloud applications over the past half-decade or so. As we quickly came to recognize the paradigm shift that would occur with growing adoption of cloud alternatives to the long established on-premise IT product offerings, FrontRange invested heavily in the development of an all-new, cloud-based multi-tenant ITSM solution. Fast forward six years…with the upcoming release of our HEAT 2013 solutions, which will be generally available in late May 2013, FrontRange is proud to be the only provider of Hybrid ITSM solutions on an integrated built-for-purpose platform.

What does this mean for our customers? Hybrid ITSM solutions give customers the ability to choose how they will deliver service to the business, without forcing them to pigeon-hole their entire organization into an either/or choice between on-premise or cloud-based solutions that more often than not results in a compromise between considerations of cost and organizational efficiency. With hybrid, customers can choose to implement multi-tenant cloud-based ITSM to teams where it makes sense to do so—such as remote branch offices where there is lacking IT staff on hand and limited infrastructure—while still employing powerful on-premise solutions at larger, main sites where there are significant IT resources on hand and the necessary infrastructure at all times. Since HEAT 2013 utilizes a unified code base, its Migration Tool allows for easy bi-directional transitions to and from on-premise and cloud deployments. Put simply, HEAT 2013 will provide clients with a product that will give them the maximum level of flexibility and control over how they deliver outstanding service and support, while minimizing costs, maximizing efficiency, and compromising nothing in the way of security, performance, or scalability.

Flexibility is very desirable to IT decision-makers when evaluating their many ITSM options. Stephen Mann, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research recently wrote, “[In my opinion], choice is important; in particular choice between delivery models and also choice over time. It’s also becoming an increasingly high-profile part of ITSM tool vendor selling and marketing/messaging conversations. FrontRange in particular has raised the stakes on choice in terms of coining a new term Hybrid ITSM and making it core to its value proposition.”[1]

Going further in the pursuit of value, FrontRange’s HEAT Service Management platform uniquely integrates voice and workflow automation with client management applications that are delivered on-premise and in the cloud. New capabilities in HEAT 2013 include the ability to post messages directly to specified service teams, social groups and/or user profiles, one-click access to recent work or accessed items to improve service analyst’s productivity, tighter integration with external applications, web services API, IE10 Support and language localization, among other features.

[1] Mann, Stephen; Forrester Blog; March 26, 2013: http://blogs.forrester.com/stephen_mann/13-03-26-the_importance_of_customer_choice_in_itsm_tool_selection_hybrid_itsm

How cloud computing alternatives are affecting the IT Service Management needs of organizations

2013-05-06T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Kevin Smith, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Business Unit, of FrontRange, says:

FrontRange and THINKstrategies have teamed up on a survey of 341 IT professionals around the world to determine how cloud computing alternatives are affecting the IT Service Management needs of organizations.

Among the many interesting findings from this survey, one in particular stands out: nearly half of the survey respondents verify that their currently installed ITSM solutionsthat serve as the backbone of IT organizationsare 5+ years old. As a result, many of these aging systems are being evaluated for major upgrades and/or replacement.

While the vast majority of respondents are deploying on premise ITSM solutions, the tide is shifting to cloud-based implementations.

And this raises big questions about the pros and cons of multi-tenant vs. single tenant cloud architectures being relied upon to deliver ITSM solutions that run everything from help desks and change management requests, to incident response processes and much more.

ITSM vendors relying on single tenant architectures are at a distinct disadvantage for a host of reasons:

1.      They can only scale out new customers in a linear fashion, which means they have to add a dedicated server or virtual machine in third-party data centers for each new client. This is an expensive business model whose significant overhead gets passed on to customers.
2.      Vendors using single tenant architectures must pay for each customer upgradethat adds substantial costs.
3.      Customers in a single tenant architecture have their own software code, which makes version control and upgrades a customer support nightmare for vendors.

Multi-tenant architectures, on the other hand, maintain notable advantages that include:

1.      Significant economies of scale since each new customer resides in a common database meaning fewer servers are required to support a bigger customer base.
2.      Software upgrades can be rolled out en masse to ensure each customer is running consistent versions of sofware.
3.      The cost to implement software upgrades is fractional compared to single tenant architectures since it is a uniform, one-time process.
4.      Less expensive customer support personnel can handle these upgrades, which saves vendors costsand those savings are passed on to customers.

These are just a handful of tradeoffs between these competing cloud architectures.

KASEYA ON THE CLOUD AND THE POWER OF FREE

2013-05-03T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Bob Davis, CMO of Kaseya (www.kaseya.com), says:

The cloud delivers a myriad of potential advantages over on-premises applications, from simplifying new software deployment and maintenance to enabling compliance and enhancing security, all contributing to significant cost savings to IT organizations. Kaseya is committed to its vision of providing the widest and most comprehensive range of automated IT systems management tools and is the industry’s only vendor to offer a complete cloud solution.

We provide an unmatched IT systems management experience for our worldwide customers. We built our business to leverage the Web to make it extremely easy for companies of all sizes to quickly deploy, manage and dynamically expand as systems management needs arise and change. The market wants effective, easy-to-use and deploy systems management technology. With our complete cloud solution and our new targeted IT Tools we are answering this call.

By leveraging a SaaS delivery model to provide free access to key IT management solutions that will identify opportunities for performance improvements, cost reductions and the achievement of compliance objectives, Kaseya has opened the door to a larger audience of organizations reliant on IT to drive business goals and profitability.

Kaseya meets the needs of modern IT organizations that fully recognize the advantages of the SaaS delivery model and the benefits to working in the cloud. The award-winning Kaseya IT Systems Management platform has been leveraged by thousands of IT organizations worldwide to solve countless IT challenges. Kaseya now delivers targeted SaaS IT tools based on specific IT pain points. These pain point driven tools can be as simple as a patch status audit or security audit to a complete patch management solution.

The free IT tools available today are:

File Share Audit
Determines and reports on what file shares have been created on up to 1,000 computers, including the accessibility of those files.

User Audit
Determines and reports on what user accounts are configured on up to 1,000 computers, including access privileges and guest accounts.

Software Audit
Provides a complete inventory of installed applications for up to 1,000 computers through comprehensive reports, views and lists.

Security Audit
Determines and reports on endpoint security settings for up to 1,000 computers, including AV engine(s) installed, active status and date of last updates.

Windows Patch Status
Determines and reports on endpoint patch status on up to 1,000 computers, including Windows update settings and patch status information.

To download and try out any of the free, subscription-based Kasey IT tools or new Essentials bundle, go to: http://www.kaseya.com/solutions/free-tools.aspx

87% of Enterprises Will Add New Data Centers in the Next 12-24 Months

2013-05-02T08:30:00.000-03:00

Buyer Behavior Study Commissioned by Compass Datacenters...

A new study of the data center industry commissioned by Compass Datacenters has identified a number of emerging factors that are shaping the data center strategies of enterprise companies in the United States. The study also projects a strong wave of new data center construction in 2013 and 2014. The research was conducted by the respected research firm Campos Research, which surveyed senior decision makers who steer the data center strategies at 150 U.S. companies with annual revenues of $250 million or more.

Key findings from the study include the following:

• 87% of companies will build a data center in next 12-24 months. This represents an acceleration of the trend, with 63% reporting that they completed data center projects in the last 12 months.

• 71% of companies ranked new applications as the primary reason for needing expanded data center infrastructure—making it the most often-cited driver for data center expansions in 2013 and 2014.

• Three-quarters of companies reported that they plan to support a combination of new applications, virtualization, Big Data, and Private Cloud with their new data centers—showing a variety of needs behind the expansions.

• 97% of companies are seeking to locate their new data centers less than 30 miles from their headquarters or major operations center—making geographic proximity a chief consideration in upcoming data center projects.

“Our team has worked with Campos for several years, and they have an uncanny ability to identify emerging trends before they reach critical mass and transform the data center industry. Their past research was prescient in identifying energy efficiency, wholesale data centers and modular design as important emerging issues well before they gathered steam and were broadly acknowledged as major trends. This new study identifies geographic proximity as a key consideration for the projects that companies are currently planning, and that has the potential to change the landscape of the data center industry, both figuratively and literally,” said Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters. “In the past, companies based outside of major data center markets had to sacrifice proximity when it came to the location of their data centers. They had little choice but to put their data center in one of the handful of markets, often placing those IT assets far from the companies’ HQ or major operations center. Not only did that increase costs and risk, but it also was inherently inefficient from a long-term operations perspective. This new study makes it clear that enterprises don’t want to make that compromise any more, and that has huge ramifications for data center providers.”

Following are additional findings from the study:

• Companies who are planning to build in the next 12 months are planning to add an average of 2 facilities. That average increases to 3.5 when the timeframe is expanded to 24 months.

• The companies who participated in the study currently have an average of 3 data centers. 25% reported that they currently have 5 or more data centers.

• 96% of companies reported that the size of their data centers will be 20,000 square feet or less.

• CIOs were identified as the primary executive who determines need for data center expansion. CIOs were cited by 37% of companies as the person who approves the project, with 24% reporting that the final decision is made by the CEO. 44% of companies described CIOs as having the most influence on the purchasing decision with 19% saying that the CEO now has the greatest influence.

• The most common process for beginning a project is to set the requirements and then look for providers as a second step in the process (71% of respondents).

• The most important factors cited in the selection process for a provider is Service Level. Green strategy was the lowest-ranked selection factor.

• 75% of companies will evaluate 3 providers as part of their selection process.

• Only 44% of companies said that they would consider building the data center themselves, indicating that “do-it-yourself” is declining.

For more findings from this study and analysis from Compass Datacenters, visit http://www.compassdatacenters.com/compass-university/.

Inter-Data Center Connectivity Gets Smarter

2013-05-01T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Ilissa Miller, CEO, iMiller Public Relations, says:

What happens when you want to get from one data center managed meet-me-room to another? First, most data centers charge a cross-connect fee – whether it’s a one-time fee or monthly recurring. Then, identifying the right, most cost-effective provider to take you from point A to point B could be time consuming and tedious. Lastly, there is the provisioning time frame to consider – one data center may have a specific policy, another may have a different one. Managing the process through each of these steps, including assuring all contract details and purchase orders are in place, can be tedious – to say the least.

If you are a customer of one colocation provider that maintains multiple facilities and offers inter-facility cross connects, your issues are managed for you. And in that instance, you are in luck. But the chances are that your network connections need to go from one provider’s facility to another – even within a given metro market – and the process to get from point A to point B, as outlined above, can be time consuming, tedious and resource-intensive.

Today’s network providers are smartening up to identifying what the issues are in the market and create business models that solve those concerns. One such company championing this thought process is Global Capacity. Global Capacity has solved the problem of interconnecting disparate networks to achieve effective access network connectivity. To get from your Point of Presence (PoP) to the end- user location requires an access network connection, and with one interconnect to One Marketplace, Global Capacity can provide customers with multiple network options and automated pricing within seconds. Should these customer-specific / competitive quote be accepted by the customer, the automated pricing platform also accepts orders, manages the provisioning process and can even manage the network for you if required.

Global Capacity has solved the problem of getting from one PoP to an end location leveraging disparate network connections through a single platform. Now, there is also a company, MOD Mission Critical that has solved the problem of getting from one meet-me-room to another meet-me-room across different data center operated facilities.

In April 2013, MOD Mission Critical launched the first-ever Inter-Building Cross Connect (IBC) platform in Los Angeles, CA. The platform provides flat rate connectivity options for companies that require inter-building connectivity to disparate data centers in the L.A. metro market. IBC is a unique service that provides inter-data center connectivity among different owner-operated meet-me-rooms. For instance, companies that would like to connect multiple facilities operated by different service providers can leverage this flat fee-based service for connections ranging from 100Mbps to 10G wavelengths.

This service is currently available in the L.A. metro market, though the company expects IBC to expand into other key metro markets soon. Inter-building connections are currently available from 624 S. Grand Street to multiple meet-me-rooms located in 600 W. 7^th Street and 900 Alameda, with near-net capabilities extending to 530 W. 6^th Street, 1200 W. 7^th Street and 818 W. 7^th Street. In addition to these metro IBC locations, MOD Mission also provides direct private line connectivity between 624 S. Grand in Los Angeles, 11 Great Oaks in San Jose, CA and 60 Hudson Street in New York. MOD Mission offers IBCs as a flat fee for 10Gbps wavelength connections and can be installed within seven business days.

For more information about Global Capacity’s access network solutions and their One Marketplace, visit www.globalcapacity.com/onemarketplace.php.

For information about MOD Mission Critical’s Inter-Building Cross Connect platform, go to www.modmc.net.

High-performance Infrastructure-as-a-service

2013-04-30T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Tom Whitcomb, CTO at Ajubeo, says:

Ajubeo's mission has always been to deliver high-performance infrastructure-as-a-service via user-defined virtual datacenters that enable IT executives to deliver more business value than ever before. Maintaining a differentiated market position in the performance IaaS space mandated an ITIL centric cloud monitoring application with unlimited capability, flexibility and an easy-to-use interface, supporting our multi-tenancy business model. After testing numerous monitoring options, ScienceLogic was the obvious choice.

One month into our ScienceLogic cloud monitoring implementation, it is clear we made the right selection. Our customers are pleased with the platform's advanced cloud monitoring capabilities and increased visibility across infrastructure and application performance. Customizable, intuitive and sophisticated dashboards are just one new feature that will provide our customers with easy access to both high-level and granular performance data. In addition to dashboards, ScienceLogic's proactive and automated event management provides real-time health-level transparency while enabling maximum system and application availability.

From a cloud services provider perspective, ScienceLogic has exceeded Ajubeo's expectations with regard to customer on-boarding efficiency, the responsiveness of ScienceLogic support, and the professional graphic interface that allows our team to quickly modify interface branding to match the exact brand-use-guidelines specifications of our customers and partners. This customization capability is critical in the delivery of our private label IaaS offering.

ActiveBatch Upgrades Automation Capabilities in Microsoft-Led Environments

2013-04-29T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Colin Beasty of Advanced Systems Concepts, says:

With IT organizations now finding it necessary to adopt an "architectural" approach to IT automation by unifying multiple scheduling solutions, Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) addressed the need to consolidate “point” scheduling solutions within Microsoft environments at this year’s Microsoft Management Summit with the latest release of ActiveBatch workload automation and job scheduling. Version 9 Service Pack 2 features new two-way integration for Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 and major improvements to existing Microsoft Dynamics AX integration, enabling IT organizations to augment the runbook automation capabilities of Orchestrator with the business process and workload automation capabilities of ActiveBatch. By providing IT organizations a single automation solution for both business and IT operational processes, the release is meant to increase IT productivity by eliminating the need to manage disparate automation tools.

ActiveBatch is the first workload automation product to offer integration with Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012, providing a two-way extension with job steps that schedule and run Orchestrator jobs from within ActiveBatch in addition to ActiveBatch jobs to be directly accessed and triggered within Orchestrator. SP2 also upgraded ActiveBatch’s existing Dynamics AX Extension, which was released back in October, featuring numerous improvements and refinements for users to better schedule, automate and integrate Dynamics AX processes throughout the enterprise.

No longer can businesses rely on traditional “elemental” approaches to IT automation with well-defined tasks set according to static schedules, solving “point” problems with platform-specific, “point” scheduling solutions. This way of thinking is outdated – in the fluid 24/7 world where business demands are real-time and where IT resources are a mix of both physical and virtual, a single automation solution is needed to manage it all. Workload automation solutions, like ActiveBatch, can automate common IT tasks across a broad range of technologies and process types without the need for scripting and from a single interface. SP2 further caters to this new way of thinking, making the product ideal for IT organizations operating in diverse, Microsoft led-environments to utilize a single automation solution for all of its processes.

Compuware AJAX Edition 4 – Optimizing Front-End Web Application Performance to Ensure Highly Satisfying Experiences

2013-04-26T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Matthew Zanderigo, product marketing manager at Compuware, says:

Poor web application performance directly impacts customer loyalty, brand and sales. As response times increase, end-user interactions begin to slow and dissatisfaction rises, resulting in a staggering business impact. Amazon has calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year.

In 2005, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, also known as AJAX, evolved as means of delivering lightning-fast end-user experiences for feature-rich applications. With AJAX, web applications can send data to, and retrieve data from, a server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The application processing takes place in the browser, on the client-side.

With AJAX, feature-rich, dynamic web applications can now be served up to end-users much more quickly and efficiently than in the past. In contrast, in the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages. Each user action required that the page be reloaded from the server, or a new page loaded. This process was highly inefficient, increasing end-user wait times due to excessive server round-trips.

The benefits of AJAX are clear, but AJAX technologies also bring with them some performance management challenges. Specifically, AJAX application traffic is not directed back to data centers, so “server-side” solutions that monitor server response times are not sufficient to gauge the end-user experience. “Server-side” solutions do not highlight any performance problems end-users might have with AJAX applications, due to the limitations of a specific browser. Not being able to proactively manage performance across browsers could hamper the very speed organizations are trying to enhance by using AJAX.

To remedy this problem, Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) business has announced Compuware APM AJAX Edition 4, a new version which enables organizations to test and diagnose AJAX application performance issues across all recent and legacy browser versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. Compuware’s APM AJAX Edition 4 leverages a new generation of APM centered on the end-user experience. It provides organizations with a bird’s eye view into how dynamic AJAX web applications are performing for real end users across a variety of browser types. This empowers organizations to pinpoint and address browser-specific problems that could be inhibiting a world-class end-user experience.

Compuware’s APM AJAX Edition 4 also features tight integration with Compuware’s SpeedoftheWeb.com. SpeedoftheWeb.com tests any site's performance from locations around the world, and provides a comparison of performance across multiple locations. Organizations can then import test sessions into an instance of Compuware APM AJAX Edition 4, for diagnostics that help fine-tune performance on the front-end.

With more application logic sitting in the web browser than ever before, it is critical to measure and optimize the performance of dynamic web applications at the browser level. This is essential to keeping customers loyal and attracting new ones. With Compuware APM AJAX Edition 4, organizations can glean tremendous insight into client-side performance issues and immediately tweak performance for AJAX-based websites and applications. By addressing the complexity created by multiple browsers at the edge of the Internet, Compuware APM AJAX Edition 4 helps organizations deliver fast, feature-rich applications that promote revenues, customer satisfaction and brand image.

Mega Datacenters: Pioneering the Future of IT Infrastructure

2013-04-25T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Rob Ober, LSI Fellow, Processor and System Architect, LSI Corporate Strategy Office , says:

The unrelenting growth in the volume and velocity of data worldwide is spurring innovation in datacenter infrastructures, and mega datacenters (MDCs) are on the leading edge of these advances. Although MDCs are relatively new, their exponential growth – driven by this data deluge – has thrust them into rarefied regions of the global server market: they now account for about 25 percent of servers shipped.

Rapid innovation is the watchword at MDCs. It is imperative to their core business and, on a much larger scale, forcing a rethinking of IT infrastructures of all sizes. The pioneering efforts of MDCs in private clouds, compute clusters, data analytics and other IT applications now provide valuable insights into the future of IT. Any organization stands to benefit by emulating MDC techniques to improve scalability, reliability, efficiency and manageability and reduce the cost of work done as they confront changing business dynamics and rising financial pressures.

The Effects of Scale at MDCs

MDCs and traditional datacenters are miles apart in scale, though the architects at each face many of the same challenges. Most notably, both are trying to do more with less by implementing increasingly sophisticated applications and optimizing the investments needed to confront the data deluge. The sheer scale of MDCs, however, magnifies even the smallest inefficiency or problem. Economics force MDCs to view the entire datacenter as a resource pool to be optimized as it delivers more services and supports more users.

MDCs like those at Facebook, Amazon, Google and China’s Tencent use a small set of distinct platforms, each optimized for a specific task, such as storage, database, analytics, search or web services. The scale of these MDCs is staggering: Each typically houses 200,000 to 1,000,000 servers, and from 1.5 million to 10 million disk drives. Storage is their largest cost. The world’s largest MDCs deploy LSI flash cards, flash cache acceleration, host bus adapters, serial-attached SCSI (SAS) infrastructure and RAID storage solutions, giving LSI unique insight into challenges these organizations are facing, and how they are pioneering various architectural solutions to common problems.

MDCs prefer open source software for operating systems and other infrastructure, and the applications are usually self-built. Most MDC improvements have been given back to the open source community. In many MDCs, even the hardware infrastructure might be self-built or, at a minimum, self-specified for optimal configurations – options that might not be available to smaller organizations.

Server virtualization is only rarely used in MDCs. Instead of using virtual machines to run multiple applications on a single server, MDCs prefer to run applications across clusters consisting of hundreds to thousands of server nodes dedicated to a specific task. For example, the server cluster may contain only boot storage, RAID-protected storage for database or transactional data, or unprotected direct-map drives with data replication across facilities depending on the task or application it is performing. MDC virtualization applications are all open source. They are used for containerization to simplify the deployment and replication of images. Because re-imaging or updating virtualization applications occurs frequently, boot image management is another challenge.

The large clusters at MDCs make the latency of inter-node communications critical to application performance, so MDCs make extensive use of 10Gbit Ethernet in servers today and, in some cases, they even deploy 40Gbit infrastructure as needed. MDCs also optimize performance by deploying networks with static configurations that minimize transactional latency. And MDC architects are now deployingat least some software defined network (SDN) infrastructure to optimize performance, simplify management at scale and reduce costs.

To some, MDCs are seen as cheap, refusing to pay for any value-added functionality from vendors. But that’s a subtle misunderstanding of their motivations. With as many as 1 million servers, MDCs require a lights-out infrastructure maintained primarily by automated scripts and only a few technicians assigned simple maintenance tasks. MDCs also maintain a ruthless focus on minimizing any unnecessary spending, using the savings to grow and optimize work performed per dollar spent.

MDCs are very careful to eliminate features not central to their core applications, even if provided for free, since they increase operating expenditures. Chips, switches and buttons, lights, cables, screws and latches, software layers and anything else that does nothing to improve performance only adds to power and cooling demands and service overhead. The addition of one unnecessary LED in 200,000 servers, for example, is considered an excess that consumes 26,000 watts of power and can increase operating costs by $10,000 per year.

Even minor problems can become major issues at scale. One of the biggest operational challenges for MDCs is HDD failure rates. Despite the low price of hard disk drives (HDDs), failures can cause costly disruptions in large clusters, where these breakdowns are routine. Another challenge is managing rarely-used archival data that may exceed petabytes and is now approaching exabytes of online storage, consuming more space and power while delivering diminishing value. Every organization faces similar challenges, albeit on a smaller scale.

Lessons Learned from Mega Datacenters

Changing business dynamics and financial pressures are forcing all organizations to rethink the types of IT infrastructure and software applications they deploy. The low cost of MDC cloud services is motivating CFOs to demand more capabilities at lower costs from their CIOs, who in turn are turning to MDCs to find inspiration and ways to address these challenges.

The first lesson any organization can learn from MDCs is to simplify maintenance and management by deploying a more homogenous infrastructure. Minimizing infrastructure spending where it matters little and focusing it where it matters most frees capital to be invested in architectural enhancements that maximize work-per-dollar. Investing in optimization and efficiency helps reduce infrastructure and associated management costs, including those for maintenance, power and cooling. Incorporating more lights-out self-management also pays off, supporting more capabilities with existing staff.

The second lesson is that maintaining five-nines (99.999%) reliability drives up costs and becomes increasingly difficult architecturally as the infrastructure scales. A far more cost-effective architecture is one that allows subsytems to fail, letting the rest of the system operate unimpeded and the overall system self-heal. Because all applications are clustered, a single misbehaving node can degrade the performance of the entire cluster. MDCs take the offending server off line, enabling all others to operate at peak performance. The hardware and software needed for such an architecture are readily available today, enabling any organization to emulate this approach. And though the expertise needed to effectively deploy a cluster is still rare, new orchestration layers are emerging to automate cluster management.

Storage, one of the most critical infrastructure subsystems, directly impacts application performance and server utilization. MDCs are leaders in optimizing datacenter storage efficiency, providing high-availability operation to satisfy requirements for data retention and disaster recovery. All MDCs rely exclusively on direct-attached storage (DAS), which carries a much lower purchase cost, is simpler to maintain and delivers higher performance than a storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS). Although many MDCs minimize costs by using consumer-grade Serial ATA (SATA) HDDs and solid state drives (SSDs), they almost always deploy these drives on a SAS infrastructure to maximize performance and simplify management. More MDCs are now migrating to large-capacity, enterprise-grade SAS drives for higher reliability and performance, especially as SAS migrates from 6Gbit/s to 12Gbit/s bandwidth.

When evaluating storage performance, most organizations focus on I/O operations per second (IOPs) and MBytes/s throughput metrics. MDCs have discovered that applications driving IOPs to SDDs quickly reach other limits though, often peaking well below 200,000 IOPs, and that MBytes/s performance has only a modest impact on work done. A more meaningful metric is I/O latency because it correlates more directly with application performance and server utilization – the very reason MDCs are deploying more SSDs or solid state caching (or both) to minimize I/O latency and increase work-per-dollar.

Typical HDD read/write latency is on the order of 10 milliseconds. By contrast, typical SSD read and write latencies are around 200 microseconds and 100 microseconds, respectively – about five orders of magnitude lower. Specialized PCIe® flash cache acceleration cards can reduce latency another order of magnitude to tens of microseconds. Using solid state storage to supplement or replace HDDs enables servers and applications to do four to10 times more work. Server-based flash caching provides even greater gains in SAN and NAS environments – up to 30 times.

Flash cache acceleration cards deliver the lowest latency when plugged directly into a server’s PCIe bus. Intelligent caching software continuously and transparently places hot data (the most frequently accessed or temporally important) in low-latency flash storage to improve performance. Some flash cache acceleration cards support multiple terabytes of solid state storage, holding entire databases or working datasets as hot data. And because there is no intervening network and no risk of associated congestion, the cached data is accessible quickly and deterministically under any workload.

Deploying an all-solid-state Tier 0 for some applications is also now feasible, and at least one MDC uses SSDs exclusively. In the enterprise, decisions about using SSDs usually focus on the storage layer, and cost per GByte or IOPs, pitting HDDs against SSDs with an emphasis on capital expenditure. MDCs have discovered that SSDs deliver better price/performance than HDDs by maximizing work-per-dollar investments in other infrastructure (especially servers and software licenses), and by reducing overall maintenance costs. Solid state storage is also more reliable, easier to manage, faster to replicate and rebuild, and more energy-efficient than HDDs – all advantages to any datacenter.

Pioneering the Datacenter of the Future

MDCs have been driving open source solutions with proven performance, reliability and scalability. In some cases, these pioneering efforts have enabled applications to scale far beyond any commercial product. Examples include Hadoop® for analytics and derivative applications, and clustered query and databases applications like Cassandra™ and Google’s Dremel. The state-of-the-art for these and other applications is evolving quickly, literally month-by-month. These open source solutions are seeing increasing adoption and inspiring new commercial solutions.

Two other, relatively new initiatives are expected to bring MDC advances to the enterprise market, just as Linux® software did. One is OpenCompute, which offers a minimalist, cost-effective, easy-to-scale hardware infrastructure for compute clusters. Open Compute could also foster its own innovation, including an open hardware support services business model similar to the one now used for open source software. The second initiative is OpenStack® software, which promises a higher level of automation for managing pools of compute, storage and networking resources, ultimately leading to the ability to operate a software defined datacenter.

A related MDC initiative involves disaggregating servers at the rack level. Disaggregation separates the processor from memory, storage, networking and power, and pools these resources at the rack level, enabling the lifecycle of each resource to be managed on its own optimal schedule to help minimize costs while increasing work-per-dollar. Some architects believe that these initiatives could reduce total cost of ownership by a staggering 70 percent.

Maximizing work-per-dollar at the rack and datacenter levels is one of the best ways today for IT architects in any organization to do more with less. MDCs are masters at this type of high efficiency as they continue to redefine how datacenters will scale to meet the formidable challenges of the data deluge.

About the Author

Robert Ober is an LSI Fellow in Corporate Strategy, driving LSI into new technologies, businesses and products. He has 30 years of experience in processor and system architecture. Prior to joining LSI, Rob was a Fellow in the Office of the CTO at AMD, with responsibility for mobile platforms, embedded platforms and wireless strategy. He was one of the founding Board members of OLPC ($100 laptop.org) and was influential in its technical evolution, and was also a Board Member of OpenSPARC.

Previously Rob was Chief Architect at Infineon Technologies, responsible for the TriCore family of processors used in automotive, communication and security products. In addition, he drove improvements in semiconductor methodology, libraries, process and the mobile phone platforms. Rob was manager of Newton Technologies at Apple Computer and was involved in the creation of the PowerPC Macintosh computers, PowerPC, StrongARM and ARC processors. He also has experience in development of CDC, CRAY and SPARC supercomputers, mainframes and high-speed networks, and he has dozens of patents in mobility, computing and processor architecture. Rob has an honors Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc.) in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Liquid cooling for data centers: It’s not a question of if, but when.

2013-04-24T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Herb Zien, CEO of LiquidCool Solutions, says:

Data center efficiency, power and cooling management issues are multiplying exponentially. Notwithstanding facilities and IT managers’ eagerness to implement tools designed to manage cooling efficiency and capacity, the industry at large maintains an unwavering dependence on air-cooling. As a result large investments in efficiency improvements are generating small, incremental returns. These baby-step changes in existing technologies that evolved over the last decade have grown into a monster: the very loud, energy-intensive fan-cooled data center that’s expensive to operate and difficult to manage.

LiquidCool Solutions (LCS) opted to take a clean slate approach. LCS developed an elegant solution for cooling electronics that focuses on energy efficiency, scalability and rack management. LCS’s patented liquid submersion technology cools all electronic components within the server chassis. Mechanical refrigeration is eliminated; as are blade fans, rack fans, CRAC units and air handling systems. By eliminating all this extraneous equipment, it is possible to reduce data center energy consumption by 40% and floor space by 50%.

There is also a range of spin-off benefits. In addition to efficiently removing heat, the dielectric fluid inside the chassis insulates electronics from air so temperature fluctuations are dampened and there are no issues with static electricity, air pollution or corrosion. Where working in a data center is typically like working in a cold, loud cage, LCS cooled spaces are surprisingly quiet.

In retrofitting existing data centers that are out of power, it’s as simple as replacing hardware on the normal refresh cycle. Server density is increased and the energy that was needed for cooling can then be repurposed to increase compute capacity, which in turn postpones the need to construct a new data center. With no raised floors, ductwork or floor space dedicated to cooling apparatus, facility construction costs are also reduced.

A three-minute overview of LCS’ liquid cooling via patented total liquid submersion and directed flow technology: http://www.liquidcoolsolutions.com/technology.html

About LiquidCool Solutions LiquidCool Solutions is an applied R&D company that licenses its extensive patent portfolio related to total liquid submersion cooling to manufacturers of IT and data center cooling equipment manufacturers. LCS also leverages its total immersion cooling expertise on a collaborative basis to help companies solve their difficult heat dissipation problems.

#1 Cause of Data Center Downtime – Batteries!

2013-04-23T08:30:00.000-03:00

As battery issues with the Boeing 787 continue to make headline news, one has to wonder why the topic of batteries have yet to make the news as it relates to downtime in data centers.

Reasons for UPS load lost (diagram above), batteries ARE the #1 cause of power interruptions, over 1/3, both as primary emergency power back-up, as well as the source of cross-over power for starting back-up generators.

This begs the question, why do so many IT managers focus on primary architectures and solutions, and treat back-up power sources as second citizens?

Traditional wired solutions, with high initial cost, high installation costs, and inherent lack of flexibility, has resulted in IT being less willing to support battery monitoring. IT budgets are always being challenged with show me why mentality.

With demands on IT systems rising, organizations require more cost-effective strategies for achieving higher levels of availability across their network. Wireless battery monitoring is an effective way to increase availability, while insuring low total cost of ownership, as opposed to break/fix mentality that violates the no downtime, high availability standards of mission-critical operations.

Knowing when and why your lead acid batteries enter the deterioration cycle, especially when there is frequent use or high temperatures, makes battery monitoring even more critical.

Below is an IEEE battery replacement curve which illustrates the expected life cycle.

IEEE recommends battery replacement within one year (if capacity is determined to be below 80% of the manufacturer’s rating).

Don’t do what many decide next, pass on re-installation, which is like kicking the can down the road! Remember, batteries have useful lives of 3 to 5 years max, making battery monitoring a critical part of predicting battery health, and premature failure before it results in system downtime.

When One is Better Than Two

2013-04-22T08:30:00.000-03:00

- Liat Malki, Director of Marketing at Axxana, says:

Everyone loves twins, and we’re proud to congratulate our colleague who recently became the father of twins. If you have twins, you’re so happy, you don’t even think about the cost. That’s true of twin babies, but it’s not true with twin data centers.

During a recent webinar there was an interesting discussion. Gil Chaouat, Axxana’s director of product management, discussed a global company with which he had recently met. The company has two data centers in every region. Two data centers per region is a common approach for organizations like this that want to deliver a zero data loss environment. There were two things that really stood out for me:

Two data centers per region is really expensive
One is sometimes better than two

For this particular company, one of the biggest costs, in addition to the cost of the second data center in every region, was the cost of the high-speed fiber connections between each of the two data centers. And, of course, because fiber connections can break, they had to have two. Twice the cost. They used fiber connections, because they wanted synchronous data replication. It was the only way they could deliver zero data loss. So why is one data center better than two?

This company had no replication between regions. That would have added even more cost, and they wanted to reduce spending, not increase it. And replication between regions, which for them would have been North America to Europe and Europe to Asia, can only be done asynchronously, which means they will lose data in a disaster.

What they are discussing is eliminating the second data center and implementing Axxana’s black box. That way they can use asynchronous replication over IP lines between regions, eliminate the cost of the redundant fiber links, and use Axxana to deliver zero data loss. Doing this also ensures zero data loss in regional disasters, disasters which might have impacted both data centers in one region. So in this scenario, one is better than two.

Of course, when it comes to babies, two is better than one.