Cloud is both a marketing term and a technical term that I am hearing from every vendor, in lots of variation. But as I posted earlier, I can’t see the clear cost savings or footprint reduction associated with cloud that we saw with virtualization. If anything, cloud seems to create new work for IT departments. So, why is this something to move forward with?

I believe I may have found an answer in New York at HP’s Pathways to Cloud event, an annual road show event to take the cloud message to HP’s customers, partners and employees around the country. Unlike other changes to the datacenter, it is business and not technological advances that is driving the adoption of cloud. (I had heard this before and obviously forgotten it.) Cloud is more agile, to borrow from the HP dictionary, meaning that the turn around necessary to deploy new solutions on the cloud is measured in hours rather than weeks with traditional IT and procurement. Business is now dictating quick turn around of the supporting services that they need to meet customer needs faster.

It is known fact that many business groups have circumvented IT all together and outsourced their CRM and other software packages with Software as a Service providers like Salesforce or Sugar CRM. These services only require a credit card to get started and there is no infrastructure or other involvement really necessary from IT. That is a scary proposition for IT, a serious threat to their long term role in organizations and a catalyst for IT departments to change.

But operationally, cloud presents a value proposition because it moves the type of cost from a capital investment to an operational investment which can impact a company’s financials in different ways. Instead of the traditional, large up-front costs associated with IT expenditures, cloud provides a pay-as-you-go or pay-as-you-grow scenario for companies to buy IT in measurable, hourly amounts.

The Pathways to Cloud event introduced to me a couple of really compelling use cases for cloud by organizations, albeit organizations much larger than the one I work for. One of these use cases is for segregation of business units. For instance, a lot of companies will toy with a new idea but are not sure it will ultimately stay in their core business. By encapsulating the business into a cloud partition, all of the data is ready to be portable if the ultimate decision is to spin it off or if the decision is to bring it in-house. By using an on-demand service provider, they can evaluate the business and operation before standing up their own infrastructure and making significant capital investment.

Another use case would be for game makers. The example given was that most mobile game makers now know within two weeks whether a game concept is going to gain traction and ultimately be a hit or not. If it is, they bring it in house and stand up the appropriate supporting resources – if not, they keep it on a pay-for-demand cloud service outside of their realm where it can easily be decommissioned once its run its course.

HP CloudSystem is not meant to be a rip and replace system, but rather a start small and scale out solution. This makes a lot of sense since the transition to cloud technology will be a gradual basis and

For the first time, I saw presented a group of criteria to move to the cloud and in a lot of ways the transition to the cloud will be a lot like companies transition to the virtualization in the datacenter. Even as recent as the last two years, there were hold outs on some business critical software which was still not ‘recommended’ to run in virtualization for a lot of companies, but even HP is echoing the VMware message that there is nothing that cannot be virtualized at this stage of maturity for virtualization.

But specifically about the criteria, some of the things to be considered around cloud are compliance and data residence issues, especially for European companies which may have regulatory issues with export of their data. Also, security concerns come into play with whether the application is able to be offloaded to the cloud.

As far as pricing is concerned, there are a lot of options for companies here. Companies can choose to pay retail prices with service providers like Savvis or Amazon Cloud if they know that their consumption or the utilization is going to be light, or they can go further to lock down wholesale prices, much in the same way that hosting providers like Rackspace have done in the past.

Disclosure: HP’s Social Media group and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for the trip to this event. My coverage here is my own set of impressions and interpretation of the information presented and has not been coached or proofread by staff from Ivy or HP. There were no requirements to write anything in particular or anything at all in return for the invitation.

The datacenter today, however, is clearly based around the x86 and x64 architecture which has supplanted all other competitive chips from the market.  There are still some small markets for RISC chips, but clearly the largest part of the market is based around x86.

With all the advantages of ARM for mobile devices, it makes sense that large companies are experimenting with using these chipsets for datacenter applications.  This will certainly mean new software projects to make use of the ARM architecture, but long term, the low power and high density could invent massive new computing platforms in the future.

In October, I spent some time in Houston at the HP facility there learning about their newest innovations, such as hyperscale computing and EcoPOD datacenters – all innovations seeking to increase the density and efficiency of computing.  HP ‘RedStone’ development platform is a proof-of-concept hardware platform and is created to get HP’s partner ecosystem some hands-on time to run their applications and figure out what this new configuration can be potentially leveraged for.  The overall strategy moving forward for these ultra low power, high density computing is what HP is calling Project Moonshot, and ‘RedStone’ is just the first rocket on that trajectory.

‘RedStone’ boasts some impressive numbers in terms of density and power consumption.  A single rack unit can enclose over 3,000 system on a chip processors.  The equivalent of this in an x86 architecture would take an entire row of racks for that number of processors.

Lets be honest.  There aren’t many customers who can really harness a single rack with over 3,000 CPU’s.  Applications for such hardware are specialized and the customers are large or specialty organizations, initially I’m thinking super computing.  But, also, web farms and large scale cloud computing could be potential applications too.  For large scale websites like Amazon and Facebook, adapting their software to use ARM could yield large benefits in space and power consumption.  But also, cloud vendors, where we are already changing the underlying software to some degree may also make a practical place for this in the market.

Hyperscale and ‘Redstone’ are clearly plays to the largest players in the datacenter and enterprise – content farms and massive websites plus supercomputing applications.  But over time, I think that even 1U and 2U rack-mount enclosures for these could trickle into the traditional datacenter, further driving convergence and shrinking footprints of compute in similar ways that blade enclosures have.

I realize that much of this is old news, but it has taken a bit of time for me to process through what this actually means to my datacenter.  I initially thought these announcements had no bearing on my daily work, but in recent weeks, I have realized that any innovations made for the large players in computing would eventually trickle down to the smallest of datacenters as well.

I really began to think about how these ultra-small computers could really revolutionize small office servers and computing.  In my consulting years, I worked for a number of small law offices.  Most of these ran Microsoft Small Business Server for email and shared calendaring, as well as file storage and faxing.  These offices would have been able to help from virtualization and failover to eliminate their single point of failure, but the required infrastructure really placed these capabilities out of their reach.  But, packaging several ARM systems into a single enclosure with bundled flash storage available to all of them could easily take and extend virtualization and cloud towards this market.  Even more so, since the software will need to be rewritten, it can take into account a completely different architecture during deployment.

Both VMware and Microsoft are working on ports of their flagship OS towards ARM processors – VMware experimenting with dual-personality phones and a hypervisor to separate work and pleasure on a personal device and Microsoft is writing the next version of Windows for ARM in hopes of gaining the tablet market.  Once the core code is ported, its a matter of time before these can extend to datacenter specific versions.  Not to mention, Linux vendors are already quickly working towards porting their OSes to ARM for use in these applications.

I’ll admit, its pretty cool stuff to think about the what-ifs and possibilities that this could lead to.  I don’t have a crystal ball or any sort of insider knowledge, all the above is simply my wild imagination and speculation.

Up until last year, I was also a Mozy user.  I thought they had the best value out there for backup to cloud.  But last year, Mozy made their changes to their service offering which would have effectively tripled my cost and so I went on a search for alternatives.  I settled on a new product called SafeCopy.  After a year, I was not happy and so I have let that go, too.  My main compliant was that the SafeCopy software didn’t seem to be very efficient at running backups.  I saw long periods with no traffic while it prepared files for backup.  With as much to backup as I have, a strong consistent stream of data means a much quicker initial backup.

I realized only a month after I started my SafeCopy subscription, the move I should have made was to subscribe to Crashplan Central – Crashplan’s cloud backup offering.  This past week, I canceled SafeCopy and I signed up for a Crashplan Central family plan and have I two computers currently running backup.

As luck would have it, I was also able to subscribe to a higher tier of cable Internet at home which gives me a 2 Mbps upstream connection.  With these two things in place, I have already completed about 10% of my initial backup without any interruption to service at home.  I do have to stop backups when I get a cell call (which sucks) because of my Microcell needs, but I’m trying to minimize the time needed to complete my initial backup so I have the bandwidth restrictions set high on both computers.

I’m really happy with having a single service and single piece of backup software to handle both peer-to-peer and cloud backups.  I should have made this decisions sooner.  Well, if I don’t count the Time Machine backups I’m also doing at home…  But since that’s built-in to the OS, I don’t count it – it just happens.

Crashplan really excels in allowing you to define how much bandwidth any backup stream can consume and when it can be run.  There are many options to limit the amount of CPU that the software can consume under different conditions.  There are good inbound and outbound bandwidth options to keep your outgoing backups or your friends incoming ones from saturating your connection.  There are pretty easy to understand options for how often files get backed up after the initial installation.  Users can secure the backup streams with a custom password and 448-bit encryption or they may use the standard 448-bit encryption.  The client software can also be secured with a password to keep a guest or malicious user from tampering with settings.

I also like that there is a background service that runs always and there is a client software to configure the settings for the service.  This architecture really works really well.

Strangely enough, the Crashplan software will not allow me to add my desktop computer to my client on the laptop as a ‘Friend’ to backup to it when I am traveling.  I’m sure there is a reason why, but just seems strange that they won’t allow me to add a client registered my own account.

But, I have to say, I’m a happy customer so far.  Happy enough to write an updated review.

In my mind, and from checking with my peers, the cloud is almost a polar opposite of the established IT department.  Cloud today seems to be working best for new companies which don’t have the established IT infrastructure.  Cloud offers a major cost advantage compared with creating your own IT shop from scratch, with pay as you go and on-demand pricing and availability.  I’m not sure how much value cloud offers to a heavily virtualized, established IT shop with storage, compute and networking already in place.

For established IT groups, moving towards IT as a Service is the main goal – to replace and augment all the traditional IT functions performed by internal system administration and storage groups.  Testing cloud services with a Software as a Service offering is probably the easiest first step – because it involves a subset of users (sales, for instance).  But the nirvana goal would be paying for on-demand usage of computing and storage from a service provider and eliminating most or all of capital investment in IT equipment.

I titled the post ‘crossing the great divide’ because I think that the established IT department is going to be forced to make major changes to how they operate to move towards cloud.  Some of these changes simply don’t make sense in organizations, however.  For instance, ERP and CRM systems in many organizations represent their bread and butter systems, but how many times does an IT group actually deploy these systems?  I’d say, not often.  And how many of these identical servers does IT deploy?  Again, probably not many.  Yet, but really build these on the cloud, IT will first have to define and create these installation workflows which can be deployed within a cloud service offering.  The cloud offerings I have surveyed all require definition of set, repeatable workflows to deploy services in a layered approach. These repeatable definitions make most sense for a service provider and not for end-user IT shops.

Another example from my company, we have a business analytics software.  I can tell you from personal experience with two installation/upgrades, I cannot imagine a service catalog being able to deploy this service.  Each installation has taken weeks of tweaks and changes to enable it to work properly.  Maybe even a little voodoo.  The thing is, even if a vendor provides a best-practices scripted installation, I’m sure every company will have variations they must change and I’m not sure how many administrators would be happy running a provided install script for their business critical applications.

So packaging software, updates and deployments is probably the first step that established shops will need to make.  Virtualization is brought the goodness of template servers for easier, managed deployment.  Packaging takes things a step forward.  A template may already have the OS, virtual tools, antivirus and other miscellaneous software pre-installed.  In a cloud offering, the template is likely OS only and ancillary software will be chosen from a list of options to be deployed.  Think of it as a layer cake with each layer being optional.  Updates to each layer would allow for deployment of upgrades into deployed assets.  If these were already in the template, your long term management may be limited.

Packaging may present a type of problem, itself.  For instance, Microsoft products come in the handy, dandy MSI format, and System Center and other management products do well with their own software, but sometimes struggle with third party installations (like Install Anywhere).  The same holds true with cloud.  With multiple different ways to install, administrators will be forced to test packages for installation against a number of options and scenarios to properly install.

Packaging of custom written software is another issue.  Many companies don’t package their custom written software today.  With Java WAR deployments and other EXE drop-in replacements, companies must figure out how to deploy these with required database layer software and configuration onto servers through scripted installations.

In our environment today, the systems administration and database administration teams handle a lot of these supporting software installations onto systems before they are turned over to developers.  The tables will turn with the cloud to where developers must handle more of these functions or collaboration must occur more in-depth to enable packages to be built with all the necessary requirements completed.  This will mean more time from many team members in testing and quality assurance which is not required today.

I don’t think cloud presents a clearly defined cost-savings proposition, when compared against the sales case for  virtualization.  The value it provides is on-demand growth and bursting.  For an established IT organization which may be considering an internal cloud, I’m not sure where the value comes in – if anything, it only creates new packaging work for teams.  Hybrid or public cloud is really where value seems to lie, however, I think most organizations will have some assets that cannot move outside the campus firewall, requiring some sort of internal cloud – or maybe legacy (traditional) configurations on-site.

Troubleshooting presents issues.  As soon as a user or administrator logs into a deployed compute instance, they will make changes which are not controlled from the service catalog, impeding maintenance and upgradability of the deployed server.  All things must be deployed through a service catalog to really be maintainable, which will be a change for administrators.

Control of systems will also be an issue.  The enterprise’s internal IT today is owned and controlled by the company.  When bringing in a cloud partner, there will be some sort of dependency on their resources and IT professionals to solve and end problems.  A lot of control could potentially be lost, if there were storage or virtualization layer problems in their cloud offering.  And I think administrators will be faced with a difficulty when their hands are tied and they are unable to aid in resolving performance or malfunctions of out-sourced systems.

And then there is security.  This is a great challenge as things move outside of the corporate controlled datacenter.  There is data in transit and all sorts of threats in the wild that must be addressed.  I’ve not seen compelling answers to the security questions yet, but its an evolving field and I think these will eventually be addressed.

These are the thoughts I have at the present time.  I think cloud is evolving as a topic and there will be big changes during 2012 from vendors like VMware, VCE, HP and others.  Its a space of radical growth and potential, but I think there are so many definitions and interpretations of how to deploy clouds that it makes the customer’s job difficult in evaluating which solution is right for their enterprise.  And once that decision is made, moving towards initial deployments on the cloud may be impaired by these challenges I have discussed.  As with the transition to virtualization, the low hanging fruit will be the first to move, followed by the more complex and critical systems later.  But, vendors have the difficult job of answering WHY should companies move to cloud in the coming year.  And that’s an answer I’m interested to hear.

The event will be a time to meet with HP’s cloud experts and discover the important, cloud concepts.  Attendees will learn how to discover the present landscape of their datacenter and learn how to move towards cloud-ready or cloud-enabled services and constructs to make a cloud a successful possibility.  The show kicks off with a keynote devoted to navigating from traditional IT to convergence, a buzzword and theme from HP in the last several years, and from convergence to the cloud and the Instant-On enterprise as HP brands it.

HP is a great resource to learn from in the marketplace because they are uniquely positioned with a full portfolio of hardware, software and services to enable the private, public or hybrid cloud for customers.  HP is taking an open approach to cloud and enabling customers to outsource or grow from a private cloud to a large list of public cloud providers, as well as managing clouds which may be composed of several different external providers or several different hypervisors internally.

With cloud being a complex and multifaceted concept, the one thing that is clear is that moving towards a cloud solution has many, far-reaching implications to an organization.  HP reaching out in this way is an indication of how steep a learning curve many customers are going to have and this opportunity to fill in the blanks.  Cloud has the potential to fundamentally change the way that organizations views and uses IT.  Cloud requires changes from application packaging to deployment and maintenance.   Understanding why is important before embarking, so Pathways to Cloud is an excellent event to attend – look for a date in your area.  I’ll be heading to the New York date to find out more myself.  Perhaps, I’ll see you there.

To find out more about the event or to register, please go to http://www.hp.com/go/pathwaystocloud.

I spent the last week working through classes to help 5 of my co-workers and myself meet the MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Administrator certification.  During the course of the week, I tweeted out about my success in passing a required exam and I got a reply from the “most certified man” in the world, @IT_Certified_, asking “U think having certs is important to your career?”  His question got me thinking.

Up until this month, my only certification was the VCP.  I have had it for a few years and I have tried to keep it up to date with each iteration of the software.  My department does not highly value certifications, and that probably worked to my benefit when being hired, since I did not have any. However, after taking the VMware Install & Configure class, I decided to try for my VCP during the version 3 exams.  It took two goes, but I passed and got the certification.  I wanted this certification as a personal goal.  It was never required by my company.

So, why should people go for certifications?

In general, I think most certifications and exams are marketing heavy and centered around sales and sales engineering staff, not particularly towards the internal IT folks.  I also think that most certifications  are more useful to consultants and sales engineers than to internal IT staff.  The reason – because these certifications represent knowledge and when a customer is shopping for a partner to enhance or recommend solutions, they want a knowledgeable person to guide them.  That would be what I count as reason number one for certification – to represent your knowledge to a potential customer.

As an internal IT professional, you may only be exposed to certain feature sets or capabilities of a particular product or software within your environment.  For instance, an internal IT department is standardized on Fibre Channel storage and may not use any iSCSI, so when testing for a product that includes both, an internal IT professional will be at a disadvantage with any iSCSI functionality on the test.

I believe that certifications are a major plus for all IT professionals during a job search – so reason number two.  While a certification may open a doorway to a job or opportunity, I’m not always convinced that they prepare the person behind the certification can do the actual work required to execute the theory.  But like a masters or doctorate degree, certifications are distinguishing factors among your peers to help set you apart. During a job interview, having a certification on your resume will distinguish you and it will show that you have worked hard and put in your time to achieve the designation.  It also shows that you are not opposed to continuing your education to keep up a certification.  And continuing eduction is incredibly important within the IT field which is ever-changing.

But, as I said earlier, I just sat for a week long class to help achieve an MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Administrator certification.  It was at the direction of my management to do so.  But if they don’t value certifications, then why?  It’s simple and its my reason number three.  Microsoft changed the rules in the past year for Gold Partners and raised the bar to include new requirements for certification.  Reason number three is to meet vendor requirements.   When your employer is a partner with other IT vendors, often it comes with certain requirements for the staff.  And this was my employer’s primary motivator, this time.

I like certifications and training for my own personal development.  As Sir Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.”  As IT people, we must always keep learning.

And, as always, these are my personal views and opinions and not that of my employer.

In the latest realignment, HP is consolidating these release sets with its Proliant Support Packs (PSP’s) and the Firmware releases that were previously three separate distributions.  In addition, HP is adopting a date style of numbering, matching the release set scheme, rather than the version numbering previously used with PSP and Firmware releases.  This will allow administrators to quickly recognize how behind a system is from the current release.

Consolidation also allows a single interface, qualification schedule and unified release for customers on all systems.  Although a solid step, the release sets did not completely match the release of Firmware DVD’s from HP and sometimes there were issues with support where case workers asked that you update firmware out of compliance with a release set.  During their first year of existence, release sets came out often and in many ways, shored up stability in our blade environment, but in the past year, they seemed to have lagged behind in releases.

Back when I first covered release sets, I also noted that it the release sets were a very good thing for customers, since the sets gave a supportable configuration and schedule of compliance.  Although I didn’t say it, compliance meant that the customer could finally force the support side of HP to work a case instead of hiding behind the ‘please patch to latest firmware’ excuse.  My hope is that the SPP will do the same in a unified firmware and driver software release.

On many of our critical systems, we have observed an increased interdependency between the firmware versions and the driver versions which need to be loaded together to gain stability.  Consolidating all these separate releases into a single engine and distribution makes logical sense as these dependencies increase.

In an effort to target exactly what customers need, there will be a master distribution of the SPP along with 6 additional subset versions targeted towards specific needs, per the HP website.    These will be smaller, which translates to faster downloads and a more customized installation, including only what is required for these solutions.

HP touts four major areas of improvement by introducing the SPP — it reduces customer qualification cycles, reduces resource usage, maintenance windows and downtime.  Since firmware patching is typically not the most fun part of a system administrators job, reducing the frequency of these upgrades is a welcome change.

HP plans to offer 3 to 5 of these SPP’s per year.  The first version released is version 2011.09.0 and 2012.01.0 is expected soon.

iChat

I’ll start with iChat, the grand-daddy of the messaging apps.  It debuted in 2002 and was primarily Apple’s own instant messaging client for AOL Instant Messenger.  At first, it was a text only chat, but later versions added video features, screen sharing between other iChat users and even presentation sharing and video conferencing.   compatibility with other messaging networks has also expanded over time.  iChat now supports Jabber-based networks like Google’s Talk, Windows Messenger and Facebook, MobileMe/iCloud accounts via the AIM network, and Yahoo Messenger, and even ICQ.

Great for: Mac to Mac communication and Mac to PC communication.  Since it supports third-party networks, anyone logged into one of these networks is accessible to you as long as you also have an account on that network.  If a mobile phone user has a client and is logged-in, you can communicate with them too.

Downsides: Advanced features, such as video chat, conferencing, and screen sharing, are iChat to iChat only features and requires an AOL Instant Messaging account to make these features work.   There isn’t an iChat for iOS, which is odd considering all that it could do.  It would be nice to have a video conference with Mac users while on the go.

FaceTime

With the iPhone 4, Apple introduced a  proprietary video chat called FaceTime.  It was first released as an iPhone to iPhone video chat, but Apple quickly released a version of FaceTime for Mac which allowed Mac to iPhone video chat.  For phone to phone, it uses the customer’s mobile phone number to be able to FaceTime and for Mac users, it uses an iTunes account and email address to identify the user.  The Mac app resembles the iPhone address book with Favorites and Contacts listed like the iPhone call screen. In the past year, FaceTime has been added as a feature to the iPad 2 and iPod Touch, as well, using iTunes accounts and email addresses to identify users.

Great for: Dead simple video chat between users of Apple products.  It does not require a third party network (AIM, Yahoo, Google) or an account, but relies instead on an iTunes account which every iPhone and Mac user likely already has.

Downsides: FaceTime came with one big limitation – it is Wifi only.  It does not work over cellular networks.  There is no Windows client.  Although certainly simpler to use, FaceTime does not seem like a full Mac app and seems it could be integrated with iChat (or vice-versus) since there is feature overlap.  The primary difference is third party chat network versus Apple proprietary FaceTime.

iMessage

Similiar to FaceTime, iMessage was introduced as a text messaging or SMS alternative.  It relies on open internet and it an Apple proprietary network.  It auto identifies other iMessage users and prefers that network to the carrier’s text messaging network when it finds two iMessage users (with iMessage enabled).  The message changes from the normal green colored talk bubble to a light blue talk bubble when using iMessage.  The best thing is that it isn’t a switch the user must think about – it just happens automatically.  The closest product on market to this is probably Blackberry’s Messenger product that allows Blackberry to Blackberry free messages.

Great for: Text and image messages between iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users running iOS5. It also lessens customer’s dependency on the carrier’s expensive text messaging plans.

Disadvantages: There isn’t a Mac client for iMessage.  It doesn’t work with other mobile devices – only iOS devices.  Wouldn’t this be handy to have in iChat somehow?  When the internet is clogged (like Disney World during Thanksgiving), messages can get stuck going out, but you can turn off iMessage and switch back to the cell network in settings.

Skype

And then there is Skype.  It is not an Apple technology, but its worth including given the fact that it runs on Mac and iOS devices, plus it adds the text message, video calling and voice calling features in a single app.  Skype is also written for almost every other device in the world and it is capable of calling anyone with a phone number anywhere in the world.

Great for: Calling PC users, users without a computer but with a phone number and strong video chat technology over both 3G and WiFi (technically, even 2G networks, though data speeds are too slow for video to work effectively). It allows very inexpensive international voice calls (computer or mobile phone to phone number).  Video chat and computer to computer voice calls are free.

Downsides: Requires another third party account.  Another billing source (if you make voice calls to phone numbers).  Many users complain of dropped calls and non-existent customer support, but what can you expect for a free service.

Disclaimer: This isn’t an exhaustive list of chat client, nor is it intended to be.  As you’ll see on my Mac App Discovery page, I have been a longtime user of Adium, however in recent years, my primary iChat use is remote screen sharing to help my friends when they run into problems.  Adium doesn’t do that, iChat does.  I use iChat.  There are lots of options – Trillium, Adium, etc.  Point is, I’ve got confused friends when it comes to the stock Apple solutions and which one to use for what.  Just trying to clear that up… 

I was pleasantly surprised and impressed how the developers chose to translate a mouse and keyboard based remote device onto a touchscreen device.  The mouse simply stays stationary and the screen moves with touch behind the interface.  It may sound counter-intuitive, but its quite elegant and easy to use.  You can make use of all of the normal iOS controls such as pinch to zoom to increase the size of the remote screen.  The keyboard is shown and hidden by a key on the menu bar at the bottom of the remote screen.  The bar also has keys to switch between right and left clicks for the mouse, which are executed by taping or double-tapping.  There is a magnifying glass key to zoom in and out and a complete list of settings behind a settings key. 

In addition to remote control, the file management and transfer capabilities that exist in the desktop version of the LogMeIn products is also baked into the iOS version.  You can pull copies of files from local disks on the remote computer and open them in iOS programs, using Quick Look or other features to play common media types.  In addition to the ability to download, since iOS has no native file manager, LogMeIn Ignition includes file storage as a feature within the application.  But file management doesn’t end there, it also includes cloud file storage

To switch between tasks, Ignition uses a multi-window concept, like in Safari, to open windows for Remote Control, the list of available computers, and file transfer.  You can easily switch between your open tasks.  All in all, its a well rounded and complete remote management solution for your desktop from your iOS device.  I am very impressed.

A couple months ago now, I sent out a cryptic tweet: “Its like Christmas in September. I’m spending some time this evening with a new product. More details to come soon on the blog…”  Soon being a relative term, I didn’t expect almost 3 months to pass before I revealed the device and my experiences with it.  But I am excited to finally talk about my experiences with the NextIO vNet I/O Maestro, officially released in mid-October.

The NextIO vNet is a converged PCI interconnect solution which takes standard PCIe network and fiber channel adapters and provisions them in a shared way back to individual rack mount servers.  The vNet extends PCI outside of the physical server through a special (albeit simple) riser PCI card then via cables to the vNet.   The provisioned resources can be reassigned to different physical hardware, if required, offering a level of portability for systems and disaster recovery.  In addition, the vNet does not add any specialized drivers or software on the hosts and the host simply see a PCI device presented to it from the vNet.   The nControl management software handles creating virtualized WWID and MAC addresses that are assigned to the individual rack mount servers through an intuitive interface.

Configuration & Testing

Installation of the vNet was very straight forward.  The unit is 4U in size and installs into any rack.  To bring the unit online, we connected power and a single network cable for management.  Once connected, the unit retrieved an address by DHCP.  Once it got an address, we were free to configure it to a static address (as most enterprise would like do).

The unit required very little configuration on our part.  The unit had two Ethernet and two Fiber Channel cards loaded on the interconnect slots.  These dual port cards were presented in the nControl management console along with all 30 possible servers which could be connected via PCI on the back-end.  The administrator is free to create profiles on any of the available server connections and these virtualized WWID and MAC addresses are portable between profiles, meaning that in the event of a failure for a critical system, the addresses could be reassigned to new hardware and the system brought back online (assuming similar enough hardware that the OS will not complain and the ability to move the OS disks to a compatible model server).

On the rackmount server side, we only needed to install a small PCI pass-through card and connect the cable from it to the vNet and it was ready to be powered on.  After this, all configuration is done in nControl.  Drivers for the Fiber Channel and Network adapters is done as normal in the operating system.  The cards I received in my demo were newer than ESX 4.1 and required us to add a OEM vendor supplied driver to ESX and the same would be true for Windows.  But in many cases, the OS vendor will bundle appropriate drivers and the solution will just work.

The management interface is easy to use with drag and drop and the vNet also supports command line configuration through SSH.  The command line interface reminded me of a configuration similar to our HP or Cisco managed switches.  Commands were easy to understand and I found no limitations of what could be configured and viewed from command line, which I know will make some Unix administrators happy.

I have always believed that a picture is worth a thousand words, so below is a logical view of how a vNet connects to a set of rack mount servers.

For my internal testing, I had two ESX hosts setup on the vNet and I was able to test network throughput between virtual machines on both boxes at amazing speeds. I was never able to get the device SAN connected to truly test some advanced features such as vMotion and disk IO due to limitations of my test hardware.  The vNet requires PCIe card slots, so users should know that going in they will not be repurposing a lot of older equipment onto a vNet, although anything produced in the last 3 year should be compatible with the solution.  I ran into issues with available hardware for my abbreviated testing since my systems were older Proliant DL380 G4′s.

I did not see boot from SAN as an option since the fiber channel card did not show during the POST of the test rack systems.  I believe this may be an option depending on the fiber channel card, but I cannot recall the exact discussion I had with NextIO about this.   Boot from SAN would greatly improve the ability to make OS profiles portable between rack servers since you no longer have to manually swap OS disk drives.  Boot from SAN could mean a remote administrator could perform a hardware failover while offsite.

Advantages

The advantages that I see with the technology are very similar to the benefits I initially show with HP Virtual Connect, although a little different since it is with more industry standard hardware.  Some of the advantages include:

• Reduced need of ports for Fiber Channel and Network, which is really useful when few applications can consume the capacity of an 8Gb fiber channel port or a 10Gb Ethernet port.   As with virtualization in its first phase which sought to increase utilization of processor and memory in hosts, this technology can be used to increase utilization of under-utilized connectivity.
• Less costly upgrades to the newest technology allowed by adding a single PCI card of a specific technology and then sharing the new features to the backend rack mount systems.
• Server to server traffic not interacting with systems outside of the vNet’s domain does not need to leave the vNet device and can travel between systems at PCIe native speeds.
• Very intuitive and easy to learn interface to provision interfaces to backend nodes.
• The special PCI riser cards are pass-through modules with no firmware or intelligence to patch and maintain.
• Interconnect cards are industry standard PCI cards – nothing special or proprietary.
• PCI traffic passes through the vNet unit even without the management module in service, meaning that a firmware upgrade or other outage in the module would not cause downtime.

Disadvantages

To be fair, I can see some downsides to this approach and these are downsides I have found with the HP Virtual Connect solutions.

• Converged solutions sometimes introduce new complexities for maintenance and patching firmware on the PCI interconnect cards and due to share nature, it could be difficult from a coordination stand-point.  This is a consideration when deciding what to run on a vNet, and in my mind makes cluster nodes and virtual hosts good candidates so that you can fail workloads onto nodes on a different vNet to enable maintenance periods.
• The solution could introduce a single point of failure, but this is easily overcome with the use of two vNet devices, although that does double the cost for both interconnect cards and vNet units.
• In some ways, it introduces a new black box to the environment whose traffic cannot be inspected which is a downside on the security end of things.

For a number of reasons, I think this solution could have a good use case with virtualization.  Particularly with a customer who is just adopting virtualization, this solution could give them the ability to repurpose fairly new servers and connect them to SAN and 10Gb Ethernet with ease.

In addition, I think that a customer who needs to limit the number of SAN and 10Gb port investment would find the technology beneficial.