TBL Networks announced today that it has received for the designation of Cisco ATP – Identity Services Engine Partner in the USA.  To earn this designation, TBL Networks has met all ATP program requirements and criteria, including the rigorous Cisco certified personnel levels required for an ATP – Identity Services Engine Partner. 

“TBL Networks is honored to be named a Cisco Identity Services Engine ATP Partner,” said Alan Sears, President and CEO of TBL Networks, Inc.  “With this certification, TBL will continue to provide its clients with the most advanced solutions in Borderless Networking, Collaboration, and Data Centers.”

TBL Networks is one of only 50 resellers in the United States invited by Cisco to achieve the ISE ATP. Already a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, this designation allows TBL Networks to sell, design, install, and support the new Identity Services Engine security solutions from Cisco.  TBL’s achievements include VMware Enterprise Level Solutions Provider Partner, EMC Premier Tier Velocity² Services Partner and VCE Vblock Qualified Partner.

TBL Networks is a major source of expertise for the technology sector in Central Virginia. Recently, TBL was included on CRN’s Next-Gen 250 channel partner list. In addition, TBL was ranked 406 on the 2011 Inc. 500 list, becoming the only firm in Central Virginia to make the list, and ranked 34th overall in IT services.

TBL Networks Partner status can be found in the Cisco Partner Locator at http://www.cisco.com/go/partnerlocator.

About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.  For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology. With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop. Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future. Let us take you there at www.theblinkylight.com.

In a recent blog post “The Power of Touch,”  Dannette Veale discussed how researchers at the University of Munich are developing “a solution that enables anything to be touch driven.”  As the video demonstrates, you can finally use your spare bucket as steering wheel for video games.

For more practical and immediate use, the Cisco TelePresence Touch 12 allows you to integrate touch technology into your TelePresence solution.  This 12-inch device works with the entire end point line of Cisco TelePresence line. 

As touch technology continues to progress into the enterprise, it’s novelty will fade as it becomes commonplace.   The truth is simple.  You’ve got the touch.   You’ve got the power.

TBL Networks today announced that they have moved their headquarters to a new location at 1801 Bayberry Court, Suite 202, Richmond, VA 23226.  With this move, TBL Networks, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, becomes suite neighbors to the Richmond Cisco office.

“We are very fortunate that our growth has necessitated this move,” said Alan Sears, President and CEO of TBL Networks, Inc.  “This new office will allow us to continue to provide the highest level of support to our clients, in addition to providing more facilities to demonstrate the advanced solutions that TBL provides.  These advantages will help TBL continue to bring the best information technology solutions to businesses in Central Virginia, while never forgetting the importance of customer service and community.”

TBL Networks is the only technology integrator in the Commonwealth of Virginia with five Cisco Voice CCIEs.  TBL’s Voice Engineers have personally deployed over 30,000 IP Phones and more than 2,700 Call Center Call Seats. In addition, TBL Networks employs Central Virginia’s only VMware VCDX, and two EMC Technical Architects.  

In 2011, TBL Networks was named to the CRN’s Next-Gen 250 and the Inc 500.  In addition, TBL’s CEO Alan Sears was recently named as one of Richmond’s Top 40 under 40, and two TBL Datacenter engineers were recognized as VMware vExperts.

TBLpursues the goal of techumanity, the positive synergy between technology and humanity.  TBLlives this ideal by working with the international World Community Grid for cancer research and local charity CJ’s Thumbs Up Foundation, which supports families with children facing chronic and life threatening illness.

TBL’s new office space will provide more room for examples of the latest technology in Voice, Virtualization, Storage and Disaster Recovery.  The new office will have two Cisco TelePresence System 1100s, a 65″ plasma display, camera, microphones, and integrated lighting system for immersive video meetings. Also, TBL’s new office will house a VCE Vblock, the world’s first completely integrated infrastructure for rapid virtualization deployment offering that is comprised of technology from VMware, Cisco, EMC and Intel.

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology. With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop. Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future. Let us take you there at http://www.theblinkylight.com.

In addition, Thanksgiving marks the time to remember the things for which you are thankful.  On this day, I celebrate the mobile applications that make my life better.

Flashlight by Latter-Day Apps (Free)

With all the things that a smartphone can do, it is important to not forget the simple things.  Case in point, this flashlight application, which allows you to use your phone’s camera flash as a flashlight.  As a father of a two-year old, this application has increased my proficiency at quietly moving through the house, while still providing me access to crucial applications for business like …

Cisco WebEx Meeting Center By Cisco (Free)

With Cisco’s WebEx application, you can take your WebEx with you wherever you are.  You can host meetings and presentations, or just attend them if you are out of the office, with a click of a button.  This application is if you often travel by car, but still need to attend meetings.

Nike+ GPS By Nike, Inc. ($1.99)

I recently downloaded this application in anticipation of my holiday binge eating.  Nike+GPS uses your smartphone’s GPS capability to help you keep track of distance and time.  Unlike other applications that  I have used, this one does not lock up. This application easily integrates with your music playlists, and also keeps your history so you can chart your progress. 

Cisco Mobile By Cisco (Free)

Cisco Mobile allows  you to take your office phone with you, without the downsides (lost voicemails, sending calls from your cell phone number) that come with using just call forwarding.  This application allows you to achieve single number reachability – the ability place and receive calls using  your work number only.  Also, you can use the Wi-Fi feature to make calls without using your mobile minutes.

ooTunes Radio By Oogli LLC ($4.99)

ooTunes allows you to listen to most radio stations across the US from your smartphone.  You can search for stations by location, format or name.  I find this application a great alternative to the iHeartRadio application, which limits you to Clear Channel stations and requires to you use your Facebook account.  ooTunes also provides you the ability make recordings, and to integrate your Last.fm account.

Papa John’s Pizza by Papa John’s International Inc. (Free)

Turkey. Family. Stuffing.  Pie.  More Stuffing.  Football. Napping (also stuffing).  At a certain point (or as I call it, Friday), you have to eat something else.  This applications allows you to break up the monotony of turkey with the power of pizza.

First, let’s define what I mean by a stretched vSphere cluster. I am talking about a vSphere  (HA / DRS) cluster where some hosts exist in one physical datacenter and some hosts exist in another physical datacenter. These datacenters can be geographically separated or even on the same campus. Some of the challenges will be the same regardless of the geographic location.

To keep things simple, let’s look at a scenario where the cluster is stretched across two different datacenters on the same campus. This is a scenario that I see attempted quite often.

This cluster is stretched across two datacenters. For this example let’s assume that each datacenter has an IP-based storage array that is accessible to all the hosts in the cluster and the link between the two datacenters is Layer 2. This means that all of the hosts in the cluster are Layer 2 adjacent. At first glance, this configuration may be desirable because of its perceived elegance and simplicity. Let’s take a look at the perceived functionality.

• If either datacenter has a failure, the VM’s should be restarted on the other datacenter’s hosts via High Availability (HA).
• No need for manual intervention or something like Site Recovery Manager

Unfortunately, perceived functionality and actual functionality differ in this scenario. Let’s take a look at an HA failover scenario from a storage perspective first.

• If virtual machines failed over from hosts in one datacenter to hosts in another datacenter, the storage will still be accessed from the originating datacenter.
• This will cause storage that is not local to the datacenter to be accessed by hosts that are local to the datacenter as shown in the diagram below.

This situation is not ideal in most cases. Especially if the datacenter is completely isolated. Then the storage cannot be accessed anyway. Let’s take a look at what happens when one datacenter loses communication with the other datacenter, but not with the datacenter’s local hosts. This is depicted in the diagram below.

• Prior to vSphere 5.0, if the link between the datacenters went down or some other communication disruption happened at this location in the network, each set of hosts would think that the others were down. This is a problem because each datacenter would attempt to bring the other datacenter’s virtual machines up. This is known as a split-brain scenario.
• As of vSphere 5.0, each datacenter would create its own Network Partition from an HA perspective and proceed to operate as two independent clusters (although with some limitations) until connectivity was restored between the datacenters.
• However, this scenario is still not ideal due to the storage access.

So what can be done? Well, beyond VM to Host affinity rules, if the sites are truly to be active / standby (with the standby site perhaps running lower priority VM’s), the cluster should be split into two different clusters. Perhaps even different vCenter instances (one for each site) if Site Recovery Manager (SRM) will be used to automate the failover process. If there is a use case for a single cluster, then external technology needs to be used. Specifically, the storage access problem can be addressed by using a technology like VPlex from EMC. In short, VPlex allows one to have a distributed (across two datacenters) virtual volume that can be used for a datastore in the vSphere cluster. This is depicted in the diagram below.

A detailed explanation of VPlex is beyond the scope of this post. At a high level, the distributed volume can be accessed by all the hosts in the stretched cluster. VPlex is capable of keeping track of which virtual machines should be running on the local storage that backs the distributed virtual volume. In the case of a complete site failure, VPlex can determine that the virtual machines should be restarted on the underlying storage that is local to the other datacenter’s hosts.

Technology is bringing us closer to location aware clusters. However, we are not quite there yet for a number of use cases as external equipment and functionality tradeoffs need to be considered. If you have the technology and can live with the functionality tradeoffs, then stretched clusters may work for your infrastructure. The simple design choice for many continues to be separate clusters.