Archive
#Gartner report – How to Choose Between #Hyper-V and #vSphere – #IaaS
The constant battle between the hypervisor and orchestration of IaaS etc. is of course continuing! But it is really fun I must say that Microsoft is getting more and more mature with it’s offerings in this space, great job!
One of the things that I tend to think most of is the cost, scalability and flexibility of the infrastructure that we build and how we build it, I often see that we tend to do what we’ve done for so many years now. We buy our SAN/NAS storage, we buy our servers but lean towards Blade servers though we think that’s the latest and coolest, and then we try to squeeze that into some sort of POD/FlexPods/UCS or whatever we like to call it to find our optimal “volume of Compute, Network and Storage” that we can scale. But is this scalable like the bigger cloud players like Google, Amazon etc.? Is this 2013 state of the art? I think that we’re just fooling ourselves a bit and build whatever we’ve done for all these years and don’t really provide the business with anything new… but that’s my view… I know what I’d look at and most of you that have read my earlier blog posts know that I love the way of scaling out and doing more like the big players using something like Nutanix and ensure that you choose the right IaaS components as a part of that stack, as well as the orchestration layer (OpenStack, System Center, CloudStack, Cloud Platform or whatever you prefer after you’ve done your homework).
Back to the topic a bit, I’d say that the hypervisor is of no importance anymore, that’s why everyone if giving it away for free or to the open source community! Vendors are after the more IaaS/PaaS orchestration layer and get into that because if they get that business then they have nested their way into your business processes, that’s where ultimately that will deliver the value as IT services in an automated way once you’ve got your business services and processes in place, and then it’s harder to make a change and they will live fat and happy on you for some years to come! 😉
Hyperscale Invades the Enterprise and the Impact on Converged Infrastructure – via @mathiastornblom
This is really interesting! Look at this video!
In this whiteboard presentation, Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman shares how enterprise IT can learn from the architectural models of hyperscale companies. He walks through Wikibon’s definition of software-led infrastructure and how converged infrastructure solutions meet the market’s requirements.
Continue reading or watch the whole channel here!
//Richard
True Scale Out Shared Nothing Architecture – #Compute, #Storage, #Nutanix via @josh_odgers
This is yet another great blog post by Josh! Great work and keep it up! 😉
I love this statement:
I think this really highlights what VMware and players like Google, Facebook & Twitter have been saying for a long time, scaling out not up, and shared nothing architecture is the way of the future.
At VMware vForum Sydney this week I presented “Taking vSphere to the next level with converged infrastructure”.
Firstly, I wanted to thank everyone who attended the session, it was a great turnout and during the Q&A there were a ton of great questions.
I got a lot of feedback at the session and when meeting people at vForum about how the Nutanix scale out shared nothing architecture tolerates failures.
I thought I would summarize this capability as I believe its quite impressive and should put everyone’s mind at ease when moving to this kind of architecture.
So lets take a look at a 5 node Nutanix cluster, and for this example, we have one running VM. The VM has all its data locally, represented by the “A” , “B” and “C” and this data is also distributed across the Nutanix cluster to provide data protection / resiliency etc.
So, what happens when an ESXi host failure, which results in the Nutanix Controller VM (CVM) going offline and the storage which is locally connected to the Nutanix CVM being unavailable?
Firstly, VMware HA restarts the VM onto another ESXi host in the vSphere Cluster and it runs as normal, accessing data both locally where it is available (in this case, the “A” data is local) and remotely (if required) to get data “B” and “C”.
Secondly, when data which is not local (in this example “B” and “C”) is accessed via other Nutanix CVMs in the cluster, it will be “localized” onto the host where the VM resides for faster future access.
It is importaint to note, if data which is not local is not accessed by the VM, it will remain remote, as there is no benefit in relocating it and this reduces the workload on the network and cluster.
The end result is the VM restarts the same as it would using traditional storage, then the Nutanix cluster “curator” detects if any data only has one copy, and replicates the required data throughout the cluster to ensure full resiliency.
The cluster will then look like a fully functioning 4 node cluster as show below.
The process of repairing the cluster from a failure is commonly incorrectly compared to a RAID pack rebuild. With a raid rebuild, a small number of disks, say 8, are under heavy load re striping data across a hot spare or a replacement drive. During this time the performance of everything on the RAID pack is significantly impacted.
With Nutanix, the data is distributed across the entire cluster, which even with a 5 node cluster will be at least 20 SATA drives, but with all data being written to SSD then sequentially offloaded to SATA.
The impact of this process is much less than a RAID…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Solving the Compute and Storage scalability dilemma – #Nutanix, via @josh_odgers
The topic of Compute, Network and STORAGE is a hot topic as I’ve written in blog posts before this one (How to pick virtualization (HW, NW, Storage) solution for your #VDI environment? – #Nutanix, @StevenPoitras) … and still a lot of colleagues and customers are struggling with finding better solutions and architecture.
How can we ensure that we get the same or better performance of our new architecture? How can we scale in a more simple and linear manner? How can we ensure that we don’t have a single point of failure for all of our VM’s etc..? How are others scaling and doing this in a better way?
I’m not a storage expert, but I do know and read that many companies out there are working on finding the optimal solution for Compute and Storage, and how they can get the cost down and be left with a more simple architecture to manage…
This is a topic that most need to address as well now when more and more organisations are starting to build their private clouds, because how are you going to scale it and how can you get closer to the delivery that the big players provide? Gartner even had Software-Defined-Storage (SDS) as the number 2 trend going forward: #Gartner Outlines 10 IT Trends To Watch – via @MichealRoth, #Nutanix, #VMWare
Right now I see Nutanix as the leader here! They rock! Just have a look at this linear scalability:
If you want to learn more how Nutanix can bring great value please contact us at EnvokeIT!
For an intro of Nutanix in 2 minutes have a look at these videos:
Overview:
#Gartner Outlines 10 IT Trends To Watch – via @MichealRoth, #Nutanix, #VMWare
This is also a good analysis I must say, I think that they are spot on! Even though I think that most companies haven’t addressed the whole Mobility aspect of going away from “managing devices” yet, there are a lot of “BYOD” strategies and solutions that companies still need to work on….
And of course I see a great opportunity to transform and build new “cloud” services/datacenters as well and do it in a more up-to-date, agile, scalable and simple way than what we’ve done over all these years. Stop building the old legacy architecture of Compure, Network and Storage and see what the market leaders of IaaS and PaaS are doing. One of the great players here is of course Nutanix as I see it (contact EnvokeIT if you need more info about this great product)!
Gartner Inc. offered a glimpse of 10 trends for IT professionals to pay attention to over the next five years.
The trends were discussed in a Thursday Webinar by David J. Cappuccio, a research vice president at Gartner. He noted that IT pros are busy enough with daily operations, with “74 percent” of IT budgets devoted to those concerns. Still, he contended that there are lots of new technologies and trends that will have an impact on IT departments.
Gartner expects these trends will affect IT over the next five years:
- “Software-defined networks
- “Software-defined storage
- “Hybrid cloud services
- “Integrated systems
- “Applications acceleration
- “The Internet of things
- “Open Compute Project
- “Intelligent datacenters
- “IT demand
- “Organizational entrenchment and disruptions”
End user expectations are affecting IT. New workers getting out of college are expecting access to everything all of the time, from any device, from anywhere, Cappuccio said. They typically own between three and four devices today, he added.
Software-defined networking (SDN) came into general awareness about two years ago, expecially after SDN pioneer Nicira came out of stealth mode, Cappuccio said. Nicira’s idea was to create a software stack that would manage the real-world physical network. The concept resonated well with the marketplace, and Nicira was bought by VMware in a $1.4 billion purchase. SDN represents a new way to operate networks, which can be configured…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Microsoft finds a new way to deliver a private #cloud in a box – #Azure via @maryjofoley
Interesting!!!! 🙂
It took three years from when it was first announced, but Microsoft may have found a way to deliver a private cloud in a box.
The company’s vision and strategy for doing this has gone through many twists and turns.
Microsoft’s original plan was to provide its largest partners and even a few, select enterprise users a so-called Azure Appliance. Announced in 2010, the Azure Appliances were to be carried by Dell, Fujitsu and HP. These OEMs were to provide the servers which could be installed in partner and select enterprise customers’ datacenters. Microsoft was supposed to provide and maintain Windows Azure as a service to these servers.
The only partner that ever delivered an Azure Appliance was Fujitsu, which announced availability in August 2011. But some time in the past few months, Microsoft ended up dropping its Azure Appliance plans, without ever officially announcing it was dead.
The IT Melting Pot! 