Category: Data and Information Management

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Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brainbuster?

Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brainbuster?

Broadcom buying CA, Brilliant or a Brain buster?

For some in the IT industry as well as financial markets, there is skepticism about Broadcom (formerly known as Avago) making an announcing that they are buying CA Technologies (CA) for USD 18.9 Billion (cash). For example, the Broadcom stock ( AVGO) took a significant negative hit (13%) on the news.

Broadcom Stock impact after announcing CA purchase
Broadcom Stock upon announcing buying CA (via Google)

Broadcom aka Avago and CA rewind

Why the backlash over buying CA? a couple of reasons, CA is not exactly the most loved software vendor by customers in the industry, and, Broadcom (Avago) has been traditionally focused on hardware.

However, to understand this better, lets take a step back.

After digesting the likes of Broadcom, Brocade, and LSI among others, as well as after failing to capture Qualcomm in a USD 117 Billion takeover attempt, Avago (e.g., Broadcom) has set its sights on Mainframe and legacy enterprise software vendor Computer Technologies (CA) formerly known as Computer Associates. CA has about USD 4.2 Billion in annual revenue with about two-thirds tied to legacy IBM mainframe software, and the rest in other enterprise software. While not a growth segment, the IBM mainframe software business is a good annuity revenue and margin stream.

Data Infrastructures
Data Infrastructures support IT business applications

Broadcom had 2017 revenues of about USD 17.6 Billion made up of a diverse product set including data infrastructure hardware along with associated software spanning legacy to new and emerging cloud environments. Some of Broadcom technologies include server I/O devices such as PCIe, SAS, SATA and NVMe adapters, RAID controllers and chips, Fibre Channel, NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF), Ethernet, switches and much more.
Broadcom and CA, Brainbuster or Brilliant?

This deal is a bit of a head-scratcher or brainbuster on the surface as Broadcom aka Avago has been primarily a hardware company (they do have a portfolio of drivers, management tools, monitoring and other software) and I can understand them wanting to get more into the software business.

Avago (excuse me, Broadcom) has had a focus on leaning out acquisitions to drive volume and integration across its portfolio, bringing value to its partners and customers. For its part, CA has been known where old (or new) software goes to die or retire garnering CA reputations as a software retirement home, or undertaker for technology. Refer to the Broadcom SEC filing for more information here.

On the other hand, CA has made a successful business wringing our value from existing software as opposed to substantial investment in new development; they do do some new development.

Perhaps this is the risk and reward that Avago sees, where similar to themselves of wringing out value from existing hardware, maybe they will do the same with CA, however, taking it to a new level. If that is the game, then once CA is bought by Broadcom, who will they pursue from a software acquisition target list similar to what Avago has done with hardware?

Where to learn more

Learn more about Broadcom (Avago), CA and data infrastructures related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

For now, Broadcom buying CA is a brainbuster, especially on the surface. However, there could be a brilliant move if Broadcom can leverage CA to do what it has done in the past. That is, similar to Avago buying various companies and leaning them out; CA has done similar with both boosting recurring revenues and increasing market footprint. Also, the combined companies can also leverage their reach into various partner ecosystems as keep in mind, hardware needs software, software needs hardware, and Broadcom is now a supplier of both.

It will be interesting to see how much Broadcom leans out CA, perhaps the lessons from buying Brocade might help as opposed to previous purchases. My point is that Brocade solutions are higher up the data infrastructure technology stack than traditional Broadcom, Avago, LSI components that require more direct customer-facing sales and marketing.

CA for its part also relies on direct customer-facing sales and marketing, however, is their room or opportunity for leaning things out?

Something else interesting to watch is how much Broadcom allows CA to operate on its own, vs. more under the direct Broadcom umbrella.

Then there is the question of to sustain growth, does Broadcom and CA go on additional shopping sprees for undervalued software companies and whom would those be? Perhaps some of the legacy big vendors such as Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, IBM, Oracle among others might be interested in selling off some under performing software.

On the other hand, perhaps there are some opportunities for Broadcom and CA to do some buy out deals with private equity firms?

Keep in mind that over the past few years, several software business units have been divested from the likes of the combined Dell and EMC, HPE among others.

For now, I’m sticking with Broadcom buying CA as a brainbuster, however, see some interesting scenarios in the future.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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May 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

May 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

May 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Volume 18, Issue 5 (May 2018)

Hello and welcome to the May 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter.

In cased you missed it, the April 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter can be viewed here (HTML and PDF).

May has been a busy month with a lot of data infrastructure related activity from software-defined virtual, cloud, container, converged, serverless to legacy, hardware, software, services, server, storage, I/O and networking along with data protection topics among others.

In this issue buzzwords topics include GDPR, NVMe, NVMeoF, Composable, Serverless, Data Protection, SCM, Gen-Z, MaaS:

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

May has been a busy month, some data infrastructure, server, storage, I/O network, hardware, software, cloud, converged, and container as well as data protection activity includes among others:

Depending on when you read this, the new global data protection regulations (GDPR) are either days away, or already in effect. For those who are not aware of GDPR other than seeing many inbox items in your email pertaining to it, here are some resources as a refresher or primer:

May Buzzword, Buzz Topic and Trends

Besides data protection and GDPR, other recent data infrastructure related news, trends, technologies and topics to keep an eye on (besides AI, ML, DL, AR/VR, IoT, Blockchain, Serverless) include Metal as a Service (MaaS) that might be familiar to some, for others, something new. Canonical has been busy for sometime now with MaaS including in Ubuntu and they are not alone with variations appearing with various managed service providers, hosting and cloud providers as well. NVMe has become a more common topic, technology, trend including for use in servers as well as over fabrics (e.g. NVMe over Fabrics) as a language for server, storage, I/O communication.

A new emerging companion to NVMe is Gen-Z which initially is a companion to PCIe. Longer term, Gen-Z could maybe possibly be a replacement, as well as for use accessing direct random access memory (DRAM) among other uses. Storage Class Memory (SCM) has been an industry conversation topic for several years now with new persistent memories (PMEM) that combine the best of traditional DRAM (Speed and write endurance) as well as persistent, higher capacity, lower cost of traditional NAND flash SSDs.

Another trend topic is that for some, ASIC, FPGA and GPU are new companions to standard commodity compute processors along with servers, yet for others it may be Dejavu as they have been being used for years (ok, decades) in some solutions. For now, two other buzzwords, buzz terms to add or refresh your data infrastructure vocabulary include distributed ledgers (aka blockchains), composable resources and ephemeral instance storage (storage on a cloud instance).

May NVMe Momentum Movement Activity

May saw a lot of NVMe related activity, from chips and components (adapters, devices) to systems spanning direct attached to NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF). Here is a primer (or refresh) for NVMe along with various deployment options. NVMeoF includes RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) based, along with NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe), as well as emerging NVMe over IP.

NVMe options
NVMe being used for front-end accessed via shared PCIe along with back-end devices

There are many different facets of NVMe including for use as a front-end on storage systems supporting server attachment (e.g. competes with Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SAS among others). Another variation of NVMe is as a back-end for attachment of drives or other NVMe based devices in storage systems, as well as servers.

NVMe backend
Front-end using traditional block SAN access with back-end NVMe, SAS and SATA devices

Read more about the many different options and variations of NVMe including key questions to ask or understand, deployment topology along with other related topics at thenvmeplace.com.

NVMe frontend NVMeoF
Various NVMe front-end including NVMeoF along with NVMe back-end devices (U.2, M.2, AiC)

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Activity

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to add new features, functionality as well as extending those as along with existing capabilities into various regions. Some recent updates include new Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Microsoft Windows Servers versions 1709 and 1803 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Other AWS updates include spot instances support for Red Hat BYOL (Bring Your Own License), VPN enhancements, X1e instances available in Frankfurt, H1 instance price reduction, as well as LightSail now in Canada, Paris, and Seoul regions.

For those who are not familiar with LightSail, they are virtual private servers (VPS) which are different from traditional EC2 instances. LightSail can be a cost-effective way for those who need to move out of general population shared hosting, yet cannot justify a full EC2 instance while requiring more than a container.

The LightSail instance also is available with various software pre-installed such as for WordPress websites among others. For example, I have used LightSail as a backup and standby WordPress site for StorageIOblog using Updraft Plus  Pro for data protection.

In other news, AWS C5d EC2 instances are available in various regions. C5d instances are available with 2, 4, 8, 16, 36 and 72 vCPUs along with up to 1800GB of NVMe based ephemeral storage for on-demand reserved or spot instances.

Note that instance-based storage is temporary meaning that it persists for the life of the instance. What this means is that if you stop and restart the instance, the data is not persistence. Instance-based storage is useful for data that can be protected or persisted to other storage including EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Usage includes batch, log and analytics processing, burst buffers, cache or workspace.

AWS also announced a new Simple Storage Service (S3) storage class a month or so ago called One Zone Availability Infrequent Access. This new storage class primarily provides a lower cost of storage with lower durability (e.g., data spread across one zone vs. multiple). Over the past couple of months, I have been migrating from S3 Infrequent Access (IA) as well as standard into One Zone Availability. Some of my active data remains in S3 Standard storage class, while cold archives are in Glacier.

A tip about migrating to One Zone Availability, as well as between other S3 storage classes is paid attention to your API calls and monthly budget. You might see an increase in S3 costs during the migration time, that then settles into the lower prices once data has been moved due to API calls (gets, puts, lists, dir). In other words, pay attention to how many API calls you are allowed per storage class per month, along with other fees beyond focusing only on cost per TByte. Read about other recent AWS news updates here.

Software-defined storage startup Cloudian announced their technology available for test drive on Google Cloud Platform as part of a continued industry trend. That trend is for storage vendors to make their storage software technology available on different cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google, Softlayer among others.

Dell Technology World 2018

Dell Technologies made several announcements as part of Dell Technologies World that are covered in a series of posts here. Announcements included PowerMax the successor to VMAX, XtremIO X2 updates, new servers, workstations among many other items, read more here.

Besides the data infrastructure, cloud service providers and systems vendors, component suppliers including Cavium announced NVMe over Fibre Channel updates (here and here), along with Marvel NVMe updates here. HPE announced new thin clients and software (t430 Thin Client, HP mt44 Mobile Thin Client, HP ThinPro software), as well as updates to 3PAR and other storage solutions.

IBM announced various storage enhancements (and here) as well as a Happy 30th anniversary to the IBM Power9 based i systems. In other news, Kaseya bought backup data protection vendor Unitrends.

NVMe NAND flash Intel Optane

Micron announced the first quad layer cell (QLC) nand flash solid state device (SSD) named 52100 has begun shipping to select customers (and vendors). QLC packs or stacks 4 bits per cell. The 5200 is optimized for read-intensive workloads with up to 33% higher densities compared to previous generation TLC (triple layer cell) NAND flash. Broader market availability is expected to occur later fall 2018, 5210 form factor is 2.5” as a standard SSD or HDD, with capacities from 1.92TB to 7.68TB.

In other news, Micron also announced a $10 Billion (USD) stock repurchase plan, along with an extension of Intel 3D NAND flash memory partnership involving 3D NAND flash, as well as 96 layer 3D NAND. Meanwhile, various vendors are increasingly talking about how their systems are or will be storage class memory (SCM) ready including for use such as Micron 3D XPoint also known as Intel Optane among others.

Microsoft has placed into public preview Azure Active Directory (AAD) Storage authentication for Azure Blobs and Queues. Azure Storage Explorer is now released as version 1.0. AAD storage authentication enables organizations to implement role-based access control of Azure storage resources. Speaking of Azure, Microsoft has published several architectures, reference and other content at the Azure Virtual Datacenter portal here.

If you have not done so, check out Azure File Sync which is currently in public preview. Having been involved and using it for over a year including during private preview, Azure File Sync is an exciting, useful technology for creating a hybrid distributed file sharing with cloud tiering solutions. Learn more Azure File Sync here and here. In other news, Microsoft has announced a preview as part of the April 2018 Windows 10 build for a Hyper-V Google Android emulator support.

NetApp has had Azure based NAS storage in preview for a while now, and also announced Cloud Volumes on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In addition to Cloud Volumes on AWS, Azure, and GCP, NetApp also announced enhanced NVMe based storage systems among other updates.

Two companies that have similar names are Opendrives (video workflow acceleration) and Opendrive (cloud storage, backup, and data protection). Meanwhile, data infrastructure startup Pavilion has received new funding as well as begun talking about their NVMe including NVMe over Fabric (NVMeOF) hardware storage system. Long-time data infrastructure converged server storage startup Pivot3 announced additional cloud workload mobility.

Pure storage made a couple of announcements including  FlashArray//X NVMe based shared accelerated storage system as well as NVIDIA (GPU powered) based AIRI Mini for AI/DL/ML.

Have you heard about Snowflake computing, aka, the cloud data warehouse solution? If not, check them out here. Another cloud-related data infrastructure vendor to look into is Upbound.io who have received additional funding for their multi-cloud management solutions.

Building off of recent VMware vSphere updates (here), and Dell Technology World here, the following is an excellent post about Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7, and VMware vSAN HCI assessment tool here.

Check out other industry news, comments, trends perspectives here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO Comments Content

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news, tips and articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via SearchStorage: Comments Managing storage for IoT data at the enterprise edge
Via SearchCloudComputing: Comments Hybrid cloud deployment demands a change in security mindset
Via SearchStorage: Comments Dell EMC storage IPO, VMware merger plans still unclear
Via SearchStorage: Comments Dell EMC midrange storage keeps its overlapping arrays
Via SearchStorage: Comments Dell EMC all-flash PowerMax replaces VMAX, injects NVMe
Via IronMountain InfoGoto:  The growing Trend of Secondary Data Storage

View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIOblog posts

Server StorageIOblog Data Infrastructure Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary
Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details
Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details
Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure
Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details
April 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter
VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 SDDC Update Summary
PCIe Fundamentals Server Storage I/O Network Essentials
Have you heard about the new CLOUD Act data regulation?
Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview
Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same
Data Infrastructure Resource Links cloud data protection tradecraft trends
IT transformation Serverless Life Beyond DevOps Podcast
Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Topics Tools Techniques Technologies Tips
Introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL Overview
Data Infrastructure Primer Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
If NVMe is the answer, what are the questions?

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) available at Amazon.com (check out special sale price), the following are Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics including Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out. Speaking of my books, Didier Van Hoye (@WorkingHardInIt) has a good review over on his site you can view here, also check out the rest of his great content while there.

Containers, serverless, kubernetes continue to gain in industry adoption, as well as customer deployments. Here is some information about Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Note that AWS has Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google, VMware and Pivotal with Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS) among others.

Here is an interesting perspective by Ben Kepps about Serverless (e.g. life beyond Kubernetes and containers (e.g. life beyond virtualization which to some is or was life (e.g. life beyond bare metal))) as well as the all to often punditry, evangelism of something new causing something else to be dead.

SNIA has updated their Emerald aka Green energy effectiveness (focus on productivity) measurement specification (V3.01) including NAS NFS file activity (besides block). Learn more at snia.org/forums/green.

Watch for more items to be added to the recommended reading list book shelf soon.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO event activities

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

June 27, 2018 – Webinar – TBA

May 29, 2018 – Webinar – Microsoft Windows as a Service

April 24, 2018 – Webinar – AWS and on-site, on-premises hybrid data protection

See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Various useful links and resources:

Data Infrastructure Recommend Reading and watching list
Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
storageio.com/downloads – Various presentations and other download material
storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

Connect and Converse With Us

Storage IO RSS storageio linkedin storageio facebook Server StorageIO on twitter @StorageIO   Google+  Server StorageIO email storageio youtube  storageio instagram

Subscribe to Newsletter – Newsletter Archives – StorageIO.com – StorageIOblog.com

What this all means and wrap-up

Data Infrastructures are what exists inside physical data centers spanning cloud, converged, hyper-converged, virtual, serverless and other software defined as well as legacy environments. So far this spring there has been a lot of data infrastructure related activity, from new technology announcements, to events, trends among others. Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure update newsletter and watch for more NVMe, Gen-Z, cloud, data protection among other topics in future posts, articles, events, and newsletters.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary
This is part one of a five-part series about Dell Technology World 2018 announcement summary. Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw). There were several announcements along with plenty of other activity from sessions, meetings, hallway and event networking taking place at Dell Technology World DTW 2018.

Major data infrastructure technology announcements include:

  • PowerMax all-flash array (AFA) solid state device (SSD) NVMe storage system
  • PowerEdge four-socket 2U and 4U rack servers
  • XtremIO X2 AFA SSD storage system updates
  • PowerEdge MX preview of future composable servers
  • Desktop and thin client along with other VDI updates
  • Cloud and networking enhancements

Besides the above, additional data infrastructure related announcements were made in association with Dell Technology family members including VMware along with other partners, as well as customer awards. Other updates and announcements were tied to business updates from Dell Technology, Dell Technical Capital (venture capital), and, Dell Financial Services.

Dell Technology World Buzzword Bingo Lineup

Some of the buzzword bingo terms, topics, acronyms from Dell Technology World 2018 included AFA, AI, Autonomous, Azure, Bare Metal, Big Data, Blockchain, CI, Cloud, Composable, Compression, Containers, Core, Data Analytics, Dedupe, Dell, DFS (Dell Financial Services), DFR (Data Footprint Reduction), Distributed Ledger, DL, Durability, Fabric, FPGA, GDPR, Gen-Z, GPU, HCI, HDD, HPC, Hybrid, IOP, Kubernetes, Latency, MaaS (Metal as a Service), ML, NFV, NSX, NVMe, NVMeoF, PACE (Performance Availability Capacity Economics), PCIe, Pivotal, PMEM, RAID, RPO, RTO, SAS, SATA, SC, SCM, SDDC, SDS, Socket, SSD, Stamp, TBW (Terabytes Written per day), VDI, venture capital, VMware and VR among others.

Dell Technology World 2018 Venue
Dell Technology World DTW 2018 Event and Venue

Dell Technology World 2018 was located at the combined Palazzo and Venetian hotels along with adjacent Sands Expo center kicking off Monday, April 30th and wrapping up May 4th.

The theme for Dell Technology World DTW 2018 was make it real, which in some ways was interesting given the focus on virtual including virtual reality (VR), software-defined data center (SDDC) virtualization, data infrastructure topics, along with artificial intelligence (AI).

Virtual Sky Dell Technology World 2018
Make it real – Venetian Palazzo St. Mark’s Square on the way to Sands Expo Center

There was plenty of AI, VR, SDDC along with other technologies, tools as well as some fun stuff to do including VR games.

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area
Dell Technology World Village Area near Key Note and Expo Halls

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Drones
Dell Technology World Drone Flying Area

During a break from some meetings, I used a few minutes to fly a drone using VR which was interesting. I Have been operating drones (See some videos here) visually without dependence on first-person view (FPV) or relying on extensive autonomous operations instead flying heads up by hand for several years. Needless to say, the VR was interesting, granted encountered a bit of vertigo that I had to get used to.

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
More views of the Dell Technology World Village and Commons Area with VR activity

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
Dell Technology World Village and VR area

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
Dell Technology World Bean Bag Area

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Ok, nuff with the AI, ML, DL, VR fun, time to move on to the business and technology topics of Dell Technologies World 2018.

What was announced at Dell Technology World 2018 included among others:

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax
Dell PowerMax Front View

Subsequent posts in this series take a deeper look at the various announcements as well as what they mean.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

On the surface it may appear that there was not much announced at Dell Technology World 2018 particular compared to some of the recent Dell EMC Worlds and EMC Worlds. However turns out that there was a lot announced, granted without some of the entertainment and circus like atmosphere of previous events. Continue reading here Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details in this series, along with Part III here, Part IV here (including PowerEdge MX composable infrastructure leveraging Gen-Z) and Part V (servers and converged) here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

This is Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcements Include:

  • PowerMax – Enterprise class tier 0 and tier 1 all-flash array (AFA)
  • XtremIO X2 – Native replication and new entry-level pricing

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax back view
Back view of Dell PowerMax

Dell PowerMax Something Old, Something New, Something Fast Near You Soon

PowerMax is the new companion to VMAX. Positioned for traditional tier 0 and tier 1 enterprise-class applications and workloads, PowerMax is optimized for dense server virtualization and SDDC, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server along with other low-latency, high-performance database activity. Different target workloads include Mainframe as well as Open Systems, AI, ML, DL, Big Data, as well as consolidation.

The Dell PowerMax is an all-flash array (AFA) architecture with an end to end NVMe along with built-in AI and ML technology. Building on the architecture of Dell EMC VMAX (some models still available) with new faster processors, full end to end NVMe ready (e.g., front-end server attachment, back-end devices).

The AI and ML features of PowerMax PowerMaxOS include an engine (software) that learns and makes autonomous storage management decisions, as well as implementations including tiering. Other AI and ML enabled operations include performance optimizations based on I/O pattern recognition.

Other features of PowerMax besides increased speeds, feeds, performance includes data footprint reduction (DFR) inline deduplication along with enhanced compression. The DFR benefits include up to 5:1 data reduction for space efficiency, without performance impact to boost performance effectiveness. The DFR along with improved 2x rack density, along with up to 40% power savings (your results may vary) based on Dell claims to enable an impressive amount of performance, availability, capacity, economics (e.g., PACE) in a given number of cubic feet (or meters).

There are two PowerMax models including 2000 (scales from 1 to 2 redundant controllers) and 8000 (scales from 1 to 8 redundant controller nodes). Note that controller nodes are Intel Xeon multi-socket, multi-core processors enabling scale-up and scale-out performance, availability, and capacity. Competitors of the PowerMax include AFA solutions from HPE 3PAR, NetApp, and Pure Storage among others.

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax Front View
Front view of Dell PowerMax

Besides resiliency, data services along with data protection, Dell is claiming PowerMax is 2x faster than their nearest high-end storage system competitors with up to 150GB/sec (e.g., 1,200Gbps) of bandwidth, as well as up to 10 million IOPS with 50% lower latency compared to previous VMAX.

PowerMax is also a full end to end NVMe ready (both back-end and front-end). Back-end includes NVMe drives, devices, shelves, and enclosures) as well as front-end (future NVMe over Fabrics, e.g., NVMeoF). Being NVMeoF ready enables PowerMax to support future front-end server network connectivity options to traditional SAN Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI among others.

PowerMax is also ready for new, emerging high speed, low-latency storage class memory (SCM).  SCM is the next generation of persistent memories (PMEM) having performance closer to traditional DRAM while persistence of flash SSD. Examples of SCM technologies entering the market include Intel Optane based on 3D XPoint, along with others such as those from Everspin among others.

IBM Z Zed Mainframe at Dell Technology World 2018
An IBM “Zed” Mainframe (in case you have never seen one)

Based on the performance claims, the Dell PowerMax has an interesting if not potentially industry leading power, performance, availability, capacity, economic footprint per cubic foot (or meter). It will be interesting to see some third-party validation or audits of Dell claims. Likewise, I look forward to seeing some real-world applied workloads of Dell PowerMax vs. other storage systems. Here are some additional perspectives Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC all-flash PowerMax replaces VMAX, injects NVMe


Dell PowerMax Visual Studio (Image via Dell.com)

To help with customer decision making, Dell has created an interactive VMAX and PowerMax configuration studio that you can use to try out as well as learn about different options here. View more Dell PowerMax speeds, feeds, slots, watts, features and functions here (PDF).

Dell Technology World 2018 XtremIO X2

XtremIO X2

Dell XtremIO X2 and XIOS 6.1 operating system (software-defined storage) enhanced with native replication across wide area networks (WAN). The new WAN replication is metadata-aware native to the XtremIO X2 that implements data footprint reduction (DFR) technology reducing the amount of data sent over network connections. The benefit is more data moved in a given amount of time along with better data protection requiring less time (and network) by only moving unique changed data.

Dell Technology World 2018 XtremIO X2 back view
Back View of XtremIO X2

Dell EMC claims to reduce WAN network bandwidth by up to 75% utilizing the new native XtremIO X2 native asynchronous replication. Also, Dell says XtremIO X2 requires up to 38% less storage space at disaster recovery and business resiliency locations while maintaining predictable recovery point objectives (RPO) of 30 seconds. Another XtremIO X2 announcement is a new entry model for customers at up to 55% lower cost than previous product generations. View more information about Dell XtremIO X2 here, along with speeds feeds here, here, as well as here.

What about Dell Midrange Storage Unity and SC?

Here are some perspectives Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC midrange storage keeps its overlapping arrays.

Dell Bulk and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)

One of the questions I had going into Dell Technology World 2018 was what is the status of ECS (and its predecessors Atmos as well as Centera) bulk object storage is given lack of messaging and news around it. Specifically, my concern was that if ECS is the platform for storing and managing data to be preserved for the future, what is the current status, state as well as future of ECS.

In conversations with the Dell ECS folks, ECS which has encompassed Centera functionality and it (ECS) is very much alive, stay tuned for more updates. Also, note that Centera has been EOL. However, its feature functionality has been absorbed by ECS meaning that data preserved can now be managed by ECS. While I can not divulge the details of some meeting discussions, I can say that I am comfortable (for now) with the future directions of ECS along with the data it manages, stay tuned for updates.

Dell Data Protection

What about Data Protection? Security was mentioned in several different contexts during Dell Technology World 2018, as was a strong physical security presence seen at the Palazzo and Sands venues. Likewise, there was a data protection presence at Dell Technologies World 2018 in the expo hall, as well as with various sessions.

What was heard was mainly around data protection management tools, hybrid, as well as data protection appliances and data domain-based solutions. Perhaps we will hear more from Dell Technologies World in the future about data protection related topics.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

If there was any doubt about would Dell keep EMC storage progressing forward, the above announcements help to show some examples of what they are doing. On the other hand, lets stay tuned to see what news and updates appear in the future pertaining to mid-range storage (e.g. Unity and SC) as well as Isilon, ScaleIO, Data Protection platforms as well as software among other technologies.

Continue reading part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable and Gen-Z) here in this series, as well as part I here, part II here, part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here, and, part V here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details

Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details

Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details
This is Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part III here and part IV here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

What was announced:

  • PowerEdge gen 14 four-socket rack mount servers
  • Preview of PowerMX Gen-Z enabled composable data infrastructure resources
  • Converged Infrastructure (CI) and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) updates
  • Wyse 5070 Thin Client and other VDI related updates
  • VMware and NSX Cloud Updates

PowerEdge Servers Updates

PowerEdge servers enhanced with generation 14 technologies initially announced last May at Dell EMC World 2017, along with Intel July 2017 technology announcements. New PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840 are designed to support AI, ML, DL along with other analytics-related demanding workloads. In addition to new PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840 models, Dell Technologies also announced Dell Precision Optimizer 5.0 with enhanced ML algorithms to intelligently tune performance while boosting productive of Dell Precision workstations.

PowerEdge Rack Servers – New PowerEdge R940xa and R840 gen 14 servers. Dell announced two new four-socket servers that are part of the 14th generation of Dell PowerEdge server portfolio initially announced at Dell EMC World 2017 leveraging new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. These new four-socket servers support up to 112 combined cores (e.g., 4 x 28), along with 6TB of DDR4 memory as well as Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) options. Other standard features include NVMe drives for high performance, low-latency flash, and other emerging SSD or SCM media.

Dell PowerEdge R840

The Dell PowerEdge R840 2U rack server, features up to 26 2.5” HDD or SSD (24 in front, two in rear bays), of which up to 24 can be NVMe U.2 small form factor (SFF) drive form factor SSD devices. Other storage options include a mix of SAS/SATA HDDs and SSDs, as well as NVMe SSDs. Also supported are up to 48 DIMM DDR4 (RDIMM or LRDIMM up to 2666MT) slots, 12 of which can be for NVDIMMs enabling up to 6TB of memory.

Networking options for the R840 include 4 x 1 GbE, 4 x 10GbE, 2 x 10GbE + 2 x 1GbE, or 2 x 25GbE. Other options include support for two double wide graphics processing units (GPU) or two Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for data-intensive computations. Other R840 features include integrated Intel ultra-path interconnect (UPI), smart adaptive cooling, secure instance erase of HDD and SSD devices, along with Dell OpenManager enterprise management software, as well as agent less iDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller) for automated server management. View additional Dell PowerEdge R940xa speeds, feeds, slots and watts specifications here (PDF).

Dell PowerEdge R940xa

The Dell PowerEdge R940xa  rack server has the same CPU and memory configuration as the R840 however in a larger 4U package. The larger packaging of the R940xa enables 12 PCIe Gen3 slots (six x16 or two x16 and ten x8), dual M.2 boot devices, network options (4 x 1 GbE, 4 x 10GbE, 2 x 10GbE + 2 x 1Gbe or 2 x 25GbE). Other components include up to 32 x 2.5” SAS/SATA HDD and SSD, and four direct-attached NVMe devices, as well as four double-wide GPUs or 8 FPGAs. With the additional resources, the R940xa is designed for accelerating databases along with other onsite high-performance workloads combines up to four CPUs along with GPUs or FPGAs. View additional Dell PowerEdge R940xa speeds, feeds, slots and watts specifications here (PDF).

Converged and Hyper-Converged

Dell Technologies has enhanced its Converged Infrastructure (CI) as well as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) portfolio with gen 14 servers, GPUs, NVMe along with 25 GbE networking. In addition to VxBlock solutions incorporating PowerMax, XtremIO X2 along with mid-range Dell Technologies storage, VxRail as well as VxRack updates were announced in support of VMware vSAN among other items.

Thin Clients and VDI

New Dell Wyse 5070 thin client workstation for on-site or cloud-based applications. Dell EMC VDI solutions leverage PowerEdge 14th generation servers including VxRail and vSAN ready nodes, as well as incorporate NVIDIA Quadro virtual data center workstation (vDWS) and Tesla P40 GPUs. In addition to Wyse thin clients, Dell has also enhanced OptiPlex PCs.

VMware NSX and Cloud

In addition to the recent April SDDC cloud foundation and March Cloud announcements, VMware also announced NSX software-defined networking enhancements. The VMware NSX updates include NSX Cloud support for applications running in Microsoft Azure cloud, Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) via its Velo cloud acquisition, along with NSX for container cloud-native and bare metal applications, along with Telco/Network Function Virtualization (NFV) updates.

Introducing PowerEdge MX Composable Infrastructure (the other CI)

Dell announced at Dell Technology World 2018 a preview of the new PowerEdge MX family of data infrastructure resource servers. PowerEdge MX is being developed to meet the needs of resource-centric data infrastructures that require scalability, as well as performance availability, capacity, economic (PACE) characteristics flexibility for diverse workloads. Read more about Dell PowerEdge MX, Gen-Z and composable infrastructures (the other CI) here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Dell is moving to converge not only technologies, tools, management of their technologies, as well as the data infrastructures of their client customers; they are also doing the same for their organization. We have seen the combination of Dell and EMC into Dell EMC and now into Dell Technologies. What was also noticed is the reinforcement of the Dell Technologies family or what in the past was referred to post-merger (or acquisition) as the EMC Federation.

Dell Technology World 2018 Party Walk The Moon and Sting
Dell Technology World 2018 Party with Walk The Moon before main act Sting

Dell Technologies World 2018 in some ways was a proof point of where the company is as well as how they have progressed in the twenty-some months since the integration of Dell and EMC. While there are still signs, messaging, naming and vestiges of the former EMC, along with EMCworld, make no mistake, this is a Dell Technologies event. From desktops to datacenters, Dell Technologies is showing its technology breadth as well as product lineup.

There were some questions from the press not answered such as what is going on with Dells financial organizational restructure, which as Michael Dell told the attendees, read the SEC 13D documents ( here, here and here) if you have not, as all the answers that Dell (Michael Dell and Dell Technologies) can talk about are there.

Here are some additional perspectives of what Dell Technologies may or may not due concerning business restructuring:

Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC storage strategy talk buzzes Dell Tech World
Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC storage IPO, VMware merger plans still unclear

Leaving Las Vegas and Dell Technology World 2018
Leaving Las Vegas and Dell Technology World 2018

Overall Dell Technology World 2018 was a good event, and I look forward to hearing more from Dell in the weeks as well as months ahead as they roll out more of what was discussed (or previewed) last week.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 SDDC Update Summary

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 SDDC Update Summary

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 SDDC Update Summary

VMware announced last week vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 among other updates for their software-defined data center (SDDC) and software-defined infrastructure (SDI) solutions. The new April v6.7 announcement updates followed those from this past March when VMware announced cloud enhancements with partner AWS (more on that announcement here).

VMware vSphere 6.7
VMware vSphere Web Client with vSphere 6.7

For those looking for a more extended version with a closer look and analysis of what VMware announced click here for part two and part three here.

What VMware announced is general availability (GA) meaning you can now download from here the bits (e.g., software) that include:

  • ESXi aka vSphere 6.7 hypervisor build 8169922
  • vCenter Server 6.7 build 8217866
  • vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 build 8217866
  • vSAN 6.7 and other related SDDC management tools
  • vSphere Operations Management (vROps) 6.7
  • Increased the speeds, feeds and other configuration maximum limits

For those not sure or need a refresher, vCenter Server is the software for extended management across multiple vSphere ESXi hypervisors that run on a Windows platform.

Major themes of the VMware April announcement is around increased scalability along with performance enhancements, ease of use, security, as well as extended application support. As part of the v6.7 improvements, VMware is focusing on simplifying, as well as accelerating software-defined data infrastructure along with other SDDC lifecycle operation activities.

Extended application support includes for traditional demanding enterprise IT, along with High-Performance Compute (HPC), Big Data, Little Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), as well as other emerging workloads. Part of supporting demanding workloads includes enhanced support for Graphical Processing Units (GPU) such as those from Nvidia among others.

What Happened to vSphere 6.6?

A question that comes up is that there is a vSphere 6.5 (and its smaller point releases) and now vSphere 6.7 (along with vCenter, vSAN among others). What happened to vSphere 6.6? Good question and not sure what the real or virtual answer from VMware is or would be. My take is that this is a good opportunity for VMware to align their versions of principal components (e.g., vSphere/ESXi, vCenter, vSAN) to a standard or unified numbering scheme.

Where to learn more

Learn more about VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN and related software-defined data center (SDDC); software-defined data infrastructures (SDDI) topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

Overall the VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 enhancements are a good evolution of their core technologies for enabling hybrid, converged software-defined data infrastructures and software-defined data centers. Continue reading more about  VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter version 6.7 SDDC Update Summary here in part II (focus on management, vCenter plus security) and part III here (focus on server storage I/O and deployment) of this three-part series.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 SDDC details

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 SDDC details

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 SDDC details

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 SDDC details of announcement summary focus on vCenter, Security, and management. This is part two (part one here) of a three-part (part III here) series looking at VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 SDDC details of announcement summary.

Last week VMware announced vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 updates as part of enhancing their software-defined data center (SDDC) and software-defined infrastructure (SDI) solutions core components. This is an expanded post as a companion to the Server StorageIO summary piece here. These April updates followed those from this past March when VMware announced cloud enhancements with partner AWS (more on that announcement here).

VMware vSphere 6.7
VMware vSphere Web Client with vSphere 6.7

What VMware announced is generally available (GA) meaning you can now download from here the bits (e.g., software) that include:

  • ESXi aka vSphere 6.7 hypervisor build 8169922
  • vCenter Server 6.7 build 8217866
  • vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 build 8217866
  • vSAN 6.7 and other related SDDC management tools
  • vSphere Operations Management (vROps) 6.7

For those not sure or need a refresher, vCenter Server is the software for extended management across multiple vSphere ESXi hypervisors that run on a Windows platform.

Major themes of the VMware April announcements are focused around:

  • Increased enterprise and hybrid cloud scalability
  • Resiliency, availability, durable and secure
  • Performance, efficiency and elastic
  • Intuitive, simplified management at scale
  • Expanded support for demanding application workloads

Expanded application support includes for traditional demanding enterprise IT, along with High-Performance Compute (HPC), Big Data, Little Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), as well as other emerging workloads. Part of supporting demanding workloads includes enhanced support for Graphical Processing Units (GPU)such as those from Nvidia among others.

What was announced

As mentioned above and in other posts in this series, VMware announced new versions of their ESXi hypervisor vSphere v6.7, as well as virtual SAN (vSAN) v6.7, virtual Center (vCenter),  v6.7 among other related tools. One of the themes of this announcement by VMware includes hybrid SDDC spanning on-site, on-premises (or on-premisess if you prefer) to the public cloud. Other topics involve increasing scalability, along with stability as well as ease of management along with security, performance updates.

As part of the v6.7 enhancements, VMware is focusing on simplifying, as well as accelerating software-defined data infrastructure along with other SDDC lifecycle operation activities. Additional themes and features focus on server, storage, I/O resource enablement, as well as application extensibility support.

vSphere ESXi hypervisor

With v6.7 ESXi host maintenance times improved with single reboot vs. previous multiple boots for some upgrades, as well as quick boot. Quick boot enables restarting the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical machine skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.

Enhanced HTML5 based vSphere client GUI (along with API and CLI) with increased feature function parity compared to predecessor versions and other VMware tools. Increased functionality includes NSX, vSAN and VMware Upgrade Management (VUM) capabilities among others. In other words, not only are new technologies support, functions you may have in the past resisted using the web-based interfaces due to extensibility are being addressed with this release.

vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)

VMware has announced that moving forward the hosted (e.g., running on a Windows server platform) version is being depreciated. What this means is that it is time for those not already doing so to migrate to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). As a refresher, VCSA is a turnkey software-defined virtual appliance that includes vCenter Server software running on VMware Photon Linux operating system as a virtual machine. VMware vCenter.

As part of the update, the enhanced vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) supports new efficient, effective API management along with multiple vCenters as well as performance improvements. VMware cites 2x faster vCenter operations per second, 3x reduction in memory usage along with 3x quicker Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) related activities across powered on VMs).

What this means is that VCSA is a self-contained virtual appliance that can be configured for very large, large, medium and small environments in various configurations. With v6.7 vCenter Server Appliance emphasis on scaling, as well as performance along with security and ease of use features, VCSA is better positioned to support large enterprise deployments along with hybrid cloud. VCSA v6.7 is more than just a UI enhancement with v6.5 shown below followed by an image of v6.7 UI.

VMware vSphere 6.5
VMware vCenter Appliance v6.5 main UI

VMware vSphere 6.7
VMware vCenter Appliance v6.7 main UI

Besides UI enhancements (along with API and CLI) for vCenter, other updates include more robust data protection (aka backup) capability for the vCenter Server environment. In the prior v6.5 version there was a fundamental capability to specify a destination for sending vCenter configuration information to for backup data protection (See image below).

vCenter 6.5 backup
VMware vCenter Appliance 6.5 backup

Note that the VCSA backup only provides data protection for the vCenter Appliance, its configuration, settings along with data collected of the VMware hosts (and VMs) being managed. VCSA backup does not provide data protection of the individual VMware hosts or VMs which is accomplished via other data protection techniques, tools and technologies.

In v6.7 vCenter now has enhanced capabilities (shown below) for enabling data protection of configuration, settings, performance and other metrics. What this means is that with improved UI it is now possible to setup backup schedules as part of enabling automation for data protection of vCenter servers.

vCenter 6.7 backup
VMware VCSA v6.7 enhanced UI and data protection aka backup

The following shows some of the configuration sizing options as part of VCSA deployment. Note that the vCPU, Memory, and Storage are for the VCSA itself to support a given number of VMware hosts (e.g., physical machines) as well as guest virtual machines (VM).

 

VCSA

VCSA

VCSA

VM

 

Size

vCPU

Memory

Storage

Hosts

VMs

Tiny

2

10GB

300GB

10

100

Small

4

16GB

340GB

100

1000

Medium

8GB

24

525GB

400

4000

Large

16

32GB

740GB

1000

10000

Extra Large

24

48GB

1180GB

2000

35000

vCenter 6.7 sizing and number of the physical machine (e.g., VM hosts) and virtual machines supported

Keep in mind that in addition to the above individual VCSA configuration limits, multiple vCenters can be grouped including linked mode spanning onsite, on-premisess (on-prem if you prefer) as well as the cloud. VMware vCenter server hybrid linked mode enables seamless visibility and insight across on-site, on-premises (or on-premisess if you prefer) as well as public clouds such as AWS among others.

In other words, vCenter with hybrid linked mode enables you to have situational awareness and avoid flying blind in and among clouds. As part of hybrid vCenter environment support, cross-cloud (public, private) hot and cold migration including clone as well as vMotion across mixed VMware version provisioning is supported. Using linked mode multiple roles, permissions, tags, policies can be managed across different groups (e.g., unified management) as well as locations.

VMware and vSphere Security

Security is a big push for VMware with this release including Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 along with Virtual TPM 2.0 for protecting both the hypervisors and guest operating systems. Data encryption was introduced in vSphere 6.5 and is enhanced with increased management simplicities along with protection of data at rest and in flight (while in motion).

In other words, encrypted vMotion across different vCenter instances and versions are supported, as well as across hybrid environments (e.g., on-premises and public cloud). Other security enhancements include tighter collaboration and integration with Microsoft for Windows VMs, as well as vSAN, NSX and vRealize for a secure software-defined data infrastructure aka SDDC. For example, VMware has enhanced support for Microsoft Virtualization Based Security (VBS) including credential Guard where vSphere is providing a secure virtual hardware platform.

Additional VMware 6.7 security enhancements include Multiple SYSLOG targets, FIPS 140-2 Validated modules. Note that there is a difference between FIPS certified and FIPS validated, of which VMware vCenter and ESXi leverage two modules (VM Kernel Cryptographic, and OpenSSL) are currently validated. VMware is not playing games like some vendors when it comes to disclosing FIPS 140-2 validated vs. certified. Other VMware security enhancements include

Note, when a vendor mentions FIPS 140-2 and imply or says certified, ask them if they indeed are certified. Any vendor who is actually FIPS 140-2 certified should not get upset if you press them politely. Instead, they should thank you for asking. Otoh, if a vendor gives you a used car salesperson style dance or get upset, ask them why so sensitive, or, perhaps, what are they ashamed of or hiding, just saying. Learn more here.

vRealize Operations Manager (vROps)

vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) v6.7 dashboard for vSphere client plugin provides an overview of cluster view and alerts of both vCenter and vSAN. What this means is that you will want to upgrade vROps to v6.7. The vROps benefit being dashboards for optimal performance, capacity, troubleshooting, and management configuration.

Where to learn more

Learn more about VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN and related software-defined data center (SDDC); software-defined data infrastructures (SDDI) topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

VMware continues to enhance their core SDDC data infrastructure resources to support new and emerging, as well as legacy enterprise applications at scale. VMware enhancements include management, security along with other updates to support the demanding needs of various applications and workloads, along with supporting application developers.

Some examples of demanding workloads include among others AL, Big Data, Machine Learning, In memory and high-performance compute (HPC) among other resource-intensive new workloads, as well as existing applications. This includes enhanced support for Nvidia physical and virtual Graphical Processing Units (GPU) that are used in support for compute-intensive graphics, as well as non-graphic processing (e.g., AI, ML) workloads.

With the v6.7 announcements, VMware is providing proof points that they are continuing to invest in their core SDDC enabling technologies. VMware is also demonstrating the evolution of vSphere ESXi hypervisor along with associated management tools for hybrid environments with ease of use management at scale, along with security.  View more about VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter v6.7 SDDC details in part three of this three-part series here ((focus on server storage I/O, deployment information and analysis).

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter Server Storage I/O Enhancements

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter Server Storage I/O Enhancements

VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter Server Storage I/O Enhancements

This is part three of a three-part series looking at last weeks v6.7 VMware vSphere vSAN vCenter Server Storage I/O Enhancements. The focus of this post is on server, storage, I/O along with deployment and other wrap up items. In case you missed them, read part one here, and part two here.

VMware as part of updates to, vSAN and vCenter introduced several server storage I/O enhancements some of which have already been mentioned.

VMware vSphere 6.7
VMware vSphere Web Client with vSphere 6.7

Server Storage I/O enhancements for vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter include:

  • Native 4K (4kn) block sector size for HDD and SSD devices
  • Intel Volume Management Device (VMD) for NVMe flash SSD
  • Support for Persistent Memory (PMEM) aka Storage Class Memory (SCM)
  • SCSI UNMAP (similar to TRIM) for SSD space reclamation
  • XCOPY and VAAI enhancements
  • VMFS-5 is now default file system
  • VMFS-6 SESparse vSphere snapshot space reclamation
  • VVOL supporting SCSI-3 persistent reservations and IPv6
  • Reduce dependences on RDMs with VVOL enhancements
  • Software-based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) initiator
  • Para Virtualized RDMA (PV-RDMA)
  • Various speeds and feeds enhancements

VMware vSphere 6.7 also adds native 4KN sector size (e.g., 4096 block size) in addition to traditional native and emulated 512-byte sectors for HDD as well as SSD. The larger block size means performance improvements along with better storage allocation for applications, particularly for large capacity devices. Other server storage I/O updates include RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) enabled Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) as well as Intel VMD for NVMe. Learn more about NVMe here.

Other storage-related enhancements include SCSI UNMAP (e.g., SCSI equivalent of SSD TRIM) with the selectable priority of none or low for SSD space reclamation. Also enhanced are SESparse of vSphere snapshot virtual disk space reclamation (for VMFS-6). VMware XCOPY (Extended Copy) now works with vendor-specific VMware API for Array Integration (VAAI) primitives along with SCSI T10 standard used for cloning, zeroing and copy offload to storage systems. Virtual Volumes (VVOL) have been enhanced to support IPv6 and SCSI-3 persistent reservations to help reduce dependency or use of RDMs.

VMware configuration maximums (e.g., speeds and feeds) including server storage I/O enhancements including boosting from 512 to 1024 LUNs per host. Other speeds and feeds improvements include going from 2048 to 4096  server storage I/O paths per host, PVSCSI adapters now support up to 256 disks vs. 64 (virtual disks or Raw Device Mapped aka RDM). Also note that VMFS-3 is now the end of life (EOL) and will be automatically upgraded to VMFS-5 during the upgrade to vSphere 6.7, while the default datastore type is VMFS-6.

Additional server storage I/O enhancements include RoCE for RDMA enabling low latency server to server memory-based data movement access, along with Para-virtualized RDMA (PV-RDMA) on Linux guest OS. ESXi has been enhanced with iSER (iSCSI Extension for RDMA) leveraging faster server I/O interconnects and CPU offload. Another server storage I/O enhancement is Software based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (e.g., SW-FCoE) initiator using loss less Ethernet fabrics.

Note as a reminder or refresher that VMware also has para (e.g., virtualization-optimized) drivers for Ethernet and other networks, NVMe as well as SCSI in addition to standard devices. For example, you can access from a VM an NVMe backed datastore using standard VMware SATA, SCSI Controller, LSI Logic SAS, LSI Logic Parallel, VMware Paravirtual, native NVMe driver (virtual machine type 6.5 or higher) for better performance. Likewise, instead of using the standard SAS and SCSI VM devices, the VMware para-virtualized

Besides the previously mentioned items, other enhancements including for vSAN include support for logical clusters such as Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server Availability Groups, Microsoft Exchange Data Availability Groups as well as Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) using vSAN iSCSI service. Note that as a proof point of continued vSAN deployment customer adoption, VMware is claiming 10,000 deployments. For performance, vSAN enhancement also includes updates for adaptive placement, adaptive resync, as well as faster cache destage. The benefit of quicker destage is that cache can be drained or written to disk to eliminate or prevent I/O bottlenecks.

As part of supporting expanding, more demanding enterprise among other workloads, vSAN enhancements also include resiliency updates, physical resource and configuration checks, health and monitoring checks. Other vSAN improvements include streamlined workflows, converged management views across vCenter as well as vRealize tools. Read more from VMware about server storage I/O enhancements to vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter here.

VMware Server Storage I/O Memory Matters

VMware is also joining others with support for evolving persistent memory (PMEM) leveraging so-called storage class memories (SCM). Note, some refer to SCM as persistent memory as PM, however, context needs to be used as PM also means Physical Machine, Physical Memory, Primary Memory among others. With the new PMEM support for server memory, VMware is laying the foundation for guest operating systems as well as applications to leverage the technology.

For example, Microsoft with Windows Server 2016 supports SCMs as a block addressable storage medium and file system, as well as for Direct Access (e.g., DAX). What this means is that fast file systems can be backed by persistent faster than traditional SSD storage, as well as applications such as SQL Server that support DAX can do direct persistent I/O.

As a refresher, Non-Volatile DIMM enable server memory by combing traditional DRAM with some persistent storage class memory. By combing DRAM and storage class memory (SCM) also known as PMEM servers can use the RAM as a fast read/write memory, with the data destaged to persistent memory. Examples of SCM include Micron 3D Xpoint also known as Intel Optane along with others such as Everspin NVDIMM among others (available from Dell, HPE among others. Learn more SSD and storage class memories (SCM) along with PMEM here, as well as NVMe here.

Deployment, be prepared before you grab the bits and install the software

For those of you who want or need to download the bits here is a link to VMware software download. However, before racing off to install the new software in your production (or perhaps even lab), do your homework. Read the important information from VMware before upgrading to vSphere here (e.g., KB53704) as well as release notes, and review VMware’s best practices for upgrading to vCenter here.

Some of the things to be aware of including upgrade order and dependencies, as well as make sure you have good current backups of your vSphere ESXi configuration, vCenter appliance. In addition to viewing the vSphere ESXi and vCenter 6.7 release notes here, also.

There are some hardware compatibility items you need to be aware of, both for this as well as future versions. Check out the VMware hardware (and software) compatibility list (HCL), along with partner product interoperability matrices, as well as release notes. Pay attention to devices depreciated and no longer supported in ESXi 6.7 (e.g., VMware KB52583) as well as those that may not work in future releases to avoid surprises.

Where to learn more

Learn more about VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN and related software-defined data center (SDDC); software-defined data infrastructures (SDDI) topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

In case you missed them, read part one here and click here for part two of this series.

Some will say what’s the big deal why all the noise, coverage and discussion for a point release?

My view is that this is a big evolutionary package of upgrade enhancements and new features, even if a so-called point release (e.g., going from 6.5 to 6.7). Some vendors might have done this type of updates as a significant, e.g., version 6.x to 7.x upgrade to make more noise, get increased coverage or merely enhance the appearance of software maturity (e.g., V1.x to V2.x to V3.x, and so forth).

In the case of VMware, what some might refer to point release that is smaller, are the ones such as vSphere 6.5.0 to 6.5.x among others. Thus, there is a lot in this package of updates from VMware and good to see continued enhancements.

I also think that VMware is getting challenges from different fronts including Microsoft as well as cloud partners among others which is good. The reason I believe that it is okay VMware is being challenged is given their history; they tend to step up their game playing harder as well as stronger with the competition.

VMware is continuing to invest and extend its core SDDC technologies to meet the expanding demands of various organizations, from small to ultra large enterprises. What this means is that VMware is addressing ease of use for smaller, as well as removing complexity to enable simplified scaling from on-site (or on-premises and on-prem if you prefer) to the public cloud.

Overall the VMware Announced version 6.7 of vSphere vSAN vCenter SDDC core components are a useful extension of their existing technology. VMware Announced release 6.7 of vSphere vSAN vCenter SDDC core components enhancements enable customers more flexibility, scalability, resiliency, and security to meet their various needs.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Have you heard about the new CLOUD Act data regulation?

Have you heard about the new CLOUD Act data regulation?

new CLOUD Act data regulation

Have you heard about the new CLOUD Act data regulation?

The new CLOUD Act data regulation became law as part of the recent $1.3 Trillion (USD) omnibus U.S. government budget spending bill passed by Congress on March 23, 2018 and signed by President of the U.S. (POTUS) Donald Trump in March.

CLOUD Act is the acronym for Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data, not to be confused with initiatives such as U.S. federal governments CLOUD First among others which are focused on using cloud, securing and complying (e.g. FedRAMP among others). In other words, the new CLOUD Act data regulation pertains to how data stored by cloud or other service providers can be accessed by law environment officials (LEO).

U.S. Supreme court
Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) Image via https://www.supremecourt.gov/

CLOUD Act background and Stored Communications Act

After the signing into law of CLOUD Act, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) to dismiss the pending case against Microsoft (e.g., Azure Cloud). The case or question in front of SCOTUS pertained to whether LEO can search as well as seize information or data that is stored overseas or in foreign counties.

As a refresher, or if you had not heard, SCOTUS was asked to resolve if a service provider who is responding to a warrant based on probable cause under the 1986 era Stored Communications Act, is required to provide data in its custody, control or possession, regardless of if stored inside, or, outside the US.

Microsoft Azure Regions and software defined data infrastructures
Microsoft Azure Regions via Microsoft.com

This particular case in front of SCOTUS centered on whether Microsoft (a U.S. Technology firm) had to comply with a court order to produce emails (as part of an LEO drug investigation) even if those were stored outside of the US. In this particular situation, the emails were alleged to have been stored in a Microsoft Azure Cloud Dublin Ireland data center.

For its part, Microsoft senior attorney Hasan Ali said via FCW “This bill is a significant step forward in the larger global debate on what our privacy laws should look like, even if it does not go to the highest threshold". Here are some additional perspectives via Microsoft Brad Smith on his blog along with a video.

What is CLOUD Act

Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data is the new CLOUD Act data regulation approved by Congress (House and Senate) details can be read here and here respectively with additional perspectives here.

The new CLOUD Act law allows for POTUS to enter into executive agreements with foreign governments about data on criminal suspects. Granted what is or is not a crime in a given country will likely open Pandora’s box of issues. For example, in the case of Microsoft, if an agreement between the U.S. and Ireland were in place, and, Ireland agreed to release the data, it could then be accessed.

Now, for some who might be hyperventilating after reading the last sentence, keep this in mind that if you are overseas, it is up to your government to protect your privacy. The foreign government must have an agreement in place with the U.S. and that a crime has or had been committed, a crime that both parties concur with.

Also, keep in mind that is also appeal processes for providers including that the customer is not a U.S. person and does not reside in the U.S. and the disclosure would put the provider at risk of violating foreign law. Also, keep in mind that various provisions must be met before a cloud or service provider has to hand over your data regardless of what country you reside, or where the data resides.

Where to learn more

Learn more about CLOUD Act, cloud, data protection, world backup day, recovery, restoration, GDPR along with related data infrastructure topics for cloud, legacy and other software defined environments via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

Is the new CLOUD Act data regulation unique to Microsoft Azure Cloud?

No, it also applies to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, IBM Softlayer Cloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the long list of other service providers.

What about GDPR?

Keep in mind that the new Global Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) go into effect May 25, 2018, that while based out of the European Union (EU), have global applicability across organizations of all size, scope, and type. Learn more about GDPR, Data Protection and its global impact here.

Thus, if you have not heard about the new CLOUD Act data regulation, now is the time to become aware of it.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR

Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR

Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR trends

It’s time for Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR Start Date.

The annual March 31 world backup day focus has come and gone once again.

However, that does not mean data protection including backup as well as recovery along with security gets a 364-day vacation until March 31, 2019 (or the days leading up to it).

Granted, for some environments, public relations, editors, influencers and other industry folks backup day will take some time off while others jump on the ramp up to GDPR which goes into effect May 25, 2018.

Expanding Focus Data Protection and GDPR

As I mentioned in this post here, world backup day should be expanded to include increased focus not just on backup, also recovery as well as other forms of data protection. Likewise, May 25 2018 is not the deadline or finish line or the destination for GDPR (e.g. Global Data Protection Regulations), rather, it is the starting point for an evolving journey, one that has global impact as well as applicability. Recently I participated in a fireside chat discussion with Danny Allan of Veeam who shared his GDPR expertise as well as experiences, lessons learned, tips of Veeam as they started their journey, check it out here.

Expanding Focus Data Protection Recovery and other Things that start with R

As part of expanding the focus on Data Protection Recovery Life Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR, that also means looking at, discussing things that start with R (like Recovery). Some examples besides recovery include restoration, reassess, review, rethink protection, recovery point, RPO, RTO, reconstruction, resiliency, ransomware, RAID, repair, remediation, restart, resume, rollback, and regulations among others.

Data Protection Tips, Reminders and Recommendations

  • There are no blue participation ribbons for failed recovery. However, there can be pink slips.
  • Only you can prevent on-premises or cloud data loss. However, it is also a shared responsibility with vendors and service providers
  • You can’t go forward in the future when there is a disaster or loss of data if you can’t go back in time for recovery
  • GDPR appliances to organizations around the world of all size and across all sectors including nonprofit
  • Keep new school 4 3 2 1 data protection in mind while evolving from old school 3 2 1 backup rules

    • 4 3 2 1 backup data protection rule

  • A Fundamental premise of data infrastructures is to enable applications and their data, protect, preserve, secure and serve
  • Remember to protect your applications, as well as data including metadata, settings configurations
  • Test your restores including can you use the data along with security settings
  • Don’t cause a disaster in the course of testing your data protection, backups or recovery
  • Expand (or refresh) your data protection and data infrastructure education tradecraft skills experiences

Where to learn more

Learn more about data protection, world backup day, recovery, restoration, GDPR along with related data infrastructure topics for cloud, legacy and other software defined environments via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

Data protection including business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BR), disaster recovery (DR), availability, accessibility, backup, snapshots, encryption, security, privacy among others is a 7 x 24 x 365 day a year focus. The focus of data protection also needs to evolve from an after the fact cost overhead to proactive, business enabler Meanwhile, welcome to Data Protection Recovery Post World Backup Day Pre GDPR Start Date.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar

AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar

AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar trends

AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar
Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET

Only YOU can prevent data loss for on-premises, Amazon Web Service (AWS) based cloud, and hybrid applications.

Join me in this free AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar (registration required) sponsored by Veeam produced by Redmond Magazine as we explore issues, trends, tools, best practices and techniques for enabling data protection with AWS technologies.

Hyper-V Disaster Recovery SDDC Data Infrastructure Data Protection

Attend and learn about:

  • Application-aware point in time snapshot data protection
  • Protecting AWS EC2 and on-premises applications (and data)
  • Leveraging AWS for data protection and recovery
  • And much more

Register for the live event or catch the replay here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about data protection, software defined data center (SDDC), software defined data infrastructures (SDDI), AWS, cloud and related topics via the following links:

SDDC Data Infrastructure

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

You can not go forward if you can not go back to a particular point in time (e.g. recovery point objective or RPO). Likewise, if you can not go back to a given RPO, how can you go forward with your business as well as meet your recovery time objective (RTO)? Join us for the live conversation or replay by registering (free) here to learn how to enable AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar, as well as using AWS S3 for on-site, on-premises data protection.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview

Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview has been announced. Windows Server 2019 in the past might have been named 2016 R2 also known as a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release. Microsoft recommends LTSC Windows Server for workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server, Share Point and SDDC. The focus of Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview is around hybrid cloud, security, application development as well as deployment including containers, software defined data center (SDDC) and software defined data infrastructure, as well as converged along with hyper-converged infrasture (HCI) management.

Windows Server 2019 Preview Features

Features and enhancements in the Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview span HCI management, security, hybrid cloud among others.

  • Hybrid cloud – Extending active directory, file server synchronize, cloud backup, applications spanning on-premises and cloud, management).
  • Security – Protect, detect and respond including shielded VMs, attested guarded fabric of host guarded machines, Windows and Linux VM (shielded), VMConnect for Windows and Linux troubleshooting of Shielded VM and encrypted networks, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) among other enhancements.
  • Application platform – Developer and deployment tools for Windows Server containers and Windows Subsystem on Linux (WSL). Note that Microsoft has also been reducing the size of the Server image while extending feature functionality. The smaller images take up less storage space, plus load faster. As part of continued serverless and container support (Windows and Linux along with Docker), there are options for deployment orchestration including Kubernetes (in beta). Other enhancements include extending previous support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Other enhancements part of Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview include cluster sets in support of software defined data center (SDDC). Cluster sets expand SDDC clusters of loosely coupled grouping of multiple failover clusters including compute, storage as well as hyper-converged configurations. Virtual machines have fluidity across member clusters within a cluster set and unified storage namespace. Existing failover cluster management experiences is preserved for member clusters, along with a new cluster set instance of the aggregate resources.

Management enhancements include S2D software defined storage performance history, project Honolulu support for storage updates, along with powershell cmdlet updates, as well as system center 2019. Learn more about project Honolulu hybrid management here and here.

Microsoft and Windows LTSC and SAC

As a refresher, Microsoft Windows (along with other software) is now being released on two paths including more frequent semi-annual channel (SAC), and less frequent LTSC releases. Some other things to keep in mind that SAC are focused around server core and nano server as container image while LTSC includes server with desktop experience as well as server core. For example, Windows Server 2016 released fall of 2016 is an LTSC, while the 1709 release was a SAC which had specific enhancements for container related environments.

There was some confusion fall of 2017 when 1709 was released as it was optimized for container and serverless environments and thus lacked storage spaces direct (S2D) leading some to speculate S2D was dead. S2D among other items that were not in the 1709 SAC are very much alive and enhanced in the LTSC preview for Windows Server 2019. Learn more about Microsoft LTSC and SAC here.

Test Driving Installing The Bits

One of the enhancements with LTSC preview candidate server 2019 is improved upgrades of existing environments. Granted not everybody will choose the upgrade in place keeping existing files however some may find the capability useful. I chose to give the upgrade keeping current files in place as an option to see how it worked. To do the upgrade I used a clean and up to date Windows Server 2016 data center edition with desktop. This test system is a VMware ESXi 6.5 guest running on flash SSD storage. Before the upgrade to Windows Server 2019, I made a VMware vSphere snapshot so I could quickly and easily restore the system to a good state should something not work.

To get the bits, go to Windows Insiders Preview Downloads (you will need to register)

Windows Server 2019 LTSC build 17623 is available in 18 languages in an ISO format and require a key.

The keys for the pre-release unlimited activations are:
Datacenter Edition         6XBNX-4JQGW-QX6QG-74P76-72V67
Standard Edition             MFY9F-XBN2F-TYFMP-CCV49-RMYVH

First step is downloading the bits from the Windows insiders preview page including select language for the image to use.

Getting the windows server 2019 preview bits
Select the language for the image to download

windows server 2019 select language

Starting the download

Once you have the image download, apply it to your bare metal server or hypervisors guest. In this example, I copied the windows server 2019 image to a VMware ESXi server for a Windows Server 2016 guest machine to access via its virtual CD/DVD.

pre upgrade check windows server version
Verify the Windows Server version before upgrade

After download, access the image, in this case, I attached the image to the virtual machine CD, then accessed it and ran the setup application.

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview download

Download updates now or later

license key

Entering license key for pre-release windows server 2019

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview datacenter desktop version

Selecting Windows Server Datacenter with Desktop

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview license

Accepting Software License for pre-release version.

Next up is determining to do a new install (keep nothing), or an in-place upgrade. I wanted to see how smooth the in-place upgrade was so selected that option.

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview inplace upgrade

What to keep, nothing, or existing files and data


Confirming your selections

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview install start

Ready to start the installation process

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview upgrade in progress
Installation underway of Windows Server 2019 preview

Once the installation is complete, verify that Windows Server 2019 is now installed.

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview upgrade completed
Completed upgrade from Windows Server 2016 to Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview

The above shows verifying the system build using Powershell, as well as the message in the lower right corner of the display. Granted the above does not show the new functionality, however you should get an idea of how quickly a Windows Server 2019 preview can be deployed to explore and try out the new features.

Where to learn more

Learn more Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview, Windows Server Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), Azure and related software defined data center (SDDC), software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview gives a glimpse of some of the new features that are part of the next evolution of Windows Server as part of supporting hybrid IT environments. In addition to the new features and functionality that convey not only support for hybrid cloud, also hybrid applications development, deployment, devops and workloads, Microsoft is showing flexibility in management, ease of use, scalability, along with security as well as scale out stability. If you have not looked at Windows Server for a while, or involved with serverless, containers, Kubernetes among other initiatives, now is a good time to check out Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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March 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

March 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter

Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

Volume 18, Issue 3 (March 2018)

Hello and welcome to the March 2018 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter.

If you are wondering where the January and February 2018 update newsletters are, they are rolled into this combined edition. In addition to the short email version (free signup here), you can access full versions (html here and PDF here) along with previous editions here.

In this issue:

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Data Infrastructure Data Protection and Backup BC BR DR HA Security

World Backup day is coming up on March 31 which is a good time to remember to verify and validate that your data protection is working as intended. On one hand I think it is a good idea to call out the importance of making sure your data is protected including backed up.

On the other hand data protection is not a once a year, rather a year around, 7 x 24 x 365 day focus. Also the focus needs to be on more than just backup, rather, all aspects of data protection from archiving to business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BR), disaster recovery (DR), always on, always accessible, along with security and recovery.

Data Infrastructure Data Protection Backup 4 3 2 1 rule
Data Infrastructure 4 3 2 1 Data Protection and Backup

Some data spring thoughts, perspectives and reminders. Data lakes may swell beyond their banks causing rivers of data to flood as they flow into larger reservoirs, great data lakes, gulfs of data, seas and oceans of data. Granted, some of that data will be inactive cold parked like glaciers while others semi-active floating around like icebergs. Hopefully your data is stored on durable storage solutions or services and does not melt.

Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O flash SSD NVMe
Various NAND Flash SSD devices and SAS, SATA, NVMe, M.2 interfaces

Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including various solid state device (SSD) mediums (e.g. nand flash, 3D XPoint, MRAM among others), packaging (drives, PCIe Add in cars [AiC] along with entire systems, appliances or arrays). Also part of the continue evolution of NVM, SSD and other persistent memories (PM) including storage class memories (SCM) are different access protocol interfaces.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between NVM (medium) and NVMe (access), NVM is the generic category of mediums or media and devices such as nand flash, nvram, 3D XPoint among others SCM (and PMs). In other words, NVM is what data devices use for storing data, NVMe is how devices and systems are accessed. NVMe and its variations is how NVM, SSD, PM, SCM media and devices get accessed locally, as well as over network fabrics (e.g. NVMe-oF an FC-NVMe).

NVMe continues to evolve including with networked fabric variations such as RDMA based NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF), along with Fibre Channel based (FC-NVMe). The Fibre Channel Industry Association trade group recently held its second multi-vendor plugfest in support of NVMe over Fibre Channel.

Read more about NVM, NVMe, SSD, SCM, flash and related technologies, tools, trends, tips via the following resources:

Has Object Storage failed to live up to its industry hype lacking traction? Or, is object storage (also known as blobs) progressing with customer adoption and deployment on normal realistic timelines? Recently I have seen some industry comments about object storage not catching on with customers or failing to live up to its hyped expectation. IMHO object storage is very much alive along with block, file, table (e.g. database SQL and NoSQL repositories), message/queue among others, as well as emerging blockchain aka data exchanges.

Various Industry and Customer Adoption Deployment timeline
Various Industry and Customer Adoption Deployment Timeline (Via: StorageIOblog.com)

An issue with object storage is that it is still new, still evolving, many IT environments applications do not yet speak or access objects and blobs natively. Likewise as is often the case, industry adoption and deployment is usually early and short term around the hype, vs. the longer cycle of customer adoption and deployment. The downside for those who only focus on object storage (or blobs) is that they may be under pressure to do things short term instead of adjusting to customer cycles which take longer, however real adoption and deployment also last longer.

While the hype and industry buzz around object storage (and blobs) may have faded, customer adoption continues and is here to stay, along with block, file among others, learn more at www.objectstoragecenter.com. Also keep in mind that there is a difference between industry and customer adoption along with deployment.

Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

In case you missed it, Amazon Web Services (e.g. AWS) announced EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) which as its name implies, is an easy to use and manage Kubernetes (containers, serverless data infrastructure) running on AWS. AWS joins others including Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Googles Kubernetes Engine, EasyStack (ESContainer for openstack and Kubernetes),VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) among others. What this means is that in the container serverless data infrastructure ecosystem Kubernetes container management (orchestration platform) is gaining in both industry as well as customer adoption along with deployment.

Check out other industry news, comments, trends perspectives here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO Comments Content

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news, tips and articles

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via BizTech: Why Hybrid (SSD and HDD) Storage Might Be Fit for SMB environments
Via Excelero: Server StorageIO white paper enabling database DBaaS productivity
Via Cloudian: YouTube video interview file services on object storage with HyperFile
Via CDW Solutions: Comments on Software Defined Access
Via SearchStorage: Comments on Cloudian HyperStore on demand cloud like pricing
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments and tips on Software Defined Storage Best Practices
Via PRNewsWire: Comments on Excelero NVMe NVMesh Database and DBaaS solutions
Via SearchStorage: Comments on NooBaa multi-cloud storage management
Via CDW: Comments on New IT Strategies Improve Your Bottom Line 
Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Comments on Software Defined Storage: Pros and Cons
Via DataCenterKnowledge: Comments on The Great Data Center Headache IoT
Via SearchStorage: Comments on Dell and VMware merger scenario options
Via PRNewswire: Comments on Chelsio Microsoft Validation of iWARP/RDMA
Via SearchStorage: Comments on Server Storage Industry trends and Dell EMC
Via ChannelProSMB: Comments on Hybrid HDD and SSD storage solutions
Via ChannelProNetwork: Comments on What the Future Holds for HDDs
Via HealthcareITnews: Comments on MOUNTAINS OF MOBILE DATA
Via SearchStorage: Comments on Cloudian HyperStore 7 targets multi-cloud complexities
Via GlobeNewsWire: Comments on Cloudian HyperStore 7
Via GizModo: Comments on Intel Optane 800P NVMe M.2 SSD
Via DataCenterKnowledge: Comments on getting data centers ready for IoT
Via DataCenterKnowledge: Comments on Beyond the Hype: AI in the Data Center
Via DataCenterKnowledge: Comments on Data Center and Cloud Disaster Recovery
Via SearchStoragae: Comments on Cloudian HyperFile marries NAS and object storage
Via SearchStoragae: Comments on Top 10 Tips on Solid State Storage Adoption Strategy
Via SearchStoragae: Comments on 8 Top Tips for Beating the Big Data Deluge

View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIOblog posts

Server StorageIOblog Data Infrastructure Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same
Application Data Availability 4 3 2 1 Data Protection
AWS Cloud Application Data Protection Webinar
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview
Application Data Characteristics Types Everything Is Not The Same
Application Data Volume Velocity Variety Everything Is Not The Same
Application Data Access Lifecycle Patterns Everything Is Not The Same
Veeam GDPR preparedness experiences Webinar walking the talk
VMware continues cloud construction with March announcements
Benefits of Moving Hyper-V Disaster Recovery to the Cloud Webinar
World Backup Day 2018 Data Protection Readiness Reminder
Use Intel Optane NVMe U.2 SFF 8639 SSD drive in PCIe slot
Data Infrastructure Resource Links cloud data protection tradecraft trends
How to Achieve Flexible Data Protection Availability with All Flash Storage Solutions
November 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Update Newsletter
IT transformation Serverless Life Beyond DevOps Podcast
Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Topics Tools Techniques Technologies Tips
HPE Announces AMD Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 For Software Defined Workloads
AWS Announces New S3 Cloud Storage Security Encryption Features
Introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL Overview #blogtober
Hot Popular New Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors To Watch

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Recommended Reading (Watching and Listening) List

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

In addition to my own books including Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) available at Amazon.com (check out special sale price), the following are Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading, watching and listening list items. The Server StorageIO data infrastructure recommended reading list includes various IT, Data Infrastructure and related topics including Intel Recommended Reading List (IRRL) for developers is a good resource to check out. Speaking of my books, Didier Van Hoye (@WorkingHardInIt) has a good review over on his site you can view here, also check out the rest of his great content while there.

In case you may have missed it, here is a good presentation from AWS re:invent 2017 by Brendan Gregg (@brendangregg) about how Netflix does EC2 and other AWS tuning along with plenty of great resource links. Keith Tenzer (@keithtenzer) provides a good perspective piece about containers in a large IT enterprise environment here including various options.

Speaking of IT data centers and data infrastructure environments, checkout the list of some of the worlds most extreme habitats for technology here. Mark Betz (@markbetz) has a series of Docker and Kubernetes networking fundamentals posts on his site here, as well as over at Medium including mention of Google Cloud (@googlecloud). The posts in Marks series are good refresher or intros to how Docker and Kubernetes handles basic networking between containers, pods, nodes, hosts in clusters. Check out part I here and part II here.

Blockchain elements
Image via https://stevetodd.typepad.com

Steve Todd (@Stevetodd) has some good perspectives about Trusted Data Exchanges e.g. life beyond blockchain and bitcoin here along with core element considerations (beyond the product pitch) here, along with associated data infrastructure and storage evolution vs. revolution here.

Watch for more items to be added to the recommended reading list book shelf soon.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO event activities

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

March 27, 2018 – Webinar – Veeams Road to GDPR Compliancy The 5 Lessons Learned

Feb 28, 2018 – Webinar – Benefits of Moving Hyper-V Disaster Recovery to the Cloud

Jan 30, 2018 – Webinar – Achieve Flexible Data Protection and Availability with All Flash Storage

Nov. 9, 2017 – Webinar – All You Need To Know about ROBO Data Protection Backup

See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

Data Infrastructure Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Various useful links and resources:

Data Infrastructure Recommend Reading and watching list
Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
storageio.com/downloads – Various presentations and other download material
storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

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Subscribe to Newsletter – Newsletter Archives – StorageIO.com – StorageIOblog.com

What this all means and wrap-up

Data Infrastructures are what exists inside physical data centers spanning cloud, converged, hyper-converged, virtual, serverless and other software defined as well as legacy environments. The fundamental role of data infrastructures comprising server (compute), storage, I/O networking hardware, software, services defined by management tools, best practices and policies is to provide a platform for applications along with their data to deliver information services. With March 31 being world backup day, also focus on making sure that on April 1st you are not a fool trying to recover from a bad data protection copy. With the continued movement to flash SSD along with other forms of storage class memory (SCM) and persistent memories (PM), data moves at a faster rate meaning data protection is even more important to get you out of trouble as fast as you get into issues.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Posted on

Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same (Part I)

Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same

Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same

Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same

This is part one of a five-part mini-series looking at Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same as a companion excerpt from chapter 2 of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft (CRC Press 2017). available at Amazon.com and other global venues. In this post, we start things off by looking at general application server storage I/O characteristics that have an impact on data value as well as access.

Application Data Value Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

Everything is not the same across different organizations including Information Technology (IT) data centers, data infrastructures along with the applications as well as data they support. For example, there is so-called big data that can be many small files, objects, blobs or data and bit streams representing telemetry, click stream analytics, logs among other information.

Keep in mind that applications impact how data is accessed, used, processed, moved and stored. What this means is that a focus on data value, access patterns, along with other related topics need to also consider application performance, availability, capacity, economic (PACE) attributes.

If everything is not the same, why is so much data along with many applications treated the same from a PACE perspective?

Data Infrastructure resources including servers, storage, networks might be cheap or inexpensive, however, there is a cost to managing them along with data.

Managing includes data protection (backup, restore, BC, DR, HA, security) along with other activities. Likewise, there is a cost to the software along with cloud services among others. By understanding how applications use and interact with data, smarter, more informed data management decisions can be made.

IT Applications and Data Infrastructure Layers
IT Applications and Data Infrastructure Layers

Keep in mind that everything is not the same across various organizations, data centers, data infrastructures, data and the applications that use them. Also keep in mind that programs (e.g. applications) = algorithms (code) + data structures (how data defined and organized, structured or unstructured).

There are traditional applications, along with those tied to Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Big Data and other analytics including real-time click stream, media and entertainment, security and surveillance, log and telemetry processing among many others.

What this means is that there are many different application with various character attributes along with resource (server compute, I/O network and memory, storage requirements) along with service requirements.

Common Applications Characteristics

Different applications will have various attributes, in general, as well as how they are used, for example, database transaction activity vs. reporting or analytics, logs and journals vs. redo logs, indices, tables, indices, import/export, scratch and temp space. Performance, availability, capacity, and economics (PACE) describes the applications and data characters and needs shown in the following figure.

Application and data PACE attributes
Application PACE attributes (via Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials)

All applications have PACE attributes, however:

  • PACE attributes vary by application and usage
  • Some applications and their data are more active than others
  • PACE characteristics may vary within different parts of an application

Think of applications along with associated data PACE as its personality or how it behaves, what it does, how it does it, and when, along with value, benefit, or cost as well as quality-of-service (QoS) attributes.

Understanding applications in different environments, including data values and associated PACE attributes, is essential for making informed server, storage, I/O decisions and data infrastructure decisions. Data infrastructures decisions range from configuration to acquisitions or upgrades, when, where, why, and how to protect, and how to optimize performance including capacity planning, reporting, and troubleshooting, not to mention addressing budget concerns.

Primary PACE attributes for active and inactive applications and data are:

P – Performance and activity (how things get used)
A – Availability and durability (resiliency and data protection)
C – Capacity and space (what things use or occupy)
E – Economics and Energy (people, budgets, and other barriers)

Some applications need more performance (server computer, or storage and network I/O), while others need space capacity (storage, memory, network, or I/O connectivity). Likewise, some applications have different availability needs (data protection, durability, security, resiliency, backup, business continuity, disaster recovery) that determine the tools, technologies, and techniques to use.

Budgets are also nearly always a concern, which for some applications means enabling more performance per cost while others are focused on maximizing space capacity and protection level per cost. PACE attributes also define or influence policies for QoS (performance, availability, capacity), as well as thresholds, limits, quotas, retention, and disposition, among others.

Performance and Activity (How Resources Get Used)

Some applications or components that comprise a larger solution will have more performance demands than others. Likewise, the performance characteristics of applications along with their associated data will also vary. Performance applies to the server, storage, and I/O networking hardware along with associated software and applications.

For servers, performance is focused on how much CPU or processor time is used, along with memory and I/O operations. I/O operations to create, read, update, or delete (CRUD) data include activity rate (frequency or data velocity) of I/O operations (IOPS). Other considerations include the volume or amount of data being moved (bandwidth, throughput, transfer), response time or latency, along with queue depths.

Activity is the amount of work to do or being done in a given amount of time (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks), which can be transactions, rates, IOPs. Additional performance considerations include latency, bandwidth, throughput, response time, queues, reads or writes, gets or puts, updates, lists, directories, searches, pages views, files opened, videos viewed, or downloads.
 
Server, storage, and I/O network performance include:

  • Processor CPU usage time and queues (user and system overhead)
  • Memory usage effectiveness including page and swap
  • I/O activity including between servers and storage
  • Errors, retransmission, retries, and rebuilds

the following figure shows a generic performance example of data being accessed (mixed reads, writes, random, sequential, big, small, low and high-latency) on a local and a remote basis. The example shows how for a given time interval (see lower right), applications are accessing and working with data via different data streams in the larger image left center. Also shown are queues and I/O handling along with end-to-end (E2E) response time.

fundamental server storage I/O
Server I/O performance fundamentals (via Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials)

Click here to view a larger version of the above figure.

Also shown on the left in the above figure is an example of E2E response time from the application through the various data infrastructure layers, as well as, lower center, the response time from the server to the memory or storage devices.

Various queues are shown in the middle of the above figure which are indicators of how much work is occurring, if the processing is keeping up with the work or causing backlogs. Context is needed for queues, as they exist in the server, I/O networking devices, and software drivers, as well as in storage among other locations.

Some basic server, storage, I/O metrics that matter include:

  • Queue depth of I/Os waiting to be processed and concurrency
  • CPU and memory usage to process I/Os
  • I/O size, or how much data can be moved in a given operation
  • I/O activity rate or IOPs = amount of data moved/I/O size per unit of time
  • Bandwidth = data moved per unit of time = I/O size × I/O rate
  • Latency usually increases with larger I/O sizes, decreases with smaller requests
  • I/O rates usually increase with smaller I/O sizes and vice versa
  • Bandwidth increases with larger I/O sizes and vice versa
  • Sequential stream access data may have better performance than some random access data
  • Not all data is conducive to being sequential stream, or random
  • Lower response time is better, higher activity rates and bandwidth are better

Queues with high latency and small I/O size or small I/O rates could indicate a performance bottleneck. Queues with low latency and high I/O rates with good bandwidth or data being moved could be a good thing. An important note is to look at several metrics, not just IOPs or activity, or bandwidth, queues, or response time. Also, keep in mind that metrics that matter for your environment may be different from those for somebody else.

Something to keep in perspective is that there can be a large amount of data with low performance, or a small amount of data with high-performance, not to mention many other variations. The important concept is that as space capacity scales, that does not mean performance also improves or vice versa, after all, everything is not the same.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Application Data Value, application characteristics, PACE along with data protection, software defined data center (SDDC), software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) and related topics via the following links:

SDDC Data Infrastructure

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means and wrap-up

Keep in mind that with Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same across various organizations, data centers, data infrastructures spanning legacy, cloud and other software defined data center (SDDC) environments. However all applications have some element (high or low) of performance, availability, capacity, economic (PACE) along with various similarities. Likewise data has different value at various times. Continue reading the next post (Part II Application Data Availability Everything Is Not The Same) in this five-part mini-series here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.