Author: Kushal Patel, Senior Consultant
Is the cloud turning IT upside down? All the talk around IT as a Service and the cloud can make even the most experienced, seasoned IT leaders worry that their team may not have what it takes to keep up. If you listen to some of the pundits, they would have you believe that IT teams are in trouble of becoming obsolete due to a lack of appropriate skills and understanding of business processes. While the cloud is creating a paradigm shift, I think many of the “experts” are overreacting and underestimating IT’s resiliency.
How many times has IT already “evolved?” There’s been the client/server revolution, wireless networking, mobile support, fighting malware, and virtualization of just about everything from servers and storage to applications and desktops. The very nature of technology, and therefore the job of IT, means it is impossible for the technology, or the role of IT, to be static. The technical know-how of IT will always be a necessity; this time it may be more about a shift in mindset that requires a realignment tied to process and workflow development. If IT leaders drive the “attitude adjustment” of its team and reassign priorities to be more tightly aligned with business goals, the team (and its skill sets) will evolve – yet again.
So what will the real impact of the cloud on IT’s role be? As IT shifts into the “cloud era,” so must your organization’s skill sets and goals. The ability to identify and leverage resources – whether they come from the cloud or the company’s own data center — is becoming a key part of IT leaders’ responsibilities and this mindset should also trickle down to your administrators and engineers. Having a unified message that IT should be a business unit that provides innovation in line with the business’ goals is essential for the evolution of IT.
And by the way, it doesn’t stop at IT. Finance and procurement also need to understand how the new cost model of cloud computing will affect the budgets for the organization. Heck, they might actually be the ones driving you towards the cloud. It will be interesting to see if they can evolve as quickly as you!
Author: Sean Gilbride, Director of Professional Services Operations
NetApp has been very busy over the past 12 months working on refreshing their entire Unified Storage line. NetApp refreshed their mid-tier (32xx) and high end platforms (62xx) in late 2010 and has recently released their new entry level platform the FAS2240.
The release of the FAS2240 marks the end for the older FAS2020 & FAS2050 systems. NetApp will still be offering the FAS2040 (refreshed in 2010) at an aggressive price point to target EMC VNXe sales.
Don’t let the entry level designation fool you, the FAS2240 can handle mid-tier workloads
- The FAS2240 has been released in 2 flavors
- FAS2240-2: 2 RU system supporting 24 internal 2.5” SAS drives
- FAS2240-4: 4 RU system supporting 24 internal 3.5” SATA drives
- Both systems support up to 144 drives (432 TB) using external shelves
- Both systems support SATA, SAS & SSD on external shelves
- 2x – 3x performance improvement over the previous generation (mid-tier performance)
- The FAS2240 can be converted in to a disk shelf when upgrading to a larger array
- More software & capabilities included in base licensing (All protocols included)
- Simplified management with OnCommand System Manager 2.0
- Support for Data ONTAP 8.1
- Support for 8Gb FC & 10GbE (via mezzanine I/O card)
So why is this important?
NetApp has recognized the need for a refreshed entry level platform and has made several important improvements outside of the expected performance boost & increased port density. These improvements include support for Data ONTAP 8.1 Operating System with large aggregate support, support for 8Gb FC or 10GbE and Multi-Path HA cabling for SAS disk shelves to mention a few.
NetApp also continues to highlight the value of their unified storage platform which leverages the same controllers & operating system for every system they offer. This is critical when considering the life of the platform and the importance of enabling simplified upgrades as customer requirements grow or change. With NetApp and upgrade is usually as simple as performing a head swap.
What is it missing?
The FAS2240 is intended to be an entry level box so it does not include support for PCI expansion. The most notable impact of this is the lack of support for FlashCache. The FAS2240 also does not include support for MetroCluster which enables long distance clustering. Both of these capabilities are available starting in the FAS32xx series.
Author: Bruce Hall, Director of Technology
You had to be living ‘off-grid’ this week if you didn’t hear about the widespread problems that resulted from the millions of consumers trying to download Apple’s new iCloud sharing and data protection service… come on you know you contributed to that problem, I know I was.
If I can secure a simple solution to automatically share all my digital media with each member of my family, from any device while having off-site protection and reliable, simple recovery…all at a reasonable, predictable, monthly cost - just tell me where to sign up! The widespread adoption of these consumer technologies (dropbox.com, box.net, online-backup solutions etc…), begs the question why can’t the same benefits be realized for companies of all sizes?
Unstructured data, one of the biggest drivers of explosive data growth is particularly well suited to cloud storage. Some early cloud-based solutions attempted to address this challenge with a 100% cloud solution, providing a gateway to direct primary data to and from the cloud. The industry quickly learned that a hybrid solution is what consumers need, a combination of an onsite device for performance and availability and off-site capacity and data protection. This led to the next round of hybrid NAS solutions. Imagine an on-premises device that has the intelligence to cache the most frequently accessed files, based upon end-user demand, while seamlessly keeping 100% of all data in the cloud and moving data back and forth on-demand with limitless retention. Then layer on multi-site access to the same file-space simultaneously, tablet and smart-phone access from anywhere in the world, and collaboration features, all for a predictable per gigabyte monthly charge. Further imagine that disaster recovery of all this unstructured data is as simple as powering up a virtual machine and entering service credentials. Within minutes the entire directory tree is presented and file restoration from the cloud is automatic, prioritized by end-user demand.
Cloud/on-line backup is not just viable for consumers and small businesses either. With hybrid and private cloud solutions, on-premises devices provide high-performance backup and restore with automated off-site protection and reliable recovery, with the efficient block-level incremental forever (deduplication) technology to handle the volumes of today and tomorrow. Engaging the right Managed Service Provider (MSP) to bring the expertise and services to phase in this technology can protect recent investments while reducing the legacy environment as time passes, until all historical data has expired and the legacy solution can be fully retired. Free up your existing resources for more important tasks and gain control of your data protection challenges with a reliable solution for a predictable monthly per gigabyte cost. It’s getting close to being as simple and cost effective as the iCloud.
Author: Ned Fairweather, Senior Consultant
Symantec just announced general availability for Enterprise Vault 10 – the newest version of its email and content archiving software. Is it worth upgrading? I think so and here’s why: The current construct of Enterprise Vault (EV) is a pure datastore. Symantec has added intelligence to the information stored as well as context to unstructured data. Social media archiving (pending Data Insight rollout) as well as integration with the cloud have also been planned in the release. The recent acquisition of Clearwell is helping bring Symantec’s best in breed archiving together with eDiscovery.
EV is looking to increase governance via content based searching and increase business value by providing classification. They are using RAIL (Rapid Agent Ingestion Layer) to achieve content specific abilities based on lines of business. Scalability is focused on the petabyte sized data stores.
Improvements are being made to event-based retention and expiry filters to enhance management of deletion for regulation and/or reclassification. Additional focus will be on solving the requirements for new cloud-based email systems outside of Microsoft, IBM, and Google. In addition to cloud solutions, pst file sprawl on file servers will be included.
Enhancements to EV 10 are as follows:
- Full 64 bit index with GUI vs. a few scripts to build on
- 6x faster searches
- Storage footprint remains at 12% overhead as in previous versions
- Support for Outlook 2011
The future of EV should make complying with legal team’s eDiscovery requests easier. Structured data archiving is being worked on as a partnered solution (i.e. Oracle, Informatica).
Getting back to whether or not upgrading makes sense. EV 10 has some great new features; however upgrade paths between some versions are not direct. Upgrades would need to be run from one version to the next to get to 10. Here are the details on supported upgrade paths: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH53174 as well as the official word on EV 10 from Symantec: http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20110801_02
Author: Jeff Choinski, Consultant
Symantec held their annual World Sales & Marketing Conference July 10-15, 2011, in Las Vegas. This year, they combined the partner training program with their annual system engineer training. It created an opportunity for partners to meet up and trade stories and also hear experiences from Symantec’s SEs.
This year’s main themes focused around the cloud, protecting virtual environments and how Symantec’s products fit into this ever evolving IT environment. Products such as NetBackup for VMware, helping protect a company’s virtual environment using features like Automated Image Recovery (AIR) and allowing for automatic detection of newly created guests to granular recovery and dedupe with their V-Ray product integration are just a few features Symantec has to offer. The “.cloud” product set is now enabling companies to offer backup and archive as a service offering, further maturing their “IT as a service” models, while at the same time improving availability and reducing costs. The appliance offerings in both the NetBackup and PureDisk space are giving organizations a scalable all-in-one solution to protect their data. Symantec has also expanded hardware configurations to the NetBackup appliance, accommodating network environments from 1G to 10G or to support their fibre channel infrastructure. ApplicationHA for VMware adds another level of protection for Windows and Linux VMs by providing a product that is not only guest aware, but application aware. This provides the ability to stop and restart applications when failures occur, instead of the entire VM. Working with VMwareHA, you can restart and recover virtual machines as well, if necessary. The net is you can run more business critical applications in a virtual environment, without having to worry about outages and downtime. Keep an eye out for more releases this year from Symantec with more products that enable businesses to protect their data, move to the cloud and reduce downtime.
Author: Jake Roczniak, Consultant
Last month EMC held its annual user conference, EMC World 2011, in Las Vegas. Each year the company chooses a theme which broadly defines their core focus for the event. This year’s theme was “Cloud Meets Big Data”. In his keynote, EMC CEO Joe Tucci exclaimed that EMC’s role was “… to lead customers on their journey to cloud computing and transforming IT.” The “Big Data” aspect EMC is referring to is the fact that the so-called digital universe will contain 35 zettabytes of information within the next decade. IDC is also expecting server images to grow by 10x in the next decade. So not only will servers continue to get more powerful but they will also multiply wildly. EMC introduced what it is calling “The EMC Big Data Stack” defining their view of how to store, manage, and act on the big data coming downstream. They are also aligning much of their product set to be efficient in their vision of a hybrid-cloud model. EMC made many announcements - some that I think will be the most interesting to keep an eye on include:
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Greenplumb & Hadoop - a “big data” analytics hardware platform
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Project Lightening – Flash based PCIe server side device for moving workloads around, to and from the storage array to the physical server itself, utilizing FAST
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All Flash versions of the VNX and VMAX
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Isilon 108NL – New hardware that can reach a 15 petabyte file system in a single volume
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VPLEX Geo – Create a federated storage pool at synchronous distance
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Atmos 2.0 – The second generation of EMC’s globally scalable storage system
Were you at EMC World this year? If so, what did you think?
Author: Kushal Patel, Senior Consultant
Really? Is everyone that surprised that a cloud provider had an outage? An Amazon EC2 service disruption is never timely, but anyone with a well-planned DR strategy should not have been affected. If you want to know what happened, you can read the Amazon post mortem here.
This begs the question: “Are users of cloud service providers neglecting to consider Disaster Recovery as part of their new cloud based architecture?”
Simple answer: “If they are, they shouldn’t…”
The main message here is, read the Cloud Providers’ SLA’s, compare them to your Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives and plan accordingly. The location(s) of application, compute, network and storage resources, whether in the cloud or on-premise, does not preclude an organization from planning for DR. This includes Infrastructure, Platform, AND Software as a Service.
Consult with a DR specialist to create a design that encompasses all of your critical resources and adheres to your businesses availability needs. Like I said, “You get what you plan for…”
For those of you who were affected by the outage, I truly am sorry for your inconvenience, but I thank you for the lesson.
Guest Blogger: Jason Diesel, Director, Systems Engineering, Varonis
Virtual servers and virtualized storage systems contain real data. This data needs to be managed and protected, just like the data sitting on physical servers—it needs to be accessible by the right people, its usage needs to be monitored, and the right people need to be involved to decide who gets access to it and what acceptable use is.
Organizations no longer have to manually manage permissions to ensure that only the correct users have access to the right data and that their permission can be revoked when they no longer need them. The previously impossible is now possible by leveraging metadata, which makes the protection of data on your virtualized storage as easy as vmware makes it to spin up a virtual host. 
When it comes to identifying sensitive data and protecting access to it, a number of types of metadata are relevant: user and group information, permissions information, access activity, and sensitive content indicators. A key benefit to leveraging metadata for preventing data loss is that it can be used to focus and accelerate the data classification process. In many instances the ability to leverage metadata can speed up the process by up to 90%, providing a short list of where an organization's most sensitive data is, where it is most at risk, who has access to it and who shouldn't.
Key questions that can be answered with the intelligent use of metadata include, who owns this data? Who has access to this data? Who should have access to it? Who is using it? What data is no longer being used? Where is sensitive data over exposed, and how do I fix it? Software automation that uses this metadata can supply the answers to these questions, route them and make them available to the newly found data owners and IT so that the right people in the organization can make informed data governance decisions.
This post just touches the surface of this important issue, but you can learn more about how to leverage metadata technology at the January 20 VMUG Winter Warmer Event at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. Daymark and Varonis will be discussing this topic at 2:00pm RED LEVEL, Room 20. Hope to see you there!
Author: Brenden Doyle, Senior Consultant
There are a few different ways to encrypt backup tapes on the market today using software solutions and hardware solutions. One thing they all have in common is that they all need a key management solution to manage the encryption keys.
Some key management solutions are considered “in band” solutions such as the KMS feature of NetBackup where the Master server can manage the keys for encryption-capable tape drives. Other key management solutions are considered “out of band” key management solutions such as Q-EKM and SKM from Quantum. Both of these out of band solutions use a specific key management appliance to supply encryption keys directly to the tape drives themselves. Each of these solutions are also proprietary to the drive type they support -- Q-EKM is used for IBM drives and the SKM is used for HP drives. This can be a bit confusing and needs to be considered when adding additional sites to an existing backup configuration. For instance, if you are s set up with IBM drives using QEKM for the key management, you are tied into the IBM drive technology if you want to swap tapes between the sites.
Another issue to be considered is NDMP backups as direct NDMP configurations pose a problem when using” in band” key management utilities. (Note: by “direct NDMP backups” I mean when a tape drive is directly connected to a filer). This poses an issue for the NetBackup Media Server Encryption Option. Since it uses a tape driver on the media server to do the encryption there is no way for it to encrypt a backup being written by the NDMP appliance. This also poses an issue for the KMS “in band” key management feature as it has no way to request a key from the Master server when the drive is directly attached to the filer. For an environment with many large filers, “out of band” key management utilities will allow you to keep the direct NDMP backup architecture in place with its high performance tape writes. An “in band” key management utility might require a swap to a remote NDMP architecture where the data will first travel over the network to a backup server before it gets written to tape. This will be a significant degradation in performance, and that won’t be acceptable to the end user.
To summarize, keep in mind the key management utility in use and match it when adding new tape drives or libraries to an existing configuration. Keep in mind that NDMP direct attached backups might need a different key management utility and that the best way to preserve the direct attached architecture is to use an “out of band” key management appliance.
Author: Kushal Patel, Senior Consultant
Cloud computing will have a significant impact on IT functions within the industry over the next several years. The challenge is having a strategy to steer clear of the pitfalls and leverage the opportunities that make sense for your business.
How do you, as the IT manager, sort through all the “cloud computing” clamor?
While cloud computing is still in its early stages, I have sifted through a lot of superfluous information that’s out there and can provide some basic, yet solid, advice.
Let’s start with understanding what cloud computing really is, and how you can begin building a framework for a cloud strategy.
There’s still a lot of confusion as to what cloud computing is – but maybe there shouldn’t be. For a midmarket company, cloud computing can simply be defined as a way to outsource some IT “headaches” to a third party (or even business unit) on a pay-as-you-use service model so you can focus on improving your core competencies. You can compare this to the power industry; before the power grid existed everyone generated and delivered their own power. Today we don’t need an investment in power-generating equipment – we simply pay for what we use and let the power companies deal with the “headache” of power generation.
How to begin establishing a strategy:
The basic questions to ask when setting a cloud strategy center around what core strengths you want to focus on. Which capabilities are you lacking and what headaches do you want to abandon? Don’t get too wrapped up in the specifics of Public Clouds, Private Clouds, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Elastic Computing, Chargeback, etc, etc, etc. Strategy is a projection into the future, so think about what technologies you want your organization to have a strong competence in, and what technologies are better suited for somebody else to deal with. Those functions that aren't core to your operation are good candidates for the cloud. For instance, data warehousing may be best if kept internal, whereas collaboration tools may be a good candidate for the cloud.
Security, security, security:
Everybody's paranoid about cloud security, and for good reason. Anytime you trust a third party, you need to consider the risks. Compliance concerns will always be tricky, and you should always check with your internal compliance watchdogs before deciding to leverage the cloud. But don't arbitrarily assume that your capacity for compliance is better than that of a third party. Just because you feel safer driving your own car doesn’t change the fact that you are safer when a professional is in control (pilot, taxi, captain, etc.).
So in summary, don’t let the term “cloud computing” cause discomfort. Begin with the basic idea of removing your headaches and focusing on critical applications. Be cautious but open to 3rd party security control and be open to the inevitable journey to the cloud.