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2012 is almost here and if you have a RISC/UNIX migration in the planning stages or are exploring a migration for next year I urge you to read our migration case studies. One of my favorite case studies is Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Freeport determined the company’s existing infrastructure and ERP environment was not delivering the scalability and performance that was needed inhibiting its ability to progress its growth agenda. Freeport’s SAP migration to Cisco UCS increased platform utilization and maximized its infrastructure investment, while simplifying ongoing management and operational support for their ERP environment.
A migration of mission-critical applications is a decision that most organizations consider carefully. A key discussion in any RISC/UNIX migration includes an investigation of the applications and how to migrate them from their current architecture to Cisco UCS. The typical questions are: How do I migrate? What are the options? Do you have any real world examples? If so, what were the results and benefits?
As part of our RISC/UNIX Migration Program, we have released a set of migration guides for key applications, such as Oracle RAC, SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel that answer those specific questions. I urge you to read how Cisco customers and Cisco IT, utilizing a planned and phased approach, migrated Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications to Cisco UCS. Read More »
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Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks from PacketPushers.net have released another in-depth podcast, this time on how to create scalable cloud networks with VXLAN. VXLAN, if you recall, is a multi-vendor effort to increase the number of logical networks that can be created within a cloud environment, and overcomes the challenges of using VLANs when separate tenants and application instances all need their own logical domains. Read More »
OK, so what has an ancient Scottish castle got to do with the Gartner Data Center Conference in London? This doesn’t sound like what I usually blog about!
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Think about it, when was the last time the business said “thank you” to IT? It’s probably been a while. Unfortunately, all too often we hear complaints that IT is too slow, or that IT is the department of “no”.
Deploying a private cloud is one way to help turn IT into the department of “yes”, with faster and more responsive IT service delivery. The customers of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud have compressed the cycle time for IT provisioning from weeks to minutes. That means that project managers and application developers no longer have to wait for IT – they can speed up their projects and get business applications up and running more quickly.
And if there’s one golden rule to remember for your private cloud solution, it’s that the business wants apps. They’ll be thankful if you can provision and manage their applications in a cloud environment with consistency, reliability and speed.
So if you’re interested in on-demand application delivery for your private cloud, check out this presentation from Cisco Intelligent Automation and our ecosystem partner rPath:
Подведены итоги первого Конкурса продуктов, организованного некоммерческим объединением специалистов Virtualization Security Group Russia и порталом VirtualizationSecurityGroup.Ru. В Конкурсе приняли участие продукты для защиты виртуальных инфраструктур компаний Cisco, HP, Trend Micro, «Код Безопасности», McAfee, IBM, Symantec. Также вне Конкурса были представлены продукты компаний ОКБ САПР, Stonesoft.
В номинации «Выбор читателей» победу одержал продукт Cisco Virtual Security Gateway, получивший наибольшее количество голосов в открытом голосовании портала VirtualizationSecurityGroup.Ru.
Rough Translation:
This is the summary of the first Competition of products organized by the non-profit association of experts, Virtualization Security Group Russia and its portal VirtualizationSecurityGroup.ru. The products that have taken part in the competition for protection of virtual infrastructures of companies include Cisco, HP, Trend Micro, « the Code of the Security », McAfee, IBM, and Symantec. Also products from companies OKB SAPR, Stonesoft have been presented.
In the nomination category « the Choice of readers », a victory was gained by the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway product, which has received the greatest quantity of voices in voting by show of hands on the portal VirtualizationSecurityGroup.ru.
Customers and experts in Russia are realizing the strong capabilities within VSG to not only protect virtual workloads and easily account for application mobility, but the ability to build sophisticated firewall policies based on the attributes of the virtual machine. This allows organizations to create trust zones for classes of applications, by tenant name/owner, by user group, for virtual desktops, by OS, etc., that align with real world policy requirements. Congratulations to VSG and to Cisco’s Server Access Virtualization Business Unit!
I finally took a leap of faith and had LASIK surgery done recently, and without a doubt it’s been a life changing decision. The daily hassle of glasses and contacts are gone, and my vision is now 20/15…it’s like going from regular TV to HiDef! Of course these benefits came with a cost, requiring investments both financial and mental. The financial cost was easy enough thanks to no interest payments, however the mental cost required a careful weighing of risk vs reward and a bit of blind faith (no pun intended). In the end, trust in the technology and the doctor, and the belief that I could find my happy place for 15 minutes to endure the procedure was enough to take the leap. Looking back it was one of my better life decisions.
Shortly after my procedure I was on site at a customer who was implementing a Vblock, and Cisco was engaged for UCS optimization services to follow up the install. For those new to integrated infrastructure solutions, a Vblock is a pre-integrated and tested infrastructure stack with various components across compute, network, and storage. My favorite component hands down is the Cisco Nexus1000 This product replaces the VMware vSwitch functionality with a feature rich Cisco switch powered by NXOS, which this particular customer had no knowledge of. Well, I’m a huge fan of the product, and I knew they would be too once they came to understand it’s use cases and capabilities. I gave their network and server admins a 4 hour overview covering everything from architecture to troubleshooting. The light bulbs went on and they were exchanging smiles about 10 minutes into the presentation when I started talking about the non disruptive operational model and VN-LINK concepts. One of the network admins interrupted me and said “ are you telling me I can get clear vision to the VM level without the hassle of dealing with these guys” as he pointed at the closest server admin. I immediately thought of my new eyes and chuckled at the thought that server admins apparently were as annoying as glasses or contacts to deal with on a daily basis.
Cloud Expo was indeed a very interesting juxtaposition of people espousing the value of cloud and how their stuff is really cloudy. You have a group of presenters and expo floor booths talking about their open API and how that is the future of cloud. Then you have the other camp that tells us how their special mix of functions is so much better than that. All of this is a very interesting dialog. APIs are indeed very important. If your technology is indeed a cloud operating model then you must have an API. Solutions like Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud rely on those APIs to orchestrate cloud services. But APIs are not the end all. The reality is that while the cloud discussions tend to center on the API and the model behind that API, the real change enabling the move towards cloud is the operating model of the users who are leveraging the cloud for a completely fresh game plan for their businesses.
James Urquhart’s recent blog: http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-cloud-boils-down-to-for-the-enterprise-2/ highlights that the real change for users of the cloud is modifying how they do development, test, capacity management, production operations and disaster recovery. My last blog talked about the world before cloud management and automation and the move from the old world model to the new models of dev/test or dev/ops that force the application architects, developers, and QA folks to radically alter their model. Those that adopt the cloud without changing their “software factory” model from one that Henry Ford would recognize to the new models may not get the value they are looking for out of the cloud.
At Cloud Expo I saw a lot of very interesting software packages. Some of them went really deep into a specific use case area, while others accomplished a lot of functional use cases that were only about a inch deep. As product teams build out software packages for commercial use, they have a very interesting and critical decision point that will drive the value proposition of the software product. It seems to me that within 2 years, just about all entrants in the cloud management and automation marathon will begin to converge on a simple focused yet broad set of use cases. Each competitor will be either directly driving their product to that point, or they will be forced to that spot by the practical aspects of customers voting with the wallets. Interestingly enough, this whole process it drives competition and will yield great value for the VP of Operations and VP of Applications of companies moving their applications to the cloud.
Big Data’s move into the enterprise has generated a lot of buzz on why big data, what are the components and how to integrate? The “why” was covered in a two part blog (Part 1 | Part 2) by Sean McKeown last week. To help answer the remaining questions, I presented Hadoop Network and Architecture Considerations last week at the sold out Hadoop World event in New York. The goal was to examine what considerations need to be taken to integrate Hadoop into Enterprise architectures by demystifying what happens on the network and identifying key network characteristics that affect Hadoop clusters.
The presentation includes results from an in depth testing effort to examine what Hadoop means to the network. We went through many rounds of testing that spanned several months (special thanks to Cloudera on their guidance). Read More »
The customers I talk to know that deploying a private or hybrid cloud will both save them money on IT operations and make them more agile to respond to the business. There is a low grade euphoria over the cloud opportunity that gets the conversation going. The conversation drives development of both our solution and our customers’ sophistication in thinking about how and why they will use Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC).
However, finance guys and IT management don’t get that feel-good feeling over the opportunity or even the coolness of the technology in the absence of dollar numbers to motivate them.
Nor should they.
We are in a part of high-tech that does not do technology for technology’s sake. We do it because it makes business sense.
Interesting trends are taking root around us and one of them is convergence. The term conjures up different thoughts depending on our background and experiences. Economists may say convergence is the parity of per capita income around the world. Convergence for telecom is the combination of voice, data and entertainment services. So what does it mean for data centers? In one of my recent informal webcast polls of technologists, one opinion was that convergence implied the union of telecom and IT. Reality is that data centers now are the hub and source for voice, video, data and application services.
So if we look at application workloads running in data centers, there are four infrastructure capacity variables -- CPU, Memory, Storage and Network. One approach is to optimize on the utilization of one of these variables. If we decide to optimize on Storage, then it must be virtualized and/or provided as a service. Implementation would involve purchase of the best of breed storage hardware, and building highly skilled teams to manage, tweak and optimize performance of the storage resources. Similarly a COE(Center of Excellence) for servers (CPU and Memory) must be formed for servers and for networks. This implies that any project would involve multiple teams and project management would be a challenge, to put it lightly. This reminds me of my mainframe experience in relation to the distributed platform. We could get an entire application developed, tested and ready to go before getting a RACF id to even access the mainframe.
Early in my career I moved quite a bit, new job, growing family, whatever the reason it seemed like every two or three years we were packing up and going to a new place and meeting our new neighbors.
Each new place had its own protocol for getting to know the neighbors, sometimes they came to us other times we had to walk around the block with the kids in tow to make that connection. The benefits of knowing your neighbors are many, who’ll lend you tools, who will help move furniture, etc.
Knowing the device neighbors in you network is just as important and fortunately there is a protocol for that, Cisco Discovery Protocol Cisco Discovery Protocol. This article is a guide to getting to know your UCS Fabric Interconnects’ neighbors in a manual and automated way.
Earlier in my career, I ran a corporate IT and managed services tooling team. I wish it was garage type tools, but it was IT operational management tools. My team was responsible for developing and integration a set of ~20 applications that was the “IT for the IT guys”. It was a great training ground for 120 of us; we worked on the bleeding edge and we were loving it. We did everything from product management, development, test, quality engineering deployment, production and operational support. It was indeed an example of eating your own cooking. Applications where king in our group. We had .NET, J2EE, JAVA, C, C+, C++ and other languages. We have custom build and COTS (commercial off the shelf) software applications.
One day on a fateful Friday, my teenagers happily asleep on a Friday night way past midnight (I guess that made it Saturday), I was biting my nails at 2 AM with my management and technical team on a concall wondering what went wrong. We were 5 hours into a major yearly upgrade and Murphy was my co-pilot that night. I had DBAs, architects, Tomcat experts, QA, load testing gurus, infrastructure jockeys, and everyone else on the phone. We had deployed 10 new servers that night and were simultaneously doing an upgrade to the software stack. I think we had 7 time zones covered with our concall. At least for my compatriots in France it was not too bad; they were having morning coffee in their time zone. Our composite application was taking 12 seconds to process transactions; it should have taken no more 1.5 secs. The big question: can we fix this by Sun at 10 PM when our user base in EMEA showed up for work, or do we (don’t say this to the management) roll back the systems and application…. I ran out of nails at this point…. My wife came into my dark home office and wondered what the heck was going on…..
There’s been some activity inside Cisco around big data, particularly with regards to Hadoop running on Cisco’s Nexus switches and UCS servers. A little bit of that work is starting to surface here and there, so I thought it would be a good time to do a little post to aggregate.
Last month, we published a solution brief with Oracle about the benefits of running Oracle NoSQL on UCS [pdf].
Sean McKeown (@sean_m_mckeown) started blogging with a series on “Why Hadoop?”. Here are part 1 and part 2. Sean covers the basics of the case for big data and Hadoop.
We just published a white paper with some very interesting data from network testing we’ve done in house called: “Big Data in the Enterprise: Network Design Considerations“. This one gets very technical very quickly, but it’s highly recommended reading for networking folks deploying big data clusters, particularly with Hadoop.
If you’re interested in what else Cisco is up to in the exploding world of big data, check out the new page we put up to pull it all together - cisco.com/go/bigdata.
UPDATE: You can catch Jacob Rapp speaking with the folks from Wikibon live at 1:15PM on Wednesday Nov 9th on siliconANGLE.tv
In this recent article by Alex Barret you’ll find some great commentary by customers on the “snowballing” interest around the Cisco Unified Computing System. It follows on the heels of TechTarget’s Virtualization Decisions 2011 Purchasing Intentions Survey where nearly 20% of respondents pointed to UCS as their platform of choice for virtualization.
When you start to see IT professionals recommending a platform to their friends and neighbors you know it’s for real. It’s exciting to see people talking about the tangible benefits that they’re realizing … and they tell the story better than anyone here at Cisco.
Recently, a customer asked me what was the value of using automation to operate a private cloud? It was a good question. Working in the middle of the reality distorition field of the cloud industry I take it for granted that everyone knows automation’s benefits.
Fundamentally, automation tools help to reduce labor costs, rationalize consumption and increase utilization.
Costs are lower because the labor required to configure and deploy is eliminate. This automation is possible by creating standard infrastructure offerings. Standard infrastructure offering make possible a new operational model: to move from the artesanal approach of delivering infrastructure ,where every system and configuration is uniqe, to the industrialized approach, that ensures repeatability, quality and agility. It’s the difference between custom tailoring and standardized sizes at The Gap. Both have their place, but one costs more.
