This is my talk I gave last week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. One slide that did not make the deck are the top reasons why people struggle with building private clouds
Management and operations process.
Culture
Funding Model
Service description and self-service interface
As my deck says, “I got 99 problems, but the tech ain’t one”
Self-Service Arrives to Workload Automation. Have Your Users Paint Your Fence.
It’s close to 11 p.m. on the last day of the quarter. And I.T. gets an urgent request to post-pone a closing of the books process because there’s a large order stuck in the CRM system. This means that it won’t hit the books and be recorded as a sale. The customer won’t get her order, the salesperson won’t get paid and finance will show a missing number.
Making matters more complicated, there’s a large marketing workload to process sentiment analysis that kicks off after close of business. That whole workload looks like this:
This generates an urgent call to the team that manages the workload automation platform: Hold the closing workflow! Stop the presses! And postpone the Hadoop workflow.
The admins have to get to their console find the job and pause it. Not a huge deal, except there are thousands of jobs to be run and hundreds of business people calling on a regular basis, at all kind of hours.
Some customers have created help desks for their workload automation teams or even off-shore to serve these kinds of requests.
The Internet of Everything fuels our daily lives, but leads to some new challenges in the networking space. Join us for this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged as Damian Karlson (@sixfootdad) and Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd) discuss the pros and cons of IPv6, firewalls, and the failure of 1970′s math. Watch and see:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
Collaborate 13, the largest independent Oracle user group (IOUG, OAUG, Quest International) event is the launch point for 3 new Oracle-based, Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). With the Joint Cisco/NetApp “FlexPod” as the hardware platform, the new CVD’s include:
Oracle RAC with Oracle Linux as the operating system
Oracle RAC with Oracle VM as the hypervisor
Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne with Oracle Linux as the operating system
These CVD’s, Prevalidated for Oracle, give Oracle RAC and Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne users the option to select a fully tested and supported solution for their infrastructure.
IT users face a difficult series of challenges; do more and do it better, but do it with lower budgets and staff levels. Prevalidated systems, like these three new FlexPod-based CVDs for Oracle software, can help address these challenges.
Cisco and NetApp, working with software companies such as Oracle, are able to give customers a potent weapon to help IT organizations drive down complexity and deliver prevalidated, converged infrastructure capabilities for their mission critical databases and applications. High availability and fast, reliable performance are benefits of converged infrastructure platforms like FlexPod.
Note: This guest blog is from our partner EMC. In it Chad Dunn, Director of VSPEX Business Operations, comments on VSPEX as an infrastructure solution for Microsoft oriented I.T. environments. Rex.
Cisco and EMC Buddy-Up on VSPEX for Microsoft Private Cloud
At EMC we’re always keen on working with fellow industry-leaders to deliver solutions that accelerate our customers’ journey to cloud computing – and Cisco, the leader in fabric, is one of our most collaborative friends. In particular, we’ve focused a ton of joint effort on EMC VSPEX.
VSPEX is a set of complete virtualization solutions – integrating virtualization, servers, networking, storage and backup – that are proven and validated by EMC and delivered to customers by channel partners. That validation is extremely important too – why? Because validation = confidence. It ensures interoperability and fast deployment, and removes the complexity and risk.
Well… What’s New?
With the increasing interest in Microsoft-based private clouds, we wanted to deliver a solution to customers that was not only validated by EMC and Cisco, but also certified by Microsoft. Just like what we did with the “small” Microsoft private cloud Fast Track implementation – but bigger. So that’s exactly what we’ve done: EMC and Cisco have just certified a new VSPEX configuration as a Microsoft private cloud Fast Track solution for enterprise implementations.
The enterprise implementation along with the small implementation greatly accelerates the transformation to Microsoft private cloud environments for our customers, but also just as important is how VSPEX can help customers simplify the ongoing management of their cloud. Key to successful cloud management is delivering robust end to end orchestration and automation. EMC and Cisco’s integration with Microsoft System Center enables our customers to leverage the management tools and interfaces that they know and already utilize. Additionally, EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) provides Microsoft application administrators more self-service and management empowerment and shortens the time to do storage provisioning by 4x for Microsoft applications.
Speaking of Microsoft applications, we’ve also just introduced 2 new VSPEX solutions to support them. VSPEX for virtualized Microsoft Exchange makes deployment of 1,000 to 10,000 Exchange mailboxes fast and easy, while VSPEX for virtualized Microsoft SQL Server dramatically simplifies implementation of an environment supporting online transaction processing.
We’re very excited about these solutions as well as all of the other things that come as a result of our collaboration with Cisco around VSPEX – and there’s plenty more to come – so keep an eye out on www.cisco.com/go/vspex and follow @EMCVSPEX on twitter for the latest.
