Author: Mark Addy

On January 8th 2013 EMC announced a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint on virtualised environments. EMC VSPEX is a reference architecture that allows the customer to choose which hypervisor, server and networking best suits the uniqueness of their environment and which they prefer to use alongside EMC unified storage such as VNX and VNXe. The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure is designed for customers looking to consolidate their storage and infrastructure and reduce TCO associated with a SharePoint deployment.

The VSPEX for SharePoint configuration can scale from 1,000 to 10,000 users and can be used with all the private cloud solutions in the VSPEX catalogue. EMC have completed tests and studies to show how VSPEX helps customers in virtualised SharePoint environments tune SharePoint storage performance in 80% less time, reduce time to provision SharePoint, accelerate SQL Server transactions by four times, cut time to manage backups by 80% and reduce storage used for backups by up to thirty times.

Read detailed information about VSPEX for SharePoint at the link below.

http://www.emc.com/platform/microsoft/microsoft-sharepoint-solutions.htm#!solution_description

EMC has recently released several apps for your Apple i device.

An EMC Support app for iPhone which allows you to quickly login and check the status of your service requests and make updates
EMC Mobile, which is billed as “the essential tool for those of us who live EMC”
EMC Folio, a news and video app to keep up with everything EMC.

Anyone who has had to deal with EMC over the years knows the pain of Powerlink, a website that is slow, only works with some browsers, and is so overloaded with information that it can be difficult to find what you are after. Regular users often keep an offline archive of important documentation so they don’t need to go online. Unfortunately this means that users have to keep their local repository up to date.

I’ve been using EMC Folio to fill in my train journey to work. I login at home and sync a couple of videos over my WiFi, then watch them on the train to keep up to date with what’s going on in the EMC World. The EMC Mobile app has a lot of potential, however currently it doesn’t have all the documentation for every product. It only has 12 Networker documents, compared to the 35 on Powerlink. It allows offline syncing and all documents are downloaded as PDFs for easy transfer to other applications or devices.

I look forward to what the future of these products brings (and hopefully their Android and dare I say it, Windows (Mobile, RT & 8) brethren), and envisage a not to distant future where I can simply tell the App to sync all Networker 7.6 and higher documentation to my iPad and I’ll never be caught without the manual again. Until then, I’ll keep downloading the documentation manually and synchronising it between my laptop and iPad using Dropbox.

As follow me data technology becomes an expected tool to most end-users, one industry has been a late adapter due to the issue of archiving and the compliance to strict industry regulations. Citrix has announced the release of ShareFile for Financial Services, a product that can assist firms comply with data archiving regulations.

Get updated on the full release.

http://investors.citrix.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=753671

Citrix Systems have signalled their intention to become market leaders in the space of enterprise mobility management (EMM) with the recent purchase of Zenprise, who are in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management Software (MDM).

Citrix has rebadged the Zenprise product and incorporated existing key Citrix products from XenMobile MDM and the Citrix Mobile Solution Bundle. The bundle includes XenMobile MDM and Cloud Gateway.

As we are now well aware, mobility has become a major priority for organisations. The drivers for mobility may be unique from one organisation to another; however one result is the same, that being the challenge it presents to IT.

The concept and introduction of mobility has resulted in an increase in employees demands to access the apps and data they rely on to perform their job from any location, on any device, including their own personal mobile devices. For IT, allowing users to access all of their apps and data from untrusted devices raises significant security and compliance concerns.

I recently attended an event by one of the big storage vendors, which had an interesting presentation by their senior technologists, i.e. one of those guys who get the big money for reading the tea leaves correctly as to where technology will be in 5 year’s time.

It included a statement about where Flash/SSD/EFD drives are today and where technology is headed. I remember two points that were made – the first one that we currently see a convergence of memory and solid state drives. Now that prices for SSD drives have come down considerably and are affordable within mainstream computers like desktops and laptops and their reliability is at least acceptable for normal use – and protected by seemingly more chips for error handling than for data use within enterprise flash drives. The gap between disk performance and speed of memory is beginning to narrow.

The second point made was that he could not see a serious future for SAS drives and was predicting for them to be obsolete within the next 5 years.

What is the best disk technology? I think the answer as so often is “it depends”. What are you trying to get out of the storage investment – are there performance requirements or are there capacity requirements? In my experience most of the time there is both, but they differ wildly – while for some environments the goal is “as much capacity as possible at acceptable response times”, other environments are trying very hard to get their response time down from 5 minutes to 4 minutes.

Several arrays nowadays can have a hybrid mix of disks installed plus – in some cases – internal memory-based cache, i.e. they can incorporate memory, EFD/SSD, SAS/FC and SATA and some advanced arrays are capable of moving data between these storage tiers, which actually leads me to the question “Who cares what the best disk technology is?”.

What do I mean by that? My recommendation is not to be dazzled by specs and technology – ultimately it does not matter, what type of storage is used and what it is called, as long as the used technology can satisfy the current requirements with some room for growth. Will it matter for most companies if SAS drives will be around in 5 years’ time? I do not think so – as long as there are spare parts for existing arrays, older arrays will eventually be decommissioned and be replaced with whatever will be around then. Does it matter if SSD drives contain NAND chips or something else? As long as they are reliable and provide the required performance: I do not think so.

It may be interesting for the companies producing storage arrays, but as an end user or a company you take the next technology refresh as it comes and install whatever fulfils the current requirements at the current required price point. And the only thing that we will know for certain is: Whatever will be the next array/disk technology, it will provide more capacity, it will be faster and it will not be more expensive.

No surprises to see that Mobility and Cloud topped the agenda of Citrixs premier event Synergy 2013, held last week in Los Angeles.

Right from the get go Citrix CEO Mark Templeton’s keynote speech addressed the ‘megatrends’ of mobile work styles and cloud services. After buying into the MDM market place with the acquisition of Zenprise, Citrix have been clearly focused at demonstrating why they believe themselves to be the clear market leaders in workforce mobility and mobile device management. A belief which is supported by the folk at Gartner.

With Mobility and Cloud services taking the lion share of many IT budgets and forming the basis of C level conversations regarding IT, let Diaxion show you how your organisation can get prepared for and benefit from mobility and cloud focused computing.

Stay tuned for more information from Citrix Synergy 2013.

Today, private clouds have emerged as a top priority for organisations. While many of these Cloud offerings are modelled after Amazon style public cloud, diverse computing workload required a solution that delivers to meet greater levels of business agility.

Citrix acquired Cloud.com back in 2011 as a strategic move towards Cloudification of its offerings and developed today’s “CloudPlatform”, which is a now key component of Citrix cloud computing portfolio that allows customers of all sizes to deliver business-ready, multi-tenant cloud services faster and at a fraction of the cost.

Citrix CloudPlatform, based on open source platform and powered by Apache CloudStack (cloudstack.apache.org) who is a mother of many industry leading big clouds, Citrix has built a product that is comparatively easy to adopt, manage and integrate with the existing setup along with the best security, performance and reliability.

Some enterprise features include:

1) Amazon AWS1 compatible: Citrix CloudPlatform continue to integrate and extend compatibility for the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that enable customers to develop their own private clouds in-house and integrate with AWS public clouds providing more flexibility and ROI.

2) Windows-as-a-service and Desktop-as-a-service: Citrix CloudPlatform integrates support for large scale deployments of Project Avalon2 that provides single install options to deliver windows app and desktops as true Cloud style apps.

3) Compatibility: Backed by Cloudstack.org open source community, Citrix CloudPlatform allows customers to take advantage of jointly developed and supported integration from industry leaders like Cisco, NetApp etc. along with a wide array of supported technologies as below:

Hypervisor: XenServer, VMware, Oracle VM, KVM and bare metal
Storage: Local Disk, iSCSI, Fiber Channel, NFS, Swift
Network: Isolation, Firewall, VPN, Load balancer etc.

4) Scalable: With easy user friendly interface provided by a single management server, the Citrix CloudPlatform can provision 1000s of physical or virtual servers in multiple physically distributed datacenters without a single point of failure.

5) Complete Solution: Customers benefit from the fact that CloudPlatform is part of an end-to-end solution from a single vendor, which includes Citrix XenServer, XenCenter, NetScaler, Branch Repeater, CloudGateway, and Citrix CloudBridge.

Customers choosing the Citrix platform experience streamlined purchasing, a single support contract and features that complement one another across the stack, each in an open, hypervisor-agnostic way.

1: AWS: Amazon Web Services
2: Project Avalon (http://www.citrix.com/products/xenapp/whats-new/project-avalon.html)

There are some quick wins you can have with a few simple housekeeping, maintenance and minor implementations of backup methods to improve your traditional backups and their durations. There are many variables that we can focus on, although for a simplistic outlook we will focus on the items below as a starting point:
Highly fragmented drives
Identifying slow clients
Dense file system backup

Fragmentation of mounts points

In our experience there have been many occasions where highly fragmented mount points have an impact on not only performance of the server, but also backup durations. Files that have blocks dispersed across a disk take longer to back up because each segment of data is located at a different location, and therefore instead of reading block after block of data, the heads on the disk must move to a number of places to access the data. When a traditional backup is performed it has to traverse all folders and files and the longer it takes to perform this activity the longer the backup duration will inturn take.

Look into executing a regular scheduled maintenance activity, such as a simple disk defragmentation that can maintain a greater consistency in performance of your operating system’s ability to service the demands placed on it, including backups and minimising their durations.

Slow Clients

If you notice unusually slow backups in terms of throughput, you should investigate further. This may be an issue if you have a reliance on resources (target device) needing to release reservations to allow further connections (backups). A couple of areas to look at for a quick win would be to either ensure these “slow” servers have backups running with a shared device pool that will piggyback off other servers sending data through to ensure the drives do not experience “shoe shining”. Another way is grouping all the client servers that are slowly transferring data into a group and dedicated “slow lane”, such as a dedicated drive, which won’t impede on the majority of servers performing backups in the environment.

The last thing you need is critical servers and their backups waiting on non-critical or test/development servers reserving resources for long periods of time before they can commence.

Dense mount points

Dense file systems that run flat file backups should be revisited in the approach taken to perform the backup. When there are millions of relatively small sized files located on a mount point, the time taken to capture and send them to tape will cause slow backups and “shoe shining” on your tape device, which doesn’t allow the tape drive to reach its optimum throughput speeds.

Having a look into using the raw disk partition as a block level backup, or perform snapshots of the dense mount point. Other options are available, however the pros and cons of such changes should be accounted for before implementation occurs. E.g. running a block level backup could mean restores at a file level is not available depending on the technology used.

New business requirements are transforming the demands placed on IT. To operate effectively in today’s fast-paced work environment, organisations need to be able to get work done anywhere, anytime, and by all means on any device. This is the context for the rise of BYOD solutions and a definitive focus on end user mobility.

A more flexible work environment increases business agility, productivity and mobility, and also improves business and workforce continuity. It also allows organisations to recruit and retain the best people regardless of their physical location or employment status whether that is full-time, part-time, contractor, consultant, temporary worker or outsourcing provider.

As expected what comes with such a dramatic shift in application delivery, content delivery, and device management is a new set of challenges faced by IT providers and support teams.

These challenges are well known and include but are not limited to:

Assessing users, devices, applications and data for BYOD participation
Evaluating your environment for BYOD adoption
Accommodating and supporting a diverse inventory of mobile devices
Creating, implementing and enforcing effective policies related to BYOD, privacy, data security and compliance
Reducing the administrative burden of BYOD on IT staff

BYOD is much more than just choosing an appropriate Mobile Device Management (MDM) tool. It is about understanding the business, user and IT requirements of your organisation in relation to implementing such a solution. As such, BYOD is unique to each organisation and there is no one solution that meets the requirements of all organisations.

A successful project is one that is delivered on time, within budget and to scope. To ensure the success of a project, there are some key things which must be taken into account throughout the project life cycle so that all stakeholder expectations are aligned and the project can remain on track.

A clearly defined scope and ensuring that the timeframes are realistic at the start of a project are the first steps towards the success of a project. By not making too many assumptions, and including the ones which are made in the statement of work, alongside the items deemed out of scope it is much easier to track what is in and out of scope and then address any variances through change control.

Utilising the right resources at the right points throughout the project to achieve maximum efficiency is vital. By using planning tools – such as Microsoft Project – to list the deliverables with dates to track against, identify dependencies and assign task owners, it is easy to make sure that this is the case.

Constantly revisiting the scope to ensure the project is tracking towards its’ original goal, as well as effectively communicating the risks and issues of the project to the key stakeholder’s and project team members is important to ensure the project is a success. By involving the key stakeholder’s in the process from the outset, getting in buy-in when needed later down the track is usually not as difficult.

Project failure can often be attributed to the following – poorly defined deliverables and scope; lack of organisational buy-in; poor resource allocation; project not being fit for purpose; and no control of risk. By being aware of these factors at the start of the project, specific measurable outcomes can be developed to ensure there is accountability and the project remains on track.

Beginning a project with the end in mind is always a useful thing to remember, as the whole idea behind a project is that it has a clearly defined start, end and milestones along the way to measure success against.