Author: Mark Addy

IT Strategy & Optimisation

Diaxion specialise in IT strategies to address individual business goals and to then integrate them with an IT solution that is optimised to achieve those goals.

IT performance is becoming increasingly critical across all aspects of business. One of the clear challenges facing IT Executives is ensuring their IT systems are aligned to their business strategies and vision, whilst taking advantage of relevant and available technologies to ensure competitive advantage.

Additional to this is their management imperative to ensure IT performance and costs are completely optimised for maximum return on investment. Based on these needs many executives are rightly concerned that key decisions are potentially being made on biased input from vendors or limited internal knowledge.

The vForum recently took place at Luna Park in Sydney. While it can be said that the venue was appropriate considering this was the vForum’s 10th anniversary, it will be great when Sydney finally will have a proper convention centre again. Especially for the vendors outside the 2 days were interesting – with a thunderstorm passing through on Wed, 05/11; however general feedback was that they at least had space as opposed to those exhibiting in the Solutions Exchange area.

The three big VMware topics were:

– SDDC = software-defined data centre

– Hybrid Cloud

– End User Computing (with a big focus on VDI)

VMware confirmed/announced that vCloud Air will start (in Melbourne) next year, which is their cloud offering; with AWS and Azure that should make it a minimum of 3 big cloud providers in Australia in 2015. One differentiator may be that VMware works with partners and enables them to offer their version of vCloud Air locally (i.e. making this a local, Australian-owned cloud not subject to the infamous Patriot Act) – some of these local providers include Telstra and Optus.

On the storage side SDS (software-defined storage) featured well. Nexenta presented that they see themselves as the market leader in this space and they do have a good story (even including HPC case studies). Even EMC only talked about ViPR, ScaleIO and a bit about XtremIO (and no word about other hardware). PernixData use Flash and RAM only as a caching mechanism for their version of software-defined storage.

Apart from the usual suspects Pure Storage (all-flash) and Nimble (hybrid), SolidFire (all-flash) has now an Australian/APAC presence and had a booth at vForum. They offer a solid modular scale-out architecture, which got excellent marks from Gartner and they promise ~$3/GB, which brings them close to the price of high-performance regular disks – the words “spinning rust” were used frequently amongst those vendors.

SimpliVity, which is next to VCE and Nutanix another vendor of converged infrastructure is now also present in Australia. They promise more features than Nutanix – including a built-in storage gateway, so looks to be a very nice solution in the right environments.

Also interesting – VMware’s design of EVO:Rail and EVO:Rack – in a way their pre-defined (“converged”?) infrastructure design, which can be commissioned in less than 15 minutes with 100VMs or 250 virtual desktops per 4-node appliance (maximum of 4 appliances in V.1). Dell and Supermicro are the first 2 companies building these at the moment with HP and 5 others to follow soon with their versions. The speed of implementation made possible through VMware’s SDS solution: VSAN. EVO:Rack promises to be the same, but on the scale of a whole rack solution.

There were a lot of talk, sessions and vendors around NSX (virtual networking) and networks in general (Palo Alto, Barracuda, Arista and Juniper networks and others). Another strong focus was on VMware Horizon as a strong VDI competitor to Citrix.

Lots of sessions (including 2 VMware super sessions) over the 2 days with plenty of time to talk to exhibitors and explore what they see as the future of virtualisation.

As a national and growing company we have constant requirements for skilled and expert staff. If you are excited by the challenge of IT and seek to be part of a broad, agile and pro-active team then contact us.

You might not fit into a box but do you fit the Diaxion brand pyramid?

We actively seek the kind of people we like to call ‘Diaxion people’. In addition to being an outstanding IT thinker and expert in your area of capability you’ll also need to meet a number of key criteria to become part of the team.

Why? Well we believe life’s too short for us to work with people who don’t ‘fit’ and likewise why would anyone want to work with a company or culture that wasn’t constantly stimulating, challenging and rewarding in more ways than one?

Clearing the decks for the big product announcements at EMC World this month, EMC quietly slipped out a few major software updates that they didn’t feel were blockbuster enough for the Las Vegas stage. The most interesting of these is the new release of DDOS, version 5.3. It brings much needed improvements to capacity, speed & functionality.

Capacity has been increased to 100PB for a DD990, thanks to new 3TB drives for the ES30 shelves, additionally enhanced DDBoost functionality means more data can be stored. DDBoost now supports writing over FC for environments with large FC deployments & natively supports Oracle RMAN Multiplexing. A feature often requested.

Support for non EMC backup products has been improved dramatically with support added for Symantec NetBackup Auto Image Replication, Dell NetVault Backup 9, improved Enterprise Vault integration and integration with Documentum for content storage, along with AXS-One for file and email archiving.

DDOS 5.3 is standing on the shoulders of an already well respected platform of 5.2, and brings many welcome improvements to not only itself, but a number of other BRS products as well.

Tags: data, Diaxion, Storage

I recently downloaded both the EMC VNX simulator and the NetApp OnTap 8 simulator for a proof of concept lab. Both came with detailed instructions on how to get them started, though the actual experience was vastly simpler for the VNX simulator over the OnTap simulator.

The NetApp procedure runs to 32 pages of which the first 26 are dedicated to setting up the VM in VMware Workstation/Player or ESX. This is followed by a page and a half of information on assigning a unique system ID. There are no instructions on how to access or configure the simulator once you get past this point, and the VM is rebooting constantly.

The EMC VNX guide is 38 pages, of which 2 are about loading the VM in VMware Workstation (EMC doesn’t support it in ESX, though it is well known to work). The remaining pages are full of clear concise instructions that take you from loading the VM to provisioning storage through the Unisphere interface.

After digging around further and finding other people with similar issues on the OnTap simulator I found there is a second manual required, one that is not linked from the page where I downloaded the simulator from. This 64 page manual covers setting up the disks and joining a cluster. It still doesn’t leave me with a GUI or any instructions on taking advantage of the underlying power of the OnTap system.

In my opinion NetApp need to lift their game with their simulator. I don’t believe that it should be difficult to provide one that requires less effort to configure, and presents an easy to use management interface on first boot.

Once both simulators, were configured and I was able to access them from another VM, I was able to save files to a CIFS and NFS share and access them. From the VNX simulator I was able to replicate to a second VNX array for a full DR proof of concept.

For the VNX simulator I recommend reading Chad Sakac’s blog http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/ which is full of useful information on not only the VNX simulator, but also ESX home brew for building a lab environment on a budget. Of particular note are most of the articles in the Celerra-VSA-Howto category.

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/celerra-vsa-howto/

Keynote:

Cisco live held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center was a tremendous success. It started off with the keynote presented by Carlos Dominguez, Senior Vice President, Office of the CEO, Cisco. The presentation was about the convergence of data and how it would change the way we drive cars, gather information and do shopping. A few examples were given, such as Nest thermostat, which allows you to manage the temperature of your home using mobile devices such as an iPhone or iPad. It also has an artificial intelligence engine which remembers the temperature set and turns itself down when no movement is detected.

An example for data convergence, solutions are being developed to have sensors in the humble lamp post. They will provide current information such as the weather, next scheduled public transport in the area and directions to it. They also will provide information on the traffic for people using personal transport. The challenges faced are to store the data specific to each individual and be agnostic on which personal device they are using to “control” and use the data.

Another example of personal devices changing the way we live, applications are being developed which map your current eating habits to what the doctors prescribes. The application not only provides the specific information about each meal but also guides you to the nearest place where you can find healthier options for the same type of food. And it charts what has been purchased and keep a track of your vital statistics such as time spent exercising, heart rate and blood pressure monitoring etc. All these applications and devices are using data which was unheard of 5 years ago.

Break-out Sessions:

The keynote was followed by technical sessions, which were related to Cisco Networking and Security, Unified Computing, Unified Computing Architecture, Cloud Computing, virtualisation and End User Computing. Most of these sessions were for the technical consultants and architects. There were also break-out sessions which were specifically aimed at the management level. These were mainly discussion sessions rather than presentations.

The technical break-out sessions provided valuable information and guided input into how cisco works specifically around network architecture and system architecture. The virtualisation stream of breakout sessions had solutions around VMware vSphere and Windows Hyper-V. There was a lot more focus on stateless computing and how to use Cisco UCS platform to manage stateful yet server independent solutions for virtualisation.

Solutions Lounge:

The Solutions Lounge was the area where all the Cisco partners presented their custom solutions for the customers. We had a booth of our own where we were talking about Cisco IAC and Cloupia products from Cisco and how they help the customer’s cloud strategy. The other notable solutions were offered by major partners like VCE, Telstra, NetApp to name a few. The interesting part (apart from the actual solutions being spoken about) was the varied games and promotions that were run by each partner. Most of them had an iPad as the prize, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering how popular they are.

A flexible approach delivered by highly professional and skilled people provides independent technology solutions to meet your unique needs. With experience across a diverse range and mix of IT departments and many varied internal skill sets, Diaxion staff have the required capabilities and expertise to deliver to the needs of almost any IT requirement. Diaxion are acknowledged within the IT industry as experts and leaders in implementation across a broad range of IT areas.

Diaxion attended the IDWS 2012 event which was held in Pyrmont, Sydney on 9th October to check out the latest solutions in the storage world.

Violin Memory were showcasing their Flash Memory 3RU array, the 6000 series. Fully loaded it has a capacity of 32TB and delivers a blistering 1 million IOPs and 40GB/s, with
connectivity to 8Gb FC, 10Gb iSCSI and 40Gb Infiniband networks. While cost per GB is very expensive compared to FC or SATA disk arrays, cost per IO is significantly cheaper. A
typical FC drive can achieve around 180 IOPS. In order to achieve 1 million IOPS you would require more than 5000 FC drives and a significant number of racks and power! Violin
arrays are suited to extremely high IO intensive applications that require almost zero latency such as financial platforms and large databases.

Read More – Violin Flash Array

Thomas Duryea Consulting were offering Disaster Recovery as a Service which aims to reduce cost and complexity by replicating data to the cloud for DR. This is achieved by replicating data at the hypervisor level (currently only VMware, Hyper-V on the roadmap) using Virtual Applicances installed on your primary ESX hosts to a Thomas Duryhea managed cloud. Replicating at the hypervisor level removes the requirement of like for like servers and storage and can be deployed quickly without the high capital investment associated with traditional DR strategies.

See you next year at IDWS 2013!

Diaxion will be out in force at the upcoming EMC Forum 2012 events in Sydney and Melbourne in the coming weeks. Themes for this year look to revolve around Cloud and Big Data. Although not presenting, we will be filtering throughout the venue over the course of the day. If you see us, make sure you come up and say ‘Hi’!

If you haven’t registered yet, make sure you sign up at: http://australia.emc.com/campaign/global/forum2012/anz.htm

Originally established in 2000 in Sydney, Australia and known as Technical Architecture Solutions (aka TAS) the business operation has grown to support clients across Asia, the US, Europe and Australia with offices in all Australian states and Beijing, China.

In addition to the organic and geographic growth of the business, the company was expanding its core capabilities and deliverables beyond its foundation expertise.

As the reputation of TAS grew it was being increasingly sought for broader, more holistic engagements. With the advent of server virtualisation it established itself as a category leader in IT strategy and optimisation.