Items Tagged: Datacenter
The Greening of the Data Center Technology in Depth
As industry analysts and consultants, the Taneja Group has a single driving mission: to deliver hype-free, accurate, and responsible information about important issues impacting the server and storage industry. This is why we have turned our attention to the green data center, which we believe badly needs insight and clarity in the midst of marketing smokescreens and competing claims. This Technology in Depth represents Taneja Group's take on this important issue. We present the background of the energy crisis, explore important data center trends, and tell you how we believe the industry should respond to a real problem and a real opportunity.
Virtualization Energizes the Data Center Automation Segment
When it comes time to automate IT processes, we recommend taking stock of your existing trusted vendor relationships as well as your most glaring pain points: do you struggle to keep operating systems and servers patched to the right levels to meet compliance?
- Premiered: 08/26/09
- Author: Taneja Group
5 Tips for Working with the Scale Computing HC3 Hyperconvergence Appliance
Is this all-in-one virtualization box a good choice for an SMB?
- Premiered: 10/28/14
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Virtualization Review
5 Ways to Clear Out IOP Bottlenecks
A look at three explicit indicators and two manual tests you can perform to know if your multipath driver is causing problems to your array's capabilities.
- Premiered: 11/18/14
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Virtualization Review
EMC PowerPath: Optimized IO Multipathing for All Flash Arrays
All-flash arrays are changing the datacenter for the better. No longer do we worry about IOPS bottlenecks from the array: all-flash arrays (AFA) can deliver a staggering amount of IOPs. AFAs with the ability to deliver hundreds of thousands of IOPs are not uncommon. The problem now, however, is how to get the IOPS from the array to the servers. We recently had a chance to see how well an AFA using EMC PowerPath driver works to eliminate this bottleneck—and we were blown away. Most comparisons with datacenter infrastructure show a 10-30% improvement in performance; but, the performance improvement that we saw with PowerPath was extraordinary.
Getting bits from an array to server is easy —very easy, in fact. The trick is getting the bits from a server to an array in an efficient manner when you have many virtual machines (VM) on multiple physical hosts that are transmitting the bits over a physical network with a virtual fabric overlay; this is much more difficult. Errors can get introduced and must be dealt with, the most efficient path must be obtained and established, re-evaluated and reestablished continually, and any misconfiguration can produce less than optimal performance. In some cases, this can cause outages or even data loss. In order to deal with the “pathing,” or how the I/O travels from the VM to storage, the OS running on the host needs a driver, or in the case where multiple paths can be taken from the server to the array, a multipathing driver needs to be used to direct the traffic.
Windows, Linux, VMware and most other modern operating systems include a basic multipath driver; however, these drivers tend to be generic and not code optimized to extract the maximum performance from an array and come with only rudimentary traffic optimization and management functions. In some cases these generic drivers are fine, but in the majority of datacenters the infrastructure is overtaxed and its equipment needs to be used in the most efficient manner possible. Fortunately, storage companies such as EMC are committed to making their arrays work as performant as possible and spend a considerable amount of time and research to develop multipathing drivers optimized for their arrays. EMC invited us to take a look at how PowerPath, their optimized “intelligent” multipath driver, performed on an XtremIO flash array connected to a Dell PowerEdge R710 server running ESXi 6.0 while simulating an Oracle workload. We looked at the results of the various tests EMC ran comparing PowerPath/VE multipath driver against VMware’s ESXi Native Multipath driver and we were impressed—very impressed—by the difference that an optimized, multipath driver like PowerPath can make in a high IO traffic scenario.
A Quick Peek Into VMware Integrated OpenStack
VMware has added a lot of value to the open source, private cloud platform.
- Premiered: 02/03/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Virtualization Review
Private and Hybrid Cloud – What Are Their Roles in a Modern Datacenter?
Join us for this informative 60 minute roundtable as we discuss how private and hybrid clouds fit into the modern datacenter. This panel includes top luminaries from major private and hybrid cloud providers. Some of the questions we will be asking include: Why use private and hybrid clouds instead of public clouds? Are all workloads suitable for these types of clouds? What are the economic factors that play into these types of clouds? Are they a transitional technology or the new normal?
Moderator: Tom Fenton, Senior Lab Engineer, Taneja Group
- Premiered: 03/24/15
- Location: OnDemand
- Speaker(s): Tom Fenton, Senior Lab Engineer, Taneja Group
5 Ways vSphere 6 Will Change the Datacenter
vSphere 6 has more than 650 new features. Here are five of the ones that have the ability to transform your environment.
- Premiered: 02/20/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Virtualization Review
VMware Virtual Volumes – What impact will they have on the datacenter?
Join us for a fast-paced and informative 60-minute roundtable as we discuss one of the hottest topics in the datacenter: VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs). VVOLs is the industry's first solution to enable native virtual machine-awareness across a broad range of SAN/NAS arrays. VVOLs will be packaged as a feature in VMware vSphere Standard Edition and above as well as in VMware vSphere ROBO editions, and is seeing a groundswell of interest from IT professionals, especially those involved in datacenter operations. The panel includes VVOL experts from four major vendors that have announced they will be implementing VVOLs into their storage. Some of the questions we will be asking them include: What immediate impact will VVOLs have on the datacenter? What should the early adopters look for in a VVOL-based storage solution? Should datacenters start to implement VVOLs right away or wait for VVOL.next?
Participants:
Tom Fenton, Senior Lab Engineer, Taneja Group
David Glynn, Technical Solutions Engineer, Dell
Eric Siebert, Worldwide Solutions Marketing Manager; HP
Joel Kaufman, VMware Technical Director; NetApp
Ben Bolles, VP Products; NexGen Storage
- Premiered: 04/02/15
- Location: OnDemand
- Speaker(s): Moderator: Tom Fenton, Senior Lab Engineer, Taneja Group
Industry Icon Arun Taneja to Host Gridstore Webinar on Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Gridstore™, the leader in hyper-converged infrastructure architecture purpose-built for Microsoft workloads, today announced the third in its 2015 series of webinars hosted by storage industry visionaries.
- Premiered: 03/19/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Market Wired
Are all software-defined storage vendors the same?
What does software-defined storage mean? How is it implemented? And why does it matter for data center managers?
- Premiered: 03/17/15
- Author: Mike Matchett
- Published: TechTarget: Search Data Center
Storage: The Next Generation
Qumulo demonstrates its new file system, the heart of its software-defined-storage product.
- Premiered: 03/25/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Virtualization Review
VMware Virtual Volumes and their Impact on the Datacenter
Join us for the first in a series of fast-paced and informative 60-minute webinars, as we discuss with VMware one of the hottest topics in the datacenter: VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVol). VVol is the industry's first solution to enable native virtual machine-awareness across a broad range of SAN/NAS arrays. VVol is packaged as a feature in nearly all VMware vSphere Editions and is being embraced by storage partners at an unprecedented rate. IT professionals, especially those involved in datacenter operations, are showing great interest in implementing VVol in their own environments.
This moderated session features Juan Novella and Ken Werneburg, VVol experts from VMware, who will discuss VVol technology, the rapidly expanding ecosystem, and the impact this game-changing capability will have in the datacenter. Attendees will be encouraged to submit their questions during the session.
Panelists:
Juan Novella, Product Marketing Manager – Storage; VMware
Ken Werneburg, Senior Architect - Technical Marketing; VMware
- Premiered: 04/30/15
- Location: OnDemand
- Speaker(s): Tom Fenton, Taneja Group; Juan Novella, VMware; Ken Werneburg, VMware
Unitrends to Participate in Taneja Group Webcast on Leveraging the Public Cloud for DR
During this webcast, Campbell, along with fellow panelists, will examine which businesses should leverage the public cloud for disaster recovery, provide implementation best practices, and discuss the pros and cons of using this approach.
- Premiered: 04/20/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: PR Newswire
Dell's Implementation of VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols)
Join us in a series of fast-paced and informative 60-minute webinars on vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVol). In this session, the Taneja Group will talk with David Glynn from Dell Storage. VVols is packaged as a feature in nearly all VMware vSphere Editions and is being embraced by VMware’s storage partners at an unprecedented rate. IT professionals, especially those involved in datacenter operations, are showing great interest in implementing VVol in their own environments.
The Taneja Group will discuss VVol technology with David and the impact this game-changing capability will have in the datacenter and how Dell is enabling this technology with their arrays. Attendees will be encouraged to submit their questions during the session.
Panelist:
David Glynn, Technical Solutions Engineer; Dell Storage
- Premiered: 05/14/15
- Location: OnDemand
- Speaker(s): Moderator: Tom Fenton, Taneja Group; David Glynn, Dell Storage
Qumulo to Team with Taneja Group on ‘How to Store 10 Billion Files’ Webinar
Qumulo, pioneer of the world’s first data-aware scale-out NAS, today announced that the company will participate in an upcoming webinar hosted by the Taneja Group, which will focus on how to design a 10 billion file storage system and what it means for the modern day datacenter.
- Premiered: 05/19/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Qumulo
Data aware storage yields insights into business info
Storage isn't just a bunch of dumb disks anymore. In fact, storage infrastructure is smarter than ever.
- Premiered: 05/20/15
- Author: Mike Matchett
- Published: TechTarget: Search Data Center
Boxing, VVOLs And Replication
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." – Mike Tyson
- Premiered: 06/09/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Virtualization Review
Hyperconvergence Finally Gets Scale At VMware
EVO:RACK, now known as EVO SDDC (no colon) are supporting a more diverse set of hardware and much greater scale, says VMware.
- Premiered: 08/31/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: The Platform
Edge HyperConvergence for Robo's: Riverbed SteelFusion Brings IT All Together
Hyperconvergence is one of the hottest IT trends going in to 2016. In a recent Taneja Group survey of senior enterprise IT folks we found that over 25% of organizations are looking to adopt hyperconvergence as their primary data center architecture. Yet the centralized enterprise datacenter may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the vast opportunity for hyperconverged solutions. Where there are remote or branch office (ROBO) requirements demanding localized computing, some form of hyperconvergence would seem the ideal way to address the scale, distribution, protection and remote management challenges involved in putting IT infrastructure “out there” remotely and in large numbers.
However, most of today’s popular hyperconverged appliances were designed as data center infrastructure, converging data center IT resources like servers, storage, virtualization and networking into Lego™ like IT building blocks. While these at first might seem ideal for ROBOs – the promise of dropping in “whole” modular appliances precludes any number of onsite integration and maintenance challenges, ROBOs have different and often more challenging requirements than a datacenter. A ROBO does not often come with trained IT staff or a protected datacenter environment. They are, by definition, located remotely across relatively unreliable networks. And they fan out to the thousands (or tens of thousands) of locations.
Certainly any amount of convergence simplifies infrastructure making easier to deploy and maintain. But in general popular hyperconvergence appliances haven’t been designed to be remotely managed en masse, don’t address unreliable networks, and converge storage locally and directly within themselves. Persisting data in the ROBO is a recipe leading to a myriad of ROBO data protection issues. In ROBO scenarios, the datacenter form of hyperconvergence is not significantly better than simple converged infrastructure (e.g. pre-configured rack or blades in a box).
Riverbed’s SteelFusion we feel has brought full hyperconvergence benefits to the ROBO edge of the organization. They’ve married their world-class WANO technologies, virtualization, and remote storage “projection” to create what we might call “Edge Hyperconvergence”. We see the edge hyperconverged SteelFusion as purposely designed for companies with any number of ROBO’s that each require local IT processing.