MI Modern Infrastructure - Bitpipedocs.media.bitpipe.com/.../MI_FEB_2016.pdf · Modern Infrastructure Creating tomorrow’s data centers FEBRUARY 2016, VOL. 5, NO. 2 IN THE MIX is

Home

Editor’s Letter

Windows to the Cloud

#Hashtag

The Cloud Bursting Bubble

Survey Says: Systems Management

Three Questions

Server Flash Forward

Conferences to Watch

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

Citrix Synergy and Modern Infrastructure Decisions Summit

HYBRID OPERATIONS


DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE


MIModern InfrastructureCreating tomorrow’s data centers

FEBRUARY 2016, VOL. 5, NO. 2

IN THE MIX

The Only Constant is Change

CONFERENCE WATCH

Spring Sessions

EDITOR’S LETTER

To the Limit

Q+A

Three Questions: DevOps

THE NEXT BIG THING

Data Center Trends, 2016 Edition

#HASHTAG

Twitter on #Azure

DATA

Systems Management Snapshot

Windows to the CloudIt’s a Windows world. And it’s not just

on premises anymore.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • FEBRUARY 2016 2

CLOUD IS SO awesome. Is there literally anything it can’t do, and do better than your legacy on-premises infrastructure?

Actually, there are quite a few areas where cloud is a work in progress. Take cloud bursting. This has long been IT’s holy grail for cloud—the ability to seamlessly expand capacity-constrained workloads to outside of your data center to meet unexpected demand. But while it sounds good on paper, it turns out it’s not so easy, finds Search-ServerVirtualization senior site editor Nick Martin in “The Cloud Bursting Bubble.” New technologies purport to help, but from this vantage point, it’s unclear whether demand for bursting will ever outstrip the technical difficulties.

Running Windows rather than Linux in the cloud also hasn’t always been easy, but things are getting better. Technically, any infrastructure as a service provider whose hypervisor exposes x86-based virtual machines should be able to run Windows. The trouble starts when you try and tie in to the Windows management ecosystem, finds SearchCloudComputing site editor Kristin Knapp in “Windows to the Cloud.” How well do cloud providers

support Active Directory authentication? Microsoft Azure does a good job, but other cloud providers are still ironing out the kinks. How easy is it to use Windows licenses that you bought with your enterprise license agreement? Here too, it depends.

Speaking of Windows, you’d think that Microsoft Azure would be a shoe-in with developers looking for an easy-to-use cloud platform. But if our recent #Hashtag feature is to judge, Azure has its fair share of discontented developers on its hands, and Microsoft might want to take heed of what its customers are saying on Twitter.

All this begs the question—if cloud is so much trouble, maybe it’s better to simply stay home? If that’s your incli-nation, you’re in luck, because never has it been so easy to get so much out of your on-premises infrastructure, for so little, writes contributor Jim O’Reilly in “Server Flash Forward.” In fact, the price of commodity solid-state disk has dropped so far, and its performance is so great, that it’s hard to make the case for using spinning hard disk drives anymore. Whether you’re buying new servers, or just upgrading the ones you already have, consider using solid-state drives in lieu of spinning disk for your primary storage needs.

Who says on-premises infrastructure can’t be awesome? n

ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Contact her at [email protected].

Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

EDITOR’S LETTER

To the Limit


It’s a Windows world. And it’s not just on-premises anymore.

BY KRISTIN KNAPP


RUNNING WINDOWS IN the cloud is more common today than ever, although it’s not always smooth sailing. Despite some looming challenges, however, one thing is clear: As more IT executives warm up to the public cloud, more core, enterprise workloads—including those that run on Windows—will move off premises and into the cloud.

“Running Windows workloads in the public cloud is on parity with open source workloads for us, in terms of being treated as a first-class citizen, in terms of SDK support and in terms of operational support,” said Kris Bliesner, CTO and co-founder of 2nd Watch Inc., a cloud consultancy and Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner based in Liberty Lake, Wash.

In fact, Bliesner said, about half of the workloads his clients run in AWS today are Windows-based—a stat that wouldn’t have rung true just a year or two ago.

For the most part, this shift stems from the enterprise’s evolving perception of public cloud; due to security con-cerns, many IT pros initially viewed public cloud as an en-vironment only suited for Web applications—many based on Linux. But as those concerns die down, more and more organizations deploy traditional, line of business appli-cations—the majority of which are Windows-based—on public cloud platforms such as AWS.

WINDOWS WORKLOADS

HOMEALEXANGE121/ISTOCK

Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

“People are getting much more comfortable running traditional applications versus just net new Web apps [in the public cloud],” Bliesner said.

Microsoft has also taken steps to make Windows more cloud-friendly, further fueling the migration of Windows workloads to the public cloud, said Carl Brooks, analyst with 451 Research based in New York.

“Windows is not a sort of kludgy old thing, limping along, that Microsoft just decided to bless us with any-more,” Brooks said. “They’ve modernized it since [Win-dows Server] 2008 and Microsoft is well aware of the new paradigms of use and consumption.”

So while Windows Server is still early on in terms of support for containers, microservices and other emerging technologies that underpin modern cloud app develop-ment, the release of Windows Server 2016 this year will change—or at least start to change—all that.

Windows Server 2016 will include two native container services—Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Con-tainers—and also offer a lightweight installation option called Nano Server that is specifically designed for cloud and DevOps. Nano Server also has a 93% smaller virtual hard disk size than Windows Server setups, according to Microsoft.

The new version of Windows Server, expected to be

available in the third quarter this year, will also help us-ers more easily bridge their on-premises and cloud-based environments, Brooks said.

“At every step, you’re going to have an option to connect what you are doing on your own personal server with external, existing systems,” Brooks said. “Microsoft has been planning and sort of doing this for quite some time, but 2016 is really the intricate application of that vision.”

WHO RUNS WINDOWS BEST?

Running Windows workloads in Azure, Microsoft’s own public cloud, is an option—but it isn’t the only one. And while users may encounter some differences running Windows workloads in Azure versus another public cloud platform, like AWS or Google, they aren’t always significant.

This is especially true when organizations’ public cloud use is limited to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), said Al Gillen, program vice president, servers and system soft-ware at IDC, a research firm based in Framingham, Mass.

“If you are talking a pure, plain and simple infrastruc-ture as a service deployment, meaning I bring my operat-ing system, I bring my application, I’m going to manage the whole stack from top to bottom—all I want [the

n IT has become more comfortable running traditional apps in the cloud instead of just Web apps.

n Microsoft has taken steps to ease the process of migrating Windows workloads to the cloud.

n From AWS to Azure, different cloud providers take different steps to treat Windows licensing.

HIGHLIGHTS


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

provider] to do is give me a virtual server in the cloud—the differentiation [is difficult to see between] Amazon and Azure and Rackspace and VMware’s vCloud,” Gillen said.

Although running Windows workloads in Azure versus a non-Azure cloud, from a pure IaaS perspective, is a fairly apples-to-apples comparison, distinctions do start to pop when platform as a service, software as a service and other provider offerings come into play.

For example, Gillen said, if you have an application that’s purpose-built for big data or the Internet of Things, you should look beyond just a provider’s IaaS environ-ment, and evaluate its data lakes, analytics capabilities and database support, as well.

That said, there are some other differences, in terms of functionality, when running Windows workloads in Azure instead of another public cloud. And one of the biggest is support for Active Directory, Microsoft’s direc-tory service for managing Windows resources and users’ access to them.

“[Active Directory] is what Microsoft has essentially built the Windows empire on, and the thing that Azure can give you in a really deep way that other cloud provid-ers generally have more trouble with,” said Brooks.

Azure customers can use a tool called Azure Active Directory Connect to integrate their on-premises direc-tory and identity management systems, such as Windows Server Active Directory, with the Azure Active Directory service. In addition, Azure Active Directory enables single sign-on capabilities for Microsoft apps, such as Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, along with third-party apps such as Dropbox.

But Azure’s competitors also value AD integration. In a bid to attract more Windows shops to its cloud, AWS in December revamped its existing directory service—which included its own Active Directory (AD) Connector and Simple AD Service—and introduced AWS Directory Ser-vice for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition).

Licensing Pricing: Round the Clock

Azure .

Rounds up to the nearest

minute your VMs run.

AWS .

Rounds up to the nearest

hour your VMs run.

Google .

Charges for a minimum

of 10 minutes and in

one-minute increments

thereafter.


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

The new service is targeted at organizations with large AD deployments—5,000 users or more—either on premises or in the cloud.

Kevin Felichko, CTO of PropertyRoom.com, an online auction company based in Frederick, Md., that uses AWS, said he would consider using the new AWS AD service, since his company had issues using Active Directory on AWS in the past.

The issue, Felichko said, stemmed from low disk space and manifested after PropertyRoom.com migrated one of its AD servers to AWS. The company imported one of its Active Directory VMs into AWS, and encountered a problem with low disk space. In resolving that problem, Felichko said, Amazon pointed out a known but undocu-mented problem in which an EC2 instance was adjusting the time, causing an issue in syncing with on-premises servers. The EC2 instance would stop responding and, ultimately, the company just decided to build the server from scratch both to resolve the low disk space issue and to have it properly sync.

“It didn’t take a long time to figure out, but… I would prefer the idea of not even having to worry about that as-pect and having somebody else handle that,” Felichko said.

AWS offers its new AD service at $0.40 per hour, while its AD Connector and Simple AD are priced at $0.05 or $0.15 per hour, based on configuration. Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory service is priced in three tiers: Free, Basic and Premium. The Basic tier is priced per user based on an organization’s enterprise agreement, and the Premium version is $6 per user, per month.

In addition to Active Directory support, Felichko noted

some of the newer AWS services aren’t Windows-based, which can make it more difficult to blend on-premises Windows environments with some AWS offerings. For in-stance, because the AWS Lambda service doesn’t support C# programming, PropertyRoom.com can’t migrate exist-ing services written in C# to Lambda without performing a complete rewrite.

“You’ve got these great [AWS services] coming out, but you might not necessarily be able to use them in what’s native to the rest of your platform,” Felichko said.

NAVIGATING WINDOWS CLOUD LICENSING

And then, there’s Windows licensing. Not surprisingly, different cloud providers treat it differently.

In AWS-land, users who want to run Windows software on Amazon EC2 can run instances that have the associated Windows licensing fees “baked in” to the overall instance cost, or, in the case of SQL Server and SharePoint, to bring in their existing Microsoft license to AWS.

But there wasn’t always a practical option for users to bring their own Windows Server licenses into AWS, Bliesner said.

“If you had an EA [enterprise agreement] that covered you for 100 Windows Server licenses and you were mov-ing 50 of your on-premises servers into AWS, you had to double pay for a little while,” Bliesner said. “You had to shrink your license count over time with Microsoft.

In fact, AWS allows users to bring their own Windows Server licenses, but it requires visibility into the specific core and socket in use, which AWS didn’t always provide.


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

But that changed with the launch of AWS EC2 Dedicated Hosts last November. With EC2 Dedicated Hosts, users have greater control of and visibility in to a dedicated AWS server. This, in turn, allows users to bring their own Windows Server licenses into AWS EC2.

“It’s your dedicated host,” Bliesner said. “You can own the operating system license, you can port that, and you can then carve it up into however many instances you want.”

Outside of EC2 Dedicated Hosts or Dedicated In-stances—which launched in 2011 and gave users some visibility into their AWS hardware, but not as much as Dedicated Hosts—users cannot practically bring their own Windows Server operating system license into AWS. And Bliesner said he hasn’t seen many AWS users “jump on the dedicated host bandwagon yet.”

Microsoft in October disclosed similar plans to let users bring their existing Windows Server licenses into Azure—just as they already can with SQL Server and SharePoint—through its bring your own license program.

Google Compute Engine users also have the option of using their existing licenses for some Microsoft applica-tions, but not for the Windows Server operating system. Instead, Google customers need to continue to run the software through Windows-based instances on Google Compute Engine, according to the Google website.

IT’S STILL A WINDOWS WORLD

While Microsoft still has its work cut out in terms of evolving Windows for the cloud, it’s clear that Azure has what it takes to nip at the heels of public cloud market leader AWS, said 451’s Brooks. In its first fiscal quarter of 2016, Azure revenue and compute usage more than doubled year-over-year, according to Microsoft, while its commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate exceeded $8.2 billion.

“If you look at the trajectory for Azure, too, in terms of revenue—there is a reason [Microsoft] is breaking out those numbers more explicitly than they were a year ago,” Brooks said. “It’s because they have now finally hit the speed of acceleration that they need in order to say they legitimately compete with AWS.”

Of course, Microsoft’s massive enterprise install base plays a big role there—and will continue to do so for years to come, said IDC’s Gillen.

“There is an awful lot of Windows out in the industry, and as much excitement as there is around Linux and next-generation applications and so forth, the install base is really dominated by Windows,” he said. “It’s going to a Windows-centric world for years to come.” n

KRISTIN KNAPP is site editor for SearchCloudComputing. Contact her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @kknapp86.

zzzzzz

Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix


#Hashtag Twitter on #Azure

Antonio Angelino

@AntoAngelino

My feeling when I tried to create a new @Azure account today. Tons of internal server errors+ pages slow as hell.

Jason St-Cyr

@AgileStCyr

Trying so hard to login and manage an existing #Azure EA subscrip-tion. Y U NO WORK? Expected: Add my email, I login and DONE. #TerribleUX

Jason Harper

@jasonharper

once i have an #azure resource group setup, with automation, and VMs, etc, is it possible to duplicate that into another RG? for testing?

Bill Chesnut

@BizTalkBill

I need to load balance internal traffic via ex-press route across 2 azure datacenters, how can I do this? traffic manager won’t work #Azure

Kacey Ezerioha

@KaceyEzerioha

Was having a talk with someone about #Azure services where he pro-nounced it as A-zu-ray.

Mike Ward

@mikeward_aa

The new #Azure inter-face is awful. Sliding sideways windows, tiny text fields, can’t open multiple windows (easily).

Trevor Sullivan

@pcgeek86

Showing #Microsoft #Azure to someone unfamiliar with it. Watching them get extremely frustrated. :) :) #ItsNotJustMe #cloud

Sean Lindo

@SeanWritesCode

Ah, seems that the cloud holds false gold. Transient errors in Azure SQL are real (& hurting us). 30s rec’d retry time #Azure #SQL #Cloud


CLOUD BURSTING: the prospect of paying only for what you use has long spurred interest in public cloud computing, from both C-level executives and IT managers faced with lean budgets. A hybrid cloud that can elastically expand workloads to a public cloud provider during peak demand—and then scale back to the original in-house servers when demand subsides—tempts organizations with promises of unlimited, uninterrupted service free of large capital outlays.

It’s easy to see why this practice, sometimes called cloud bursting, could be attractive. A hybrid cloud model in which workloads move seamlessly across clouds and dynamically adjust to changing demand serves as a shining example of how IT can enable the business to respond to its customers. However, the reality is that bursting in-house workloads to exploit the near-limitless resources of a public cloud has been more than a headache; for most organizations, it’s unobtainable.

“I do not think it is as prevalent as most people think it is,” said Edward Haletky, principal analyst at The Vir-tualization Practice. “The level of automation required, requires absolute trust in the automation, proper moni-toring and control. … Are companies doing this? I’m sure they are, but I only know of really big companies.”

HYBRID OPERATIONS

HOMEAVESUN/ISTOCK

The Cloud Bursting BubbleIt sounds good in theory, but there are a lot holes

in the idea of bursting compute to the cloud.BY NICK MARTIN


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

CLOUD BURSTING CHALLENGES

While the idea of cloud bursting is appealing, there are many complicated problems when extending an in-house application to a public cloud. These challenges can out-weigh the benefits of cloud bursting, enough to where it might make more sense to buy a few new servers, said Bob Plankers, a virtualization and cloud architect at a major Midwestern university and TechTarget contributor.

“There can be a lot of latency between the in-house pieces and the public cloud,” Plankers said. “A lot of orga-nizations have not sized outbound Internet connectivity for these sorts of things. Latency leads to slow apps and slow apps are what you’re trying to avoid in the first place.”

Most traditional enterprise application stacks aren’t designed to seamlessly scale into a cloud. Consider a situation in which a business’s enterprise resource plan-ning system experiences peak demand as the accounting department works to close the books. IT administrators may consider bursting a new front-end engine to handle the demand, but it would still need to communicate with SAP on the backend, said Keith Townsend, SAP Infra-structure Architect at AbbVie, a pharmaceutical research and development company.

“It doesn’t make any sense to put those engines in the cloud when my data exists in my data center,” Townsend

said. “It’d be easier and cheaper to spin up the VMs in my private data center.”

Networking is one of the primary challenges with mod-ern approaches to cloud bursting, but those challenges aren’t limited to latency and connectivity speed. Security also gets more complicated when applications span in-house servers and public clouds, Townsend said.

“I can set up a rule in my network Layer 2 firewall that watches traffic between two Web servers, but then when I burst out to the cloud, how is that security enforced and how is it logged?” he said. “What happens if I get audited?”

Even if an IT department can meet infrastructure challenges, cloud bursting still presents massive adminis-trative and business hurdles. In many ways, you’re adding complexity along with the extra capacity, Haletky said.

“A lot of people talk a good story, but I don’t know of many people [bursting from a data center to a cloud], be-cause you have to have really good automation,” Haletky said. “How many companies have that level of automa-tion? Netflix does, but are all companies a Netflix?”

Bursting must be planned well in advance, because VM images and data need to be pre-staged in the cloud so that they’re ready to take over when an application experiences peak demand. This isn’t an insurmountable problem for businesses that can predict future needs, but

n Cloud bursting in-house workloads isn’t just a headache, it’s nearly unobtainable.

n In many cases, it makes more sense to buy new servers than extend an in-house app to the cloud.

n Most traditional enterprise application stacks aren’t designed to seamlessly scale into a cloud.

HIGHLIGHTS


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

administrators must make difficult decisions about how much cloud capacity they’ll need and how much they’re willing to pay to keep data at the ready.

Ironically, one of the motivations for bursting work-loads to the cloud—the desire to avoid capital outlay and contain costs—can end up backfiring.

“If I automate something, the cost may actually go up if I don’t also automate the shutdown of that workload,” Haletky said. “The whole idea behind the bursting of workloads is to run what you need when you need it and then fall back to the default. If I fire up 20 new Web servers on Amazon running full bore, that’s a significant amount of money every hour.”

PLANNING FOR VOLATILE APPS

The simplest solution—and often the cheapest—to deal-ing with a spike in computing demand is still the tradi-tional method of keeping enough spare server capacity on hand, experts said. This doesn’t have to mean buying new servers. The first step to evaluating whether a burst to the cloud is the right approach is to evaluate how you’re using your current resources, Townsend said.

“In many cases, the conversation is no longer to burst up to the cloud, but looking at how enterprises are ex-tremely inefficient,” Townsend said. “Let’s measure the resources you use, and right-size the resources so that you do have the capacity to do these things.”

For organizations that experience larger demand swings or have truly run out of capacity, automation tools such as Puppet and Chef, coupled with virtualization

and cloud management platforms, can help them build a flexible hybrid cloud approach. However, there are newer vendors aiming to take a unique approach to reducing the complexity of bursting to the cloud.

Ravello Systems allows organizations to map appli-cation dependencies, manage network configurations and then clone entire application stacks to the cloud. However, rather than cloning and bursting production applications into a public cloud, most customers prefer to take a different approach, said Shruti Bhat, director of

What Exactly is Cloud Bursting?

WHILE THERE’S GENERAL agreement over the goal of

cloud bursting—handling a temporary increase in

computing demand—many experts and analysts

have different opinions on what it entails. Experts

agreed that the burst should be a temporary

extension of an existing in-house workload to a

cloud environment. However, they disagreed over

whether the target must be a public cloud (rather

than private) and about whether the bursting and

drawback processes must be automated. In the

end, if you can successfully handle the demand

spike, it doesn’t matter much what you call the

process. n


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

product marketing at Ravello. “What we’re seeing our customers do is keep their pro-

duction application in their data center and make enough room for it to scale by moving its pre-production copy, its dev and test copy and other environments out to the public cloud,” Bhat said. “This is still cloud bursting, but you now take away the performance problems and risk of connecting the application across a VPN and having your data residing somewhere else.”

Ravello’s customers include an online gaming company, 888poker, that moved QA and certification environments to the public cloud, as well as two major banks that use the product to clone environments for cyber-security labs. Red Hat also uses Ravello’s product to offer multi-server lab environments to students in its OpenStack training courses after in-house capacity is reached, Bhat said. “Red Hat discovered that every time a student came in, they needed a full-blown OpenStack environment to play with,” Bhat said. “If you want to give each student five to six servers, you run out of capacity in your data center very quickly. So, as students sign up, they give them access to servers in the data center, and when they run out of capac-ity they start provisioning these OpenStack environments on top of Ravello.”

Israel-based startup Velostrata hopes to help businesses burst in-house workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) on demand and looks to address data transfer latency and compliance problems by decoupling compute from the data. “It takes a long time to move data to the cloud, and exposes that data to security or compliance risks,” said Issy Ben-Shaul, Velostrata CEO. “We provide a technology

that can move VM images to the cloud and give those images access to on-premises data without degrading performance.”

The company’s product, which should be generally available this year, includes a vCenter plug-in, adapts VM images to run on AWS, and streams the VM image to the cloud. This streaming allows the VM to start very quickly, and is similar to how a streaming video can begin playing before all the information has been transferred, Ben-Shaul said. A virtual appliance running in AWS serves as the storage target for the VM, provides deduplication functions and caches hot data.

“We only stream what is needed. In a matter of three to five minutes, you can take a VM that was running on premise and have it up in the cloud,” Ben-Shaul said.

Still, while new tools are emerging to streamline and manage on-demand bursting of applications to a public cloud, it’s possible that the practice may never become widespread, analysts said. Cloud bursting is as much an application design problem as it is an infrastructure deliv-ery problem. Bursting traditional applications will always present technical and administrative challenges. More enterprise application vendors are offering software-as-a-service options. And, as more companies invest in public clouds, they may find it easier to build applications for the cloud that are designed to scale out from the get-go, rather than bursting from in-house servers. n

NICK MARTIN is a senior site editor with SearchServerVirtualization. Contact him at [email protected].

w


Survey SaysSystems Management SnapshotHome

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

D Which of the following systems management tools do you have installed?

D How many VMs does your virtual-ization systems management tool manage?

45 D The percentage of respondents who said that server availability monitoring was one of the mort important features when purchasing new virtualization system management tools. N=119; SOURCE: CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SURVEY

N=402; SOURCE: CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SURVEY

N=192; SOURCE: CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SURVEY

Virtualization management

tools

Cloud management

tools

Neither

73%

30%24%29+27+12+15+8+929%

27%

15%12%

9%

8%

10 to 99

100 to 499

1,000 to 4,999

500-999

5,000+

1-9


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

SENDACHI IS A DevOps-focused IT consultancy, which takes its name from the Japanese word for guide, leader or pioneer. We caught up with veteran entrepreneur and CEO Steven Anderson about what people really mean when they talk about DevOps.

How do you define DevOps?

DevOps is a funny term. You get 40 people in a room and you’ll get 40 different definitions of what it is. For an old guy like me, the closest definition of DevOps is release management, but that’s limited in some ways.

We think about it in terms of a layer cake. At the top, you have the application. Beneath that, there’s architec-ture—containers and microservices. Then there’s the vir-tualization layer. And underpinning it all is cloud. In terms of the toolkit, that means looking at containers, cloud, the AWS ecosystem, but also automation, microservices,

and new development frameworks like node, angular and Riak.

What do organizations

stand to gain from

adopting DevOps?

People talk about things like Continuous Integra-tion and Continuous De-

livery, but I think what they’re really looking for is how to operate differently. [The DevOps community] talks a lot of about rapid response to innovation, and that’s all nice and well, but that’s not CIOs’ primary concern. They’re really worried about how to do more with less, without sacrificing quality.

Should organizations form dedicated

DevOps teams, or restructure existing ones?

The idea of a dedicated Dev-Ops team isn’t exactly mis-guided, but it might be a bit of a step backwards. If instead of embracing what you already have and define DevOps as a prescriptive function, you create additional complexity. n

ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Contact her at [email protected].

Q+A

Three Questions: DevOps

ANDERSON


SOLID-STATE DRIVES have reached a tipping point. Com-pared with traditional spinning hard disk drives (HDDs), SSDs have much lower latency, as much as 1000 times the number of IOs per second and three to five times the throughput. Coupled with price parity or better, SSDs could rapidly replace HDDs inside the server as soon as this year.

There’s no question that servers that use SSD as di-rect-attached internal storage run faster—often much faster—than with HDDs. That means fewer servers for the same workload, for significant cost avoidance. It’s also possible to retrofit existing servers with SSDs, speeding them up and extending their useful life. Nor is it necessary to replace every hard drive; tiering software can move low-activity data out of the SSD onto the HDD. In fact, adding just two or four SSDs and converting with the hard drives to bulk storage will still out-perform the whole of the previous HDD-based configuration.

Saving money and boosting performance aren’t the only wins for SSDs. Some tasks that used to be very diffi-cult are now duck soup. As an example, rapidly scanning video during editing used to require big, fast RAID arrays to get low enough latency. Now it’s possible to do it from an SSD-equipped workstation. Database searches operate

HOME

DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE

ALEXANDER VASIN/ISTOCK


2016 will be the year we stop putting hard disk drives in our servers.

BY JIM O’REILLY


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

much faster too (although the ultimate in performance here is obtained by using in-memory approaches). In the financial world, SSDs bring much lower access latency to the table and, with transaction costs measured in me-ga-dollars per second, soon pay for themselves.

SSDs are even bailing out the cloud. One problem from the start in cloud computing has been the latency and rate of IO to the underlying storage. The cloud’s early stateless servers have given way to demanding applications leverag-ing GPUs and large amounts of memory, with data stored in local drives inside the virtualized servers. While the mega-clouds have tried out HDDs to support large work-loads, SSD can simply offer much more IO.

TAKING THE SERVER FLASH PLUNGE

What does this mean for the average data center? A long time ago, mega cloud service providers such as AWS and Google cut the umbilical to traditional server vendors in favor of buying direct from original design manufacturers (ODM) such as SuperMicro, Lenovo, Mitac and Quanta. In 2016, mainstream data center managers will begin to follow in their footsteps.

Unlike traditional tier-one vendors, ODMs do not push special interfaces or drivers, making it possible to use

generic SSDs with their systems. Thus, an SSD in the $300 per terabyte range compares very favorably to a $700 SAS 1 TB hard disk drive from Dell. (It’s also worth noting that Dell lists a 960 GB SSD at $533—meaning that SSD can actually be cheaper than an equivalent-capacity enterprise hard drive.)

This challenges the long-standing myth that SSDs are more expensive than hard drives. This is true, but only when looking at the prices charged by array vendors, where the SSD for drives have been modified to work only in their arrays. Buying the same (but generic) product on the Internet actually reverses the picture!

Another flash myth is how quickly it wears out. Today, a flash drive typically wears out after five years of extremely heavy use, much better than the original four years of light use that MLC flash offered. Assuming a server refresh rate of 36 months, most flash products will outlive the overall system’s life expectancy with quite a bit of room to spare. Increasingly, there’s no reason not to convert primary server storage to SSD.

SERVER FLASH OPERATIONAL CAVEATS

That said, the high performance of SSDs introduces changes compared with the old HDD approach.

n Compared with traditional hard disk drives, SSDs have much lower latency.

n Servers that use SSD as direct-attached internal storage run faster than HDDs.

n While the mega-clouds have tried out HDDs to support large workloads, SSD can simply offer much more IO.

HIGHLIGHTS


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

First, SSD pushes the limits of RAID. With SSDs, most RAID controllers become bottlenecks in RAID 5 mode, throwing away a good part of available performance. Consider that four SSDs can handle 1.6G IOPS. That’s much more than any RAID controller’s XOR engine can support, and also faster than what the RAID controller’s CPUs handle well from an interrupt point of view. Thus, when deploying SSDs, it’s better to use a RAID 1 or 10 mirror for data protection, which can be achieved using host software.

Next, look at the storage capacity needs of the server, because SSD give better options for right-sizing than HDDs. The issue is that all other HDDs are more expen-sive than the benchmark 1 TB drive, sometimes by con-siderable amounts. For example, a workload that needs just 128 GB of storage can find a low-cost SSD of that size,

while the smallest available HDD (500 GB) still costs more than $150.

Make sure that the SSD you choose can handle the ex-pected write workload. Most of the time, this really isn’t an issue, but some write-heavy use cases such as sensor data storage or surveillance might require extended life drives, which are available from several vendors. For example, Toshiba’s PX04 products have write durability that is rated up to 25 full disk writes per day for five years.

Finally, when calculating the costs of server flash to justify the project to the CIO, remember to factor in power savings. Standard SSD (at around 2/10ths of a Watt) save an average 10 W over an HDD, and the need for fewer servers generates substantial additional savings. Also, by no longer being locked in to a single vendor for your HDDs and having to purchase capacity up front, SSD drive

SSD Performance n HDD n SATA SSD n NVMe

400000

300000

200000

100000

0

3500

3000

2500

2000

1500

1000

500

0

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

IOPS MBps Power Watts


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

purchases can be deferred to an as-needed basis. That means that when it comes time to purchase a new drive, they will likely have decreased considerably in price.

WHERE FLASH IS HEADED

The world of hard disk drives is divided in two: SAS-con-nected “enterprise” drives, and SATA-connected capacity and consumer models. In the SSD space, the concept of the “enterprise drive” is less well-defined. We are finding little value in SAS SSD with dual interface ports for serv-ers in a world where servers are virtualized and failure recovery is achieved by starting new instances on another server.

Going forward, server SSDs will split in to two camps: non-volatile memory express (NVMe) drives with PCI Express (PCIe) interfaces for the most challenging tasks and SATA drives for the rest. In fact, the SATA-Express interface allows for both these drive types to talk to the host via the same connector. In that case SATA drives need no longer be “enterprise” drives, since all but a few SSDs now have the features needed in a server, for example super-cap backup power to allow the write cache to be flushed to flash on power failure, higher write durability and better internal error correction.

Overall, SSD pricing will continue to drop, as new technologies become mainstream. Take 3D NAND; this technology enables much denser chips, and we’ll see fur-ther price erosion as it is perfected. The industry is also nearing the launch of 4-bit-per-cell QLC flash for the bulk storage end of the market, which will sell in the $30/TB

range in the 2017 timeframe.The other major change that will impact the SSD in-

dustry is the arrival of SSDs with capacities beyond that of even the largest spinning drives. HDD vendors are run-ning into the limitations of physics. Helium filled drives and shingled recording together have made 10 TB drives possible, but any larger capacities will need either heat-as-sisted magnetic recording, which uses a laser to soften a spot on the magnetic media, or pre-formatted disks with isolated pits for each bit. These are both several years from production. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the announcement of 16 TB SSDs and we can expect SSD capacity to grow to as much as 30 TB by 2020.

One thing to watch for is the advent of X-Point memory from Intel/Micron this year. This type of memory will challenge NVMe flash in the fastest applications, but it requires changes in the server and in the system software to really bring value, so it will likely be 2017 before it be-comes mainstream.

To sum up, we’ve reached a point where it’s easy to jus-tify equipping servers with SSDs: the performance gains they offer enable new workloads, and improve end-user satisfaction with response time and run time. In many cases, SSDs pay for themselves by avoiding new server purchases. There is simply no reason not to migrate from HDD to SSD in servers anymore! n

JIM O’REILLY has managed a number of companies and corporate divisions. He led the creation of SCSI with the first SCSI ASIC now in the Smithsonian, built multi-billion dollar server and PC businesses and created containerized storage for the cloud. He can be reached at [email protected].

zzzzzz

FEBRUARY 21-25

IBM InterConnect 2016Las Vegas

On the docket: cloud, system z, power, DevOps, hybrid cloud, IoT and applications.

MARCH 9-10

Open Compute Summit 2016San Jose, Calif.

Topics include the latest developments from the open source community involving the Open Compute Project.

MARCH 2, MARCH 22

IDC Directions 2016San Jose, Calif., Boston

If digital business strategies, 3rd platform, cognitive systems, cloud, mobility, and social are your thing, this is the event for you.

APRIL 18-19

AWS SummitChicago

Everything you ever wanted to know about Amazon Web Services, to educate new customers and offer technical content to succeed with AWS.

APRIL 25-29

OpenStack Summit 2016Austin, Texas

Come here to learn about the OpenStack ecosystem, how to plan a cloud strategy and share knowledge about operating OpenStack clouds. n

Conferences Events for IT infrastructure and operations professionals to attend this spring.Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix H E L L Omy name is

H E L L Omy name is

HE L L O

my name is

H E L L Omy name is H E L L O

my name is



Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

LAST MONTH WAS a time to make obvious predictions, and short-lived resolutions. Now is the time for intelligent analysis of the shark-infested waters of high tech. The New Year is an auspicious time for new startups to come out of the shadows. But what is just shiny and new, and what will really impact our data centers?

Let’s look at a few emerging trends that are on my list of next big things.

n Data protection awakens. It’s the return (or long-awaited chapter 7) of data protection solutions that can reduce or eliminate most business continuity risk. In this time of petabyte-scale data lakes, proliferating databases

and global 24x7 operations, it’s no longer sufficient to hold onto the full-backup-to-tape routine. The backup window is shrinking—even disappearing—thanks to applications that can’t take as much (or any) time off. And data is getting too big to dump in one big image. Not to mention fooling ourselves about restoring from traditional backups. Go ahead, try to restore a Hadoop cluster from backups! In the new year, look for new data protection capabilities from companies like Talena that directly address big data stores, direct array features like HPE 3PAR’s “flat backup” that steers snapshots directly into StoreOnce, and Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance that makes protecting all those big, 24x7 Oracle databases dead simple.

n Scale-out convergence is not an oxymoron. Scale-up monolithic architectures are so last decade. Now we have distributed, scale-out, parallel networked designs for everything including servers (cloud/virtualization/big data), processes (container-based microservices), stor-age (billion file object stores), and even memory grids. The problem is that most of our applications can’t take advantage of scale-out resources. They tend to like sim-ple, centralized resources. The good news is that there are increasing layers of support, which can map legacy applications onto newer IT architectures. For example, parallel file systems such as Lustre and GPFS are maturing into enterprise data center storage solutions (e.g., IBM

THE NEXT BIG THING

Data Center Trends, 2016 Edition It’s true: Scale-out convergence is not an oxymoron. BY MIKE MATCHETT


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

Spectrum Scale). Containers are increasingly able to host large and stateful applications including databases, as well as software-defined resources like storage). New object stores capable of holding billions of objects (e.g., Qumulo) blur the line between what used to be tier 2 archives and today’s data-aware (almost tier-1 object storage.

This shift to scale-out thinking isn’t necessarily in literal hardware terms, but should be considered at every level of your stack. Consider the mainframe. Today’s mainframe is technically an awesomely large hyper-converged con-tainer host—the biggest iron running massive numbers of the littlest workloads! In this new world, think about which layers are best optimized as aggregated pools, which as a centralized consolidated resource, and which as truly distributed “Internet of Things” style nodes or hybrid cloud mash-ups. Only then will it be possible to make that completely opaque to applications and allow IT to optimize application hosting dynamically.

n Applications get to drive. Whether you believe in hu-man DevOps, autonomic IT infrastructure or in the invis-ible intelligence inside your cloud provider, applications need to dictate the resources and quality of service (QoS) that they need—and they will do so more dynamically. Infrastructure is already getting smarter about respond-ing to dynamic changes in per-application QoS. VMware provides some great examples of dynamically flexible infrastructure with software-defined resources like NSX

networking and Virtual SAN storage that applies QoS policies on a per-VM basis.

Containers also promise to define the resources that each component of an application dynamically requires. Of course, what’s still missing here is the meta-intelligence to help applications assure their own service levels. Look out for big data based management solutions that combine infrastructure and application performance management views for active operational guidance.

n Lifetime data value curve lengthens. The value of data used to drop off as it aged. But with active archives and big data, most data offers value long past its active opera-tional use. Data lakes, built-in analytics and cost-effective scale-out storage are changing the fundamental data value curve. This is the year to take look for the hidden value in your data. Don’t forget to consider new internal (e.g., internet of things) and external (partner, supply chain, 3rd party) data sources in combination.

Each of these trends deserves some deeper examina-tion—and an open mind. While it’s tempting to stick with what we know, it pays to stay open to new ideas. Some folks might question how smart our infrastructure needs to be, but the real question is how smart can it be? n

MIKE MATCHETT is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. Contact him at [email protected].


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

OVER THE LAST few months there’s been a lot of hand wringing over the proposed Dell-EMC merger. I under-stand the commotion. Joe Tucci, president and CEO of EMC Corporation, has wanted to retire but couldn’t find a successor. There has also been a lot of pressure from ac-tivist investors to break up EMC to maximize shareholder value. EMC is an industry juggernaut with fingers in a lot of industry pies, and changes to that might be disruptive to the industry.

Dell is, at its core, a computing hardware company, but it has tried hard to grow its networking and storage businesses. Dell is private, and unlike publicly traded

companies has no requirement to divulge numbers be-yond corporate tax obligations. So while we can see some aspects of EMC’s businesses, Dell is completely opaque. Dell also doesn’t have to report changes like EMC does, so while we’ve seen some layoffs and changes in the EMC Federation there are a lot of unknowns for Dell.

So what does this mean for Dell and EMC customers? To start, let’s look at where there’s a good fit between the companies. While EMC has been the ‘E’ in VCE, the granddaddy of converged infrastructure, the ‘C’ (for Cisco) has left the venture. That leaves the door open for Dell Networking, especially in conjunction with VMware NSX. Many of Dell’s network switches already support the software-defined networking standard OpenFlow. Soft-ware-defined networking should be on every enterprise’s radar, and with all the pieces under one roof there’s a high probability it’ll be developed and supported well. This is good.

Another place without real collision is compute hard-ware. Cisco UCS has been a preferred platform at VCE and around EMC, mostly because of its nice management interfaces. Improvements to Dell PowerEdge have made that line equivalent, and in some ways better, than UCS. Additionally, Dell does a lot of business in the custom hardware market for OEMs so a compute solution that is form-fit to converged solutions is well within Dell’s capa-bilities. This is all good, too.

IN THE MIX

The Only Constant is ChangeThe Dell-EMC merger might not affect customers nearly as much as originally thought. BY BOB PLANKERS


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

The software front is a mixed bag for customers. Much of what Dell sells for software overlaps with EMC, VM-ware, and Pivotal products. The key here, if you’re using EMC or Dell software, is to watch the other products in

the space. Current offerings won’t be abandoned outright, but as resources move to other products, some will no longer get new features, and releases become more about security and maintenance. If that starts happening to products your organization uses then it is time to start thinking about a migration strategy, before you’re in an end-of-support situation.

Last, of course, is storage. Dell is already in the midst

of ending the EqualLogic PS series, given that there hav-en’t been any new models or features in a long time. That leaves Dell with Compellent, which competes against EMC VNX. EMC’s Isilon and VMAX lines have no equals at Dell, and I think it’s safe to say that the continued creep of flash into storage arrays, as well as the industry trends towards hyper-convergence (of which Dell will be a player, owning an entire VMware VSAN hardware and software stack) will be more interesting and transformative for storage customers than the Dell/EMC merger.

So overall, as customers, should we be concerned with this merger? I don’t think so. While it’ll change the logos on some of the equipment, and the sales teams we deal with, the result of this merger should be better, more in-tegrated IT systems that allow us to do more with the staff time we have, with better alignment with our businesses. And that’s always a good thing. n

BOB PLANKERS is a virtualization and cloud architect at a major Midwestern university.

SO OVERALL, AS CUSTOMERS, SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED WITH THIS MERGER? I DON’T THINK SO.


Home

Editor’s Letter


#Hashtag



Three Questions



The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com e-publication.

Margie Semilof, Editorial Director

Alex Barrett, Editor in Chief

Adam Hughes, Managing Editor

Phil Sweeney, Managing Editor

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Joe Hebert, Production Editor

Rebecca Kitchens, Publisher, [email protected]

TechTarget, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com

© 2016 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice.

At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH AND PAGE 3: ALEXANGE121/ISTOCK

Follow

@ModernInfra

on Twitter!

Documents

MI Modern Infrastructure - Bitpipedocs.media.bitpipe.com/.../MI_FEB_2016.pdf · Modern Infrastructure Creating tomorrow’s data centers FEBRUARY 2016, VOL. 5, NO. 2 IN THE MIX is