RSSNews Analysis
Extreme's Data Center Play
Extreme Networks has taken another step in articulating its data center vision with two new announcements to their data center product line. The first addresses applying policies to network traffic to and from the VM, and having those policies follow the VM during moves and disaster recovery events. The second is Extreme's stake in the ground supporting hypervisor switch by-pass that allows the hardware switch to move frames from VM to VM. Both announcements address architecture design requirements needed to support a virtualized data center. Extreme has to come up with something unique to compete with Cisco's Nexus architecture, HP's newly acquired H3C switch line, as well as Juniper and Brocade in the data center.
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Architectures
Abstracting Computing Resources Into Block
UCS (unified computing systems) came on the IT scene in 2009 as an alternate virtualization strategy and presented a viable option for the nearly 70 percent of data center hardware and software assets that were not yet virtualized. Cisco's UCS approach was a useful virtualization strategy for siloed enterprise applications designed to run on physical servers, but not in traditional virtualized environments. Cisco accepted the fact that these applications required their own hardware and offered a means of creating a resource-sharing "fabric" for hardware-resident assets that was capable of yielding similar resource-sharing benefits to software-based virtualization.
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Reviews & Workshops
Apple's iPad Not Ready For The Enterprise
Much like the iPhone before it, the Apple iPad is a polarizing device. Supporters of the tablet see it as a new paradigm in personal computing, while others deride it as just a really big media player. We put Apple's tablet to the test, seeing how close the new device could get to replacing the traditional laptop in the hands of an enterprise user. After a week of testing, the iPad experience offered a series of highs and some really big lows, but in the end, it is not quite ready to replace my laptop yet.
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Blogs
Interop Data Center Chair Jim Metzler On Networking
April 22, 2010 10:12 AM
Posted by Mike Fratto, Editor
We caught up with Jim Metzler who is the track chair of both the Networking track chair at Interop. He is also track chair for Application Delivery 2.0, as well. A lot is changing in Ethernet beyond "just faster," such as new standards for multi-pathing Ethernet and doing away with spanning tree, lossless Ethernet and better flow control. All of these feature will impact how you design networks.
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Server Virtualization 3.0 And Load Balancing
April 21, 2010 10:00 AM
Posted by Frank Berry
If you don't have hands-on experience, you might find it difficult to sort out what infrastructure will most effect your server virtualization deployment because even printer ink suppliers are claiming to make your virtual environment work better. But there are some products that, with tighter integration, can make a big difference. Best-in-class load balancing systems from Cisco, Coyote Point and F5 are great examples.
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Shouldn't Auto-Tiering Also Auto-Optimize?
April 20, 2010 3:07 PM
Posted by George Crump
Automated tiering, the ability to move data between different types of storage within an array, is quickly becoming a popular feature of advanced storage systems. While there is a focus on how these systems will lower costs and increase performance, there is one feature that is missing: the ability to auto-optimize.
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Interop Data Center Chair Jim Metzler On Application Delivery
April 20, 2010 8:00 AM
Posted by Mike Fratto, Editor
We caught up with Jim Metzler to discuss his plans for the Interop Application Delivery 2.0 track. Application delivery has always been important, but new demands are being made on IT to delivery applications to user where ever they are on what ever device they are using. Users are getting spoiled by ubiquitous bandwidth and more powerful computing devices like netbooks and PDA's. Getting the app to the user efficiently and securely is a challenge. Where that application resides such as a data center or cloud service certainly impacts IT's ability to deliver. These are some of the topics in the Interop Application Delivery 2.0 track.
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Mobile Applications Really Do Matter, Especially On The iPad
April 19, 2010 11:30 AM
Posted by Michael Brandenburg
My review of Apple's iPad, recently posted online, quickly met with some criticisms. The comments either deemed it flawed, pointing out that the tablet was not meant to be a laptop replacement, or basically implied that I really didn't understand the use cases for the device. And of course, there was the comment that I was a dinosaur, stuck in 1990's thinking about mobility.
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A Cautionary Tale
April 19, 2010 8:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
As Robert burns famously wrote "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray." As we moved the lab from SUNY to our new digs in beautiful New Jersey a series of failures convinced me that he was right, and that Edsel Murphy PhD had come to visit. First, we discovered that the power supply in one of our key VMware hosts, a Dell PowerEdge 2950, didn't survive the trip. Since the lab isn't a production environment, we didn't equip it with redundant power supplies, which turned out to be a bigger mistake than we would have believed as both of the replacements I ordered from eBay turned out to be duds. But wait. . .there's more.
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Best of the Web
Data deduplication: Declawing the clones
Data deduplication is emerging as a critically important new arrow in the storage administrator's quiver to answer hard questions about the increasing problem in storage growth costs.
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.
WAN Optimization Whitelists and Blacklists
Optimization is a fantastic way of saving money and creating really happy customers at the same time, but it doesn't work flawlessly for all applications.
WAN Optimization as a Managed Service: It's Not About the Cost
This insight examines how organizations outsourcing their WAN optimization initiatives to a third-party go about achieving their goals for application performance, reducing operational costs, and streamlining enterprise infrastructure.
