In my previous post I briefly mentioned one of my cooler projects of 2020: closing down a datacenter and consolidated it to our other datacenters at Open Line. The complexity of this project was mostly on the network and “BU carve-out” side of IT, but also featured a very cool Pure Storage FlashArray ActiveCluster component. In fact, using ActiveCluster technology ensured that we kept it all very simple from a data migration and risk perspective. Let me explain why we did what we did, but also start with a disclaimer.
Cloud Computing
9 posts
Last week I returned from Tech Field Day 20 in Silicon Valley. One of the themes was data visualization: how can you make data easy to consume with handy visualization techniques. The first presentation of week was by SolarWinds, showing the various data visualization products they’ve integrated in the Orion platform since 2014. And it goes quite a bit further than just throwing in a switch for a dark theme and changing an icon left and right, like Apple latest iOS. One of the challenges is that current IT infrastructure is very dynamic. If your monitoring tool can’t cope with this, it will be out of date and useless. Lets explore how SolarWinds solves this.
Back at Storage Field Day 16 in Boston, Zerto presented their VM replication software. It’s a block level, continuous hypervisor based replication, using a journal to log I/O in a VCR-like fashion. This enables you to rewind to any point in time that’s covered in the journal, and recover your VMs to that exact state. Zerto’s plans are a bit grander than “just VM Replication” though… they aim to cover the complete IT Resiliency market.
Moving to the cloud comes with many advantages. There’s the obvious advantages: if you put all your servers or services in the public cloud, you do not need your own datacenter. Provisioning rates are typically pretty fast, so this improves the time needed to spin up a new service. Plus pretty much every cloud is based on a “pay as you use/grow” billing model, giving you predictable costs.
Different public cloud providers charge different prices for services. So what if you could use the best value components from each cloud provider? Say hello to the multi cloud.
This is a long overdue post covering Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas and the announcements that were made during the event. I’ll recap some of the topics that resonated most with me, namely that cloud computing is not a place but a way of doing IT. Secondly, I spoke briefly with some of the Dell EMC server guys whom give me hope that the Dell 14th generation servers are a big step up from previous experiences. Finally, I’ll share a bit of insight in what the Dell EMC Elect picked up during an interview with John Roese, and will link to a few posts from friends that attended Dell EMC World 2017. Maybe it’s a bit more of a “Dear diary,”-style post, so hang in there.