Mobility with Control

I participated in VMware conference just after VMworld 2012. I appreciate VMware Vision & direction towards End user computing area.

As we know major transformation is happening in End user computing space but somehow i believe it is still limited with PC based end user devices. By virtue of VDI , we are able to consolidate consumer (employee's) desktops and saving cost on management/Maintenance & hardware refresh. Acceptance of VDI is still very low because of introduced latency/user experience and all above ROI. some % of customer are already running VDI instances for contractors/partners and to some extent for FTE's but large % of customers are still evaluating benefits of VDI. 

As we know , Modern users rather i would say "consumers" have come out of PC world and have gone into phone/tablet era and therefore they want to extend availability of corp or non corp application on their mobile devices. I read a case study published by  large automobile company using iPhone for their sales/Marketing department. They developed an application on top of iPhone to effectively distribute vehicle & part information.some organizations are promoting BYOD (Bring your own Device) Model to reduce investment on end user devices.

Having said all above, we can visualize the end state of end user computing in coming years. so lets assume what if your company allow you to bring your own laptop/Phone/Tablet and use that for your routine work. well it sounds excellent for you as you do not have to follow corporate IT policy/rules/ you can install any kind of application that you want even though its not licensed to your company. if we look at it from the organization perspective you are introducing following risks.

• Breech of IT Policy
• Data security 
• unmanned devices - IT dept has no control or idea what you are running on that device.
• Bring unknown risks to corp network

and many more. i know some of you would say, well, its my device and if company is willing to use it why should i give them control ? I also agree , but lets also understand that its you who wants mobility correct ? How many of you are using corp laptop/tablet and following guidelines? :).  Having said that , we need a middle way which allows you to have full control on your device and then at the same time your organization can control and manage it. Windows guys answer.. lets have dual boot systems... Ha Ha.. :) not a bad idea.

No need for dual boot, that's where VMware can help you. I like VMware approach when it comes to neutralize underlying Hardware. As we know different OEM have different IOS/OS and applications are also tied up with platforms. VMware opens the door and gives you a platform to run on any IOS/OEM and access your application. so what is that VMware offers , there you go

http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/horizon-application-manager/overview.html

VMware goes further and allows you have multiple profiles on single device which means, one for yourself where you install what you like and then another for your corporate. one big question  is how do you manage these Sprawling devices ? Well answer is VMware only.

Having said all above , it does not mean that other vendors are not evolving their products however I think VMware is putting efforts into right direction and they really understand what will be the application delivery model of future.

HTML 5 is going to change lot of things the reason i am saying this is because VMware Horizon is leveraging the same. 

Cheers,

Pankaj!!

  

Dell moves the needle in data center networking

Dell is doing some great work in Data center networking area ever since they acquired Force10 (http://www.force10networks.com/). Recently Dell announced DFM (Data Center Fabric Manager) which shows company vision towards Data center networking and most importantly  towards SDN (Software Defined Networks).

Dell is capitalizing on some of the major challenges which we face while designing & Maintaining Data Center network. Let's take a look at some of those.

• Designing Core Network :- Takes huge amount of time to design Data center core network and i am sure you must have spent weeks and weeks in front of Visio & Excel.
• Maintaining similar Software on switches :- Depending on the size of organization you may be maintaining 100s of switches worldwide or may be in certain areas. Have you checked if they are updated and running latest binaries. well and answer is , we know to some extent.
• Knowledge Transfer :- What if your network admin decides to move on you are left with Built/Architecture documents which are mostly not updated. Yes this is known fact , look at your document repository and see when was the last time it was updated :)
• Lots of Typing :- If you have to configure 100 switches with same CLI commands , you may create a script or find some other way but there are no standard way to enable all network engineers/administrator to follow same standards while configuring switches. if you have to validate Layer 3 configuration on these switches, you again need to spend week or may be more than a week. 
• Cabling Information :- How many times you have asked for help to trace the cable, I know almost every time :). I have seen people maintaining excel sheets to maintain cabling information. If cable dressing was properly done , you still need to look into the excel sheet and find our what is connecting where. We have traced some servers in DC using MAC address and i can tell you from my experience although it was easy but u need to logon to multiple switches to trace it.

Answer to all above challenges from Dell is http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/dell-fabric-manager/pd

Having said all above, i see a great value from Dell to customer in helping them with tool based approach to not only design the network but to maintain it. Dell has got very limited information on this overall solution offerings and therefore i am still not sure if its going to work with Cisco/Juniper/HP Network stacks or just with Dell Force10. 

I hope Dell has bigger plans in Network space and they would like to provide unique solution in new era of networking which will be driven by software.

Software define Networking is going to be the future and i will write a separate post on this topic.

Cheers!!

Pankaj

Getting Disk IOPS right

One of the commonly discussed subject in storage space. Although Certain guidelines and recommendations are always available from the Application vendors however its worth spending  some time to ensure you are correctly designing storage fabric & Arrays to provide agreed capacity + Performance.

From my opinion, its very important to first understand the application Nature and associated I/O pattern plus its latency thresholds. and at the same time you need to know the complete architecture of your SAN fabric and storage arrays.

Having said that , what are the most important information that i need to kickstart, Here you go!

• Application IO Requirement :- Majority of Application Vendors (Microsoft/Oracle/SAP etc) - They provide I/O sizing tools
• Latency threshold :- Some applications would require system to respond back in specified second.
• I/O Pattern :- Very important point to consider , you need to know whether I/Os are Random/Very Random / Sequential. Also focus on de-duplication capabilities of storage arrays, this will effect sequential access to random.
• % Read/Write :- Another important point to consider, you should know if there are 10 IOPS per second , then how many are for read and how many for write.
• I/O Size :- You need to know what is the size of read/write request (512 Bytes, 4K , 8K etc). This is considered as size of one transaction.
• Sudden Burst & Failure Penalties:-  Assume some buffer for peak hour and to provide same performance in event of few spindle failure in RAID groups.
• Future Growth :- think of future requirements as well, although you can always add capacity or performance but give some time to understand future requirements as well.
• Raid Penalties :- We all know all  kind of  RAID levels for performance and redundancy but do we know I/O penalties associated with each raid level ?

let me emphasize a bit on Raid Penalties because generally its not discussed. so what is it? well depending on RAID level you have to commit write request twice or thrice or may be more. take an example of RAID 10 you are writing 2 times for one write request and therefore you are eating 2 write IOPS which is not in the case of RAID 0. There are no penalties involved while reading from RAID volume. Following table shows penalties for different RAIDs.

Now lets understand Layers of Storage Fabric/Arrays which may help you to think through some other aspect which may be important.

Following diagram shows a typical layers from server to the storage system.

so lets first understand , how physical disks type can significantly change overall math. Transactions which are being generated from server is passing through several layers and finally reaching to the physical disks which are the actual labors :)

I hope you all are aware of different disks types and their performance matrix , but just for the sake of people  who are not exposed to Arrays, lets quickly look at some of the important offerings

• SSD
• FC
• SCSI
• SAS
• NL-SAS
• SATA

you can find more information on web, if you like to further dig down and understand how they are different or similar. but since we are talking about IOPS its worth knowing number of IOPS you can get from these disks depending on their RPM. Following table provides IOPS count.

These are some industry standard numbers and don't trust on vendor statements , they always add 10-15 % extra. to get complete performance matrix , you can visit www.spec.org and you can find published performance data from multiple vendors and then make a decision.

I hope this post was informative, some interesting posts on storage are on the way.

Cheers!!

Pankaj