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CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

Building a Better I/O Mousetrap

MIModern InfrastructureCreating tomorrow’s data centers

JANUARY 2016, VOL. 5, NO. 1

APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE

Event-Driven DevOps

IN THE MIX

Behold Our Latest Free Lunch

EDITOR’S LETTER

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DATA

SAN Storage

THE NEXT BIG THING

The Year of the Container

Impact AwardsAnnouncing the products that will change

IT operations in 2016.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 2

IT’S JANUARY, AND you know what that means—awards season! Not one to be left out of the party, Modern Infra-structure is happy to announce the winners of its third annual Impact Awards, where readers, industry experts and editors weigh in on the products and technologies that will have the biggest impact on IT operations in the coming year. Congratulations to all the winners.

Part of the fun of holding an awards program is watch-ing the returns roll in (over 800 readers participated in this year’s voting). But for me, the fun comes much earlier—back in the summer when we’re thinking about which categories to keep, which categories to add, which categories to tweak, and which to retire. We don’t want to boil the ocean and recognize every conceivable product category on which IT spends time and money. The idea is to highlight the technologies that are effecting the most change in the data center—and the areas where infra-structure and operations folks can use a little help.

Back this year are categories for Best Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Software-Defined Infra-

structure, and Best AWS Partner. For Best Data Protection, we defer to our colleagues at Storage magazine. DevOps tools get their own category this year, as do private and hybrid cloud management tools. Finally, rather than give awards to cloud service providers themselves, we chose to highlight tools that will help you move to the cloud, with the new Best Public Cloud Migration and Optimization Tool category.

Which leads me to another mainstay of January jour-nalism: predictions! Usually, I take late, great New York Yankees Manager Casey Stengel’s advice: “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” But just this once, I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that next year’s Impact Awards will recognize innovations around containers. Certainly, our columnists seem to think that containers are the future. “This is the year that contain-ers will arrive in a big way—much earlier and faster than many expect,” writes Mike Matchett in “Container Ships Steam In.” Whether containers will be a boon or a bust for IT operations is still up for debate. “It’s clear that devel-opers are eating the free lunch that containers promise,” writes Bob Plankers in “Behold Our Latest Free Lunch!”, “but I often wonder who is paying for the meal, because it’s a very expensive one.” n

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

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The 2016 Impact Awards

And the winners are...BY MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE STAFF


THE READERS HAVE spoken.The result? A list of go-to data center products and

services that will shake up IT operations this year. Here are the winners in the 2016 Impact Awards.

BEST CONVERGED AND HYPER-CONVERGED

INFRASTRUCTURE PRODUCT

Winner: Nutanix NX-3060-G4

An easy-to-use management interface and growing name recognition garnered Nutanix its second win for Modern Infrastructure’s Best Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Product Impact Award in a row.

The Nutanix hyper-converged offering comprises scalable data center compute, storage and networking hardware with the Prism management interface and a choice of Nutanix Acropolis, VMware vSphere or Micro-soft Hyper-V hypervisors.

“We liked the idea of VMs running close to compute and memory, with clustered aggregated storage,” said Joe Aiello, staff engineer in Global Labs at Shoretel, which adopted Nutanix 20 months ago. Aiello runs traditional infrastructure—storage from NetApp, Nimble Storage and EMC and servers from Dell and HP, among other

IMPACT AWARDS

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products—in addition to hyper-converged infrastructure. “I like the Prism interface from Nutanix,” Aiello said,

because he doesn’t need to go into the command line to manage his systems. Prism “One-Click” management

covers software upgrades, capacity trend analysis and planning and troubleshooting of storage, compute and virtualization layers in the Nutanix computing platform. Aiello said that hyper-converged infrastructure lets com-panies do more on those platforms without hiring a roster of individuals with deep technical specializations.

Nutanix’s native hypervisor Acropolis is based on Li-nux KVM, and offers an alternative to vSphere and Hy-per-V virtualization. Acropolis touts increased security, self-healing capabilities based on SaltStack systems and configuration management, and VM management for enterprise data centers. Aiello uses both Acropolis and vSphere on his Nutanix hyper-converged boxes.

“Acropolis has great potential,” he noted, and is in use for his own infrastructure rather than for shared resources until it develops more. But vSphere is baked in, he said, and Acropolis doesn’t have role-based access that’s needed for shared resources.

Honorable Mention: SimpliVity OmniStack

SimpliVity and Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure offerings remained neck-and-neck among Modern Infra-structure Impact Award voters. SimpliVity OmniCube won the converged and hyper-converged platform category in 2013, and SimpliVity OmniStack came a close second to Nutanix for this year’s Impact Awards.

SimpliVity OmniStack is a hyper-converged infrastructure platform on Cisco UCS x86 servers. The compute and storage hardware support hypervisor-based virtualization, backup and replication with real-time dedupublication, cloud connections, WAN optimization and other modern IT requirements.

Voters like the commodity x86 servers underlying the converged management and operations, and one IT pro said the OmniStack takes data virtualization “that much further.”

One SimpliVity user affirms that hyper-converged was the right replacement for traditional servers and stor-age. Tanner LLC, an accounting firm in Salt Lake City, switched from HP to SimpliVity OmniCubes on Dell hardware about a year ago.

“I sleep a lot better at night knowing full copies of my servers back up offsite multiple times a day on hardware that we own,” said Matt Huff, IT director at Tanner. He

NUTANIX NX-3060-G4: What voters valued the most is the true integration of the compute, storage and networking tiers, coupled with the product’s building block design.


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voted for the SimpliVity OmniStack because SimpliVity makes storage resource provisioning easier, and man-agement all takes place in VMware vCenter. Storage utilization is growing slowly, with deduplication and compression features, he added.

BEST DEVOPS TOOL

Winner: CloudBees Jenkins Platform

Open-source Jenkins is practically synonymous with DevOps-style continuous integration and test-driven development. CloudBees Jenkins Platform takes that foundational toolset and makes it enterprise-worthy. “This platform is our foundation for DevOps, being used by all of our teams,” wrote one reader. “It allows our corporate tool support team to centralize management and operations of our Jenkins cluster,” said another. Features provided by CloudBees Jenkins Platform include role-based access control, high availability, distributed team management and analytics, plus integration with any number of platforms and tools: public and private clouds such as Amazon, Openstack, Kubernetes, or Microsoft Azure, or development tools such as BlazeMeter for load testing and New Relic for performance monitoring.

Combined with Docker, CloudBees Jenkins Platform can replace older approaches to delivering applications. Choose Digital, of Miami, now uses Docker and Cloud-Bees Jenkins Platform to automate the delivery of its white-label digital media marketplace that used to run on a Java platform as a service. The real benefit that Cloud-bees Jenkins Platform brings to the table is its more than

two dozen plugins, said Mario Cruz, Choose Digital CTO. “Getting started with open source Jenkins is pretty easy, but when you get out of dev and move into corporate production, that’s when you want the enterprise support.”

Honorable mention: Red Hat Ansible

When it comes to DevOps tools, Modern Infrastructure readers value simplicity—and that’s what they say they get with Ansible, automation and configuration manage-ment software acquired by Red Hat in November. Readers describe Ansible as “low overhead,” “intuitive,” and “easy in all aspects” including learning, configuration, deploy-ment, use and maintenance. The learning curve “is far smaller than [competitors] Chef/Puppet,” one reader said.

Another big piece of Ansible’s simplicity is that it

CLOUDBEES JENKINS PLATFORM: Replaces older approaches to delivering apps, includes high availability, and integrates with any number of platforms.


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eschews agents, and relies on SSH for communication instead, said Walid Shaari, an infrastructure architect for a Saudi oil company that voted for Ansible. “It capitalizes on something that already exists,” he said. Other benefits include code that is human readable, and the ease with which it’s possible to create hierarchies and add to in-ventories. Like voters, Shaari also called out the vibrant Ansible community, which counts over a thousand com-mitters. When it comes to community engagement, “the only competitor to Ansible right now is Docker, when you think about it.”

Honorable Mention: Ruxit Full Stack Monitoring

Ruxit, a division of Dynatrace, is a newcomer to the DevOps scene, but Modern Infrastructure readers are very excited about what the infrastructure and application performance monitoring (APM) tool can do for them. Of-fered as either software as a service (SaaS) or on-premises, Ruxit requires a single agent per host that automatically discovers and baselines the environment. “I chose Ruxit because of its out-of-the-box capacity to monitor system and infrastructure aspects, as well as application perfor-mance and user experience,” wrote one reader. “[Ruxit] replaced three previous products we were using,” said another; “it is simple to use compared to our previous solutions,” and has a “gorgeous interface.”

But the aspect that whets readers appetite for more is Ruxit’s use of artificial intelligence to automatically de liver insight. In fact, readers said other tools pale in comparison. “I’ve been blown away by its auto-discovery, artificial intelligence and deep application knowledge,”

said one reader. “No other tool provides such insight with-out any human configuration and input.”

BEST PUBLIC CLOUD OPTIMIZATION

AND MIGRATION TOOL

Winner: Cloudyn

Moving enterprise apps and data to the public cloud—and then optimizing them post-migration—can introduce a number of hurdles for IT. As a result, many enterprise IT shops turn to third-party vendors and tools to help simplify that process. And when it comes to choosing one of those tools, Modern Infrastructure readers had one

CLOUDYN: The SaaS-based Cloudyn pro vides a range of cloud management and monitoring capabilities that work across a variety of cloud computing environments.


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clear-cut favorite in 2015: Cloudyn. A SaaS offering, Cloudyn provides a range of cloud

management and monitoring capabilities that can work across different cloud computing environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack. To give users better visi-bility into their public, private or hybrid clouds, Cloudyn offers different reporting, graphing and dashboarding tools.

But, in addition to helping users track cloud resources and performance, Cloudyn provides the means to monitor and optimize another vital aspect of cloud environments, one that every customer must stay on top of: cost.

Users, for example, are able to track cloud spending by region or business unit to get a handle on who is us-ing which cloud resources and how much, exactly, they consume.

Those capabilities are crucial for AutoGrid, a provider of big data analytics for energy and utility companies, based in Redwood Shores, Calif. The company uses Clou-dyn to optimize its AWS hosting environment to prevent and identify cloud sprawl—especially as AutoGrid’s cus-tomer base, along with the number of smart meters and sensors it monitors, continues to grow, said Tim Fewkes, head of product operations for AutoGrid.

“We’re spinning up big storage volumes and we try to be very nimble for our clients—this is real-time stuff, this is big data crunching—and because of this we needed to have an anti-sprawl tool where my system administra-tors… can be held accountable for the compute resources they use,” Fewkes said.

Honorable Mention: Ravello InceptionSX

Ravello InceptionSX earns high praise from Modern In-frastructure readers for its ability to run VMware ESXi hypervisors in the public cloud.

Along with bridging the gap between VMware and leading public cloud platforms like AWS and Google, InceptionSX provides a solid development and testing environment, and can also be used with production work-loads, readers wrote.

“The ability to run nested ESXi on AWS is awesome, and a real home-lab replacement,” one wrote.

Readers also applauded the tool for its easy set-up and intuitive interface.

“It’s definitely a very cool technical achievement,” said Jirah Cox, sales engineer at eGroup, a VMware partner and reseller based in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. “No doubt there.”

Honorable Mention: CloudVelox One Hybrid Cloud

Platform

Have a lot of workloads to migrate to the cloud? Modern Infrastructure readers recommend CloudVelox, whose One Hybrid Cloud Platform is designed to save users both time and money.

CloudVelox’s software, for instance, significantly re-duced the time it took to move a production web site for a leading hotel chain—Hyatt.com—to the cloud, said Doug Lionberger, managing director at Candor Technol-ogy Solutions, a cloud consultancy based in Naperville, Illinois, and previously the director of e-commerce, cloud services and DevOps for Hyatt.


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“The CloudVelox software mapped the environment, blueprinted the environment and migrated it to the cloud in about eight days,” Lionberger said, noting that, manu-ally, that process would have taken weeks if not months.

And if help is needed, the CloudVelox support team is quick to step up, he added.

“It’s one thing to have the software, but it’s another to have the staff behind,” Lionberger said.

BEST SOFTWARE DEFINED INFRASTRUCTURE

Winner: Cloudian HyperStore 5.2

Need to store lots and lots of data on premises? Read-ers suggest you evaluate Cloudian HyperStore—an on-premises scale-out object storage stack that can run on commodity hardware, encrypts all its data, and is fully compatible with AWS’ Simple Storage Service (S3) APIs.

That last point was especially important to Calligo, a cloud services provider based out of the Channel Island Jersey that uses Cloudian for media and archival storage for its customers. “There are so many apps that just plug in to S3 these days, said Julian Box, Calligo CEO, for in-stance backup and file sharing apps such as Veeam and ownCloud. “That way you don’t have to think about the compatibility.” Further, “S3-compatibility makes this a great product for trying cheap then moving later,” pointed out another reader.

Compared with other object-storage solutions, readers also cited Cloudian for its hybrid model that allows users to offload data to AWS for long-term archival, and for its el-egant management console where systems administrators

can specify data retention and protection policies across the geographically distributed HyperStore cluster. Or, to quote another Cloudian fan, “We believe that their S3 product is a forward looking storage technology with features that organizations will require moving forward.”

Honorable Mention: Stratoscale Symphony

Are you building a private cloud, but don’t have the budget for VMware, don’t have the stomach for OpenStack, and don’t want get locked in to a proprietary hyper-converged architecture? Modern Infrastructure readers feel the same as you, and recommended Stratoscale as a software-only software-defined storage stack that offers most of the functionality of commercial offerings, extensive scalabil-ity, and less of an up-front integration effort than running on open-source OpenStack.

Bezeq, an Israeli telecommunications provider that recently began offering infrastructure as a service to its

CLOUDIAN HYPERSTORE 5.2: This scale-out object storage stack runs on commodity hardware, encrypts all its data, and is fully compatible with AWS S3 APIs.


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business customers based on Stratoscale and commodity hardware. “We like to do things on our own, in a way that will cost the least money,” said Arik Sudman, department manager for systems and storage. But because the startup uses OpenStack APIs, it makes it easy for Bezeq to extract itself from it if it decides to change directions down the road. But for now, Stratoscale is firmly in Bezeq’s plans: down the road, it plans to evaluate it to replace existing VMware systems.

BEST PRIVATE AND HYBRID CLOUD

MANAGEMENT PRODUCT

Winner: CloudBolt

The definition of private and hybrid cloud has become in-creasingly muddied over the years, but this year’s Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards winner can help IT profes-sionals understand what a true private cloud should be.

In short, CloudBolt’s software helps enterprise IT shops operate like a cloud service provider. Many competing private and hybrid cloud products offer only a piece of the cloud pie, but managing multiple tools can create new challenges for IT administrators who were hoping a private cloud would help ease management.

One Modern Infrasturcture reader and CloudBolt user put it perfectly, saying “I use multiple clouds, and Cloud-Bolt makes it easy for me to choose the right tool for each job. I don’t have to switch back and forth between each vendor’s interface. I just log into CloudBolt for a single place to manage all my environments.”

Judges said CloudBolt’s software “takes all the features

enterprises are looking for and puts them into a single intuitive interface that enables IT to react to business needs.” Among the most important factors that led judges to select CloudBolt was its compatibility with products from a wide range of hardware and software vendors. The vendor-agnostic product can be deployed as part of a new private cloud build or can be easily integrated into an ex-isting infrastructure.

CloudBolt’s software offered the most comprehensive feature set of the nominated products, with customizable dashboards, reporting and automation control, readers said, as well as a user-friendly interface and ease of use.

“CloudBolt installed in our environment in an incred-ibly short period of time (i.e. less than an hour) and did an extremely comprehensive import of our environment,” one reader wrote. “We literally turned our existing

CLOUDBOLT: Offers customizable dashboards, reporting and automation control, as well as a user-friendly interface and ease of use.


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infrastructure into an Amazon-like cloud in a matter of minutes. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it.”

Honorable Mention: EMC Federation

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

If a company is looking for a top-to-bottom new hybrid cloud deployment—from hardware to software and public cloud integration—they can find no more comprehensive platform than the EMC Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. This collection of top-notch hardware from EMC and VCE hardware along with VMware software and cloud services represent the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid cloud platform. EMC claims its EMC Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud can be installed from scratch in just 28 days.

BEST AMAZON PARTNER

Winner: REAN Cloud

Modern Infrastructure readers came out in force this year for REAN Cloud, an AWS Managed Service Partner based in Herndon, Va. as their choice for Best Amazon Web Service Partner. REAN Cloud offers consulting and profes-sional services as well as managed services for AWS. Cus-tomers cite their commitment to change as AWS evolves as setting REAN Cloud apart from the competition. One voter commented that they are “friendly, hard-working and technologically brilliant.”

One of the customers REAN Cloud has helped with an AWS cloud computing setup, Ditech Financial LLC, based

in Fort Washington, Pa., said the firm helped it avoid “newbie mistakes” in regulatory compliance.

“We are a very strongly regulated industry, and working with people who are very scared of change,” said Jason Mc-Munn, chief cloud architect for Ditech. ”They helped us map all of the regulatory requirements and controls into a framework that was understandable by both the tech people and the auditors.”

Honorable Mention: Flux7

For the second year in a row, readers commended Flux7, an AWS Advanced Tier Consulting Partner based in Aus-tin, Texas, for its stellar AWS consulting services.

Voters praised Flux7 for its extremely committed team, highly technical leadership, customer-driven focus and ability to change with the times.

“They are very technically capable, up-to-date with the latest AWS technologies, and responsive whenever we have questions or need assistance with our DevOps

REAN CLOUD: Customers cite the consulting and profes sional services company’s commitment to change.


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infrastructure,” said Shilo Rohlman, a software developer at Medallion Learning based in Denver.

Flux7 also jump-started a project for Tessitura Network Inc., based in Dallas, among many others, and its flexibil-ity proved to be a difference maker.

“Flux7 assisted us in developing a prototype architecture

for a fairly complex hosting operation,” said Ron Wilson, Tessitura’s CTO. “Flux7 was … also flexible in tailoring the scope of the project, ultimately providing us with an initial architecture template and supporting automation tooling that we then took internally for refinement, testing and deployment.” n

zzzzzz

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#Hashtag On Docker

Tom Riat

@riattom

Ok ... let’s try to build something with Docker for our new dev server #Docker

Mike Grimshaw

@mikegrimshaw2

With #docker you can run #CLUSTERS of #VPC’s as honeypots, imagine the #infosec possibilities :)

Brandon Williams

@williamsbdev

Docker pro tip: beware of sparse files when doing a ‘docker commit’. #Docker #linux

Mike Metral

@mikemetral

A process manager in a #docker container means you’re prob thinking of it as a VM still. Break it up & create smaller containers per role

Petros Gasteratos

@ptrgast

Note to self: If you want to install #docker (the container runtime) on a debian based system then docker.io is the right package not docker

Ajeet Singh Raina

@ajeetsraina

Universal Control Plane looks too cool and easy to setup. Docker swarm integration is just awesome!! #docker #docker-machine

Derek Bekoe

@derekbekoe

Being able to launch a new site with #docker #nginx #cloudflare and #azure in a few minutes feels good

Teemu Vesala

@teemuvesala

#Docker has become one of my favorite tools for admin things. Simplifies environment creation.

https://twitter.com/riattom/status/681479905956245505

https://twitter.com/hashtag/Docker?src=hash

https://twitter.com/mikegrimshaw2/status/681228453308317696

https://twitter.com/hashtag/docker?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/CLUSTERS?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/VPC?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/infosec?src=hash

https://twitter.com/williamsbdev/status/680867964317339649

https://twitter.com/hashtag/linux?src=hash

https://twitter.com/mikemetral/status/680774730153103361


https://twitter.com/ptrgast/status/681219341040377856


https://twitter.com/ajeetsraina/status/680709746245042176


https://twitter.com/hashtag/docker%3Fsrc%3Dhash

https://twitter.com/derekbekoe/status/681179454903721984


https://twitter.com/hashtag/nginx?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/cloudflare?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/azure?src=hash

https://twitter.com/teemuvesala/status/684341324665982976



THERE’S CLOUD STORAGE, there’s high performance storage, but is there really such a thing as high-performance cloud storage? For a long time, the answer was no.

“Any time you move your infrastructure somewhere outside of your data center, there’s going to be latency involved, and you run in to the speed of light problem,” said Scott Sinclair, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. “The speed of light can only go so fast.”

Those that required high performance storage out of their cloud providers either learned to compromise, or stayed home. Increasingly though, there are emerging technological approaches that suggest that you can have your cloud storage cake and eat it too—that is, it’s possible to run IO-intensive, latency sensitive applications with some level of cloud-based infrastructure.

High-performance cloud storage could allow orga-nizations to run very demanding database applications in the cloud that have been stymied by cloud storage’s limitations. It could also allow you to keep applications on-premises, but take advantage of cheap and scalable cloud storage over the wide area network. And finally, it could make it possible to run compute in the cloud that accesses storage infrastructure back in the private data center.


HOMETHE-LIGHTWRITER/ISTOCK

High Performance Cloud Storage:

Not an OxymoronCloud storage is tracking down the speed of light.

BY ALEX BARRETT


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But unlike most storage problems, the trick to achieving high performance cloud storage isn’t just to throw more disk drives or flash at the problem, Sinclair said. When solving for the speed of light, new technologies “need to rely on a specific innovation to solve the problem,” he said. Namely, colocating data very close to compute, or introducing some sort of network optimization or cach-ing mechanism. Some systems combine all three of these approaches. And while it’s still early days, early adopters have seen promising returns.

ON-PREM COMPUTE, CLOUD STORAGE

“We used to have the mindset that storage is cheap, and if you need more storage, just go buy some more,” said David Scarpello, COO at Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group, a benefits management firm in Wakefield, Mass. “Then I came to the realization that storage is not cheap, and whoever told me that was hugely mistaken.”

Between purchasing extra capacity, support and main-tenance, staff, backup, maintaining a data center and disaster recovery site, Sentinel pays upwards of $250,000 per year to maintain 40 TB worth of on-premises stor-age—over $6,000 per TB. “It’s a lot,” he said—and for what?

“Storage is important—it keeps us safe—but it’s not something that you want to be spending a lot of money on.”

Meanwhile, public cloud providers offer raw capacity at rates that rival consumer hard disk drives. Prices for Ama-zon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) start at $0.03 per GB per month (less for greater capacities and infrequent access tiers), or $240 per year for a managed, replicated TB.

But that cheap capacity tier is based on object storage, whose performance is adequate in the best of times—and downright slow when accessed over the wide area network. So the challenge for many IT organizations is how to tap in to the cloud’s scalability and low cost, while maintaining a modicum of performance.

For Sentinel, one potential fix is a data caching and acceleration tool from Boston-based startup ClearSky Data that combines an on-premises caching appliance and a sister appliance located in a local point of presence (POP) that is directly connected to high-capacity public cloud storage. By caching hot data locally and accessing the cloud over a dedicated, low-latency connection, cus-tomers take advantage of cheap cloud-based storage for on-premises compute without a performance hit.

In an initial release, ClearSky promises near local IOPS

n Colocating data close to compute or introducing network optimization can solve for the speed of light.

n Public cloud providers offer raw capacity at rates that rival consumer hard disk drives.

n Best practices dictate that you go with the cloud provider’s block storage for latency-sensitive database applications in the cloud.

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and latencies of under two milliseconds, for customers out of its Boston, Philadelphia and Las Vegas POPs. The plan is to increase its geographic presence, and add support for additional cloud storage providers, said Ellen Rubin, ClearSky Data co-founder and CEO.

Sentinel has begun to move about 7TB of test and devel-opment volumes to AWS via ClearSky, with no complaints from developers. Ideally the company will slowly move over all its data, thereby eliminating a $5,000/month maintenance fee to NetApp, and the need for backups and offsite disaster recovery.

CLOUD COMPUTE, AND STORAGE TOO

If you’re running a latency-sensitive database application in the cloud, best practices dictate that you go with the cloud provider’s block storage offering, for instance AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS). That used to be a death-knell for large database workloads, who were stymied by limited IOPS and smaller volumes sizes.

When Realty Data Company’s parent company National Real Estate went bankrupt in 2012, it had to make some quick decisions concerning its three data centers: go in to another data center, rent colocation space, or go to the cloud. “As much as it’s hard to let go, going to the cloud made the most sense, financially,” said Craig Loop, direc-tor of technology at the Naperville, Ill., firm.

At first, Realty Data scrambled to do lift-and-shift mi-grations of its applications, but stumbled to migrate its 40TB image database off of an EMC array and in to the cloud. Latency and performance numbers from S3 were

Building a Better I/O Mousetrap

MOST ATTEMPTS TO deliver more I/O center around

providing additional disk resources. With its new

Parallel I/O offering, storage virtualization pioneer

DataCore Software proposes a new approach:

harness the power of today’s multi-core CPUs in

the service of delivering IOPS, rather than just

compute.

“In a traditional virtualized machine, there’s

only one I/O worker trying to split time between all

the different VMs,” said Augie Gonzalez, Datacore

director of product marketing. “With Parallel I/O,

you have a lot of different I/O workers, so that

each VM has at least one I/O worker working on

its behalf.”

Dustin Fennell, CIO at EPIC Management, L.P., a

provider of healthcare services in Redlands, Calif.,

thinks Parallel I/O will help him solve login storm

issues in his Citrix environment. “Leveraging the

CPU that we already have in a different way is

really exciting to us,” Fennell said. “It means we

wouldn’t have to add more hardware.”

DataCore claims several cloud service provid-

ers are beta testing Parallel I/O for use in their

infrastructure. n


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unacceptable, and meant rewriting its in-house appli-cation to support object storage. “Even with shims, we couldn’t get it to work,” Loop said. Meanwhile, AWS EBS wasn’t a real option either, because at the time, EBS sup-ported volume sizes of only 1TB. “EBS would have been a management headache,” Loop said.

Working with cloud consultancy RightBrain Networks, Realty Data used a Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA), dedicated single-tenant storage adjacent to the cloud data center and connected via a fibre link, and pur-chased using a pay-as-you-go model. The Zadara VPSA presents familiar SAN and NAS interfaces, and storage performance developers expected with an on-premises EMC array. Zadara has since added VPSAs at other cloud providers, as well as an on-premises version that provides cloud-like pay-as-you-go consumption.

Native cloud block storage options have also upped their game. AWS EBS, for instance, now supports volume sizes of up to 16TB, and EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes backed by solid state drives deliver up to 20,000 IOPS per volume. Still, while that’s good enough for a lot of database workloads, it isn’t for all of them.

Lawter Inc., a specialty chemicals company based in Chicago, Ill., recently moved its SAP and Sharepoint infra-structure to a public cloud service from Dimension Data, and chose Zadara VPSA because it needed to guarantee a minimum of 20,000 IOPS for its SAP environment. “[Dimension Data’s] standard storage could not meet our IOPS requirements,” said Antony Poppe, global network and virtualization manager with the firm.

Meanwhile, traditional storage vendors see a market for

their wares at cloud service providers. Not only do some cloud block storage offerings fail to deliver sufficient IOPS and latency, many cloud users report suffering from “IOPS competition”—competing for IOPS resources with other tenants of the environment, said Varun Chhabra, EMC di-rector of product marketing for its Elastic Cloud Storage. Pairing cloud compute with dedicated storage can achieve predictable performance.

At the same time, using dedicated storage for cloud-based workloads is reassuring to some businesses, said Catherine Van Aken, lead for business development, channels and partners at Virdata, which develops a big data and analytics platform for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and whose platform is based on OpenStack running on NetApp FlexPod converged infrastructure.

“Not all customers are ready for the public cloud,” Van Aken said. “The market is growing from the edge, but will move to the cloud over time,” she said, citing an IDC prediction that within five years, over 90% of IoT data will be hosted in the cloud. With its approach, Virdata can offer its customers a stepped approach to going from an

“ NOT ALL CUSTOMERS ARE READY FOR THE PUBLIC CLOUD.”—Catherine Van Aken, lead for business development, channels and partners at Virdata


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all on-prem environment, to compute in the cloud, with storage nearby.

Further, using traditional storage in the cloud offers management familiarity, said Phil Brotherton, NetApp vice president of the Data Fabric group. It even appeals to compliance officers, he said, “by holding data out of the cloud, even if the compute is in.” NetApp has hundreds of customers for its NetApp Private Server, which delivers fat, low-latency performance “near the cloud,” at provid-ers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and AliBaba Group, Brotherton said.

CLOUD COMPUTE, STORAGE ON-PREM

But for some organizations, any storage in the cloud is too much storage in the cloud. The volume of data is too great, the investments in on-prem storage infrastructure are too large, or the regulations governing their actions are too stringent to seriously contemplate putting data in the public cloud.

Compute, however, is another story. There are lots of scenarios when an organization may want to run an ap-plication in the cloud, but keep its data at home, said Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO of Velostrata, a startup whose software decouples storage from compute. They may want to use cloud compute for application modernization, for test and dev, or to accommodate utilization spikes. Meanwhile, keeping data on premises provides investment protection, meets compliance goals, or avoids massive data migration

efforts. It can also lay the foundation for a multi-cloud strategy, moving applications between clouds to avoid cloud lock-in, without having to make changes to their data stores.

“Decoupling compute and storage has a lot of implica-tions,” Ben-Shaul said.

In addition to severing the connections between stor-age and compute, the VeloStrata software streams and caches application images to the cloud from on-premises storage. It consists of two VMs—one running in VMware vCenter that mediates access to on-premises storage for reads and writes, and one in the cloud that communicates with the running compute processes, and integrates with monitoring engines.

“The whole idea is to be cloud-agnostic, and allow VMs to run natively in the target cloud environment,” Ben-Shaul said.

Enterprise Strategy Group’s Sinclair anticipates that the storage community will continue to put forth creative solutions to deliver high performance cloud storage. Ac-cording to its research, using some sort of off-premises cloud resources is IT organization’s top initiative for the coming year.

“There’s obviously a huge amount of interest, but at the same time, you really have to solve the speed of light challenge.” n

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


w


Survey SaysSAN increases to expand storage capacityHome

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D How much SAN and/or NAS storage capacity do you currently have installed?

D Which type of array are you looking to purchase?*

55D Percentage of respondents who intend to include solid-state (flash) storage in their storage purchase

SOURCE: PRIMARY STORAGE OPTIMIZATION SURVEY 2H2015; BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 445 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS.


SAN (block)

Unified array (file and block)

NAS (file)


62%

45%37%

500 TB-999 TB

101-249 TB

1PB+

250-499 TB

Under 100TB

14%

10%

9%

13%

54%


FOR ALL THE positive changes they have seen, many Dev-Ops shops still find themselves caught between highly Ag-ile app development and still-cumbersome IT operations. Could event-driven computing bridge that gap?

In an event-driven world, work is triggered by events such as user actions, sensors or messages from other ap-plications and services. That’s in contrast to the dominant procedural-programming model that defines a series of steps to be carried out.

“It’s really about turning around who is driving the bus,” said Jonathan Eunice, a DevOps architect at WayUp, an online job board in New York City. “In procedural pro-gramming, the program is driving the bus. In event-driven programming, users and results and things are driving it.”

In recent years, several cloud providers have begun to offer event-based automation services. The most well-known of these is Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, which runs code without users having to provision any servers. Industry experts believe that event-driven services such as these could take today’s software de-velopment techniques and add more agile, reactive and automated infrastructure operations, balancing out the lopsided DevOps equation.

“[Event-driven computing] is fundamental to folks

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getting the kind of productivity boost that they’re all being offered by their vendors telling them, ‘Hey, go Agile!’” said Evan Powell, CEO of StackStorm, an event-driven software maker based in Palo Alto, Calif., which boasts big Web-scale players such as Netflix among its custom-ers. “Agile isn’t enough if you don’t have ops acting in an Agile way.”

Modern, closed-loop automation that uses snippets of software code to reactively automate the infrastructure allows users to make the process of developing apps and managing their underlying resources more productive and Agile in the real world, Powell said.

“I think it is the missing piece,” Powell said.

EVENT-DRIVEN IN ACTION

IT pros who have put event-driven automation products into production agree with this assessment.

“Good software developers are not always good server administrators,” said Seamus James, software engineer for Betabrand, an online clothing retailer in San Francisco. “We don’t want them bogged down in the difficulties of server administration. Amazon and Lambda are taking out a lot of that difficulty and allowing software developers to write software, which is what we are supposed to do.”

Event-driven automation also allows for easier manage-ment of computing resources at a scale that is too large for humans to keep up with. For example, Betabrand first put Lambda to use when a marketing partnership with a popular gaming blog generated traffic to Betabrand’s website that overwhelmed servers in a traditional hosting environment.

“It demolished our servers,” James said. “Took them down in like 20 seconds.”

Meanwhile, James and his team had run across the Jaws platform (now rebranded Serverless), which deploys AWS Lambda functions with the Simple Storage Service (S3), and ties together all the pieces Amazon has available for Lambda automation in a command line interface. Beta-brand used this framework to overhaul its Web infrastruc-ture to accommodate the traffic spike.

The first step was for Betabrand to break down the company’s page design into a static website hosted on S3. Then, in order to notify customers when products they are interested in become available for purchase, Betabrand set up a Lambda function that collects email addresses and adds them to a DynamoDB database. This allowed Betabrand to capture marketing leads as one million unique visitors hit the website, without overwhelming the infrastructure.

n Many DevOps shops find themselves caught between highly Agile app dev and cumbersome IT ops.

n In recent years, several cloud providers have begun to offer event-based automation services.

n Event-driven automation allows for easier management of computing resources at a scale that is too large to keep up with.

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“It couldn’t have been easier to get that configured,” James said. And the initial bill, taking into account Ama-zon’s free tier of services? Seven cents.

That number grew to about $200 once S3 bandwidth costs were factored in, but the costs were still paltry com-pared with scaling out Web servers to accommodate the traffic, James said.

VidRoll is another example of an Amazon customer using event-driven computing to achieve infrastructure management at massive scale. The company processes billions of events per month in its advertising technology computing platform and has seen rapid growth. At first it was processing 4 billion data points per month; within six weeks this year that grew to 40 billion, and a few weeks after that, 200 billion.

“There are these network effects of scale which are very difficult to manage if you have to spin up your own servers and manage all of the peaks and spikes of traffic,” said James Young, CTO for VidRoll, which began using Lambda early in the beta. Within months, the company was on track to process 40 billion events a month with a team of four people.

“Having the ability to use Lambda allowed us not to have to worry about the underpinnings of how to keep the servers up,” Young said. Engineers can also resolve prob-lems with their code quickly, without having to coordinate across dev and ops teams.

Event-driven computing is also necessary when servers are located in places administrators can’t reach, but rely on frequently updated event analytics to function. That’s the case for Edeva, a Swedish company which makes

“smart” speed bumps. Edeva uses a software-as-a-service offering from Iron.io to allow servers in remote speed-bump locations to send data to a central analytics system for processing, which runs on AWS.

John Eskilsson, a consultant to Edeva who set up the Iron.io infrastructure, said its easy integration into the Yii software development framework and its early support for the Python language have made the remote management of servers both on and off AWS much more developer-friendly.

“It just makes sense to use a software as a service like that so you don’t have to manage all these extra servers and so on,” Eskilsson said.

MESSAGE QUEUING FOR THE MASSES

In some ways, what’s old is new again—for Iron.io and StackStorm’s products, old-fashioned message queuing is central to how the software operates. Iron.io even sells a separate message queuing product called IronMQ, which triggers events in sister software called IronWorker.

However, there are some differences, said StackStorm’s Powell. “The ability to go out to your systems, see how they’re performing actively or passively, take that back and then make decisions as to whether that is something that is actionable, all of that precedes then dropping [data] in the queue,” Powell said. “The difference is the transfor-mation and the conditional logic on the way in, and then having the proper [infrastructure] hooks on the way out.”

StackStorm’s product is meant to be wholly managed by the user, but cloud services can further streamline and


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abstract the message-queuing elements from users, to the point where applications can appear to run without requiring any servers at all.

One example of where cloud event-driven computing services can take the heavy lifting out of automation is by eliminating the need for applications to poll the envi-ronment looking for changes to kick off automation, said Lambda user Theodore Kim, director of SaaS operations for Jobvite, a talent acquisition software maker in San Mateo, Calif.

It’s unclear whether the AWS Lambda service uses poll-ing or message queuing somewhere in the back end, but to the user, Lambda functions appear to kick off immediately, without needing to wait for polling to take place.

“In the old days we’d drop [data] into a queue and poll against that, whereas with Lambda…it’s immediate,” said Kim. “It’s kind of a black box, where it’s all handled by the Lambda service. And for us it looks like it executes as soon as an event is triggered.”

COULD EVENT-DRIVEN COMPUTING

UPSTAGE MICROSERVICES?

As event-driven computing catches on, it’s bumping up against another exploding software development trend: containerization using Docker, and developing software in terms of microservices.

Like event-driven automation, containers and micro-services also promise application flexibility, automation between components and scalability. Event-driven com-puting and Docker aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive

technologies. In fact, to scale out containers in its EC2 Container Service, Amazon recommends a workaround involving Lambda to trigger the creation of new containers.

“When we scale this out, I’m not afraid at all of moving over to a Docker-based deployment,” said Edeva’s Eskils-son. “But the integration I’ve made into the Yii framework for pushing code up to Iron.io, it’s so streamlined I have frankly not seen the need to do [containers].”

For enterprise organizations forced to adapt a legacy architecture to the cloud, event-driven computing might be too big an architectural leap, said VidRoll’s Young, and containers offer a more Agile way of porting a legacy infrastructure into an automated, cloud-agnostic world.

In fact, Young’s company has developed the ability to flip-flop the architecture of its application between Lambda and Docker, to hedge its bets as its scales up with Lambda. “Containers make sense, because they’re a better abstraction than having to maintain a complete server,” Young said.

IT shops will have different preferences on developer productivity vs. operational freedom, said StackStorm’s Powell.

Container-based compute has a higher potential for in-ter-cloud portability of workloads. Conversely, things like Lambda “are up there with data gravity in terms of sources of lock-in,” Powell said. “Literally, your business logic at least in that one application is being run by Amazon as a service.” n

BETH PARISEAU is senior news writer for SearchAWS. Write to her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @PariseauTT.


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IT’S HARD TO predict what the biggest thing to hit the data center will be in 2016. Big data? Hyper-convergence? Hy-brid cloud? I’ve decided that this is the year that contain-ers will arrive in a big way—much earlier and faster than many expect, catching unprepared IT shops by surprise.

Unlike other technologies like big data that require vision and forward investment, containers are a natural next step for application packaging, deployment and hosting that don’t require massive shifts in mindset or vision. It’s just quicker and easier to develop and deploy an application in a container than it is to build a virtual appliance. Containerized architectures also have the compelling operational and financial benefits of cheaper

or free licensing, more efficient use of physical resources, better scalability and ultimately service reliability. Look-ing ahead, containers will help organizations take better advantage of hybrid or cross-cloud environments.

Server virtualization was also a great idea when it first came out with significant advantages over physical host-ing, but it still took many years for it to mature (remem-ber how long it was before anyone hosted an important database in a VM?). The same has been true for private or hybrid clouds, new storage technologies and even big data. But even though containers are just out of the gate, they have gotten farther down the maturity road by leveraging the roadmap laid out by server virtualization. And you can get a jumpstart by using trusted hypervisors like VMware vSphere Integrated Containers to shepherd in containers while the native container world polishes up its rougher edges. Because containers are sleeker and slimmer than VMs (they are essentially just processes), they will slip into the data center even if IT isn’t looking or paying at-tention (and even if IT doesn’t want them yet).

Containers were originally created to host stateless microservices-based application layers, but the latest Docker releases show that containers are destined to host far more than microservices. For example, with Flocker plug-ins providing persistent storage you can immediately containerize just about any application. Stir in one of sev-eral software defined networking options and you have a

THE NEXT BIG THING

The Year of the Container Containers are maturing at a rapid pace—and in 2016, IT better be prepared. BY MIKE MATCHETT


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scale-out container-ship! As a result there are already big data, relational databases and software defined storage solutions running as containers.

And unlike with hyper-converged architectures, con-tainers’ fundamentally fluid design means nothing is really going to lock you in. In fact, if you run SDS and SDN and containers, you might claim to be “super” hyper-converged.

It will take years before we containerize everything, and there are some thorny challenges yet to work through before container architectures become fully general-pur-pose platforms, including how to guarantee application performance service levels when an application consists of multiple (tens, thousands?) of containers, many of which might be shared with other apps in a complex web of dependencies. We’ll need new management solutions to visualize where problems or contention have crept in, as well as big-data-powered predictive automation to re-mediate issues and optimize performance and cost. And because containerized applications are extremely fluid—they can easily migrate across physical, virtual, and cloud servers—we’ll need tools to dynamically arbitrate and migrate containers across infrastructures.

When will all this happen? I predict that IT organi-zations will likely be supporting some kind of container “ship” in production within the next six months. Vendors

are already racing to see who can put together the best converged container “distro” and hyper-converged scale-out platform to support them. Application vendors are quickly rolling out containerized versions of their wares. Containers are coming quickly!

Container architectures might help IT worry less on what’s in a container, and concentrate more on running the best possible “ship.” But like with server virtualization, eventually you will want to map across the container “ab-straction” from application through to infrastructure. To get there, start looking for ways to gain the total visibility that you will need for troubleshooting, resource planning and service assurance in the impending containerized data center. n

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

IT ORGS WILL LIKELY BE SUPPORTING SOME KIND OF CONTAINER “SHIP” IN PRODUCTION WITHIN THE NEXT SIX MONTHS.



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HAVE YOU HEARD the news? Containers are here and will be the savior of IT! If you aren’t familiar with containers they encapsulate applications in a way that hides operating systems and other pesky infrastructure layers. Application developers can check out a container image, install their application, and then deploy it repeatedly. With these techniques, developers can build, ship, and run any app, anywhere, according to Docker, arguably the largest con-tainer software vendor.

I’m being sarcastic about containers being our savior, though. I see a lot of parallels between Docker and Java.

Java promised the ability to write an application once and run it anywhere. That was a bold promise, and Sun Microsystems (and now Oracle) almost completely failed to deliver on it. We are forever mired in Java version problems, forward and backward version incompatibility, platform incompatibilities, performance issues between platforms, security problems, and so on.

We see some of these same problems with containers. Despite the promise of abstraction from the underlying operating system, there still is an underlying operating system that needs care and feeding. In particular, it needs updates and patching, which developers rarely do. A ma-jority of container images contain serious unremediated security issues, studies show. Furthermore, there are big trust issues in the container world. Is it okay that your developers are building applications on container images built by unknown people on the Internet? How do you know that those images are safe, and don’t contain back doors or malware?

There are versioning problems, too, just like Java. There is different container software out there, such as Docker, Rocket, LXC, VMware ThinApp, Solaris Zones, etc., and it isn’t uncommon for two different development teams to have chosen two different technologies. Each technology has compatibility issues with underlying infrastructure, too. Developers need version X of their container technol-ogy but the operating systems my organization supports

IN THE MIX

Behold Our Latest Free LunchContainers require IT to ask itself the questions it always has—how are things secured and how do we prove it? BY BOB PLANKERS


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and secures aren’t compatible, or require heavy retrofit-ting, which increases staff time commitments.

On top of this, there are very few management inter-faces for containers. Chargeback/showback is unheard of. Security tools are nonexistent. Backup and restore isn’t possible in the normal frameworks, either, which is a big problem not only for daily operations but also disaster recovery and business continuity. Change man-agement is laughed at. Given all the holes in the process the pessimist in me starts thinking that containers are an elaborate way for developers to shirk the responsibilities of traditional IT, especially around risk management. And while it’s clear that developers are eating the free lunch that containers promise, I often wonder who is paying for the meal, because it’s a very expensive one.

So what do we do about it? For starters, we start asking all the same hard questions we’ve always asked. How are these things secured, and how do we prove it? How do we handle an incident with a container? Where is application

data stored and how is it protected? Can we standardize all teams around one container platform? Who is building and maintaining “gold master” container images, and if it isn’t our organization, how do we know we can trust

them? How do our applications get security updates? How do containers mesh with our change management process, and how do we do capacity planning?

Because when all is said and done, there really no such thing as a free lunch. n

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

THERE ARE VERY FEW MANAGEMENT INTERFACES FOR CONTAINERS.

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