Ready for Cloud Storage? Key Considerations & Lessons Learned

Flash is the hottest technology in the storage industry today. But with all its touted advantages, there are some challenges – including how to effectively measure the performance benefits for your own environment.

Although flash can be expensive, most of the flash-based storage arrays implement sophisticated compression, deduplication and pattern reduction processing to minimize the amount of data written to flash memory in order to lower the cost per GB and extend the life of flash memory.

Effectively measuring the performance of flash arrays requires more than the basic freeware benchmarking tools and following the steps documented by the SNIA SSSI specification. It requires the need for specifying complex data patterns in these data reduction technologies. Measuring performance without taking these features into account could falsely overstate the performance of a flash array by a factor of 2 or more.

Attend this presentation to learn how to best validate the performance of your potential flash storage arrays in order to optimize costs and mitigate risk.

Legacy data center network architectures are typically static, inflexible and manually provisioned, making them unsuitable for the scale and agility required of a cloud business model. Emerging cloud delivery models incorporate automated service provisioning in a virtualized, multi-tenant environment to achieve scale and agility. Dynamic service chaining is a critical component in building an on-demand model for consumption of L4-L7 application network services. In this session we will cover how dynamic service chaining is integrated into the SDN and cloud orchestration platforms to deliver a highly available, secure and accelerated infrastructure.

Study of data centers reveals the average computer room has cooling capacity that is nearly four times the IT heat load. When running cooling capacity is excessively over-implemented, then potentially large operating cost reductions are possible by turning off cooling units and/or reducing fan speeds for units with variable frequency drives (VFD). Using data from 45 sites reviewed by Upsite Technologies, this presentation will show how you can calculate, benchmark, interpret, and benefit from a simple and practical metric called the Cooling Capacity Factor (CCF). Calculating the CCF is the quickest and easiest way to determine cooling infrastructure utilization and potential gains to be realized by AFM improvements.

A new class of software defined storage ServerSAN solutions promise to bring to the staid world of storage the disruption, and efficiencies, that virtualization has brought to computing. ServerSANs, typified by VMware’s VSAN and hyperconvirged solutions from Simplivity and Nutanix use software, running under a hypervisor, to take SSDs and spinning disks into a common, high performance storage pool.

Can ServerSANs replace the physical SANs and disk arrays the way virtual servers have replaced their physical counterparts or are ServerSANs a niche solution for remote offices and SMBs? Either way it’s clear this new technology should be in your storage solution bag of tricks.

In this presentation we’ll explore the common elements ServerSAN solutions have and compare some of the leading solutions and their unique solutions to common problems like fault tolerance and data protection.

In today's data centers, the need for flexibility and agility is undeniable. As businesses continue to grow and leverage technology to remain competitive, they require a new way of simplified IT. IT organizations can no longer deal with complex, cumbersome legacy infrastructure that can't keep at the pace of the business.

In this webinar, discover:
- What is hyper convergence
- The benefits of converged infrastructure
- Best practices and use cases for leveraging hyper converged architectures

This is a continuation of our 2-part series on Big Data Visibility with Network Packet Brokers (NPBs).

Big data techniques and technologies can be powerful tools for scaling network monitoring and forensics. They can also facilitate new use cases for network data, potentially beyond the scope of Operations.

Gordon Beith, Director of Product Management at VSS Monitoring, will discuss practical considerations for migrating to a Big Data Visibility Architecture, including:
• Accommodating network volume, velocity and variety using sophisticated hardware preprocessing and APIs
• Metadata versus flow statistics versus full packet capture – considerations and use cases for each
• Open versus proprietary formats for storage
• Pros and cons of integrated capture/storage/analysis solutions versus separate capture/ storage solutions coupled with virtualized analysis probes
• Addressing retrieval in an “open” forensics model
• Leveraging a distributed computing framework for processing large-scale data stores

High availability has traditionally required virtualization and a SAN. Then came virtual storage appliances (VSAs) which were managed like a physical SAN but ran as a virtual machine. Now comes hypervisor convergence, the latest trend that eliminates the entire concept of a SAN, both physical or virtual. Is this hype? Or can this latest technology save you time and money? Let Scale Computing show you how HC3 can radically change your environment for the better.

HC3 represents the cutting edge of infrastructure innovation: A highly available platform with the scalability of the cloud and the security of your own servers, coupled with a radical reduction in both upfront costs and TCO. No more VMware. No more SAN. No more headaches.

This is part 1 of our 2-part series on Big Data Visibility with Network Packet Brokers (NPBs).

Even as network data has exploded in volume, velocity and variety, network monitoring solutions have been behind the curve in adopting new technologies and approaches to cost-effectively scale and accommodate a widening virtualization trend. Customers are demanding greater freedom in how applications are deployed and are moving to a consolidated, shared model of data using big data frameworks, such as Hadoop, which enable large-scale processing and retrieval for multiple stakeholders.

Join Andrew R. Harding, VP of Product Line Management at VSS Monitoring, as he discusses:
- Big data and its implications for network monitoring and forensics
- Why network monitoring solutions are lagging from a virtualization standpoint and why this is a problem for network owners
- How certain traditional network monitoring functions will eventually be offloaded to adjacent technologies
- How Network Packet Brokers can accelerate the adoption of virtualized probes, “open” storage, and big data technologies within network management / monitoring
• How a Big Data Visibility architecture can enable network data to become part of the “big data store,” allowing it to integrate with the rest of enterprise data

Frictionless access to information makes everyone think they can do this at home. But, in fact, deploying OpenStack on optimized hardware hardware presents a hatful of challenges that your infrastructure team might not have thought about.

In this session, we'll look at a range of challenges that can stop your project before it makes it to deployment. The session is divided into two topics that we’ll dive into:

(a) Introduction to scalability techniques: clouds from a hardware perspective.
Building a large cloud is more than just throwing hardware into a hall and lighting it up. Network, storage, compute and scaling strategies must be designed in from the beginning. In the current state of the art of OpenStack, some decisions are easy to unwind later on and some are impossible. This portion of the presentation will focus on describing the steps you need to execute to build a successful cloud and which decisions you can push off to later.

(b) The second section of the session will focus on strategies to simplify the optimized hardware experience. If you’re assembling racks on onsite, you need a plan to deal with everything from cabling and airflow to the NIC firmware and drivers. Each of these details can delay your project and run up costs. We’ll also look at the trend toward scalable rack-level units that are factory integrated and tested.

Attendees will also learn about some of the simple things that are obvious with enterprise hardware but can be challenging in any optimized hardware environment. Examples include power on/off, power monitoring, system health/event monitoring, remote console access.

You'll leave this session armed with practical knowledge about running OpenStack on Open Compute and other optimized hardware hardware.

85% of enterprises permit BYOD, but only 25-30% of them actually have policies and technology to manage these devices. What is your business doing to ensure that the content on that device stays secure, regardless of what device your employees are using? If you are considering moving to a BYOD strategy or are in the midst of doing so, join this webinar to learn how to develop and execute a BYOD plan in your company. We'll talk about major challenges from creating a BYOD strategy and best practices from ensuring that the content on your device stays secure with Box.

Learn why benchmarking your current network and server virtualization infrastructure is vital to your organizations long-term Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) success. Benchmarking will yield your IT organization the knowledge needed for solid planning, effective execution and post-migration performance validation.

The future of work sees changes to how employees work, how managers lead, and how organizations are structured. However, technology still remains the central nervous system of organizations and things like enables flexible work, collaboration, communication, and BYOD. In short, IT helps organizations be competitive. But how is IT changing in the context of new work behaviors and expectations, a multi-generational workforce, the cloud, globalization, and many of the other trends that are shaping the world of work? Join us in this session as a panel of experts debates and explores how IT is changing and what the future of IT looks like.

As more and more software product companies are looking to migrate their traditional on-premise software to a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering they are discovering it takes longer than first expected and comes with many challenges.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides a great way to create highly scalable applications. PaaS accelerates application development, testing, deployment and maintenance of your SaaS application.

Join Mark Eisenberg, a thought leader in cloud and mobile, and Motifworks’ Nitin Agarwal to learn how to accelerate your migration to SaaS using PaaS. This webinar will feature a review of the Windows Azure PaaS platform and Motifworks SaaS development framework to further reduce your time-to-market.

Attendees will learn:
* The benefits of Platform as a Service over Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
* How PaaS accelerates development and delivery of SaaS
* Azure Cloud Services (PaaS) overview
* Best practices for great cloud application on Azure PaaS

Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks, will present an end-to-end open source technology stack for SDN R&D, spanning switch hardware, software and SDN controllers. He will touch on the Open Compute Projects' switch design, Open Network Linux, Project Indigo, Project Floodlight and others. He will also discuss how these projects fit together, their various evolutionary paths, and how this stack fits in the landscape of emerging commercial and open source SDN products.

Join Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, Troy Toman, Cloud Architect at Rackspace and Das Kamhout, IT Principal Engineer at Intel, to discuss updates on Icehouse, the latest OpenStack software release, available on Thursday, April 17. OpenStack Icehouse is the ninth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds. Mark will also review the next OpenStack Summit agenda taking place in Atlanta, Georgia May 12-16, 2014 at the Georgia World Conference Center.

This webinar will cover:
- The latest features and trends from OpenStack Icehouse
- Updated growth metrics from the OpenStack community
- Opportunities to learn more at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta May 12-16, 2014