Ready for Cloud Storage? Key Considerations & Lessons Learned

A 2018 survey of Enterprise organisations by Ensono and the Cloud Industry Forum showed that 89% of the 500 participants surveyed indicated that legacy technology within their businesses were preventing or hampering their ability to execute effective digital transformation.

Perhaps the greatest legacy within many organisations is the mainframe estate that brings the challenges of punitive vendor commercials, risks with maintaining on-going skills, lifecycle planning issues and the sheer volume of residual workload that remains within these estates. With increasing pressure to modernise the applications, methodologies and tooling surrounding these legacy environments, the mainframe is often seen as holding businesses back but does this need to be the case?

This webinar will explore different approaches to enabling these legacy systems to be part of the transformational journey rather than a blocker and examine how organisations can re-define the legacy blockers as positive rather than negative attributes.

Enterprise Architecture is dead. Long live Enterprise Architecture!

In the face of DevOps and Agile development methodologies, many enterprises have backed off entirely from the concept of an enterprise architecture. That's a mistake. Enterprise Architecture is needed more urgently than ever before--but not the old, silo-ed, inflexible architecture.

Next-generation Enterprise Architecture needs to be fast, flexible, and as adaptive as next-generation development methodologies. It needs to encompass the radical changes in infrastructure, from virtualization to cloud- and mobile-first.

And it's absolutely essential for enterprises who want to align their technology investments with their fast-moving business goals.

This webinar reviews the fundamentals of enterprise architecture and provides a blueprint for a next-generation EA that encompasses DevOps, cloud, mobility, virtualization, microservices, and more!

Scale-out storage is increasingly popular for cloud, high-performance computing, machine learning, and certain enterprise applications. It offers the ability to grow both capacity and performance at the same time and to distribute I/O workloads across multiple machines.

But unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. Clients often access multiple storage servers simultaneously; data typically replicates or migrates from one storage node to another; and metadata or management servers must stay in sync with each other as well as communicating with clients. Due to these demands, traditional network architectures and speeds may not work well for scale-out storage, especially when it’s based on flash. Join this webinar to learn:

•Scale-out storage solutions and what workloads they can address
•How your network may need to evolve to support scale-out storage
•Network considerations to ensure performance for demanding workloads
•Key considerations for all flash

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog: http://bit.ly/scale-out-q-a

Building a cloud storage architecture requires both storage vendors, cloud service providers and large enterprises to consider new technical and economic paradigms in order to enable a flexible and cost efficient architecture.

Economic:
Cloud infrastructure is often procured by service providers and large enterprises in the traditional way – prepay for expected future storage needs and over provision for unexpected changes in demand. This requires large capital expenditures with slow cost recovery based on fluctuating customer adoption. Giving these cloud service providers flexibility in the procurement model for their storage allows them to more closely align the expenditure on infrastructure resources with the cost recovery from customers, optimizing the use of both CapEx and OpEx budgets.

Technical:
Clouds inherently require often unpredictable scalability – both up and down. Building a storage architecture with the ability to rapidly allocate resources for a specific customer need and reallocate resources based on changing customer requirements allows the cloud service provider to optimize storage capacity and performance pools in their data center without compromising the responsiveness to the change in needs. Such architecture should also align to the datacenter level orchestration system to allow for even higher level of resource optimization and flexibility.

In this webcast, you will learn:
•How modern storage technology allows you to build this infrastructure
•The role of software defined storage
•Accounting principles
•How to model cloud costs of new applications and or re-engineering existing applications
•Performance considerations

Today's demand for high-speed everything brings potential unforeseen challenges to your infrastructure environments. A single rogue failure or a noisy neighbor can result in a loss in customer satisfaction or confidence. Plus, when your virtualized applications delivery infrastructure are siloed, small problems can turn into big situations. This all quickly leads to the all too familiar IT war room scenarios.

Does your enterprise experience application outages and/or application slowdowns? For those who have experienced these problems, you also have experienced the IT war room, which conjures memories of extreme inefficiencies - from tedious conference calls, to blame storms, with each person ready to be the first to prove their innocence, rather than contribute to solving the problem at hand. How did we get here?

Join 451 Research and Virtual Instruments as we discuss:

- Technology trends that led to the nightmare war room scenario
- Siloed monitoring tools and organizational models that exacerbate the problem
- Options for improving – or even eliminating – the war room
- Benefits you can expect to realize by solving inefficient war rooms

Join this live panel discussion with experts at VMworld Europe to learn what the future holds for data centers and hybrid cloud management.

Tune into this interactive Q&A session with world-renowned Data Center, Cloud, Virtualization, Storage experts as they discuss the following:

- How to develop an integrated IT strategy for a modernized data center
- Trends in virtualized infrastructure, applications, hyper-converged and more
- How technologies like HCI, software-defined and automation are shifting the data center landscape, and what IT leaders can do to prepare
- How to navigate through the cloud-native journey with containers, microservices, Kubernetes, and PaaS

This live panel will be streamed directly from VMworld Europe in Barcelona! Join us for live Q&A from the comfort of your desk.

Panellists:
Lee James, CTO, Rackspace
Eran Brown, CTO, EMEA, Infinidat
Tim Lawrence, Head of Pre Sales and Services, UKCloud
Curtis W. Preston (aka “Mr. Backup”), Chief Technologist, Druva
Jonathan Delicata, Senior Enterprise Cloud Architect, Nationwide

Join this live panel discussion with experts at VMworld Europe for up-to-date trends on what's disrupting the market and how to take your business to the next level.

Tune into this interactive Q&A session with world renowned IT and business leaders while they discuss the following:

- How to declutter and take on today's most pressing IT priorities
- The latest technologies, methodologies and best practices for IT leaders
- How to ensure your organization is primed for 21st century trends from both a business and tech perspective

This live panel will be streamed directly from VMworld Europe! Join us for live Q&A from the comfort of your desk.

Panellists
Dave Welch, CTO, House of Brick Technologies
Oliver Lindner, Head of Business Line DCIM, FNT Software
Jay Hibbin, Sales Director, Financial Services, CenturyLink EMEA
Christine McMonigal, Director of Hyperconverged Marketing, Intel Corporation

With just a few days to VMware’s premier digital infrastructure event, we've gathered some of the elite speakers who will be taking the stage to debate the hottest solutions, trends and the biggest opportunities and challenges for businesses to successfully embrace digital change.

- Innovation Through Digital Transformation
- The Future of Data Centres and Cloud in a Virtualized World
- Securing Your Cloud Networks
- Next-Gen Trends and Technologies

Join this session to get a glimpse of the innovations that will accelerate your journey to a software-defined business—from mobile devices to the data center and the cloud!

This session (and VMworld Europe) is specifically aimed at CTOs, CIOs, heads of IT infrastructure, security specialists and technical experts.

What will they be talking about at the Fira Gran Via Barcelona, on the 5 – 8 November 2018, what do they want to hear about, what are they looking forward to?

Moderator: Omar Alassil, Cloud Solution Owner, Nokia

Panellists;
Dave Welch, CTO, House of Brick Technologies
Melinda Safdarzadeh, Senior Business Manager, Hybrid Cloud, Data Center Group at Intel

For datacenter applications requiring low-latency access to persistent storage, byte-addressable persistent memory (PM) technologies like 3D XPoint and MRAM are attractive solutions. Network-based access to PM, labeled here PM over Fabrics (PMoF), is driven by data scalability and/or availability requirements. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network protocols are a good match for PMoF, allowing direct RDMA Write of data to remote PM. However, the completion of an RDMA Write at the sending node offers no guarantee that data has reached persistence at the target. This webcast will outline extensions to RDMA protocols that confirm such persistence and additionally can order successive writes to different memories within the target system.

The primary target audience is developers of low-latency and/or high-availability datacenter storage applications. The presentation will also be of broader interest to datacenter developers, administrators and users.

After you watch, check-out our Q&A blog from the webcast: http://bit.ly/2DFE7SL

The conversation about the transition to a Cloud-first world is often dominated by Cloud computing but business communications is one of the most affected areas of this transformation.

The analyst firm MZA predicts that the value of the hosted cloud market will more than triple by 2022 to $7.2 billion worldwide with 2.5x growth in the number of Cloud users.

IT leaders are increasingly having to do more with less while simultaneously turning their IT and communications infrastructure into something that drives growth. This is happening against a background of changing models of work and the need to continuously improve the customer experience.

As part of a quest to make life easier for the IT leader of today we will explore why it’s important to also consider your business communications.

- Why bringing your communications and not just your computing into the cloud matters
- The relevance of cloud to improving the customer experience
- How collaboration is boosted in a unified communications environment
- What paths exist on your journey to the cloud including on-premises, hybrid and cloud

Andy has a 25 year track record in business communications with a background in senior management roles in Marketing, Sales, and Pre-Sales consultancy. Today Andy leads Mitel Sales and Sales Engineering training initiatives throughout the EMEA and APAC regions.

This broad experience has given Andy valuable perspectives (both technical and customer use based) for today’s IT and communications leaders and technicians.

Andy has taken part in some major industry milestones including deploying the first high speed network for the Government and being the design authority on one of the world’s largest switch networks.

While cloud adoption continues to increase, enterprises are faced with an ongoing talent shortage. According to global consulting firm Capgemini, nearly 70% of organizations believe that the skills gap has a direct impact on their bottom line revenue.

With that in mind, many organizations are exploring cloud training programs but also discovering that the traditional learning and development (L&D) system is broken. In this webinar, Albert Qian will discuss the characteristics and traits that enterprise executives should consider when investing in training, including:

- Which elements are key in an effective and modern learning platform
- Why leaders should embrace guided, structured training in accomplishing innovation goals
- Why standardized learning curriculum is not enough, especially as more enterprises invest in multi-cloud
- And much more!

Protocol Analysis for High-Speed Fibre Channel Fabrics in the Data Center: Aka, Saving Your SAN (& Sanity)

The driving force behind adopting new tools and processes in test and measurement practices is the desire to understand, predict, and mitigate the impact of Sick but not Dead (SBND) conditions in datacenter fabrics. The growth and centralization of mission critical datacenter SAN environments has exposed the fact that many small yet seemingly insignificant problems have the potential of becoming large scale and impactful events, unless properly contained or controlled.

Root cause analysis requirements now encompass all layers of the fabric architecture, and new storage protocols that usurp the traditional network stack (i.e. FCoE, iWARP, NVMe over Fabrics, etc.) for purposes of expedited data delivery place additional analytical demands on the datacenter manager.
To be sure, all tools have limitations in their effectiveness and areas of coverage, so a well-constructed “collage” of best practices and effective and efficient analysis tools must be developed. To that end, recognizing and reducing the effect of those limitations is essential.

This webinar will introduce participants to Protocol Analysis tools and how they may be incorporated into the “best practices” application of SAN problem solving. We will review:
•The protocol of the Phy
•Use of “in-line” capture tools
•Benefits of purposeful error injection for developing and supporting today’s high-speed Fibre Channel storage fabrics

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://bit.ly/2P0hsqp