Risks & Rewards of Cloud & Hybrid Data Centers

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.

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.

All Data Centers, whether great or small, have one thing in common; they have a heat transfer (cooling) problem. Not even ten years ago, cooling problems were solved with the purchase and installation of another Computer Room Air Condition (CRAC). Today’s cooling methodologies are truly amazing, but can be very intrusive and expensive to implement. It seems that Data Center Managers ‘stuck’ with a ‘legacy’ data center have been given two options; either adopt the latest and greatest cooling methodologies or move your Information Technology (IT) to the cloud. In many cases today, the question may be “How do we keep the wheels on the donkey cart while we figure out how and when we go to the cloud?”

Join Cask to understand issues such as:
- Why your cooling solution may not be as pathetic as you think.
- How Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can help you understand how heat transfer works (or doesn’t work) in your data center.
- What you can do to inexpensively update your cooling methodology.

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

The emergence of “the Cloud” has introduced unprecedented levels of automation and virtualization to the data center environment. The Cloud is now maturing to virtualize network functions along with the computing resources. Understanding orchestration is imperative for succeeding with Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization

Three Key Take-Aways:
- What does the “Next Gen Datacenter” look like
- Driving better service stability through DevOps
- Leveraging Business Process Management to align with the business

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

The performance of databases often slows as data and business grows, users find new and demanding ways to leverage applications, and those applications mature and expand in functionality. Whenever a key database slows down, SQL or NoSQL, the business damage can be widespread and it usually becomes a high priority effort to remediate.

At Taneja Group we’ve noted 5 major ways that IT operations can improve database performance, including a couple of quick and ready ideas that impose little risk or cost. In this 30 minute webcast, we'll look at why IT operations often gets the responsibility for database performance, and the IT-centric options they can pursue.

Mike Matchett brings to Taneja Group over 20 years experience in managing and marketing IT datacenter solutions particularly at the nexus of performance, capacity and virtualization. Currently he is focused on IT optimization for virtualization and convergence across servers, storage and networks, especially to handle the requirements of mission-critical applications, Big Data analysis, and the next generation data center. Mike has a deep understanding of systems management, IT operations, and solutions marketing to help drive architecture, messaging, and positioning initiatives.

Frictionless access to information makes everyone think they can do this at home. But, in fact, deploying OpenStack on optimized 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.