The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech.  It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself.

This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

Now, Cisco, EMC, VMware, HP, Oracle and potentially many others want to own your data centre.  They want you bought into their computing stack.  Over time, I suspect many of those same companies want to move you to their cloud infrastructure offerings, even if they don’t offer them today.  This will be both directly and indirectly.  There will be the direct model, where the vendor offers cloud services to you under their name; there will be the indirect model where their technology powers the cloud provider, or is offered as a service.  It’s at this point the 3Par acquisition becomes much more interesting.

3Par already have many customers in the cloud services sector.  In fact they sell their hardware on the virtues of multi-tenancy, reduced cost through thin provisioning, tight integration with virtual hypervisors and so on.  In this growth sector of the industry, cost is a key driver and no end user or company will pay more than they need for storage.  This means Enterprise arrays like those from Hitachi and EMC won’t play a central role in this future, but rather storage devices which provide the highest efficiency will.  Where do all the major players stand?

• EMC have entered the market with a brand new platform – Atmos.  Although withdrawn as a direct service, Atmos continues to be available from partners.  EMC have chosen to use their own technology as the foundation for cloud.  In addition, VPLEX provides the ability to virtualise the storage layer, including federation features that fit well with VMware.
• HP have a strong blade server offering for their cloud infrastructure.  Matrix provides orchestration for the server, network and some parts of the storage layer, however this work is incomplete and doesn’t fit well with the high end XP arrays.  Slotting 3Par into the storage layer would provide a storage platform well suited to HPs unified computing infrastructure.  It means EVA can be quietly dropped and XP can be retained (in whatever future guise) for high end customers (including mainframe) and if required, gradually dropped.
• Cisco have chosen to partner with EMC rather than acquire storage technology itself.  In fact, looking and both EMC and Cisco, they need each other; EMC have no server platform, Cisco have no storage; it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, a bit like Jack Sprat and his wife.  At this stage, Cisco could have purchased 3Par and provided and end-to-end solution, but clearly that would be a big step and would require kicking EMC to the kerb, something they obviously don’t want to do (yet).
• Hitachi have server and storage offerings, however Blade Symphony is mainly sold in domestic Japan and not widely advertised globally.  They do have the potential to provide an end-to-end offering as Hitachi also sell networking equipment.  Key for Hitachi will be credibility in a market they don’t currently play in.
• IBM should have all the components of a consolidated infrastructure but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of discussion about their offerings.  They appear to have two strategies – Dynamic Infrastructure and Cloud Computing but their offerings aren’t clear.
• Dell clearly wanted 3Par to fit into their medium to high-end storage offerings.  Today Equallogic has successfully met their SMB requirements, but they OEM technology from EMC (CLARiiON and Symmetrix) for the rest.  Acquiring 3Par would remove that dependency and allow Dell to offer end-to-end technology as their own products.
• Netapp have a self-proclaimed unified architecture that does fit well with virtualisation from VMware.  However they don’t own any other parts of the technology stack and so must partner to deliver unified offerings.  Netapp are covering all bases by offering solutions with VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, but none of these could be described as the unified stack other vendors have.
• Oracle already provide an integrated infrastructure based around their Exadata acquisitions and of course all of the Sun Microsystems technology, however I’m not sure many companies would see the Oracle offerings as other than tied directly to their database platform and not for virtualisation.

Overall, 3Par fit the requirements of HP & Dell to provide integrated technology offerings.  The move to the cloud will require leaner and efficient storage products, plus tight integration and orchestration.  It’s all about positioning today for bigger returns tomorrow.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | 3Par Acquisition: The Future For The Storage Industry
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

After years spent focusing on personal technology, businesses are increasingly turning back to the enterprise. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is the poor economy. Individuals simply have less free cash to spend on gadgets and software, and the meagre profits are increasingly going into the pockets of a single company: Apple.

The corporate IT market is much more dynamic and competitive, with a few very large “superpower” companies discovering their power to drive purchasing decisions. If a supplier can create an integrated “stack” of hardware and software, they can push product purchases that might otherwise be overlooked or postponed. This is the main reason that enterprise IT acquisitions work so well: Where a small company must fight to sell their product, a large one can hitch it to a much more strategic sale and have it pulled along.

The old IBM model is the prototype, with that company once selling everything from office equipment to datacenter gear as well as the consulting and integration services to make it all work.

HP has spent almost two decades bulking up to become the new IBM, buying their way into open systems laptops, desktops, and servers (Compaq), networking (3Com), services (EDS), and storage (Compaq, LeftHand, Ibrix, and perhaps 3Par). HP has been remarkably proficient at executing on this enterprise plan: In talking to enterprise IT folks, I often hear IBM-esque sentiments regarding the new HP. They tell me they’re willing to give HP the benefit of the doubt when it comes to new technologies and products, buying on basis of the company’s reputation and ability to make everything work. This bodes well for the company’s post-Hurd future, and HP has the most-complete “enterprise stack” in the business.

But HP has a target on its back, pinned there by Dell. The folks from Round Rock believe they can be more efficient (and thus profitable) than HP in the same markets, and have been making moves to fortify their enterprise offerings. Dell was always more of a manufacturing than R&D business, but they have shown a desire to broaden their focus. Intrigued by the high-margin mid-enterprise storage business built from their EqualLogic acquisition and their success selling EMC storage, Dell is moving into the enterprise. They matched HP/EDS by purchasing Perot and have made smaller buys in storage (Ocarina, Exanet) as well as the big move for 3Par.

The next big emerging stack player is Oracle. The acquisition of Sun gave Oracle a strong hardware base to complement their command of enterprise software, and many expect further acquisitions. But Oracle is playing a different game than HP and Dell, focusing on the high-margin enterprise space and ignoring more competitive outlying areas. Many suspect the company might make a play in the network space (Brocade, Juniper, and F5 have been mentioned) but storage is possible as well. CEO Larry Ellison is a major investor in Pillar Data Systems, so many expect a spin-in here. But Oracle has the appetite for something much bigger, even EMC or NetApp.

Then there is Cisco, who have attempted to parlay their data center networking strength into a broader position. But Cisco’s halting moves into storage (Fibre Channel switching and SAN extension) did not displace the market leaders, and their server products (UCS) have not made much of a dent on HP, IBM, and Dell either. A solid partnership with EMC has delayed further forays into the enterprise storage market, and Cisco seems puzzlingly interested in low-margin access businesses (Linksys, Flip) and their Cius tablet.

There are other players in the enterprise space as well. EMC has diversified under CEO Joe Tucci, taking a dominant position in server virtualization (VMware) and making a strong enterprise security acquisition (RSA). But the many faces of enterprise storage remains EMC’s strength, and they seem content to partner with Cisco for a stack sale. Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu also offer varying enterprise hardware and software stacks, but their comparatively small sales presence in the US market limits their ability to execute. In the final analysis, only IBM, HP, Dell, and perhaps Oracle can claim to be enterprise IT superpowers at this point.

Image credit: Steam Engine by Stuck in Customs

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Meet the Enterprise IT Superpowers
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 8: Symantec Application HA, VirtualStore, and NetBackup 7
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage, Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast

I was lucky enough last week to be involved in a Gestalt IT conference call with Symantec.  The conference call was designed to give us all a sneak preview of what Symantec were planning to announce at VMworld 2010 in a couple of weeks.  Unfortunately it was under embargo, that is until today!

There were a couple of announcements being made, Symantec introduced a new NFS storage product called VirtualStore and made some further announcements about NetBackup 7 and new VMware specific features.  However the most interesting announcement on the call for me was the release of Symantec Application HA for VMware.

Symantec have been looking at why customers are not going “the last mile” with virtualisation.  Why are customers not deploying their Tier 1 applications on their virtual platforms? Symantec’s view on this was that customers still have issues with application level failure within guest VM’s.  This product has been designed to fill that void and at present is a product with no real competitors.

As the call progressed the current HA options were described by Symantec and discussed by the group. The obvious one is VMware HA which covers a physical host failure event. Within the VMware HA product there is also VM monitoring which covers you in the event of an OS level failure event, such as a  blue screen.  Then you can of course employ other technologies such as OS level clustering, however you then have to take heed of caveats that hinder the ability to use features such as vMotion and DRS.

I’m always sceptical when I see new virtualisation products, one of my fears is that companies are attempting to just jump on the crest of the wave that is virtualisation. Symantec are obviously a bit more established than your average company, but as always the jury is out until we see a final product doing the business for real.  It transpired during the call that the product is actually based on Symantec Veritas Cluster Server,  a product with a long history in application availability.

Veritas Cluster Server has a lot of in built trigger scenarios for common products such as Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange Server and  IIS.  On top of this built in, out of the box support Symantec also have a VCS development kit allowing for custom scenarios to be written.  I like this approach,  it reminds me of F5 Networks use of the customer community to support the writing of custom rules and features for their product.  If a custom rule or feature has enough demand then they spend the time developing it into their product range.    Perhaps Symantec could look at leveraging their customer base and community in this way and improve the support around VCS trigger scenarios.  One other potential use of the VCS SDK that springs to mind is for application vendors who are making specialist software, CRM, ERP, Finance systems, etc.  They could look to build in Application HA into pre-configured virtual appliances, that would be a great selling point for any software vendor.

The deployment of the product itself takes the form of a guest deployment / agent. Technical deep dive information on the exact integration between the Symantec product and VMware was thin on the ground.  However there was mention of Symantec’s integration with the VMware HA API,  something that I don’t think has been announced by VMware just yet.  The description given to us during the call was that if Symantec Application HA failed to restart the application it could send a downstream API call to VMware HA and ask it to restart the VM’s Operating System.  An interesting concept, something I am sure we’ll hear more about at VMworld.

Licensing for this new product is quite competitive, $350 per virtual machine, a small price to pay for ensuring your Tier 1 application recovery is automated.  Symantec have promised full integration with vCenter Server and the screenshot below shows Symantec Application HA in action monitoring a SQL 2008 server, click on the thumbnail to see a full size image.

If you would like to learn more about Application HA, then get along to VMware and Symantec’s break out session at VMworld. – http://www.vmworld.com/docs/DOC-4658

Alternatively you can listen to a Podcast from Symantec’s Niraj Zaveri discussing the new product.  – http://www.symantec.com/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=ent_application_ha

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Symantec Application HA for VMware – VMworld 2010
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization, Top Story

When we announced our “Get Away to VMworld” contest, we knew it would be popular. But we had no idea that it would spark interest from so many people! We are overwhelmed by the response, with more than 70 entries, and by the support from our friends at Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam. It has been so successful, many are asking us to do it again for future shows, and not just VMworld!

The Entries

There were many excellent entries among the 70+ submitted. Thank you! In fact, more than half were judged worthy of the trip by at least one voter, and a dozen got one or more “top choice” nods.

This made the selection especially difficult. Each entry was judged on its own merit after identifying information was removed, and judges were careful to focus on the ideas presented rather than trying to guess the identities of individuals. Although we reserved the right to eliminate “budget-breaking” entries, we did not have to resort to that. The two picked won outright on straight votes.

Voting was handled by the awesome Gestalt IT Field Day delegates. This most-excellent bunch were themselves selected based on their thought leadership in the areas of virtualization, storage, networking, and enterprise systems administration and are well worth watching! They looked for someone like themselves: Committed to giving back to the IT community. If you’re interested in learning more about them, please check out the lists from San Jose, Boston, and Seattle. And watch two weeks after VMworld as our first-ever Networking Field Day is held!

Thanks so much for entering! We wish we could send everyone; maybe the success of this contest will allow us to do more in the future.

The Winners

Although many of the top finishers deserved to win, we are very pleased with the results of the voting. Like many of the entrants, they promised to “pay it forward” to an under-served group. We see many similarities among the top finishers, in fact, but these two must have stood out just enough to draw top votes from our panel.

Luigi Danakos

Luigi is becoming more and more well-known in technical circles, tweeting as @NerdBlurt and blogging under that name as well. He promises to blog more content focused on VMware beginners, as well as kickstarting a program for techies to give back to children in need. We’ll let him explain that part on his blog!

Allan Ruiz

Allan noted the lack of Spanish-language VMware content and Central-American community, and has promised to fill this gap. He tweets as @AllRuiz. We look forward to hearing all Allan is able to bring home from VMworld!

Thank You, Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam!

We want to take a moment to recognize Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam and thank them for sponsoring this contest. It would not be possible without their support. We encourage you to stop by at the show, check out what they have at their booths, and thank them for their help making this happen.

Everyone Wins! Join Us At VMworld!

Look for Stephen Foskett at VMworld! FCoTR Lives!

We love VMworld, and really look forward to seeing you there! Even if you didn’t enter our contest, we’ve got a special prize for you: VMware has generously extended a special discount code to Gestalt IT readers, allowing you to register at the early bird rate! That’s $1495, or $250 off the regular price!

Here’s how to do it!

1. Go to http://vmworld2010.com/registration.jspa.
2. If you have a vmworld.com account or attended VMworld in 2009, use the “Existing VMworld Account” section. If you do not have an existing VMworld account, please create an account and then continue with the registration process.
3. Please enter “gestaltIT” as your registration code! (note the capitalization and spacing!)

When you’re at VMworld, keep an eye out for Stephen Foskett and the rest of the Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day crew. We’ll have some special gifts for our friends, and we’ve been told about some great events we can invite you to!

One More Thing

Gestalt IT is a community effort. If you’d like to start blogging, please email “editor” at our domain. We welcome guest posts!

And if your company would like to support this community effort, please contact us as well. As you can see, engaging directly with the community really helps you stand out from the crowd!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Announcing the Winners of our Get Away to VMworld Contest!
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Top Story

As my friend Stu Miniman pointed out, a recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. Dubbed “vFabric,” This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality. This appears to be more than just a generic version of what Cisco already uses for their Nexus 1000V!

Update: @SSauer points out that this is vShield, and posted some information here: A New Generation of vShield Security Products

vSwitch, vNetwork, vShield?

Most hypervisor products include an internal virtual network switch, but VMware’s ESX has multiple choices. The original “dumb” virtual Ethernet switch was augmented by vSwitch back in the ESX 3 days, bringing more-advanced configuration options.VMware improved and renamed the vSwitch in vSphere 4, creating the vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS).

But it was the introduction of vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) in vSphere 4 that really set VMware’s network capabilities apart. The champion of this field is Cisco, whose Nexus 1000V virtual switch extends their NX-OS datacenter networking OS right into the ESX world.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V runs both the supervisor and Ethernet modules inside the virtual ESX environment

As illustrated above, the Nexus 1000v consists of two key components:

1. The Virtual Supervisor Module is an implementation of NX-OS on an ESX virtual machine, and provides the interface and configuration of the virtual network
2. The Virtual Ethernet Module runs at a lower level in ESX, replacing the vSwitch for networking between VMs

One can think of the Cisco Nexus 1000v as a specialized replacement for the more-generic vNetwork Distributed Switch. Both include plug-in vSwitch replacements and centralized management, and both implement more-advanced network protocols like private VLANS and receive-rate limiting as well as supporting vMotion. But Cisco’s 1000v goes much further, adding PortChannel, LACP, security and QoS, and advanced management features.

See this comparison of vSwitch, vSS, vDS, and 1000v as well as Rich Brambley’s vSS/vDS post

From a technology standpoint, the key to both vDS and 1000v is the ability to replace the core ESX vSwitch with a more-capable alternative. Now let’s turn to what VMware might be introducing next.

What Do We Know?

Howie Xu, VMware Director of R&D, released a video discussing his sessions at VMworld, entitled ”The Future Direction of Networking Virtualization” (TA8361). This video begins with a quick pan past Xu’s whiteboard (pictured below) and includes a discussion of the state of the art, vision, and product and technology roadmap for VMware’s networking-related efforts.

The part that really piqued my interest was later in the video, when Xu talks about creating a “networking virtual chassis or hypervisor” to allow third-parties to develop and roll-out advanced networking devices within vSphere. VMware has already steamrolled through the heart of server-based applications, making VMware-based virtual appliances as common an installation format as the DVD. Now the company is turning its attention to the network. This is huge!

Xu speaks of both a platform and a service to support this ”open extensible networking virtual chassis platform,” and goes on to suggest that it could be used by “networking security, load balance, application acceleration, IP address management, and performance management” products. The virtual appliance marketplace is already populated by the familiar names in networking, from F5 to Bluecoat to Checkpoint. Therefore, VMware must be talking about something much deeper and more advanced than merely encouraging the creation of more virtual appliances!

The core question is whether VMware is opening up the “green box” in my diagram above to run third-party applications and what level of system access they will get.

Consider this a vFabric pre-intro!

Then there is the name. The whiteboard prominently includes the words, “vFabric Intro” in the corner. Judging by the rest of the readable content, this indicates that this new technology will indeed be called “vFabric” as Stu speculated.

Update: It appears that vFabric is not the name of this virtual chassis (thanks, Stu and Howie!). Good thing, too, since the name, “vFabric” is a registered trademark of QLogic Corporation, for “computer software for managing computer hardware, namely switches used in networks.”

What’s Coming?

I’m more of a storage guy, so I rang up my friend Greg “Etherealmind” Ferro and ran some ideas past him. Greg and I talked about the needs of network-based devices, and how they differ from traditional server-based applications.

Greg suggests that vFabric will really assist vMotion

Networkers have been conditioned with the belief that custom silicon is the best way to achieve low latency and high performance for network devices. The same could be said of the storage world, where companies like HDS, 3PAR, and BlueArc pride themselves on their custom ASICs. But EMC, HP, and others are proving that Intel’s server-class CPUs and peripheral busses now have the guts to go head-to-head with custom silicon. The networking world is no different, with many newer companies basing their products around industry-standard hardware.

But deploying these systems in a virtual environment is more challenging. Can a virtual machine hypervisor prioritize threads for network devices? Can it handle the overhead related to networking operations in real-time? What happens in the event of a DDoS or network flood? Most network devices run real-time operating systems like VxWorks or QNX to ensure packet throughput, but virtual environments are notorious for “overflow” of I/O or CPU load between guest machines.

The whiteboard provides some hints as to how VMware will tackle these issues. First, we spot the term, “latency-aware queueing,” which suggests that a mechanism will monitor the hypervisor and alter the queues for virtual network devices as the load changes. As latency rises, the hypervisor can move workloads to different processor cores or even alternate hardware using vMotion. We also spot a reference to “non-blocking”, suggesting an asynchronous I/O mechanism will reduce the likelihood that one of these virtual network devices will have to wait for data.

Both of these technologies are hallmarks of real-time operating systems (RTOS), and are critical to the design of scalable hypervisors like VMware’s ESX. It is likely that the company is developing an advanced hypervisor environment for these specialized devices, an evolution of vDS and the API that allows the Cisco Nexus 1000v to run its Virtual Ethernet Module.

Stephen’s Stance

If our assumptions are true, then this is an exciting development indeed. If VMware exposes the “green box” in our diagram above to third-party developers, we could see an entirely new and more-powerful ecosystem evolve around VMware vSphere. Running virtual network devices in a quasi-real-time environment will enable even-greater integration and flexibility.

The Nexus 1000v has not eliminated purchasing of Cisco hardware, and vFabric will not destroy the larger network device market. But we expect wide vendor support for the concept, especially those involved in lower-end and remote-office applications. We would love to see Palo Alto Networks, Infoblox, SolarWinds, and Vyatta, to name a few, developing next-generation applications for vFabric. Virtualization-aware integrated networking shouldn’t be the sole domain of Cisco.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | A VMware Hypervisor For Networkers?
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Server Virtualization

Last week we announced the Gestalt IT “Get Away to VMworld” Contest and have been overwhelmed by the response. We’ve had blog posts, tweets, comments, and (most importantly) three dozen entries in the contest so far.

But one thing was getting us down: The entries were excellent but we could select only one winner. So we headed back to the old address book and contacted some more friendly companies, asking if they’d like to join the effort.

Two Winners!

Today we’re announcing two major bits of news regarding our VMworld contest:

1. The deadline to enter has been moved from tonight to Thursday night, August 12. The awarding of the winner has also been moved, to Friday, August 13.
2. We’re moving the deadline because we’re giving away a second trip! Thanks to two wonderful additional sponsors, Zetta and Veeam, we have the resources to pick two winners and send them both to VMworld!

How To Enter

Ok, so how can you enter this contest? Here are the simple steps:

1. Consider how attending VMworld would help you and the broader community
2. Fill out the contest entry form
3. Plan on stopping by the Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam booths at the show and thanking them for their support
4. Consider publicizing the contest by sharing this article with friends and associates
5. Consider subscribing to Gestalt IT with RSS, by email, on Twitter, or in iTunes
6. Consider supporting DonorsChoose.org and donating your swag to school kids in need

We look forward to hearing from you!

We have postponed the entry deadline to Thursday, August 12 and the selection of the winner to Friday, August 13! Follow @GestaltIT on Twitter to watch the selection live at noon Pacific time!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | “Get Away to VMworld” Contest: Enhanced and Extended!
Read more posts categorized as All, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization

Storage virtualization has become a central component of the modern data center, and the annual VMworld gathering in San Francisco has become the central event for virtualization-related companies. Although focused on VMware, the conference draws many companies. And the labs and sessions are really awesome! But not everyone can attend this must-go event. It’s fairly expensive ($1745 to register!) and reasonable airfare to SFO is offset by crazy hotel prices.

We at Gestalt IT want to help deserving folks get to this conference. We already paid for airfare for the winner of the Boche.net pass giveaway, but we can do more. So we contacted some of our favorite technology companies about sponsoring a contest to send another deserving person to the show!

Update: We’ve Enhanced and Extended the contest!

The Contest: Get Away to VMworld

Here’s the deal: Thanks to our generous sponsors (Xsigo, Symantec, Zetta, and Veeam), we’ll pay airfare, hotel, and registration for two lucky and deserving winners out there to attend VMworld San Francisco 2010! That’s right – you get to go to VMworld for free!

Our travel agent will arrange airfare and hotel and we’ll get you set up with a full conference pass, giving you access to everything the show has to offer. Sound good?

The Catch: Pay It Forward

There’s always a catch, right? Inspired by winner Greg Stuart‘s desire to contribute to the community, we’re not just going to pick a winner at random. We’re going to pick the person who presents the best case for themselves.

Entrants must explain how they plan to “pay it forward” if they get to go to VMworld. Will you start a blog? Write some tutorials? Contribute to a forum or online community? Present to your local VMUG? Get creative and spread the wealth of knowledge you get from the event!

Our panel of judges is made up of none other than the most-excellent roster of past Tech Field Day delegates! They’ve proven themselves to be independent-minded and knowledgeable, and we’re sure that they will pick the best entries!

Thank You, Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam!

We want to take a moment to recognize Symantec and Xsigo and thank them for sponsoring this contest. It would not be possible without their support. We encourage you to stop by at the show, check out what they have at their booths, and thank them for their help making this happen. Both have some cool stuff up their sleeves, and are well-worth checking out!

Update: Zetta and Veeam have thrown in their support, allowing us to select two winners! They deserve special thanks, too!

One More Thing

If you look around at technology-oriented shows, one thing is very clear: The field of techies isn’t all that diverse. We need to work harder to attract a wider group of young people to study science, technology, engineering, and math. That’s why we’ve also made a donation through Donors Choose to a cool classroom project in Arizona that teaches engineering to girls through robotics. We encourage you to support this and other “STEM” projects in your local schools!

We’ve also suggested that you Donate Your Swag to School Kids In Need, as suggested by Kevin Houston. When you get home from VMworld, consider filling up the bags you get with school supplies and bringing them to your local school building. I’m sure they can find someone who needs the help!

How To Enter

Ok, so how can you enter this contest? Here are the simple steps:

1. Consider how attending VMworld would help you and the broader community
2. Fill out the contest entry form
3. Plan on stopping by the Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam booths at the show and thanking them for their support
4. Consider publicizing the contest by sharing this article with friends and associates
5. Consider subscribing to Gestalt IT with RSS, by email, on Twitter, or in iTunes
6. Consider supporting DonorsChoose.org and donating your swag to school kids in need

We look forward to hearing from you!

Update: With two more sponsors, Zetta and Veeam, we have postponed the entry deadline to Thursday, August 12 and the selection of the winner to Friday, August 13! Follow @GestaltIT on Twitter to watch the selection live at noon Pacific time!

The Fine Print

There’s always some fine print, right? Here’s ours:

Contests like this aren’t allowed everywhere. This one is void in locations where it would be illegal or overly restricted.

We’re paying for one roundtrip air ticket from one of the major airports near you to SFO or another airport in the San Francisco area. We’re also paying for three nights at a hotel within 1 mile of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event runs August 30 through September 2, so we expect that’s when you’ll be there. Finally, we’ll pay for one conference pass. You can bring along a guest if you like, but you’ll have to pay their own way.

Sorry, but we can’t afford first class flights and the Ritz. Our travel agent will do their best to accommodate your travel needs, but we’re on a budget here. We stayed at the Mosser last year, and it may be small but it’s really convenient!

International winners must stay over Saturday night to make the airfare work. They might need to pay for a fourth hotel night themselves. And we might need to disqualify entries if the travel costs would break our budget. Sorry again!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Announcing the Gestalt IT “Get Away to VMworld” Contest!
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

When you come to think about it, people who work in the IT sector are all slightly nuts. We all work in an area that is notorious for trying to make itself not needed. When we find repetitive tasks, we try to automate them. When we have a feeling that we can improve something, we do just that. And by doing that, we try to remove ourselves from the equation where we possibly can. In a sense, we try to make ourselves invisible to the people working with our infrastructure, because a happy customer is one that doesn’t even notice that we are there or did something to allow him to work.

Traditional IT shops were loaded with departments that were responsible for storage, for networking, for operating systems and loads more. The one thing that each department has in common? They tried to make everything as easy and smooth as possible. Usually you will find loads of scripts that perform common tasks, automated installations and processes that intend to remove the effort from the admins.

In comes a new technology that allows me to automate even more, that removes the hassle of choosing the right hardware. That helps me reduce downtimes because of (un)planned maintenance. It also helps me reduce worrying about operating system drivers and stuff like that. It’s a new technology that people refer to as server virtualization. It’s wonderful and helps me automate yet another layer.

All of the people who are in to tech will now say “cool! This can help me make my life easier”, and your customer will thank you because it’s an additional service you can offer, and it helps your customer work. But the next question your customer is going to ask you is probably going to be something along the lines of “Why can’t I virtualize the rest?”, or perhaps even “Why can’t I virtualize my application?”. And you know what? Your customer is absolutely right. Companies like VMware are already sensing this, as can be read in an interview at GigaOM.

The real question your customer is asking is more along the lines of “Who cares about your hardware or operating system?!”. And as much as it pains me to say it (being a person who loves technology), it’s a valid question. When it comes to true virtualization, why should it bother me if am running on Windows, Unix, Mac or Linux? Who cares if there is an array in the background that uses “one point twenty-one jiggawatts” to transport my synchronously mirrored historic data back to the future?

In the long run, I as a customer don’t really care about either software or hardware. As a customer I only care about getting the job done, in a way that I expected to, and preferably as cheap as possible with the availability I need. In an ideal world, the people and the infrastructure in the back are invisible, because that means they did a good job, and I’m not stuck wondering what my application runs on.

This is the direction we are working towards in IT. It’s nothing new, and the concept of doing this in a centralized/decentralized fashion seem to change from decade to decade, but the only thing that remained a constant was that your customer only cared about getting the job done. So, it’s up to us. Let’s get the job done and try to automate the heck out of it. Lets remove ourselves from the equation, because time that your customer spends talking to you is time spent not using his application.

© Bas for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Virtualization makes me say “Who cares about your hardware or operating system?!”
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The Seattle Tech Field Day was actually 2 days.  Across those 2 days, the TFD delegates watched 5 presentations from 5 different vendors, plus had a mixer-style dinner with all the vendors.  Most of these presentations were storage and virtualization related.  Only one vendor, F5 Networks, would be considered to be a networking company, and even their presentation showed some of their fancy new integration with VMware.

Even though the presentations I saw targeted the storage and virtualization guys more than the networking guy (uh, me), all of the products had serious implications for the network.  Storage is presented to hosts via iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS.  NAS heads with multiple switch ports uplink to the network via MPIO, LACP, and in other ways.  Storage arrays could replicate their data across the LAN or across a WAN of various bandwidths and latencies.  Some replication schemes WAN optimize themselves, but can still be helped by external WAN accelerators.  VMware virtual machines can be moved from one ESX cluster to another using VMotion, which naturally traverses the network, possibly even a WAN link.

What follows is a brief overview of the presentations.  Since I’m not yet in deep with storage and virtualization technologies like I am with networking, what I am opting to do is briefly outline each company, and what they presented on.  From there, you can click the links to dig in if you want more information.

1. Veeam‘s focus is on virtualization environment management, backup, and disaster recovery.  Veeam presented on their virtual machine backup and restoration features.  I knew nothing about Veeam’s product set before their presentation, and from folks I know who’ve known Veeam for a while, they’ve come a long way in a hurry, making a feature-rich product of great use to VMware shops.  The feature that stood out to me the most during the presentation was the ability to instantly bring back up a failed virtual host by starting up the backed up image of the dead production host.  While it’s a little like running on “the donut” after experiencing a flat tire in your care, it helps minimize the outage time, while you work on bringing the full virtual host back into production.Read more about Veeam’s backup product set via the following links:
   http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KB9ktninyc
2. Nimble Storage was, for me personally, the most interesting presentation.  Nimble launched at Tech Field Day, bringing their converged storage, backup, and disaster recovery solution to market.  Nimble is targeting the medium business market with 12TB or 24TB raw capacity arrays that include all features with no additional licensing.  Nimble has created the CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) architecture, which describes how they gain very high IOPS using inline compression and a large adaptive flash cache while writing to high capacity SATA disks (saving overall cost).  Nimble is working with resellers starting at the west coast of North America, and moving east.  The EMEA market is on their radar for 2011.

Stay tuned for part 2…

© ethan for Gestalt IT, 2010. | GestaltIT.com Seattle Tech Field Day July 2010 – Presentations Overview Part 1 of 2
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage