Remember When Hand Carts Were State Of The Art? Me either.
Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think on that for a moment. What high-tech tool that was around 20 years ago are you still using? Let alone 200 years ago. The replacement of handcarts as a medium for transport not only wasn’t instant, it’s still going on 100 years after cars were mass produced. Handcart in use – Mumbai Daily We in high-tech are constantly in a state of flux from this technology to that solution to the other architecture. The question you have to ask yourself – and this is getting more important for enterprise IT in my opinion – is “does this do something good for the company?” It used to be that IT folks could try out all sorts of new doo-dads just to play with them and justify the cost based on the future potential benefit to the company. I’d love to say that this had a powerful positive effect, but frankly, it only rarely paid off. Why? Because we’re geeks. We buy this stuff on our own dime if the company won’t foot for it, and our eclectic tastes don’t necessarily jive with the needs of the organization. These days, the change is pretty intense, and focuses on infrastructure and application deployment architectures. Where can you run this application, and what form will the application take? Virtualized? Dedicated hardware? Cloud? the list goes on. And all of these questions spur thoughts about security, storage, the other bits of infrastructure required to support an application no matter where it is deployed. These are things that you can model in your basement, but can’t really test out, simply because the architecture of an enterprise is far more complex than the architecture of even the geekiest home network. Lori and I have a pretty complex network in our basement, but it doesn’t hold a candle to our employers’ worldwide network supporting dev and sales offices on every continent, users in many languages, and a potpourri of access methods that must be protected and available. Sometimes, change is simply a change of perspective. F5’s new iApps, for example, put the ADC infrastructure bits together for the application, instead of managing application security within the module that handles application security (ASM), it bundles security in with all of the other bits – like load balancing, SSL offload, etc – that an application requires. This is pretty powerful, it speeds deployment and troubleshooting because everything is in one place, and it speeds adding another machine because you simply apply the same iApp Template. That means you spin up another instance of the VM in question, tweak the settings, and apply the template already being used on existing instances, and you’re up. Sometimes, change is more radical. Deploying to the cloud is a good example of this, and cloud deployments suffer for it. Indeed, private and hybrid clouds are growing rapidly precisely because of the radical change that public cloud can introduce. Cloud storage was so radical that very few were willing to use it even as most thought it was a good idea. Along came cloud storage gateways like our ARX Cloud Extender or a variety of others, and suddenly the weakness was ameliorated… Because the radical bit of cloud storage was simply that it didn’t talk like storage traditionally has. With a gateway it does. And with most gateways (check with your provider) you get compression and encryption, making the cloud storage more efficient and secure in the process. But like the handcart, the idea that cloud, or virtualization, or consumerization must take hold overnight and you’re behind the times if you weren’t doing it yesterday are misplaced. Figure out what’s best for your organization, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of timelines also. Sure, some things, like support for the CEOs iPad will take on a life of their own, but in general, you’ve got time to figure out what you need, when you need it, and how best to implement it. As I’ve mentioned before, at the cutting edge of technology, when the hype cycle is way overblown, that’s where you’ll find the largest number of vendors that won’t be around to support you in five years. If you can wait until the noise about a space quiets down, you’ll be better served, because the level of competition will have eliminated the weaker companies and you’ll be dealing with the technological equivalent of the Darwinian most fit. Sure, some of those companies will fail or get merged also, but the chances that your vendor of choice won’t, or their products will live on, are much better after the hype cycle. After all, even though engine powered conveyances have largely replaced hand carts, have you heard of White Motor Company, Autocar Company, or Diamond T Company? All three made automobiles. They lived through boom and were swallowed in bust. Though in automobiles the cycle is much longer than in high-tech (Autocar started in the late 1800s and was purchased by White in the 1950s for example, who was purchased later by Audi), the same process occurs, so count on it. And no, I haven’t developed a sudden interest in automobile history, all of these companies thrived making half-tracks in World War Two, that’s how I knew to look for them amongst the massive number of failed car companies. Stay in touch with the new technologies out there, pay attention to how they can help you, but as I’ve said quite often, what's in the hype cycle isn’t necessarily what is best for your organization. 1908 Autocar XV (Wikipedia.org) Of course I think things like our VE product line and our new V.11 with both iApps and app mobility are just the thing for most organizations, even with those I will say “depending upon your needs”. Because contrary to what most marketing and many analysts want to tell you, it really is about your organization and its needs.When The Walls Come Tumbling Down.
When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few years they would refresh it to make certain that the standby DC had the correct equipment to take over, but they counted on relocating staff from what would be a ravaged area in the event of a catastrophe, and were going to restore thousands of systems from backups before the remote DC could start running. At the time it was a good plan. Today it sounds quaint. And it wasn’t that long ago. There are also a lot of you who have yet to launch a cloud initiative of any kind. This is not from lack of interest, but more because you have important things to do that are taking up your time. Most organizations are dragging their feet replacing people, and few – according to a recent survey, very few – are looking to add headcount (proud plug that F5 is – check out our careers page if you’re looking). It’s tough to run off and try new things when you can barely keep up with the day-to-day workloads. Some organizations are lucky enough to have R&D time set aside. I’ve worked at a couple of those too, and honestly, they’re better about making use of technology than those who do not have such policies. Though we could debate if they’re better because they take the time, or take the time because they’re better. And the combination of these two items brings us to a possible pilot project. You want to be able to keep your organization online or be able to bring it back online quickly in the event of an emergency. Technology is making it easier and easier to complete this arrangement without investing in an entire datacenter and constantly refreshing the hardware to have quick recovery times. Global DNS in various forms is available to redirect users from the disabled datacenter to a datacenter that is still capable of handling the load, if you don’t have multiple datacenters, then it can redirect elsewhere – like to virtual servers running in the cloud. ADCs are starting to be able to work similarly whether they are cloud deployed or DC deployed, that leaves keeping a copy of your necessary data and applications in the cloud, and cloud storage with a cloud storage gateway such as the Cloud Extender functionality in our ARX product allow for this to be done with a minimum of muss and fuss. These technologies, used together, yield a DR architecture that looks something like this: Notice that the cloud extender isn’t listed here, because it is useful for getting the data copied, but would most likely reside in your damaged datacenter. Assuming that the cloud provider was one like our partner Rackspace, who does both cloud VMs and cloud storage, this architecture is completely viable. You’ll still have to work some things out, like guaranteeing that security in the cloud is acceptable, but we’re talking about an emergency DR architecture here, not a long-running solution, so app-level security and functionality to block malicious attacks at the ADC layer will cover most of what you need. AND it’s a cloud project. The cost is far, far lower than a full blown DR project, and you’ll be prepared in case you need it. This buys you time to ingest the fact that your datacenter has been wiped out. I’ve lived through it, there is so much that must be done immediately – finding a new location, dealing with insurance, digging up purchase documentation, recovering what can be recovered… Having a plan like this one in place is worth your while. Seriously. It’s a strangely emotional time, and having a plan is a huge help in keeping people focused. Simply put, disasters come, often without warning – mine was a flood caused by a broken pipe. We found out when our monitoring equipment fried from being soaked and sent out a raft of bogus messages. The monitoring equipment was six feet above the floor at the time. You can’t plan for everything, but to steal and twist a famous phrase, “he who plans for nothing protects nothing.”Whither Cloud Gateways?
Farm tractors and military tanks share an intertwined history that started when some smart person proposed the tracks on some farming equipment as the cross-country tool that tanks needed to get across a rubble and shell-hole strewn World War One battlefield. For the ensuing sixty years, improvements in one set of tracks spurred improvements in the other. Early on it was the farm vehicles developing improvements, but through World War Two and even some today, tanks did most of the developing. That is simply a case of experience. Farmers and farm tractor manufacturers had more experience when tanks were first invented, but the second world war and the variety of terrain, climate, and usage gave tanks the edge. After World War Two, the Cold War drove much more research money into tank improvements than commercial tractors received, so the trend continued. In fact, construction equipment eventually picked up where farming equipment dropped off. This is no coincidence, bulldozers received a lot of usage in the same wildly varying terrain as tanks during the second world war. Today, nearly all tracked construction equipment can trace their track and/or road wheel arrangements back to a specific tank (one bulldozer brand, for example, uses a slightly modified LT vz. 35 - Panzer 35(t) in German service - wheel system, invented in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. That suspension was a modification of an even earlier Vickers tank design). Bradley AFV tug-o-war with a Farm Tractor What does all this have to do with cloud gateways? Well, technology follows somewhat predictable patterns, be it cloud and cloud communications or track and suspension systems. Originally, cloud gateways came out a few years back as the solution to making the cloud work for you. Not too long after cloud storage came along, some smart people thought the cloud gateway idea was a good one, and adopted a modified version called Cloud Storage Gateways. The driving difference between the two from the perspective of users was that Cloud Storage was practically useless without a gateway, while the Cloud could be used for application deployment in a much more broad sense without a gateway. So Cloud Storage Gateways like F5’s ARX Cloud Extender are a fact of life. Without them, Cloud Storage is just a blob that does not communicate with the rest of your storage infrastructure – including the servers that need to access said storage. With a Cloud Storage Gateway, storage looks and acts like all of the other IT products out there expect it to work. In the rush, Cloud Gateways largely fell by the wayside. Citrix sells one, and CloudSwitch is making a good business of it (there are more startups than just CloudSwitch, but they seem to be leading the pack), but the uptake seems to be nothing like the Cloud Storage Gateway uptake. And I think that’s a mistake. A cloud gateway is the key to cloud interoperability, and every organization needs at least a bare-minimum level of cloud portability, simply so they can point out to their cloud vendor that there are other players in the cloud space should the relationship become unprofitable for the customer. Add to that the ability to secure data on its way to the cloud and back, and Cloud Gateways are hugely important. What I don’t know is why uptake and competition in the space seems so slight. My guess would be that organizations aren’t attempting to integrate Cloud deployed applications into their architecture in the manner that Cloud Storage must be in order to be used. Which would scream that Cloud has not yet begun actual adoption yet. Though it doesn’t indicate whether that’s because Cloud is being dismissed by decision-makers as a place to host core applications, or just that uptake is slow. I’d be interested in hearing from you if you have more data that I’m somehow missing. It just seems incongruous to me that uptake isn’t closer to Cloud usage uptake claims. Meanwhile, security (encryption, tunneling, etc) can be had from your BIG-IP… But no, I don’t think BIG-IP is the reason Cloud Gateway uptake seems so low, or I wouldn’t have written this blog. I know some people are using it that way, with LTM-VE on the Cloud side and LTM on the datacenter side, but have no reason to suspect it is a large percentage of our customer base (I haven’t asked, this is pure conjecture). I’d like to see the two “gateway” products move in cooperative fits and starts until they are what is needed to secure, utilize, and access portable cloud-deployed applications and storage. You decide which is tank and which is tractor though… And since we’re talking about tanks, at least a little bit, proof that ever-smaller technology is not new in the computer age - The Nazi Goliath tank - Courtesy of militaryphotos.net Related Blogs: Cloud Storage Gateways. Short term win, but long term…? Cloud Storage Gateways, stairway to (thin provisioning) heaven? Certainly Cirtas! Cloud Storage Gains Momentum Tiering is Like Tables, or Storing in the Cloud Tier Cloud Storage Use Models Useful Cloud Advice, Part One. Storage Cloud Storage: Just In Time For Data Center Consolidation. Don MacVittie - F5 BIG-IP IPv6 Gateway Module If I Were in IT Management Today…Copied Data. Is it a Replica, Snapshot, Backup, or an Archive?
It is interesting to me the number of variant Transformers that have been put out over the years, and the effect that has on those who like transformers. There are four different “Construction Devastator” figures put out over the years (there may be more, I know of four), and every Transformers collector or fan that I know – including my youngest son – want them all. That’s great marketing on the part of Hasbro, for certain, but it does mean that those who are trying to collect them are going to have a hard time of it, just because they were produced and then stopped, and all of them consist of seven or more parts. That’s a lot of things to go wrong. But still, it is savvy for Hasbro to recognize that a changed Transformer equates to more sales, even though it angers the diehard fans. As time moves forward, technology inevitably changes things. In IT that statement implies “at the speed of light”. Just like your laptop has been replaced with a newer model before you get it, and is “completely obsolete” within 18 months, so other portions of the IT field are quickly subsumed or consumed by changes. The difference is that IT is less likely to get caught up in the “new gadget” hype than the mass market. So while your laptop was technically outdated before it landed in your lap, IT knows that it is still perfectly usable and will only replace it when the warrantee is up (if you work for a smart company) or it completely dies on you (for a company pinching pennies). The same is true in every piece of storage, it is just that we don’t suffer from “Transformer Syndrome”. Old storage is just fine for our purposes, unless it actually breaks. Since you can just continue to pay annual licensing fees, there’s no such thing as “out of warrantee” storage unless you purchase very inexpensive, or choose to let it lapse. For the very highest end, letting it lapse isn’t an option, since you’re licensing the software. The same is true with how we back up and restore that data. Devastator, image courtesy of Gizmodo.com But even with a stodgy group like IT, who has been bitten enough times to know that we don’t change something unless there’s a darned good reason, eventually change does come. And it’s coming to backup and replication. There are a lot of people still differentiating between backups and replication. I think it’s time for us to stop doing so. What are the differences? Let’s take a look. Backups go to tape. Hello Virtual Tape Libraries, how are you? Backups are archival. Hello tiering, you allow us to move things to different storage types, and replicate them at different intervals, right? So all is correctly backed up for its usage levels? Replication is near-real-time. Not really. You’re thinking of Continuous Data Protection (CDP), which is gaining traction by app, not broadly. Replication goes to disk and that makes it much faster. See #1. VTL is fast too. Tape is slow. Right, but that’s a target problem, not a backup problem. VTLs are fast. Replication can do just the changes. Yeah, why this one ever became a myth, I’ll never know, but remember “incremental backups”? Same thing. I’m not saying they’re exactly the same – incremental replicas can be reverse applied so that you can take a version of the file without keeping many copies, and that takes work in a backup environment, what I AM saying is that once you move to disk (or virtual disk in the case of cloud storage), there isn’t really a difference worthy of keeping two different phrases. Tape isn’t dead, many of you still use a metric ton of it a year, but it is definitely waning, slowly. Meaning more and more of us are backing up or replicating to disk. Where did this come from? A whitepaper I wrote recently came back from technical review with “this is not accurate when doing backups”, and that got me to thinking “why the heck not?” If the reason for maintaining two different names is simply a people reason, while the technology is rapidly becoming the same mechanisms – disk in, disk out, then I humbly suggest we just call it one thing, because all maintaining two names and one fiction does is cause confusion. For those who insist that replicas are regularly updated, I would say making a copy or snapshotting them eliminates even that difference – you now have an archival copy that is functionally the same as a major backup. Add in an incremental snapshot and, well, we’re doing a backup cycle. With tiering, you can set policies to create snapshots or replicas on different timelines for different storage platforms, meaning that your tier three data can be backed up very infrequently, while your tier one (primary) storage is replicated all of the time. Did you see what I did there? The two are used interchangeably. Nobody died, and there’s less room for confusion. Of course I think you should use our ARX to do your tiering, ARX Cloud Extender to do your cloud connections, and take advantage of the built-in rules engine to help maintain your backup schedule. But the point is that we just don’t need two names for what is essentially the same thing any more. So let’s clean up the lingo. Since replication is more accurate to what we’re doing these days, let’s just call it replication. We have “snapshot” that is already associated with replication for point-in-time copies, which makes us able to differentiate between a regularly updated replica and a frozen-in-time “backup”. Words fall in and out of usage all of the time, let’s clean up the tech lingo and all get on the same language. No, no we won’t, but I’ve done my bit by suggesting it. And no doubt there are those confused by the current state of lingo that this will help to understand that yes, they are essentially the same thing, only archaic history keeps them separate. Or you could buy all three – replicate to a place where you can take a snapshot and then back up the snapshot (not as crazy as it sounds, I have seen this architecture deployed to get the backup process out of production, but I was being facetious). And you don’t need a ton of names. You replicate to secondary (tertiary) storage, then take a snapshot, then move or replicate the snapshot to a remote location – like the cloud or remote datacenter. Not so tough, and one term is removed from the confusion, inadvertently adding crispness to the other terms.The Right (Platform) Tool For the Job(s).
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historical timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… The oldest (24 y/o) being a WarHammer 40k player and the youngest (3 y/o) just plain enjoying anything that looks like a robot. While I have been modeling more or less for decades, only in the last five years have I had the luxury of owning an airbrush, and then I restrict it to very limited uses – mostly base-coating larger models like cars, tanks, or spaceships. The other day I was reading on my airbrush vendor’s website and discovered that they had purchased a competitor that specialized in detailing airbrushes – so detailed that the line is used to decorate fingernails. This got me to thinking that I could do more detailed bits on models – like shovel blades and flesh-tones with an airbrush if I had one of these little detail brushes. Lori told me to send her a link to them so that she had it on the list for possible gifts, so I went out and started researching which model of the line was most suited to my goals. The airbrush I have is one of the best on the market – a Badger Airbrush Company model 150. It has dual-action, which means that pushing down on the trigger lets air out, and pulling the trigger back while pushing down lets an increasing amount of paint flow through. I use this to determine the density of paint I’m applying, but have never thought too much about it. Well in my research I wanted to see how much difference there was between my airbrush and the Omni that I was interested in. The answer… Almost none. Which confused me at first, as my airbrush, even with the finest needle and tip available and a pressure valve on my compressor to control the amount of air being pumped through it, sprays a lot of paint at once. So I researched further, and guess what? The volume of paint adjustment that is controlled by how far you draw back the trigger, combined with the PSI you allow through the regulator will control the width of the paint flow. My existing airbrush can get down to 2mm – sharpened pencil point widths. I have a brand-new fine tip and needle (in poor lighting I confused my fine needle with my reamer and bent the tip a few weeks ago, so ordered a new one), my pressure regulator is a pretty good one, all that is left is to play with it until I have the right pressure, and I may be doing more detailed work with my airbrush in the near future. Airbrushing isn’t necessarily better – for some jobs I like the results better, like single-color finishes, because if you thin the paint and go with several coats, you can get a much more uniform worn look to surfaces – but overall it is just different. The reason I would want to use my airbrush more is, simply time. Because you don’t have to worry about crevices and such (the air blows paint into them), you don’t have to take nearly as long to paint a given part with an airbrush as you do with a brush. At least the base coat anyway, you still need a brush for highlighting and shadowing… Or at least I do… But it literally cuts hours off of a group of models if I can arrange one trip down to the spray area versus brush-painting those same models. What does all of this have to do with IT? The same thing it usually does. You have a ton of tools in your datacenter that do one job very well, but you have never had reason to look into alternate uses that the tool might do just as well or better at. This is relatively common with Application Delivery Controllers, where they are brought in just to do load balancing, or just for application acceleration, or just for WAN Optimization, and the other things that the tool does just as well haven’t been explored. But you might want to do some research on your platforms, just to see if they can serve other needs than you’re putting them to today. Let’s face it, you’ve paid for them, and in many cases they will work as-is or with a slight cost add-on to do even more. It is worth knowing what “more” is for a given product, if for no other reason than having that information in your pocket when exploring solutions going forward. A similar situation is starting to develop with our ARX family of products, and no doubt with some competitors also (though I haven’t heard of it from competitors, I’m simply conjecturing) – as ARX grows in its capabilities, many existing customers aren’t taking advantage of the sweet new tools that are available to them for free or for a modest premium on their existing investment. ARX Cloud Extender is the largest case of this phenomenon that I know of, but this week’s EMC Atmos announcement might well go a long way to reconcile that bit. To me it is very cool that ARX can virtualize your NAS devices AND include cloud and/or object storage alongside NAS so as to appear to be one large pool of storage. Whether you’re a customer or not, it’s worth checking out. Of course, like my airbrush, you’ll have some learning to do if you try new things with your existing hardware. I’ll spend a couple of hours with the airbrush figuring out how to make reliable lines of those sizes, then determine where best to use it. While I could have achieved the same or similar results with masking, the time investment for masking is large and repetitive, the dollar cost is repetitive. I also could have paid a large chunk of money for a specialized detail airbrush, but then I’d have two tools to maintain, when one will do it all… And this is true of alternatives to learning new things about your existing hardware – the learning curve will be there whether you implement new functionality on your existing platforms or purchase a point solution, best to figure out the cost in time and money to solve the problem from either direction. Often, you’ll find the cost of learning a new function on familiar hardware is much lower than purchasing and learning all new hardware. WWII Russians – vehicle is airbrushed, figures not.It is Never Easy, But There’s a Lot of Change Going On.
Every spring I get excited. I live in Wisconsin, which my travels have shown me you may not understand. I have actually been told “that is not your house, there is snow on the ground. All of America is sun and beaches”. Well, in Wisconsin, it gets cold. Moscow style cold. There are a couple of weeks each winter where going out is something you do only after bundling up like a toddler… Mittens, hats, coat, another coat, boots… But then spring comes, and once the temperature gets to the point where the snow starts to melt, the sun starts to feel warm again. It’s at that point that I start to get that burst of energy, and every year it surprises me. I realize that I was, toward the end of the winter, slowing down. Not work-wise, but home-wise. You can’t do too much work outside, there are days I didn’t even break down boxes for recycling because it was too cold in the (unheated) garage. So inside things take precedence. This year it was staining some window frames, helping Lori get her monstrous new fishtank set up, and working on some fun stuff I’d been sitting on. I register a very similar surprise in IT, even though, just like winter, it is a predictable cycle. The high-tech industry just keeps turning out new ideas, products, and hype cycles. Black Bear Hibernating – www.bear.org But this round seems different to me. Instead of a rush of new followed by a predictable lull while enterprises digest the new and turn it into functional solutions, it seems that, even given the global economy, the new just keeps coming. From Server Virtualization to Server Consolidation to Storage Virtualization to Primary Dedupe, through network virtualization and the maturity of load balancers into ADCs, then the adaptation of the best ADCs into tools to manage virtualization sprawl. Throwing in Cloud, then Cloud Storage, and heaping network convergence (with storage networks) onto the heap, and then drop the mobile device bomb… Wow. It’s been a run. IT has always had the belief that the only constant is change, but the rate of change seems to be in high gear over the last several years. The biggest problem with that is none of this stuff exists in a vacuum, and you don’t really get the opportunity to digest any of it and make it an integral part of your architecture if you’re doing it all. F5 and several other companies have some great stuff to help you take the bull by the horns, ours being instantiated as what we call Strategic Points of Control, but they too require time and effort. The theory is, of course, that we’re going to a better place, that IT will be more adaptable and less fragile. That needs to be in your sights at all times if you are participating in several of these changes at the same time, but also in your sites must be the short term – don’t make your IT less adaptable and more fragile today on the promise of making it less so in the future. And that’s a serious risk if you move too fast. That is a lot of change in your systems, and while I’ve talked about them individually, an architecture plan (can you tell I was an Enterprise Architect once?) that coordinates the changes you’re making and leaves breathing space so you can make the changes a part of your systems is a good idea. I’m not saying drag your feet, but I am saying that the famous saying “He who defends everything defends nothing” has an IT corollary “He who changes everything risks everything”. Do we here at F5 want you to buy our products? Of course we do. We wouldn’t make them if we didn’t think they rocked. Do we want you to redesign your network on-the-fly on a Sunday night from one end to the other? Not if it risks you failing. We look bad if you look bad because of us. So take your time, figure out which of the many new trends holds the most promise for your organization, prioritize, then implement. Make sure you know what you have before moving on to the next change. Many of you have stable virtualized server environments already, so moving on from there is easier, but many of you do not yet have stability in virtualization. VMWare and others make some great tools to help with managing your virtualized environment, but only if you’ve been in the virtualization game long enough to realize you need them. Where will we end up? I honestly don’t know. For sure with highly virtualized datacenters, and with much shortened lead times for IT to implement new systems. Perhaps we’ll end up 100% in the cloud, but there are inherent risks that make 100% doubtful – like outsourcing, you’re only as good as the date on your contract. So the future is cloudy, pun intended. So take your time, I’ve said it before, and will likely say it again, we’re here to help, but we want to help, not help shove you over the cliff. Good vendors will still be around if you delay implementation of some new architectural wonder by six weeks or six months to stabilize the one you just implemented, and the vendors that aren’t around? Well, imagine if you’d bought into them. :-) Another old adage that has new meaning at the current rate of change is “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”. Of course there will be politics in many of the most recent round of changes – pressure to do it faster – can’t help you there other than to suggest you point out that the difference between responsive and reckless is directly related to the pressure applied. My big kick is at the moment is access to cloud storage from your local network. Big bang for the buck whether you’re using our ARX Cloud Extender or one of the various cloud storage gateways out there, it gives you a place to move stuff that means you don’t have to back it up, but you don’t have to risk losing it either.No Really. Broadband.
In nature, things seek a balance that is sustainable. In the case of rivers, if there is too much pressure from water flowing, they either flood or open streams to let off the pressure. Both are technically examples of erosion, but we’re not here to discuss that particular natural process, we’re here to consider the case of a stream off a river when there is something changing the natural balance. Since I grew up around a couple of man-made lakes – some dug, some created when the mighty AuSable River was dammed, I’ll use man-made lakes as my examples, but there are plenty of more natural examples – such as earthquakes – that create the same type of phenomenon. Now that I’ve prattled a bit, we’ll get down to the science. A river will sometimes create off-shoots that run to relieve pressure. When these off-shoots stay and have running water, they’re streams or creeks. Take the river in the depiction below: The river flows right to left, and the stream is not a tributary – it is not dumping water into the river, it is a pressure relief stream taking water out. These form in natural depressions when, over time, the flow of a river is more than erosion can adjust for. They’re not at all a problem, and indeed distribute water away from the source river and into what could be a booming forest or prime agricultural land. But when some event – such as man dredging a man-made lake – creates a vacuum at the end of the stream, then the dynamic changes. Take, for example the following depiction. When the bulbous lake at the top is first dug, it is empty. The stream will have the natural resistance of its banks removed, and will start pulling a LOT more water out of the river. This can have the effect of widening the stream in areas with loose-packed soil, or of causing it to flow really very fast in less erosion-friendly environments like stone or clay. Either way, there is a lot more flowing through that stream. Make the lake big enough, and you can divert the river – at least for a time, and depending upon geography, maybe for good. This happens because water follows the path of least resistance, and if the pull from that gaping hole that you dug is strong enough, you will quickly cause the banks of the stream to erode and take the entire river’s contents into your hole. And that is pretty much what public cloud adoption promises to do to your Internet connection. At 50,000 feet, your network environment today looks like this: Notice how your Internet connection is comparable to the stream in the first picture? Where it’s only taking a tiny fraction of the traffic that your LAN is utilizing? Well adding in public cloud is very much like digging a lake. It creates more volume running through your Internet connection. If you can’t grow the width of your connection (due to monthly overhead implications), then you’re going to have to make it go much faster. This is going to be a concern, since most applications of cloud – from storage to apps – are going to require two-way communication with your datacenter. Whether it be for validating users or accessing archived files, there’s going to be more traffic going through your WAN connection and your firewall. Am I saying “don’t use public cloud”? Absolutely not. It is a tool like any other, if you are not already piloting a project out there, I suggest you do so, just so you know what it adds to your toolbox and what new issues it creates. But the one thing that is certain, the more you’re going “out there” for apps and data, the more you’ll need to improve performance of your Internet connections. Mandatory plug: F5 sells products like WOM, EDGE Gateway, and WAM to help you improve the throughput of your WAN connection, and they would be my first stop in researching how to handle increased volumes generated by cloud usage… But if you are a “Vendor X” shop, look at their WAN Optimization and Web Acceleration solutions. Don’t wait until this becomes an actual problem rather than a potential one – when you set up a project team to do a production project out in the public cloud, along with security and appdev, make sure to include a WAN optimization specialist, so you can make certain your Internet connection is not the roadblock that sank the project. This is also the point where I direct your attention to that big firewall in the above diagram. Involve your security staff early in any cloud project. Most of the security folks I have worked with are really smart cookies, but they can’t guarantee the throughput of the firewall if they don’t know you’re about to open up the floodgates on them. Give them time to consider more than just how to authenticate cloud application users. I know I’ve touched on this topic before, but wanted it to be graphically drawn out, so you got to see my weak MS-Paint skills in action, and hopefully I gave you a bit more obvious view of why this is so important.Cloud Storage: Just In Time For Data Center Consolidation.
There’s this funny thing about pouring two bags of M&Ms into one candy dish. The number of M&Ms is exactly the same as when you started, but now they’re all in one location. You have, in theory, saved yourself from having to wash a second candy dish, but the same number of people can enjoy the same number of M&Ms, you’ll run out of M&Ms at about the same time, and if you have junior high kids in the crowd, the green M&Ms will disappear at approximately the same rate. The big difference is that fewer people will fit around one candy dish than two, unless you take extraordinary steps to make that one candy dish more accessible. If the one candy dish is specifically designed to hold one or one and a half bags of M&Ms, well then you’re going to need a place to store the excess. The debate about whether data center consolidation is a good thing or not is pretty much irrelevant if, for any reason your organization chooses to pursue this path. Seriously, while analysts want to make a trend out of everything these days, there are good reasons to consolidate data centers, ranging from skills shortage at one location to a hostile regulatory environment at another. Cost savings are very real when you consolidate data centers, though they’re rarely as large as you expect them to be in the planning stages because the work still has to be done, the connections still have to be routed, the data still has to be stored. You will get some synergies by hosting apps side-by-side that would normally need separate resources, but honestly, a datacenter consolidation project isn’t an application consolidation project. It can be, but that’s a distinct piece of the pie that introduces a whole lot more complexity than simply shifting loads, and all the projects I’ve seen with both as a part of them have them in two separate and distinct phases - “let’s get everything moved, and then focus on reducing our app footprint”. Lori and the M&Ms of doom. While F5 offers products to help you with all manner of consolidation problems, this is not a sales blog, so I’ll focus on one opportunity in the cloud that is just too much of the low-hanging fruit for you not to be considering it. Moving the “no longer needed no matter what” files out to the cloud. I’ve mentioned this in previous Cloud Storage and Cloud Storage Gateway posts, but in the context of data center consolidation, it moves from the “it just makes sense” category to the “urgently needed” category. You’re going to be increasing the workload at your converged datacenter by an unknown amount, and storage requirements will stay relatively static, but you’re shifting those requirements from two or more datacenters to one. This is the perfect time to consider your options with cloud storage. What if you could move an entire classification of your data out to the cloud, so you didn’t have to care if you were accessing it from a data center in Seattle or Cairo? What if you could move that selection of data out to the cloud and the purposely shift data centers without having to worry about that data? Well you can… And I see this as one of the drivers for Cloud Storage adoption. In general you will want a Cloud Storage Gateway like our ARX Cloud Extender, and using ARX or another rules-based tiering engine will certainly make the initial cloud storage propagation process easier, but the idea is simple. Skim off those thousands of files that haven’t been accessed in X days and move them to Cloud storage, freeing up local space so that maybe you won’t need to move or replace that big old NAS system from the redundant data center. X is very much dependent upon your business and even the owning business unit, I would seriously work with the business leaders to set reasonable numbers – and offering them guidance about what it will take (in terms of days X needs to be) to save the company moving or replacing an expensive (and expensive to ship) NAS. While the benefits appear to be short-term – not consolidating the NAS devices while consolidating datacenters – they are actually very long term. They allow you to learn about cloud storage and how it fits into your architectural plans with relatively low-risk data, as time goes on, the number of files (and terabytes) that qualify for movement to the cloud will continue to increase, keeping an escape valve on your NAS growth, and the files that generally don’t need to be backed up every month or so will all be hanging off your cloud storage gateway, simplifying the backup process and reducing backup/replication windows. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the ongoing costs of cloud storage, after all, you will be paying each and every month. But I contend you would be anyway. If this becomes an issue from the business or from accounts payable, it should be relatively easy with a little research to come up with a number for what storage growth costs the company when it owns the NAS devices. The only number available to act as a damper on this cost would be the benefits of depreciation, but that’s a fraction of the total in real-dollar benefits, so my guess is that companies within the normal bounds of storage growth over the last five years can show a cost reduction over time without having to include cost-of-money-over-time calculations for “buy before you use” storage. So the cost of cloud being pieced out over months is beneficial, particularly at the prices in effect today for cloud storage. There will no doubt be a few speed bumps, but getting them out of the way now with this never-accessed data is better than waiting until you need cloud storage and trying to figure it out on the fly. And it does increase your ability to respond to rapidly changing storage needs… Which over the last decade have been rapidly changing in the upward direction. Datacenter consolidation is never easy on a variety of fronts, but this could make it just a little bit less painful and provide lasting benefits into the future. It’s worth considering if you’re in that position – and truthfully to avoid storage hardware sprawl, even if you’re not. Related Articles and Blogs Cloud Storage Gateways, stairway to (thin provisioning) heaven? Certainly Cirtas! Cloud Storage Gains Momentum Cloud Storage Gateways. Short term win, but long term…? Cloud Storage and Adaptability. Plan Ahead Like “API” Is “Storage Tier” Redefining itself? The Problem With Storage Growth is That No One Is Minding the Store F5 Friday: F5 ARX Cloud Extender Opens Cloud Storage Chances Are That Your Cloud Will Be Screaming WAN.Chances Are That Your Cloud Will Be Screaming WAN.
While helping Lori with her fishtank avocation, I have learned a lot of incidental information, like the fact that there are essentially three types of tank – reef, fish, and mixed. Reef tanks hold corals, anemones, etc, while fish tanks hold fish, with a minimum of incidental coral or coralline structure. Mixed tanks have fish who are carefully selected specifically not to eat the pretty corals, soft corals, anemones, and other tasty tidbits growing on the rocks. This is somewhat amazing to me, because in a sense, I share the Toddler’s view of fishtanks. He points and says “That’s Nemo’s Home!” and I point and say “That’s the fish tank!” Lori however has spent a lot of time making “the fish tank” work as a reef tank, so neither of us is doing the entire creation justice. There is a similar phenomenon with Cloud. There are, in fact, three types of cloud – Internal, External, and Hybrid. And while the argument about which is better has been “settled” a million times, I don’t think there is a better solution unless you know your organization. Some organizations will not be comfortable putting critical data out on the public cloud, some will not be comfortable trusting their productivity to a public cloud, some will start in the cloud and never build a datacenter. It just depends upon your business, your market, and your leadership. I think short-term, hybrid will be the most visible model, just because people will implement internal but use external for point solutions. The problem here is of course that most of us point and say “That’s Nemo’s Home In The Clouds!” when there is a world of difference between internal and external clouds – a world spanned by a hybrid infrastructure. But the one thing that is likely to be applicable no matter what is that your WAN connection will become the bottleneck. A bottleneck that inn some scenarios you can work out, and in some you cannot. In the Clouds??!!?? Let’s say that you have moved an application or ten to a remote cloud (internal or external), and storage to remote cloud storage. Then you replicate and encrypt your secondary storage out to the cloud so that it is backed up and protected. While that replication is going on, your WAN connection has a heavy burden that it did not have before now (it might have for some people – replication between datacenters springs to mind – but for most of us it did not). This is a great use for the cloud because you’ll get a one-time upload fee and a monthly maintenance (disk usage) fee, but no other charges unless you update the replica – which you will want to do, but you can control how often and thus how much it costs. So your application “in the cloud” is clipping along, and your replication is going well, but your WAN connection is now feeling the pain. In many cases, WAN Optimization can help with this phenomenon by reducing the amount of traffic sent through your WAN connection. Many, but not all. In order to do the astounding magic that WAN Optimization devices do, they require a device on either end of the connection. If your cloud vendor lets you put in virtual machines, then you can run a virtual version of your WAN Optimization appliance and optimize between there and your data center. The only problem is that the largest amount of data being sent through your WAN in the above scenario is going to a cloud storage target, and if that cloud storage is on an internal cloud, you can use WAN Optimization, if it is not, you’ll need more than just what WAN Optimization has to offer. Cloud Storage Gateways can give you that added bit of throughput if deployed correctly, since they will compress and dedupe on the way out of your datacenter, and then rehydrate on the way back in. That should cover the storage end nicely. Since most Cloud Storage Gateways do encryption on-the-fly also, you should be covered for all of the requirements if you are deploying both WAN Optimization and a Cloud Storage Gateway. Whoa Dude, the clouds can be benign. In the end, your WAN connection doesn’t have to be your bottleneck, and you can still point at your cloud and go “That’s Nemo’s Home In The Clouds” without concern for which type of cloud you’re working with. If your cloud provider does not offer you the ability to run VMs, then you might have a bit more difficulty. About the best solution out there at this time for such a problem would be to upgrade your WAN connection. It isn’t cheap, but if you can’t make less traffic flow through the connection, then the connection just has to be bigger. Since this scenario will likely be a small number of enterprises – they have to have enough traffic to need a solution, and have to have no ability to dedupe and compress on the connection between the primary data center and the cloud – this shouldn’t be a huge issue for the marketplace. People have talked about the evolution of the data center, I think the evolution of the WAN is a better analogy. We’ve used the WAN for a very long time, now we’re going to see an increasing number of organizations actually utilizing it to the potential that was always there, but the infrastructure – and business – were not yet ready to take advantage of. Images courtesy of Disney Pixar Studios and are linked to the source item.Another Guest Post on F5 Fridays
As you all know, I try to keep my marketing spiel for F5 to a minimum here. I don’t hesitate to mention when F5 has a product that will solve your problem, but try to focus on the problem and technical solutions. But sometimes I want to crow about how good our product lines really are. Thankfully, Lori provides a venue for us to do just that called F5 Fridays. This week I guest wrote an F5 Friday article about our new ARX Cloud Extender product and it’s cool enough I thought I’d let those of you who read my blog and don’t follow Loris know that it’s out there. Check it out here. If you’re a File Virtualization customer, or you want to take advantage of the cloud from your traditional storage arrays, it is worth a quick read.
