Congrats to all!
]]>The days of traditional hardware, software and IT as we know it are coming to an end. The following will break down the simplest components of Traditional IT and compare it to Cloud or OnDemand Infrastructure; specifically related to Infrastructure as a Service.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Limitations between IT and Business interoperability. Small businesses are especially susceptible to long periods of downtime because there is a lack of capital and skillset to provision and maintain secondary systems to test upgrades ensure smooth transitions and fail safe infrastructure in place for expected hardware failures and disasters.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Businesses only pay for what they use. Employees can access and edit company-specific data including email, financials, and other documents on or off-site seamlessly in real-time. No special device or virtual portal required; only a smart phone or laptop is needed. Decreases overhead costs since employees can work remotely. An organization can hire talent from all over the world and not just what is available locally.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: IT Support and maintenance is focused on more frequently than technological innovation. In-house and contracted labor is needed to install and maintain hardware and infrastructure. Training required for a lot of the complex systems required for a resilient infrastructure is costly and repetitive.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: IT department no longer has to worry about constant server updates and other computing issues; they will be free to concentrate on innovation. Requires fewer IT staff so that there is more money to spend towards moving the business forward. IT personnel no longer need to worry about keeping hardware, software and data backups up-to-date. Bookkeeping stays consistent since fees are subscription-based, or are incremental with the pay-as-you-go model, which is easy to budget for the year.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Cycling of hardware licensing is mandatory based on agreements with hardware vendors ranging from 1-5 years. Major Capital Expenditure is required to expand, upgrade and maintain the existing infrastructure.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Companies bypass the need to upgrade hardware and software every one to three years. The underlying infrastructure is refreshed and upgraded as required and is completely transparent to its tenants and services within the OnDemand Infrastructure.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: A lot of software licensing is not structured to be consumed by the business on a pay per use model and as also tied to mandatory agreements and renewal policies that also cycle between 1- 5 years. A large amount of capital expenditure is required to acquire, upgrade and maintain the existing licensing agreements.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Software Licensing agreements can be brokered through OnDemand Licensing in a pay as you go model which will provide the ability to expand and reduce the number of licensed for certain applications as required by the business.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: A lot of today's existing datacenter infrastructure for small/medium business is housed internally at local office locations. When the decision is made to move to a secured datacenter, many are surprised about the additional cost and limitations policies with datacenters. Most in-house IT departments with in-house hardware and datacenters don't realize that the building covers the cost of power and cooling.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: OnDemand offerings are housed in Tier 3 high availability an secure datacenters. Levering datacenter partnerships, the datacenter cooling, power costs and risks managed and maintenance by the OnDemand Infrastructure.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Very rarely can small/medium business can justify the cost of a large datacenter network backbone to support services that require it.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Datacenter network is directly connected to major Internet backbones and regional ISPs available in the vicinity of a given data center location. It provides customers with a redundant Internet connection, a 100 per cent availability SLA and the flexibility to scale to higher bandwidth requirements. The service also includes access to a central NTP service from a stratum-1 time source, and self-administration of customer domains using the datacenters robust DNS management service. The location takes advantage of a strong network topology, multiple power grids, and close proximity to fully redundant feeds from Tier 1 providers.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Provided that existing capacity is on premise and ready to be used; the ability to install new services within the infrastructure. The challenge comes when the new services require additional resources and capacity that the current in-house infrastructure is unable to provide thus kicking of another procurement cycle that can prove to be costly and time constrained. Unexpected requirements for new projects and business events can create challenges with cost and wasted time for procurement when the infrastructure needs to be expanded.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: The customers environment is already up and running, ready for your capacity to be turned on.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Traditional hardware purchases and deployments don't allow for the flexibility to support a pay as go model of hardware acquisition and usage.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Pay as you use, if projects come to a close turn down capacity and stop paying.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Ability to provision new servers and storage can be simple to a point. When procurement of new hardware is required, the time to plan, provision, test and deploy is dramatically increased and can slow down business and IT processes.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Ability to provision more servers and storage within minutes.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Small businesses are especially susceptible to long periods of downtime because there is a lack of capital and skillset to provision and maintain secondary systems to test upgrades ensure smooth transitions and fail safe infrastructure in place for expected hardware failures and disasters.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Entire environment is built for guaranteed 99.99% availability to design similar solutions are millions of dollars in investment.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: The cost of covering 24x7 support using the same staff to maintain, support and develop the infrastructure can be challenging to sustain without disrupting work/life balance for staff. Access to in-house high level expertise can be difficult to attain. Lack of overlap of skillsets and cross training with limited staff can also be challenging.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: A 24x7 team in place to ensure that environment is up and functional at all times. Access to in-house high level expertise across multiple technologies is easily attainable and the customer only pays for what they need to be supported.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: Dependent on the skills of the IT staff and consultants engaged to support and upgrade the infrastructure which is challenging with a limited amount of expertise in-house.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Several Managed service options exist that allow for self service, co-managed, or fully managed environments.
Traditional IT Infrastructure: The cost of deploying an infrastructure to comply with a high level of security standards can be extremely high depending on the skillset and hardware investment of the current architecture. Achieving ISAE 16 / SAS 70 Type II compliance can be very costly to an organization if the existing infrastructure does or cannot support it.
OnDemand (Cloud) Infrastructure: Built to ISAE 16 / SAS 70 Type II report and PCI DSS certification. Ensure clear understanding of the security practiced at the different cloud service providers and what their SLA’s state. Find ability to audit physical site and resources.
]]>vBenchmark provides a succinct set of metrics in these categories for your VMware virtualized private cloud. Additionally, if you choose to contribute your metrics to the community repository, vBenchmark also allows you to compare your metrics against those of comparable companies in your peer group. The data you submit is anonymized and encrypted for secure transmission.
Additional Resources:
]]>Yes, at first glance, you may be forgiven for thinking that this subject hardly warrants a blog post. But for those of you who have suffered the consequences of an All Paths Down (APD) condition, you'll know why this is so important.
Let's recap on what APD actually is.
APD is when there are no longer any active paths to a storage device from the ESX, yet the ESX continues to try to access that device. When hostd tries to open a disk device, a number of commands such as read capacity and read requests to validate the partition table are sent. If the device is in APD, these commands will be retried until they time out. The problem is that hostd is responsible for a number of other tasks as well, not just opening devices. One task is ESX to vCenter communication, and if hostd is blocked waiting for a device to open, it may not respond in a timely enough fashion to these other tasks. One consequence is that you might observe your ESX hosts disconnecting from vCenter.
Here are the Top 10 videoes from 2011 on VMware KB TV
Special mention - @esloof also has a great collection of quality vidoes that I would strongly recommend you subscribe to in iTunes.
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