In keeping with the tradition of the last three to five years, 2012 is being touted by analysts and vendors alike as "the year for VDI." This year there is a slightly new twist to the hype and marketing, and that’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). It’s a simple concept:…
Year: 2011
Hybrid Cloud’s Burst Bubble
One of the more hyped use-case examples for hybrid cloud is cloud bursting. And why not? It’s truly the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario. During normal business operations, your systems run in-house on private cloud infrastructure, and during unforeseen or unpredictable peaks, your services burst to excess capacity at your public cloud provider(s)…
Horton Hears Hadoop
I’m feeling Seuss-ish so here goes (Line 1 and 2 by Ken Oestreich @fountnhead.) Of this poem you should first realize, of course, Is based on Big Data, and code open-source. On disk that was spinning sat data quite large So much that in fact it would fill up a…
The Idle Cycle Conundrum
One of the advantages of a private cloud architecture is the flexible pooling of resources that allows rapid change to match business demands. These resource pools adapt to the changing demands of existing services and allow for new services to be deployed rapidly. For these pools to maintain adequate performance,…
TCO and ROI: A Cadillac Perspective
This summer I traded in my beloved Toyota 4 runner for a Cadillac CTS V Black Diamond edition. There was no issue with the 4 Runner and I owed nothing on it. I was not in need of an extra payment, I just wanted the V. Maybe it was a…
Blades are Not the Future
Kevin Houston, Founder of Blades Made Simple and all around server and blade rocket surgeon, posted an excellent thought provoking article titled ‘Why Blade Servers Will Be the Core of Future Data Centers ( http://bladesmadesimple.com/2011/10/why-blade-servers-will-be-the-core-of-future-data-centers/.) The article is his predictions and thoughts on the way in which the server industry…
Cloud Success Factor: Rethink Application Development
You’ve been driving a perfectly suitable family sedan for the last ten years. It’s highly rated by all the gurus who rate such things; it’s safe, reliable and gets acceptable gas mileage. You’ve never loved it in anyway, although you did have a moment of pure capitalist joy when you…
Hypervisors are not the Droids You Seek
Long ago, in a data center far, far away, we as an industry moved away from big iron and onto commodity hardware. That move brought with it many advantages, such as cost and flexibility. The change also brought along with it higher hardware and operating system software failure rates. This…
Server Networking With gen 2 UCS Hardware
** this post has been slightly edited thanks to feedback from Sean McGee** In previous posts I’ve outlined: How UCS server failover occurs from a network perspective: http://www.definethecloud.net/ucs-server-failover How Inter-fabric traffic is handled in End-Host mode: http://www.definethecloud.net/inter-fabric-traffic-in-ucs How inter-fabric traffic is handled in switch mode: http://www.definethecloud.net/inter-fabric-traffic-in-ucspart-ii If you’re not familiar…
Choosing The Right Private Cloud Storage
One of the key decisions in architecting an infrastructure for private cloud is selecting a storage platform for the deployment. Storage is a key component of the infrastructure and will play a major role in the overall performance of the private cloud. The storage decision carries additional weight due to…