With all of the hype around private clouds and manufacturer private cloud infrastructure stacks I thought I’d take some time to differentiate between ‘private-cloud’ and ‘converged-infrastructure.’ For some background on Private Cloud see two of my previous posts: http://www.definethecloud.net/building-a-private-cloud and http://www.definethecloud.net/is-private-cloud-a-unicorn. Private clouds typically consist of four architectural stages (I…
Category: Concepts
The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks
With the industry drive towards cloud computing models there has been a lot of talk and announcements around ‘converged infrastructure’ ‘integrated stack’ solutions. An integrated stack is pre-packaged offering typically containing some amount of network, storage, and server infrastructure bundled with some level of virtualization, automation, and orchestration software. The…
Is Private Cloud a Unicorn?
With all of the discussion, adoption, and expansion of cloud offerings there is a constant debate that continues to rear its head: Public vs. Private or more bluntly ‘Is there even such thing as a private cloud?’ You typically have two sides of this debate coming from two different camps:…
The Reality of Cloud Bursting
Recently while researching the concept of ‘Cloud Bursting‘ I received a history lesson in Cloud Computing after a misguided tweet at Chris Hoff (@Beaker.) My snarky comment suggested Chris needed a lesson in Cloud history, but as it turns out I received the lesson. My reference turned out to be…
Innovative Versus Integration Cloud Stacks
The Live Webcast with NetApp and Kingman Tang went quite well with good discussion on private cloud and data center stacks. Check out the recording below. A BrightTALK Channel Related posts: The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks Choosing The Right Private Cloud Storage Hybrid Cloud’s Burst Bubble The Difference Between…
OTV and Vplex: Plumbing for Disaster Avoidance
High availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, etc. are all key concerns of any data center design. They all describe separate components of the big concept: ‘When something does go wrong how do I keep doing business.’ Very public real world disasters have taught us as an industry valuable lessons in…
Cisco Unified Computing System Value: A Customer’s Perspective
For those who do not know me, I’ve been blogging since April 2010. My primary subject has been Cisco UCS and everything around it. Now, when I say “everything around itâ€, I really mean “everything around it as it pertains to my organizationâ€. If you want to read a lot,…
Disaster Recovery and the Cloud
It goes without saying that modern business relies on information technology. As a result, it is essential that operations personnel consider the business impact of outages and plan accordingly. As an illustration, Virgin Blue recently experienced a twenty-hour outage in its reservation system that resulted in losses of up to…
Shakespearean Guest Post
I got all Hamlet with my guest post on Thomas Jones blog, check it out to address ‘To blade or not to blade.’ http://www.niketown588.com/2010/09/to-blade-or-not-to-blade.html Related posts: Post defining VN-Link My Recent Guest Spot on The Cloudcast (.NET) Podcast My First Podcast: ‘Coffee With Thomas’ Collapsing Server Management Points with UCS…
Data Center 101: Server Virtualization
Virtualization is a key piece of modern data center design. Virtualization occurs on many devices within the data center, conceptually virtualization is the ability to create multiple logical devices from one physical device. We’ve been virtualizing hardware for years: VLANs and VRFs on the network, Volumes and LUNs on storage,…