Starting clockwise with Camden Ford of Xsigo, the crew included the following:

• Howard Marks
• Scott D. Lowe
• Greg Stuart
• Stephen Foskett
• Jason Boche
• Allan Ruiz
• Craig Stewart
• Luigi Danakos

Download the roundtable video podcast now, or subscribe in iTunes to tune in to the discussion!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 10: Xsigo Discussion at VMworld
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Greg W. Stuart, winner of the Boche.net/Gestalt IT VMworld trip contest

Finally Attending a Computer/Technology Event

I have to confess something right off the bat; I’ve never actually been to a computer/technology conference in the 10 years that I’ve been in the business. Yes, that is pitiful, being that there are so many good conferences out there such as Microsoft’s TechEd, Oracle’s Open World, Citrix’s Synergy and of course VMware’s VMworld. These are all very exciting and highly entertaining conferences. That being said, I can finally say I’ve attended a computer/technology event, VMworld 2010.

Being completely new to virtualization (introduced to VMware for the 1st time in December of 2009), I quickly gained a passion for the field and the technology involved, particularly with VMware. We have Citrix and even an instance of Hyper-V in our infrastructure but VMware grabbed my attention and I’ve been hooked ever since. In April of 2010 I achieved my VMware Certified Professional (V4) certification and have gained a lot of good experience and knowledge in a fairly short period of time. This is thanks to the amazing VMware community; i.e. blogs, twitter feeds, training, etc.

As I’m surfing through many of the great blogs on VMware I came across a blog post by Jason Boche promoting a “Get Away to VMworld” contest. Jason donated a free registration to the person who won his contest, and Gestalt IT agreed to cover the airfare. I thought, why not, I never win anyways and it only took my 2 minutes to enter, done.

Just as I’m about to fall asleep one night, I get an email on my phone and sure enough it was from Jason telling me I won his competition. I was going to VMworld, my first computer/technology conference. Needless to say I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night.

Inspired to Join the Community

Winning that contest inspired me to join the community of bloggers evangelizing VMware and find ways to give back as well. I started my own blog, vDestination.com, and quickly began writing about VMware, my experiences as well as a few contests that would help give back to the community.

In the days leading up to VMworld 2010, I ran a contest giving away a full library of books based on VMware vSphere and its tools.  Authors and vExperts, Eric Siebert, Scott Lowe and Mike Laverick all donated a book (some donated 2) as well as David Davis and Train Signal donating their vSphere training video series and even a donation of Windows 7 Ultimate by Chris Kusek. It was a huge testament to the willingness of the community to give back to those who are seeking to expand their knowledge base on VMware.

Finally the day to leave for VMworld had arrived; excitement was at its apex as I boarded the plane in Baltimore to head out to San Francisco. The first order of business upon arriving at the Moscone Center was getting my badge and my swag… I mean conference materials.  VMware provided a really nice backpack chock full of conference material, a helpful map of Moscone, a guide to all of the sessions, labs, etc. and a map of the Solutions Exchange show floor. Being my first time at VMworld the first day was very overwhelming and the guides and materials provided really helped to make it a more structured event for me.

Day One

Day one I headed over to the bloggers lounge in hopes to meet some of the bloggers whose content I read on a daily basis, and to meet some of my readers as well. The difficult part was figuring out who was who due to the fact that our avatars were not posted on our badges (note to VMware: print badges with avatar/twitter handle next year).  I plugged in my laptop and began tweeting and blogging.

No more than 2 minutes after I had tweeted that I was in the bloggers lounge, Guy Chapman sends me a tweet that said, “@gregwstuart Raise your left hand if you are here” I looked around worried that people might think I was crazy sitting in the lounge with my left hand raised so I did a quick scan and saw Guy hanging out in the corner. We met and had a nice chat for about a half hour, first networking connection made! I also met Patrick Redknap, John Troyer and Stu Miniman, Kendrick Coleman as well as the man that made my trip possible, Jason Boche.

From there I went to my first session which was about building your own home lab, the speakers included Eric Siebert and Simon Seagrave, both vExperts and authors. The sessions were really great, while I didn’t attend many; the ones I did attend were very knowledgeable and entertaining as well. You don’t always assume that a tech conference is going to be entertaining, but this was different, VMworld was fun at every turn.

The Scene

The labs were amazing. This was an area that was constantly packed and at times had a significant wait to get into. In different areas of Moscone there was what I call “chill” areas, staged with small ottoman like cubes to sit on or even, get this, giant VMworld beanbag chairs. People napped, held meetings, typed away on their laptops or just sat for a breather, it was very interesting.

There were even areas that were staged like a game room. I counted about 4 ping pong tables, a couple of air hockey tables and other areas you could hang out in that were relaxing and fun.

I didn’t expect this to be the scene at VMworld. I thought it was going to be long days of bad food, very involved sessions, waiting in lines, and having nowhere to sit. This was not the case. The food was always good and available at every turn it seemed, from hot food, food for on the go, candy, soda, water and everything in between. This is an aspect of the conference that I thought was very well put together, it made the long days easier to handle.

Day Two

Day two I was invited to attend a product launch/press release held by Xsigo at the W hotel across from the Moscone Center. This was an awesome event. I was there on behalf of Gestalt IT, and following the press release and lunch, Xsigo invited us to hold a round table discussion on their new line of Virtual I/O Directors and to discuss the relevance of virtual I/O in the field today.

It was very educational and I made some good contacts and came away with a nice blog post as well. It was nice to be the first to get the news and blog about it, a significant benefit of attending these types of events.

The Solutions Exchange

Lastly, the Solutions Exchange was my most favorite attraction at VMworld; this is where I spent the bulk of days 3 and 4. There were over 200 sponsors and exhibitors that had their offering of the latest technology to either partner with VMware or even in some instances compete with VMware, yes Citrix had a booth, 10×20 actually… which I thought was interesting.

My favorite booth was the WYSE booth. WYSE had their WYSE Pocket Cloud product on display with a number of various end points displaying its ability to reach your virtual desktop anywhere you are. They had the DroidX phone, the iPhone 4 and a couple of other handhelds on display that you could actually play with and test drive the application. Cisco, Veeam and NetApp all had really great booths and very good presentations.

The Solutions Exchange next year should really be called The Swag Depot, this is where I got 98% of my swag from all of the different vendors. My most prized piece of swag was an iPod Nano that I won, and I can’t even remember who I won it from. There was just so much stuff going on, at times it was information overload.

A Year’s Worth of Knowledge

In less than a week at VMworld, I came away with a year’s worth of knowledge it seems. I definitely came back with a ton of stuff to blog about; I think I generated at least 4 blog posts resulting from my trip to VMworld.

I also made some very good connections with others inside the VMware community that are sure to be long lasting and mutually beneficial. I was actually approached by Mike Laverick and he told me he loved my blog contest and has begun to run contests on his blog as well.

The VMware community is very involved in helping others join in the community and gain the knowledge and experience that will further their careers in the virtualization field. To be a part of this community had done more for my career than any certification or training course had done to date. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett at GestaltIT and Jason Boche for helping me get to VMworld; I wouldn’t have gone without your help.

© guest for Gestalt IT, 2010. | VMworld 2010: A Trip to Remember
Read more posts categorized as All, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Top Story

The show was a little late this week, because as our friend @ioshints put it, we had a “cloud ladder failure” on Sunday: Greg’s broadband was out.  But when we finally gathered ’round the great big conference room in the sky, we did it up right.  Dan was coming in loud and clear on his new Mac Book Pro, Greg reminisced about the good ol’ days of FDDI-to-token ring bridging, and Ethan made bold predictions about the virtualized networking future.

• First up was VMworld.  We didn’t go, and didn’t care (much). Okay, maybe we did want to hang with all the cool kids.  But whether here or there, we were paying attention, and some interesting products were announced from Cisco and (naturally) VMware.
• Cisco’s Virtual Security Gateway integrates with the Cisco Nexus 1000V and provides a host-facing firewall as part of a defense-in-depth strategy to secure your virtualized environment.  VSG is tightly integrated with your VMs, such that the security policy you build will follow a VM during a VMotion event.  Cool stuff, we say.  Read more about VSG from Omar Sultan, and watch a 3+ minute overview from Cuong Tran on the Cisco Data Center YouTube channel.
• Not to be outdone, VMware announced their vShield product family, pushing the mantra of “IT as a service” and trying to make security easier to deliver and flexible during change.  Do you want VMware to become the networking provider of a cloudy, virtualized world? Read even more about VMware’s long-term networking vision over at Wikibon.
• The Pushers talk about the networking world colliding with the server world at the junction point of VMware.  Do you do VMware?  Time for us network geeks to dive into the deep end of the virtualization pool…so say we all!
• Ethan and Greg are headed over to San Jose on 9/15 – 9/17 for a GestaltIT.com Net Field Day event.  We’ll be tweeting and live blogging about the vendor presentations, and you can participate! Send us the hardest questions you’ve got for the vendors, ’cause we’re talkin’ to the boffins, not the marketing types.  Vendor list coming soon.
• Xsigo would be delighted to sell you an ethernet-attached virtual I/O appliance. Bolt it into your rack, select the modules appropriate to the sort of data you’d like to shovel across your ethernet, and you’ve got a low-cost way to take advantage of that network you’ve already got.  For example, you can do FCoE without the cost and implementation challenges of a converged network adapter.  The ethernet NIC you’ve already got will work just fine!  Xsigo says more modules are coming.
• Is VEPA a gamble?  What about TRILL or FabricPath?  What’s an architect to do when the network world is changing oh-so-fast, but a data center design must be finalized today?
• The Pushers give their take on this question from listener Andrew H. “How much time do you guys typically take to implement a new technology into a live network? I always like as much lab time as I can get to make sure I don’t run into any gotchas during cutover day, but don’t want to put too many hours and end up over thinking the plan.”

Feedback

Follow the Packet Pushers on Twitter (@packetpushers | Greg @etherealmind | Dan @rovingengineer | Ethan @ecbanks), and send your queries & comments about the show to packetpushers@gmail.com.  We want to hear from you!

© Etherealmind for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Show 19 – Worlds Collide – VMware and Networking
Read more posts categorized as All, Favorites, Networking

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

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

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

The discussion was wide-ranging, and we’ve split it into two episodes. This second episode includes discussion of the following:

• HP’s unique position as a soup-to-nuts infrastructure supplier
• The enterprise readiness of 3COM, D-Link, Virtual Connect, Xsigo
• Cisco’s secret plan with UCS marketing
• The concept of integrating the VMware hypervisor as firmware in the stack
• The exact definition of stack – what does it really mean?
• Is there a difference between a “marketing stack” or reference architecture and a “real stack”?
• What is the compelling economic driver that makes people move to vertical integration?
• What is VMware’s long-term strategy for stack wars?
• Was vBlock designed for the cloud?

Joining the call are the following Gestalt IT authors and Field Day delegates:

• Jason Boche (@JasonBoche, Boche.net)
• Rich Brambley (@RBrambley, VM /ETC)
• Carlo Costanzo (@CCostan, VMware Info)
• Chris Evans (@ChrisMEvans, The Storage Architect)
• Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind, EtherealMind)
• Edward Haletky (@Texiwill, The Virtualization Practice)
• Joerg Hallbauer (, Joerg’s Storage Blog)
• Robin Harris (@StorageMojo, Storage Mojo)
• Rod Haywood (@Rodos, Musings of Rodos)
• John Hickson (@StudioSystems, Studio Sysadmins)
• Scott Lowe (@Scott_Lowe, ScottLowe.org)
• John Obeto (@JohnObeto, Absolutely Windows)
• Devang Panchigar (@StorageNerve, StorageNerve)
• Bas Raayman (@BasRaayman, Bas Raayman)
• Ed Saipetch (@EdSai, Breathing Data)

Download the stack wars roundtable podcast now, or subscribe in iTunes to tune in to the discussion!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 7: Stack Wars Roundtable 2
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Exclusive, Featured, Server Virtualization, Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast, Top Story

But what does this all mean to enterprise IT? Who benefits from these vertically-integrated stacks? Who stands to lose out? To paraphrase the wise Jedi master, Yoda, “cloudy, the future is.” So, the stack wars have begun!

What’s a Stack?

The largest IT infrastructure vendors are aligning their own products and joining together in alliances to create vertically-integrated “datacenter in a box” stacks that include server, storage, networking, and higher-level software for virtualization and management. Cisco and EMC are certainly at the forefront of this development with their Acadia VCE vBlock, as demonstrated and deconstructed at our Tech Field Day earlier this month. The reinvigorated HP has its own offering in this space, and is unique in its ability to use all in-house hardware, and IBM and Oracle/Sun are serious challengers. Today, Hitachi announced their own Unified Compute Platform as well.

The battle of the stacks extends upward into software as well. Although VMware and Microsoft (and don’t forget Citrix) are quick to point out that they can run on anyone’s hardware stack, they are being pulled into the war through alliances, ownership, and old feuds. VMware forms the “V” in the Cisco/EMC “VCE” stack, though they also linked up with Cisco and NetApp in February. HP and Microsoft signed an even bigger agreement in January, suggesting that Hyper-V is their preferred virtualization solution. Hitachi’s UCP digs deep into the Microsoft solution set and mixes in home-grown software to do everyone else one better. But perhaps it will be Oracle/Sun who will deliver a real software-focused stack, given Oracle’s historical focus.

All of these stacks have a few things in common:

1. Standard hardware configurations are specified for ease of purchasing and support
2. The hardware stack includes blade servers, integrated I/O technology, Ethernet networking for connectivity, and SAN or NAS storage
3. Unifying software is included to manage the hardware components in one interface
4. A joint services organization is available to help in selection, architecture, and deployment
5. Higher-level software, from the virtualization hypervisor through application platforms, will be included as well

Who’s Driving?

Although all of these stacks include software components, it is interesting to note that it is the hardware guys who are in the driver’s seat. Microsoft and VMware are surely wary of tying up too closely with any one server or storage vendor, lest they lose the ability to compete in other environments. One expects these two to announce partnerships across a few hardware stacks, though it is unlikely that they will both fully integrate with every offering.

When it comes to stack hardware, only HP has a complete solution, having recently acquired 3COM, LeftHand, and Ibrix. IBM, Dell, and Oracle are thin on networking technology, though their storage story is stronger than many give them credit for. EMC clearly lacks the server and networking components and so tied up with a complementary Cisco who is strong in both areas. Then there is Hitachi, with a solid reputation in storage and strong but relatively unknown blade server offering but no clarity on the networking side. Perhaps HDS is already on the phone with Xsigo, VirtenSys, or Arista?

Certainly, all of these hardware vendors would like to offer a complete solution. This leads one to assume that many of the smaller hardware companies will soon be acquired, since they cannot hope to offer their own stack. The networking and virtual I/O companies are especially juicy targets, but don’t count storage out either. One could certainly imagine Cisco picking up a storage company or two and leaving EMC at the altar! Compellent is undervalued right now, and 3PAR must look pretty good, too.

The Cloud Angle

What doe these stacks have to do with that other megatrend in IT, cloud computing? There are two angles here:

1. Integrated stacks are the perfect foundation for private and public cloud deployment, providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as a turnkey purchase. I called this the “home theater in a box” concept at Tech Field Day: A single line item gets you all the components you need to roll out a large-to-huge virtualization-ready infrastructure.
2. Integrated stacks are a lame attempt for the hardware guys to stay relevant in a public cloud world. Public cloud providers are taking a top-down approach to infrastructure with most relying on generic commodity servers, storage, and networking rather than buying from the big-iron providers in the stack wars. This consolidation mirrors the dying breaths of the British auto industry, which attempted to retain their hold on the market through scale rather than competitive products.

It’s not immediately clear whether one, both, or neither of these arguments truly provides the impetus for these hardware stacks, but the vendors are all pushing them as cloud-ready. Certainly, the advent of cloud computing is a major factor.

Only the Beginning

This is only the beginning of the stack wars. I have asked the Gestalt IT authors and Tech Field Day delegates to weigh in on this subject, and expect to see a number of insightful pieces written on the topic in the coming weeks. I will continue covering the topic as well. Please consider subscribing to the Gestalt IT RSS feed or following @GestaltIT on Twitter to stay up to date on the latest developments. Thoughtful comments and responses are always welcome as well.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Stack Wars Have Begun!
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

Last Friday (April 9th), I and the rest of the Gestalt IT tech field day delegates were invited by Cisco to get a briefing on Cisco’s Unified Computing System or in short “UCS”. Basically this is Cisco’s view that builds on the notion that we are currently viewing a server as being tied to the application, instead of seeing the server as a resource that allows us to run that application.

Anyone in marketing will know that the next question being asked is “What is your suggestion to change all that?”, and Cisco’s marketing department didn’t disappoint us and tried to answer that question for us. The key, in their opinion, is using a system consisting of building blocks that allow me to to give customers a solution stack.

As the trend can be spotted to go towards commodity hardware, Cisco is following suit by using industry standard servers that are equipped with Intel Xeon processors. Other key elements are a virtualization of services, a focus on automated provisioning and unification of the fabric by means of FCoE.

What this basically means is that you order building blocks from Cisco in the form of blade servers, blade chassis, fabric interconnects and virtual adapters. But instead of connecting this stuff up and expanding my connectivity like I do in a standard scenario, I instead wire my hardware depending on the bandwidth requirements and that’s pretty much it. Once I am done with that, I can assign virtual interfaces as I need them on a per blade basis, which in term removes the hassle of plugging in physical adapters and cabling all that stuff up. In a sense it reminded me of the take that Xsigo offered with their I/O director, but with the difference that Cisco uses FCoE instead of Infiniband, and with Cisco you add the I/O virtualization to a more complete management stack.

The management stack

This is in my opinion the key difference. I can bolt together my own pieces of hardware and use the Xsigo I/O director in combination with VMware and have a similar set-up, but I will be missing out on one important element. A central management utility.

This UCS unified management offers me some advantages that I have not seen from other vendors. I can now tie the properties to the resources that I want, meaning that I can set up properties tied to a blade, but can also tie them to the VM or application running on that blade in form of service profiles. Things like MAC, WWN or QoS profiles are defined inside of these service profiles in an XML format and then applied to my resources as I see fit.

Sounds good, but…..?

There is always a but, that’s something that is almost impossible to avoid. Even though Cisco offers a solution that seems to offer some technical advantages, there are some potential drawbacks.

• Vendor lock in: This is something that is quite easy to see. The benefit of getting everything from one vendor also means that my experience is only as good as the vendors support is in case of trouble. Same thing applies when ordering new hardware and there are unexpected problems somewhere in the ordering/delivery chain
• The price tag: Cisco is not know to be cheap. Some would even say that Cisco is very expensive, and it will all boil down to one thing. Is the investment that I need to make for a UCS solution going to give me the return on invest? And is it going to do that anytime soon? Sure it can reduce my management overhead and complexity, sure it can lower my operational expense, but I want to see something in return for the money I gave Cisco and preferably today, not tomorrow.
• Interoperability with my existing environment: This sort of stuff works great when you are lucky enough to create something new. A new landscape, a new data center or something along those lines. Truth is that usually we will end up adding something new to our existing environment. It’s great that I can manage all of my UCS stack with one management interface. But what about the other stuff? What if I already have other Cisco switches that are not connected to this new UCS landscape? Can I manage those using the built in UCS features? Or is this another thing that my admins have to learn?
• The fact that UCS is unified does not mean that my company is: In smaller companies, you have a couple of sysadmins that do everything. They install hardware, configure the operating system, upload firewall policies to their routers and zone some new storage. So far so good, I’ll give them my new UCS gear and they usually know what goes where and will get going. Now I end up in the enterprise segment where I talk to one department to change my kernel parameters, a different to configure my switch port to auto-negotiate and the third one will check on the WWN of my fibre-channel HBA to see if this is matching to the one configured on the storage side. Now I need to get all of them together to work on creating the service profiles, although not all will be able to work outside of their knowledge silo. The other alternative would be to create a completely new team that just does UCS, but do I want that?

Besides the things that are fairly obvious and not necessarily Cisco’s fault, I think that Cisco was actually one of the first companies to go this way and one of the first to show an actual example of a federated and consolidated solution. Because that is what this is all about, it’s not about offering a piece of hardware, it’s about offering a solution. Initiatives like VCE and VCN only show us that Cisco is moving forward and is actually pushing towards offering complete solution stacks.

My opinion? I like it. I think Cisco have delivered something that is a usable showcase, and although unfortunately I have not been able to actually test it so far, I do really like the potential it offers and the way it was designed. If I ever get the chance to do some testing on a complete UCS stack, I’ll be sure to let you know more, but until then I at least hope that this post has made things a bit clearer and removed some of the questions you might have. And if that’s not the case, leave a comment and I will be sure to ask some more questions on your behalf.

Disclaimer: The sponsors are each paying their share for this non-profit event. We, the delegates, are not paid to attend. Most of us will take some days off from our regular job to attend. What is paid for us is the flight, something to eat and the stay at a hotel. However as stated in the above post, we are not forced to write about anything that happens during the event, or to only write positive things.

© Bas for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – On Cisco and UCS
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization

Day 1 of the Gestalt IT Field Day started early at 7am with a trip to VMware and their executive briefing centre where breakfast was provided.   As well as food, there was an opportunity to see the “data centre in a rack”, used at VMworld to run all of the demo and presentation materials. Once replete, we were whisked off to another VMware office for presentations from MDS Micro, Xsigo and VMware. At this point the choice of sponsors became clear, as the integration of high density server hardware (MDS Micro), I/O virtualisation (Xsigo) and virtualisation software (VMware) was used to create the “data centre in a rack” we saw earlier. Whilst the combination of the three offerings was compelling, I think it may be some time before highly compact computing offerings like this are widely adopted. The lab test was testament to this; the simplicity with which virtual HBAs and NICs could be created lends itself to virtual device sprawl unless clear best practices and standards are put in place. That said, this type of computing power will be the future for many organisations.

From VMware, we moved on to 3Par and a presentation on the InServ hardware, with a follow up from Symantec. Again the parthership message was clear. 3Par provide thin provisioning with the ability to reclaim unused resources. This is achieved today through detecting patterns of data with no content (binary zeros), but in partnership with Symantec will be integrated into the Veritas File System. The 3Par presenters were excellent and the only disappointment was the lack of time to talk. To be fair, it would have been possible to take the whole day just discussing 3Par alone.

Next stop was the Computer History Museum for the first evening party. This was a chance to catch up more informally with the sponsors. It was also an opportunity for me to talk with The Notorious 3P (otherwise known as Marc Farley). The museum was fascinating, with exhibits ranging from Babbage’s Difference Engine to the first Apple I and a range of computing devices from my youth (the Commodore Pet, Sinclair Spectrum and many many others).

Festivities continued at the bar of the DoubleTree where the heated discussion turned to the subject of thin provisioning with VMware. it’s interesting that thin provisioning still causes serious debate.

All in all, the day was extremely successful, The depth and quality of the content in the presentations was very high; the whole day ran without a hitch, to which the organisers (Stephen, Claire and Sunshine) deserve all the credit.

In the coming weeks I’ll discuss in more detail the content of today’s presentations, including more talk about thin provisioning. In the meantime, here are pictures from the day.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33818355@N07/sets/72157622685914563/show/

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Day 1: MDS Micro, Xsigo, VMware
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage