Cloudy with a Chance of Azure - Bitpipe...categories: Best Cloud Management Software, Best Cloud Services Platform, Best Converged Infrastructure Product, Best Hybrid Flash Storage,

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Mi MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE

Cloudy with a Chance of AzureCan the platform lift Microsoft’s fortunes?

PLUS:

Google Glass Gets a Closeup

Fortify Your Infrastructure

Why Unix Still Matters

OCT. 2013

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MADDEN: LIFE AFTER OFFICE

AZURE’S SHAKY CLAIM TO THE CLOUD

UNIX: SHOULD YOU STAY OR SHOULD YOU GO?

DESIGNING A NETWORK TO WITHSTAND BYOD

EUNICE: QUANTITIES AND QUALITIES

2 MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • OCTOBER 2013

The data center is constantly evolving, and that’s a good thing, since the IT professionals who work there are temperamentally wired for change. But with innovative technologies coming fast and furious, it can be hard to decide which products merit your attention first.

That’s why we’re holding the first annual Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards: to help you identify the products and technologies that have made the biggest impact in enterprise data centers this year, so that you can prioritize which tools and technologies to evaluate down the road.

We’ll consider products and technologies across seven categories: Best Cloud Management Software, Best Cloud Services Platform, Best Converged Infrastructure Product, Best Hybrid Flash Storage, Best Desktop Virtu-alization Product, Best Enterprise Mobility Management Product and Best Enterprise Cloud App. IT is a vast and complex enterprise, so we chose these as the key areas of focus, where interesting products, old and new, are competing.

We’ll also recognize a single, emerging technology with the Modern Infrastructure Bright Idea Award. Re-served for technologies that have yet to reach general availability, this category gives you the chance to weigh

in on the most promising data center technologies—the ones that really stand to change how your data center looks and operates.

Editors and subject matter experts will evaluate sub-missions and present readers for voting what we think is a coherent, comprehensive list of up to ten contenders per category. But you have a role to play in this too. I have opinions about who is doing cool stuff in IT, but the reality is that you, the IT infrastructure and operations professional, must also have a say in the matter. At the end of the day, it’s the people who actually implement these technologies who are best qualified to comment on how important a given product really is.

So with that, I’d like to encourage you to vote on the various Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards categories for which you have insight and expertise. In addition, if you feel like we failed to include an important product in our shortlist, feel free to nominate it yourself and tell us why it deserves our attention. Voting will be open to readers through October 25, at which point we’ll use your input to make our final choices.

Winners will be announced in a special December edition of the e-zine. May the most impactful product win! n

EDITOR’S LETTER | ALEX BARRETT

Making an Impact

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Modern-Infrastructure-Impact-Awards-criteria


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IN THE LAB

Mapping the Data Center Even in an era of consolidation, the data center can be a vast, uncharted territory.

Data center monitoring has made it easy for IT admins to manage vast server farms from a desk. But data cen-ters aren’t abstract. In many cases, they’re still rooms or buildings full of servers—each with its own qualities.

A technology called vSight, part of VMware’s advanced research and development program, would let a data center manager tag servers with an identifier—be it a

QR code, a radio code or another type of asset tag—then map those servers and their locations with a mobile app. Users could also choose which features to track on each server, such as temperature, health or drive failures.

It’s physical management, and a way to navigate a data center. “It’s like a live map of the physical assets of the data center,” said Sean Borman, director of innovation in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

Any type of optical or radio code can be used to tag servers, though RFID tags aren’t ideal because of the “electronic noise” that a data center emits.

The Virtual Brain TrustAt VMworld this year, the company hosted its R&D Innovation Lounge, devoted to showcasing technolo-gies still in the lab.

The academic-like post-ers (right) hung in the booth offered a glimpse into the brainstorming that goes on behind the scenes at a major tech

CURRENTS10/13All the news you can use about modern infrastructure

vSight technology on display at VMworld

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company. The VMware innovation program includes an annual brainstorming meeting, where developers bring new tech ideas to see what sticks or rises to the top.

“It can be off the wall, but it stimulates ideas about how you can do something better,” Borman said. Some projects on display were highly speculative, while others are production software already in use at VMware.

Last year’s Socialcast concept came out of the

advanced development program, according to Borman. VMware brings six of the advanced research and devel-opment ideas onto a public drawing board of sorts at VMworld, where VMware engineers can get feedback from attendees.

“I pay attention to [comments like] ‘This is awesome, but…’” said Borman. “Our role is to understand their needs and make their lives easier.” —CHRISTINE CIGNOLI

READER SNAPSHOT43+39+18++p10+36+54++p31+59+10++p

Does your company develop its own

mobile apps?

Will open source virtualization ever

become mainstream?

Do you manage multiple public cloud

environments?

43% No

10% Maybe

31% Yes,

more than two

39% Yes

36% No

59% No

18% No, and we don’t plan

to

54% Yes

10% Yes, two

SOURCE: SEARCHCONSUMERIZATION.COM READER SURVEY

SOURCE: SEARCHSERVERVIRTUALIZATION.COM READER SURVEY

SOURCE: SEARCHCLOUDCOMPUTING.COM READER SURVEY

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CURRENTS | OVERHEARD

“ Network virtualization, like cloud, can mean different things to different people.”—LANCE WEAVER, CTO of GE Appliances and Lighting, during a VMworld keynote

“ This is the reality of having to work with Apple. They can move their ecosystem so rapidly that we have no choice but to adjust.”—BEN GOODMAN, VMware’s end-user computing evangelist, on VMware changing its approach to iOS mobile app management because of Apple’s mobile application management plans in iOS 7

“ Our tagline is ‘Citi never sleeps,’ which really means, ‘IT never sleeps.’”—GREG LAVENDER, Citibank CTO, during a VMworld keynote

“ Has a demo ever lied, Carl?”—KIT COLBERT, VMware engineer, demoing the NSX network virtualization platform during a VMworld keynote

“ Users, like servers, are extremely sensitive to any changes in performance.”—LEE CASWELL, VP of virtualization products group, Fusion-io

“ We have more de-mand than we can keep up with. Is the year of VDI finally here? Yeah, it is.”—OLIVIER THIERRY, CMO of Pivot3

“ When I was a sys admin, I was a master of the universe. People would line up at my door, and I could choose to help them or not.”—PAT GELSINGER, CEO of VMware, during his VMworld keynote

OVERHEARD VMWORLD

2013 EDITION

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FIRST LOOK

Google Glass

The first wave of BYOD featured employees carrying their own smartphones, tablets and laptops into the workplace. In the future, BYOD may be staring IT in the face—literally.

Google Glass, an Android-powered computer em-bedded in a pair of eyeglasses, is the most talked-about device in the new wave of wearable technologies, which also include smartwatches. By taking in the sights and sounds around users, Google Glass aims to provide real-time, relevant information as people go about their lives. This approach, called contextual computing, carries significant promise, and it’s why experts are already thinking of ways to put wearables to work in the enterprise.

But Google Glass isn’t even generally available yet, and mass adoption isn’t a sure bet. For now, it’s better to focus on the basics.

How Does Google Glass Work?

Like any modern device, it has a built-in microphone and camera, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connec-tivity. What’s different is that

instead of a traditional screen, it displays information right in front of users’ eyes, and it’s controlled by voice commands and a touchpad on its frames. Users can per-form traditional tasks such as Web browsing, but the big advancement is the line of apps called Glassware that take advantage of the device’s contextual computing capabilities.

Is It Really a Computer?

As much as any other mobile device, yes. Glass has 1 GB of RAM, about the same as the iPhone 5 or Samsung Gal-axy S3, along with 16 GB of flash storage that backs up to Google’s cloud. And its camera can take 5-megapixel

photos and shoot video in 720p. Obviously, the biggest difference with Google Glass is in

how the user interacts with the device, and that’s ultimately what will determine

its success or failure.

How Can I Try It Out?

You have to know a guy who knows a guy—at least for now. Google Glass

is only available to developers and people who signed up to test the proto-

type. Google is expected to release Glass to the public and launch its own

app store sometime in 2014.—COLIN STEELE

CURRENTS | FIRST LOOK

PHOTO: MARTIN MATTHEWS/FOTOLIA

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n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n nn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n nn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n nn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n nn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n

16+8+4+72s

CURRENTS | SUMMING IT UP

Web application hosting

Business applications

Email

Test and development

Data protection/backup/archive

Disaster recovery/business continuity

Business intelligence/data analytics

Branch office/remote office

Batch computing jobs

N=334; SOURCE: TECHTARGET’S CLOUD PULSE SURVEY, SPRING 2013 N=122; SOURCE: TECHTARGET’S CLOUD PULSE SURVEY, SPRING 2013

N=703; SOURCE: TECHTARGET’S CLOUD PULSE SURVEY, SPRING 2013

Why did your organization choose the SaaS model?

What percentage of your IT infrastructure is running on PaaS?

What do you use cloud IT services for?

55%

55%

54%

49%

40%

16% Best features/functions available

4% Other

11% Didn’t require IT resources

25% Easiest to deploy to employees

16% 26 to 50%

8% 51 to 75%

4% 76 to 100%

28% Faster imple-

mentation time

72% 1 to 25%

16% Price

26%

12%

27%

28%

SUMMING IT UP


It only took about five minutes after the initial release of the iPad in 2010 before people started asking, “Hey, I wonder when Microsoft will release Office for this thing?” Back then, there weren’t many apps and the iPad was unproven. Three years and 150 million iPads later, we get plenty of work done on our iPads, and leave our laptops at home.

Many IT departments still believe that there’s one thing missing from the iPad world: the “real” version of Microsoft Office from Microsoft Corp. IT pros say that there are plenty of third-party document, spreadsheet and presentation editing apps available, but only with the official version of Office will the iPad be able to seriously integrate into enterprise workflows.

The waiting almost ended in June when Microsoft

announced the official Microsoft Office for iPod and iPhone. The IT world was overjoyed—for about 10 min-utes. Then we all read the fine print and realized that the product is severely limited. It’s only for iPod and iPhone (not iPad or any version of Android), and it requires an Office 365 subscription. In other words, you can’t buy it, and your existing Office SA licenses don’t work for it.

Waiting in VainIn an instant, IT pros’ collective attitudes shifted back to, “Let’s continue to do nothing and wait for a better ver-sion of real Office to come out.” And that’s where I come in as the end-user advocate. Don’t wait for the real Office for iOS. You can do everything you need to do now with the available third-party Office-like applications.

As an end user, I don’t particularly care whether I use the real version of Office or not. I just need to be able to edit Word docs and spreadsheets. The app can be called Microsoft Office or Quickoffice or Stupid Face Editor, for all I care—as long as it opens my Office files, I’m happy. And products that do this, like Quickoffice, CloudOn and Smart Office, have been available for years, for both iPads and iPhones, Android and iOS, without requiring additional subscriptions. You just give the vendor the money and they give you the app. What a novel concept!

And if you’re worried that these “unofficial” apps are

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END-USER ADVOCATE BRIAN MADDEN

There’s Life After Microsoft Office

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END-USER ADVOCATE | BRIAN MADDEN

not as good as those from Microsoft, check the reviews of the official Office app from Microsoft. It was panned across the Web as one of the worst Office suite editors

in existence. Having the Microsoft brand on the splash screen only means that this company is desperately try-ing to convince users that iOS sucks.

As an added bonus, many enterprise mobility management vendors have secure mobile file-syncing

products that securely link to whatever Office editor they bundle with their suite. So if you’re worried about document security on mobile devices, the official Office app won’t help anyway. The official app only connects to Microsoft SkyDrive—and the cloud version at that. You can’t even use it with your SharePoint or on-premises SkyDrive.

So for now, do your users a favor and stop holding your breath for the official Microsoft Office. Give us one of the many great tools that’s been out for years and let us get to work! n

BRIAN MADDEN is an opinionated, super-technical, fiercely indepen-dent desktop virtualization and consumerization expert. Write to him at [email protected].

THIS COMPANY IS TRY ING TO CONVINCE USERS THAT IOS SUCKS.


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In February 2010, well before Steve Ballmer declared Microsoft to be a devices and services company, the commercial version of Windows Azure made its debut. The newly minted cloud platform was tucked tightly into Windows Server, which owned, and still does, a commanding share of the server operating systems market.

Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Azure turned out to be, surely integration with Windows Server would guarantee it some measure of success.

But nearly four years later, in a time when Windows operating systems have lost some of their mojo, and where Microsoft faces multi-billion dollar, cloud-fo-cused competitors such as Amazon and Google—neither of which aspires to own a server operating system—the pressure of carrying Microsoft’s server-based

AZURE’S SHAKY CLAIM TO THE CLOUDMicrosoft has pinned its hopes on Azure for a cloud future, but are Windows shops taking the bait?

WINDOWS SERVER | ED SCANNELL

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environments and applications business may fall to Azure.

Azure’s burden may not end there. Its success, or lack of it, may also largely determine the fortunes of Micro-soft’s mobile devices, since much of their competitive advantage will be derived from the quality and quantity of Azure-based cloud services.

Mark Eisenberg, an independent consultant to enter-prise accounts specializing in cloud environments, sum-marizes the criticality of Azure’s success:

“I’ll answer it this way: What could possibly be more important?” he said. “It used to be that Azure was built using Windows Server. Now, every product [Micro-soft] builds or service they provide has Azure as its core platform.”

A Stalled Cloud SystemHowever, Microsoft’s success in convincing enterprise shops, along with third-party developers, to create appli-cations and services that exploit Azure have been “mod-est at best,” Eisenberg said. Others agree.

“As much as I get my hands dirty in developer en-gagements in enterprise shops, I am not seeing much movement at all (with Azure),” said Mike Drips, an in-formation architect at CSC in Houston, specializing in supporting cloud engagements in larger shops. “I won’t say development for it doesn’t exist, but it is miniscule right now.”

One reason IT shops are holding back dedicated de-velopment dollars for Azure, Drips adds, is outages. The

handful of outages Microsoft has experienced over the past year or two have not gone unnoticed.

“Outages can have a hell of an impact, especially if you have a heavily customer-oriented business,” Drips said. “It is important for these shops to know they can rely on Azure always being up.”

Some, however, have bet heavily on Azure. One is Viewpoint Government Solutions based in Belmont, Mass., which has helped 40 cities and towns migrate var-ious government operations off their legacy systems and onto Azure-based servers. Viewpoint believes the cost benefits of moving to Azure have proved beneficial to many of these city governments.

“These governments were nervous about the cloud because they deal with public data, which has a lot of se-curity issues,” said Alex Pajusi, director of innovation for Viewpoint Government Solutions. “But when they do the costs-benefit analysis they realize they can save a lot of money and that there is no compelling reason to operate their own servers for these software solutions.”

With the continued popularity of browser-based appli-cations, along with the increasing number of users seri-ously investigating cloud platforms, Pajusi believes Azure will surpass Windows Server in terms of strategic impor-tance sooner rather than later. This development would put Azure in a better position than many of its competi-tors to become the gold standard for the enterprise cloud platform.

“Amazon has more of a consumer cloud focus, so Azure has a real opportunity now to become the


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enterprise cloud platform. I think our client base reflects that,” Pajusi said.

A Difficult ForecastMicrosoft may not be helping its own cause by refusing to offer any specific information about how financially successful the platform has been to date. Even ardent analysts tracking Microsoft’s every strategic move have little insight into how the product has performed relative to the competition. Some suspect it is either because the numbers are embarrassingly low or are higher than most think, and so Microsoft doesn’t want to alert the compe-tition to how well it is doing.

“At some point they have to tell people when their business becomes material. But for Microsoft, as a $70 billion company, what’s a material business?” asked Al Gillin, program vice president, system software at IDC in Framingham, Mass. “I have seen a number of $1 billion thrown out there but it could well be a bigger number than that.”

Generally, Gillin thinks Azure is “doing OK in some respects.” Why the product has not achieved greater suc-cess at this point likely goes back to Microsoft’s decision to build it as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) instead of better positioning it as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment.

“Microsoft jumped the gun [with Azure] on PaaS. Most people at the time weren’t ready to go straight to PaaS; they wanted IaaS first but Azure didn’t support it,” Gillin said. “So they sold more and more IaaS on

Windows Azure even though it is a PaaS environment, which means what [customers] were getting was a VM running on Hyper-V.”

Despite Microsoft’s mammoth marketing machine, some believe the company has failed to do an effective job positioning Azure as the software capable of tying to-gether its wide-ranging cloud portfolio, from Office 365, to Hadoop, to Office 2013, to its Systems Center 2012 suite of management tools.

“Azure should be sold as this unifying platform for all the other (cloud-based) products,” Drips said. “When you think of Azure, that word should light up in your head, ‘Microsoft in the cloud,’ but that is not the case right now.”

Recapturing that Old Microsoft MagicEven considering the apparent momentum of its cloud archrivals, some believe Microsoft’s massive Windows Server and server-based application installed base buys them time. Also in Microsoft’s favor is the fact many shops want to avoid the angst and expense of swapping out Windows Server for a competing product.

“Microsoft has a tight lock on Windows users. More than two-thirds of all servers installed are Windows Servers. If users are running Windows apps, those apps need to go somewhere for the next (cloud) deployment,” Gillin said. “And if it isn’t Windows and Azure, they have to do a full migration to a different solution in a different environment.”

Gillen doesn’t see Amazon Web Services or Google

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as major threats to Azure among higher-end enterprise shops, given their consumer focus. The only threat, and it is not a big one, are some of the larger solutions provid-ers specializing in Windows Server and/or Azure-based products.

“No one has as much invested in such a broad range of cloud technologies as Microsoft for the enterprise. They are off by themselves,” Gillin said.

What could help accelerate more immediate success for Azure would be a more rapid adoption of the cloud-based version of Office 2013. What many users are balk-ing at is paying a yearly $100 subscription fee for the product, as opposed to continuing with their existing physical version which they own, subscription-free. For $100 a year, some users want more out of Office 2013.

“For me, I need more than the application code and data delivered from the cloud. I need real services to come along with the apps to make $100 per user worth-while,” said Mark Whittle, a purchasing agent with a mid-size Kansas City, Mo.,-based transportation company.

To Eisenberg, one measure of Azure’s success will come when Microsoft no longer needs to talk about the

underlying platform, but only about the products and services delivered by the company’s other cloud-based of-ferings. Users should not have to care where cloud-based services are coming from, only that they are receiving them reliably.

“If Office 365 or Office 2013 runs on Azure, that shouldn’t mean anything to the public. Don’t talk about Azure, talk about the products and services you are sell-ing,” Eisenberg said. “As in [the movie] Fight Club, the first rule of Windows Azure should be: Never talk about Windows Azure.” n

ED SCANNELL is senior executive editor of the Data Center and Virtualization group at TechTarget.

USERS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CARE WHERE CLOUD-BASED SERVICES ARE COMING FROM.


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Scale-up systems based on the Unix platform and its accompanying RISC processors enjoyed a long and heady heyday, first as the undisputed king of enterprise and even high-end work-stations, then as the original engine of the Internet and the Web.

Those were good times. Today, Unix systems still run a healthy chunk of en-

terprise mission-critical apps, but there’s no denying that the party’s coming to an end. A good chunk of Unix shops have already left, or are at least gathering their things and saying goodbye.

Still, there are plenty of hearty souls sticking around, for reasons peculiar to their organization and applica-tions. Will they keep the party going?

A Long Way DownNo one’s arguing that the Unix market is in decline. That fact is painfully clear to anyone who bothers to listen

UNIX: SHOULD YOU STAY OR SHOULD YOU GO?The 40-year-old operating system may be down, but it’s not out.

OPERATING SYSTEMS | ALEX BARRETT

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to market research firms. The worldwide Unix server market stood at $9.1 billion in 2012, down 48% from its perch of $17.6 billion in 2003, according to market re-search firm IDC.

But where things go from here is less certain. While the Unix market fell precipitously during the 2009 reces-sion, IDC projects that Unix customer revenue—factory revenue plus “channel uplift”—will drop in dribs and drabs, from $10.2b in 2012 to $8.7b by 2017.

“The Unix market contracts, but there will always be this core audience, kind of like the mainframe,” said Jean Bozman, IDC research vice president for enterprise servers.

And while the market may not be what it once was, the Unix industry is still nothing to sneeze at.

“Yes, there’s a change, but there’s still a lot of money,” said Richard Fichera, vice president at Forrester Re-search. “So what if the market declines 10%? It’s still a $10 billion industry.”

Further, the margins on pricey Unix systems are much higher than they are on commodity systems, he pointed out, which should guarantee continued investment and new systems for years to come.

Shifting SandsStill, throughout Unix’s decline, there have been losers, and there have been worse losers. In the early 2000s, Sun Microsystems was neck and neck with Hewl-ett-Packard Co. for the top spot in the Unix market, with 30% share, and in 2008, the year before Sun was

acquired by Oracle Corp., it still enjoyed 29% share. But by 2012, its share had dropped to a mere 19%, with no signs of growth.

Oracle’s entrance into the Unix market also acceler-ated HP’s misfortunes. In 2008, HP held 27% of the Unix market with HP-UX systems based on the Intel Itanium processor, but had dropped to 19% in 2012. That decline was in part due to Oracle’s decision to stop developing new versions of its software for the platform, which pushed shops running Oracle apps on HP-UX to look elsewhere.

“HP’s Itanium business appears to be fading rapidly,” said Fichera, as evidenced by the company folding its Business Critical Systems and Industry Standard Servers business units into a single HP Converged Systems group this spring. “As far as new HP Integrity systems are con-cerned, Intel’s next-generation Itanium ‘Kittson’ is proba-bly the end of the line.”

Things are better over at IBM, which has capitalized on Oracle and HP’s missteps, and now commands 56% of the Unix market, up from 26% a decade ago. But it’s not all fun and games for IBM Power Systems either. In the second quarter of 2013, IBM reported that its Power Systems business had dropped a full 25% over the same quarter the year before.

Linux BoundAll this begs the question: Where are all those Unix workloads going? In a word, Linux and x86.

“I started out on SunOS in ‘93, then moved to Solaris

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and used it for almost everything—Web hosting, mail—everything,” recalled Mike Horwath, co-owner of ipHouse, a hosting solutions provider in Minneapolis who worked at another hosting provider at the time. But around 2002, enthusiasm for Sun hardware started to wane.

“We started noticing that the performance of these servers was lagging behind other systems,” Horwath said. “The servers were incredibly stable, but they didn’t have the same oomph as x86 systems—the performance of these RISC systems just hasn’t kept up.” Thus began a

slow and steady march to x86 hardware running Linux.Linux system hardware and support can also be pur-

chased for a small fraction of an equivalent Unix system. Hardware acquisition and maintenance costs for x86 vs. Unix systems are often on the order of two or three times less expensive, said Dr. Alex Heublein, senior director for solutions and strategy at Red Hat Consulting, and that’s not counting software licenses, which are often priced higher on RISC platforms.

Unix administrators also command a much higher salary than young-gun Linux admins, Horwath said,

Unix Winners and LosersAs the Unix market has declined, IBM has capitalized on the missteps and misfortunes of its competitors to take a commanding lead of the remaining market.

0

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Unix market

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26% 27%19% 19%

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56%

$17.6b$16.7b

$9.1b

DATA FROM IDC

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and are increasingly hard to come by. “They’re a dying breed.”

Diminishing RisksIn the beginning, migrating away from the stalwart Unix was seen as a risky compromise. Over time, those con-cerns have diminished, experts say.

Initially, x86 and Linux’s reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features were a huge question mark for administrators coming from the world of bulletproof Unix systems, but those concerns have been mitigated by Linux’s increased maturity, plus new availability fea-tures found in virtualization software such as VMware. “VMware Fault Tolerance is severely limited [to systems running on a single CPU], but it gives you near 100% up-time,” Horwath said.

Grumbling about Unix features that are missing from Linux is also on the wane, said Kerry Kim, director of corporate marketing at SUSE, whose SUSE Linux Enter-prise Server is a common destination for Unix-to-Linux migrations. Still, Solaris admins routinely lament the loss of DTrace, ZFS and Solaris Containers.

“People can agree to disagree whether the capabilities in Linux are on par,” said Kim, but SUSE has functional equivalents for all those popular Solaris features, he said, including System Tap for tracing, the high-performance Btrfs file system and Linux Containers.

Linux scalability, meanwhile, is now on par with some of the largest scale-up Unix systems. SGI’s Linux-based UV 2000, for instance, scales to 4,096 threads on 256

Intel Xeon processors, and up to 64 TB of memory. “That’s comparable to an HP Superdome,” Kim said.

“The question is no longer ‘does Linux scale,’ or ‘does it have the RAS capabilities of Unix?’” he said. With all the advancements in the Linux kernel and subsystems, “The question is, rather, what is the justification for keeping it on Unix?”

Hardy SoulsTry telling that to large enterprises. For all of the talk of Unix’s demise, there are still companies actively buying and building new Unix environments.

“We are expanding and unifying our Unix systems,” said Tom Higgins, an operations analyst at a large US manufacturing firm. The firm used to have Unix systems from every major manufacturer, most of which it got rid of over the past five years. But Higgins said that they’d decided to keep IBM AIX for use with its Oracle EBS suite. “It is fast, efficient, and fits our needs better than just about any other alternative.”

Indeed, try as they might, x86 and Linux system ven-dors have yet to convert most tier-one applications to their camp.

For most enterprises, “90% of the tier-three appli-cations that were running on RISC have already been migrated,” said Scott Clark, vice president for Cisco Services, as have the tier-two applications. But when it comes to the meatier tier-one applications such as Or-acle, DB2 or custom applications—“those are probably still on RISC environments,” he said.

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The greater the amount of customization, the greater the likelihood that the application is still on RISC, and will continue to stay there, Clark added.

“Some of the apps that are the most brittle are the ones that are getting the RISC platform refreshes,” he said, often because the people that built the applications are no longer around. “You want to get those applications off, but you can’t.”

Then there’s the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it school of Unix shops—organizations with a mission-critical application that runs perfectly well on its existing platform.

GHY International, a customs brokerage service in Winnipeg, Canada has been running on IBM systems since the 1980s, when it deployed its first AS/400 plat-form for its core business application. In 2002, it mi-grated that application to IBM AIX and the Progress database, where it still lives, running as a virtual machine on an IBM Power 750 server, said Nigel Fortlage, GHY vice president of IT and social business.

The Unix Melting PotFor those veteran Unix shops, the remaining vendors are bending over backwards to make it as painless as possible for customers to keep their applications where they are. In IBM’s case, the company has long offered customers the ability to run a mix of AS/400, AIX and Linux operat-ing systems on its Power hardware. Now, it is going one step further and offering Power blades that run within its x86 PureSystem converged infrastructure chassis.

HP, too, supports a mix of Itanium-based Integrity and Xeon-based ProLiant blades in its HP BladeSystem chassis, and barring that, has a very active Linux program to help customers migrate workloads to its high-end Pro-Liant servers, said Forrester’s Fichera.

Retaining high-end customers is the name of the game, he said. “IBM prefers to see a Unix workload go first onto Linux on Power, then Linux on x86. But the key is to keep it on IBM.”

That converged, heterogeneous path isn’t just a kludge; it could have real benefits for IT operations, said GHY’s Fortlage. GHY plans to put an IBM PureSystem in place by the end of the year.

“We’re very excited to have a primary hypervisor within the management console,” Fortlage said. “We’ve never had a single point of view across all our plat-forms—only across individual platforms.”

And ultimately, today’s IT teams have to maintain and support an organization’s applications—regardless of the underlying platforms. In truth, finding administrators to support both Linux and Unix needn’t be a problem, Fort-lage said.

“People that are new to Linux and Unix tend to move pretty freely between different brands and distributions and the differences in the command sets,” he said. “For day-to-day operations, the average system administrator skills are fluid.” n

ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Write to her at [email protected].

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DESIGNING A NETWORK TO WITHSTAND BYODIt’s time to pay attention to the back end of supporting phones and tablets.

BYOD is all the rage these days. According to a recent Cisco survey, 78% of U.S. white-collar workers use a mobile device for work purposes, and 65% of the respondents say that those workers require mobile con-nectivity to do their jobs.

Much has been written about the benefits of bring your own device (BYOD) for both workers and compa-nies, as well as the swarm of security requirements that BYOD engenders. However, the problem of bandwidth consumption has taken a bit of a back seat. Meanwhile, a recent Gartner Inc. study found that 80% of recently installed corporate wireless networks will become ob-solete in the next year because of poor infrastructure planning.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to prevent BYOD from wreaking havoc on the corporate network: You can add and upgrade network resources, and you can control or restrict access to devices, sites and applications.

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Bandwidth 101First, it’s important to define bandwidth because the term is widely used and abused. I was recently in a meeting where someone said that an entire hospital only used 200 MB of bandwidth. This statement begs the question, “What in the heck were you measuring?” One radiolog-ical survey can consume multiple gigabytes, and one pa-tient record can far exceed that!

Others express bandwidth as a port utilization per-centage. To say a port is only utilized 20% of the time and therefore doesn’t require much bandwidth is analo-gous to saying, “I’m only in the car 20 minutes a day and therefore only need a car that goes 20 miles an hour.” It’s not how often a port is used, but how fast and reliable the port is when you need it.

The correct definition of bandwidth is the overall ca-pacity of a channel or circuit to pass bits of data. Thus, a 1 gigabit connection refers to one gigabit of bandwidth, which can be consumed by any number of resources with access to that connection. If that connection’s access is controlled by a wireless access point (WAP), then any de-vice that connects to the WAP will share that bandwidth, and the total bandwidth available to all the devices re-mains 1 gigabit (Gb).

Beyond bandwidth, another consideration is the number of packets passed. Packets passed will tell us the amount of data that is moving across the circuit. If a 1 Gb circuit is shared by 10 users, then each user has up to 1 Gb, assuming no one else is transmitting data. If all the users are transmitting data, then their speed will

decrease based on sharing the packets that the pipe can forward over the gigabit connection—approximately 1/10th of the bandwidth or about 100Mb/s.

The more users that share a network connection, the greater the potential for bottlenecks. Imagine multiple lanes of traffic converging on a single tollbooth, where the tollbooth represents a shared channel. A truck will take longer to pass through the tollbooth than a car.

Likewise, packets come in various sizes depending on the payload, or what is being transmitted. And just like all lanes don’t have the same number of cars converging on the tollbooth, nor will packets converge on a channel at the same rate.

BYOD dramatically increases the number of cars hit-ting that tollbooth, which can only process cars at a fixed rate. Today users typically have 2.8 devices, according to the same Cisco study, but in 2016, that number is ex-pected to increase 18%, to 3.3 devices per user.

In the case of the tollbooth, in order to process more cars and decrease the wait times, you would need to add more tollbooths, increase the speed at which the

IT’S IMPORTANT TO DEFINE BANDWIDTH BECAUSE THE TERM IS WIDELY ABUSED.

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tollbooth can process traffic, or both. Likewise, if enter-prise network resources remain stagnant, then traffic de-lays will occur. Users will wait longer to get and process data.

The Way of the WAP Early adopters of BYOD have learned that there is a hit on network resources as the number of devices increase. Imagine a 60-foot square space (3,600 sq. ft.) that holds 36 offices, each 10 feet by 10 feet. If employees only have one device each, that is 36 devices, which a single WAP may be able to handle.

But if the number of devices increases to 3.3 per user as predicted, we now have just under 119 devices. Unless the employees are largely transient and rarely in the of-fice, a single WAP cannot service all those devices.

A ballooning number of devices results in not having enough slices or available attachments for communica-tion. For instance, if someone is attached to an access point that is at the far end of the office, he could be knocked off by someone attaching at a location closer to the access point. Many WAP vendors advertise higher theoretical limits, but in general most WAPs support only 15 to 20 devices with any level of usable speed.

As WAPs become congested, new WAPs need to be added upstream, which increases the number of needed uplink switch ports and may increase the number of backbone connections and the speed at which they op-erate. For instance, 12 access points will take 12 network connections. Moving to 25 access points increases the

need to 25 connections and perhaps a new switch. As each switch needs to connect to the communications core, additional uplink ports may be required.

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) released a Technical Service Bulletin (TSB) to suggest ways to cable access points in a network. TIA TSB-162 suggests a telecommunications outlet in the center of every 13 meter block on a grid (see Figure 1). This allows the access point to be tuned to the environment, moving the access point as needed to avoid sources of interfer-ence. Many wireless deployments, however, have one cord for one WAP—in each conference room, for exam-ple—leaving large dead spots around the remainder of the office space.

Adding WAPs around the office may or may not be easy to accomplish. In the case where only a few were installed in conference rooms, adding capacity in the remainder of the office may not be that bad. But if you’ve already installed several access points, adding incremen-tal WAPs may be more difficult.

Consider the grid in Figure 1. While this methodology allows an access point to be installed in the center of each 60 foot grid with up to a 13-meter (42-foot) patch cord, there can be interference within each grid section. Multipath signals—bouncing off people, walls and other signals—can be a real problem.

Choosing different channels for each WAP can help in those situations. Also, you need to determine direction and strength of antennas in the space. (Continued on page 23)

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TO

R=13m (42')

Cabling Channels to Telecommunications Closet

(Switch Port)

TO

WAP

WAP

TO

WAP

TO

WAP

FIGURE 1: TIA’S RECOMMENDED ACCESS POINT DESIGN



Upgrade the LAN Upgrading older access points to the newer IEEE 802.11n standard or even IEEE 802.11ac, once it is ratified as a standard, can help boost speed. Most WAPs on the mar-ket today have mixed 802.11 b/g and n.

An issue with some models is that if an 802.11g device attaches to an 802.11n access point, all devices negotiate to the lower 802.11g speed. This “feature” can rear its ugly head when older BYOD devices enter the network, effectively slowing everyone down. A quick check from the manufacturer will let you know.

The newer 802.11ac standard will have distinct advantages in that it can use beamforming to “beam” the signal to a single device rather than flooding a room. While this feature was available in previous 802.11 standards, there was no single way of doing it, making end-to-end beamforming proprietary and difficult at best.

The 802.11ac standard will provide stronger signals and a single method of beamforming. It will also provide multiple channel bonding and increase streams from four to eight, allowing much better provisioning of the available bandwidth.

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A TYPICAL WAP CHANNEL

(Continued from page 21)



Take Control of BandwidthAssuming you have built out the network to support all devices, you need to control how much of the bandwidth the various devices, apps and protocols can use. A single YouTube video at just average resolution can take up one-third of a T1 circuit.

BYOD smartphones with high-definition cameras can create many large video and photo files. Backing those files up to a server or the cloud can put a drain on the network. Downloads and upgrades from an app store and operating system upgrades will also draw on resources, as do cloud-based apps with mobile clients.

Then there are other bandwidth hogs on corporate networks that we didn’t even think about a few years ago, such as Skype, FaceTime and gaming. It can be tempting to restrict access to these outlets outside of work hours, but as more companies embrace social media outlets, that will be harder to do.

Controlling which IP ports and applications can pass packets on the network is another way to conserve bandwidth, but as data stores get larger, that may not be enough. Already, many services such as on-plane, in-air Wi-Fi restrict video streaming and calls.

A smarter move may be to partition corporate and private data networks. It is difficult to tell whether or not a backup is work-related. By splitting networks, workers can attach only to public shared Wi-Fi with their per-sonal devices, while corporate-supported devices can connect to corporate networks.

For networking, shorter DHCP leases may be needed when there is a highly transient workforce. It may also be necessary to control which brands of devices have access to the network.. Having a short list of supported equipment can also relieve some burdens on IT staffers as to what devices they need to support. There are device managers on the market that will recognize MAC man-ufacturer control information and deny access based on brand.

When it comes to BYOD planning, it’s all about con-trol. We need to control the number and type of devices, and we need to manage bandwidth. It is difficult to con-trol unbound wireless devices, but failure to do so will doom your BYOD initiative to failure. n

CARRIE HIGBIE is global director of data center solutions and services at Siemon.

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HOME

ARE WE THERE YET?JONATHAN EUNICE

Quantities and Qualities

In 1958, Oliver Smoot Jr. and his fraternity brothers at MIT measured Harvard Bridge using his body as a mea-suring stick. The resulting smoot unit is immortalized with markings and a plaque on the bridge, but it’s found almost nowhere else. But people in Cambridge like smoots, which reflect their history and their character.

In fact, you might argue that all measurement systems are arbitrary. Inches, acres, miles, meters, gallons and gigajoules—their definitions were all chosen. We called the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second a meter and made it a foundation of the International System of Units (a.k.a. the metric sys-tem). But we could have picked 1/300,000,000 or 1/299,876,321 or anything, really.

IT is going through tremendous rebuilding and

rearchitecting. We’re between a half-dozen and 30 years into cloud, virtualization, converging infrastructure, Internet everywhere, wireless, mobile, power- and ther-mal-limited data centers, not to mention analytics and big data. We frequently judge investments in these new directions with backwards-leaning evaluations.

TCO, ROI and such are fine, but they measure the sta-tus quo in a world of constant change. They also presume that everyone wants the same thing: lower cost. In fact, business and IT leaders want a lot of things—only some of which are cost-related. They want capabilities that make them effective, not just cost-effective.

Beyond MetricsWe need to be more honest about what we really need and value, then make IT decisions accordingly. Consider the following criteria:

Portfolio fit. We’re building composite portfolios, not individual IT applications and services. How easily and well new tools integrate with and leverage existing tools is crucial. The “best tool” is not the best tool for the job if it isn’t a strong fit with the rest of your toolbox.

Capability growth. Will an investment help grow your capabilities or fitness? Sure, you want portfolio fit—but if that’s all you consider, your choices condense and

http://web.mit.edu/spotlight/smoot-salute/

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/International-System-of-Units-SI

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ARE WE THERE YET? | JONATHAN EUNICE

stagnate. “How does this help us branch out and grow?” is the yang to the “How does this fit in to what we’re al-ready doing?” yin. You need both.

Ability to futureproof. We are constrained by choices that, given a second chance, we might have made differ-ently. Breaking that cycle means considering how much an investment (or pattern of investments) locks you in—or, conversely, how much it promotes future flexibility.

Trialability. Enterprise software is famously hard to get working. Consumer companies put a much higher pre-mium on providing ease of exploration. Increasingly, en-terprise IT is also asking whether something can be used on a small/trial basis, without massive upfront cost or difficulty, and whether it can scale. Thanks, cloud!

None of these axes are really new. They’re often lurk-ing in investment discussions, albeit without equitable standing, and are dismissed as being Too Soft or Not Quantifiable. Yet such attributes can be rated. Moreover, they frame an IT shop’s overall ability to execute in ways that metrics such as payback-duration never will.

We have a much larger scale and broader vistas than the IT of even five or 10 years ago. We should apply this same flexibility to our investment evaluations, judging structural attributes as full peers of financial metrics. To boil this down to a single rallying cry: Smoots! n

JONATHAN EUNICE is a principal IT adviser at Illuminata Inc.

Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com publication.

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