Simplivity vs. Nutanix

At a high level both of these products provide the same service(s) for the user.  Certainly the two “leap-frog” each other in terms of features, but at this point in time, they are very close. Both of them are “Hyper-converged VMware appliances”, though Nutanix is able to support other hypervisors such as Hyper-V and KVM as well as VMware.  Simplivity will allow large customers to utilize their own hardware, however, the customer must buy the Simplivity software as well as the OmniCube Accelerator Card for each server since the card is what does all of the writes in the Simplivity architecture. 

From an architectural perspective both systems provide a “hyper-converged” solution made up of X86 servers with internal storage which are networked/clustered together. You grow the overall system by simply adding additional nodes to the cluster.  As of this writing, Nutanix offers more different kinds of options for those nodes, giving the user more flexibility on how the clusters is gown.  Both systems provide for multiple tiers of storage including SSD and HDDs and will automatically move hot data between tiers.   It should be noted that Nutanix offers an interesting feature that Simplivity does not.  Nutanix has the concept of “data locality”.  With data locality, when you v-motion a VM to a different node in the cluster, Nutanix will move the datastore(s) for that VM to the same node (assuming there is space).  This movement is done in the background, over time so as not to impact performance.

As of the latest version both systems provide deduplication of data natively built into the system. There is some discussion about which method of deduplication is “better”, however, in the end I believe that both will provide the user good deduplication results. Both systems also provide compression of data at the lower tiers. 

Again, in regards to backups, replication, DR, etc. both system provide very similar features. Both systems allow for replication of deduplicated/compressed data thus providing “WAN optimization”, both systems provide for snapshots, and both systems replicate data within the cluster for data durability. Simpilivity is able to provide one feature that Nutanix is not currently able to support, and that is replication to the “cloud”.  Specifically, Simplivity provides their software as a VM image running in AWS which can be federated to an Omnicube running in the users data center. 

In regards to management.  Both systems provide for a GUI management environment which allows the user to manage the entire footprint from a single pane of glass.  Again, how this is implemented is somewhat different. Nutanix provides a somewhat traditional management GUI based on HTML 5 that can be used to manage the Nutanix system. Simplivity takes a different approach. Simplivity utilizes a Vcenter plug-in to manage the Simplivity Omicube.  This ties Simplivity to VMware, and will make it more difficult to support other hypervisors.

In conclusion, I believe that the two products would provide effectively the same capabilities for most customers with the single exception of the AWS support that Simplivity  provides. This support would provide the ability for customers to create a Hybrid cloud infrastructure that span the customers private cloud and the AWS public cloud. 

Is 2014 the Year of Object Based Storage?

Object based storage has actually been around for a long time.  Some implementations started to appear as early as 1996, and there have been different vendors offering the technology ever since.  However, it has never experienced the “explosion” in usage that some were predicting that it would. 

It least until now.

IDC said the OBS market is still in its infancy but it offers a promising future for organizations trying to balance scale, complexity, and costs. The leaders include Quantum, Amplidata, Cleversafe, Data Direct Networks, EMC, and Scality, with other notables such as Caringo, Cloudian, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Basho, Huawei, NEC, and Tarmin.

Last year OBS solutions were expected to account for nearly 37% of file-and-OBS (FOBS) market revenues, with the overall FOBS market projected to be worth $23 billion, and reach $38 billion in 2017, according to IDC. At a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.5% from 2012 to 2017, scale-out FOBS – delivered either as software, virtual storage appliances, hardware appliances, or self-built for delivering cloud-based offerings – is taking advantage of the evolution of storage to being software-based.

IDC predicts that scale-up solutions, including unitary file servers and scale-up appliances and gateways, will fall on hard times throughout the forecast period, experiencing sluggish growth through 2016 before beginning to decline in 2017.

IDC said emerging OBS technologies include: Compustorage (hyperconverged), Seagate Open Storage platform, and Intel’s efforts with OpenStack. The revenue of all of OBS vendors combined is relatively small right now (but expected to grow rapidly) with a total addressable market (TAM) expected to be in the billions.  Noted Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director, Storage Systems, IDC. “Vendors like EMC and NetApp have not ignored this market – if anything they have laid the groundwork for it.”

One of the challenges that IT continues to confront is the growth of unstructured data.  This growth creates challenges around data protection, as well as for users when they go to find their data.  Object based storage addresses both of these issues. Use of technologies like Erasure Codes allows OBS to store data in a way that is both highly durable, as well as geographically distributed.  This eliminates the need to create multiple full copies of the data in multiple locations, as you would have to do with traditional NAS arrays. So, rather than having to place storage systems that comprise 300% of your actual data size, you can utilize as little as 50%.

In addition, because many object storage systems are software solutions that can be run on nodes using low cost server hardware and high capacity disk drives, they can cost significantly less than proprietary NAS systems. Throw in better data protection and enhanced features that can enhance search performance and efficient data tiering and it’s easy to see why OBS is catching on.

So, what’s the downside?  There are a couple.  First, it’s performance.  OBS typically cannot match the performance of traditional NAS arrays. With object retrieval latency in the 30-50ms range, applications that require high performance are going to have a problem with OBS.  This is one of the reasons that AWS recommends that you put data on Elastic Block Storage if you need good performance, as opposed to using S3.  The other challenge is that applications today are often not written to access data on OBS. Therefore changes to applications must be made, or the OBS storage must be accessed through a NAS gateway.  Introducing a NAS gateway, however, eliminates the flat namespace, as well as the ability to attach meaningful metadata to your files/object.  This reduces the utility of OBS significantly.  However, the use of NAS gateways as an interim solution may simply be a necessity if OBS is to take over the NAS space.

Backing Up Openstack

Today,  I want to talk a little backup backups.  Specifically, how to backup your Openstack environment. But not only how to backup the contents of your Openstack environment, but how to backup Openstack itself. 

The thing to keep in mind here is that OpenStack is based around a modular architecture in which a number of different components can be combined together to offer cloud services on standardized hardware. These modules are freely available under the Apache license.

Backing up OpenStack

Backup solutions are typically developed with either operating systems or applications in mind. OpenStack is neither. OpenStack is merely a collection of components that can be combined to provide various types of cloud services. As such, OpenStack administrators must consider what needs to be backed up and how to perform the backup.

OpenStack backups should focus on backing up configuration files and databases for Openstack itself. The configuration files can be backed up at the file level since Openstack is just software running on a Linux machine.

The /etc/nova /var/lib/nova folders should be backed up on both the cloud controller and the compute nodes. However, you must exclude the /var/lib/nova/instances folder on any compute nodes. This folder contains live KVM instances. Restoring a backup that was made of a live KVM instance will typically result in an unbootable image.

One of the most important folders to include in your backup is /etc/swift/. This folder contains the ring files, ring builder files, and swift configuration files. If the contents of this folder are lost, the cluster data will become inaccessible. As such, it is a good idea to copy the contents of this folder to each storage node so that multiple backups exist within your storage cluster.

Some other folders that contain configuration data and should be included in your backups include:

/etc/keystone
/var/log/keystone
/etc/cinder
/var/log/cinder
/etc/glance
/var/log/glance
/var/lib/glance
/var/lib.glance/images

In addition to the folders listed above, there are also several databases that need to be backed up. Typically the databases will reside on the cloud controller, which doubles as a MySQL Server. This server hosts databases related to the Keystone, Cinder, Nova, and Glance components of OpenStack.

You can back up these databases by using the mysqldump command. The command requires you to specify the names of the databases that you want to back up as well as an output file. For example, if you wanted to back up the keystone database to a file named KeystoneBackup, you could do so with the following command:

# mysqldump –opt keystone > KeystoneBackup.sql

As a shortcut, you can substitute the all-databases parameter in place of the database name. For instance, if you wanted to back up all of the databases to a file named MyCloud, you could use the following command:

# mysqldump –opt –all-databases >MyCloud.sql

What's missing?

Backing up configuration files and databases will allow you to protect your OpenStack configuration, but there are some things that are not protected by this type of backup. This method does not protect individual objects within object storage. Similarly, block storage data is also left unprotected. According to the OpenStack documentation, these types of data are left for users to back up on their own.

You can use any compatible backup application. The OpenStack documentation basically says that it is up to the users to back up data residing on the  virtual machines that they create. As such, the backup application would have to be compatible with the virtual machines. It should be noted at this point that users of the public cloud have the same problem. Public cloud providers also leave it up to the user to backup their virtual machines and the data that this virtual machines use.

Of course, this raises the question of how you can better protect an OpenStack cloud. One thing to keep in mind is that like any cloud environment, OpenStack makes use of server virtualization. In fact, OpenStack is designed to work with a number of different hypervisors. You can see the full hypervisor support matrix at:https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix

One way that you can better protect your OpenStack environment is to adopt a backup application that is specifically designed for the hypervisor that you are using. You will still need to protect the OpenStack configuration files and databases, but you can use the backup software to protect the individual virtual machines and their contents

Another thing that you can do is to adopt a backup application that is OpenStack aware. However, this is more easily said than done. As previously mentioned, OpenStack is a collection of modular components that can be used to construct a private cloud. As such, none of the major backup products come preconfigured to back up OpenStack clouds.

Backup vendor Druva recently made headlines when they announced that their inSync software now supports OpenStack based scale-out storage. The software is designed to access OpenStack storage using the SWIFT OpenStack storage access protocol. It will also have the ability to back up file and object storage, as well as mobile endpoints (laptops, smart phones, etc).

Similarly, Zmanda supports the OpenStack framework with its Amanda enterprise backup software. The software is designed to create backups from the remote server layer.

Both Druva and Zmanda back up specific OpenStack resources, as opposed to the entire OpenStack infrastructure. It should be possible to also use traditional backup apps like NetBackup for Linux to back up the required components. However, NetBackup is not OpenStack aware. It would, therefore, be the backup admin's responsibility to manually configure a backup job that includes all of the required config data and databases.

The key to adequately protecting your OpenStack environment is to determine what it is that needs to be protected and then build a backup solution to meet those needs. While there are commercial products that can back up certain OpenStack resources, those products may not offer the level of protection that you require. You may have to combine commercial backup products with script-based backup techniques.

PaaS Outlook for 2014

Yup, it's that time of year again where everyone makes their 2014 predictions. I guess I'm no exception...

In this blog posting I’d like to spend a little time talking about Cloud, and specifically, about PaaS.  But first, a little background material.

First, lets define the different “kinds” of Clouds there are:

Public Cloud – Gartner defines public cloud as a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are provided as a service to external customers using Internet technologies—i.e., public cloud computing uses cloud computing technologies to support customers that are external to the provider’s organization. 

Private Cloud – Webopedia defines Private cloud as the phrase used to describe a cloud-computing platform that is implemented within the corporate firewall, under the control of the IT department. 

Hybrid Cloud – SearchCloudComputing.com defines a hybrid cloud as a cloud-computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. 

There are some others, but they are all basically variations of the above.

Once you have a Cloud solution, the question is, what kind of Cloud is it? Here are the definitions that NIST provides.

 Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) - The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls). 

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment. 

Software as a Service (SaaS) - The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure2. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

I recently did some research on PaaS, but I found the research tough to do because it’s almost impossible to put all of the PaaS players in the same bucket, and common patterns are hard to find.

Unlike the IaaS players that provide IT resources as a service, PaaS providers are really solution development platforms.  Therefore, they are built around the types of problems they solve, not some industry-accepted approach.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that PaaS is today’s most ill-defined area of cloud computing.  The approaches, features, and definitions vary widely, with many PaaS providers offering a specific focus.  This may include support for specific programming languages such as Salesforce.com’s Heroku, support for Ruby, Node.js, Python, and Java, or perhaps tight integration with major databases, such as Oracle’s Cloud Platform.  Or, perhaps it’s the delivery model, with private PaaS offerings from Active State, App Fog, or Apprenda, for those of you who can’t yet trust the public PaaS offerings from Google or AWS. Then there is an entirely new set of PaaS providers such as Elastic Box that bring a completely different approach to the problem.

Overall it’s largely a function of the providers all of which are trying to be relevant in this emerging marketplace.  PaaS is the last frontier of cloud computing, and thus the least defined.  So, it’s still possible for vendors to manipulate the market by positioning their products to better define what PaaS is and its value, or, more likely, their campaigns will just confuse people.

In 2013, the PaaS market took on some new dimensions.  Private PaaS players saw strong growth as some enterprises looked to keep applications and data in-house.  Also, there is greater support for the emerging use of DevOps, better database integration, and better support for emerging multi-cloud deployments.  This builds upon, not replaces, the traditional uses of PaaS to automate application development, testing, and deployment processes.

Moreover, the PaaS market saw increased meshing with the IaaS space in 2013.  This includes strong showings from AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and other IaaS-focused players.  We also saw the arrival of some new PaaS players, including Oracle, and we got a clearer picture of how Saleforce.com’s and Pivotal’s PaaS offerings will likely exist in the emerging market.

Given all of these developments, there is a need to reevaluate the PaaS market and the PaaS players, in terms of how PaaS truly fits within an enterprise application development strategy.  Questions are emerging such as:  When will PaaS work for enterprise IT?  When will PaaS not work for enterprise IT?   What is the changing value of PaaS technology, now, and into 2014?

Some confusion in the attempts to answer these questions, and complexity has emerged.  This led to some pushback when it comes to PaaS within enterprise IT.  Many consider PaaS too complicated and too limiting for most development efforts, and for most developers.

For instance, most PaaS offerings place the developer into a sandbox, with only the features and functions that the PaaS provider furnishes to build and deploy applications.  While this makes development an easy and controlled process, many developers need to gain access to the resources and tools required to support specific features, such as remote and native APIs, as well as middleware and database services.  While the PaaS providers consider this abstraction from the underlying “metal” a path to productivity, many developers don’t agree.

PaaS does provide the ability to automate much of the development and deployment activities, as well as provide the developers with the ability to offer self- and auto-provisioning capabilities.  This means that application developers can focus on the applications, and not have to deal with the purchase of hardware, software, and development tools to support increasing demands on the applications or the need to scale.

Moreover, PaaS supports new and more innovative approaches to delivery, including DevOps and the move to “continuous delivery.”  Approaches such as continuous integration, automated testing, and continuous deployment allow software to be developed to a high standard and easily packaged and deployed.  This results in the ability to rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly push out enhancements and bug fixes to customers at low risk and with minimal manual overhead.

If there is a core pattern that is a part of most PaaS, it’s that  it’s solution-oriented.  PaaS providers are focused on being the factory for cloud applications, and they understand there are many paths to get to that goal.  As such, the offerings are very different from provider to provider, and thus the market is fragmented, complex, and confusing to those in enterprise IT.

I suspect this situation won’t improve much as we enter 2014.  However, PaaS continues to be a consideration for those moving to the cloud.  How and if it’s leveraged will be defined by the particular enterprise.

Forecast, Cloudy with a lot of public and a touch of private...

If you believe that the pundits tell you, then private cloud is all the rage for enterprise customers.  Certainly, if you look at what we've been doing here at EVT, there seems to be some evidence to suggest that's actually true.  Our Enterprise customers seem to all be either interested in, currently deploying, or running some kind of private cloud.

Forrester Research says that 31% of Enterprise  customers already have a private cloud in place and 17% plan to build one over the next year.  However, when you dig down a little further, what you'll find is that only 13% actually have something that fits the "true" definition of private cloud.  Most have some kind of virtualization in place with some added software to help manage that virtual infrastructure.  But, more often than not, those so called private clouds are missing some key elements of a "true" private cloud.

Part of the problem could be that IT has a very loosey-goosey definition of what private cloud really is - and therefore what it brings to the table for IT and for IT's customers.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says that for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to be considered as a cloud it must have 5 attributes:

1. On-demand self-service
2. Broad network access
3. Resource pooling
4. Rapid elasticity
5. Measured service

IT's definition of a cloud is often very different, and can vary from "We have a data center" to "we look just like Amazon Web Services".  But without the 5 essential characteristics above, IT will not be able to achieve the goals of going to "The Cloud" that most people are trying to achieve.  The scalability, elasticity, and cost savings that the public cloud promises to the business customers of IT are the real goals that IT should be looking to match with the private cloud.

So why is public cloud growing so rapidly?  AWS was a $2 billion business last year, and they are predicted to double that this year.  Yet, as you can see above, private cloud seems to be struggling to gain traction in the data center. Especially when you consider the number of data centers that have a private cloud in name only (PCINO).  I suspect that there are a number of reasons.

First, moving to a true private cloud is a very difficult cultural and organizational hurdle for most IT departments.  It really means a shake-up of IT at the most fundamental level all the way from the top to the bottom.  It means that IT will truly have to morph into that service organization that they have been trying to morph into for a long time, and many have yet to reach. That's the cultural change. They also need to change from an organizational perspective. They need to move away from vertically siloed departments within IT such as Server, Storage, network, etc. to horizontally organized departments is key to IT achieving the results that they desire and to be able to compete successfully with public cloud providers.

It should be noted here that IT often attempts to "cheat" the organizational change by "matrixing" people from existing IT departments into new "cloud" organizations. This often leads to failure since those "matrixed" people often bring with them old ideas about how things should be run as well as old processes and procedures.

This change also must go beyond just IT.  For example, the purchasing department must understand the new model for purchasing converged infrastructure. For example, they can't be allowed to "break up" the converged infrastructure and purchase the individual components through old, existing vendor relationships.  This continues on into IT as well, converged infrastructure means just that, converged. This often means that equipment that was traditional purchased directly from the manufacturer may now be part of the converged infrastructure stack and thus will be purchased as part of that solution. These old relationships with vendors and manufacturers often get in to way to achieving "true" cloud.

So, IT's inability to make the cultural and organizational changes to successfully compete with the public cloud is one reason I believe that private cloud adoption is where it is today.  A related reason is that in some cases IT recognizes the issues, and actually starts to utilize the public cloud to deliver services to their end users.  This is often an attempt to reel back into the fold "shadow IT" that has already deployed solutions in the public cloud. This if often followed quickly by a discussion on IT's part of hybrid cloud. In many cases that's because IT feels it just can't compete against the public cloud for all applications, and thus comes to the reluctant conclusion that rather than lose the entire pie, it's willing to give some part of the pie to the public cloud and build a private cloud for the rest. There's also an unspoken idea on the IT of IT that once they get their hybrid cloud up and running, they they will eventually prove to the business that they are better than public cloud and thus a majority of the application will move into that private cloud over time leaving only a small hand full of applications in the public cloud.

In the end, I think that unless IT can address the barriers to private cloud discussed above, that their dream of making the public cloud a temporary home is actually just a pipe dream. But in either case, IT's future is one in which they are a service provider and service director that helps the business find the best, most cost effective home for their applications.

Is OpenStack ready for prime time yet?

For those who've been reading this blog for a while, or who know me, you know that while I've been in the data center business for a long time, that lately I've been focused on storage and backup. However, over the last couple of years I've been watching the infrastructure business change.  What I find interesting is that what's old is new again!

When I first started out in "Open Systems", network, server, and storage was all managed as a single entity. So, here we are again. A "pod" or stack is just network, server, and storage all managed together, as a single entity.  The new wrinkle here is that we also size them as a single entity which provides a number of advantages. But that's for another blog. As a matter of fact, I plan to write a couple of blogs on IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, how to move successfully to "the cloud", and data protection a cloud environment.

In this blog, I want to talk about one of the "stacks" called "OpenStack". The first questions I get asked when I first begin to talk about OpenStack is, what's the difference between a "stack" and a "pod"?  Why is it called OpenStack and not OpenPod? The confusion is quite understandable, since the amount of hype and marketecture around everything having to do with "the cloud", including this topic, is enormous.  As a matter of fact, it's so bad, that some of the terms are, in my opinion, starting to become meaningless.  So I like to start out any discussion of any of these topics with a couple of definitions so that the audience and I are on the same page. According to Wikipedia:

OpenStack is a cloud computing project to provide an infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It is free open source software released under the terms of the Apache License. The project is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community.

This begs a definition of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) again form Wikipedia:

In the most basic cloud-service model, providers of IaaS offer computers - physical or (more often) virtual machines - and other resources. (A hypervisor, such as VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or KVM, runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.) IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). 

Note that IaaS can also be implemented in a private cloud (in your data center), or in both the public and a private cloud called a Hybrid Cloud.  This ability to utilize the resources of both a private cloud, and a public cloud, is becoming more and more interesting to large enterprises.  Again, more on this in a later blog where I will talk about the economics of "cloud".

OK, so enough of laying the groundwork.  Let's talk about OpenStack, and see of we can answer the basic question, is it ready for "prime time"?  Can I use it in the enterprise to implement my private cloud IaaS infrastructure? The answer is, maybe. Let's talk about it a bit.

First, clearly the interest in OpenStack is definitely growing, and growing quickly. You can see this by looking at the attendance of The OpeStack Summit which started out life with a $15,000.00 budget, and 75 people were basically coerced to go. The most recent OpenStack Summit had a $2 million budget and over 3,000 attendees. So, clearly, interest is up, but no where near the kind of interest that VMware has managed to get. The most recent VMworld had over 23,000 attendees.  So, no doubt, lots of interest. But what's driving the interest? Obviously, cost is a big consideration. Since OpenStack is open source, the cost of implementing it is significantly lower than for any of the commercial software out there.  But are there hidden costs that perhaps make it not as good a "buy" as perhaps one might think at first blush?  the short answer to that is "yes", just like it is with any open source software. Things like support costs as well as the cost of finding/training staff, etc. all add to the TCO of any open source solution, including that of OpenStack.

But lets talk about OpenStack itself a bit.  One of the things that I think was holding back OpenStack was the difficulty of deploying the solution.  However, this is rapidly being address by software such as Canonical's Juju. There are also a number of companies that provide IOpenStack based solutions such as Pistson OpenStack.  Piston provides a turn-key OpenStack solution that includes:

The other way we can tell if anything is ready for prime time is if we look at existing adoption of the technology. A year of two ago, there were almost no enterprise implementations of openStack outside of some service providers such as Rackspace, as well as NASA.  This has changed, companies such as Bloomberg, Comcast, and Best Buy have all implemented OpenStack. 

At the most recent OpenStack Summit Bloomberg CTO Pravir Chandra, one of several company executives who detailed their real-world experience with the platform at the summit, said his team set a high bar for OpenStack. Bloomberg’s goals included capabilities such as high availability, no cascading failures, and smooth scale down and scale up. As described in GigaOM:

"They were able to get there by deploying OpenStack along with considerable custom work of their own, both above and below that layer. They ended up setting up the high-availability databases and figuring out how to aggregate logs from the hypervisor level."

A story about Best Buy in ITWorld describes Bestbuy.com as "the poster child for organizations that can benefit from the cloud." The online retailer built an internal cloud on OpenStack that the company says speeds up the ecommerce site, allows faster development cycles, and scales.

For example, at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season last year, Bestbuy.com saw a spike of eight times its normal traffic, Joel Crabb, chief architect, told ITWorld. "If that doesn’t scream out for elastic scaling, I don’t know what does."

OpenStack also dramatically cut costs for Best Buy, company executives told summit attendees. Director of eBusiness Architecture Steve Eastham said past releases of the website cost about $20,000 to provision a single managed VM. With OpenStack, he said, the company is spending around $91,000 per rack.

So I think that it’s still an open question about how OpenStack will ultimately stack up against Amazon Web Services in the public cloud infrastructure sector and VMware in the (mostly) private cloud market, where legacy applications are in play. But OpenStack evangelists like Rackspace CTO John Engages are gearing up to bring their solutions to enterprise customers. In an interview, he told Ryan Cox:

The enterprise community is thirsty for the cloud and that ball will soon drop. The opportunity to innovate in open source with OpenStack is one that the legacy solutions in enterprise will soon be eaten. Mobile devices, Big Data, your and my Internet of Things … access to all of these through infrastructure that can scale quickly at low cost is a common theme we’re hearing at the OpenStack Summit 2013.

So, back to our original question, is OpenStack "ready for prime time"?  I think that the answer is, maybe. If you're looking to build a private cloud infrastructure, I think it's a ready option. If you're looking for a hybrid solution, it's a bit less clear, but it's certainly possible.

Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm particularly curious if our involved in a OpenStack deployment. 

Upgrading Your Storage Microcode

Folks,

I was just reading a posting by Chris Evans on this topic at http://architecting.it/2013/06/03/managing-microcode-upgrades/ and he makes a lot of great points.  I agree with everything that Chris posted,  only I would go even further and say that based on my experience that having a regular process for upgrading your storage microcode is critical to managing any storage environment.

There seem to be three competing philosophies that cause problems on this topic "in the wild":

1. "If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It!" - This is the idea that you should only patch or upgrade your storage infrastructure if you run into a problem.  I run into this approach more often than you would think, and invariably what this means is that you will run into every problem that exists in the microcode and have to deal with it on an "emergency" basis. It also means that you will often go for long periods of time without patching or updating, and then when you hit a problem, you have a huge jump, which almost always means that you also have a lot of servers that need HBA firmware and/or driver updates.  This usually ends up being  aHUGE and painful project, that, in some people's minds simply confirms why they are avoiding doing the storage microcode upgrades in the first place.  What they don't realize is that the main reason it's so painful is that they are so far behind. If they actually kept up, then the pain would be less and spread over time.
2. "Pick a standard, and keep it as long as possible" - This approach is one I see fairly often as well. Here the storage team picks a "standard" version of the OS, ans sticks to it only patching it when there is a problem, or until they are forced to change because new hardware doesn't support than version of the OS any longer. Then they adopt the new version of the OS as their standard, and bring everything up to that level. It's actually similar to #1, and suffers from the same sorts of issues.
3. "Apply every patch and/or upgrade the vendor releases as soon as it becomes GA" - I see this much less frequently mainly because people are afraid, often rightfully so, that patching/upgrading this frequently will cause more problems than it solves.

The process that Chris outlines in his blog post, is, in my opinion, the right way to go. Apply your patches either quarterly, or twice per year in predefined upgrade windows.  This doesn't mean that you can't apply patches to resolve specific issues as they arise.

But I would go a bit further in my definition of the process.  Specifically, I would have a process that works something like this:

1. Between upgrades (i.e. during the quarter or 6 month period between upgrades) I would pull down every patch and upgrade that the storage manufacturer releases into the storage team lab, and apply it to a lab box.  I would then apply a set of regression tests to validate that the patch/upgrade worked in my environment, with my servers, HBA's, etc.
2. About a week prior to my upgrade window I would pull together an "upgrade" package where I decide what patches/upgrades, etc I was going to apply to the storage, as well as any that were required for the HBA's, host OS's, etc.  Note it's critically that the host HBA's be upgraded to the latest version of their drivers, etc. that are supported by the patches/upgrades that you are going to roll out to avoid issues. Upgrades to the servers are often avoided even more than the storage OS upgrades since they are usually the source of outages (reboot required) and due to the fact that it's not the storage team doing those upgrades in many cases.
3. I would actually have two windows, once for arrays that support dev/test, and one for arrays that support production if it's possible. I would then roll out the patches to dev/test, and let them bake there for a week or two, and then roll them out to production. This isn't 100% necessary, especially if you've done good testing in your lab, but it would be nice.
4. Go to step #1 and start the process all over again.

When I've described this process to people I often get push back like "hey, that means that we will constantly either testing, or performing upgrades"!  This is especially the case if you decide to go on the quarterly schedule. My response if "yup, because that's part of what a storage team does, and why you have a storage team". Frankly, the team's time is better spent on this, than on, say, doing a lot of LUN allocations which you can automate, and even delegate, once it's automated.

The bottom line is, it's a "pay me now, or pay me later" situation and I would rather do as much of my patching/upgrading in a proactive manner, than in a reactie maner where's an a big emergency, and a big project with a lot of downtime at once.