Taking the EZ-Pass Lane to a Hybrid Storage Cloud

Nexenta Blog

Everyone wants to get from point a to point b as fast as possible and transitioning from a traditional datacenter to a modern hybrid or all cloud based infrastructure should not be any different.  Just like the EZ-Pass lanes at toll booths get you moving quicker, the new One-Click Deployment of NexentaCloud will move you from a traditional on-prem storage to a cloud based storage solution quickly and easily.  The steps below will walk you through the simple wizard that is built into NexentaFusion to deploy NexentaCloud in less than 30 minutes for up to 300TB!

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How much does tech help?

I spend my life surrounded by technology, working with a tech start up and living in one of the worlds larger cities, I can’t avoid being connected. But as I sit right now on a train passing through the British and then French countryside on the Eurostar I see the fields and fields of farming and old world cottages. I would never be on this train if it was not for my career in technology, going from one meeting to a conference in another country is a blessing no doubt, but am I really making a difference? To that point, are any of us involved in technology, supporting the latest buzzword, having an impact on the world at large. And more importantly are we making the world better

These are the thoughts I have been pondering and as i see classic farmland and beautiful scenery, the first reaction is that I am having no impact on how these people live, but then I started to look deeper into it. Most likely, I will never meet the farmer and his family living in the cottage we just passed, or the butcher that will make sure those same families are fed but that does not mean that we in technology have no impact. Some of these homes were built hundreds of years ago, yet they all have electricity and running water now, something unheard of when they were built. At the time electricity was nothing but a buzzword. Has the farmers life been impacted by the many many points of data stored from the “internet of things”, surely it has. Better weather forecasts, faster methods of selling their goods, all of these are things that the farmer enjoys. They make a difference in his life.

Does it matter that I work for a company that has a mantra that we can change the way data is stored, of course it does. The ability to store more data and process it faster could some day help the farmer and the butcher know that there may be a storm that could impact the crops and the herds of sheep that we watch pass by. I often get asked, what keeps me motivated to try to stay on the cutting edge of technology. It is sometimes amazing that the only time I get to stop and think of an answer about technology is when I am disconnected from the very technology world I live in.

To all those that ask why I travel so much or how I keep pushing, just make sure you take the few minutes to disconnect and look out the window at the farms and the small villages. They would easily exist without new technology, but can we as technologist make their life better or longer? That might be the ultimate question, but for me, the answer is yes and I hope some day to be involved with something that has as much impact as electricity.

VMware brings app delivery to the web

We live in an app-centric world now. If you use a smart phone you probably have spent time searching the app store for the latest new app. Then you go to work and open up Word or Excel or Outlook to get your work done. Users are less and less interested in the operating system and more on how well their app will work on it. With that in mind, VMware announced the tech preview of AppBlast.

VMware Changes Desktop Certifications

VMware announced that effective today, the VMware Certified Associate – Desktop certification will no longer be a prerequisite for the VMware Certified Professional – Desktop.  The exam will continue to be available for the VCA-DT.  The VCP-DT will be required along with a VCP to take the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop exam.  It is not known at this time if the VCA-DT will be retired since it is no longer part of a certification track.  The new track is shown below.

VMware takes Cloud Contracts globally

VMware has made steps to make the public cloud a much more dynamic system. VMware Global Connect is a partnering agreement between vCloud DataCenter certified vendors that will allow a customer to use all of their services with a single contract. Adding vCloud Connector into the mix will allow a customer to migrate systems from a private cloud to a local vCloud Datacenter provider.  VMware now has 7 global providers approved as vCloud Datacenter providers.  The vCloud DataCenter certification means that a vendor has built a full datacenter using a specific architecture that has been approved by VMware.  The Global Connect agreements provide shared SLA and reporting that is managed by the local provider but guaranteed regardless of the physical datacenter that the systems reside in.

UGGHH My calendar is messed up..How to fix it.

I have hated traveling to the west coast, not because of it being the west coast.  The weather is beautiful normally and people seem nice enough, but my calendars on my phone seem to be messed up all the time with the time zone changes.

I keep multiple calendars on my iPhone, my corporate exchange calendar and my GMail one being the most used.  It seemed as though everytime I would travel my time zones were off but only on some appointments.  I have found a few reasons for you to check.  You might need to try some or all of these and depending if you have “fixed” some appointments, you may need to put them back to the original.

What to do with the business cards you get…

If you are anything like me, when you travel around for meetings and conferences you end up collecting a stack of business cards and they never end up in my contacts.  You could go out and buy a CardScan scanner and scan them all in when you get back to your office, but in all reality who has the time.  Worry not, there is a solution out there for all of you with smartphones.  Welcome WorldCard Mobile.  I first came across Worldcard on my Windows Mobile phone a few years back and when I first switched to an iPhone I was disappointed it did not exist.  Lucky for you, times have changed and the development team has built iPhone and Android apps along with the Windows Mobile app.

Is the world finally ready for HP Virtual Connect?

HP Virtual Connect is not a new technology. A quick Google search for when it was first released showed a version 1.3 release note in October of 2008. If you apply Moore’s Law to something that was released originally in early 2008, it should have advanced 4x by now with it doubling every 2 years. In reality, the technology was built to grow and expand and change as connectivity changed. The problem with Virtual Connect previously was that a standard user normally had a very hard time understanding what HP was trying to accomplish.

Pre-Built Private Cloud: Is it Marketing or Innovation?

If you have been anywhere near a briefing from VMware, Citrix, or Microsoft in the past few years, you are well aware of what “the cloud” is.  You have probably already heard about the public cloud with the likes of Amazon and Google among others.  The newest additions to the cloud vernacular are the private and hybrid cloud.  The private cloud is where software companies like Citrix and VMware have developed solutions to allow an enterprise to keep their data secure, but still get the commodity model that has been advertised to their users in the consumer space. The hybrid model is the utopian integration and flexibility between the public and private cloud environments. As I sat through the second session of the Blogger Reality Show, which was focused on Converged Systems, it occurred to me that like so many pre-built platforms these days, the HP CloudSystem is exactly what the private cloud was envisioned as.  Then the thoughts of all the other hardware vendors starting sneaking in and I got to thinking about what is really included in these hardware offerings. Are we seeing a revolution in the way that IT equipment is purchased or are we just seeing marketing spin by a few vendors that have joined forces to sell the solutions that are already available.

HP: The Legos of enterprise IT

Security breaches from lost laptops, consumerization of enterprise IT, and a slowed economy have all been factors forcing current CIOs and IT staffs to find ways to cut costs and increase efficiencies. Virtual desktops while often one of my primary topics has become just one of the many pieces of the puzzle. The others include but are certainly not limited to the server infrastructure, networking equipment, enterprise storage and all the components that allow them to run, both physically with cabling, cooling and power, but also virtually, with management consoles and user interfaces.

Over the past two years, almost every major vendor in the IT industry has come up with a new fancy name to say that they are combining all the components needed to run your enterprise. Acadia was a collaboration from EMC, VMware and Cisco which later became VCE, Netapp was soon to follow with the Flexpod. Both of these are great solutions and are clearly geared at the large enterprise that buys in bulk. They both allow you to control the storage as part of a solution that includes the servers and even includes hooks into the virtual infrastructure. However, they also come with a cost, and a large one since you have to buy the units as a full configuration all at once.