CitrixModern Synergy and Modern Infrastructure Decisions Infrastructure Summit Creating tomorrow’s data centers Home MIEditor’s Letter 2016 Impact EDITOR’S LETTER #HASHTAG Award Winners The Envelope, Please Twitter on #Docker #Hashtag Impact Awards Announcing the products that will change High Performance IT operations in 2016. Cloud Storage: Not an Oxymoron CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE Survey Says: SAN Storage High Performance Building a Better Cloud Storage: I/O Mousetrap Event-Driven Not an Oxymoron DevOps The Next Big Thing DATA APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE In the Mix SAN Storage Event-Driven DevOps THE NEXT BIG THING IN THE MIX The Year of Behold Our the Container Latest Free Lunch JANUARY 2016, VOL. 5, NO. 1 EDITOR’S LETTER Home Editor’s Letter structure, and Best AWS Partner. For Best Data Protection, 2016 Impact The Envelope, Award Winners we defer to our colleagues at Storage magazine. DevOps tools get their own category this year, as do private and #Hashtag Please hybrid cloud management tools. Finally, rather than give awards to cloud service providers themselves, we chose to High Performance Cloud Storage: highlight tools that will help you move to the cloud, with Not an Oxymoron the new Best Public Cloud Migration and Optimization IT’S JANUARY, AND you know what that means—awards Tool category. Survey Says: season! Not one to be left out of the party, Modern Infra- Which leads me to another mainstay of January jour- SAN Storage structure is happy to announce the winners of its third nalism: predictions! Usually, I take late, great New York annual Impact Awards, where readers, industry experts Yankees Manager Casey Stengel’s advice: “Never make Event-Driven DevOps and editors weigh in on the products and technologies predictions, especially about the future.” But just this that will have the biggest impact on IT operations in the once, I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that next The Next Big Thing coming year. Congratulations to all the winners. year’s Impact Awards will recognize innovations around Part of the fun of holding an awards program is watch- containers. Certainly, our columnists seem to think that In the Mix ing the returns roll in (over 800 readers participated containers are the future. “This is the year that contain- in this year’s voting). But for me, the fun comes much ers will arrive in a big way—much earlier and faster than earlier—back in the summer when we’re thinking about many expect,” writes Mike Matchett in “Container Ships which categories to keep, which categories to add, which Steam In.” Whether containers will be a boon or a bust for categories to tweak, and which to retire. We don’t want to IT operations is still up for debate. “It’s clear that devel- boil the ocean and recognize every conceivable product opers are eating the free lunch that containers promise,” category on which IT spends time and money. The idea is writes Bob Plankers in “Behold Our Latest Free Lunch!”, to highlight the technologies that are effecting the most “but I often wonder who is paying for the meal, because change in the data center—and the areas where infra- it’s a very expensive one.” n structure and operations folks can use a little help. Back this year are categories for Best Converged and ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Software-Defined Infra- Contact her at [email protected]. MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 2 IMPACT AWARDS The 2016 Impact Awards And the winners are... BY MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE STAFF THE READERS HAVE spoken. The result? A list of go-to data center products and services that will shake up IT operations this year. Here are the winners in the 2016 Impact Awards. BEST CONVERGED AND HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PRODUCT Winner: Nutanix NX-3060-G4 An easy-to-use management interface and growing name recognition garnered Nutanix its second win for Modern Infrastructure’s Best Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Product Impact Award in a row. The Nutanix hyper-converged offering comprises scalable data center compute, storage and networking hardware with the Prism management interface and a choice of Nutanix Acropolis, VMware vSphere or Micro- soft Hyper-V hypervisors. “We liked the idea of VMs running close to compute and memory, with clustered aggregated storage,” said Joe Aiello, staff engineer in Global Labs at Shoretel, which adopted Nutanix 20 months ago. Aiello runs traditional infrastructure—storage from NetApp, Nimble Storage and EMC and servers from Dell and HP, among other KIMBERRYWOOD/ISTOCK HOME MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 3 products—in addition to hyper-converged infrastructure. “Acropolis has great potential,” he noted, and is in use Home “I like the Prism interface from Nutanix,” Aiello said, for his own infrastructure rather than for shared resources because he doesn’t need to go into the command line to until it develops more. But vSphere is baked in, he said, Editor’s Letter manage his systems. Prism “One-Click” management and Acropolis doesn’t have role-based access that’s needed 2016 Impact for shared resources. Award Winners Honorable Mention: SimpliVity OmniStack #Hashtag SimpliVity and Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure offerings remained neck-and-neck among Modern Infra- High Performance Cloud Storage: structure Impact Award voters. SimpliVity OmniCube won Not an Oxymoron the converged and hyper-converged platform category in 2013, and SimpliVity OmniStack came a close second to Survey Says: Nutanix for this year’s Impact Awards. SAN Storage NUTANIX NX-3060-G4: What voters valued the most is the true integration of the compute, storage and SimpliVity OmniStack is a hyper-converged infrastruc- networking tiers, coupled with the product’s ture platform on Cisco UCS x86 servers. The compute and Event-Driven building block design. DevOps storage hardware support hypervisor-based virtualization, backup and replication with real-time dedupublication, The Next Big Thing cloud connections, WAN optimization and other modern covers software upgrades, capacity trend analysis and IT requirements. In the Mix planning and troubleshooting of storage, compute and Voters like the commodity x86 servers underlying the virtualization layers in the Nutanix computing platform. converged management and operations, and one IT pro Aiello said that hyper-converged infrastructure lets com- said the OmniStack takes data virtualization “that much panies do more on those platforms without hiring a roster further.” of individuals with deep technical specializations. One SimpliVity user affirms that hyper-converged was Nutanix’s native hypervisor Acropolis is based on Li- the right replacement for traditional servers and stor- nux KVM, and offers an alternative to vSphere and Hy- age. Tanner LLC, an accounting firm in Salt Lake City, per-V virtualization. Acropolis touts increased security, switched from HP to SimpliVity OmniCubes on Dell self-healing capabilities based on SaltStack systems and hardware about a year ago. configuration management, and VM management for “I sleep a lot better at night knowing full copies of my enterprise data centers. Aiello uses both Acropolis and servers back up offsite multiple times a day on hardware vSphere on his Nutanix hyper-converged boxes. that we own,” said Matt Huff, IT director at Tanner. He MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 4 voted for the SimpliVity OmniStack because SimpliVity Home makes storage resource provisioning easier, and man- agement all takes place in VMware vCenter. Storage Editor’s Letter utilization is growing slowly, with deduplication and 2016 Impact compression features, he added. Award Winners #Hashtag BEST DEVOPS TOOL Winner: CloudBees Jenkins Platform High Performance Cloud Storage: Open-source Jenkins is practically synonymous with Not an Oxymoron DevOps-style continuous integration and test-driven development. CloudBees Jenkins Platform takes that Survey Says: foundational toolset and makes it enterprise-worthy. “This CLOUDBEES JENKINS PLATFORM: Replaces older SAN Storage approaches to delivering apps, includes high availa- platform is our foundation for DevOps, being used by all of bility, and integrates with any number of platforms. our teams,” wrote one reader. “It allows our corporate tool Event-Driven DevOps support team to centralize management and operations of our Jenkins cluster,” said another. Features provided two dozen plugins, said Mario Cruz, Choose Digital CTO. The Next Big Thing by CloudBees Jenkins Platform include role-based access “Getting started with open source Jenkins is pretty easy, control, high availability, distributed team management but when you get out of dev and move into corporate In the Mix and analytics, plus integration with any number of production, that’s when you want the enterprise support.” platforms and tools: public and private clouds such as Amazon, Openstack, Kubernetes, or Microsoft Azure, or Honorable mention: Red Hat Ansible development tools such as BlazeMeter for load testing and When it comes to DevOps tools, Modern Infrastructure New Relic for performance monitoring. readers value simplicity—and that’s what they say they Combined with Docker, CloudBees Jenkins Platform get with Ansible, automation and configuration manage- can replace older approaches to delivering applications. ment software acquired by Red Hat in November. Readers Choose Digital, of Miami, now uses Docker and Cloud- describe Ansible as “low overhead,” “intuitive,” and “easy Bees Jenkins Platform to automate