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

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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 the delivery of its in all aspects” including learning, configuration, deploy- white-label digital media marketplace that used to run on ment, use and maintenance. The learning curve “is far a Java platform as a service. The real benefit that Cloud- smaller than [competitors] Chef/Puppet,” one reader said. bees Jenkins Platform brings to the table is its more than Another big piece of Ansible’s simplicity is that it

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 5 eschews agents, and relies on SSH for communication said one reader. “No other tool provides such insight with- Home instead, said Walid Shaari, an infrastructure architect for out any human configuration and input.” a Saudi oil company that voted for Ansible. “It capitalizes Editor’s Letter on something that already exists,” he said. Other benefits

2016 Impact include code that is human readable, and the ease with BEST PUBLIC CLOUD OPTIMIZATION Award Winners which it’s possible to create hierarchies and add to in- AND MIGRATION TOOL ventories. Like voters, Shaari also called out the vibrant Winner: Cloudyn #Hashtag Ansible community, which counts over a thousand com- Moving enterprise apps and data to the public cloud—and mitters. When it comes to community engagement, “the then optimizing them post-migration—can introduce a High Performance Cloud Storage: only competitor to Ansible right now is Docker, when you number of hurdles for IT. As a result, many enterprise Not an Oxymoron think about it.” IT shops turn to third-party vendors and tools to help simplify that process. And when it comes to choosing one Survey Says: Honorable Mention: Ruxit Full Stack Monitoring of those tools, Modern Infrastructure readers had one SAN Storage Ruxit, a division of Dynatrace, is a newcomer to the DevOps scene, but Modern Infrastructure readers are very Event-Driven DevOps excited about what the infrastructure and application performance monitoring (APM) tool can do for them. Of- The Next Big Thing fered as either software as a service (SaaS) or on-premises, Ruxit requires a single agent per host that automatically In the Mix discovers and baselines the environment. “I chose Ruxit because of its out-of-the-box capacity to monitor system and infrastructure aspects, as well as application perfor- mance and user experience,” wrote one reader. “[Ruxit] replaced three previous products we were using,” said another; “it is simple to use compared to our previous solutions,” and has a “gorgeous interface.” But the aspect that whets readers appetite for more is Ruxit’s use of artificial intelligence to automatically CLOUDYN: The SaaS-based Cloudyn pro­vides a range of cloud management and monitoring capabilities de­liver insight. In fact, readers said other tools pale in that work across a variety of cloud computing comparison. “I’ve been blown away by its auto-discovery, environments. artificial intelligence and deep application knowledge,”

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 6 clear-cut favorite in 2015: Cloudyn. Honorable Mention: Ravello InceptionSX Home A SaaS offering, Cloudyn provides a range of cloud Ravello InceptionSX earns high praise from Modern In- management and monitoring capabilities that can work frastructure readers for its ability to run VMware ESXi Editor’s Letter across different cloud computing environments, such as hypervisors in the public cloud.

2016 Impact Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Along with bridging the gap between VMware and Award Winners Cloud Platform and OpenStack. To give users better visi- leading public cloud platforms like AWS and Google, bility into their public, private or hybrid clouds, Cloudyn InceptionSX provides a solid development and testing #Hashtag offers different reporting, graphing and dashboarding environment, and can also be used with production work- tools. loads, readers wrote. High Performance Cloud Storage: But, in addition to helping users track cloud resources “The ability to run nested ESXi on AWS is awesome, Not an Oxymoron and performance, Cloudyn provides the means to monitor and a real home-lab replacement,” one wrote. and optimize another vital aspect of cloud environments, Readers also applauded the tool for its easy set-up and Survey Says: one that every customer must stay on top of: cost. intuitive interface. SAN Storage Users, for example, are able to track cloud spending “It’s definitely a very cool technical achievement,” said by region or business unit to get a handle on who is us- Jirah Cox, sales engineer at eGroup, a VMware partner Event-Driven DevOps ing which cloud resources and how much, exactly, they and reseller based in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. “No consume. doubt there.” The Next Big Thing Those capabilities are crucial for AutoGrid, a provider of big data analytics for energy and utility companies, Honorable Mention: CloudVelox One Hybrid Cloud In the Mix based in Redwood Shores, Calif. The company uses Clou- Platform dyn to optimize its AWS hosting environment to prevent Have a lot of workloads to migrate to the cloud? Modern and identify cloud sprawl—especially as AutoGrid’s cus- Infrastructure readers recommend CloudVelox, whose One tomer base, along with the number of smart meters and Hybrid Cloud Platform is designed to save users both time sensors it monitors, continues to grow, said Tim Fewkes, and money. head of product operations for AutoGrid. CloudVelox’s software, for instance, significantly re- “We’re spinning up big storage volumes and we try to duced the time it took to move a production web site for be very nimble for our clients—this is real-time stuff, this a leading hotel chain—Hyatt.com—to the cloud, said is big data crunching—and because of this we needed to Doug Lionberger, managing director at Candor Technol- have an anti-sprawl tool where my system administra- ogy Solutions, a cloud consultancy based in Naperville, tors… can be held accountable for the compute resources Illinois, and previously the director of e-commerce, cloud they use,” Fewkes said. services and DevOps for Hyatt.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 7 “The CloudVelox software mapped the environment, Home blueprinted the environment and migrated it to the cloud in about eight days,” Lionberger said, noting that, manu- Editor’s Letter ally, that process would have taken weeks if not months.

2016 Impact And if help is needed, the CloudVelox support team is Award Winners quick to step up, he added. “It’s one thing to have the software, but it’s another to #Hashtag have the staff behind,” Lionberger said.

CLOUDIAN HYPERSTORE 5.2: This scale-out object High Performance storage stack runs on commodity hardware, encrypts Cloud Storage: all its data, and is fully compatible with AWS S3 APIs. Not an Oxymoron BEST SOFTWARE DEFINED INFRASTRUCTURE Winner: Cloudian HyperStore 5.2 Survey Says: Need to store lots and lots of data on premises? Read- SAN Storage ers suggest you evaluate Cloudian HyperStore—an can specify data retention and protection policies across on-premises scale-out object storage stack that can run the geographically distributed HyperStore cluster. Or, Event-Driven DevOps on commodity hardware, encrypts all its data, and is fully to quote another Cloudian fan, “We believe that their compatible with AWS’ Simple Storage Service (S3) APIs. S3 product is a forward looking storage technology with The Next Big Thing That last point was especially important to Calligo, a features that organizations will require moving forward.” cloud services provider based out of the Channel Island In the Mix Jersey that uses Cloudian for media and archival storage Honorable Mention: Stratoscale Symphony for its customers. “There are so many apps that just plug Are you building a private cloud, but don’t have the budget in to S3 these days, said Julian Box, Calligo CEO, for in- for VMware, don’t have the stomach for OpenStack, and stance backup and file sharing apps such as Veeam and don’t want get locked in to a proprietary hyper-converged ownCloud. “That way you don’t have to think about the architecture? Modern Infrastructure readers feel the same compatibility.” Further, “S3-compatibility makes this a as you, and recommended Stratoscale as a software-only great product for trying cheap then moving later,” pointed software-defined storage stack that offers most of the out another reader. functionality of commercial offerings, extensive scalabil- Compared with other object-storage solutions, readers ity, and less of an up-front integration effort than running also cited Cloudian for its hybrid model that allows users on open-source OpenStack. to offload data to AWS for long-term archival, and for its el- Bezeq, an Israeli telecommunications provider that egant management console where systems administrators recently began offering infrastructure as a service to its

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 8 business customers based on Stratoscale and commodity Home hardware. “We like to do things on our own, in a way that will cost the least money,” said Arik Sudman, department Editor’s Letter manager for systems and storage. But because the startup

2016 Impact uses OpenStack APIs, it makes it easy for Bezeq to extract Award Winners itself from it if it decides to change directions down the road. But for now, Stratoscale is firmly in Bezeq’s plans: #Hashtag down the road, it plans to evaluate it to replace existing VMware systems. High Performance Cloud Storage: Not an Oxymoron CLOUDBOLT: Offers customizable dashboards, BEST PRIVATE AND HYBRID CLOUD reporting and automation control, as well Survey Says: MANAGEMENT PRODUCT as a user-friendly interface and ease of use. SAN Storage Winner: CloudBolt The definition of private and hybrid cloud has become in- Event-Driven DevOps creasingly muddied over the years, but this year’s Modern enterprises are looking for and puts them into a single Infrastructure Impact Awards winner can help IT profes- intuitive interface that enables IT to react to business The Next Big Thing sionals understand what a true private cloud should be. needs.” Among the most important factors that led judges In short, CloudBolt’s software helps enterprise IT shops to select CloudBolt was its compatibility with products In the Mix operate like a cloud service provider. Many competing from a wide range of hardware and software vendors. The private and hybrid cloud products offer only a piece of vendor-agnostic product can be deployed as part of a new the cloud pie, but managing multiple tools can create private cloud build or can be easily integrated into an ex- new challenges for IT administrators who were hoping a isting infrastructure. private cloud would help ease management. CloudBolt’s software offered the most comprehensive One Modern Infrasturcture reader and CloudBolt user feature set of the nominated products, with customizable put it perfectly, saying “I use multiple clouds, and Cloud- dashboards, reporting and automation control, readers Bolt makes it easy for me to choose the right tool for each said, as well as a user-friendly interface and ease of use. job. I don’t have to switch back and forth between each “CloudBolt installed in our environment in an incred- vendor’s interface. I just log into CloudBolt for a single ibly short period of time (i.e. less than an hour) and did place to manage all my environments.” an extremely comprehensive import of our environment,” Judges said CloudBolt’s software “takes all the features one reader wrote. “We literally turned our existing

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 9 infrastructure into an Amazon-like cloud in a matter of Home minutes. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it.” Editor’s Letter

2016 Impact Honorable Mention: EMC Federation Award Winners Enterprise Hybrid Cloud If a company is looking for a top-to-bottom new hybrid #Hashtag cloud deployment—from hardware to software and public REAN CLOUD: Customers cite the consulting cloud integration—they can find no more comprehensive and profes­sional services company’s commitment High Performance to change. Cloud Storage: platform than the EMC Federation Enterprise Hybrid Not an Oxymoron Cloud. This collection of top-notch hardware from EMC and VCE hardware along with VMware software and cloud Survey Says: services represent the industry’s most comprehensive in Fort Washington, Pa., said the firm helped it avoid SAN Storage hybrid cloud platform. EMC claims its EMC Federation “newbie mistakes” in regulatory compliance. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud can be installed from scratch in “We are a very strongly regulated industry, and working Event-Driven DevOps just 28 days. with people who are very scared of change,” said Jason Mc- Munn, chief cloud architect for Ditech. ”They helped us The Next Big Thing map all of the regulatory requirements and controls into BEST AMAZON PARTNER a framework that was understandable by both the tech In the Mix Winner: REAN Cloud people and the auditors.” Modern Infrastructure readers came out in force this year for REAN Cloud, an AWS Managed Service Partner based Honorable Mention: Flux7 in Herndon, Va. as their choice for Best Amazon Web For the second year in a row, readers commended Flux7, Service Partner. REAN Cloud offers consulting and profes- an AWS Advanced Tier Consulting Partner based in Aus- sional services as well as managed services for AWS. Cus- tin, Texas, for its stellar AWS consulting services. tomers cite their commitment to change as AWS evolves Voters praised Flux7 for its extremely committed team, as setting REAN Cloud apart from the competition. One highly technical leadership, customer-driven focus and voter commented that they are “friendly, hard-working ability to change with the times. and technologically brilliant.” “They are very technically capable, up-to-date with One of the customers REAN Cloud has helped with an the latest AWS technologies, and responsive whenever AWS cloud computing setup, Ditech Financial LLC, based we have questions or need assistance with our DevOps

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 10 infrastructure,” said Shilo Rohlman, a software developer for a fairly complex hosting operation,” said Ron Wilson, Home at Medallion Learning based in Denver. Tessitura’s CTO. “Flux7 was … also flexible in tailoring the Flux7 also jump-started a project for Tessitura Network scope of the project, ultimately providing us with an initial Editor’s Letter Inc., based in Dallas, among many others, and its flexibil- architecture template and supporting automation tooling

2016 Impact ity proved to be a difference maker. that we then took internally for refinement, testing and Award Winners “Flux7 assisted us in developing a prototype architecture deployment.” n

#Hashtag

High Performance Cloud Storage: Not an Oxymoron

Survey Says: SAN Storage

Event-Driven DevOps

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 11 zzzzzz #Hashtag Home On Docker

Editor’s Letter

2016 Impact Award Winners

#Hashtag Mike Petros High Performance Tom Riat Grimshaw Gasteratos Derek Bekoe Cloud Storage: @riattom @mikegrimshaw2 @ptrgast @derekbekoe Not an Oxymoron Ok ... let’s try to build With #docker you can Note to self: If you Being able to launch a Survey Says: something with Docker run #CLUSTERS of want to install #docker new site with #docker SAN Storage for our new dev server #VPC’s as honeypots, (the container runtime) #nginx #cloudflare and #Docker imagine the #infosec on a debian based #azure in a few minutes possibilities :) system then docker.io feels good Event-Driven is the right package DevOps not docker

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

Brandon Ajeet Singh Williams Mike Metral Raina Teemu Vesala @williamsbdev @mikemetral @ajeetsraina @teemuvesala

Docker pro tip: beware A process manager Universal Control #Docker has become of sparse files when in a #docker container Plane looks too cool and one of my favorite doing a ‘docker commit’. means you’re prob easy to setup. Docker tools for admin things. #Docker #linux thinking of it as a swarm integration is Simplifies environment VM still. Break it up just awesome!! #docker creation. & create smaller #docker-machine containers per role

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 12 CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

High Performance Cloud Storage:

Not an Oxymoron THERE’S CLOUD STORAGE, there’s high performance storage, Cloud storage is tracking down the speed of light. but is there really such a thing as high-performance cloud BY ALEX BARRETT storage? For a long time, the answer was no. “Any time you move your infrastructure somewhere outside of your data center, there’s going to be latency involved, and you run in to the speed of light problem,” said Scott Sinclair, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. “The speed of light can only go so fast.” Those that required high performance storage out of their cloud providers either learned to compromise, or stayed home. Increasingly though, there are emerging technological approaches that suggest that you can have your cloud storage cake and eat it too—that is, it’s possible to run IO-intensive, latency sensitive applications with some level of cloud-based infrastructure. High-performance cloud storage could allow orga- nizations to run very demanding database applications in the cloud that have been stymied by cloud storage’s limitations. It could also allow you to keep applications on-premises, but take advantage of cheap and scalable cloud storage over the wide area network. And finally, it could make it possible to run compute in the cloud that accesses storage infrastructure back in the private data center. THE-LIGHTWRITER/ISTOCK HOME

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 13 But unlike most storage problems, the trick to achieving “Storage is important—it keeps us safe—but it’s not Home high performance cloud storage isn’t just to throw more something that you want to be spending a lot of money disk drives or flash at the problem, Sinclair said. When on.” Editor’s Letter solving for the speed of light, new technologies “need Meanwhile, public cloud providers offer raw capacity at

2016 Impact to rely on a specific innovation to solve the problem,” he rates that rival consumer hard disk drives. Prices for Ama- Award Winners said. Namely, colocating data very close to compute, or zon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) start introducing some sort of network optimization or cach- at $0.03 per GB per month (less for greater capacities and #Hashtag ing mechanism. Some systems combine all three of these infrequent access tiers), or $240 per year for a managed, approaches. And while it’s still early days, early adopters replicated TB. High Performance Cloud Storage: have seen promising returns. But that cheap capacity tier is based on object storage, Not an Oxymoron whose performance is adequate in the best of times— and downright slow when accessed over the wide area Survey Says: ON-PREM COMPUTE, CLOUD STORAGE network. So the challenge for many IT organizations is SAN Storage “We used to have the mindset that storage is cheap, and if how to tap in to the cloud’s scalability and low cost, while you need more storage, just go buy some more,” said David maintaining a modicum of performance. Event-Driven DevOps Scarpello, COO at Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group, For Sentinel, one potential fix is a data caching and a benefits management firm in Wakefield, Mass. “Then acceleration tool from Boston-based startup ClearSky The Next Big Thing I came to the realization that storage is not cheap, and Data that combines an on-premises caching appliance whoever told me that was hugely mistaken.” and a sister appliance located in a local point of presence In the Mix Between purchasing extra capacity, support and main- (POP) that is directly connected to high-capacity public tenance, staff, backup, maintaining a data center and cloud storage. By caching hot data locally and accessing disaster recovery site, Sentinel pays upwards of $250,000 the cloud over a dedicated, low-latency connection, cus- per year to maintain 40 TB worth of on-premises stor- tomers take advantage of cheap cloud-based storage for age—over $6,000 per TB. “It’s a lot,” he said—and for on-premises compute without a performance hit. what? In an initial release, ClearSky promises near local IOPS

n Colocating data close to compute or introducing network optimization can solve for the speed of light. n Public cloud providers offer raw capacity at rates that rival consumer hard disk drives. HIGHLIGHTS n Best practices dictate that you go with the cloud provider’s block storage for latency-sensitive database applications in the cloud.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 14 and latencies of under two milliseconds, for customers out Home of its Boston, Philadelphia and Las Vegas POPs. The plan is to increase its geographic presence, and add support Building a Better Editor’s Letter for additional cloud storage providers, said Ellen Rubin, I/O Mousetrap 2016 Impact ClearSky Data co-founder and CEO. Award Winners Sentinel has begun to move about 7TB of test and devel- MOST ATTEMPTS TO deliver more I/O center around opment volumes to AWS via ClearSky, with no complaints providing additional disk resources. With its new #Hashtag from developers. Ideally the company will slowly move Parallel I/O offering, storage virtualization pioneer over all its data, thereby eliminating a $5,000/month DataCore Software proposes a new approach: High Performance harness the power of today’s multi-core CPUs in Cloud Storage: maintenance fee to NetApp, and the need for backups and Not an Oxymoron offsite disaster recovery. the service of delivering IOPS, rather than just compute. Survey Says: “In a traditional virtualized machine, there’s SAN Storage CLOUD COMPUTE, AND STORAGE TOO only one I/O worker trying to split time between all If you’re running a latency-sensitive database application the different VMs,” said Augie Gonzalez, Datacore Event-Driven DevOps in the cloud, best practices dictate that you go with the director of product marketing. “With Parallel I/O, cloud provider’s block storage offering, for instance AWS you have a lot of different I/O workers, so that The Next Big Thing Elastic Block Storage (EBS). That used to be a death-knell each VM has at least one I/O worker working on for large database workloads, who were stymied by limited its behalf.” In the Mix IOPS and smaller volumes sizes. Dustin Fennell, CIO at EPIC Management, L.P., a When Realty Data Company’s parent company National provider of healthcare services in Redlands, Calif., Real Estate went bankrupt in 2012, it had to make some thinks Parallel I/O will help him solve login storm quick decisions concerning its three data centers: go in issues in his Citrix environment. “Leveraging the to another data center, rent colocation space, or go to the CPU that we already have in a different way is cloud. “As much as it’s hard to let go, going to the cloud really exciting to us,” Fennell said. “It means we made the most sense, financially,” said Craig Loop, direc- wouldn’t have to add more hardware.” tor of technology at the Naperville, Ill., firm. DataCore claims several cloud service provid- At first, Realty Data scrambled to do lift-and-shift mi- ers are beta testing Parallel I/O for use in their grations of its applications, but stumbled to migrate its infrastructure. n 40TB image database off of an EMC array and in to the cloud. Latency and performance numbers from S3 were

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 15 unacceptable, and meant rewriting its in-house appli- their wares at cloud service providers. Not only do some Home cation to support object storage. “Even with shims, we cloud block storage offerings fail to deliver sufficient IOPS couldn’t get it to work,” Loop said. Meanwhile, AWS EBS and latency, many cloud users report suffering from “IOPS Editor’s Letter wasn’t a real option either, because at the time, EBS sup- competition”—competing for IOPS resources with other

2016 Impact ported volume sizes of only 1TB. “EBS would have been a tenants of the environment, said Varun Chhabra, EMC di- Award Winners management headache,” Loop said. rector of product marketing for its Elastic Cloud Storage. Working with cloud consultancy RightBrain Networks, Pairing cloud compute with dedicated storage can achieve #Hashtag Realty Data used a Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array predictable performance. (VPSA), dedicated single-tenant storage adjacent to the High Performance Cloud Storage: cloud data center and connected via a fibre link, and pur- Not an Oxymoron chased using a pay-as-you-go model. The Zadara VPSA “NOT ALL CUSTOMERS ARE presents familiar SAN and NAS interfaces, and storage READY FOR THE PUBLIC Survey Says: performance developers expected with an on-premises SAN Storage CLOUD.” EMC array. Zadara has since added VPSAs at other cloud —Catherine Van Aken, lead for providers, as well as an on-premises version that provides Event-Driven business development, channels DevOps cloud-like pay-as-you-go consumption. Native cloud block storage options have also upped and partners at Virdata The Next Big Thing their game. AWS EBS, for instance, now supports volume sizes of up to 16TB, and EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes At the same time, using dedicated storage for cloud- In the Mix backed by solid state drives deliver up to 20,000 IOPS per based workloads is reassuring to some businesses, said volume. Still, while that’s good enough for a lot of database Catherine Van Aken, lead for business development, workloads, it isn’t for all of them. channels and partners at Virdata, which develops a big Lawter Inc., a specialty chemicals company based in data and analytics platform for Internet of Things (IoT) Chicago, Ill., recently moved its SAP and Sharepoint infra- applications and whose platform is based on OpenStack structure to a public cloud service from Dimension Data, running on NetApp FlexPod converged infrastructure. and chose Zadara VPSA because it needed to guarantee “Not all customers are ready for the public cloud,” Van a minimum of 20,000 IOPS for its SAP environment. Aken said. “The market is growing from the edge, but “[Dimension Data’s] standard storage could not meet our will move to the cloud over time,” she said, citing an IDC IOPS requirements,” said Antony Poppe, global network prediction that within five years, over 90% of IoT data and virtualization manager with the firm. will be hosted in the cloud. With its approach, Virdata can Meanwhile, traditional storage vendors see a market for offer its customers a stepped approach to going from an

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 16 all on-prem environment, to compute in the cloud, with efforts. It can also lay the foundation for a multi-cloud Home storage nearby. strategy, moving applications between clouds to avoid Further, using traditional storage in the cloud offers cloud lock-in, without having to make changes to their Editor’s Letter management familiarity, said Phil Brotherton, NetApp data stores.

2016 Impact vice president of the Data Fabric group. It even appeals to “Decoupling compute and storage has a lot of implica- Award Winners compliance officers, he said, “by holding data out of the tions,” Ben-Shaul said. cloud, even if the compute is in.” NetApp has hundreds of In addition to severing the connections between stor- #Hashtag customers for its NetApp Private Server, which delivers age and compute, the VeloStrata software streams and fat, low-latency performance “near the cloud,” at provid- caches application images to the cloud from on-premises High Performance Cloud Storage: ers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and storage. It consists of two VMs—one running in VMware Not an Oxymoron AliBaba Group, Brotherton said. vCenter that mediates access to on-premises storage for reads and writes, and one in the cloud that communicates Survey Says: with the running compute processes, and integrates with SAN Storage CLOUD COMPUTE, STORAGE ON-PREM monitoring engines. But for some organizations, any storage in the cloud is “The whole idea is to be cloud-agnostic, and allow VMs Event-Driven DevOps too much storage in the cloud. The volume of data is too to run natively in the target cloud environment,” Ben- great, the investments in on-prem storage infrastructure Shaul said. The Next Big Thing are too large, or the regulations governing their actions Enterprise Strategy Group’s Sinclair anticipates that are too stringent to seriously contemplate putting data in the storage community will continue to put forth creative In the Mix the public cloud. solutions to deliver high performance cloud storage. Ac- Compute, however, is another story. There are lots of cording to its research, using some sort of off-premises scenarios when an organization may want to run an ap- cloud resources is IT organization’s top initiative for the plication in the cloud, but keep its data at home, said Issy coming year. Ben-Shaul, CEO of Velostrata, a startup whose software “There’s obviously a huge amount of interest, but at decouples storage from compute. They may want to use the same time, you really have to solve the speed of light cloud compute for application modernization, for test and challenge.” n dev, or to accommodate utilization spikes. Meanwhile,

keeping data on premises provides investment protection, ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Contact meets compliance goals, or avoids massive data migration her at [email protected].

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 17 w Survey Says Home SAN increases to expand storage capacity

Editor’s Letter

2016 Impact Award Winners D How much SAN and/or NAS D Which type of array storage capacity do you currently are you looking to purchase?* #Hashtag have installed?

High Performance Cloud Storage: 62% Not an Oxymoron 45% 1PB+ Survey Says: 14% 37% SAN Storage

500 TB-999 TB Event-Driven 10% DevOps SAN Unified array NAS (block) (file and block) (file) 250-499 TB 9% The Next Big Thing SOURCE: PRIMARY STORAGE OPTIMIZATION SURVEY 2H2015; BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 445 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS. 13% 101-249 TB In the Mix

Under 100TB 54% D Percentage of respondents who intend to include solid-state (flash) storage in their storage purchase

SOURCE: PRIMARY STORAGE OPTIMIZATION SURVEY 2H2015; SOURCE: PRIMARY STORAGE OPTIMIZATION SURVEY 2H2015; BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 842 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS. 55BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 445 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 18 APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE

FOR ALL THE positive changes they have seen, many Dev- Ops shops still find themselves caught between highly Ag- ile app development and still-cumbersome IT operations. Could event-driven computing bridge that gap? In an event-driven world, work is triggered by events such as user actions, sensors or messages from other ap- plications and services. That’s in contrast to the dominant procedural-programming model that defines a series of steps to be carried out. “It’s really about turning around who is driving the bus,” said Jonathan Eunice, a DevOps architect at WayUp, an online job board in New York City. “In procedural pro- gramming, the program is driving the bus. In event-driven programming, users and results and things are driving it.” Event-Driven In recent years, several cloud providers have begun to offer event-based automation services. The most well- known of these is Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, DevOps which runs code without users having to provision New event-driven automation services may be any servers. Industry experts believe that event-driven just what IT need to achieve DevOps success. services such as these could take today’s software de- BY BETH PARISEAU velopment techniques and add more agile, reactive and automated infrastructure operations, balancing out the lopsided DevOps equation. “[Event-driven computing] is fundamental to folks VLADGRIN/ISTOCK HOME

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 19 getting the kind of productivity boost that they’re all being Event-driven automation also allows for easier manage- Home offered by their vendors telling them, ‘Hey, go Agile!’” ment of computing resources at a scale that is too large said Evan Powell, CEO of StackStorm, an event-driven for humans to keep up with. For example, Betabrand first Editor’s Letter software maker based in Palo Alto, Calif., which boasts put Lambda to use when a marketing partnership with

2016 Impact big Web-scale players such as Netflix among its custom- a popular gaming blog generated traffic to Betabrand’s Award Winners ers. “Agile isn’t enough if you don’t have ops acting in an website that overwhelmed servers in a traditional hosting Agile way.” environment. #Hashtag Modern, closed-loop automation that uses snippets of “It demolished our servers,” James said. “Took them software code to reactively automate the infrastructure down in like 20 seconds.” High Performance Cloud Storage: allows users to make the process of developing apps and Meanwhile, James and his team had run across the Jaws Not an Oxymoron managing their underlying resources more productive and platform (now rebranded Serverless), which deploys AWS Agile in the real world, Powell said. Lambda functions with the Simple Storage Service (S3), Survey Says: “I think it is the missing piece,” Powell said. and ties together all the pieces Amazon has available for SAN Storage Lambda automation in a command line interface. Beta- brand used this framework to overhaul its Web infrastruc- Event-Driven DevOps EVENT-DRIVEN IN ACTION ture to accommodate the traffic spike. IT pros who have put event-driven automation products The first step was for Betabrand to break down the The Next Big Thing into production agree with this assessment. company’s page design into a static website hosted on S3. “Good software developers are not always good server Then, in order to notify customers when products they are In the Mix administrators,” said Seamus James, software engineer for interested in become available for purchase, Betabrand Betabrand, an online clothing retailer in San Francisco. set up a Lambda function that collects email addresses “We don’t want them bogged down in the difficulties of and adds them to a DynamoDB database. This allowed server administration. Amazon and Lambda are taking out Betabrand to capture marketing leads as one million a lot of that difficulty and allowing software developers unique visitors hit the website, without overwhelming to write software, which is what we are supposed to do.” the infrastructure.

n Many DevOps shops find themselves caught between highly Agile app dev and cumbersome IT ops. n In recent years, several cloud providers have begun to offer event-based automation services. HIGHLIGHTS n Event-driven automation allows for easier management of computing resources at a scale that is too large to keep up with.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 20 “It couldn’t have been easier to get that configured,” “smart” speed bumps. Edeva uses a software-as-a-service Home James said. And the initial bill, taking into account Ama- offering from Iron.io to allow servers in remote speed- zon’s free tier of services? Seven cents. bump locations to send data to a central analytics system Editor’s Letter That number grew to about $200 once S3 bandwidth for processing, which runs on AWS.

2016 Impact costs were factored in, but the costs were still paltry com- John Eskilsson, a consultant to Edeva who set up Award Winners pared with scaling out Web servers to accommodate the the Iron.io infrastructure, said its easy integration into traffic, James said. the Yii software development framework and its early #Hashtag VidRoll is another example of an Amazon customer support for the Python language have made the remote using event-driven computing to achieve infrastructure management of servers both on and off AWS much more High Performance Cloud Storage: management at massive scale. The company processes developer-friendly. Not an Oxymoron billions of events per month in its advertising technology “It just makes sense to use a software as a service like computing platform and has seen rapid growth. At first it that so you don’t have to manage all these extra servers and Survey Says: was processing 4 billion data points per month; within six so on,” Eskilsson said. SAN Storage weeks this year that grew to 40 billion, and a few weeks after that, 200 billion. Event-Driven DevOps “There are these network effects of scale which are MESSAGE QUEUING FOR THE MASSES very difficult to manage if you have to spin up your own In some ways, what’s old is new again—for Iron.io and The Next Big Thing servers and manage all of the peaks and spikes of traffic,” StackStorm’s products, old-fashioned message queuing is said James Young, CTO for VidRoll, which began using central to how the software operates. Iron.io even sells a In the Mix Lambda early in the beta. Within months, the company separate message queuing product called IronMQ, which was on track to process 40 billion events a month with a triggers events in sister software called IronWorker. team of four people. However, there are some differences, said StackStorm’s “Having the ability to use Lambda allowed us not to Powell. “The ability to go out to your systems, see how have to worry about the underpinnings of how to keep the they’re performing actively or passively, take that back and servers up,” Young said. Engineers can also resolve prob- then make decisions as to whether that is something that lems with their code quickly, without having to coordinate is actionable, all of that precedes then dropping [data] in across dev and ops teams. the queue,” Powell said. “The difference is the transfor- Event-driven computing is also necessary when servers mation and the conditional logic on the way in, and then are located in places administrators can’t reach, but rely having the proper [infrastructure] hooks on the way out.” on frequently updated event analytics to function. That’s StackStorm’s product is meant to be wholly managed the case for Edeva, a Swedish company which makes by the user, but cloud services can further streamline and

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 21 abstract the message-queuing elements from users, to technologies. In fact, to scale out containers in its EC2 Home the point where applications can appear to run without Container Service, Amazon recommends a workaround requiring any servers at all. involving Lambda to trigger the creation of new containers. Editor’s Letter One example of where cloud event-driven computing “When we scale this out, I’m not afraid at all of moving

2016 Impact services can take the heavy lifting out of automation is over to a Docker-based deployment,” said Edeva’s Eskils- Award Winners by eliminating the need for applications to poll the envi- son. “But the integration I’ve made into the Yii framework ronment looking for changes to kick off automation, said for pushing code up to Iron.io, it’s so streamlined I have #Hashtag Lambda user Theodore Kim, director of SaaS operations frankly not seen the need to do [containers].” for Jobvite, a talent acquisition software maker in San For enterprise organizations forced to adapt a legacy High Performance Cloud Storage: Mateo, Calif. architecture to the cloud, event-driven computing might Not an Oxymoron It’s unclear whether the AWS Lambda service uses poll- be too big an architectural leap, said VidRoll’s Young, ing or message queuing somewhere in the back end, but to and containers offer a more Agile way of porting a legacy Survey Says: the user, Lambda functions appear to kick off immediately, infrastructure into an automated, cloud-agnostic world. SAN Storage without needing to wait for polling to take place. In fact, Young’s company has developed the ability “In the old days we’d drop [data] into a queue and poll to flip-flop the architecture of its application between Event-Driven DevOps against that, whereas with Lambda…it’s immediate,” said Lambda and Docker, to hedge its bets as its scales up with Kim. “It’s kind of a black box, where it’s all handled by the Lambda. “Containers make sense, because they’re a better The Next Big Thing Lambda service. And for us it looks like it executes as soon abstraction than having to maintain a complete server,” as an event is triggered.” Young said. In the Mix IT shops will have different preferences on developer productivity vs. operational freedom, said StackStorm’s COULD EVENT-DRIVEN COMPUTING Powell. UPSTAGE MICROSERVICES? Container-based compute has a higher potential for in- As event-driven computing catches on, it’s bumping up ter-cloud portability of workloads. Conversely, things like against another exploding software development trend: Lambda “are up there with data gravity in terms of sources containerization using Docker, and developing software of lock-in,” Powell said. “Literally, your business logic at in terms of microservices. least in that one application is being run by Amazon as a Like event-driven automation, containers and micro- service.” n services also promise application flexibility, automation

between components and scalability. Event-driven com- BETH PARISEAU is senior news writer for SearchAWS. Write to her at puting and Docker aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @PariseauTT.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 22 THE NEXT BIG THING

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Editor’s Letter

2016 Impact The Year of or free licensing, more efficient use of physical resources, Award Winners better scalability and ultimately service reliability. Look- ing ahead, containers will help organizations take better #Hashtag the Container advantage of hybrid or cross-cloud environments. Containers are maturing at a rapid Server virtualization was also a great idea when it first High Performance Cloud Storage: pace—and in 2016, IT better be came out with significant advantages over physical host- Not an Oxymoron prepared. ing, but it still took many years for it to mature (remem- BY MIKE MATCHETT ber how long it was before anyone hosted an important Survey Says: database in a VM?). The same has been true for private or SAN Storage hybrid clouds, new storage technologies and even big data. But even though containers are just out of the gate, they Event-Driven DevOps have gotten farther down the maturity road by leveraging the roadmap laid out by server virtualization. And you can The Next Big Thing get a jumpstart by using trusted hypervisors like VMware IT’S HARD TO predict what the biggest thing to hit the data vSphere Integrated Containers to shepherd in containers In the Mix center will be in 2016. Big data? Hyper-convergence? Hy- while the native container world polishes up its rougher brid cloud? I’ve decided that this is the year that contain- edges. Because containers are sleeker and slimmer than ers will arrive in a big way—much earlier and faster than VMs (they are essentially just processes), they will slip many expect, catching unprepared IT shops by surprise. into the data center even if IT isn’t looking or paying at- Unlike other technologies like big data that require tention (and even if IT doesn’t want them yet). vision and forward investment, containers are a natural Containers were originally created to host stateless next step for application packaging, deployment and microservices-based application layers, but the latest hosting that don’t require massive shifts in mindset or Docker releases show that containers are destined to host vision. It’s just quicker and easier to develop and deploy far more than microservices. For example, with Flocker an application in a container than it is to build a virtual plug-ins providing persistent storage you can immediately appliance. Containerized architectures also have the containerize just about any application. Stir in one of sev- compelling operational and financial benefits of cheaper eral software defined networking options and you have a

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 23 scale-out container-ship! As a result there are already big are already racing to see who can put together the best Home data, relational databases and software defined storage converged container “distro” and hyper-converged scale- solutions running as containers. out platform to support them. Application vendors are Editor’s Letter And unlike with hyper-converged architectures, con- quickly rolling out containerized versions of their wares.

2016 Impact tainers’ fundamentally fluid design means nothing is Containers are coming quickly! Award Winners really going to lock you in. In fact, if you run SDS and SDN and containers, you might claim to be “super” #Hashtag hyper-converged. IT ORGS WILL LIKELY BE It will take years before we containerize everything, SUPPORTING SOME KIND High Performance and there are some thorny challenges yet to work through Cloud Storage: OF CONTAINER “SHIP” Not an Oxymoron before container architectures become fully general-pur- IN PRODUCTION WITHIN pose platforms, including how to guarantee application Survey Says: performance service levels when an application consists THE NEXT SIX MONTHS. SAN Storage of multiple (tens, thousands?) of containers, many of which might be shared with other apps in a complex web Container architectures might help IT worry less on Event-Driven DevOps of dependencies. We’ll need new management solutions what’s in a container, and concentrate more on running to visualize where problems or contention have crept in, the best possible “ship.” But like with server virtualization, The Next Big Thing as well as big-data-powered predictive automation to re- eventually you will want to map across the container “ab- mediate issues and optimize performance and cost. And straction” from application through to infrastructure. To In the Mix because containerized applications are extremely fluid— get there, start looking for ways to gain the total visibility they can easily migrate across physical, virtual, and cloud that you will need for troubleshooting, resource planning servers—we’ll need tools to dynamically arbitrate and and service assurance in the impending containerized migrate containers across infrastructures. data center. n When will all this happen? I predict that IT organi-

zations will likely be supporting some kind of container MIKE MATCHETT is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. “ship” in production within the next six months. Vendors Contact him at [email protected].

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 24 IN THE MIX

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Editor’s Letter

2016 Impact Behold Our Java promised the ability to write an application once Award Winners and run it anywhere. That was a bold promise, and Sun Microsystems (and now Oracle) almost completely failed #Hashtag Latest Free to deliver on it. We are forever mired in Java version problems, forward and backward version incompatibility, High Performance platform incompatibilities, performance issues between Cloud Storage: Lunch Not an Oxymoron platforms, security problems, and so on. Containers require IT to ask itself the We see some of these same problems with containers. questions it always has—how are Survey Says: Despite the promise of abstraction from the underlying SAN Storage things secured and how do we prove it? operating system, there still is an underlying operating BY BOB PLANKERS system that needs care and feeding. In particular, it needs Event-Driven DevOps updates and patching, which developers rarely do. A ma- jority of container images contain serious unremediated The Next Big Thing security issues, studies show. Furthermore, there are big trust issues in the container world. Is it okay that your In the Mix developers are building applications on container images HAVE YOU HEARD the news? Containers are here and will be built by unknown people on the Internet? How do you the savior of IT! If you aren’t familiar with containers they know that those images are safe, and don’t contain back encapsulate applications in a way that hides operating doors or malware? systems and other pesky infrastructure layers. Application There are versioning problems, too, just like Java. There developers can check out a container image, install their is different container software out there, such as Docker, application, and then deploy it repeatedly. With these Rocket, LXC, VMware ThinApp, Solaris Zones, etc., and techniques, developers can build, ship, and run any app, it isn’t uncommon for two different development teams to anywhere, according to Docker, arguably the largest con- have chosen two different technologies. Each technology tainer software vendor. has compatibility issues with underlying infrastructure, I’m being sarcastic about containers being our savior, too. Developers need version X of their container technol- though. I see a lot of parallels between Docker and Java. ogy but the operating systems my organization supports

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 25 and secures aren’t compatible, or require heavy retrofit- data stored and how is it protected? Can we standardize Home ting, which increases staff time commitments. all teams around one container platform? Who is building On top of this, there are very few management inter- and maintaining “gold master” container images, and if Editor’s Letter faces for containers. Chargeback/showback is unheard it isn’t our organization, how do we know we can trust

2016 Impact of. Security tools are nonexistent. Backup and restore Award Winners isn’t possible in the normal frameworks, either, which is a big problem not only for daily operations but also THERE ARE VERY FEW #Hashtag disaster recovery and business continuity. Change man- MANAGEMENT INTERFACES agement is laughed at. Given all the holes in the process High Performance FOR CONTAINERS. Cloud Storage: the pessimist in me starts thinking that containers are an Not an Oxymoron elaborate way for developers to shirk the responsibilities of traditional IT, especially around risk management. And them? How do our applications get security updates? Survey Says: while it’s clear that developers are eating the free lunch How do containers mesh with our change management SAN Storage that containers promise, I often wonder who is paying for process, and how do we do capacity planning? the meal, because it’s a very expensive one. Because when all is said and done, there really no such Event-Driven DevOps So what do we do about it? For starters, we start asking thing as a free lunch. n all the same hard questions we’ve always asked. How are

The Next Big Thing these things secured, and how do we prove it? How do we BOB PLANKERS is a virtualization and cloud architect at a major handle an incident with a container? Where is application Midwestern university. In the Mix

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2016 26 Home

Editor’s Letter

2016 Impact Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com e-publication. Award Winners Margie Semilof, Editorial Director #Hashtag Alex Barrett, Editor in Chief High Performance Cloud Storage: Adam Hughes, Managing Editor Not an Oxymoron Follow @ModernInfra Phil Sweeney, Managing Editor on Twitter! Survey Says: SAN Storage Patrick Hammond, Associate Features Editor

Event-Driven Linda Koury, Director of Online Design DevOps Joe Hebert, Production Editor The Next Big Thing Rebecca Kitchens, Publisher, [email protected] In the Mix TechTarget, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com

© 2016 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group. About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.

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