THE VBLOCK, THE IOT GATEWAY AND THE SENSORS Sherif Mohsen Services Proposal Consultant Dell EMC [email protected] Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3 The Vblock ................................................................................................................................. 3 Big Data and Vblock .................................................................................................................. 4 Mobile Computing ...................................................................................................................... 6 Ubiquitous Computing and Pervasive Systems .......................................................................... 7 FOG Computing ......................................................................................................................... 7 Windows 10 IoT Core ................................................................................................................. 8 Case Study ................................................................................................................................ 9 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................11 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................12 Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this article are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Dell EMC’s views, processes or methodologies. 2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2 Introduction The IT world is radically changing with new technologies focused on extending the mobile device era to the era where everything has sensors. i.e. the Pervasive Systems era. The data center with its powerful components in processing, networking, storage, virtualization and management will always be a fundamental component of the IT world. This is where Vblock has revolutionized the data center ensuring customers can benefit from state-of-the-art components and integration of leading companies such as VMware, Cisco and Dell EMC. The Vblock is a single stop shop for a complete data center and the deployment and components’ flexibility ensure no time is wasted trying to get components from different vendors to work together, and whether a patch on a component will be supported with the rest of the ecosystem. The Release Certification Matrix and thousands of hours VCE engineers invest means the customer no longer needs the extensive effort of component assembly. However, we believe the next era of IT solutions holds more. Sensors have the potential to generate billions of terabytes from everyday devices, from cars, to washing machines, to the air purifiers in our offices. This huge amount of data needs proportional processing capabilities and technologies. This can be done in the data center and projected to be expanded to include IoT Gateway devices which will be small hubs present in the streets to collect real-time data from the sensors, filter out this data, perform preliminary processing and may be capable of providing real-time insight and decision making. From the Intel Gateway to the clustering of Raspberry PI projects utilizing Windows 10 IoT Core, we will discuss in this article the potential of providing IT capabilities, not only in the data center via Vblocks, but also extending this to include sensor devices and IoT Gateways. The Vblock The data center has always been a core part of IT infrastructure delivering compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management capabilities to IT consumers. This, coupled with the client-side compute, has been the cornerstone of the era where computers dominated the work experience. The next era of IT promises even more. The shift from Client Server IT models to an era where IT resources can be accessed in the Cloud, coupled with the increased proliferation of mobile and pervasive systems opens a window to a new world of opportunities. From the data center perspective, converged infrastructure has basically provided organizations with a data center in a box. Much like a smartphone includes phone, email, camera, and GPS, converged infrastructure provides compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management in a single platform. For small and medium businesses (SMB), Hyper Converged Infrastructure provides a single data center in a box but at a smaller scale more convenient to this customer segment. (Akkiraju) VCE Vblock accelerates time to deployment as customers no longer need to deal with different vendors, researching compatibility of different components, procuring components from different vendors, and going through the pain of integrating these components. Moreover, upgrading firmware of a single component must be verified with all others in the data center to ensure clean post-upgrade operations. VCE spares all this effort by providing all components from a 2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 3 single vendor, doing the engineering work and compatibility tests in their labs and freeing up IT staff to more productive and innovative work. Moreover, it eliminates vendors finger-pointing if problems arise as customers have a single point of contact to refer to when facing any issues. Vblock are leaders in this segment providing different offerings including the 100, 200, 300, 500 and 700 systems which provide organizations with choice and scale, from the smaller VNXe storage scaling to the midrange class VNX systems and extending to the enterprise class VMAX (10k, 20k, 40k,100k, 200k and 400k) systems, and from rack mount servers to Cisco UCS computing. The VxBlock systems take a further step by offering customers flexible choice of software-defined networking with VMware NSX or Cisco ACI (factory built), in addition to flexible storage deployments including VNX or VMAX3 storage systems. The VCE VxRack system 1000 and VxRail address the Hyper Converged infrastructure segment providing modular design and allowing for expansion as IT needs grow. VCE Vscale architecture is an innovative solution which enable customers to treat data centers as modules that can be combined to scale and pool resources to unprecedented levels. The enabling technology behind this is the scalable spine-leaf network fabric. (VCE, 2015) The image below offers a high level overview of this great technology enabler. Figure 1 (VCE, 2016) Big Data and Vblock Big Data has been a trending term over the past few years, and for good reason. As the term implies, Big Data represents a BIG amount of structured and unstructured data which is generated from many sources including web, social media, sensors and mobile (Figure 2). An IDC forecast expects the Big Data technology and Services market to grow at a 26.4% compound annual growth rate to $41.5 billion through 2018 (Big Data & Analytics - An IDC Four Pillar Research Area, 2016). This is huge and holds many opportunities for all players in the IT market. The main challenge with Big Data is how to analyze this huge amount of data and 2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 4 generate insight that businesses/individuals can utilize to derive insight and make decisions based on this analysis. Some like to refer to the analysis of Big Data as the “divide and conquer” methodology which includes acquiring Big Data, organizing it and analyzing it. Simply said, data has to be divided, the different portions individually analyzed, and utilize the power of distributed computing and storage to put this data back together and generate the insight. Figure 2 (www.ibmbigdatahub.com) Vblock provides an enterprise-level infrastructure which can be utilized with Big Data by integrating Isilon® for Scale-Out Network Attached Storage with native Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) integration to provide a much more resilient and scalable architecture than one which utilizes commodity hardware. Additionally, this provides a solution for customers who are looking for support of unstructured as well as traditional databases. Furthermore, Hadoop deployment can be virtualized with VMware vSphere Big Data Extension (BDE) which provides the advantage of advanced features that virtualization brings to today’s IT world. Table 1 summarizes the features Vblock provide for support of Big Data and Analytics. Solution Highlights Big Data and Analytics on Vblock System Availability / Reliability Enterprise- and service provider-class, 6 x 9’s Enterprise- and service provider-class, high configurability Performance / Scalability with dynamic and intelligent scaling Data-at-rest encryption, secure data transmission, multi- Security / Privacy level segregation, control, and isolation 2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 5 Protocol Support HDFS 1/2, NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP All data including structured and unstructured data, select Data / Analytic Support Dell EMC Symmetrix VMAX, VNX, and/or Isilon. Multi-Tenancy Yes Mixed Workload Yes Integrated Support Yes Virtualization Yes, as well as bare metal, implement vSphere BDE Operations Management Yes with VCE Vision, Open API. System metrics available Table 1 (TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS: BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS WITH VCE AND EMC, 2014) Mobile Computing According to June 2014 Gartner Statistics, traditional PC sales are declining and mobile while tablets sales are rising (Figure 3). This means