Wednesday, April 27, 2016

The Future of Storage

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a Blab on advanced storage with Daniel Newman and Eric Vanderburg.  We covered some pretty interesting points on enterprise storage challenges, advanced storage trends and flash.  If you didn't catch it, a replay is now available.
https://marketing.dell.com/storage-blab-storage-insights

( This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. To learn more about tech news and analysis visit Power More. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies. )



Cloud Musings
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2016)



Sunday, April 3, 2016

DevOps and Hybrid Infrastructure Synergy


(This post first appeared in IBM's Point B and Beyond)

The definition of DevOps emphasizes collaboration and communication between software developers and other IT professionals while automating the software delivery and infrastructure change process. While agile software development and the use of automated infrastructure configuration tools stand proudly in the DevOps spotlight, little has been said about the actual infrastructure that modern tools such as Puppet and Chef automate.

DevOps in Hybrid IT Environments


Much has been written about Chaos Monkey, a tool that ensures individual software components work independently by randomly killing instances and services within Netflix’s Amazon Web Service (AWS) infrastructure. This process clearly stresses AWS infrastructure operations as automation scripts reconfigure infrastructure components on the fly. Without taking anything away from the operations excellence this displays, how would an enterprise match this feat across a hybrid IT environment? How would you support the DevOps philosophy across a hybrid IT infrastructure?

The DevOps philosophy embodies the practice of operations and development engineers working together through the entire service life cycle, from design to development to production support. It’s linked closely with agile and lean approaches and abandons the siloed view of the development team being solely focused on building and the operations team being exclusively centered on running an application.

As enterprises adopt both private and public clouds, they typically do not throw away their in-house infrastructure. Although consolidation, outsourcing and IT efficiencies may reduce the number of corporately owned data centers, a hybrid operational environment will still remain. Extending the DevOps philosophy into such an environment requires active management of all an organization’s IT infrastructure, regardless of its source. This active IT management is different from the budget-and-forget management seen in the past and requires the following:
  • Active monitoring and metering of all IT services;
  • Continuous benchmarking and comparisons of similar services; and
  • Viable options for change among pre-vetted and approved IT infrastructure service options (IT supply chain management).
These management functions are delivered by IT service broker enablement, which refers to the integration of platforms that aggregate, customize and/or integrate IT service offerings through a single platform. In transforming the traditional, mostly static infrastructure model into a multisourced IT service supply chain operation, these platforms also deliver financial management and hybrid IT solution design support. They uniquely enable the infrastructure dynamism needed to pursue DevOps across a hybrid IT environment.

A DevOps Mindset in the Dynamic World of Cloud


According to Gravitant, hybrid IT is also more than just a catalog of public and private IT infrastructure resources. It is a strategic approach that unifies the hardware and software operational components of an end-to-end solution. With this approach, an organization standardizes the delivery of multisourced solutions by doing the following:
  • Leveraging existing tools and resources without disruption;
  • Offering additional, automated choices for users who need speed and agility; and
  • Addressing architecture holistically, with the optimal balance of technology investments — on-premises, off-premises, hosted, private or public.

This concept requires a shift in structure and mindset because the dynamic world of the cloud requires a new organizational structure. The shift in structure helps organizations move from a