Posts

It is a pretty fair assumption that the Netapp company that you’re currently familiar with will be a much different company within the next five years. I say this because there isn’t much of a choice for anything else. Where is Netapp? When I say Netapp, my guess is the first thing that you think about is a good ole’ storage array that’s been sitting in a data center. Netapp has been around for a pretty long time, and pre-dates virtualization. The storage array has had a pretty good run in the data center and provides all the capabilities that enterprises have been looking for in a storage array. The write anywhere file layout (WAFL) introduced a very performant file system and RAID DP (Dual Parity) are part of the legacy of Netapp. Unfortunately, the legacy of Netapp has started to make them feel like a “legacy” company over the past few years. ...

In today’s world, if you can get an Internet connection, you can go anywhere and connect to any service that is publicly available. No restrictions are imposed and you can use the entire amount of bandwidth you purchased from your Internet service provider. This is the world under Net Neutrality. To illustrate this point further take the following example. If you purchase a 25Mbps circuit from Comcast or AT&T, you can use all of that bandwidth, assuming the service on the other end is also providing 25Mbps or better. ...

HPE recently announced that they were getting deeper into the cloud game bin introducing their Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV) solution. Now while this sounds a lot like a storage array function, it’s really its own separate cloud that is focused only on storage. The idea behind it is that storage in both AWS and Azure isn’t great for enterprises and they want a better option to connect to their EC2 instances or Azure VMs. ...

Once a year the Discovery channel has a Shark-a-palooza around all things sharks. Silly contests like having Olympic swimmers race CGI sharks, Dirty Jobs hosts doing gross stuff with sharks, people busting shark myths… you get the picture. It’s one of my favorite weeks because you can learn stuff about cool animals and there is something to watch on TV during the summer. But this year I gave up much of my Shark Week for a good cause. The folks over at GestaltIT were having their Cloud Field Day 2 in Silicon Valley and they were gracious enough to invite me to join them as a delegate. ...

I had high expectations for the sessions being presented during Cloud Field Day 2 hosted by GestaltIT in Silicon Valley during the week of June 26th-28th. The first of the sessions presented was from a company that I hadn’t heard of before called Nirmata. I had no idea what the company did, but after the session I found out the name is an Indo-Aryan word meaning Architect or Director which makes a lot of sense considering what they do. ...

Tech Field Day will be presenting Cloud Field Day 2 on July 26th through the 28th in Silicon Valley. If you have the time, please join in on the fun and watch the live stream right here. The schedule will consist of nine great companies all explaining the ins and outs of their solutions and it’ll get real geeky. The schedule is found below and all times are Pacific US. So be sure to do the conversions. ...

Deploying security patches to servers is almost as much fun as managing backup jobs. But everyone has to do it, including companies that have moved their infrastructure to AWS. As we’ve learned with previous posts, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager allows us to use some native AWS tools for management of our EC2 instances, and patch management is no exception. EC2 Systems Manager allows you to do patch compliance where you can set a baseline and then based on a defined maintenance window a scheduled scan and deployment can be initiated on those EC2 instances. This assumes that you’ve already installed the SSM Agent and setup the basic IAM permissions for the instances to communicate with the Systems Manager service. The details can be found in the previous post. ...

In a previous post we covered the different capabilities and basic setup of EC2 Systems Manager, including the IAM roles that needed to be created and the installation of the SSM Agent. In this post we’ll focus on running some commands through the EC2 Systems Manager Console. We’ve already got an Amazon Linux instance deployed within our VPC. I’ve placed this instance in a public facing subnet and it is a member of a security group that allows HTTP traffic over port 80. ...

We love Amazon EC2 instances because of how easy they are to deploy and we have a huge catalog of templates (AMIs) to choose from which really speeds up our provisioning. But once those instances are up and running it would be really nice to have some methods of managing those instances. Luckily, Amazon has developed several capabilities to help manage Amazon EC2 instances after they’ve been deployed. These capabilities are used to execute scripts, manage patches and kick off automation routines within an EC2 instance, directly from the AWS console. ...

AWS is taking the virtualization world by storm. Workloads that used to get spun up on vSphere are now being deployed in AWS in many cases. But what if you’ve got workloads in vSphere that need to be moved? Sure, it probably makes sense to build new servers in AWS and decommission the old ones but sometimes it’s OK to lift and shift. Amazon has a service that can help with this process called the AWS Server Migration Service. ...