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Customers have a ton of requirements around log aggregation, file shares, media streaming repositories, and just a simple place to store objects. It can be difficult to manage all of these different use cases but Dell EMC Isilon might just be the solution that can help to manage these requirements. Many times customers have several small islands of storage used for different purposes. Maybe this is because of a brand new requirement like “all security camera data will be stored for seven years”, which might require some additional storage space. Whatever the reason, companies many times will have small islands of storage, possibly even from different storage companies. This can become tough to manage and require more storage administrators with differing skill sets. ...

I was pretty unfamiliar with Cohesity until the recent Tech Field Day 12 presentation but they’ve been receiving a lot of buzz in the industry. If you’re like I was and weren’t paying enough attention, you should at least check them out. Cohesity’s go to market strategy is based around covering all aspects of the secondary storage market. The thought being that there are way too many solutions in use by the enterprise and that all of these different solutions makes it difficult to manage. For example, the secondary storage solutions include media servers, backup managers, target storage for backups, cloud gateways, test/dev storage, file shares for archives and a copy of data for analytics. This is a big task to tackle but the real goal for Cohesity is to replace all of these individual server types into a single scale-out solution. ...

Today begins the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 12 in Palo Alto California. If you’ve been in IT for a while and want to remember what it’s like to be just “keeping up” with the conversation, join in on the live stream which you can watch right here. Companies presenting include: Cohesity Dell EMC Docker Drive Scale Igneous Rubrik StorageOS Pay attention to these other bloggers on twitter to get their perspective on the solutions presented: ...

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is a critical step because it’s what your end users will request new virtual machines and services from. There are a couple types of catalogs that will deploy virtual machines, advanced and standard. Standard selects a virtual machine template from vSphere. Advanced selects a pre-defined workflow that has been built in UCSD and then published to the catalog. Create a Standard Catalog To create a “standard” object go to the Policies drop down and select catalogs. From there click “Add”. Select a catalog type and then click “Submit”. In this example, I’ve chosen the “Standard” catalog type. ...

I’m a big fan of Terraform from Hashicorp but many organizations are using cloud management platforms like Cisco UCS Director or vRealize Automation in order to deploy infrastructure. If you read my blog often, you’ll know that I’ve got some experience with both of these products and if you’re looking to get up to speed on either of them, check out one of these links: UCS Director 6 Guide or vRealize Automation 7 Guide. But why not use Terraform with Cisco UCS Director and have the best of both worlds? ...

Creating a Cisco UCS Director Catalog is the first step to publishing services to your end users. The second step is to assign permissions. This post will show you how to assign permissions to UCS Director Catalogs. To allow users to access a catalog item they must be granted permissions. To do this, go to the Administration drop down –> Users and Groups. From there click on the “User Groups” tab and find the group which should be entitled. ...

The Cisco UCS Director end user self-service policy is used to determine which day 2 operations that come out of the box are available on catalogs in a VDC. By “day 2” I mean the types of operations that can be performed on a virtual machine after its been deployed, such as reboot, power on, snapshot, etc. To configure these, go to the Policies drop down and select Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery. Then select the “End User Self-Service Policy” and click the Add button. ...

Cisco UCS Director VMware Management Policy is used to determine how virtual machines will behave and more specifically be cleaned up. In the cloud world, the removal of inactive and unnecessary virtual machines may be more important that the deployment of them. The VM Management Policy is used to configure leases, notifications about when leases expire, and determining when a VM is inactive. This policy is very useful to keep your cloud clean, and removing unneeded virtual machines when they’re past their usefulness. ...

Chargeback or at least showback is an important thing for any cloud environment. Cisco UCS Director can provide cost information back to managers but you need to create a UCS Director cost model. This cost model will define how all the costs are calculated. Add a Cost Model To create a cost model, go to the Policies drop down and select Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery. Then select the Cost Model tab. ...

UCS Director System Policies are kind of a catch all for any settings that need to be defined prior to a virtual machine being deployed, and that don’t fit into a neat little category like Network, Storage or Compute. This post reviews two types of system policies: VMware and AWS. VMware System Policy This policy is used to configure things like the Time Zones, DNS Settings, virtual machine naming conventions and guest licensing information. The policy can be found under the Policies drop down –> Virtual/Hypervisor Policies –> Service Delivery screen and from there you’ll be looking for the VMware System Policy tab. ...