The document discusses best practices for running virtualized workloads on an all-flash array. It covers topics like scale-out architecture, metadata management, data services, space reclamation, and virtualization efficiencies enabled by all-flash arrays. It also provides a case study of VMware's private cloud deployment using XtremIO arrays and discusses successes like supporting over 100,000 virtual machines created in 4 days for hands-on labs.
HCLT Whitepaper: Multi- Tenancy on Private CloudHCL Technologies
http://www.hcltech.com/engineering-rd-services/overview~ More on Engineering and R&D
Advances in cloud computing technology and changes in business models create major paradigm shifts in the way software applications are designed, built, and delivered to end users. The concept of multi-tenancy is one of the key and direct derivatives of cloud computing. Multi-tenancy is an architectural model that optimizes resource sharing. The applications will be deployed and delivered from a shared environment while providing sufficient levels of isolation to the tenants and Quality of Service (QoS) throughout the environment. Like any other paradigm shift, a cloud-based delivery (SaaS) model also comes with a new set of technical challenges.
This paper provides a technical overview on how to convert an application traditionally hosted on-premise to a multi-tenant environment and deliver through an SaaS model. This paper also covers the challenges and benefits of moving this to a cloud infrastructure.
Excerpts from the Paper
The advent of cloud computing boosted a new business model for delivering software, which is generally termed SaaS (Software as a Service). ISVs started realizing the necessity of transforming their traditional on-premise products to the new ―cloud business model. Multi-tenancy is the fundamental design approach that essentially improves the acceptability of SaaS applications. The idea of multi-tenancy, or many tenants sharing resources, is fundamental to cloud computing. Isolation and service assurance are the key elements to be addressed. Isolation ensures that the resources of existing tenants remain untouched, and the integrity of the applications, workloads, and data remain uncompromised when the service provider provisions new tenants. Each tenant may have access to different amounts of network, computing, and storage resources in the shared virtual environment. Tenants see only those resources allocated to them.
IBM was ranked #1 in 2014 for having 40% marketshare in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Learn why people are excited about Software Defined environments like OpenStack, IBM Cloud, VMware and Microsoft, what IBM has to offer in this area with Spectrum Storage family of products, and how to deploy this in your own datacenter.
HCLT Whitepaper: Multi- Tenancy on Private CloudHCL Technologies
http://www.hcltech.com/engineering-rd-services/overview~ More on Engineering and R&D
Advances in cloud computing technology and changes in business models create major paradigm shifts in the way software applications are designed, built, and delivered to end users. The concept of multi-tenancy is one of the key and direct derivatives of cloud computing. Multi-tenancy is an architectural model that optimizes resource sharing. The applications will be deployed and delivered from a shared environment while providing sufficient levels of isolation to the tenants and Quality of Service (QoS) throughout the environment. Like any other paradigm shift, a cloud-based delivery (SaaS) model also comes with a new set of technical challenges.
This paper provides a technical overview on how to convert an application traditionally hosted on-premise to a multi-tenant environment and deliver through an SaaS model. This paper also covers the challenges and benefits of moving this to a cloud infrastructure.
Excerpts from the Paper
The advent of cloud computing boosted a new business model for delivering software, which is generally termed SaaS (Software as a Service). ISVs started realizing the necessity of transforming their traditional on-premise products to the new ―cloud business model. Multi-tenancy is the fundamental design approach that essentially improves the acceptability of SaaS applications. The idea of multi-tenancy, or many tenants sharing resources, is fundamental to cloud computing. Isolation and service assurance are the key elements to be addressed. Isolation ensures that the resources of existing tenants remain untouched, and the integrity of the applications, workloads, and data remain uncompromised when the service provider provisions new tenants. Each tenant may have access to different amounts of network, computing, and storage resources in the shared virtual environment. Tenants see only those resources allocated to them.
IBM was ranked #1 in 2014 for having 40% marketshare in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Learn why people are excited about Software Defined environments like OpenStack, IBM Cloud, VMware and Microsoft, what IBM has to offer in this area with Spectrum Storage family of products, and how to deploy this in your own datacenter.
S cv0879 cloud-storage-options-edge2015-v4Tony Pearson
IBM is ranked #2 in Cloud storage. Learn how IBM XIV, DS8000, Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller and the rest of the Storwize family built with Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server, Storwize V7000 Unified, and offerings from IBM SoftLayer Cloud services.
The worlds of Big Data and Enterprise IT are converging, creating new challenges and opportunities for businesses across all industry segments. Join us for this recorded webcast and hear from EMC Isilon’s John Mallory, CTO Americas West, speak about how EMC Isilon scale-out storage solutions can help you manage data more effectively and accelerate your business transformation.
White Paper: Deploying and Implementing RecoverPoint in a Virtual Machine for...EMC
This White Paper explains the best practices for deploying EMC RecoverPoint for demonstration purposes as a virtual machine under ESX server 4.01 or later using the VMware DirectPath feature.
IBM PureApplication System - Application platform system with integrated expertise. It consolidates workloads, simplifies infrastructure and delivers services rapidly using built-in expertise.
EMC collaborates with colleges and universities worldwide to help prepare students for successful careers in a transforming IT industry. The Academic Alliance program offers unique ‘open’ curriculum-based education on technology topics such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and information storage and management. All courseware and faculty training are offered at no cost to qualifying higher education institutions.
The courses focus on technology concepts and principles applicable to any vendor environment, enabling students to develop highly marketable knowledge and skills required in today’s evolving IT industry.
INDUSTRY-LEADING TECHNOLOGY FOR LONG TERM RETENTION OF BACKUPS IN THE CLOUDEMC
CloudBoost is a cloud-enabling solution from EMC
Facilitates secure, automatic, efficient data transfer to private and public clouds for Long-Term Retention (LTR) of backups. Seamlessly extends existing data protection solutions to elastic, resilient, scale-out cloud storage
Force Cyber Criminals to Shop Elsewhere
Learn the value of having an Identity Management and Governance solution and how retailers today are benefiting by strengthening their defenses and bolstering their Identity Management capabilities.
S cv0879 cloud-storage-options-edge2015-v4Tony Pearson
IBM is ranked #2 in Cloud storage. Learn how IBM XIV, DS8000, Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller and the rest of the Storwize family built with Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server, Storwize V7000 Unified, and offerings from IBM SoftLayer Cloud services.
The worlds of Big Data and Enterprise IT are converging, creating new challenges and opportunities for businesses across all industry segments. Join us for this recorded webcast and hear from EMC Isilon’s John Mallory, CTO Americas West, speak about how EMC Isilon scale-out storage solutions can help you manage data more effectively and accelerate your business transformation.
White Paper: Deploying and Implementing RecoverPoint in a Virtual Machine for...EMC
This White Paper explains the best practices for deploying EMC RecoverPoint for demonstration purposes as a virtual machine under ESX server 4.01 or later using the VMware DirectPath feature.
IBM PureApplication System - Application platform system with integrated expertise. It consolidates workloads, simplifies infrastructure and delivers services rapidly using built-in expertise.
EMC collaborates with colleges and universities worldwide to help prepare students for successful careers in a transforming IT industry. The Academic Alliance program offers unique ‘open’ curriculum-based education on technology topics such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and information storage and management. All courseware and faculty training are offered at no cost to qualifying higher education institutions.
The courses focus on technology concepts and principles applicable to any vendor environment, enabling students to develop highly marketable knowledge and skills required in today’s evolving IT industry.
INDUSTRY-LEADING TECHNOLOGY FOR LONG TERM RETENTION OF BACKUPS IN THE CLOUDEMC
CloudBoost is a cloud-enabling solution from EMC
Facilitates secure, automatic, efficient data transfer to private and public clouds for Long-Term Retention (LTR) of backups. Seamlessly extends existing data protection solutions to elastic, resilient, scale-out cloud storage
Force Cyber Criminals to Shop Elsewhere
Learn the value of having an Identity Management and Governance solution and how retailers today are benefiting by strengthening their defenses and bolstering their Identity Management capabilities.
Shared drives are a fact of life for many organizations, and when organized properly they become excellent information management tools. But if you aren’t using RM best practices to manage them, they can morph into massive public folders filled with confusing and unstructured records. These unstructured shared drives can lead to a variety of issues including compliance and legal risks, increased retrieval times, versioning issues and unnecessary duplication of documents.
This slide deck presents a project in which TAB successfully helped an oil and gas company organize their shared drive.
DevOps is a cultural change. We review the current technology and social trends that are driving companies towards DevOPs, what companies can do to jump in the DevOPs train before it departs and finally we provide a framework to start a DevOPs project.
Based on my experience leading an agile transformation initiative, I had put together this as there are tons of questions across the industry on the relevance of the functional manager role in an agile organization. This content was presented in an Agile conference in Hyderabad
Ready set go, Containers vs VMs! Using the typical goal posts for comparing containers and VMs does not describe why containers are a part of a successful recipe for deploying applications in frictionless ways today. This presentation reviews the developers view of applications based on the new abstraction layer that is created by containers.
International Project Management Standards - PRINCE2, PMI & Co. And Their Ben...Stefan Ondek, PMP, CSPM
Brief summary and comparison of top international project management standards (focus on PRINCE2 and PMI), their benefits, certification levels & requirements. Contains also key information about training courses on these project management standards.
The Future of Storage : EMC Software Defined Solution RSD
EMC provides intelligent software-defined storage solutions that help organizations drastically reduce management overhead through automation across traditional storage silos and pave the way for rapid deployment of fully integrated next generation scale-out storage architectures.
Presentation of Executive Briefing, April 2015
The presentation covers solutions from EMC to improve performance, increase data protection, enhance business continuity for your conventional SAP applications as well as SAP HANA.
Dell EMC XtremIO & Stratoscale White PaperItzik Reich
o improve competitiveness in a fast-paced world, organizations are embracing software as a prime differentiator. A software-driven business is more agile and efficient, innovates faster, and responds dynamically to changing market and customer demands. Increasingly, gaining these compelling advantages requires adopting cloud-native applications.
Building and maintaining a proper cloud platform (for example, life-cycle management, troubleshooting issues, etc.) on premises, by yourself can be capital-intensive and difficult, as most organizations do not have the required skills. Going to a public cloud is an option for some, but those with sensitive data, or compliance and performance requirements, may not want to take the risk. In either case, you need to devote special attention to ensuring high availability of your cloud-native applications, which requires a specialized set of skills.
Hybrid cloud solutions have historically focused on bridging infrastructure aspects of the enterprise data center with public clouds. By stretching compute, storage, and networking layers between the two, the notion of hybrid cloud has enabled new use cases, requiring better redundancy, elasticity and security.
The public cloud has since pressed forward to offer a wider and wider range of cloud (platform) services, ranging from container orchestration to analytics, and big data processing to managed database services.
In order for businesses to maximize the effectiveness of their cloud strategies, hybrid cloud solutions must evolve to something beyond simply infrastructure. Hybrid cloud solutions must now encompass the same types of cloud services as those powering applications that are born in the public cloud.
In this white paper, we present a solution that provides the robust capabilities and built-in high availability that you need for cloud-native applications; the combination of Dell EMC XtremIO X2 all-flash storage platform and Stratoscale’s hybrid cloud solution.
The paper details the features of this integrated solution around high availability and scalability for the applications and the platforms. Therefore, you can take your most critical cloud-native applications from development to production using this solution, with complete confidence.
With this proven cloud platform, organizations can accelerate their digital business objectives via cloud-native applications, from development through testing and into production, on a single platform, with ease and agility. Most importantly, eliminating the risk of application downtime preserves critical revenue streams, helps ensure customer satisfaction and strengthens your competitive advantage
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
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During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
In only its first year on the market, XtremIO has become the leading all-flash array (AFA) by every measure, including market share and the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Customers have adopted XtremIO more rapidly than any storage platform in history – $1BILLION run-rate in our very first year, with over 1400 customers and 40% of the Fortune 100. And most important of all, this huge early customer base has experienced well over 5x9s of reliability (and 6x9s for those deploying with VPLEX!), showing XtremIO is ready for the most mission-critical workloads.
EMC purchased XtremIO in 2012 after evaluating every all-flash array startup in the world. XtremIO was picked because it innovated a fundamentally unique architecture that enabled the real end-game for AFAs: broad Tier 1 + workload consolidation for the agile data center. But we had to take our time to truly bullet-proof the product and integrate with best-of-breed EMC solutions, and we were in fact the last AFA to enter the market in November 2013. So why did we rocket to #1 so fast? Because we were the FIRST to market with the next generation AFA that can truly deliver massive mixed workload consolidation with rich application services.
We will be covering the following best practices for why an AFA is the best array for the virtualization use case while also discussing some specific gotchas and how to overcome these.
When you think about an AFA, the first thing that jumps to mind and it is also the thing that so many storage vendors tried to solve is to be really fast, we on the other hand, thing that being fast is a granted wish but we were focusing more on being the smartest array as well
The reason for this is because when you look at the modern virtualized datacenter, you have the concept of the “I/O blender”, meaning that you have thousands of VMs performing IO all over the place, during this steady state IO, you also have provisioning operations that require additional / separate type of IO and lastly, the entire I/O blender is all over the place since the VMs keep moving from one host to the other using technologies like vMotion and DRS and can even move their data from one lun to the other using technologies like storage DRS.
I want to take you a few years back to my life in a professional services team, I used to go to customer sites and analyze their storage infrastructure in a virtualized environment, and I manually tried to move the pieces round, basically, trying to eliminate hotspots, thing is that it worked for couple of months and then I had to come again, to move the pieces again because, as we covered, data in a virtualized world is very fluid and dynamic, it keep moving around, its like playing Tetris, there is always another piece that you need to manually move ..and it NEVER ends.
You know when you design and build a storage product, there are always decisions that you can take that will male the product simpler from an engineering perspective on the expense on being a degraded end user product, this is NOT the route we chose to take and our design philosophy was backed by the famous albert Einstein..
Lets look at a scale out architecture using an airplane, a long range airplane will typically have more than two engines, in this case we have 8 engines, all of them are working all the time
< CLICK> and when an engine or engines fails, the surviving engines need to take ownership on the load.
<CLICK> it wont make sense to design a product with so many engines where only one of them is working because when you design a product like an airplance, you design it for 99.999% of the time as oppose to the 0.00001% of the time which is the failure time.
Another question is why do you need to buy the latest smartphone every two years or so, what's wrong with the iPhone 3GS for example, it can still run your corporate email, right?
The reason that we rush to upgrade every year or two is that the moment a new cellphone being introduced into the market, new application will be written by developers to it that will know to take advantage of the new hardware, same apply for an AFA, you want to have the option to scale out because you are purchasing a storage array that will need to support your existing AND you FUTURE workloads, why limit yourself to a storage product that can only run some of your TODAY’s workload??
Imagine the days of the public libraries, yes the ones you used to visit as a kid, remember that when you were looking for a book, you didn’t have to walk trough all the isles but instead you went for a catalog that told you were the book you are after is located. In essence, metadata allow you to see the actual data in a faster way.
Using traditional metadata chunks size, we can see that we can lose a lot space
Not only that we don’t use traditional metadata sizes, we also store the content based metadata that allow us to see the actual data in the fastest way possible.
You want to store the metadata on the fastest media possible, e.g, RAM but since metadata seeking is expensive (done with the array controllers), dual architecture will be very limited in the amount of metadata they can store and in the number of controllers they have (two) so they have to destage the majority of metadata to the drives themselves which will make seeking the metadata much slower than if it was stored in RAM
You want to store the metadata on the fastest media possible, e.g, RAM but since metadata seeking is expensive (done with the array controllers), dual architecture will be very limited in the amount of metadata they can store and in the number of controllers they have (two) so they have to destage the majority of metadata to the drives themselves which will make seeking the metadata much slower than if it was stored in RAM
Lets look at a practical use case where metadata stored in RAM is important, for example, if you clone a VM using VMware XCOPY or Microsoft ODX, the XtremIO cloning will be super fast and it has nothing to do with the SSD drives, it mainly because of the fact we just create a lot of metadata pointers in the system, all stored in RAM!
[Talk through and show the actual data services as the data flows through the array and highlight how this can only be done with a scale-out global in-memory metadata. This is the richest set of data and application services for any AFA, and they create dramatic efficiencies with data reduction that make XtremIO more cost-effective than disk-- but with none of the compromised performance consistency that Gen 2 and Gen 3 flash arrays suffer with post-processed data services. And with XtremIO, these data services are always free, bundled with the array.
In the following section, we will cover some specific gotchas with AFAs in virtualized environments.
One of the most requested features is Quality Of Service, aka, QoS, were going to see a demo of how XtremIO integrated with VMware QoS, aka SIOC.
Now were going to speak about space reclamation, a question to you, Upon a deletion of a VM and / or File(s) inside a VM, you would expect the capacity to return back to the array, right?
If you said No, you were right, the deletion of these will not cause of an automated return of the physical space to the storage array
When using Virtual Provisioning Storage Array, The deletion of a VM doesn’t cause the array to claim back the storage.
It’s a two layer issue, inside the guest VM and outside the guest VM (at the datastore level)
Lets see how we can run space reclamation at the datastore level using our free VSI (Virtual Storage Integrator) plugin.
Running space reclamation inside the VM is a bit more complex, you have two options, the free but not automated one using MS Sdelete or the automated and clever (but not free) option using a 3rd party tool like RAXCO PerfectStorage (http://www.raxco.com/products/perfectstorage )
Here we can see how to apply ESXi host best practices (many of them exist) using our VSI plugin which will save you a lot of time and errors doing things manually.
Many of us are not storage administrators but we still want to have an insight to the storage from the native tools we are using, for these, we have special integration with many products that will give you this insight, for example, Microsoft System Center, VMware vRealize Operations Manager, Oracle EMM