VCDX – Remote Defense

If you fail your first VCDX panel defense (in-person), you will be given the option of a VCDX Remote Defense if you resubmit. The same is true for Multi-VCDX. This was added to the VCDX program to reduce the travel expenses for VCDX candidates and to provide a more flexible VCDX defense schedule. This post is about my experience with the VCDX Remote Defense for the VCDX-DTM track.

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Running @IBM AIX with @Nutanix software

Earlier this year IBM announced that AIX is supported on the Nutanix platform. This is in addition to the 2017 announcement of PowerLinux being initially supported.

What does this mean if you are a customer, particularly in finance? You finally have a web-scale platform that you can use to consolidate all of your legacy and cloud-native applications onto. Those vertically-scaled mission critical applications running on AIX and PowerLinux finally have a modern platform that aligns with your x86 workloads. Strategically, this makes the Nutanix platform a great choice if you need a stepping stone for non-x86 to x86 application refactoring (assuming your applications fit on the scale-out POWER8 CS hardware and do not require the POWER8 E8XX big iron).

Requirements of the solution:

  • You need IBM POWER8 technology-based CS821 and CS822 nodes.
  • Running Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.2.1.1 and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) 20170331.78.
  • For AIX 7.2 with the 7200-02 Technology Level with Service Pack 7200-02-02-1810 and APAR IJ05283, or later.
  • For PowerLinux, SLES 11 or 12, Ubuntu 16.04 or 17.04, CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 are supported.

Some caveats and additional information:

  • LPARs, VIO Server and HMC are no longer required and are replaced by AHV, Prism and IPMI as the management and virtualization platform.
  • Nutanix X-Ray 2.3 and above supports the IBM CS platform as test targets for scenario-centric performance testing.
  • Need to ensure app/DB binaries are ported to ppc64le (PowerLinux) and ppc64be (AIX) to run on the IBM CS platform with AHV.
  • NIM/mksysb are supported.
  • Data can be migrated using similar techniques available to the Nutanix x86 platform.
  • Intel CPUs have 2 threads per core, IBM POWER8 CPUs have 8 threads per core.
  • AHV schedules threads for x86 and cores for POWER8.
  • POWER8 processors excel at computationally intensive workloads, in particular high throughput databases and congnitive/AI workloads.
  • Purchases are transacted through IBM channel partners or IBM Power Systems server sales.
  • You contact IBM for support.
  • Implementation services via IBM Lab Services.
  • Nutanix sales teams can assist customers with the sales process.

Additional Resources

#SFD16 – Nasuni Enterprise File Services Platform

RoundTower Technologies sells a lot of Nasuni, which is how I came to know about their UniFS solution. Nasuni has come a long way from their early days, and the size of their customer-base is proportional to their growth as a company.

What I like about their product strategy, is they have led with public cloud, rather than adding it on as an afterthought. This cloud-first architecture gives them the unique ability to provide enterprise file services that scale globally across many geographic sites. If you need to provide multi-site enterprise file services and you are currently caught in the mesh of legacy NAS to get that done, then consider Nasuni as an alternative.

SFD16 Nasuni Session Resources:

#SFD16 – NetApp OCI and Cloud Insight

 One of my largest enterprise customers is a prolific user of NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI) for global storage management, which is how I came to appreciate the scale, flexibility and functionality of OCI. James Holden did a great job of covering OCI and the Cloud Insight SaaS offering in the sessions below.

If you are an enterprise looking for a ubiquitous storage management system, then OCI is definitely worth considering, even if you do not have NetApp storage arrays. If you are an SMB or Commercial customer, then Cloud Insight would be a better fit, since it is the SaaS offering of OCI. OCI and Cloud Insight do not have feature parity, due to the markets being addressed.

One corner case worth mentioning, if you want to quickly implement a chargeback, showback or “shameback” solution, then OCI could give you the fastest time to value.

SFD16 NetApp Session Resources:

#SFD16 – Dell-EMC PowerMax and CloudIQ

Since #SFD14 last year, the VMAX All Flash has evolved to the PowerMax, which was announced at Dell Technologies World. PowerMax has advanced the VMAX All Flash architecture with NVMe. A nod to the SNIA session, NVMe-over-Fabrics is on the PowerMax road-map. You can watch the videos below to get all of the details. The synopsis of these sessions is this, the Symmetrix/VMAX platform is continuing to evolve, it is still the best-of-breed storage platform for legacy 3-tier hardware and legacy applications that are mission-critical. Make sure you have budget, because you are going to need it. Dell-EMC considers the PowerMax to be a flag-ship offering and will continue to invest and develop that ecosystem, since their customers demand it (yes, FICON will continue to be supported).

After the session, I mentioned to Vince Westin that within the Tech Field Day family he is considered the gold-standard that vendors should try to meet when presenting to a TFD delegation. Presenters that know their stuff, get to the point, have an opinion and are not afraid to express it.

A new offering, CloudIQ, was also presented, basically a storage administrator’s continuous health check that is offered at no extra cost for customers with active Dell-EMC storage support contracts. CloudIQ gets its data feed from the call-home function (ESRS) and is accessible as a SaaS offering, no on-site resources required. If you are an existing Dell-EMC customer, make sure you talk to your Dell-EMC account executive about getting it enabled with your account for the supported storage solutions you have in your data centers, there is definite value here.

SFD16 Dell-EMC Session Resources: