Welcome to the first daily recap of the OpenStack Summit. Stephen Spector and I will post a daily recap of highlights of the day along with information from Dell sessions, keynotes, and various interviews with ecosystem solution providers. Be sure to follow us at @SpectorAtDell and @RafaelKnuth during the day for the latest OpenStack information. 

Dell Booth

The Dell booth contained several of our latest servers including new ARM servers as well as Project Sputnik laptops running the game Minecraft on an OpenStack cloud. Attendees had plenty of time to learn about Dell and OpenStack as well as play some Minecraft. We will do some videos tomorrow to provide more information on the solutions in the booth.

Session

From Grizzly to Havana: A DevOps Upgrade Pattern with Rob Hirschfeld, Dell Distinguished Engineer

Rob discussed the issue of how operators can collaborate to determine best practices and create tools to properly handle upgrade procedures when moving from one OpenStack release to another. Rob has details on his ideas in a blog post “DevOps approaches to upgrade: Cube Visualization”.  The goal of Rob and the OpenStack team he works on is to get full community support for continuous deployment built-in with all future upgrade paths for OpenStack releases (major and minor).

Slides from Presentation on SlideShare

Interviews

Vincent Untz, Project Manager at SUSE

We spoke with Vincent about SUSE's own OpenStack distribution, OpenSUSE, which is fully integrated with Dell's Crowbar deployment mechanism for OpenStack.

https://www.suse.com/products/suse-cloud/

https://twitter.com/SUSE

https://github.com/crowbar/crowbar/wiki

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Noam Shendar, VP Business Development at Zadara Storage

We talked with Noam about the Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA™) - an iSCSI/NFS storage array in the Cloud, connected to a customer's Cloud servers. Each VPSA has dual controllers (HA), dedicated drives and offers free choice of SSD, SAS or SATA drives. The VPSA can be managed in the same way as a SAN or NAS array in a datacenter.

http://www.zadarastorage.com/

https://twitter.com/NoamShen

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Dan Dumitriu, Co-Founder and CEO at Midokura

We interviewed Dan about Midokura's network virtualization solution.

http://www.midokura.com/

https://twitter.com/midokura

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Joe Arnold, CEO at SwiftStack

We chatted with Joe about SwiftStack's Software Defined Storage for object storage. SwiftStack has leadership of the core OpenStack Swift team and has been involved with OpenStack since day one.

http://swiftstack.com/

https://twitter.com/joearnold

Joe’s video is in review and will be available in the next day or so.

I also spoke with Hui Cheng, OpenStack Board Member. Hui Cheng formerly worked as a technical lead for OpenStack at Sina Corporation, and he just recently started his own venture UnitedStack providing an OpenStack distribution specifically tailored for Chinese customers' needs. The interview will be transcribed and published after the OpenStack summit.

After Hours

As with any OpenStack conference there are plenty of evening parties to attend with both Dell and Red Hat hosting large gatherings today. There are also some small developer meetups where people have a chance to get to know each other and discuss specific topics. For example, CloudSoft hosted a food and drink session for about 30 developers interested in the HEAT project. 

Welcome to the Day 2 Recap of the OpenStack Summit 2013 in Portland. 

Sessions

Opening Keynote - Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director OpenStack Foundation

OpenStack is about building a platform ecosystem for clouds with servers, network, storage, orchestration and a common API;  a powerful general purpose technology like iOS and Android, as Jonathan explained: “One day we are going to see industries we all know, running services that we use every day on OpenStack. The Target day is: April 16th – right now, today.” Obviously, OpenStack is embracing “real” businesses instead of being only a community of developers – and enterprises love OpenStack back. Representatives from Bloomberg, BEST BUY and COMCAST explained how they are moving to the cloud, relying heavily on OpenStack, making services they sell to their customers faster and more reliable. Also, it’s encouraging to see how enterprises play open source right: Bloomberg made their Chef cookbooks publicly available at Github for all those who want to solve similar problems in their cloud environments.

Hadoop for OpenStack Log Analysis - Mike Pittaro, Dell Architect Cloud Solutions

Let's discuss Hadoop for OpenStack log analysis! Hadoop can support operational monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity planning in a consistent and open way. We'll share the work we've started, and lead an interactive discussion of different approaches already in play. Our goal is to collaborate on the best patterns for different deployment environments.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Interviews

Ross Turk, VP Community at Inktank

(Please visit the site to view this video)

We spoke with Ross about Inktank, patron of Ceph – a storage solution for OpenStack unifying object and block storage.

http://www.inktank.com/
http://ceph.com/
https://twitter.com/rossturk

Boris Renski, Co-Founder and EVP at Mirantis

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Boris gave us a brief heads up on what’s cooking at Mirantis – the largest OpenStack system integrator globally.

http://www.mirantis.com/
https://twitter.com/zer0tweets

Atul Jha, OpenStack India

(Please visit the site to view this video)

We chatted with Atul (better known as Koolhead17 at Twitter) about the state of affairs OpenStack in India.

http://www.meetup.com/Indian-OpenStack-User-Group/
https://twitter.com/koolhead17

Matt Ray, Senior Technical Evangelist at Opscode

(Please visit the site to view this video)

We met Matt to talk about Opscode, the company behind Chef, an open source system integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud.

http://www.opscode.com/
http://chefconf.opscode.com/
https://twitter.com/mattray

John Griffith, Project Technical Lead OpenStack Cinder & SolidFire

(Please visit the site to view this video)

We met John to talk about OpenStack block storage project Cinder as well as about Solidfire, a company that delivers a high performance SSD storage solution to cloud service providers.

http://solidfire.com/
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder
https://twitter.com/jdg_8

Jorge Castro & Ben Kerensa of the Ubuntu Community

(Please visit the site to view this video)

We let Jorge and Ben do the talking – about the Ubuntu community and Juju, the corresponding open source service orchestration tool.

http://www.ubuntu.com/
https://juju.ubuntu.com/
https://twitter.com/castrojo
https://twitter.com/bkerensa

This blog post is written by Shine KA and Charu Panigrahi from Dell iDRAC team

                With recent iDRAC7 release (iDRAC7 1.30.30 onwards), you can use iDRAC Web GUI or Racadm interface to update all server components. Using this feature you can update any server component (BIOS, iDRAC, USC, NIC etc.) which is supported through Lifecycle Controller update. You can use windows Dell Update Packages (DUP) for this method.

                To use this feature first you have to upload DUP for the required component to iDRAC. Once uploaded, jobs will be created for each component update. You can check the status of the job also in iDRAC GUI or Racadm. Some of the updates (E.g. BIOS, PERC, NIC Etc.) required system reboot to perform the update and some updates (iDRAC, USC, Driver Pack, Diagnostics Etc.) does not require system reboot to apply the update. Based on this you need to reboot the server if required. Once system is rebooted all updates will be applied.

                For GUI based update, you can browse Dell Update Package (DUP) from local client file system for installation and for racadm based update you can keep DUP file on local file system (Local and Remote racadm) or in NFS/CIFS share (Local, Remote and FW Racadm). You need to have iDRAC Servercontrol privilege level to use this feature. The minimum required license level for this feature is express. But you can update .d7 and .usc with Basic management license.

Updating Server Component using iDRAC7 GUI

                You can use this feature from the update section under Update and Rollback page of iDRAC GUI.  To use this feature, first you have to browse and upload windows DUP for the component which require update. During the upload the package verification will be done. Depending on success or failure of verification the status message will be displayed. The Available and Current version of the uploaded component will be displayed in the update details section. Multiple components can be updated at a time by uploading multiple windows DUP one by one. You can schedule the reboot depending upon the requirement. If the DUP does not require a system reboot you can apply the update immediately. If a reboot is required either you can apply the update immediately which is followed by system reboot or schedule the update for next reboot. Different jobs will be created for each update. Job status can be viewed in the Job Queue page. On expanding (+) for each update job you can view the status of the update.

Updating Server Component using Racadm

                You can use racadm interface also to perform firmware update of all server component. This can be done using any racadm interface (Local, Remote and FW Racadm - SSH, Telnet and Serial). Component update can be done from a Local File (Using Local and Remote Racadm) or from remote CIFS / NFS share (Using Local, Remote and FW Racadm). To initiate the pending or scheduled update user need to perform Server power action control using the racadm serveraction command. Once the update is successfully initiated one job will be created for each update operation. If the update does not require reboot then the update will be applied immediately. If the update requires a reboot, update will be scheduled for next reboot .You can upload multiple DUP by uploading one by one and apply all update in a single reboot.  (Using “racadm jobqueue view ” command you can get the status of the update).

Usage-

 Upload the Update file from the local file system using local racadm

               racadm update –f <filename>

 Upload the Update file from a remote CIFS share

                 racadm update -f <updatefile> -u username –p password   -l //IP-Address/share

Upload the Update file from a remote NFS share:

                  racadm update -f <updatefile>  -l IP-address:/share

To check the update status

                racadm jobqueue  view

For rebooting the server

                racadm serveraction <powercycle/powerdown/powerup>

Another long, amazing day at the OpenStack Summit and I am ready to share a variety of videos and highlights.

At the Dell booth today, a Project Sputnik developer laptop was given away to a lucky winner,  Kyle Cafien shown here with Joseph George and Barton George.  

Sessions

SDN and OpenStack: Shaping the Future of Cloud Networking Innovation

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Stephen Spector attended some of the 5 minute lightning talks today and wanted to share some of them to give you insight into these unique presentations:

Alex Heneveld of CloudSoft on Project Brooklyn

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Eric Windisch of CloudScaling on ZeroMQ RPC in Grizzly

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Interviews 

Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical

http://www.canonical.com/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
https://twitter.com/ubuntu

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Joshua McKenty, Co-Founder and CTO

http://www.pistoncloud.com/
https://twitter.com/jmckenty

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Anne Gentle, OpenStack Technical Writer at Rackspace Hosting

http://docs.openstack.org/
https://twitter.com/annegentle

(Please visit the site to view this video) 

Bernard Golden, Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, Enstratius

http://www.enstratius.com/
https://twitter.com/bernardgolden

(Please visit the site to view this video) 

John Mark, Community Manager Gluster, Red Hat

http://www.gluster.org/
http://twitter.com/johnmark 

(Please visit the site to view this video)

The final day here in Portland has come to an end and Stephen and myself were able to sneak a few more interviews for your enjoyment. A complete review of the Dell blogging and videos from this event are available in our Cloud Community Event Page. 

Dell Booth

Dell and SUSE Executives Discuss the Recent Joint Announcement on Private Clouds:

Forrest Norrod, Dell VP Worldwide Servers &  Doug Jarvis, Cloud Solutions Product Marketing Manager, SUSE

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Interviews

Chris Kemp, CEO and Founder of Nebula

https://www.nebula.com/
https://twitter.com/Kemp

(Please visit the site to view this video)  

Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO and Founder of CloudSoft

https://twitter.com/duncanjw
http://www.cloudsoftcorp.com/

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Randy Bias, CTO and Co-Founder of CloudScaling

http://cloudscaling.com/
http://engineering.cloudscaling.com/
https://twitter.com/randybias

(Please visit the site to view this video) 

Thomas Goirand, Debian Community 

http://www.debian.org/

(Please visit the site to view this video) 

Garima Thockchom, CEO and Founder of Talligent

https://twitter.com/GarimaRT
https://twitter.com/talligent
http://talligent.com/

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (florian_klaffenbach@Dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Migrate Hyper-V Cluster to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V via Cluster Migration Wizard by Thomas Maurer

Windows Azure IaaS reaches GA by Thorsten Hans

Sharing roles with Hyper-V on the same physical host by Alessandro Cardoso

Server monitoring with System Center Advisor by Marcelo Sinic

Azure

Windows Azure IaaS reaches GA by Thorsten Hans

Installing and Configuring #WindowsAzure Backup agent part 1 of 2 Hybrid #Cloud by James van den Berg

Installing and Configuring #WindowsAzure Backup agent part 2 of 2 Hybrid #Cloud by James van den Berg

Exchange

#PSTip Count the number of mailboxes per department by Shay Levy

Redmond: where’s my Exchange Admin Center by Johan Veldhuis

Hyper-V

Creating Virtual Machine Using Powershell–Part 2 by Lai Yoong Seng

Microsoft Hyper-V und System Center: Das Handbuch für Administratoren in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Migrate Hyper-V Cluster to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V via Cluster Migration Wizard by Thomas Maurer

Sharing roles with Hyper-V on the same physical host by Alessandro Cardoso

Design Considerations For Converged Networking On A Budget With Switch Independent Teaming In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V by Didier van Hoye

Office 

Word-Serienbrief mit Excel-Daten: Datum formatieren in German by Nils Kaczenski

PowerShell

#PSTip PowerShell command-line switch shortcuts by Shay Levy

System Center Avisor

Server monitoring with System Center Advisor by Marcelo Sinic

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Cannot remove Hyper-V Host from SCVMM by Thomas Maurer

 SQL Server

#PSTip Backing up SQL transaction log using SMO by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Restoring a SQL Database using SMO by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows Server Core

My thoughts on 70-410 by Michael Bender

WebDeploy Port ändern oder wofür ist Port 8172 da? in German by Robert Mühsig

Corefig: Konfiguration für Windows-Core-Server in German by Nils Kaczenski

Written by Daniel Turner, PowerEdge-C Systems Performance Engineer

Dell has achieved the world record for the most power-efficient modular servers once again. This time, the PowerEdge C5220, in a 12-node C5000 chassis, has scored 6000 SPECpower_ssj2008 overall ssj_ops/watt, taking the top power-efficiency spot among all modular (or multi-node) results. This score supplants the PowerEdge M620’s world record from last year. Dell again proves our commitment to setting the power-efficiency standard against which all others are measured.

The C5220 is a high-density, low cost, and extremely power-efficient platform that is an ideal solution for dedicated and virtual hosting, Web 2.0, or content delivery network (CDN) applications. With its relatively small 3U form factor, the C5220 is ideal for any business, small to enterprise, which wants the best bang-for-the-buck without a large footprint.

The C5220’s power-efficiency blows away the competition, with up to 80% better efficiency:

Note that Cisco hasn’t even published a SPECpower_ssj2008 result. We know why. Oracle claims their blades are energy-efficient, but they haven’t published results either. HP hasn’t submitted results on any Intel® platform since 2011! Why is that?

The data shows that Dell continues to lead the way in modular server power-efficiency, and the PowerEdge C5220 is the latest system to prove it.

Comparison based on multi-node results published on www.spec.org as of April 16 2013.  SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECpower_ssj® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.  For more information about SPECpower, see www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/.

Join Dell and Samsung^™ in a Tweet Chat on increasing your data center’s server performance, business efficiency, and performance with solid state storage.

No matter the size of your organization, you depend on data for business. Today’s customer requirements have made it imperative for firms like yours to make data and applications accessible 24/7. These demands have placed storage at the top of today’s business requirements. Making storage a key ingredient in your ability to deliver a reliable and trustworthy customer experience.

In our Tweet Chat, we will discuss SSD solutions can help you lower cost, improve your ROI, and increase performance and business efficiency.

Join Dell (@DellSMBUS), Samsung^™ (@SamsungSemiUS) and storage expert Greg Schulz (@StorageIO) on April 24 from 12—1 p.m. CT for a discussion on how you can address your storage issue with SSD technology and what this means for your business, including:

· Strategic planning of data storage technology and implementation

· Accelerating and increasing storage and I/O performance in servers and data centers

· Consolidating and optimizing your storage environment

Follow the hash tag #DellStorage to join in. Come prepared with your questions and thoughts and don’t miss this informative Tweet Chat.

Register here: http://bit.ly/100nDVh

For 11G and 12G PowerEdge systems, the backup and restore methods have an optional parameter to enter a passphrase. If a passphrase is used, it must be correctly entered in order for the restore operation to be successful. Passphrases shall be validated against the following rules:

1.         Must be 8-32 characters in length

2.         Must contain 1 Uppercase letter

3.         Must contain 1 Lowercase letter

4.         Must contain 1 Number

5.         Must contain 1 Special character

See more about Lifecycle Controller (LC), here.

See more about Backup and Restore in the LC Best Practice Guide, here.

Dell PowerEdge C AMD servers: the most power-efficient AMD servers in the industry

Dell has achieved the two highest SPECpower benchmark results for all AMD-based servers! The PowerEdge C6105, a chassis that supports four 2-socket server nodes , has scored 4510 overall ssj_ops/watt, taking the #1 power-efficiency spot among all AMD-based results.  

Dell’s PowerEdge C6145, a chassis that supports two 4-socket server nodes, is only 11 points behind, with a score of 4499 overall ssj_ops/watt. Both of these results are more than 380 points better than the closest competitor!  

Dell enterprise servers continue to set power-efficiency records that competitors just can’t match.

The PowerEdge C6105 is a high-density, low cost, and extremely power-efficient AMD platform that is an ideal solution for dedicated hosting environments, Web farms or price-performance targeted clusters like Hadoop. With its small 2U form factor, the C6105 is perfect for any business, small to enterprise, where power efficiency and high performance are needed.

The PowerEdge C6145 is a high-core density, high memory density, and extremely power-efficient server that is ideal for HPC (Large Compute, GPU), Engineering Design Assessment (Large Memory) or Film/Entertainment (Rendering) applications. With its compact small 2U form factor, the PowerEdge C6145 is for enterprise customers requiring the highest AMD performance.

Dell continues to lead the way in power efficiency, and the PowerEdge C6105 and C6145 are the latest servers to prove it. For more information on how these SPECpower scores were achieved, check out the following whitepaper link.

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (Florian_Klaffenbach@Dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Interview with Didier Van Hoye about his Storage, Network and more by Carsten Rachfahl

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) and MAT Architecture #SCVMM #Hyperv #VMware by James van den Berg

April 24th–Windows 2003 Is 10 Years Old by Didier van Hoye

Create Exchange 2010 Individual Inbox Reports with PowerShell by Jeffery Hicks

Azure

#Microsoft System Center Advisor Connector for Operations Manager Preview #sysctr by James van den Berg

Exchange

Exchange 2013: e-Discovery tasks stay queued by Johan Veldhuis

Create Exchange 2010 Individual Inbox Reports with PowerShell by Jeffery Hicks

Events

Mastering new Microsoft Technologies while doing what you love by Kristian Nese

April 24th–Windows 2003 Is 10 Years Old by Didier van Hoye

Hyper-V

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: Configure VM Processor Compatibility via PowerShell by Thomas Maurer

Choosing Hyper-V Storage: Physical Disks by Aidan Finn

Creating High Availability Virtual Machine Using Powershell–Part 3 by Aidan Finn

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) and MAT Architecture #SCVMM #Hyperv #VMware by James van den Berg

Office 365

Videocast: Wie Sie die Standarddomain in ihrem Office 365 Plan ändern können in German  by Kerstin Rachfahl

PowerShell

#PSTip Changing SQL database AutoShrink property using SMO and PowerShell by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Enumerate Time Zones that support day light savings by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Get the AD site name of a computer by Shay Levy

#PSTip List all Active Directory constructed attributes by Shay Levy

Decompiling C# Code with ILSpy and PowerShell by Adam Driscoll

 SQL Server

#PSTip Enumerate all SQL Server instances in a network by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows Client

Podcast – Talking Windows 8 Client Hyper-V With Run As Radio by Aidan Finn

Windows Server Core

SMB 3.0 Multichannel Auto Configuration In Action With RDMA / SMB Direct by Didier van Hoye

Interview with Didier Van Hoye about his Storage, Network and more by Carsten Rachfahl

Wie finde ich heraus ob mein ADFS 2.0 funktioniert? in German by Robert Mühsig

 New Service was Launched last week. "Dell ProSupport Plus". Please take a look at this "Going to the End of the Earth" Video.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Dell Prosupport Plus

 Critical systems need more than break-fix support – they need proactive and preventative measures to get ahead of problems before they happen.

Dell ProSupport Plus combines expertise, technology and environmental intelligence to proactively improve the performance and stability of your critical systems, allowing you to focus on your strategic goals.

The five critical components of ProSupport Plus

 1) Dedicated Technical Account Manager

• Your #1 support advocate at Dell, ensuring you have someone who knows you and your business.
• Trusted advisor for support planning and technology decisions.
• Leverages data collected by SupportAssist to improve performance and stability with proactive, personalized recommendations.
• Serves as single point of contact for account management, escalation resolution and monthly reporting reviews.

2) Direct access to elite ProSupport Plus engineers

• Immediate advanced troubleshooting from an elite ProSupport Plus engineer who will reduce downtime and lost productivity.
• Deep and broad expertise across the full breadth of Dell enterprise products to enable comprehensive issue resolution.
• Utilizes information collected through SupportAssist technology to gain visibility into the issue as well as configuration and diagnostic data.

3) Remote monitoring and automated support with SupportAssist

• Remotely monitors enterprise systems through leading system management consoles
• Accelerates resolution with notifications , automated case creation and proactive response.
• Improve productivity by reducing time spent resolving issues.
• Collects configuration information from your environment to identify critical patches and updates
• Analyzes information across entire customer base, to identify trends and best practices. 

4) Monthly reporting and performance  recommendations

• Monthly health checks enabled through SupportAssist provide critical updates and performance recommendations.
• Monthly contract and support history reporting to aid in budgeting and planning.
• Recommendations based on trends and best practices across the Dell customer base.
• The full ProSupport Plus reporting suite is available only with the implementation of SupportAssist.

5) System maintenance

• System maintenance is delivered as needed based on monthly reporting and performance recommendations
• Flexible scheduling of service delivery – available 24/7.
• Service is delivered based on your available maintenance window.

ProSupport Plus advantage

Today Dell affirmed its commitment to customers using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 SP1, by delivering an update to the Dell Client Integration Pack (DCIP) to support ConfigMgr 2012 SP1.

Key components of DCIP 3.1 are:

• ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 support
• Windows 8 support
• WinPE 4.0 support
• Remote HDD Wipe with the Dell Unique AMT plugin

I have been working on setting up a mobile lab using VMware workstation for a while now (it’s an ongoing process). But I came across the Windows Azure free trial and thought “why not?” so here we go.

After clicking “try it for free” and signing into your account

You are presented with a 3 step process to get going.  First step is letting you know what you’ll get and what you need to proceed. Notice that your 10 web sites and mobile services stay free after the trial period.

The next step is verifying your account with a text or phone call if you prefer.

Once your code has been verified you will enter billing information, but according to Microsoft all new customers signing up for the free trial have a default spending limit of $0 so no charges will occur.

Then your done!

Login to your portal and start your 30 second tour on how the management portal works and then….start creating!

You can find the original post on my site here.

Hope that helps! Leave a comment and tell me what you think :)

Where can you find me?

The following is a guest post by Jeff Aaron, VP of Marketing at Silver Peak

While many organizations have already deployed Silver Peak’s replication acceleration with Dell storage, the two companies wanted to go one step further and perform comprehensive testing of the combined Silver Peak and Dell Compellent solution.  

The results were more than compelling (bad pun intended). Our joint testing showed that Silver Peak addressed many of the problems inherent in the wide area network (WAN) that affect replication, resulting in up to 30X improvement in replication times for Compellent remote instant replay.

We conducted hundreds of tests, but as an example, we tested a (typical) 155 megabit-per-second (Mbps) WAN and simulated replication between Atlanta, Georgia and Dallas, Texas (40 milliseconds of latency). Without Silver Peak, the time required to replicate a 200 gigabyte (GB) dataset was 13 hours, potentially causing a customer to miss their RPO. With Silver Peak, the replication time was reduced to 30 minutes, well within a customer’s replication window.

Another outcome of our joint testing was simplifying the deployment of the Silver Peak and Compellent solution. Normally, there would be many touch-points for deploying a solution like this – including the storage team, networking team, network provider, and others in the IT organization. With Silver Peak and Dell Compellent, deployment takes just minutes.  Here is a video showing how.

Denali Federal Credit Union is a perfect example of the above.  They improvedreplication performance by over 66 percentwith Silver Peak and Dell Compellent. Prior to deployingthe joint solution, replication of a 50 GB dataset between Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaskawas taking 11 hours. After deploying Silver Peak,replication times were reduced to less than five hours.

Travis Rupp, associate vice president of project management at Denali said it best, “Silver Peak’s software is really simple to set up. We met our recovery point objectives without doing any special tweaks to the network or datasets, which really makes Silver Peak stand out.”

Want more information?  Visit Silver Peak’s Compellent landing page.   (If you’re an EqualLogic customer, don’t fret, we have a resource center for EqualLogic too.)

There is also great Silver Peak information on Silver Peak’s Wiki section of the Dell Tech Center

Finally, register for the webcast on Remote Data Replication with Dell Compellent & Silver Peak on May 8th, 2013.

So Say SMEs in Virtualization & Cloud

In Episode 11, Kong Yang and Todd Muirhead talk about changes involving colleagues and the NFL. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. 

Please click below to view the video.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

In case missed ChefConf 2013 (April 24th - 26th 2013), you can find recorded sessions at the Opscode YouTube Channel. Enjoy!

DevOps

• Devopsdays: “What if Devops was invented by Coca Cola” by Patrick Debois
• Food Fight Show: “#ChefConf - Day 2 Wrap-up”
• Food Fight Show: “Chefconf 2013: Talking Shop with Spheromak, Kisoku, and Miah_”
• Food Fight Show: “Chefconf 2013: Talking about Push Jobs with Kevin Smith”
• Food Fight Show: “Chefconf 2013: Day 1 Roundup”
• Rackspace: “Chef Conference Recap” by Jason Smith
• Rackspace: “Bootstrapping Chef on Windows” by Edward Adame

OpenStack

• Cloudscaling: “Cloud 2020 Summit: Perturbing the Punditocracy” by Randy Bias
• Dell: “Pictures, Videos, Highlights from the OpenStack Havana Summit Portland” by Kamesh Pemmaraju
• Dell: “DevOps Days Austin — John Willis: Culture as the secret weapon in the war of hiring” by Barton George - Personal Blog
• Dell: “DevOps Days Austin: Patrick Debois” by Barton George - Personal Blog
• Dell: “Thoughts on OpenStack Summit in Portland” by Stephen Spector - Personal Blog
• Dell: “OpenStack Summit Playlist” by Stephen Spector - Personal YouTube Channel
• Dell: “7 takeaways from DevOps Days Austin” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Dell: “OpenStack steps toward Interopability with Temptest, RAs & RefStack.org” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Dell: “From orphans to open source, data matters” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Dopenstack: “Dope'n'Stack - E.N.T.E.R.P.R.I.S.E.” by Dopenstack YouTube
• Mirantis: “Introducing Murano: Bringing Windows Environments to OpenStack” by Georgy Okrokvertskhov
• OpenStack Foundation: “Germany, Israel & Hungary – OpenStack Events” by Claire Massey
• OpenStack Foundation: “Contribute to OpenStack Activity Board” by Stefano Maffulli
• OpenStack Foundation: “Deploying and Managing OpenStack with Heat” YouTube Channel
• OpenStack Foundation: “Wicked Easy Ceph Block Storage & OpenStack Deployment with Crowbar” by Kamesh Pemmaraju (Dell) and Neil Levine (Inktank)
• Opscode: “Chef 11.4.4 and Chef 10.24.4 Released”
• Opscode: “ChefConf 2013 - Zero to Production in Crazy Time - Adobe's Transformation - John Martinez”
• Opscode: “ChefConf 2013 -The Postmortem -- It Doesn't Have to be Messy - Ron Vidal”
• Opscode: “ChefConf 2013 - Growing Pains With Chef - A Tale of DevOps in a Large Organization - Brian Akins”
• Opscode: “ChefConf 2013 - Creating a Culture for Continuous Delivery - John Esser”
• Piston Cloud: “What is OpenStack Up to With the Latest Grizzly Release?” by Piston Staff
• Simplicity Scales: “The Trouble With Link Bonding (LACP, LAG)” by Paul Guth
• SUSE: “Private Clouds With SUSE Cloud and Hyper-V”

Hadoop

• Cloudera: “Customer Spotlight: Six3 Systems’ Wayne Wheeles Drives Cyber Security Innovation using Impala” by Karina Babock
• Cloudera: “How the SAS and Cloudera Platforms Work Together” by Jairam Ranganathan
• Cloudera: “Cloudera Impala 1.0: It’s Here, It’s Real, It’s Already the Standard for SQL on Hadoop” by  Marcel Kornacker & Justin Erickson
• Pentaho: “Pentaho Acquires Dashboard and UI Specialist Partner Webdetails”
• Pentaho: “Getting Started and Successful with Big Data” webinar 5-15-2013

Contributors

Please find detailed information on all contributors in our Wiki section.

Contact

If you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, or if you’d like to contribute - I’ll be happy to hear back from you.

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth

Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (Florian_Klaffenbach@Dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Hyper-V Versus vSphere – Comparing Apples With Apples by Aidan Finn

The Exchange 2013 alphabet: Database Availability Group – part 2 by Johan Veldhuis

How to Convert a VHD File into VHDX by Aidan Finn

Great #Microsoft Fabric Management Architecture Guide #sysctr #SCVMM by James van den Berg

Azure

#Microsoft Technet Virtual LABS #Cloud #sysctr #WindowsAzure #WS2012 #Sharepoint by James van den Berg

Making a TestLAB with Windows Server 2012 – System Center 2012 SP1 – #WindowsAzure – Hybrid #Cloud #sysctr by James van den Berg

Exchange

Create Exchange 2010 Multiple Mailbox Reports with PowerShell by Jeffery Hicks

The Exchange 2013 alphabet: Database Availability Group – part 2 by Johan Veldhuis

Hyper-V

MUST HAVE : Three Great Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Books to Learn from #Hyperv #MVPBUZZ by James van den Berg

Virtual Machine Import Wizard of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Manager #Hyperv #WS2012 by James van den Berg

High-Performance, Highly Available File Share Storage for Server Applications #SMB #WS2012 #Hyperv by James van den Berg

#Microsoft Window Server 2012 Products and Editions Comparison #Winserv #Hyperv by  James van den Berg

#Microsoft Fabric Architecture Guide #Hyperv #SCVMM #WS2012 by  James van den Berg

Hyper-V Versus vSphere – Comparing Apples With Apples by Aidan Finn

How to Convert a VHD File into VHDX by Aidan Finn

Understanding Hyper-V Error Messages by Aidan Finn

Another WS2012 Hyper-V Converged Fabric Design With Host & Guest iSCSI Networks by Aidan Finn

KB2769588 – An Update That Adds 4-Node Failover Cluster Deployment Support In OEM WS2012 OOBE by Aidan Finn

Maintenance Windows For Patching A WS2012 Hyper-V Cluster Make No Sense To Me by Aidan Finn

How do I convert a Hyper-V pass-through disk to a VHDX disk? by Aidan Finn

Unable to Live Migrate Virtual Machine Running in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V by Lai Yoong Seng

PowerShell

PowerShell PopUp by Jeffery Hicks

Sharepoint 

Creating and configuring a SharePoint 2013 search service application by Ravikanth Chaganti

System Center Core

Connecting the System Center Products for better integration by Marcelo Sinic

#Update System Center and Management related content #sysctr #scvmm #configmgr #scorc by Robert Smit

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

How to install System Center 2012 SP1 Update Rollup 2 for VMM by Thomas Maurer

Great #Microsoft Fabric Management Architecture Guide #sysctr #SCVMM by James van den Berg

 SQL Server

#PSTip Failing over a mirrored SQL database using SMO by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows Server Core

Storage Spaces Inside a Virtual Machine Is Not Supported by Aidan Finn

#PSTip Extending the default output property set for Active Directory objects by Shay Levy

Using RAMDisk To Test Windows Server 2012 Network Performance by Didier van Hoye

SMB Direct RoCE Does Not Work Without DCB/PFC by Didier van Hoye

AD-Anmeldedatum per csvde exportieren und in Excel darstellen in German by Nils Kaczenski

Please join our first Lunchtime Live Demo May 10^th at 1.00 – 1.45 pm EDT (UTC-4 hrs). With that series, we want to introduce you to innovative (startup) companies that provide exciting solutions for the cloud. Expect no PowerPoint, no marketing talk – just  a quick glance under the hood and an opportunity to chat with those guys who built the product.

If you are not able to attend, watch out for the wrap up blog post which we will publish a few days after the demo. Also, if you have any questions prior to the chat or suggestions, feel free to reach out to me via email (see below). We love to iterate and get better with every iteration!

About Datadog

Datadog is a SaaS monitoring service and data platform for Dev and Ops teams supporting applications on cloud, on-premise and hybrid infrastructure. Datadog unifies the data from servers, OS, databases, applications, tools and services to present an integrated view of an IT environment. In addition to its out-of-the-box alerting and graphing capabilities, Datadog can correlate data from infrastructure components such as Chef, MySQL and Git to provide insights that enable IT teams to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems and ensure on-time application releases and deployment.

Our Presenters

Amit Agarwal is VP of Products at Datadog. Throughout his 15 years of experience in the enterprise software industry, Amit has worked in various business strategy and senior technical management roles to bring new enterprise software products to market. Before Datadog, Amit was the Director of Product Management at Quest Software (now Dell). In this role he led the product management team that was responsible for performance monitoring and high availability solutions.

Alex Rosemblat is Director of Marketing at Datadog. Previously, Alex served as Product Marketing Manager for Dell’s Virtualization and Cloud Management product family (via the acquisition of VKernel).

In order to attend the chat, go to delltechcenter.adobeconnect.com/chat No registration is required. If you have any questions prior to the chat, please contact rafael_knuth@dellteam.com. Looking forward to see you there!