Category Archives: Performance

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Cloud Architectures Are Not New

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Well, if cloud architectures are not new, exactly how old are they? The title almost begs the question.

It may be the latest, hottest buzzword, but architecturally, the cloud is more than 20 years old.  And, you are intimately familiar with it. It’s the Web. What makes it “the cloud” are the enterprise applications getting moved onto the Web.  But, this move isn’t just a matter of deploying some application servers and offering HTTP-based interfaces to existing software. It is a marked change with the architecture of these software systems built on and for the Web, rather than for traditional enterprise infrastructure.

A key tenet that makes enterprise application deployment in the cloud possible over the Web is REST. Having emerged over the past few years as a predominant Web service design model, REST has increasingly displaced other design models such as SOAP because of its simpler style. Joining me in the development of this blog post to be published when I’m on vacation is EMC senior technologist Cornelia Davis. Continue reading →

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EMC Extends Service Assurance With Watch4net

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What if you could ensure the availability—and performance—of your virtual data center?

With the acquisition of Montreal-based Watch4net Solutions, EMC provides another compelling option for getting your data center under better control.

EMC IT Operations Intelligence ensures the availability of the virtual data center (VDC) with a root cause or fault analysis engine second to none. And, while availability is a basic requirement for the 24×7 VDC, you also need to ensure performance, as you scale your mission-critical applications.

Watch4net Solutions APG software suite provides the performance monitoring, analysis, and reporting from vApp to LUN. While availability may be cast as black or white (available or not), performance assurance is more akin to keeping an eye on the varying shades of gray to assess the impact or potential impact of the dynamic elements of the VDC on applications and infrastructure. It all comes down to service levels and being able to deliver the throughput and response times expected by the unruly mob—er, users.

Watch4net is the performance complement to IT Operations Intelligence’s deterministic availability solution. This combo is service assurance for the VDC and the cloud.

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What Happens In Las Vegas Goes On The Internet

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Did you see any of the Hangover movies?

Well, EMC World is not like either of those movies. But, we do have pictures—and a video!

Unlike our heroes in Hangover, I know where I’ve been. It’s hard to forget a 16-hour workday spent in this whirlwind called EMC World. (Hope my boss is reading this part).  From pushing out three blog posts at 6:00 AM pacific time, to product sessions, through a number of analyst meetings, to the Solutions Pavilion floor, it was a long, exhilarating day. With more than 13,000 people in attendance, you could feel the energy in the air.

EMC announced a staggering 42 new products and technologies yesterday to speed your journey to the cloud. These introductions spanned all key EMC areas including storage, backup, virtualization, and software management.

The customers I spoke with were impressed. Plus, the many breakout sessions and exhibit floor demonstrations helped put the announcements into perspective, which made for a great customer experience. Don’t want to keep them guessing.  But, wait, there’s more. Continue reading →

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Faster Performance For Your VMware Environment

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What if you could get faster performance out of your VMware environment? You’d do it.

Stifling I/O bottlenecks, shrinking backup windows, and unplanned outages are commonplace concerns shared among data center architects rolling out their virtual data center and cloud.

Virtual machine (VM) growth tends to escalate as data centers get comfortable with virtualization technologies. But, growth often gets hampered by the lowest common denominator if not addressed as part of the implementation plan.

A few months back, I used the DeLorean with the flux capacitor from the old Back to the Future movies as an analogy to supercharging applications through data path optimization. Now, if you recall, in the second installment of this famed movie series, the fictional character Doc Brown went into the future to retrofit his DeLorean time machine with the power of flight. Similarly, upgrading your path management to optimize your virtual environment can make your data center seemingly levitate—and eliminate many of the concerns for virtual and cloud deployments.

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Opt For The Data Express Lane With A LAN-Free Approach

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Have you ever played the game SimCity?  

Once you get slightly beyond beginner stage and build up a city, the biggest challenge becomes traffic.  

It becomes very frustrating, very quickly with all of these little simulated cars, until you realize the solution.

LAN traffic in your data center can be a real challenge too. But, there is an answer here as well and it can be found in the not readily obvious and not entirely new.

The SimCity car glut is much like the challenges from unbridled virtual machine sprawl and data growth.

You need a solution for getting data around that takes you off the highways and byways and onto the road less traveled.

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