Category: Storage

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cloud computing servers Storage

IT Simplified: Cloud Orchestration and its Use Cases

What is Cloud Orchestration?

Cloud orchestration refers to the centralized management of automated tasks across different cloud systems. It involves controlling automated jobs from various cloud tools through a unified platform. By consolidating control through an orchestration layer, organizations can establish interconnected workflows. Often, IT processes are developed reactively, leading to isolated automated tasks and fragmented solutions. However, this approach is inefficient and costly. To address these challenges, IT operations decision-makers, in collaboration with cloud architects, are adopting orchestration to connect siloed jobs into cohesive workflows that encompass the entire IT operations environment.

Benefits of Cloud orchestration:

  1. Enhanced creativity in IT operations: A fully orchestrated hybrid IT system allows for a more innovative approach to problem-solving and efficient IT operations.
  2. Comprehensive control: Organizations gain a holistic view of their IT landscape, eliminating concerns about partial visibility and providing a single pane of glass view.
  3. Guaranteed compliance: Orchestrating the entire system ensures built-in checks and balances, leading to consistent compliance across the organization.
  4. Powerful API management: Orchestrated workflows can leverage APIs as tools to perform specific tasks triggered by events, resulting in seamless coordination and synchronicity.
  5. Cost control: Cloud-based systems require an automation-first approach to effectively manage resources, optimize costs, and potentially reduce overall expenses.
  6. Future-proofing: It allows IT operations teams to have peace of mind regarding the future of their IT environments, as orchestration enables adaptability and proactive management.
  7. Single point of control: The right tool can serve as a centralized control point for the entire system, ensuring superior performance and consistency.

Cases :

  1. Automating tasks with cloud service providers: Modern workload automation solutions can orchestrate hybrid or multi-cloud environments, unifying the IT system and enabling seamless automation across different platforms and providers.
  2. Compliance and security updates across hybrid or multi-cloud: Orchestration simplifies the process of implementing compliance and security updates across diverse applications and cloud infrastructures, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency.
  3. Hybrid cloud storage and file transfer: It streamlines the movement of data between public and private cloud platforms in a hybrid environment, ensuring fast, accurate, and secure data pipelines.

Given the prevalence of hybrid cloud environments today, cloud orchestration is vital for organizations to fully leverage the benefits of their hybrid landscapes. Proper orchestration acts as a single point of cloud management, ensuring seamless inter-connectivity between systems. When combined with workload automation, cloud orchestration also minimizes errors by reusing automated tasks as building blocks.

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servers Service software Storage

IT Simplified: Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

SDDC

What is an SDDC?

An SDDC is a traditional data center facility where organizational data, applications, networks, and infrastructure are centrally housed and accessed. It is the hub for IT operations and physical infrastructure equipment, including servers, storage devices, network equipment, and security devices.

In contrast, a software-defined data center is an IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) platform that services an organization’s software, infrastructure, or platform needs. An SDDC can be housed on-premise, at an MSP, and in private, public, or hosted clouds. (For our purposes, we will discuss the benefits of hosting an SDDC in the cloud.) Like traditional data centers, SDDCs also host servers, storage devices, network equipment, and security devices.

Here’s where the differences come in.

Unlike traditional data centers, an SDDC uses a virtualized environment to deliver a programmatic approach to the functions of a traditional data center. SDDCs rely heavily on virtualization technologies to abstract, pool, manage, and deploy data center functions. Like server virtualization concepts used for years, SDDCs abstract, pool, and virtualize all data center services and resources in order to:

  1. Reduce IT resource usage
  2. Provide automated deployment and management
  3. Increased flexibility
  4. Business agility

Key SDDC Architectural Components include:

  • Compute virtualization, where virtual machines (VMs)—including their operating systems, CPUs, memory, and software—reside on cloud servers. Compute virtualization allows users to create software implementations of computers that can be spun up or spun down as needed, decreasing provisioning time.
  • Network virtualization, where the network infrastructure servicing your VMs can be provisioned without worrying about the underlying hardware. Network infrastructure needs—telecommunications, firewalls, subnets, routing, administration, DNS, etc.—are configured inside your cloud SDDC on the vendor’s abstracted hardware. No network hardware assembly is required.
  • Storage virtualization, where disk storage is provisioned from the SDDC vendor’s storage pool. You get to choose your storage types, based on your needs and costs. You can quickly add storage to a VM when needed.
  • Management and automation software. SDDCs use management and automation software to keep business critical functions working around the clock, reducing the need for IT manpower. Remote management and automation is delivered via a software platform accessible from any suitable location, via APIs or Web browser access.

What is the difference between SDDC and cloud?

A software-defined data center differs from a private cloud, since a private cloud only has to offer virtual-machine self-service, beneath which it could use traditional provisioning and management. Instead, SDDC concepts imagine a data center that can encompass private, public, and hybrid clouds.

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computing Storage

IT Simplified: Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU

Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) is an enterprise RAID solution that unleashes the performance of NVMe SSDs. Intel® VROC is enabled by a feature in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors called Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD), an integrated controller inside the CPU PCIe root complex. Intel® VMD isolates SSD error and event handling from the operating system to help reduce system crashes and reboots. NVMe SSDs are directly connected to the CPU, allowing the full performance potential of fast storage devices, such as Intel® Optane™ SSDs, to be realized. Intel® VROC enables these benefits without the complexity, cost, and power consumption of traditional hardware RAID host bus adapter (HBA) cards placed between the drives and the CPU.

Features of VROC include:

  1. Enterprise reliability: Increased protection from data loss and corruption in various failure scenarios such as unexpected power loss, even when a volume is degraded.
  2. Extended Management Tools: Pre-OS and OS management includes HII, CLI, email alerts, and a Windows GUI, all supporting NVMe and SATA controls.
  3. Integrated caching: Intel® VROC Integrated Caching allows easy addition of a Intel® Optane™ SSD caching layer to accelerate RAID storage arrays.
  4. Boot RAID: Redundancy for OS images directly off the CPU with pre-OS configuration options for platform set-up.
  5. High performance storage: Connect NVMe SSDs directly to the CPU for full bandwidth storage connections.

Intel VROC support the below three sets that requires a licensing mechanism to activate:

  1. Intel VROC Standard
  2. Intel VROC Premium
  3. Intel VROC Intel SSD Only

The VROC feature debuted in 2017 to simplify and reduce the cost of high-performance storage arrays, and it has enjoyed broad uptake in enterprise applications. The feature brings NVMe RAID functionality on-die to the CPU for SSD storage devices, thus providing many of the performance, redundancy, bootability, manageability, and serviceability benefits that were previously only accessible with an additional device, like a RAID card or HBA. Thus, VROC gives users a host of high-performance storage features without the added cost, power consumption, heat, and complexity of another component, like a RAID card or HBA, in the chassis — not to mention extra cabling.

In order to have VROC work on a system, the requirements were something like:

  1. Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake or newer) system with BIOS support for Intel VMD
  2. The motherboard needs a header for the VROC hardware key
  3. A VROC hardware key needs to be installed with the correct level of functionality you want
Categories
cloud computing servers Storage

IT Simplified: Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a combination of servers and storage into a distributed infrastructure platform with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays.Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a paradigm shift in data center technologies that aims to:

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security servers Storage Tech. Trends

IT Simplified: Network Firewall

A firewall is a network security device, either hardware or software-based, which monitors all incoming and outgoing traffic and based on a defined set of security rules it accepts, rejects or drops that specific traffic.A firewall establishes a barrier between secured internal networks and outside untrusted network, such as the Internet.

History and Need for Firewall

Before Firewalls, network security was performed by Access Control Lists (ACLs) residing on routers. ACLs are rules that determine whether network access should be granted or denied to specific IP address.But ACLs cannot determine the nature of the packet it is blocking. Also, ACL alone does not have the capacity to keep threats out of the network. Hence, the Firewall was introduced.

How Firewall Works

Firewall match the network traffic against the rule set defined in its table. Once the rule is matched, associate action is applied to the network traffic. For example, Rules are defined as any employee from HR department cannot access the data from code server and at the same time another rule is defined like system administrator can access the data from both HR and technical department. Rules can be defined on the firewall based on the necessity and security policies of the organization.

From the perspective of a cooperate business, network traffic can be either outgoing or incoming. Firewall maintains a distinct set of rules for both the cases. Mostly the outgoing traffic, originated from the server itself, allowed to pass. Still, setting a rule on outgoing traffic is always better in order to achieve more security and prevent unwanted communication.

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servers software Storage

IT Simplified: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

A business continuity and disaster recovery plan is a broad guide designed to keep a business running, even in the event of a disaster. This plan focuses on the business as a whole, but drills down to specific scenarios that might create operational risks. With business continuity planning, the aim is to keep critical operations functioning, so that your business can continue to conduct regular business activities even under unusual circumstances.

When followed correctly, a business continuity plan should be able to continue to provide services to internal and external stakeholders, with minimal disruption, either during or immediately after a disaster. A comprehensive plan should also address the needs of business partners and vendors.

A disaster or data recovery plan is a more focused, specific part of the wider business continuity plan. The scope of a disaster recovery plan is sometimes narrowed to focus on the data and information systems of a business. In the simplest of terms, a disaster recovery plan is designed to save data with the sole purpose of being able to recover it quickly in the event of a disaster. With this aim in mind, disaster recovery plans are usually developed to address the specific requirements of the IT department to get back up and running—which ultimately affects the business as a whole.

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Storage

IT Simplified: Data Archival

Data archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage device for long-term retention. Archive data consists of older data that remains important to the organization or must be retained for future reference or regulatory compliance reasons. Data archival systems indexation and have search capabilities, so files can be located and retrieved.

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cloud computing Storage

IT Simplified: Virtualisation

Computing virtualization or virtualisation is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. In more practical terms, imagine you have 3 physical servers with individual dedicated purposes. One is a mail server, another is a web server, and the last one runs internal legacy applications. Each server is being used at about 30% capacity—just a fraction of their running potential. But since the legacy apps remain important to your internal operations, you have to keep them and the third server that hosts them, right?

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Storage

IT Simplified:SAN

A storage area network (SAN) is a high-speed block-based storage network that provides access to data storag . It connects servers with storage devices like disk arrays, RAID hardware, and tape libraries. In these configurations, the server’s operating system views the SAN devices as if they were directly connected. The data stored on those devices is then made available to all authorized users on the network, even if they’re in a different part of the data center or office building.

A SAN leverages a high-speed architecture that connects servers to their logical disk units (LUNs). A LUN is a range of blocks provisioned from a pool of shared storage and presented to the server as a logical disk. The server partitions and formats those blocks—typically with a file system—so that it can store data on the LUN just as it would on local disk storage.

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