F5 ARX
There are 40 entries for the tag F5 ARX
Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think...
Lori and I have a large technical reference library, both in print and electronic. Part of the reason it is large is because we are electronics geeks. We seriously want to know what there is to know about computers, networks, systems, and development tools. Part of the reason is that we don’t often enough sit down and decide to pare the collection down by those books that no longer have a valid reason for sitting on our (many) bookshelves of technical reference. The collection runs the gamut from the outdated to the state of the art, from the old...
When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few...
An interesting thing about toll booths, they provide a point at which all sorts of things can happen. When you are stopped to pay a toll, it smooths the flow of traffic by letting a finite number of vehicles through per minute, reducing congestion by naturally spacing things out. Dams are much the same, holding water back on a river and letting it flow through at a rate determined by the operators of the dam. The really interesting bit is the other things that these two points introduce. When necessary, toll booths have been used to find and...
It’s interesting to watch the evolution of IT over time. I have repeatedly been told “you people, we were doing that with X, back before you had a name for it!” And likely, the speaker is telling the truth, as far as it goes. Seriously, while the mechanisms may be different, putting a ton of commodity servers behind a load balancer and tweaking for performance looks an awful lot like having LPARs that can shrink and grow. You put “dynamic cloud” into the conversation and the similarities become more pronounced. The biggest difference is how much you’re paying for...
In our first house, we had a set of stairs that were horrible. They were unfinished, narrow, and steep. Lori went down them once with a vacuum cleaner, they were just not what we wanted in the house. They came out into the kitchen, so you were looking at these half-finished steps while sitting at the kitchen table. We covered them so they at least weren’t showing bare treads, and then we… Got used to them. Yes, that is what I said. We adapted. They were covered, making them minimally acceptable, they served their purpose, so we enjoyed...
We spend an obsessive amount of time looking at the market and trying to lean toward accepted technologies. Seriously, when I was in IT management, there were an inordinate number of discussions about the state of market X or Y. While these conversations almost always revolved around what we were doing, and thus were put into context, sometimes an enterprise sits around waiting for everyone else to jump on board before joining in the flood. While sometimes this is commendable behavior, it is just as often self-defeating. If you have a project that could use technology X, then find...
One of the things that F5 has been trying to do since before I came to the company is reach out to developers. Some of the devices in your network could be effective AppDev tools if utilized to their full extent, and indeed, I’ve helped companies develop tools utilizing iControl that give application managers control over their entire environment – from VMs to ADCs. While it is a struggle for any network device company to communicate with developers, I think it is cool that F5 continues to do so. But increasingly, the Network is the place you need...
It is interesting to me the number of variant Transformers that have been put out over the years, and the effect that has on those who like transformers. There are four different “Construction Devastator” figures put out over the years (there may be more, I know of four), and every Transformers collector or fan that I know – including my youngest son – want them all. That’s great marketing on the part of Hasbro, for certain, but it does mean that those who are trying to collect them are going to have a hard time of it, just because...
There’s a whole lot of talk about cloud revolutionizing IT, and a whole lot of argument about public versus private cloud, even a considerable amount of talk about what belongs in the cloud. But not much talk about helping you determine what applications and storage are a good candidate to move there – considering all of the angles that matter to IT. This blog will focus on storage, the next one on applications, because I don’t want to bury you in a blog as long as a feature length article. It amazes me when I see comments like “no...
I recently read a piece in Network Computing Magazine that was pretty disparaging of NAS devices, and with a hand-wave the author pronounced NAS dead, long live cloud storage. Until now, storage has been pretty much immune to the type of hype that “The Cloud” gets. Sure, there have been some saying that we should use the cloud for primary storage, and others predicting that it will kill this or that technology, but the outrageous and intangible claims that accompany placing your applications in the cloud. My favorite, repeated even by a lot of people I respect, is...
Lori and I’s youngest daughter graduated from High School this year, and her class chose one of the many good Vince Lombardi quotes for the theme of their graduation – “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” Those who know me well know that I’m not a huge football fan (don’t tell my friends here in Green Bay that… The stadium can hold roughly half the city’s population, and they aren’t real friendly to those who don’t join in the frenzy), but Vince Lombardi certainly had a lot of great quotes over...
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historical timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… The oldest (24 y/o) being a WarHammer 40k player and the youngest (3 y/o) just plain enjoying anything that looks like a robot. While I have been modeling more or less for decades, only in the last five years have I had the luxury of owning an airbrush, and...
While plenty of people have had a mouthful (or page full, or pipe full) of things to say about the Amazon outage, the one thing that it brings to the fore is not a problem with cloud, but a problem with storage. Long ago, the default mechanism for “High Availability” was to have two complete copies of something (say a network switch) and when one went down, the other was brought up with the same IP. It is sad to say that even this is far-and-away better than the level of redundancy that most of us place in our...
On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...
Since I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I thought I’d offer you all a link to my article in Computer Technology Review about The Cloud Tier. The point was to delve into how/when/where/why of cloud storage usage. While there is a lot to say on that topic and the article was of limited word count, I think the idea that it can fit into your existing architecture with minimal changes and then be utilized to service the needs of the business in a better/faster/more agile manner is the key point. Normally I keep my blogs relatively vendor-independent....
I was on the road last week, doing my bit for a roadshow with VMWare and NetApp sponsored by CDW. My team has spread these trips out amongst us, and I drew Nashville as my city to visit. I’ve been through and around Nashville, but never stayed there. This trip was no exception to that rule, I saw the airport, the hotel, and the venue where the event was held. But that’s okay, I was there to do business, not sight-see, so I was in one morning and out the next. The attendance was okay, and the attendees were as...
My older children, like most kids in their age group, all played with or collected Pokemon cards. Just like I and all of my friends had GI Joes and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Kung-fu grip versus hard hands, they and all of their friends sat around talking about how much cooler their current favorite Pokemon card was compared to all of the others. We let them play and kept an eye on how cards were being passed about the group (they’re small and tend to walk off, so we patrolled a bit, but otherwise stayed out of...
Our basement, like most geek basements, has a pretty good collection of outdated computer gear. Some of it is running on the network, some of it is sitting there waiting for the end times. Or for a crook to break in and steal it so we don’t have to dispose of it. I’ve posted this picture before, but here is “the cable box” before the last time I went through and cleaned it up. Or at least a close-up of one part of it, it is a pretty large box. One of the things that we have been...
There’s this funny thing about pouring two bags of M&Ms into one candy dish. The number of M&Ms is exactly the same as when you started, but now they’re all in one location. You have, in theory, saved yourself from having to wash a second candy dish, but the same number of people can enjoy the same number of M&Ms, you’ll run out of M&Ms at about the same time, and if you have junior high kids in the crowd, the green M&Ms will disappear at approximately the same rate. The big difference is that fewer people will fit...
The limiting factor in adoption of file virtualization has been, in my opinion, twofold. First is the FUD created by the confusion with block-level virtualization and proprietary vendors wanting to sell you more of their gear – both of which are rapidly disappearing – and second is the unknown element. The simple “how does this set of products improve my environment, save me money, or cut manhours?” Well now this issue is going to rapidly go away also, because you can find out easily enough. Those of you who follow my writing know that I was a hard...
As you all know, I try to keep my marketing spiel for F5 to a minimum here. I don’t hesitate to mention when F5 has a product that will solve your problem, but try to focus on the problem and technical solutions. But sometimes I want to crow about how good our product lines really are. Thankfully, Lori provides a venue for us to do just that called F5 Fridays. This week I guest wrote an F5 Friday article about our new ARX Cloud Extender product and it’s cool enough I thought I’d let those of you who...
I recently replaced my home laptop. My trusty old Dell Latitude was just worn out, as we tend to put our systems to a lot of use, and it was three years old – dead battery, failed to start one time, telling me it had no hard drive, etc. We buy enough computer equipment that even though we are not a small business, we purchase through the Dell small business sales unit. It doesn’t provide us any benefit other than one very important one – warranties against any possible harm. To quote the support rep I chatted with when...
For decades now, the game Dungeons and Dragons has suffered from what is commonly called “Edition Wars”. When the publisher of the game releases a new version, they of course want to sell the new version and stop talking about the old – they’re a business, and it certainly does make the ability to be profitable tough if people don’t make the jump from version X to version Y. Problem is that people become heavily invested in whatever version they’re playing. When Fourth Edition was released, the MSRP on just the three books required to play the game was...
The hype around cloud shows every indication of settling down, which, if you go with the Gartner Hype Cycle model means that the trough of disillusionment is yawning before you. But you don’t have to dip into the trough, if you didn’t ride up the hype hill. The thing is, that with this particular hype cycle, IT was the brakes on the hype cycle, wanting to quickly identify what Cloud could and could not do for your organization, while the business was riding the hype up. That’s good, it will serve to smooth out the trough. If you’re...
When I was in Radiographer (X-Ray Tech) training in the Army, we were told the cautionary tale of a man who walked into an emergency room with a hatchet in his forehead and blood everywhere. As the staff of the emergency room rushed to treat the man’s very serious head injury, his condition continued to degrade. Blood everywhere, people rushing to and fro, the XRay tech with a portable XRay machine trying to squeeze in while nurses and doctors are working hard to keep the patient alive. And all the frenzied work failed. If you’ve ever been in an...
Every once in a while you hear something going on in the political spectrum that strikes you as meaningful and useful, that you hope against hope they will manage to get past the details and partisanship and move forward on. Right about the time of the writing of this blog, in the United States, we’re hearing a lot of these things because it’s an election cycle. Problem is that with 300 million people it is rare that any one idea is agreed upon by everyone, and politicians cover the spectrum, so often what sounds like a good idea is tough...
Thursday was quite the day for us. I mentioned earlier in the week that I was setting up the storage for Lori to digitize all of the DVDs, well we came to the conclusion that we needed 12 terabytes of raw disk to hold movies + music. Our current NAS total was just over four Terabytes, clearly not enough. While I take it in stride that I would consider purchasing an additional 12 TB of disk space, you have to stop in awe for a moment, don’t you? It was just a decade ago that many pundits were saying...
There is an interesting bit in high-tech that isn’t much mentioned but happens pretty regularly – when a good idea is adapted and moved to new uses, raising it a bit in the stack or revising it to keep up with the times. The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the progression from “subroutines” to “libraries” to “frameworks” to “APIs” to “Web Services”. The progression is logical and useful, but those assembler and C programmers that were first stuffing things into reusable subroutines could not have foreseen the entire spectrum of what their “useful” idea was going to become over...
A RANGE OF OPTIONS Almost exactly a year ago, I inherited several sets of model railroad trains. Two full O scale sets and two full HO scale sets. They were in varying stages of disrepair, and I wasn’t certain any of them worked. I’m not a train person, but my kids might be – given the chance to try them out. So I took them all to different dealers (who would have thought that different people work on different scales?), and had them all looked at to determine which one was most in...
When you’re going through your basement, attic, or garage and reorganizing, you move things from box to box, shuffle locations of boxes, buy better boxes to hold things that are more precious, take steps to see to their safety by keeping boxes off the floor… There is an entire sorting mechanic going on that you are likely hardly even thinking about. THE BIGGER THE MESS… I recently swept through our basement – boxes had been dumped down there when we moved into the house (seven years ago), and two of our children have...
A couple of weeks ago, one of the people I follow on our home Twitter account (focused on role-playing and miniature wargames) tweeted “Zombies! This Year’s Vampires Are Zombies! Oh Please Let This Year’s Vampires Be Zombies!!” as a joke aimed at those in the entertainment industry that were riding the fad wave of Vampire films/books/games. Seriously, the show that did the penitent Vampire in the 80s was good, everything portraying a “good-guy” Vampire after that was lame follow-on. That’s how I feel about high-tech sometimes. “Cloud is This Year’s SOA! Oh Please Let Cloud Be This Year’s...
So I’m jealous that Lori works D&D references into her posts regularly and I never have… Until today! For those who aren’t gamers or literary buffs, a Hydra is a big serpent or lizard with a variable number of heads (normally five to nine in both literature and gaming). They’re very powerful and very dangerous, and running into one unprepared is likely to get you p0wned. The worst part about them is that mythologically speaking, if you cut one of the heads off, two grow in its place. Ugly stuff if you’re determined to defeat it. That’s...
For those who don’t know, according to the Meyers & Briggs Foundation, part of the Meyers-Briggs Assessment is defined as: The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent… The same can be said about your data. Much that is seemingly random is consistent and predictable. One of the problems currently facing the enterprise is to properly categorize that data so that its “personality” is well known. You cannot sort (or tier) what you don’t know, and this is a simple proposal for how you might begin such a...
In the rush to cloud, there are many tools and technologies out there that are brand new. I’ve covered a few, but that’s nowhere near a complete list, but it’s interesting to see what is going on out there from a broad-spectrum view. I have talked a bit about Cloud Storage Gateways here. And I’m slowly becoming a fan of this technology for those who are considering storing in the cloud tier. There are a couple of good reasons to consider these products, and I was thinking about the reasons and their standing validity. Thought I’d share with...
I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now. By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta...
THE (STORAGE) WORLD IS A-CHANGING Innovation in the storage space seems to be at an all time high, and that means you have a lot more choices in what to do for storage tiering. Maybe too many choices if you are considering everything you possibly can. Seriously. Tons of moving parts underneath you at different layers of the stack. It’s pretty out there. Or pretty ugly, depends upon your view. A NEW KIND OF HYBRID The new hybrid disk being offered by Seagate, well evaluated in Storage...
THERE WAS A DAY… In the heady days of the networked IT explosion, it was a green field. We had very little data stored anywhere, everything was reasonably new, and whatever we thought might help the organization we were able to just go do, assuming the organization had the money to do it. Systems started to make everyone’s life easier, not just the few who benefitted from mainframes, we were helping the organization be more efficient and more adaptable. For the enterprise, those days are gone. Now we are a key part...
George Crump posted an interesting article over on Storage Switzerland that talks about the current state of the storage market from a protocol perspective. Interestingly to me, CIFS is specifically excluded from the conversation – NAS is featured, but the guts of the NAS bit only talks about NFS. In reality, NFS is a small percentage of the shared storage out there, since CIFS is built into Microsoft systems and is often used at the departmental or project level to keep storage costs down or to lighten the burden on the SAN. But now that I’ve nit-picked, it’s a...
THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY The Interstate road network in the US was built to facilitate interstate trade. Using public funding, the idea was that everyone benefitted if goods were able to move easier across the nation. Everyone did benefit, and unfettered interstate trade facilitated a whole lot of business that might never have occurred if each state maintained their own road network. But then a rather odd, and likely unforeseeable thing happened. Where an interstate ran through large cities, locals started using it not for inter-state travel, but for their daily commute...
