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Instability in the Cloud? Say it isn’t so! According to this post on Dave Rosenberg’s CNET blog, Australian researchers have found that three major cloud providers have instability and performance variance. This is the opposite side of the hype cycle, where all those who can only see black and white and had dumped me into the “against the cloud” category suddenly get confused. I’m not for or against any technology, I just like to see it used in the proper manner and at the proper time. It’s a bit early for the hype to start turning into cold hard reality, but Cloud has kind of... posted @ Thursday, August 20, 2009 11:28 AM | Feedback (1)

Storage Security – It’s not who’s responsible, it’s who’s responsible. Since I first started covering storage, back around the turn of the century (sounds more impressive than it is, no?), the argument has been ongoing in far more organizations than you could imagine about who should “own” storage security. Does it belong with the storage group? With the security group? How about in IT services, since they’re the ones that are on the pointy end of user relations? Considering the number of times that the security group has been around this May-pole, you’d think they would have all the answers, but in many ways this isn’t a “what... posted @ Monday, August 17, 2009 1:49 PM | Feedback (0)

Advanced Load Balancers for Developers: ADCs - The Code For me, as a developer, the big differentiator between a Load Balancer and an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is the ability to use code to help manage how my application and the network interact. Some things you just can’t do from your application because by the time your application knows it should be doing something, it’s too late, some things are just easier done on a network device (yeah, or a VM pretending to be a network device if your name is Izzy ;-)). Note that by far my experience is with F5 products, it’s my job to know... posted @ Friday, July 17, 2009 10:26 AM | Feedback (0)

Cloud Interoperability – haven’t we danced before? It amuses me when people start throwing about phrases like “interoperability” and “federation” in a space still hopping in the middle of the hype cycle. You would think that with our long and growing history, we in IT could be realistic about the prospects of any early implementers putting interoperability high on the list above functionality, wouldn’t you? It just isn’t going to happen tomorrow – the marketing hype has gotten so wound up that they’re getting the cart far before the horse. Early adopters in any high-tech space believe that lock-in is a business model, and... posted @ Monday, July 13, 2009 1:45 PM | Feedback (1)

Advanced Load Balancing for Developers – ADCs, What’s the Difference? So a while back I covered Load Balancing for Developers, trying to help developers  who don’t yet have exposure to load balancing to understand the when/where/how of load balancing.  I took a bit of a break to do some BIG-IP/TMOS V.10 work, and figure it’s about time (since I’ve been gently prodded by readers a couple of times) to move on with the advanced applications. But first, a moment of silence for Borland, who this time surely is breathing its last. I’ll try not to reminisce too much here, but their DOS IDE was the best out... posted @ Tuesday, July 07, 2009 8:32 AM | Feedback (5)

v.10 – Application Security Manager (ASM) From iControl We first introduced iControl interfaces for ASM in version 9 of LTM, and that support was about what you would expect from a first release – usable, but not expansive. With V10, we have stepped up the number of interfaces and the functionality they offer you access to, and here’s a quick overview of those changes. There is a Tech Tip coming soon about the interfaces themselves and how to use them, this blog is just to help you determine if you can achieve your goals utilizing iControl against ASM. Not that I want that to sound too harsh on... posted @ Monday, May 18, 2009 7:11 AM | Feedback (1)

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 – 4TB of Tasty Goodness Lori and I have a larger home network, with several servers, multiple switches, two WAPs, and eight or so clients. Thrown into the middle of all of that is an aging Infrant Technologies (now NetGear) ReadyNAS, 1 Terabyte. The ReadyNAS, from before NetGear purchased Infrant, has had a bad cable for about two years, but has been working just fine otherwise. Of course a bad cable implies one of the drives was down (it was), and that makes RAID kind of redundant. About a week ago the ReadyNAS took itself off-line. We have a lot of data out there that... posted @ Thursday, May 07, 2009 10:39 AM | Feedback (4)

v.10 - iSessions in the Cloud (or a remote data center, you choose) Well, I’ve covered the basics of iSessions – a secure, optimized tunnel between two BIG-IPs – so now it’s time to talk about usefulness, both today and going forward. Since iSessions are an infrastructure issue, the following works for redundant data centers also, assuming they have BIG-IPs in them, it’s just that cloud is the buzzword du-jour, and there’s actually a teentsy bit more benefit to using them for the cloud. First off, I assume that your cloud vendor has BIG-IPs (that is a safe assumption as of today), but you’re living in the real world, check with them... posted @ Wednesday, May 06, 2009 11:38 AM | Feedback (0)

v.10 - Introduction to iSessions Amongst the wave of new features that came out in Version 10 of TMOS is a nifty little feature called iSessions. This being the first release of iSessions, there is a lot of curiosity and not as much documentation as we’d like yet. So I’ll walk you through what is available, why you’d want to use it, and what benefits it offers in this blog post. As time goes on we will expand our coverage of iSessions to more fully discuss all of the options and challenges they present. The concept of iSessions in v.10 is pretty straight-forward…... posted @ Wednesday, April 29, 2009 10:58 AM | Feedback (3)

v.10 – Testing Configurations Note: If you’re here for Load Balancing for Developers or Reasons You Need File Virtualization (both iterated on my team page), I took this week and last off to cover v.10, check back next week. Forest, Trees… The new functionality in v.10 is so expansive that it’s easy to get buried and not see the larger picture right away. That’s kind of what happened to me when this blog post came about. Originally I was going to write about using Logical Volume Management (lvm) for testing configurations, but honestly the release of evaluation licensing makes for some other... posted @ Thursday, April 16, 2009 10:38 AM | Feedback (0)

v.10 – Logical Volume Manager One of the cool new items in v.10 is the use of a logical volume manager (LVM) to create and manage multiple “partitions”. This is the last time I will use the term “partition” to refer to v.10 disk space in this post, since partitioning was the way things were done prior to v.10, moving forward we use the volume system. Considerations The first thing to do is decide if LVM is the right tool for you. Like most massively cool technologies, it supersedes the system it is designed to replace. While we do our best to provide... posted @ Monday, April 13, 2009 1:24 PM | Feedback (1)

v.10 - New iControl Interfaces. For those who missed it, we’re in the middle of the IT Revolution lead by our v.10 release of TMOS and our new 8900 model. Due to all the great stuff to talk about in the new version of TMOS, I have put off the Load Balancing for Developers and Reasons You Need File Virtualization series on hold for this week, and possibly next. Then I’ll hop back on them and we’ll explore ADCs for Developers and more Reasons You Need File Virtualization. As part of the revolution, you need more control. Or iControl, as the case may... posted @ Thursday, April 09, 2009 12:05 AM | Feedback (2)

v.10 Power in the Shell – tmsh and You! For a good long while, bigpipe has been the command line tool for use with BIG-IP products. It worked admirably, and has lasted a good long while, but as with everything that is vibrant and successful, BIG-IP outgrew bigpipe. Starting with v.10, you have access to a new command processor – tmsh. While you can still call bigpipe, tmsh offers such power that we figure you won’t be doing that for long. Offering a full blown scripting language based on tcl, tmsh gives you functionality that makes this author wonder if a whole lot of work currently doled... posted @ Wednesday, April 08, 2009 7:20 AM | Feedback (0)

The Sam IM Continuing the Friday Funny series (some missed that when I didn’t disclaim it last week, so “Fridays are the days I think I’m funny”). Thursday was an insane day, starting with my laptop having VPN issues, and ending with after-hours work calls. Indeed, I’m writing this at 10 PM Central time (GMT – 5) Thursday night, just because I’m here and just finishing up. Not too much work, just one of those days. So midway through the day, a friend of mine that does freelance in technology and RPGs – Bill Silvey – tried to... posted @ Thursday, April 02, 2009 9:04 PM | Feedback (0)

Reason #5 That You Need File Virtualization If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page. Are we at reason #5 already? Wow. Okay, this is another one that salesmen will tell you because it is truly compelling, but it is truly a good reason, one of the best. It is also one of the ones that I eschewed before getting to see real numbers that I could quantify were not marketing material. The disk savings are real. Yeah, I said it, and it’s true. Sure, you could argue that... posted @ Thursday, April 02, 2009 8:13 PM | Feedback (3)

Intro to Load Balancing for Developers – The Algorithms   If you’re new to this series, you can find the complete list of articles in the series on my personal page here If you are writing applications to sit behind a Load Balancer, it behooves you to at least have a clue what the algorithm your load balancer uses is about. We’re taking this week’s installment to just chat about the most common algorithms and give a plain- programmer description of how they work. While historically the algorithm chosen is both beyond the developers’ control, you’re the one that has to deal with performance problems, so you should know what is... posted @ Tuesday, March 31, 2009 11:02 PM | Feedback (3)

Reason #4 That You Need File Virtualization I took the easy topic this week, and things are so crazy it’s still late in the day that I’m posting this. My apologies. This one also focuses more on ARX than previous ones – this is because replication is a differentiator for many vendors’ products, so I’m being careful to talk about what most can do, then give details for the one I know the best. If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page. Replication is of growing importance in the enterprise, be it... posted @ Thursday, March 26, 2009 5:30 PM | Feedback (0)

Reason #3 That You Need File Virtualization. If you’re just joining this series, check out Reason #1 and Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization Tiering is the one benefit that a sales person will tell you about, so I was putting it off a bit, but it is the one thing I’ve had requests for, and it’s a benefit most enterprises can relate to. I’ll tell you up-front that even though it does offer a huge savings, for reasons I’ll mention below, this isn’t one of the big drivers for me – I knew about the benefits of tiering before I decided that File Virtualization... posted @ Thursday, March 19, 2009 7:03 AM | Feedback (0)

Intro to Load Balancing for Developers – How they work So last time we were talking about when and why you might implement load balancing – either with a dedicated load balancer, or with a full-blown Application Delivery Controller (ADC). This time we’ll briefly run over what a load balancer does and how it does it. If you’re just now joining us, the first blog in this series can be found here: Intro to Load Balancing for Developers – the Architects View. Note that this is a very high level overview, but the end of the article includes links to other articles that offer you more detail... posted @ Tuesday, March 17, 2009 8:16 PM | Feedback (6)

Dear Twitterer. Some Twitter users get really upset when people unfollow them. I’ve seen public apologies on blogs and in Tweets, people wondering why… I figured I’d save them all some trouble, and lump 15 of the reasons into one Friday blog post for your enjoyment. Remember, on Fridays I think I’m funny. 1. Dear PoliticalCommentator: You had roughly a 50% chance that I would disagreed with you, and another 50% chance that your constant stream of amateur political commentary was just plain annoying. Which means that technically you should have no followers by now. 2. Dear MarketingMessage:... posted @ Friday, March 13, 2009 8:13 PM | Feedback (0)

Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization If you’re just joining us, the first article in this series is here. While desktop management is a volume issue – touch enough desktops and something is likely to break – Reason #2 is more about complexity. Our data centers are like the cloverleaf on a busy freeway intersection – stuff going every which direction, and no one is quite certain (though some claim to be) what causes all those collisions and slowdowns. Simplified – and possibly more effective - Security Yes indeed, I did say that. And I mean it. I figure that once... posted @ Thursday, March 12, 2009 8:21 AM | Feedback (0)