F5 WOM
There are 29 entries for the tag F5 WOM
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...
In nature, things seek a balance that is sustainable. In the case of rivers, if there is too much pressure from water flowing, they either flood or open streams to let off the pressure. Both are technically examples of erosion, but we’re not here to discuss that particular natural process, we’re here to consider the case of a stream off a river when there is something changing the natural balance. Since I grew up around a couple of man-made lakes – some dug, some created when the mighty AuSable River was dammed, I’ll use man-made lakes as my examples, but...
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Our basement, like most geek basements, has a pretty good collection of outdated computer gear.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...
It should be no surprise to anyone that the number of mobile devices is increasing at an astounding rate. In fact, according to Ericsson, mobile broadband subscriptions will double in 2011. Let’s all just take a moment to ponder what that means to our worldwide infrastructure. Lots has been written about this topic from a theoretical viewpoint, but we’re about to find out how flexible our infrastructures really are. If you have web servers or other resources on the Internet, some of those new mobile devices will be coming your way. Let’s take the worst case scenario and...
It is an interesting twist in the IT world that with the increased usage of purchased packages and the growth of on-demand IT, we increasingly find ourselves talking about “Applications”. This is a good reference point, it addresses all of the things running on our servers with one fell swoop, but much like when you talk about “vehicles”, the phrase has little meaning beyond discussing similarities. In the IT sense of the word, Application can be defined as a program running on hardware. In the datacenter sense of the word, it can be a program running on one of our...
One of the things that I love about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it. One of the things I hate about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it… And there are marketing geeks and pundits willing to tell you which one to choose before you even know that you have the problem. I was out in Anaheim last week with F5’s rockstar salesforce, telling them about the Future of IT. Or trying to, you’ll have...
That’s a mouthful, but this is just a quick blog to point you at the actual blog I guest wrote for our F5 Fridays series. In short, we’ve been toying with F5 BIG-IP WOM in the labs as a performance and distance enhancement tool for VMWare vMotion moves over the WAN when NetApp Flexcache is deployed. Pretty cool stuff, and while I wasn’t involved in all of the testing that went on, as the Technical Marketing Manager for WOM I did get to see the results as they rolled out of the lab. Take a read if...
If you’ve never heard of my Load Balancing For Developers series, it’s a good idea to start here. There are quite a few installments behind us, and I’m not going to look back in this post any more than I must to make it readable without going back… Meaning there’s much more detail back there than I’ll relate here. Again after a lengthy sojourn covering other points of interest, I return to Load Balancing For Developers with a more holistic view – application performance. Lori has talked a bit about this topic, and I’ve talked about it in the...
You could, in theory, install 2 foot diameter pipes in your house to run water through. If you like a really forceful shower, or want your hot-tub to fill quickly, bigger pipes would be your first thought. Imagine your surprise if you had someone come in, and install huge pipes on the inside of your water meter, only to discover that you didn’t get a whole heck of a lot more water through them? You see, the meter is a choke point. As is the pipe leading up to your house. It’s not just the issue of the pipes...
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...
Someone said something interesting to me the other day, and they’re right “at 10 Gig WAN connections with compression turned on, you’re not likely to fill the pipe, the key is to make certain you’re not the bottleneck.” (the other day is relative – I’ve been sitting on this post for a while) I saw this happen when 1 Gig LANs came about, applications at the time were hard pressed to actually use up a Gigabit of bandwidth, so the focus became how slow the server and application were, if the backplane on the switch was big enough to...
I owned a book once – long since wandered off in the hands of a friend or one of my children so I can’t give proper reference – where they discuss replication teleportation. Where your pattern is transmitted, but your physical self is not. Back in the 90s, some smart folks at IBM were working on just this theory. In the book, the new copy of you wakes up and they say “congratulations, you’ve made it to Mars safely”, while the old copy of you wakes up and gets the same speech, right before the old copy is killed. The...
We developers used to be obsessed with optimizations. Like a child with an Erector Set and a whole lot of spare parts, we always wanted to “make it better”. In our case, better was faster and using less memory/CPU resources. Where development came from – a few Kilobytes of memory, a much slower CPU, and non-optimizing compilers, this all made sense. But the rest of IT, and indeed, the business, didn’t want to see us build our Erector set higher, or make our code more complex buy more efficient, machines were speeding up at a relatively constant rate and the...
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...
In the US, many people watch the entire season of NASCAR without ever really paying attention to the racing. They are fixated on seeing a crash, and at the speed that NASCAR races average – 81mph on the most complex track to 188 mph on the least curvy track – they’re likely to get what they’re watching for. But that misses the point of the races. The merging of man and machine to react at lightning speed to changes in the environment are what the races are about. Of course speed figures in, but it is not the only...
Storage at rest de-duplication has been a growing point of interest for most IT staffs over the last year or so, just because de-duplication allows you to purchase less hardware over time, and if that hardware is a big old storage array sucking a ton of power and costing a not-insignificant amount to install and maintain, well, it’s appealing. Most of the recent buzz has been about primary storage de-duplication, but that is merely a case of where the market is. Backup de-duplication has existed for a good long while, and secondary storage de-duplication is not new. Only recently...
YES, IT IS ABOUT THE BUSINESS… Over the years data archiving and backup technology have waxed and waned, growing closer and further away from each other as the needs of the enterprise, new technologies, and the external economic and regulatory environment have changed. There have been clear indications that the need for reliable backup and archiving of data was a growing regulatory requirement, yet it did nothing for the business, and that meant it was a hard-to-sell expense. BUT LET’S NOT GENERALIZE TOO MUCH. Out in the...
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...
Anyone who has children and travels by car will tell you that there is no substitute for the mandatory array of bathroom breaks that must be taken by those children. One of the many reasons I prefer to travel at night when driving long distances is that children who are asleep are not asking to pull into the next rest stop for yet another restroom break. And I was one of those children. My father once told me I had the smallest bladder on the planet… Right before my mother made him stop at a gas station for me. ...
Where you are going has a huge impact upon the mode of transportation that you choose to use. If you are going to the neighbor’s house, you tend to walk. If on your way to town or downtown, you tend to take a motorized vehicle. Out for a leisurely trip around the subdivision? You are likely going to ride a bike. Going to another continent, probably a plane, maybe a ship… You get the idea. Several years ago (while working for Network Computing) I reviewed WAN Optimization products, with an eye to file transfer acceleration. Interestingly, F5 decided not...
Lori, the Toddler, and I drove down to my mothers’ house in Cincinnati (about 9 hours away) for the fourth of July weekend. Our youngest daughter drove her car with her sister, the sister’s fiancé, and our grand-daughter. We stayed in touch via text message and drove through the night. What does all of this have to do with networking, you ask? Well I was driving about 1AM around Indianapolis, Indiana, and realized that there were an awful lot of cars on the road for the middle of the night, presumably holiday traffic, but things were moving along smoothly,...
THE SLOW GROWTH OF SPEEDY COMMUNICATIONS It used to be that if you were replicating database or file storage to a remote location you had few options if your connection was not the best. You could use rate shaping to give more of the pipe over to your replication, increase TCP window sizes, turn on jumbo frames… All relatively primitive stuff. As time went on, the speed and reliability of data connections grew, which increased our usage of such connections to replicate data, which decreased the reliability of the connections because we...
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...
It’s been a good long while since I wrote an installment of Load Balancing for Developers, but you all keep reading them, and they are still my most read blog posts on a monthly basis, so since I have an increased interest in WAN Optimization, and F5 has a great set of WAN Optimization products, I thought I’d tag right onto the end with more information that will help you understand what Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are doing for (and to) your code, and how they can help you tweak your application without writing even more code. If you’re...
In a recent blog by Randy George over at Network Computing, he gets a little excited over the prospects of running 100% virtual, and is somewhat dismissive of hardware appliances. Buried in toward the end of the post is a note that says he’ll be running tests of virtual Wan Optimization tools, which explains his excitement up front a bit. Lori and I used to write for Network Computing (NWC), before it went away, then returned as a web pub. We never worked with Mr. George, but we have worked with some of the people who are still...
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...
