Scale Computing & the Time-Starved Administrator’s Guide to Simplifying the Server Room

Editor's Notes

• #2: ** slides full screen** make us all organizers** click SHOW MY SCREEN** Start broadcast** RECORDThanks everyone for joining us! We will being the webinar at 2 minutes after the hour to ensure that everyone who wants to join, is able to join the call. Please hang on for a couple more minutes and we’ll be right back!——[TITLE SLIDE]Hello and Welcome to The Time-Starved Administrator’s Guide to Simplifying the Server Room!In this webinar, we will cover…- The challenges that today’s mid-market administrators are facing- we’ll discuss new technology that can helpAnd, finally, we’ll have a live demo of the scale computing hyperconvergence solution in actionIf you have questions during the webinar, please use the gotomeeting question box to enter your question. During the webinar there will be one point where we ask you to answer 4 quick survey questions to ensure that we are connecting with your needs on this webinar and future webinars. And finally, the last point that I want to make is that, anyone who is attending this event live today will be entered to win your own drone quad copter, thanks to Scale Computing and VirtualizationSoftware.com.This webinar is dedicated to those admins out there who are the firefighters of technology, every day (and maybe every night) at their company. From this webinar we hope to help to make your life simpler and less stressful. We’ve got a lot to cover so Let’s get started!!
• #3: So that you have a little background on who is presenting today, let me first tell you about myself.My name is David Davis and I’m a VMwarevExpert, VCP, CCIE, and a video training author, on the topic of virtualization, for pluralsight.com. I started my career in IT as a server and network admin, working in the datacenter. Later I was an IT manager at medium enterprise where we had a very successful server consolidation project, consolidating roughly 80% of our servers. It was then that I learned about the great power and efficiency that virtualization could provide. Since then, I’ve been writing, speaking, and creating video training around virtualization. I’ve spoke at VMware user groups and Vmworld in the US, Canada, and Europe. I’m the co-owner of actualtechmedia.com where we create technical marketing content and demand generation for companies in virtualization, storage, and cloud computing. My blog isvirtualizaitonsoftware.comand you can find me on Twitter as @DavidMDavis.Also on the call is Dave Demlow from Scale Computing. Davejoined Scale Computing in 2010 and is responsible for all aspects of Product Management, Technical Support and Services. Dave brings over 20 years of storage and software product management experience having previously served as CTO and VP of Product Management for Double-Take Software and leading their product, technology and M&A strategy over the course of 13 years.  In addition to the release of many innovative products and patented technologies, Dave was a key contributor to Double-Take’s overall business plan which lead to key partnerships, multiple rounds of venture funding, IPO and multiple M&A transactions.  Prior to Double-Take, Dave held product management and systems engineering roles with Seagate Software and the LAN Dealers Association (LANDA).  Dave holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Marketing from the University of Illinois, Chicago.Now that you know who we are, let’s start this webinar off by talking about some of the ongoing challenges we are facing in IT.
• #4: I want to start this webinar off by giving a special thanks to those heros of the datacenter – the people (many of you on the call today) who work hard every day to put out the never ending number of problems that pop up in the datacenter.Hopefully you never have a real fire in the datacenter and likely you know the types of problems I’m talking about-New applications demands and servers to run themSlow application performance complaintsOut of disk space issuesRemote user access issuesTroubleshooting backup and restore And trying to find time tp plan for disaster recoveryYou might feel like you are constantly playing the “whack a mole game”Trust me, I have been there. I’ve been responsible for over 2500 end users, spread across 80 locations, using 1500 devices to access the datacenter with about a 100 servers. I dealt with a number ending support requests queue and felt that I would never find the time to just slow down and do those things that I should be doing to PREVENT fires instead of constantly fighting them.
• #5: I blame many of the problems in the datacenter on the technology we use. When we bought it, a few years back, it was touted as the greatest thing ever invented BUT, today, we are left with the headaches of too many physical servers that are too hard to manage, complex network configurations, storage arrays that need full time babysitters, high availability systems that are too costly and complex to put in for more than a couple of your most critical applications, and simply too many vendors to call when something breaks.Surely you have heard of all the advanced features offered in the high end virtualization platforms that are used by the largest enterpriises. Unfornatuely, most mid- market companies struggle to pay for the advanced features that they could benefit from – things like HA, load balancing, replication, automated disaster recovery systems, and advanced virtualization backup application.
• #6: I worked for a private mid-market company where every dollar we spent came right out of the owners checkbook and IT was seen as an expense that needed to be reduced as much as possible. At the same time, the same company executives would stop by with a weekly pet technology project that they wanted help with and would drop off approvals for new applications and end user devices, left and right.Likely, your in a similar boat – increasing expectations on IT – where they want more functionality and more end users with access while, at the same time, an ever decreasing IT budget.The expectations are always “do more with less” and it can be a frustrating place to be.Before we talk about what the answer is to this problem, at least in my opinion, …
• #7: Back to the problems that we are facing … let’s talk about what I see as the answer to help you save time in the datacenter, help you be more productive, and help your company save money.The datacenter must be simplified! Those complex systems must be consolidated, physically, and managed from a single interface.Only with simplification can you be able to “do more with less”, meet those expectations, provide for the increased demands, and decrease the stress that you are under.What if you could get to a single “monolithic” datacenter where, in a single cluster of a handful of servers, you were able to meet your application needs and manage it from a single interface?
• #8: I believe that, through some of the latest innovations in technology – this more simple datacenter concept – could be a reality.…At the top of the list is virtualization. Virtualization isn’t totally new but so many companies still haven’t taken full advantage of it. Virtualization personally saved me and my datacenter team a tremendous amount of time. It made our life so much more efficient and allowed us to do things we never dreamed possible (and especially not on a relatively low budget) – moving running VMs from one host to another, cloning VMs, high availability, and simplified disaster recovery.Some companies still need to virtualize while other companies stated virtualization and stalled out. To help you save time in the datacenter, I encourage you to push forward with virtualization to 100% virtualization in your datacenter.[POLL QUESTION -- what % virtualized are you?][POLL QUESTION – how many people in IT?]…Something else that has changed over the past few years is that server hardware has increased in scalability, with the ability to run so many more VMs than ever before. A the same time, that hardware has become more commoditized where, with the virtualization layer applied, on top, one mid-grade server is just as good as another.…At the same time, Virtualization software has gotten smarter and more feature rich. Additionally, the virtualization ecosystem has matured with virtualization specific backup software, disaster recovery software, management software, and more – that make these common datacenter tasks – tremendously more efficient.…Another new advent in smarter software is accomplished with scale out storage architecture.Now I want to bring in Dave Demlow to talk about what scale out storage is and how it helps datacenter admins……Thanks Dave, finally, cloud ready and web scale applications and infrastructure are changing the way that we think about datacenter infrastructure. Dave, how does Sclae computing use web scale?
• #9: Graph from - http://www.ofthat.com/2013/01/enterprise-scale-is-not-web-scale.htmlSpeaking of web scale, this is how the amazons, googles, and facebooks of the world achieve massive scale, massive efficiency, at a fraction of the cost that the typical enterprise spends. If you look at the graph on the right, you can see how, the cost of web scale is relatively flat vs the typical enterprise – scale where the cost (and the complexity) skyrockets as the number of users grows.
• #10: Now let’s talk about a, potentially, new term for many of you and that is hyper convergence.. Web scale typically uses hyper convergence.With hyper convergence
• #12: Let me stop and ask you a question to think about..Who do you call in the data center when something doesn’t work?Like darthvader here, do you have just one proverbial “throat to choke”?Likely you have a call list of about 10 vendors – one or multiple vendors for storage, one or multiple vendors for network, one or multiple vendors for servers, perhaps some specialized hardware, and specialized software. This increases complexity and induces that horrible finger pointing syndrome between vendors – which increases frustration, on your side, and lengthens the outage time or slow performance time for your end users.Back when I had a IBM RS 6000 mini computer, attached IBM storage, and IBM AIX OS in the datacenter, one of the benefits was that I just had a single call.Now, I’m not saying that anyone should move to IBM – what I’m saying is that I appreciated the support model of having just a single vendor to call.With hyperconvergence plays, like scale computing, you will finally be able to get to that “single vendor support” model that, the next time there’s a problem, I know you’ll appreciate!
• #13: [ bring in Dave here ]
• #14: [ bring in Dave here ][POLL QUESTION – how long would it take to recover key apps after server failure?][POLL QUESTION – what is your primary hypervisor?]
• #15: DEMO hereKey points – Availability with Simplicity
• #19: Q1 2014 NPS 74 – all time high, trending higher
• #21: Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Power Edition Quadricopter!And the winner is…“Richard L - a storage admin from Alabama’Congrats !Be looking for an email from us so that we can get your mailing address.I won’t tell the govt about your new drone.
• #22: Dave – I’d like to give you the final word here on the webinar by asking you –If I were the typical midmarket datacenter admin out there – what action should I take today to see if a web-scale hyperconverged infrastructure might be a fit for my company?THANKS for all the time starved admins who took time out of their day to attend the webinar today!Have a great day!