Application Storage, Data Storage
Article | July 12, 2023
Introduction
It is hard to manage a modern firm without a convenient and adaptable IT infrastructure. When properly set up and networked, technology can improve back-office processes, increase efficiency, and simplify communication. IT infrastructure can be utilized to supply services or resources both within and outside of a company, as well as to its customers. IT infrastructure when adequately deployed aids organizations in achieving their objectives and increasing profits.
IT infrastructure is made up of numerous components that must be integrated for your company's infrastructure to be coherent and functional. These components work in unison to guarantee that your systems and business as a whole run smoothly.
Enterprise IT Infrastructure Trends
Consumption-based pricing models are becoming more popular among enterprise purchasers, a trend that began with software and has now spread to hardware. This transition from capital to operational spending lowers risk, frees up capital, and improves flexibility. As a result, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues increased by 53% from 2015 to 2016, making them the fastest-growing cloud and infrastructure services segments. The transition to as-a-service models is significant given that a unit of computing or storage in the cloud can be quite cheaper in terms of the total cost of ownership than a unit on-premises.
While businesses have been migrating their workloads to the public cloud for years, there has been a new shift among large corporations. Many companies, including Capital One, GE, Netflix, Time Inc., and others, have downsized or removed their private data centers in favor of shifting their operations to the cloud.
Cybersecurity remains a high priority for the C-suite and the board of directors. Attacks are increasing in number and complexity across all industries, with 80% of technology executives indicating that their companies are unable to construct a robust response. Due to lack of cybersecurity experts, many companies can’t get the skills they need on the inside, so they have to use managed security services.
Future of Enterprise IT Infrastructure
Companies can adopt the 'As-a-Service' model to lower entry barriers and begin testing future innovations on the cloud's basis. Domain specialists in areas like healthcare and manufacturing may harness AI's potential to solve some of their businesses' most pressing problems.
Whether in a single cloud or across several clouds, businesses want an architecture that can expand to support the rapid evolution of their apps and industry for decades. For enterprise-class visibility and control across all clouds, the architecture must provide a common control plane that supports native cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well as enhanced networking and security features.
Conclusion
The scale of disruption in the IT infrastructure sector is unparalleled, presenting enormous opportunities and hazards for industry stakeholders and their customers. Technology infrastructure executives must restructure their portfolios and rethink their go-to-market strategies to drive growth. They should also invest in the foundational competencies required for long-term success, such as digitization, analytics, and agile development.
Data center companies that can solve the industry's challenges, as well as service providers that can scale quickly without limits and provide intelligent outcome-based models. This helps their clients achieve their business objectives through a portfolio of 'As-a-Service' models, will have a bright future.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 3, 2023
Communications giant Verizon last week launched 5G for Business Internet in 20 new markets, targeting SMBs and enterprises alike.
The fixed-wireless plans provide download speeds of 100Mbps ($69/month), 200Mbps ($99/month), and 400Mbps ($199/month) with no data limits. Upload speeds are slower. Verizon is also offering a 10-year price lock for new customers with no long-term contract required.
“As 5G Business Internet scales into new cities, businesses of all sizes can gain access to the superfast speeds, low latency and next-gen applications enabled by 5G Ultra-Wideband, with no throttling or data limits,” Tami Erwin, CEO of Verizon Business, said in a statement.
“We’ll continue to expand the 5G Business Internet footprint and bring the competitive pricing, capability, and flexibility of our full suite of products and services to more and more businesses all over the country.”
The service was previously launched in parts of Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. Verizon started rolling out 5G services last year using lower spectrum bands. According to a study by IHS Markit’s RootMetrics, Verizon offers speeds similar to those of T-Mobile but behind AT&T.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 10, 2023
With the regular increase of data in both cloud and organizations, a way to tackle these data and extract valuable insights is highly in demand. Although there are multiple tools available in the market not all of them can provide a complete resolution.
Developed in 2003, Slunk has become the ideal tool for numerous businesses across the globe. It is a software platform that is popular for searching, monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing data in real-time. Slunk performs operations such as gathering, interpreting, and coordinating data to create alerts, dashboards, and graphs instantaneously.
Why Splunk?
1. Business Flexibility
It improves the way people around organizations identify, predict, and solve problems simultaneously. It helps in answering questions for every part of the business, be it DevOps, IT, or Business Development. It offers capabilities to detect, visualize and collaborate anytime.
2. Enhance Digitization
Splunk assists businesses in ensuring the success of their digitization with its artificial intelligence and machine learning-based solutions.
3. New Opportunities
No matter how much data you have gathered, Splunk will help in scaling according to the data volume. It does that with the ecosystem provided by its partners and services.
4. Data-To-Everything
It is a platform that enables businesses to detect, monitor, analyze, and work with both structured and unstructured data regardless of their source and timescale. It allows users to ask any question related to insights and take actions accordingly.
5. Fast & Flexible
The time to value can be sped up to two days. Companies can deploy in increasing capacity within two days and retrieve their data as long as 90 days. Moreover, the upgrades and updates are handled by the team for them.
6. Maximize Value
The subscribers of Splunk do not have to manage infrastructure and they do not even need one. As a service, it offers scarce and valuable resources as required for better performance.
7. Robust Security
Splunk is certified and authorized by ISO 27001 and FedRAMP. They proffer dedicated cloud environments with encryption to the customer for robust security as well.
Apart from these major advantages, Splunk also grants incredible GUI, reduces troubleshooting time, real-time dashboard visibility, incorporates AI in data strategy, monitors business metrics, powerful visualization, and search. Some of the crucial features of Splunk include development & testing, faster ROI generation, developing real-time data applications, and real-time architecture stats & reports.
Be Ready for Splunk-Based Cloud Infra Maintenance
At its core, Splunk is an efficient tool for data aggregation that comes with versatile search functionality. Any business can get started with Splunk depending on certain needs they have for data-set monitoring and management. It allows users to take a highly effective data wealth that is pulled from different sources like websites, apps, or IoT.
All that is needed to do is getting started with Splunk-based applications for which you can hire developers with relevant knowledge and experience.
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DevOps
Article | May 5, 2023
Adopting DevOps and CD in IaaS environments is a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to achieve agility, competitiveness, and customer satisfaction in their software delivery processes.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. What is IaaS Virtualization?
3. Virtualization Techniques for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
4. Integration of IaaS with CI/CD Pipelines
5. Considerations in IaaS Virtualized Environments
5.1. CPU Swap Wait
5.2. CPU System/Wait Time for VKernel:
5.3. Memory Balloon
5.4.Memory Swap Rate:
5.5. Memory Usage:
5.6. Disk/Network Latency:
6. Industry tips for IaaS Virtualization Implementation
6.1. Infrastructure Testing
6.2. ApplicationTesting
6.3. Security Monitoring
6.4. Performance Monitoring
6.5. Cost Optimization
7. Conclusion
1. Introduction
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) virtualization presents significant advantages for organizations seeking to enhance their agility, flexibility, and speed to market within the DevOps and continuous delivery frameworks. Addressing the associated risks and challenges is crucial and can be achieved by employing the appropriate monitoring and testing techniques, enlisted further, in this blog.
IaaS virtualization allows organizations to provision and de-provision resources as needed, eliminating the need for long-term investments in hardware and data centers. Furthermore, IaaS virtualization offers the ability to operate with multiple operating systems, databases, and programming languages, empowering teams to select the tools and technologies that best suit their requirements.
However, organizations must implement comprehensive testing and monitoring strategies, ensure proper security and compliance controls, and adopt the best resource optimization and management practices to leverage the full potential of virtualized IaaS. To achieve high availability and fault tolerance along with advanced networking, enabling complex application architectures in IaaS virtualization, the blog mentions five industry tips.
2. What is IaaS Virtualization?
IaaS virtualization involves simultaneously running multiple operating systems with different configurations. To run virtual machines on a system, a software layer known as the virtual machine monitor (VMM) or hypervisor is required.
Virtualization in IaaS handles website hosting, application development and testing, disaster recovery, and data storage and backup. Startups and small businesses with limited IT resources and budgets can benefit greatly from virtualized IaaS, enabling them to provide the necessary infrastructure resources quickly and without significant capital expenditures.
Virtualized IaaS is a potent tool for businesses and organizations of all sizes, enabling greater infrastructure resource flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
3. Virtualization Techniques for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Virtualization is a vital part of the DevOps software stack. Virtualization in DevOps process allows teams to create, test, and implement code in simulated environments without wasting valuable computing resources. DevOps teams can use the virtual services for thorough testing, preventing bottlenecks that could slow down release time. It heavily relies on virtualization for building intricate cloud, API, and SOA systems. In addition, virtual machines benefit test-driven development (TDD) teams that prefer to begin their troubleshooting at the API level.
4. Integration of IaaS with CI/CD Pipelines
Continuous integration is a coding practice that frequently implements small code changes and checks them into a version control repository. This process not only packages software and database components but also automatically executes unit tests and other tests to provide developers with vital feedback on any potential breakages caused by code changes.
Continuous testing integrates automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline. For example, unit and functionality tests identify issues during continuous integration, while performance and security tests are executed after a build is delivered in continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is the process of automating the deployment of applications to one or more delivery environments.
IaaS provides access to computing resources through a virtual server instance, which replicates the capabilities of an on-premise data center. It also offers various services, including server space, security, load balancing, and additional bandwidth. In modern software development and deployment, it's common to integrate IaaS with CI/CD pipelines. This helps automate the creation and management of infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code (IAC) tools. Templates can be created to provision resources on the IaaS platform, ensuring consistency and meeting software requirements. Additionally, containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes can deploy applications on IaaS platforms.
5. Considerations in IaaS Virtualized Environments
5.1. CPU Swap Wait
The CPU swap wait is when the virtual system waits while the hypervisor swaps parts of the VM memory back in from the disk. This happens when the hypervisor needs to swap, which can be due to a lack of balloon drivers or a memory shortage. This can affect the application's response time. One can install the balloon driver and/or reduce the number of VMs on the physical machine to resolve this issue.
5.2. CPU System/Wait Time for VKernel
Virtualization systems often report CPU or wait time for the virtualization kernel used by each virtual machine to measure CPU resource overhead. While this metric can't be directly linked to response time, it can impact both ready and swap times if it increases significantly. If this occurs, it could indicate that the system is either misconfigured or overloaded, and reducing the number of VMs on the machine may be necessary.
5.3. Memory Balloon
Memory ballooning is a memory management technique used in virtualized IaaS environments. It works by injecting a software balloon into the VM's memory space. The balloon is designed to consume memory within the VM, causing it to request more memory from the hypervisor. As a result, if the host system is experiencing low memory, it will take memory from its virtual infrastructures, thus negatively affecting the guest's performance, causing swapping, reduced file-system buffers, and smaller system caches.
5.4. Memory Swap Rate
Memory swap rate is a performance metric used in virtualized IaaS environments to measure the amount of memory being swapped to disk. When the swap rate is high, it leads to longer CPU swap times and negatively affects application performance. In addition, when a VM is running, it may require more memory than is physically available on the server. In such cases, the hypervisor may use disk space as a temporary storage area for excess memory. Therefore, to optimize, it is important to ensure that VMs have sufficient memory resources allocated.
5.5. Memory Usage
Memory usage refers to the amount of memory being used by a VM at any given time. Memory usage is assessed by analyzing the host level, VM level, and granted memory. When memory usage exceeds the available physical memory on the server, the hypervisor may use disk space as a temporary storage area for excess memory, leading to performance issues. The disparity between used and granted memory indicates the overcommitment rate, which can be adjusted through ballooning.
5.6. Disk/Network Latency
Some virtualization providers provide integrated utilities for assessing the latency of disks and network interfaces utilized by a virtual machine. Since latency directly affects response time, increased latency at the hypervisor level will also impact the application. An excessive amount of latency indicates the system is overloaded and requires reconfiguration. These metrics enable us to monitor and detect any negative impact a virtualized system might have on our application.
6. Industry tips for IaaS Virtualization Implementation
Testing, compliance management and security arecritical aspects of managing virtualized IaaS environments . By implementing a comprehensive strategy, organizations ensure their infrastructure and applications' reliability, security, and performance.
6.1. Infrastructure Testing
This involves testing the infrastructure components of the IaaS environment, such as the virtual machines, networks, and storage, aiming to ensure the infrastructure is functioning correctly and that there are no performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, or configuration issues. Testing the virtualized environment, storage testing (testing data replication and backup and recovery processes), and network testing are some of the techniques to be performed.
6.2. Application Testing
Applications running on the IaaS virtual environment should be thoroughly tested to ensure they perform as expected. This includes functional testing to ensure that the application meets its requirements and performance testing to ensure that the application can handle anticipated user loads.
6.3. Security Monitoring
Security monitoring is critical in IaaS environments, owing to the increased risks and threats. This involves monitoring the infrastructure and applications for potential security threats, vulnerabilities, or breaches. In addition, regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing help identify and address potential security issues before they become significant problems.
6.4. Performance Monitoring
Performance monitoring is essential to ensuring that the underlying infrastructure meets performance expectations and has no performance bottlenecks. This comprises monitoring metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, network traffic, and disk utilization. This information is used to identify performance issues and optimize resource usage.
6.5. Cost Optimization
Cost optimization is a critical aspect of a virtualized IaaS environment with optimized efficiency and resource allocation. Organizations reduce costs and optimize resource usage by identifying and monitoring usage patterns and optimizing elastic and scalable resources. It involves right-sizing resources, utilizing infrastructure automation, reserved instances, spot instances (unused compute capacity purchased at a discount), and optimizing storage usage.
7. Conclusion
IaaS virtualization has become a critical component of DevOps and continuous delivery practices. To rapidly develop, test, and deploy applications with greater agility and efficiency by providing on-demand access to scalable infrastructure resources to Devops teams, IaaS virtualization comes into picture. As DevOps teams continue to seek ways to streamline processes and improve efficiency, automation will play an increasingly important role. Automated deployment, testing, and monitoring processes will help reduce manual intervention and increase the speed and accuracy of development cycles. In addition, containers will offer a lightweight and flexible alternative to traditional virtualization, allowing DevOps teams to package applications and their dependencies into portable, self-contained units that can be easily moved between different environments. This can reduce the complexity of managing virtualized infrastructure environments and enable greater flexibility and scalability. By embracing these technologies and integrating them into their workflows, DevOps teams can achieve greater efficiency and accelerate their delivery of high-quality software products.
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