Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

I wasn’t aware of all the stuff F5 does, so I am glad to have been part of this, because the things they showed us were quite impressive. The online vMotion of a virtual machine between data centers is what really made the biggest impression if you ask me.

Not all live demo’s done by presenters go without flaw. That’s the biggest danger of doing live demo’s in front of an IT crowd. If something should go wrong, the IT crowd is sure to notice it. You might end up looking like a fool. But not here at the F5 Tech Field Day session. F5 could proudly rely on their own equipment and knowledge to pull of their demo without a problem.

For all the stuff we got to see, the data was hosted on a NFS share, so these demo’s certainly do not apply to all VMware installations. F5 strengths are not in the Fibre channel arena, but in the IP arena. In there, they are able to kick some serious IP ass.

I was shown some impressive network (WAN) optimization products like the BIG-IP  Local Traffic Managers and Global Traffic Managers. Load balancing and IP fail-over, all done, all working. I am not a networking guy, so I was actually more into the ARX series device. If you are more of IP guy or gall, try some of the other Tech Field Day blog posts.

ARX Series.

This device is a NAS virtualization product, a technology F5  acquired by buying Acopia in 2007. You can put this in front of one or more file serving devices, either CIFS or NFS based, and have all of this virtualized.

The applications and users in your environment will talk to the ARX device, which in turn will serve your data from it’s backend NAS devices like NetApp, HP PolyServ, Dell NX series or regular file servers.

With the ARX device you can define a whole bung of policies which control the management of your file data. Based on age, file extensions, or what ever policy you might want to set, the data can get moved to another file storage tier in your environment. You could move all your employees mp3 files to a low cost SATA array with no protection for instance. Many scenarios are possible, only limited by your imagination and wallet I guess.

Some additional features you would probably like to have in your environment, like virus scanning, is not available. You will still be relying on the methods in place on the file serving gear you are already using. Data protection of the files you are storing is also not a feature provided by the ARX. It is what it is. File virtualization. If you want data protection, you still would want to use the features your NAS devices provides, or rely on the more traditional methods like file based backup or NDMP. This product can help in reducing your backup volume though, by moving unused (or almost never used) data off to a tier that has different backup schemes, or maybe no backup at all (not my recommendation though).

The next step in tiering your data would be to put it into the ” cloud ” (here’s that term again) so you would no longer have to operationally manage this data in your infrastructure, including backup handling. The ARX has several API interfaces to the currently biggest cloud storage vendors ready to go. F5 showed us another successful demo in which they were able to show us just how seamless the integration works. From an end-user perspective there was no difference noticeable as to where the file was actually stored. With large files, you might experience some delay however. This was not shown in the demo, because it could take up a lot of our precious time.

The file will remain in the cloud, even if it is updated. The update of a file will not result in the file being stored on a local tier. This can cause some delay in the file manipulation transaction. Only new files will be matched to a policy to store it on a local tier. I have some reservations whether or not this is a good way to work. I would think storing the updated file locally would be the better way to go. I might be missing some detailed information on the policy options here. That’s because the session wasn’t long enough to go into it in that much detail. Feel free to comment on this post if you can offer more detailed info on the policies or have any other remark on this post.

The ARX box comes in three sizes.

1. ARX500
   1. Entry level, single power supply.
   2. 800 Mbps throughput.
   3. 2 x 1Gb/s.
   4. Supporting up to 600 users.
2. ARX2000
   1. A redundantly powered device.
   2. 4Gbps throughput.
   3. 12 x 1Gb/s.
   4. Supporting up to 6000 users.
3. ARX4000
   1. Like the ARX2000, a redundantly powered device.
   2. 12Gbps throughput.
   3. 2 x 10Gb/s.
   4. 12 x 1Gb/s.
   5. Supporting up to 12000 users.

There is a question I have about the maximum number of users it supports. The numbers are very high obviously, but are they based on -1- active session per user, or not? It is very rare for a user to have just -1- active session to a file server.

The device in itself is a single point of failure, no matter how robust the hardware and software is. If you want a high-availability solution, your should buy at least two, and put them in a cluster configuration. I wasn’t able to determine whether or not you could make it a stretched cluster to span two data centers to provide availability and disaster tolerance.

Data Manager

In case you might be curious on how much file data you have and how much of it is actually used, you could go discover your file data using the F5 Data Manager. You can try it for free for 90 days. That’s actually quite a long trial period.
Data Manager gives you some elaborate reports on your file data and profiles.

More on Data Manager…

This morning, I saw a tweet about a x86 blade being shoved into a zSeries frame.
It appeared to be an IBM Press release introducing new developments in IBM zSeries land. Like tape, mainframe is dead for years (so they say). There are not many analysts that believe this statement, and mainframe is long from being dead. I do see fewer of them however. Only the very large (mostly financial) companies seem to be able to run zSeries workloads because of the expertise and cost involved with running zSeries.

Over the last years, IBM has done a lot of development in mainframe equipment and really has brought down cost of running mainframe gear. For most IT folks, the mainframe has lost its sexiness (if it ever was sexy), and it has gotten really hard to find decent staff to operate mainframe gear and workloads. So in a technical and financial sense, the mainframe might be long from dead, but without good staff, who can run mainframe gear in their shops? I have been seeing a lot of new faces in the IT industry, none of which seem to be developing skills in the mainframe arena.

The open systems world seems to be more exciting because the development is done much faster and cheaper (although I myself might not agree with the cheaper part). Many new developments in the various IT stacks like networking, storage, systems and software are solely targeted at open systems worlds, completely ignoring the mainframe world. The vendors we spoke last week at Tech Field Day also have no plans on developing for mainframe. Part of which is the mainframe vendors own fault, since they have really closed down access to mainframe development resources for everyone.

zEnterprise (z196)

The new zEnterpise will be available later this year, and will hold 96 of the worlds fastest CPU’s running at 5.2 Ghz. It has water-cooling enablement. Funny, because water-cooling was removed around the time I was introduced to the mainframe world, back in 1996. This system is going to have 60% more capacity then its predecessor “System z10″, while consuming about the same amount of energy.

Introducing the BladeCenter Extension.

IBM is also developing gear which is supposed to simplify the data-center. The’d be stupid not to obviously. The BladeCenter extension is a frame that can be attached to the new IBM zEnterprise “main”-frame which will be able to hold a number of “open systems” blades.

” The IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension allows supports purpose IBM POWER7 and System x BladeCenter systems as well as blades optimized for specific workloads, such as analytics and managing Web infrastructure.”

• Later this year IBM will be introducing the Power7 blades to run IBM AIX
• Next year, xSeries blades will be running Linux OS in this extension.

Using the new Unified Resource Management software, IBM claims to be able to run over a 100,000 virtual machines on a fully configured zEnterprise system.

The mainframe software has a very well deserved reputation of being extremely manageable and configurable and is well known for its stability and predictability. My life in IT once started as a MVS operator, so I always have had a weakness for mainframe environments.

What this will hold for us in the future, who knows, but if IBM manages to gets the virtualization part of the ground including Microsoft Windows workloads, this might be another player in the UCS and VCE arena worth watching, although I sure hope there is a way to run this zEnterprise system without the need of mainframe system engineering skills. If these skills are required to operate this system, I think the market is limited to the current mainframe shops and will pose no threat to the UCS and VCE solutions.

My opinion on this is, unless IBM manages to run this system with the server virtualization features a la VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V they will have a hard time selling this. Even in the shops that already deploy mainframe gear.

The data center convergence question I have for IBM is; when will you join in convergence with “Ficon over Ethernet (FioE)” or in accordance with recent Tech Field Day developments FCoTR?

But I love to be educated on the markets IBM is targeting and how they would be doing that.