September 2011 - TBL Networks

Cisco Jabber for Mac–General Availability

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

Cisco has released the first Jabber client for Mac OS X. The Jabber client supports both cloud based (WebEx Connect) and on-premise (CUPS) instant messaging and collaborative technologies. Cisco has made available or will subsequently make available the Jabber client for Apple iOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, and Windows.

As a WebEx Connect customer, we’re excited to have the first support client for the Mac operating system.

Cisco Jabber

Existing WebEx Connect users may download the Mac client through their Org Administration Tool. Other users may download the file from CCO at: http://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/release.html?mdfid=283880684&flowid=29241&softwareid=284006014&release=8.6%281%29&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest

What Fantasy Football Can Teach You About Your Data Center

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Steve Glissman

The return of football means different things to different people. For some, they strap on their shoulder pads, place a helmet on their head, and don their jersey before heading to the gridiron. For others, they load up a bowl with corn chips, turn on their laptop and television, and put on a jersey before sitting on a couch and wondering if their kicker is going to receive 7.1 points instead of his projected 6.9 points so they can beat the guy who sits in the cube across from him at work.

Yes, the arrival of autumn heralds the return of the world’s greatest fake sport – Fantasy Football . During this season, over 19 million people will “play” this “sport.” And, yes, I am one of those people who will manage their team, while not registering the irony of putting on athletic clothing so I can more effectively sit on my backside and stare at a various glowing rectangles all Sunday afternoon.

As I have found with other avenues of entertainment, I see how Fantasy Football provides us lessons regarding information technology solutions. In this case, I would like to point out some lessons that Fantasy Football can teach us about your Data Center.

Disaster Recovery/Have a back up plan

My number one draft pick this season was Jamaal Charles of the Kansas City Chiefs. Charles was ranked as a top five running back, and projected to have a great season … until I drafted him. (Yes, I take credit for his injury). After his unfortunate collision with the Detroit Lions mascot, Charles received a torn ACL, and his season was ended.

With Charles’ injury, my season could easily end in disaster. However, I was fortunate enough to plan ahead by drafting other Running Backs in case of injury, including the Buffalo Bills’ RB Fred Jackson. By having a back up plan, I still have a chance to contend for a pretend trophy.

With your data center, you too must have a disaster recovery plan. Unlike Fantasy Football, your data center actually means something in real life. In business, it is paramount for leaders to find ways to mitigate the risks to their businesses, protecting their employees, customers and investments. Extended down time or lost data equals lost productivity and lost profits.

In Fantasy Football, it is crucial to have a back up plan. Just like in disaster recovery, it is not a matter of if, but of when you will need to use it.

Value of planning ahead

When managing your Fantasy Football team, you have to factor in that your players will experience bye weeks. Every NFL team is assigned an off, or bye, week when they do not play. Accordingly, you must account for the weeks in which your players take off. You might have the best team in your league; however, if you have not planned ahead for when key positions are empty, you can put your season in jeopardy.

With your data center, it is not enough to focus on right now. You need to plan ahead to scale and grow your data center for future needs. At TBL, our data center engineers can assist you by planning for future growth, and testing to see that your current infrastructure is optimized.

In both Fantasy Football and Data Center, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

The power of defense

While it is not as exciting as drafting the best QB, or picking up the unknown Running Back who becomes a dominant player, picking a good Defense is key to your Fantasy Football success. In my first week matchup, my imaginary team squeaked out a 3.08 point victory. I need every point that I could muster that week. Fortunately for me, I had chosen San Francisco 49er’s Defense, which generated the highest points of Week 1. Without a strong defense, I would have lost.

Even if your data center is not large, defense is crucial for your success. During a recent interview with Work It Richmond, Bryan Miller of Syrinx Technologies, who partners with TBL Networks on system security, said that smaller organizations often think “that the bad guys don’t want the resources they own. They feel because they are small that whatever they own isn’t worth the trouble” and that hackers often go after “low-hanging fruit. If you present yourself an easy target, the bad guys will take advantage of it.” A strong defense is key to success in both Fantasy Football and Data Center.

While managing your Data Center might not involve keeping track of which Cincinnati Bengals are currently in jail, you can still find lessons from Fantasy Football to ensure victory in your systems management.

Memory Management in vSphere – Where we are at today

Posted on September 19, 2011February 11, 2019 by admin

This is a quick blog to discuss where vSphere is at with memory management today. vSphere has many mechanisms to reclaim memory before resorting to paging to disk. Let’s briefly look at these methods.

Memory Reclamation

Transparent Page Sharing (TPS)

Think of this as deduplication for memory. Identical pages of memory are shared with many VM’s instead of provisioning a copy of that same page to all VM’s. This can have a tremendous impact on the amount of RAM used on a given host if there are many identical pages.

Balooning

This method increases the memory pressure inside the guest so that memory that is not being used can be reclaimed. If the hypervisor were to just start taking memory pages from guests, the guest Operating Systems would not react positively to that. So, balooning is a way to place artificial pressure on the guest VM so that the VM pages unused memory to disk. Then, the hypervisor can reclaim that memory without disrupting the guest OS.

Memory compression

This method attempts to compress memory pages that would normally be swapped out via hypervisor swapping. This is preferable to swapping as there can be a performance impact when memory is swapped to disk.

Hypervisor swapping

This is the last resort for memory management. The memory pages are swapped to disk. New in vSphere 5 is the support for swapping these memory pages to SSD’s. This increases the performance when swapping is needed.

As you can see there are many memory management techniques in vSphere that allow greater consolidation ratios. The hypervisor in the virtual infrastructure does much more than just host guest VM images. There is a lot going on under the hood to consider before choosing a specific hypervisor to serve as the foundation for your infrastructure. Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss any of the “under the hood” features of vSphere.

Improving Data Center TCO

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Alan Sears

Businesses are in the business of making money. While the model that a company chooses to attempt such a feat varies widely, the formula they all subscribe to is universal: revenue less costs equals profit. It is no wonder that the goal of most senior executives is to increase revenue, decrease cost, or both. The IT department for most organizations is seen as a cost center, and usually one that is in direct conflict with one of the three aforementioned goals. Yes, as technology continually improves, it seems the IT department wants to spend more and more. “Didn’t they just buy new servers six years ago?”

However, with the guidance of a data center consultant with expertise in virtualization, computing, and storage, the next expenditure in data center technology can improve operational costs of the IT department, and work in conjunction with the goals of executives. The consolidation of hardware and software that virtualization provides can allow for a reduction in many key factors that commonly contribute to the ongoing costs of supporting the data center. With the proper study ahead of time by skilled professionals, these areas can be identified, measured, and included in a plan for the next technology refresh that will improve the total cost of ownership for the IT department. At TBL, we have created a practice around 7 of these key areas that have the most impact on the data center. It takes a proven methodology and the discipline of carefully planned deployments with low level detail given to the migration from old to new, but savings can be realized in a virtualization project.

The main issue that many organizations that virtualize face is that they do not measure ANY factors, and therefore cannot claim success in virtualizing. While the ability to consolidate is a powerful one, simply reducing the quantity of something does not inherently means that the costs associated with operating it are reduced. Businesses who are planning to virtualize the data center should make sure to work off of a baseline of known cost factors so that the financial impact can analyzed. That is the true measure of success for a business.

Quest for the Perfect Social Platform–Part 2

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

Let’s call this Quad day 1 and what a ride its been so far. Admittedly, my Linux skills are limited and that most certainly did not help in this process. There’s been quite a bit of learning about command and control of files systems and mount points that I had previously been able to get through life with which not having to become so familiar. This is all without brining up the oracle discussion…which I’ll skip, for now.

As it stands right now, I have created and deployed twelve, count them, twelve virtual machines to support this meager deployment. This sounds like an extraordinary number of servers, and it is, except for the fact that it’s all running on only two UCS B-Series blades and barely touching the CPU and RAM counts. Each blade has a single 6 core processor and 48GB or RAM.

For performance and failover testing reasons, I have all images running from one host and it’s topping out at less that 10% average CPU and 21GB of RAM consumed.

The number of virtual machines and the subsequent installation of each was initially disconcerting. Having said that, through the install process I have gathered a pretty good understanding of each machine and the role it provides. The manner in which Quad separates services would easily allow for rapid growth and roll out capacity to the tens or even hundreds of thousands of users. This isn’t all that surprising when you take into account Cisco’s history or delivering a product for the enterprise market and over time bringing it downstream.

Cisco’s approach to separating services isn’t all that different that say SharePoint; however, SharePoint allows for database, search, web, and cache services to be installed co-resident. Quad is in essence doing the same thing except that its abstracting the services out at the virtualization layer as opposed to a windows service layer. If anything, this gives Quad a bit of an advantage from flexibility and agility in allow services to be moved around or scaled without having to re-spin.

Now that we’ve completed the installation phase of this little project, we move into usability testing. Over the next few weeks I’ll be making a number of integrations with Communications Manager for phone services, Unity Connection for voicemail presentation, Exchange 2010 for calendar accessibility, and the WebEx Connect cloud for presence federation. It’s going to be an exciting few weeks. More info to come!

TBL Achieves VCE Vblock Qualified Partner Status

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Steve Glissman

Leading Technology Integrator becomes 58th company in U.S. to attain VCE qualification

TBL Networks, Inc. announced today that the company has achieved Vblock Qualified Partner Status. TBL Networks becomes just the 58^th company in the U.S. to receive this qualification from VCE.

“TBL Networks is very honored to receive the title of Vblock Qualified Partner,” said Alan Sears, President and CEO of TBL Networks, Inc. “With this certification, TBL will continue to provide its clients with the most advanced solutions in Unified Communications, Virtualization and Storage.”

TBL Networks is now qualified to sell the VCE Vblock, the world’s first completely integrated converged infrastructure offering for rapid virtualization deployment. To be considered for the status of Vblock Qualified Partner, a company must receive the highest designations and certifications for the Cisco, EMC, and VMware products that comprise the Vblock Infrastructure Platform. TBL’s accolades include Cisco Gold Certified Partner, VMware Enterprise Level Solutions Provider Partner, and EMC Premier Tier Velocity² Services Partner.

TBL Networks is a major source of expertise for the technology sector in Central Virginia. Recently, TBL was included on CRN’s Next-Gen 250 channel partner list. In addition, TBL was ranked 406 on the 2011 Inc. 500 list, becoming the only firm in Central Virginia to make the list, and ranked 34th overall in IT services.

TBL Networks is the only technology integrator in the Commonwealth of Virginia with five Cisco Voice CCIEs, employs the state’s only VMware VCDX, and had two engineers recognized as 2011 VMware vExperts.

TBL’s partner status can be found on the VCE website at http://www.vce.com/partners/profiles/tbl-networks.htm.

About VCE

VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock platform, delivers the industry’s first completely integrated IT offering with end-to-end vendor accountability. Learn more at www.vce.com.

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology. With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop. Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future. Let us take you there at www.theblinkylight.com.

Revving Up the Data Center

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Steve Glissman

Every fall, Richmond International Raceway hosts a demonstration showcasing the power of advanced engineering and cutting edge technology. When NASCAR’s “One Last Race to Make The Chase” comes to town, race fans get a chance to see (and hear) the power of converged technology in person. On the eve of the Wonderful Pistachios 400, TBL Networks used this back drop to announce our latest advancement in the use of converged technology in the data center – the Vblock.

TBL Networks’ President Alan Sears announced that TBL Networks has achieved Vblock Qualified Partner Status, becoming just the 58^th company in the world to receive this certification from VCE. With this announcement, TBL Networks can now provide it’s clients with the VCE Vblock, the world’s first completely integrated converged infrastructure offering for rapid virtualization deployment.

Using the combined resources of four technology stalwarts – VMware, Cisco, EMC and Intel, the Vblock brings together the best of the best to create a simple yet powerful data center. The Vblock’s converged infrastructure places virtualization, server, storage, networking, security and management in a single, prebuilt solution. Whereas most data centers are constructed from individual components, the Vblock arrives fully integrated and test, providing users unmatched operational simplicity.

In addition, the Vblock brings together simple yet powerful customer service and support. VCE’s partnership allows client’s access to cross-company, cross product-trained support experts. If you need support, you will not have to ponder which vendor to contact; VCE allows you to receive a single customer service experience.

Following the Vblock presentation, participants got a chance to view live NASCAR Nationwide action, exploring the pit area and watching as Kyle Busch won the Virginia 529 College Savings 250.

Revving up the data center might not be as loud as revving up a NASCAR engine, but with Vblock, it can be just as powerful.

A Cius User, Part II

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Alan Sears

The much anticipated day has arrived! The first installment of this series was posted on June 24^th, where I anxiously awaited the arrival of the Cius tablets we had just ordered from Cisco. The accessories have been trickling in over the last few weeks: first the power supplies, then the Bluetooth headsets, leather cases, a spare battery, then the media station dock with telephone receiver. I could practically visualize the full solution, we just needed the Cius tablets themselves!

Then, this past Tuesday the 30^th of August, while I was away on business in Charlotte, NC, the Cius tablets were delivered. My coworkers delighted in the irony that I was not in the office that day, and expressed their feelings in a portrait that they graciously sent to me.

So now begins the task of integrating the Cius into our infrastructure. I will leave the details of Cisco Unified Communications Manager versions, Microsoft Exchange compatibility, VMware View, Windows Folder Redirection, etc. to the technical blogs, but as we deploy the Cius for our own use, you will see more here on the user experience. Stay tuned!

End User Computing with VMware

Posted on September 6, 2011February 11, 2019 by admin

The desktop PC is dead! Finally!

Well, not yet, but VMware is sure working hard to make this a reality. I have been discussing with clients and colleagues why the traditional desktop model does not make sense for “today’s” end user for quite a few “todays.” VMware calls a user-centric approach to computing End User Computing. End users need access to their applications and information on any device from anywhere. They should not know or care about the nuances of the Operating System. This sounds like a lofty goal, but it is becoming a reality more and more every year.

If we look at the last decade (or even further into the 90’s), we have seen the Operating System itself have the spotlight. New “Operating System” features were actually marketed towards end users.

The latest OS supports more RAM!
The latest OS supports 64-bit computing!
The latest OS supports Solid State Flash Drives!
The latest OS can take advantage of a USB drive to cache your file searches and access! (What?)

I can’t think of one real end user (IT folks don’t count, sorry) that cares about any of the above. Operating System, you had your chance in the spotlight. It’s time to fade into the background where you belong. End users care about their applications to get work and play done. Operating Systems just get in the way of delivering those applications more often than not.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure certainly eases the pain of managing the Operating System for the IT Administrator while still giving the end user a computing experience that they are accustomed to. For some end users the desktop that they are accustomed to will be adequate. For some users, IT needs to deliver a computing experience beyond what they are accustomed to. No start menus, no shortcuts, no c: drive, d: drive, etc. What I’m talking about is an end user experience where the applications take front and center on any device from anywhere. This is exactly the type of technology that VMware has been working on and was previewed at VMworld 2011. They are calling it Project Appblast.

Imagine being able to launch any application (including Windows Applications) using nothing more than an HTML-5 compliant browser. Below is a technical preview of this exciting project from VMware.

The desktop PC and Operating System’s days are numbered. Bring on the apps.