ForeThought - RCV Innovations

The Perspective in this blog is a first hand account from working for a network service provider under going a transformation. We are moving from simple bandwidth and data center services provider to a complete managed services provider(for IT Infrastructure) by partnering with several hardware, software and tools providers. Let me do jargon bursting for easier comprehension... SaaS - Software as a Service - Providing a in-house/third party software in a shared Multi-tenanted (apartment leasing type) model with automatic upgrades and technology refreshes in a Pay as you go model. Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Providing basic building blocks of IT like Servers, Storage and Networks along with some tools that enable hosting/running compatible applications on a pay as you go model. Cloud computing - Similar to PaaS in a pay per use model with more generic/abstracted platform services. What are Managed Services ? Managed services in general is the practice of transferring day-to-day relat...

Virtualization as a technology existed from the mainframe era in large glasshouse data centers. Transfer of virtualization technology on to commodity x86 based hardware has increased the adoption of virtualization. The first generation of x86 based Virtualization technologies had limited use in testing, development and re-hosting legacy applications. We are seeing rapid evolution of Virtualization technologies by the vendor community into what we know as Virtualization 2.0. What is Virtualization 2.0 ? In my view, Virtualization 2.0 is about taking the virtualization from development, staging and production servers to Desktop (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - VDI), Mobile and affordable Cloud based Disaster Recovery/business continuity applications. Virtualization 2.0 signifies free/inexpensive access to advanced hypervisor based Virtualization technologies from various vendors. This is allowing the change in deployment models for virtualization from typical scale-up approach(SMP with ...

Storage Networking is a tricky animal...My brush with networked storage platforms started from the time we needed few hundred megabytes of shared storage for building a cluster to enable database and email consolidation in the late 90's. The essential character of Block based network storage continues, the goal is to protect and consolidate mission critical workloads. Networked Storage using traditional FC-SAN's are getting more complicated in the quest for speed and functionality. In my view, there is a need to simplify networked storage to reduce risk, decrease mean-time-to-repair and reduce costs. Drawing from my personal experience, More complicated SAN sub-systems and network elements are harder to understand, harder to troubleshoot and expensive to deploy.... Personally, I have moved away from SAN implementations with FC-Front end networks after attempting to use use FC-to-ISCSI routers and put up with the complexity in the nework layout and provisioning challenges. The A...