ForeThought - RCV Innovations

The Choice of a Data Center location is largely influenced by emotional need for security, Business Sense and Technical Prudence. As one of the largest data center provider of India, our team is constantly juggling between these factors. It is important to understand the emotional needs of user community. Even in this age of borderless commerce and cloud based virtual infrastructure; there is still a premium for secure and accessible data center facilities. Users continue to feel safer if their servers are close to the work location. They are willing to pay a premium for accessible and secure locations. In addition to emotional needs, there may be regulatory and political factors for locality of the data. The recent drive by government of India to fund State Data Centers(SDC) in many of the Indian states under the National e-Governance Program is a visible example to fulfill these needs. In my Experience, It was easy to convince the datacenter users/customers to move-in the computing a...

This is the age of IT savvy business executives. they have a keen insight into the benefits and pitfalls of IT. This crop of Business executives constantly challenge the IT departments/CIO's on both merit and value of implemented technologies. The recent downturn has further increased the scrutiny in to the exact spend and benefits of IT investments. This resulted in a significant reduction of spend on Big ticket/Big Toys(Large SMP servers, Storage and Network Overhauls) and Growth oriented Buzzword deployments(BI/CRM etc). The New Mantra for CIO's is to plan and execute growth oriented projects with S.A.M.E (Simple, Agile, Mobile, Efficient) and Greener IT : Simple – CIO's are looking for simpler more transparent closed ended deployments of software and hardware infrastructure at a predictable cost. This driving the adoption XaaS - (X as a Service -SaaS-Software, PaaS-Platform, IaaS - Infrastructure etc) in the Enterprise. Agile- The Projects generating unique Intellect...

When I was kid... We used to go on bicycle trips... one, two some time three people on one bicycle... the bicycle trip was more fun with more people sitting on them but painful for the driver. Sharing a Single user appliance with multiple users is generally painful for the primary owner of the resource. Let's take the case of Desktop computers. If you carefully analyse a desktop computer, there are three main functions: 1. Access - Keyboard, Video, Mouse, Sound, USB etc. 2. Storage - Harddisk and CDROM 3. Compute - Processor and Memory Let's take the bicycle analogy again of sharing access - this can be realized by software like VNC Server and VNC Viewer - here One Driver(VNC Server) and Many passengers (VNC viewers) can share the Access experience. In this case the passengers(VNC viewers) are the sufferers. So Sharing the Access layer may not be such a good idea. The same is not true for both storage and compute. The Capabilities and capacities of desktop storage and compute e...

A friend of Mine shared these question to help his friend to face the media... All the answers are straight from my heart... 1. Is cutting costs in the data center a priority for most of your customers? What are the key factors pertaining to cost that pose a problem in data centers? Security enforcement, Power Density and Cooling efficiency 2. How do you propose to go about helping clients cut costs without new investments? Reuse servers, Reclaim Storage and Consolidate Database/application workloads – this will help in cutting costs. 3. What are the key criteria to improve performance of the data center? - Balanced architecture with mixture of Dense(blade-like) and standard Workloads to balance power and cooling requirements. - Well planned storage foot print with balance of performance and capacity storage. - Plan a Flat low latency network core switching and routing with properly configured structured cable plant. - Simpler non-intrusive security infrastructure so that server cycle...

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...

There are hardly any tools to truely automate a Multivendor Storage Services Environment. Storage Admin's are stuck with Veriety of Independent Web interfaces or commandline tools with little or no common semantics for common configuration elements or a provisioning activities. The procedures are generally convoluted with myriad manual settings... This is the most realistic dipiction of Multi-vendor Storage Administrators Plight... I was a ECC( http://www.emc.com/products/family/controlcenter-family.htm ) user and large-size env.. EMC Storage admin.. ECC got very close... but it was pig... to slow. Good for Symmetrix..Weak for for Clariion and third party arrays.. There are tools like NetAPP SanScreen( http://www.netapp.com/us/products/management-software/sanscreen/sanscreen-service-insight.html ), Symantec Command Central( and HP AppIQ( http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/software/bto/srmgt/index.html ), itheon's SRA http://www.itheon.com/solutions/storage_resource_analysis.htm...