ForeThought - RCV Innovations

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way. Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time. On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching. In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence ...

Desktop experience is essentially a combination of personalized profile storage, processing engine and Interaction Interface. Personal Profile Storage: Profile consists of preferences such as background color, placement of programs on the screen, Documents (current and recent), Search Results, Alerts(new mail, IM, phone call), password keyring for cloud services, bookmarks, application data(registry entries/file locations) and any other items that are specific to the individual session. Processing engine: The guts of desktop its cpu, memory, network and disk i/o capabilities that drive the performance and intuitiveness of the local and cloud applications such as office or graphics rich apps, Skype, webex etc. Interaction interface: Keyboard, Mouse, Multi-Touch and Display. The elements that assist in user interface and interaction. The trends in personalized storage are rapidly moving to cloud either as storage(google drive/dropbox) or as a synchronization platform(...

Adopting BYOD - Bring your own device is next evolution of Cloud. I am influenced by some arguments around complexity with traditional hypervisor based approached to delivering Applications to BYOD party.  The Virtual desktop infrastructure architectures and use cases are getting complex and expensive. The answer may be Datacenter based Hardware desktops(blade-pc ++) driven by advances energy efficient processor, system on chip technologies and innovations from server vendor in creating massive pools of thinHardware servers based on ATOM/VIA like processor technologies Building a inherently stateless desktops using these thinHardware is amenable for quick and easy provisioning with streamed operating systems.  It can be coupled with dynamic provisioning of user context, applications and data through intelligent provisioning middleware. This approach has a potential to create a compelling architectural choice for a new way to deploy centralized desktop exper...

It all started of with a simple idea of making cloud relevant to Business in India. We felt creating trained manpower is the first step. we had a goal of training 1000 people in 1000 days in cloud technologies. We hired Sai Narayan and Giri Pantla to market the training programs and VMware.  Within a Month, with help of Vinod(vmware) and Avik(vmware). We landed into our first VMware Deal of (Rs. 2,00,000/-). It was an IBM account - a subcontract to us by Venkat of Abacus-a local IBM dealer. With the right credentials and revenue, We became Enterprise Partners of VMware with in one month of our start. Ragesh(Our VMware Partner Business Manager) said, We were the fastest to reach that designation in the partner community.  We landed into several VMware PoCs(VDI etc) and deployment deals later in the year... We started of with a 2 day cloud computing boot camps. In a true cloud style, we used SaaS-SlideRocket(later acquired by VMware) for our first Brochure/Poster. We ha...

Aacharya Devo bhava... Dr. Vijay Bhatkar

Apple and Steve jobs have been my favorite place and person. I have been following apple since the retun of Steve jobs and own 5 apple devices dating back to a decade. I am happy to see the iCloud announcement. This is a strategic move for apple to drive the cloud+appliance model that apple has so successfully built from the itunes/ipod days. The fact that it is harnessing appstore ecosystem and developers coupled with the "free" price tag will drive cloud adoption to the next level. It is fundamentally changing definiton of Cloud from Application/Platforms/Infrastructure to a higher level abstraction of identity, information and will provide apple new insight into the content that is dear to people. This will result in making apple smarter about identifying trends and designing features into the products they build making those products even more compelling. The philosophy making it Simple, Secure and Scalable so that "it just works" is brilliant. This is...

Cloud computing is the most recent paradigm shift in Information technology. While it is not a result of any major technological breakthrough, Cloud Computing feeds on the advances in scalability and affordability of Power, Cooling, Security and Virtualization of Servers/Storage/Networking technologies. The most comprehensive industry accepted definition of Cloud computing is from NIST “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction “ The cornerstone of cloud computing is a new operational service model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and new IT Infrastructure deployment model (Private, Community, Public and Hybrid Cloud) The Prudence of Indian Government policies coupled with Industry enthusiasm have been fruitful to revolutionize informatio...

Our Team(at Sify) has been fortunate to assocate ourselves with Tidal and newscale in building the first prototype of Cloud Services Delivery Framework Demo in Dubai NewScale is definitely a well thought out service catalog and workflow environment with rich set of Webservices API's. It is completely complementaty to TIDAL and LineSider as it solves a very real need to create and mange the product/service lifecycle in a Cloud computing environment. It is a excellent choice for Integrating with VBLOCK/EMC IONIX for Baremetal Provisioing of Servers/Storage along with LineSider for Network Automation coupled Tidal Enterprise Orchestrater to realize most of the Public and Private Cloud Use cases. It is a good move Cisco-Tidal, VCE/VBlock and the Cloud computing story from Cisco.

Cloud computing is raising the expectation on the agility, availability and access to sophisticated computing and communication platforms for small and medium business. Today most critical IT components for running a successful business are available as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS platforms. There is little value in recreating all these services from the scratch by a new age service provider. It may be prudent to create a skeletal platform for essential services while taking a position of services broker to organize a rich portfolio by aggregating important services into tightly knit IT-as-a –Service offering. The initial target market for such a service provider is Small and Medium Business. We will review aspirations and capabilities needed to serve the ever increasing expectations of small and medium customers from a modern service provider. The Vision, Strategy and Execution plan to create a modern Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) provider infrastructure is described on the...

There are three aspects to Cloud Automation: 1. Provisioning 2. Change Managment 3. Security/Compliance Provisioning is typically across domains and is better enabled by strong service orchestration platforms that understand both the business(CRM/BSS etc) and the technology stack. Tidal has a edge in this context with its strong background supporting Enterprise Software integration(SAP etc.) and Runbook automation use cases with its flagship product(Tidal Scheduler). Its recent focus on intelligent network automation using tidal enterprise orchestrator platform is paying off. However it's UI capability seems to be weaker than Linesider from a cloud worldview LineSider addresses provisioning from access management and compliance perspective with decent user inteface and simple VM/appliance based delivery model for demonstrating technical provisioning capabilities. Today Cisco announced the intention to buy Pari Networks. http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2011/corp_012611.htm...

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I have been working for a new age service provider for over 3 years. Since last 2 years, I am part of the team responding to RFP's for modernizing major service provider networks including staging, testing and deployment of 4G/LTE services.I have been following the 4G/LTE trends at TMForum and other related information sources since then. History ======== In the mid-70's Telecom networks underwent a important change, they introduced the common channel signalling to break-away from physical network path to virtualizing the call setup. This was enabled by a relatively open standard called Signaling System No. 7 (SS7). According to Wikipedia - "SS7 is a set of telephony signaling protocols which are used to set up most of the world's public switched telephone network telephone calls. The main purpose is to set up and tear down telephone calls. Other uses include number translation, prepaid billing mechanisms, short message service (SMS), and a variety of other mass...

Our team had the good fortune of finishing the first vBlock deployment today as a Lab environment of a major Service Provider. Without Prior knowledge of Flexpod, we suggested adding dedicated Nexus Nexus 5500 based Access layer with L3 capability to vBlock for completeness of their Private Cloud Requirement. Incidentally the Launch of FlexPod today with integrated Nexus 5500/1010 along with UCS and Netapp 3000 Series came as a good surprise and Qualified our approach in terms of Bill of Material for Private cloud. We still donot see any L3 capabilities, Security and Application networking built-in. The Value of Private cloud deployments is the power of simplicity through stack standardization and while maitainting the performance, reliability and security of a vertically integrated infrastructure. Ideally intelligent non-it components such as switched pdu's, mini-VESDA and sensor networks need to be integrated in the hardware layer. The orchestration and management sta...

The Traditional Definition of information in the Enterprise is changing from simple unstructured and Structured ASCII Data to more broader binary formats. In the era where almost every business class mobile device is sensor-enabled, connected and Video capable. This popularity of embedding complex sensors, displays and end-effectors in to mobile devices is creating new and interesting Data collection and anlaysis use cases. The proliferation of sensor-enabled data-rich, video and voice capabilities into the business workflows is only a matter of time. Before too long we will see emergence of voice and video streaming functions becoming main stream information source. Transcribing and annotating audio/video streams enable easy indexing and search capabilities. The Data corellated from embedded sensors and sensor network will add a dimension to voice and video data to make it context and location aware. The Broadcast(like youTube), multi-cast(like netflix) and conference(webex) capabilit...

Cisco's Announcement to acquire Line sider is interesting to say least. The Approach of dynamically creating VLAN based on User Roles and tearing them down is a very interesting use case for Network Automation, this idea of very powerful when you look at the big picture of cloud workloads from virtual machine perspective. A better use case for Policy based Networks is to identify Virtual machine with a Certificate and Mac address on wakeup and by doing do the policy lookup/LDAP magic, the associated Nexus 1000v port can be configured to belong to the correct vlan. All in all it is nice story to follow... LineSider - Cisco Acquisition

The Cloud market places are emerging for buying and Selling Capacity of IaaS platforms. http://www.spotcloud.com/Technology.5.0.html I am impressed by AT&T Renewed focus on promoting vertical third party SaaS apps from its portal. Salesforce.com has strong ISV community on Force.com - PaaS and has started pitching for migration of Lotus, Sharepoint and other custom Apps into Force.com platform. This Cloud Marketplace trend is a welcome change in accelarating the adoption of cloud services.

Private Cloud is a secure, stable, scalable and simple shared services model deployed within enterprise network boundary adhering to cloud computing principles. Primary Goal of Migration to Private Cloud is Seamless transfer of Application Services from Current Data Center to the new facilities built using Shared Services Architecture for Private cloud. AppsCloud – A Methodology for migrating to Private Cloud The Emphasis of this methodology is on: Understanding application workload Behavior Ensure Security Leverage technology innovations Adherence to Cloud Computing Principles The Goal is to de-risk the datacenter migration, reduce disruption due to change and simplify the path to Private cloud adoption. Understanding Application Workloads Application Infrastructure in a large organization is inherently difficult to comprehend as a single entity due to diversity of Application workloads (Email, Database, Data warehousing, ERP, Analytics etc). D...

Cloud computing is loosely used to describe the convergence of servers, storage, network unified with a common automation framework. In order to create a sustainable and successful team, there is a need to invest into a SOLID cloud team with clear objectives of creating a SIMPLE, STABLE, NIMBLE and CAPABLE Engineering Leadership. Service Orchestration, Logistics, Infrastructure Design & Deployment (SOLID 2 ) Cloud Team Server Technology Automation & Build Lead Engineer (STABLE) Storage Infrastructure Management Practice Lead Engineer (SIMPLE) Network Infrastructure Management & Build Lead Engineer (NIMBLE) Capacity Availability Performance Automation & Build Lead Engineer (CAPABLE) This could be winning team.... on lighter vien...

The Management challenges, Eco-Consciousness and Escalating costs are driving the Technology providers to move from discrete solutions for Compute, Storage and networking to Unified Information Infrastructure. The Unified Information Infrastructure as a framework builds on Unified Compute, Unified Network, and Unified Storage. There is a need to incorporate the management and security services to complete the Data Center 3.0 requirements. The Advancements in network technologies and Standards (10 G Ethernet, FCoE, IPMI etc) are fuelling the Vision of a Unified Network. It is practical to unify the management traffic, inter-process (cluster)-communication- IPC, Storage area network (SAN) and Local area network-LAN traffic onto a single unified fabric. Some solutions are driving this to the realm of reality today. With the advent of in Blade server technology and Virtualization at the access network layer for these solutions, there is a clear shift toward Unifieds Compute. Unified Compu...

Cloud adopters should consider the following key elements when implementing Cloud service delivery frameworks: Leverage existing infrastructure within the prospective Cloud providers. Use a graduated adoption from semi-automated to fully automated processes. Balance between customization and standardization while making an effort to have differentiated services. In order to help cloud adopters realize the value of this approach, It is better to walk the talk....A Cloud Lab can be created and evolved in the same manner as a Production Cloud deployment. As a Physical Manifestion of a cloud, there are three critical components Core Network and Shared Data Center Workload Execution Engines Resource Pool Management, Securty, SLA Analytics and Automation Infrastructure (on-going development/enhancement roadmap) A Practical Deployment plan for Core Data Center Network Services is as follows: Core Network Services such as CRS, Nexus 7k Cat 6k Services complex with Service blades for Firewall/L...