In this e-book, we’ll cover storage basics, storage performance and capacity, forecasting and usage and storage best practices.
In addition to the thought provoking articles about storage silos, data protection, application performance bottlenecks, data fabrics, and the role of hyperconverged infrastructure, the eBook concludes with an original thought leadership section, A Blueprint for Smarter Storage Management: Addressing the Top 3 Challenges Impacting Your Data with Software-Defined Storage, including:• Maintaining data accessibility even in the event of a catastrophic failure• Capacity utilization and scale• Extreme performance to keep up with the rate of data acquisition
eBook topics:• Storage Silos 101: What They Are and How To Manage Them• RPO/RTO and the Impact on Business Continuity• Data Storage 101: How To Determine Business-Critical App Performance Requirements• How Best To Protect and Access Your Company’s Data• Data Fabrics and Their Role in the Storage Hardware Refresh• The Rise of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure• A Blueprint for Smarter Storage Management – Addressing the Top 3 Challenges Impacting Your Data with Software-Defined Storage
Most enterprises underestimate the planning process; they do not spend sufficient time understanding the cloud landscape and the different options available. While there are tools at hand to assist the implementation and the validation phases of the migration, planning is where all the crucial decisions need to be made.
Bad planning will lead to failed migrations. Challenges that enterprises often grapple with include:
HyperCloud Analytics provides intelligence backed by 400+ million benchmarked data-points to enable enterprises to make the right choices for the organization. HyperCloud’s cloud planning framework provides automation for four key stages that enterprises should consider as they plan their migration projects.They get automated instance recommendations and accurate cost forecasts made with careful considerations of their application requirements (bandwidth, storage, security etc). Multiple assessments can be run across the different cloud providers to understand application costs post-migration.Download our whitepaper to learn more about how you can build high-confidence, accurate plans with detailed cloud bills and cost forecasts, while expediting your cloud migrations.
The public cloud has unleashed an unprecedented wave of creativity and agility for the modern enterprise. A great cloud migration has upended decades of established architecture patterns, operating principles, and governance models. However, without any replacement for these traditional controls in place, cloud spend inevitably rises faster than anticipated. If not addressed early in the cycle, this is often overlooked until it gets out of control.
Over the course of a few decades, we have created a well-established model of IT spending; to arrive at economies of scale, procurement is centralized and typically happens at three- to five-year intervals, with all internal customers forecasting and pooling their needs. This created a natural tendency for individual project owners to overprovision resources as insurance against unexpected demand. As a result, the corporate data center today is where the two famous laws of technology meet:
With its granular and short-term billing cycles, the cloud requires a degree of financial discipline that is unfamiliar to most traditional IT departments. Faced with having to provide short-term forecasts and justify them against actual spend, they need to evolve their governance models to support these new patterns.
Having a well thought out AWS strategy is crucial to your long-term cloud gains. Taking the time to understand and pick the right instances for your apps is well worth the time and effort as it will directly impact your AWS pricing and bill.
We hope these ten strategies help inform and support you as you navigate the sometimes-turbulent waters of cloud transition. They are here for you to consult and rely on as best practices and cost-saving opportunities.
Given the virtually uncountable number of combinations, we have tried to identify the most practical and reliable ways to optimize your deployment at all stages and empower your end-users while insulating them from temptations, assumptions and habits that can cost you some unpleasant surprises when the bill arrives.
If you’re here to gather some of the best practices surrounding vSphere, you’ve come to the right place! Mastering vSphere: Best Practices, Optimizing Configurations & More, the free eBook authored by me, Ryan Birk, is the product of many years working with vSphere as well as teaching others in a professional capacity. In my extensive career as a VMware consultant and teacher (I’m a VMware Certified Instructor) I have worked with people of all competence levels and been asked hundreds - if not thousands - of questions on vSphere. I was approached to write this eBook to put that experience to use to help people currently working with vSphere step up their game and reach that next level. As such, this eBook assumes readers already have a basic understanding of vSphere and will cover the best practices for four key aspects of any vSphere environment.
The best practices covered here will focus largely on management and configuration solutions so should remain relevant for quite some time. However, with that said, things are constantly changing in IT, so I would always recommend obtaining the most up-to-date information from VMware KBs and official documentation especially regarding specific versions of tools and software updates. This eBook is divided into several sections, and although I would advise reading the whole eBook as most elements relate to others, you might want to just focus on a certain area you’re having trouble with. If so, jump to the section you want read about.
Before we begin, I want to note that in a VMware environment, it’s always best to try to keep things simple. Far too often I have seen environments be thrown off the tracks by trying to do too much at once. I try to live by the mentality of “keeping your environment boring” – in other words, keeping your host configurations the same, storage configurations the same and network configurations the same. I don’t mean duplicate IP addresses, but the hosts need identical port groups, access to the same storage networks, etc. Consistency is the name of the game and is key to solving unexpected problems down the line. Furthermore, it enables smooth scalability - when you move from a single host configuration to a cluster configuration, having the same configurations will make live migrations and high availability far easier to configure without having to significantly re-work the entire infrastructure. Now the scene has been set, let’s get started!