Search results: “business one”

Anyone who has been paying attention over the last 10 years has observed that the pace of technology innovation is accelerating. Just try and keep up with your kids’ communication preferences. It’s not just Facebook anymore (that’s for old people), but apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Vine and Pinterest. In the world of enterprise technology, I was just starting to feel comfortable with big data, and now that’s old news, buried under the hype about containers, IoT, micro data centers and a dozen other things.

As a system administrator, developer, enterprise architect, or IT decision maker, how do you keep up? At some point, you have to pop your head up, put your current project down, and find out what people are talking about. And not just observe, but participate in the conversation. Technical conferences, if done right, are a great way to get a handle on the latest information that can affect the way you do your job.  Let’s use SUSECon as an example.

Learn

In a few days and in one place, you can catch up on the latest technology in a broad range of topics (122 sessions) that interest you, getting an overview if it’s peripheral to your job, or a deep-dive, hands-on if it’s essential. But it’s not just about us talking to you. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between the people that use the technology and the people that develop it. As important as it is for you to get the latest roadmaps and trends from your technology partners, it’s equally important for us to hear from you, because it’s your customers’ requirements that are driving the demand.

Network

Good conferences are set up to maximize attendee conversations and give you plenty of opportunity to talk to people who are facing the same challenges as you so that you can learn from each other. Networking with developers, end users, product managers and executives – in the hallway, in a session, or over a beer – is one of the biggest benefits of attending a technical conference. Find out what others are doing to innovate in their businesses, and bring that back with you.

Certify

If your job involves being an expert in Linux administration, then certification can increase your job skills and establish your credibility in addition to helping you get your job done more effectively. If you haven’t already taken the tests for SUSE Linux Certification, take advantage of that SUSECon

Recharge

Let’s be honest – you work hard and you deserve this. Employee burn out is a real thing. From this New York Times article earlier this year:

“What companies really need to measure is not how engaged their employees are, but rather how consistently energized they feel. That means focusing not just on inspiring them and giving them opportunities to truly add value in the world, but also on caring for them and providing sufficient time to rest and refuel.”

And while not exactly a vacation, a technical conference done right (like SUSECon) lets you get stuff done that’s important to your job while giving you an opportunity to recharge in a magnificent venue in one of the world’s most beautiful and accessible cities.

So don’t put it off any longer. Register for SUSECon today.

Immersed in the technology world, we tend to think of networking as linking machines, especially computers, to operate interactively. Before there were computers though, we might have said that networking refers to how people come together intelligently to get things done. In our hyper-connected world, open source software development is an excellent example of the latter, and increasingly a driving force behind innovation of the former.

With the announcement today at LinuxCon, SUSE is excited to be a founding member of IO Visor, an open source project and a community of developers to accelerate the innovation, development, and sharing of new IO and networking functions.

As an enterprise Linux company, our job is to produce the most reliable, secure, stable and enterprise-ready Linux on which our customers can base their entire physical and virtual infrastructure, whether they’re running their workloads in the data center, public or private cloud, or some combination of all of them.

The hybrid nature of our customers’ infrastructures is putting new pressures on the networking stack in particular. Since the physical network interface protocols vary across vendors and evolve over time, a handy thing would be to provide a “network hypervisor” that abstracts away the physical network interface thereby accommodating new requirements more easily. This would help accelerate innovation and enable enterprises to more easily deploy software defined network infrastructures.

This is what IO Visor does. Through a module that is upstream in the Linux kernel, Linux distributions like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will be able to provide a programmable environment in which network function data planes can be loaded and instantiated at runtime, giving developers the ability to create applications, publish them, and deploy them in live systems without having to recompile. And the IO Visor solution is agnostic, not bound to any particular vendor’s hardware or software solution.

Open source software development is now the new normal for business IT, and projects like OpenStack, Open Container Initiative and Cloud Foundry are where the innovation is happening today. With the increased frequency that new open source projects are forming, we have to be judicious about which ones we elect to participate in, and we put a high priority on those that will help to solve challenges that our customers have today. IO Visor is such a project.

All of the analysts are predicting big things from Software Defined Storage (SDS) over the next several years.  In fact, some analysts are even predicting some very hard times for some of the traditional storage vendors.  This is all based on the tremendous pushback that is occurring against expensive, proprietary hardware based arrays and moving enterprise customers towards commodity (and thus interchangeable) components.

There are some vendors who started to work in the space with SDS solutions early on.  The biggest drawback with these solutions, is that while they move the hardware to more common, off-the-shelf gear, the software and interfaces are STILL proprietary in nature.  Having worked for a storage company in the past, I know they will tout the benefits of their proprietary technology and interfaces and their tremendous experience in the space.  These are all valid points.  However, they cannot get away from one inescapable fact; their solution is STILL proprietary, and open source will rapidly catch up and pass their capabilities.

Being experienced in leading the open source and Linux industries across some evolutionary changes in the past (Linux on IBM Mainframe, x86_64, XFS, OpenStack, btrfs, etc), SUSE decided to step in and help the industry adopt software defined storage.  The biggest key?  Making sure it is TOTALLY open source and thus preventing a technology lock-in.  As things mature, I am sure there will be some proprietary technologies that can add value here and there, especially things like infiniband stacks. However, the key is that the choice belongs to the customer to make use of the proprietary technology; it is not a requirement.

SUSE’s venture into the space started over 18 months ago when we announced at SUSECon that we would be launching SUSE Enterprise Storage in the future.  We had already picked up experience by shipping Ceph as a technical preview in SUSE Cloud 2.  This started a journey down the path that led to the release of the 1.0 product using Ceph Firefly earlier this year.  The first task?  Make sure it packages and installs well and is supportable.  With SUSE Enterprise Storage 1.0, this mission was accomplished.

I can easily say this, as I am working on a number of projects that utilize SUSE Enterprise Storage and have stood up 10+ different cluster configs in my home lab alone.  What I see  an opportunity for is helping the enterprise consume this product easier:  make the installation process better; make it more supportable; and provide solid reference architectures and sizing rules that guide against the creation of hardware starved infrastructure.

This is the point where there are a number of efforts underway within SUSE. Some are mine, others owned by our Senior Product Manager, Larry Morris, or by Lars Marowsky-Brée, our Distinguished Engineer, who is leading an incredible team of brilliant engineers. These efforts will start to materialize with our version 2 product due later this year, and will help make sure that enterprise customers can more easily consume the incredible technology that Ceph offers without needing a computer science degree.

If you want to get an idea of how important it is to SUSE to make open source consumable to the enterprise, check out SUSE OpenStack Cloud.  SUSE has won every Rule the Stack competition due to our ability to rapidly deliver a deployed and supportable OpenStack cloud.

I mentioned our product leads above because I think it is important to understand the depth of SUSE’s experience in mission critical enterprise infrastructure.  Below you will find a little about Larry and Lars.

Larry Morris came to SUSE with a tremendous amount of history with HP’s StorageWorks team. This includes several different engineering director positions in storage product development, storage product test, storage product support and storage technical strategy.  His long experience (20+ years) working on enterprise storage products and strategy has embedded the needs and requirements businesses have for a real storage product into his genes. Larry approaches the challenge of making a PhD project a product with all of his knowledge, experience and passion, which I believe is critical to success.

Lars has been with SUSE for 15 years.  Having spent many years working on our industry leading HA stack, and having co-developed and patented several important technologies for resilient architectures, Lars knows what it means to build a supportable and stable solution.  His expertise is deep and wide and his passion for open source solutions is second to none.  When I work with Lars, he digs deep to understand the question or concern and then applies his knowledge and deep technical skills as a software engineer and the broad experience of a solution engineer to direct the research or answer down the best path.  With Lars, we have a steady and experienced hand in engineering making sure we solve the challenge in the right way while giving our customers the best solution for the long term.

In the future, I will be posting some additional articles that outline some guidelines and reference architectures we develop with partners here at SUSE.  Keep your eyes peeled and feel free to contact anyone at SUSE (including me) for more information.

One of the great things about modern life is that we are often spoilt for choice. As an example, many of us enjoy a good cup of coffee. In the office where I work, there are always at least four different flavor options to choose from and best of all, they are all provided free of charge. My particular favourite at the moment is the Espresso Leggero.

A good coffee, like so many other things in life, is entirely dependent upon the quality of the product that you begin with (the coffee beans), combined with how the final product is prepared, packaged and delivered. A bad coffee can leave a bad taste in your mouth or can even end up being undrinkable.

You might be wondering what all this talk about coffee has to do with cloud computing and about OpenStack in particular. Let me explain.

Most businesses are already using or at least actively investigating how they will use cloud computing to provide new levels of agility, flexibility, and cost savings for their business. OpenStack cloud is acknowledged as the best option for businesses looking to maximize innovation and avoid the high cost of vendor lock-in from proprietary cloud options. According to the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, more than 60 percent of businesses are already using private cloud and OpenStack is the fastest growing private cloud option.

Because it is open source software, OpenStack cloud is all about choice. It is a mature, high-quality product to start with. However, just like with your choice of coffee, your user experience will depend upon how carefully the product you choose is prepared, packaged and delivered. The wrong choice could leave a bad taste in your mouth, or even be unpalatable to your business. By contrast, the right choice can take the pain out of the process, make the experience smooth, deliver the product quickly and easily and leave you with a smile on your face.

SUSE has over 20 years of experience delivering high-quality open-source software products. We were the first to release an enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution. Since then, we have made it our priority to prepare, package and deliver the smoothest user experience for our customers. With SUSE OpenStack Cloud, our intention is to provide the most mature, dependable and satisfying cloud solution for your business, without any bitter after-taste.

If you would like to know a little more about OpenStack technology and at the same time contribute to a good cause, the link below will take you to an ebook entitled “OpenStack Explained”. You can download the ebook for a small donation to help provide emergency and reconstruction aid for the victims of the earthquake in Nepal.

Donate to Nepal & Get e-book

Recently I attended the CONNECT Expo in Melbourne, which included an OpenStack conference, where I participated as a speaker & panelist.

The focus of that conference was about whether OpenStack is ready for the enterprise, and included contributions from Dave Medbury from Time Warner Cable, Mike Dorman from GoDaddy, and Rik Harris from Telstra, who presented their real-world experiences with OpenStack in commercial settings.

One of the things that was very clear from the conference is that OpenStack is ready for the enterprise. This is probably not news to many who have been following the project for the past few years, but there definitely seems to have been a turning point in recent times, especially enterprise versions of the Juno release (such as SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5) that have become available in the past few months.

The turning point I’ve really noticed is that OpenStack is becoming much less of a developer’s toy or interesting plaything, where new features are the most important aspect of development, and is transitioning (in the core areas at least) to a more practical enterprise-class framework, where component stability, infrastructure high-availability, and robust support options are necessary.  This was reflected in the composition of the audience for the event, which included many more “enterprise architect” types than have been present in the past.  It was also reflected in the questions asked during the panel sessions, which often seemed focused as much on business & organisation as on implementation and technicalities.

So OpenStack is definitely ready for the enterprise, yet as with any complex system and organisational change, there are a few considerations to bear in mind (and many of these are relevant, regardless of the private cloud infrastructure software to be used):

• Implementing cloud computing is an organisational as well as operational change, and should be handled carefully
• Successful cloud implementations rely on an existing IT operations mindset that includes automation & policy-driven deployment (see my previous article).
• Executive-level sponsorship (ideally CIO-level or more) is required to effectively marshall all the disparate IT disciplines towards making cloud deployment a success
• Integration with the lines of business is critical – internal customers of the private cloud have to agree to use the standardised cloud resources, rather than expecting bespoke IT services at cloud prices.
• Not every workload is suitable for cloud deployment right now, as applications really need to be well suited to that kind of environment; this is OK – it’s all about using the right tool for the job, so it’s best not to try to force the issue and encounter failure.
• The OpenStack control plane must provide High Availability (99.999%+ uptime). Without a highly-available control plane, access to the cloud resources disappears, and even cloud-aware services can fail.
• OpenStack deployment and management can be difficult without the right tools and support, so it makes sense to work with an open source infrastructure software vendor (such as SUSE) to provide the technology, integration, support and training necessary to build up your own capabilities.

There is a growing number of enterprises (including PayPal and BMW) that have adopted OpenStack as a significant part of their IT infrastructure, and this trend will continue as the framework becomes more mature, and as the vendors and other members of the OpenStack Foundation build the body of knowledge in terms of documentation and training.

On that note – SUSE is hiring. At the time of writing there are at least 13 roles open at SUSE related to OpenStack & Cloud. Check https://www.suse.com/jobs for details.

Last week we posted the first (in a 3 part series) on why the future of storage is Open Source and cloud.  And now, without further ado, we present the 2nd part of the series.

2) Storage virtualization disrupts traditional vendor business models

While IT has reaped the benefits of better resource use and cost reductions, this has come at the expense of sales for vendors. As adoption of server virtualization took off, server sales plummeted, moving from a steady gain in volume and value every quarter to a catastrophic drop. In 2009, with the recession in full force (itself a significant driver of virtualization for cost savings) analysts at IDC recorded the first ever drop in server sales. All the big players, HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) and Fujitsu, recorded huge decreases in sales, between 18.8 percent and 31.2 percent year on year. The impact was softer in high power CISC and RISC segments where it was tougher for IT teams to change vendors (e.g., with mission-critical Oracle applications where licensing costs were tied to the number of processors in use or specific hardware), but especially severe in the lower end x86 market.

Changes followed suit. IBM exited the commodity market altogether, selling out to Lenovo, who with a cheaper manufacturing base built on lower wages and controlled exchange rates were in a better position to win. HP endured a merry-go-round of revolving door CEOs and successive re-inventions, and Dell went private. This pattern of disruptive change is set to follow into the storage marketplace.

When even the very largest suppliers suffer in this way, an expectation builds of disruptive, game-changing technology. IT buyers stop looking at brand in the same way. Where there used to be a perception of safe partners with a long-term, safe product road maps and low risk, there is now an expectation that the older players are going to be challenged by new companies with new approaches and technologies. The famous 70s slogan “no-one ever got fired for buying IBM” doesn’t hold water when IBM shuts up shop and sells it commodity servers business.. IT buyers expect the same disruption in storage, and they are right to do so.

In this environment, the status quo for storage vendors cannot hold. The big players are nervously eying each other, waiting for the deciding moves in what adds up to a game of enterprise business poker with astronomical odds. The old proprietary business model is a busted flush, and they all know that sooner or later someone will call their bluff on price and lock down software. A new player in the game, or even somebody already at the table, is going to bring the game into a new phase –or, as distinguished Gartner analyst and VP Joe Skorupa put it, “throw the first punch” in 2016.

In the next article: #3 – Cloud makes the case for open source compelling, because data must be portable.

Written by Jason Phippen

SUSE Enterprise Storage — having only been launched just a little over one month ago — just picked up two awards at this year’s Network Computing Awards in London: “Storage Product of the Year” and “Product of the Year”.

“To us SUSE has always been at the forefront of innovation, and their product offerings have always stood head and shoulders above the rest,” said Ray Smyth, editor of Network Computing. “Their two wins highlight how good they are at innovating and delivering premium enterprise products and solutions at affordable prices.  This was not lost on the readers of Network Computing who voted for SUSE in their droves.”

Besides being dubbed “Product of the Year”, SUSE Enterprise Storage is also getting a big thumbs up from the tech news media.  Such as this quote from Jack Wallen at Tech Republic.

“And now… self-healing, self-managing, distributed software-based enterprise storage.  The enterprise needs it, and SUSE has it.  This is a brilliant move by a company that should be on the radar of every enterprise business.”

Or this one from Dan Kusnetzky over at Virtualization Review:

“The major claim to fame for SUSE is taking open source technology and all of its relevant components and making it available to its customers in an easy-to-install, easy-to-use, supported way.  Other suppliers tend to make a selection of the options available rather than offering everything.  This means that SUSE prides itself on offering customers the greatest flexibility. Take a look at what SUSE is doing with both OpenStack and SDS, and I expect you’ll be impressed.”

Well done, SUSE Enterprise Storage.  Not bad for a 1 month old.  Not bad at all.

SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph, enables organizations to build cost-efficient and highly scalable storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives, and it is well suited for object, archival and bulk storage with features including cache tiering, thin provisioning, copy-on-write cloning and erasure coding.

OpenStack provides a number of great benefits for customers looking to stand up an open and agile cloud environment. SUSE OpenStack Cloud is an enterprise OpenStack distribution that rapidly deploys and easily manages highly available, mixed hypervisor IaaS Clouds. SUSE works with technology partners that provide additional value around performance, provisioning and cost of deploying an OpenStack infrastructure. One of those partners is Infoblox, a global company that helps businesses automate complex network control functions to reduce costs and increase security and uptime.

Today, many network teams still rely on manual IP address and DNS provisioning, leaving them unable to provision cloud services quickly. While they can now spin up multiple virtual machines in minutes, in many cases it still takes hours, days, or even weeks to provision them with an IP address and DNS name.

By automating key network provisioning processes that are currently manual, Infoblox enables private-cloud projects to reach the finish line much sooner and deliver the business flexibility and agility they promise. The Infoblox DDI Adapter for OpenStack brings new levels of automation for core IP networking services such as DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, which OpenStack does not deal with natively.

SUSE and Infoblox sponsored a webinar on March 25, 2015 that highlighted the hidden risks and demystified the network challenges in an OpenStack-powered private cloud environment including:

• Improving scalability, provisioning and managing services
• Eliminating manual processes for provisioning IP address and DNS records
• Enhancing private cloud visibility from pilot to production to scale out

To learn how to leverage OpenStack with network automation to simplify your private cloud deployment, you can view a recording of the webinar.

Keeping time is a tricky business — especially when we’re talking about keeping time at a high precision level.

Every so often our clocks, which tend to follow Coordinated Universal Time, get a little out of sync with the Mean Solar Time.  When this happens, we Earthlings utilize a rather ingenious concept we call a “Leap Second”.  The idea is pretty similar to a “Leap Year”… except that it’s only a 1 second adjustment instead of an entire day.

That 1 second adjustment may not seem like much but, for some functions, high performance timekeeping is absolutely critical (such as for scientific and economic computing needs).

And, as it so happens, on June 30th of this year (2015) — at midnight — one additional Leap Second will be added.

Luckily, if you’re running SUSE Linux Enterprise, you are in good shape. Here’s a quick run-down of the high level information.  (For more detailed notes, see the Knowledge Base article.)

• Running SUSE Linux Enterprise 12?  You’re all set — nothing you need to do here.
• Same goes for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 or earlier.
• Currently on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11? You’ll want to make sure you’re properly updated to the latest kernel updates in order to make sure you are not impacted. Specifically:
  • SLE 11 SP1 – Kernel 2.6.32.59­0.7 or later.
  • SLE 11 SP2 – Kernel 3.0.38­0.5 or later.
  • SLE 11 SP3 – Not impacted, except for one known issue that will be fixed in the next maintenance update for SP3.