Tech Bytes

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 19th, 2018, and here’s what’s happening:

* I had a briefing with Igneous Systems earlier this month. Who’s Igneous Systems? Igneous is focused on providing “as-a-service” solutions for unstructured data, including storage, backup & archival, global metadata indexing, and data workflow management. In this briefing, Igneous discussed recent announcements around their DataProtect, DataDiscover, and DataFlow services.

* Before we get to that, what is unstructured data? Unstructured data is, more or less, data that’s not in a highly structured form such what you’d find in a relational database. That doesn’t mean unstructured data doesn’t have any structure at all, but rather that the structure is not in a row/column format that lends itself well to carefully constructed queries. You know, like what SQL (structured query language) is all about.

* It’s the lack of nicely “queryable” structure that makes the unstructured data problem an interesting one to solve, as most data found at organizations is, in fact, unstructured. This is true even for big data shops, where high performance computing clusters run Hadoop and similar tools against massive unstructured datasets. In this unstructured data context, you find Igneous Systems solving problems for companies. Let’s walk through the products they discussed with me in this briefing.

* First, DataProtect. DataProtect isn’t completely new, as it is the culmination of Igneous’ archive and backup offerings. The tool does what you’d expect. It’s about protecting your data in the form of backups, archival, and tiering of data to any public cloud, all delivered “as-a-service” meaning that Igneous is taking care of the DataProtect platform itself for you remotely.

* Second, DataDiscover. DataDiscover is about figuring out what’s interesting about your vast swaths of unstructured data by indexing all of the metadata that describes it. This service, by itself, is not about data movement or storage of the data. As the name suggests, DataDiscover wants to help you know what data you’ve got. Perhaps some of your data is old. Maybe there’s a huge volume of datasets, in which case DataDiscover helps you operate at scale. DataDiscover helps data managers understand what’s going in their data repositories and answer questions. Such as…is there data that should be archived? Where are the biggest files? Which files are the oldest? Etc.

* Third, DataFlow. DataFlow is about enabling end user workflows–making the lives of data consumers easier. In other words, this is less about IT folks who are storage professionals, and more about those who use the massive piles of data filling up all the storage volumes. The workflows around datasets tend to follow a lifecycle of capturing, processing, and analyzing data. Let’s give a simple high performance computing example. Imagine that, first, data is created by software. Then, the data is moved into an HPC cluster. The cluster runs software to process the data, generating more data in the form of results. That “results” dataset is copied to a directory for final analysis. Igneous DataFlow helps workflows around processes such as our little HPC example to be accomplished via APIs. The Igneous customer success team will work with the end user to make sure that metadata tagging, Python code, API calls, and overall workflow are functioning as well as possible. Again, remember that the DataFlow product is about the end user perspective. Igneous offered Paige.AI, a cancer research company, as a custo…

The following is a transcription of the audio recording you can hear in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 15, 2018, and here’s what’s happening:

* I had a briefing with Oracle Cloud last month while attending a Tech Field Day event as a delegate.

* Oracle is, of course, one of the largest IT companies in the world. Their enterprise database, CRM, financial, and other applications have a massive install base that keep Oracle ticking along at $9 or $10 billion dollars in revenue or so per quarter.

* What you might not realize is that a significant percentage of that revenue comes from Oracle Cloud. That’s because what Oracle’s mostly done with their cloud is provide a home for enterprises to run Oracle applications. For shops who want to run their own workloads on Infrastructure as a Service, that might make Oracle Cloud seem uninteresting.

* However, there’s a lot more to the Oracle cloud story. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is slowly working its way towards being feature competitive with the Big 3 – AWS, Azure, and GCP.

* How are they doing that? By building out robust cloud infrastructure aimed at the typical enterprise. Oracle’s take is that the Big 3 clouds aren’t meeting their customers’ needs. And again, when you hear “customers’ needs” in this context, you should think, “enterprise customers’ needs.”

* The claims here are that Big 3 cloud performance is inconsistent, and not well-suited for running Oracle apps. In addition, public cloud costs are high, sometimes with hidden or poorly understood charges. Add to that an inability to pick up and move when you want to if you’re leveraging PaaS, and maybe Oracle has a point.

* The focus for Oracle Cloud then is consistent, high performance, low, predictable pricing, and the ability to migrate enterprise workloads easily. In summary, making it easier for enterprises to operate in the cloud by giving them a cloud infrastructure that makes sense with the way typical enterprise applications are architected.

* This is an important point. Many shops that have attempted the “lift and shift” model of migrating to the cloud have been stunned by the resulting operational costs. That’s because the Big 3 aren’t setup to work as a mirror of your data center model. They are designed to be efficient when you use lots of tiny workloads spun up and shut down on demand as opposed to a few massive workloads that run 24×7. Think scale-out as opposed to scale-up, and maybe all the buzz about microservices starts to come into focus.

* So what do you do when re-architecting your applications isn’t really an option? Maybe, you talk to Oracle Cloud.

* Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers, as you’d expect, compute, storage, and networking. There’s even a bare metal offering that’s a big as 52 cores, 8 GPUs, 768GB RAM, 51TB local SSD, and 5M IOPS according to my notes.

* Oracle cloud network struck me as a bit of unicorn magic. Rainbows all over the place. I didn’t get a deep-dive on how they are doing what they are doing, but Oracle has made some huge promises here. They describe the network as non-oversubscribed with a flat architecture, which I took to mean not leaf-spine, which is certainly possible. There are a lot of interesting network topologies out there aimed at specific traffic patterns. Whatever the topology is, Oracle will provide a cloud network performance SLA of less than < 100µs expected one way latency between hosts in an Availability Domain and < 500µs between Availability Domains. Oracle will provide credits if the performance falls below the SLA.

* Storage is NVMe SSDs everywhere, and importantly, Oracle does not …

The following is a transcription of the audio recording you can hear in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 15, 2018, and here’s what’s happening:

* I had a briefing with Oracle Cloud last month while attending a Tech Field Day event as a delegate.

* Oracle is, of course, one of the largest IT companies in the world. Their enterprise database, CRM, financial, and other applications have a massive install base that keep Oracle ticking along at $9 or $10 billion dollars in revenue or so per quarter.

* What you might not realize is that a significant percentage of that revenue comes from Oracle Cloud. That’s because what Oracle’s mostly done with their cloud is provide a home for enterprises to run Oracle applications. For shops who want to run their own workloads on Infrastructure as a Service, that might make Oracle Cloud seem uninteresting.

* However, there’s a lot more to the Oracle cloud story. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is slowly working its way towards being feature competitive with the Big 3 – AWS, Azure, and GCP.

* How are they doing that? By building out robust cloud infrastructure aimed at the typical enterprise. Oracle’s take is that the Big 3 clouds aren’t meeting their customers’ needs. And again, when you hear “customers’ needs” in this context, you should think, “enterprise customers’ needs.”

* The claims here are that Big 3 cloud performance is inconsistent, and not well-suited for running Oracle apps. In addition, public cloud costs are high, sometimes with hidden or poorly understood charges. Add to that an inability to pick up and move when you want to if you’re leveraging PaaS, and maybe Oracle has a point.

* The focus for Oracle Cloud then is consistent, high performance, low, predictable pricing, and the ability to migrate enterprise workloads easily. In summary, making it easier for enterprises to operate in the cloud by giving them a cloud infrastructure that makes sense with the way typical enterprise applications are architected.

* This is an important point. Many shops that have attempted the “lift and shift” model of migrating to the cloud have been stunned by the resulting operational costs. That’s because the Big 3 aren’t setup to work as a mirror of your data center model. They are designed to be efficient when you use lots of tiny workloads spun up and shut down on demand as opposed to a few massive workloads that run 24×7. Think scale-out as opposed to scale-up, and maybe all the buzz about microservices starts to come into focus.

* So what do you do when re-architecting your applications isn’t really an option? Maybe, you talk to Oracle Cloud.

* Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers, as you’d expect, compute, storage, and networking. There’s even a bare metal offering that’s a big as 52 cores, 8 GPUs, 768GB RAM, 51TB local SSD, and 5M IOPS according to my notes.

* Oracle cloud network struck me as a bit of unicorn magic. Rainbows all over the place. I didn’t get a deep-dive on how they are doing what they are doing, but Oracle has made some huge promises here. They describe the network as non-oversubscribed with a flat architecture, which I took to mean not leaf-spine, which is certainly possible. There are a lot of interesting network topologies out there aimed at specific traffic patterns. Whatever the topology is, Oracle will provide a cloud network performance SLA of less than < 100µs expected one way latency between hosts in an Availability Domain and < 500µs between Availability Domains. Oracle will provide credits if the performance falls below the SLA.

* Storage is NVMe SSDs everywhere, and importantly, Oracle does not …

Tech Bytes are short, sponsored conversations on the latest technologies and products. Today’s episode is sponsored by Silver Peak, and we talk to their customer swyMed.

SwyMed makes telemedicine software, hardware, and solutions for the healthcare industry. On today’s episode we talk about swyMed’s DOT Telemedicine Backpack.

Designed for first responders and for use in remote locations such as oil refineries and factories, the backpack enables high-quality audio and video between responders on site and doctors and nurses at hospitals or clinics.

This telemedicine solution allows doctors and nurses to weigh in on treatment and make diagnoses without being on site. The product uses a small Silver Peak SD-WAN appliance to bond multiple LTE links to ensure persistent and high-quality connectivity.

Jeff Urdan, Chief Operating Officer of swyMed, talks with the Packet Pushers about how the backpack works, the role the Silver Peak appliance plays in enabling connectivity, and shares stories of how the technology is used to help save lives.

Tech Bytes are short, sponsored conversations on the latest technologies and products. Today’s episode is sponsored by Silver Peak, and we talk to their customer swyMed.

SwyMed makes telemedicine software, hardware, and solutions for the healthcare industry. On today’s episode we talk about swyMed’s DOT Telemedicine Backpack.

Designed for first responders and for use in remote locations such as oil refineries and factories, the backpack enables high-quality audio and video between responders on site and doctors and nurses at hospitals or clinics.

This telemedicine solution allows doctors and nurses to weigh in on treatment and make diagnoses without being on site. The product uses a small Silver Peak SD-WAN appliance to bond multiple LTE links to ensure persistent and high-quality connectivity.

Jeff Urdan, Chief Operating Officer of swyMed, talks with the Packet Pushers about how the backpack works, the role the Silver Peak appliance plays in enabling connectivity, and shares stories of how the technology is used to help save lives.

I got together to Chris Swan @cpswan to record a two beer networking. Through my own staggering incompetence the video hasn’t turned out but the audio is just fine.

Chris a leader in service practice and the conversation talks about how organisational scar tissue. He recently attended the European IDC CIO summit in Lisbon which made it possible for him to meet on the harbourside and have a couple of beers to talk about how organisations tend to damage themselves when it comes to technology.

I got together to Chris Swan @cpswan to record a two beer networking. Through my own staggering incompetence the video hasn’t turned out but the audio is just fine.

Chris a leader in service practice and the conversation talks about how organisational scar tissue. He recently attended the European IDC CIO summit in Lisbon which made it possible for him to meet on the harbourside and have a couple of beers to talk about how organisations tend to damage themselves when it comes to technology.

The following text is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in your podcatcher or the web player.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s September 13, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Amy Ariel, CMO and Etay Bogner, CEO of Meta Networks today.

Who’s Meta Networks?

Meta Networks is a remote access network provider. If you currently manage your own VPN concentrators or firewalls so that your remote workers can access the network, Meta Networks is a Network-as-a-Service alternative to that traditional VPN architecture familiar to many of us.

In this briefing, Meta Networks discussed their…

New Partnership With Talari

Talari is an SD-WAN provider for enterprises. Meta is providing remote access. Therefore, what you’ve got with the Talari/Meta partnership is a full-featured WAN solution. Talari provides the SD-WAN part, and Meta provides the software defined perimeter part. (That’s right, folks…software defined perimeter is a category now.)

How Does All Of This Work?

First, I’m going to assume you have a sense of what SD-WAN is all about. Your wide area network, multiple circuits terminated on a forwarding device at each of your sites, optimizing traffic in accordance with a policy you’ve defined. That includes forwarding traffic between branch offices and headquarters, as well as traffic to and from the cloud and cloud-based services.

SD-WAN, such as what Talari has, doesn’t usually give you remote access capability. You still need a VPN service for that. Enter Meta Networks.

Meta’s got a Network-as-a-Service. As a Meta Networks customers, you get a virtual network that assumes zero-trust. That is, a Meta network isn’t just about access. It’s also about strict policy control. That means that endpoints don’t get access to something on the network just because they connected and authenticated successfully. Rather, a network administrator sets a policy defining exactly what resources endpoints have access to. Meta tracks user identity of each remote endpoint based on the IPSEC overlay tunnel connecting it to your virtual Meta network.

Meta describe their network as a “sun” architecture. Think of that big bright thing in the sky that you sometimes see when leaving a data center to get coffee or go out for lunch. Meta imagines the sun as a ring connecting all of their global POPs together. Endpoints connect to the sun, like rays of light. Endpoints could be laptops or a device at your headquarters office. Or a Talari SD-WAN box.

Meta Described The Partnership As At Stage One

The integration is not very tight as yet. You’ll be managing a security policy for remote access users on the Meta side, and a network policy for your wide area network on the Talari side.

The magic here is the connection between your Talari appliances and your Meta Networks virtual network, giving you some traffic optimization to cloud for your remote access users, as well as secure access everywhere. A good way to think about what you end up with is an interconnected, remote access, wide area network that caters to security-conscious shops spread out over a large geographic area.

You’ll work with channel partners to bring the combined solution to life.

For More Information

…about these solutions, go to metanetworks.com and talari.com. You can also do a search on packetpushers.net for Meta Networks as well as Talari, where you can find more podcasts and articles we’ve created about these companies.

The following text is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in your podcatcher or the web player.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s September 13, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Amy Ariel, CMO and Etay Bogner, CEO of Meta Networks today.

Who’s Meta Networks?

Meta Networks is a remote access network provider. If you currently manage your own VPN concentrators or firewalls so that your remote workers can access the network, Meta Networks is a Network-as-a-Service alternative to that traditional VPN architecture familiar to many of us.

In this briefing, Meta Networks discussed their…

New Partnership With Talari

Talari is an SD-WAN provider for enterprises. Meta is providing remote access. Therefore, what you’ve got with the Talari/Meta partnership is a full-featured WAN solution. Talari provides the SD-WAN part, and Meta provides the software defined perimeter part. (That’s right, folks…software defined perimeter is a category now.)

How Does All Of This Work?

First, I’m going to assume you have a sense of what SD-WAN is all about. Your wide area network, multiple circuits terminated on a forwarding device at each of your sites, optimizing traffic in accordance with a policy you’ve defined. That includes forwarding traffic between branch offices and headquarters, as well as traffic to and from the cloud and cloud-based services.

SD-WAN, such as what Talari has, doesn’t usually give you remote access capability. You still need a VPN service for that. Enter Meta Networks.

Meta’s got a Network-as-a-Service. As a Meta Networks customers, you get a virtual network that assumes zero-trust. That is, a Meta network isn’t just about access. It’s also about strict policy control. That means that endpoints don’t get access to something on the network just because they connected and authenticated successfully. Rather, a network administrator sets a policy defining exactly what resources endpoints have access to. Meta tracks user identity of each remote endpoint based on the IPSEC overlay tunnel connecting it to your virtual Meta network.

Meta describe their network as a “sun” architecture. Think of that big bright thing in the sky that you sometimes see when leaving a data center to get coffee or go out for lunch. Meta imagines the sun as a ring connecting all of their global POPs together. Endpoints connect to the sun, like rays of light. Endpoints could be laptops or a device at your headquarters office. Or a Talari SD-WAN box.

Meta Described The Partnership As At Stage One

The integration is not very tight as yet. You’ll be managing a security policy for remote access users on the Meta side, and a network policy for your wide area network on the Talari side.

The magic here is the connection between your Talari appliances and your Meta Networks virtual network, giving you some traffic optimization to cloud for your remote access users, as well as secure access everywhere. A good way to think about what you end up with is an interconnected, remote access, wide area network that caters to security-conscious shops spread out over a large geographic area.

You’ll work with channel partners to bring the combined solution to life.

For More Information

…about these solutions, go to metanetworks.com and talari.com. You can also do a search on packetpushers.net for Meta Networks as well as Talari, where you can find more podcasts and articles we’ve created about these companies.

The following is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in your podcatcher or the player above.

I had a briefing with Ian Eyberg, CEO of NanoVMs today.

Who is NanoVMs?

NanoVMs makes software to help you create and deploy unikernels. In this briefing, Ian discussed with me the state of the unikernel ecosystem and how NanoVMs fits into things.

Quick context for you if you don’t know what a unikernel is. Quoting from unikernel.org, “Unikernels are specialised, single-address-space machine images constructed by using library operating systems. They are built by compiling high-level languages directly into specialised machine images that run directly on a hypervisor, such as Xen, or on bare metal.”

A big point with unikernels is that of security. Since unikernels are single process with a minimal attack surface, they aren’t interesting targets for hackers. A hacker can’t do anything with a unikernel, even if they were to find a vulnerability.

If that context didn’t help, search for datanauts + unikernels for several podcasts we’ve recorded on the subject.

Let’s jump back to the conversation I had with Ian.

One point Ian made was that unikernels, even though you haven’t been hearing much about them lately, are seeing a lot of interest and adoption. Unikernels are in production in shops both large and small, and there are several startups in the space.

That said, there are some barriers to unikernel adoption, the main one being that they are a challenge to work with if you come from a typical operations background. You gotta create the unikernel before you can deploy it, and making a unikernel isn’t like firing up apt-get and installing all the stuff you need into an base operating system until you get to a golden image.

Instead, unikernel creation requires working with source code and binaries, compiling everything required for the machine image to run. That’s a knowledge gap for many operators, as most of us aren’t really systems-level people. We work above that layer.

This is at the core of what NanoVMs helps with–handling that system level work that’s required to make a unikernel so that anyone could do it using their GUI.

Speaking of their GUI,

I did get a passing glance at it at VMworld in late August. Ian was there at the NanoVMs booth, and I did an on-the-spot interview with him for our YouTube channel, so Google Ian Eyberg and Packet Pushers if you want a distant look at the GUI through the lens of our camera.

In addition to helping you create unikernels,

NanoVMs helps you deploy them.

Maybe you’re equating unikernels with just a different sort of container, and thinking that you’d rather use Kubernetes for unikernel deployment than NanoVMs tooling. Ian pointed out to me that while unikernels have many parallels with containers, they are different beasts.

Kubernetes is very good at container orchestration, but not optimized for unikernel orchestration. You’d actually be incurring a needless performance penalty using K8s to deploy unikernels. So, sure…you COULD integrate NanoVMs with a Kubernetes environment, but Ian is pretty sure you don’t actually want to do that.

Furthermore, the unikernel orchestration process will vary depending on the unikernel use case. Unikernels are finding uses in IoT, embedded systems, NFV, edge computing, and cloud infrastructure. Those use cases differ dramatically, meaning a different sort of orchestrator might be appropriate in each. Kubernetes isn’t a fit everywhere.

Another issue I raised with Ian about the barriers to unikernel adoption ...