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Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?
EDITOR’S LETTER DATA

#Hashtag Why White Box What Does

Modern Mean?
Survey Says:
On Virtual Servers

Opening Up
to Open Source
Switching?
The jury’s still out on software-defined
Survey Says: On #HASHTAG Q&A: POWER DOWN
Virtual Servers
networking, but white box switching
just might stand the test of time. Twitter on Power Down
Q&A: Power Down #DellEMC

Minding the Herd

The Next Big Thing

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE IT OPERATIONS

In the Mix Opening Up Minding the Herd

to Open Source

THE NEXT BIG THING IN THE MIX

Can Your Clusters Evolve or Perish

Pass Muster?

NOV/DEC 2015, VOL. 4, NO. 10

 EDITOR’S LETTER

Home

Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?
What Does Modern infrastructures combine all that commodity
hardware and open source software, and come up with

#Hashtag Modern Mean? distributed scale-out clusters. Among the contemporary

Opening Up
to Open Source
Survey Says: On WHAT MAKES ONE infrastructure “modern” and another,
Virtual Servers well, not? That question is continually up for debate, but
there are some common themes.
Q&A: Power Down
Modern infrastructures are based on commodity,
non-proprietary hardware. People have used commodity
Minding the Herd
servers for a long time, but now we are seeing more com-
The Next Big Thing
modity switching gear too, on which we layer open net-
work operating systems. This is a promising area, writes
In the Mix contributor Ethan Banks in “Why White box Switching?”
An offshoot of software-defined networking (SDN),
“white box switching might survive on its own merits—
even if SDN falls by the wayside.”
Modern infrastructures run on open source software,
finds contributor Ed Scannell in “Opening Up to Open
Source.” The reasons for today’s surge of open source proj-
ects aren’t the same as yesterday’s—whereas open source
used to be about saving money, now it’s about exploiting
“the latest Web-based technologies for mobile, cloud and
analytics platforms,” and tapping in to the innovative and
creative communities that support them.
examples based on scale-out clustering, Taneja Group an-
alyst Mike Matchett lists hyper-convergence, software-de-
fined storage, public and private clouds, and last but not
least, big data analytics in his column “Can Your Clusters
Pass Muster?”
But modern infrastructures aren’t simple. Arguably,
some of today’s most modern infrastructures are applica-
tions based on containers and microservices. The benefits
are huge, I find in “Minding the Swarm.” Developers can
update individual components that make up an appli-
cation without having to overhaul the whole thing. The
flip side? There’s a whole lot more to manage—both the
number of things, and the relationships between them.
So while modern infrastructures may be cheap and
flexible and big, they’re not very manageable—at least not
yet. Stay tuned. n
ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure.
Contact her at abarrett@techtarget.com.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   2

NETWORKING

Why White Box

Switching?
The jury’s still out on software-defined
networking, but white box switching just DISRUPTION IS A technology buzzword applied to any new
might stand the test of time. idea that threatens to overturn the status quo, and the
field of networking has seen a great deal of disruption
BY ETHAN BANKS
over the last five years. Specifically, software-defined net-
working resurrected the idea of centralized network con-
trol, where applications manage network configuration,
issuing commands to the network hardware and software
within its domain via a centralized controller.
A byproduct of software-defined networking (SDN) is
white box switching, which decouples the physical net-
work switch hardware from its network operating system
(NOS) software. While vendors and practitioners alike are
still pondering the merits of SDN and centralized network
control, white box switching might survive on its own
merits—even if SDN falls by the wayside.
Also known as open networking, the idea behind
white box switching is to allow an organization to buy a
switch of its choosing and pair it with its preferred NOS.
While IT practitioners are used to this sort of flexibility
with servers, networking is another matter, as vendors
traditionally couple their software tightly with their own
hardware.
The coupled approach allows each vendor to write its
NOS in ways that fully exploit the hardware. It also means
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MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   3
 that a vendor can charge a premium. If an organization
Home
has standardized on specific processes to configure its
Editor’s Letter
switches, it is tied to a specific command-line interface
(CLI) to execute those processes. This expensive state of
Why White Box affairs is bothersome to savvy IT organizations that feel
Switching? they are being overcharged for the hardware to get the
software they want.
#Hashtag Making the financial sting a little worse, many network
switches contain largely the same hardware as their white
Opening Up
to Open Source
box counterparts, based on “merchant silicon.” That is to
say, the networking vendor outsourced the chip design
Survey Says: On and manufacturing to a third party such as Broadcom
Virtual Servers (recently acquired by Avago Technologies), whose Trident
II, Trident II Plus and Tomahawk chipsets can be found
Q&A: Power Down
inside proprietary and white box switches alike—with
identical performance numbers.
Minding the Herd
So instead of asking whether a network switch will
The Next Big Thing
work properly, the question becomes one of differen-
tiation. Why pay a premium for a network switch with
In the Mix internals that are the same as several competing switches?
The differentiator has always been the network operating
system. By decoupling network hardware and NOS, white
box switching allows companies to evaluate hardware on
its capabilities (and costs) and pair that with an NOS that
competes on its own merits.
n White box switching decouples the physical network switch hardware from its NOS software.
HIGHLIGHTS n White box switching allows an organization to buy a switch of its choosing and pair it with its NOS.
n Many networking switches contain largely the same hardware as their white box counterparts.
WHO’S WHO IN WHITE BOX SWITCHING
Generically branded switches with no default network
operating system are available from any number of man-
ufacturers. Vendors such as Accton, Delta Networks and
QuantaQCT sell their hardware under the names Edge-
Core Networks, Agema Networks and IW Networks, re-
spectively. In addition, well-known names like Dell have
gotten into the brite-box market, which is Gartner’s term
for branded white boxes.
Once you have a white box switch, you need to add the
NOS. This market is rapidly evolving, and rumors abound
about new entrants both from startups and incumbent
vendors that don’t want to miss out on the potential op-
portunity. Here are some examples:
n Big Switch Networks offers the SwitchLighNOS, which
is not a NOS that an operator interacts with, but rather
an agent for an application running on an SDN controller.
Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric and Big Monitoring Fabric
controller applications program white box switches in the
fabric via the SwitchLight NOS.
n Pica8,with its PicOS, offers a full-featured white box
NOS that can be configured via a traditional CLI as well
as modern automation tools.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   4
 n Cumulus Networks sells Cumulus Linux, a true Linux
Home
distribution paired with a hardware abstraction layer.
Editor’s Letter
Cumulus Linux is aimed at shops that already use auto-
mation tools to manage their network infrastructure and
Why White Box that would like to automate network switch configuration
Switching? using those existing tools.
#Hashtag n Juniper Networks has not ported its Junos to a white
box format—at least not yet. However, it does have the
Opening Up
OCX1100, a brite-box switch running a version of Junos
to Open Source
aimed at cloud providers. The OCX1100 could run another
Survey Says: On NOS. This is a toe-in-the-water approach from Juniper.
Virtual Servers
n Gigamon, a major provider of network visibility fabrics,
Q&A: Power Down
has ported its GigaVUE-OS to white box switches.
Minding the Herd
n Hewlett-Packard added a brite-box product to its net-
The Next Big Thing
working mix. The Accton switch runs Cumulus Networks
as the NOS.
In the Mix
n Dellhas bet big on open networking, offering several of
its own products as white box switches, and supporting
NOSes from vendors like Big Switch and Cumulus.
n IP Infusionhas historically sold to networking vendors,
but now offers its OcNOS product to white box users.
CHANGE NOS AT WILL
But is white box switching really a good idea? Let’s con-
sider when white box switching makes sense, and the
implications of this networking model. The open net-
working market is quite young, and the technology won’t
be right for everyone.
Perhaps the biggest argument for white box switching is
choice. It gives organizations the ability to change a NOS
at will, without changing the switch hardware. This free-
dom affords a business more flexibility in how it conducts
its network operations.
SDN HAS DRIVEN
NETWORK VENDORS TO
ADD A FEATURE IN THEIR
SWITCHES CALLED NET-
WORK PROGRAMMABILITY.
Thinking through the choice a bit further, remember
that making an operational change is difficult. SDN,
however, has driven network vendors to add a feature in
their switches called network programmability, using ap-
plication programming interfaces (APIs) and other stan-
dards-based protocols like OpenFlow or NETCONF. This
means that network operators don’t have to interact with
the command line to configure a switch. Rather, other
tools, such as scripts or third party applications can be
used. This reduces the dependence on specific CLI syntax.
The big catch here is that network programmability
doesn’t guarantee that interacting with APIs, OpenFlow or
NETCONF will be the same experience on every network
switch. In fact, the experience can vary widely. In that
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   5
 sense, the industry hasn’t moved the ball far enough ahead
Home
to make network configuration a generic, platform-ag-
nostic task. So while the advantage of a NOS choice is a How to Investigate
Editor’s Letter
significant one, there is still an operational impact to a White Box Switching
Why White Box NOS change.
WHITE BOX SWITCHING could be asking a great deal
Switching?
of your organization’s IT operations team. Here
#Hashtag are some key points to consider:
THE COST FACTOR
In general, an organization will find choice a compel- n Understand why you need it. The white box
Opening Up
to Open Source
ling argument for open networking—if it configures its model can be a powerful enabler, but only if your
network switch using an SDN application provided by a existing networking vendor harms your business
Survey Says: On vendor. That way, it doesn’t have to worry about how the agility or budget. This is not the sort of change to
Virtual Servers switches are configured, and IT staff can interact with the be undertaken for sheer novelty. Make sure the
application that handles the configuration details. The drivers are there.
Q&A: Power Down
organization should also have in-house developers ready
to write custom networking applications as the business n Know your operational model. Having a deep
Minding the Herd
defines new requirements. understanding of your organization’s network
The other major driver for white box switching is cost. operations is critical when evaluating white box
The Next Big Thing
White box switching makes sense for organizations that switching. The change will impact staff, service
clearly understand the total cost of ownership of their ex- delivery and system monitoring.
In the Mix
isting network infrastructure. Only then can an accurate n Start small and test carefully. White box switch-
cost comparison be made to the total cost of ownership
ing is not an all-or-nothing proposition. For orga-
(TCO) of proprietary and white box switching.
nizations with existing infrastructure, a simple
Intuitively, a white box hardware switch should be
place to start is in a lab, to validate switch hard-
cheaper than a premium branded switch with the same
ware and software capabilities, provisioning pro-
internals. This provides a potential benefit in cost of ac-
cesses, management capabilities and integration
quisition. A NOS to run on the hardware will vary in price
with the existing network. Only then should a few
and purchasing model.
switches be deployed into production, in a low-
When thinking through costs, consider that white box
risk area. n
TCO is not merely the sum of a switch and a NOS. Some
NOS offerings require a subscription plan. Other potential

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   6

 costs include support contracts, staff training and integra- on the switching market—this, despite having network
Home
tion with the legacy network. operating systems that could be adapted to the white box
Editor’s Letter
In the end, the idea of decoupling network hardware model.
from network software makes sense for many of the same That said, buyers vote with their wallets. If enough dol-
Why White Box reasons it made sense in the server world. However, the lars switch towards the white box model, the big vendors
Switching? future of white box switching is far from assured. will be forced to adapt. n
Naturally, big networking vendors who sell big iron ar-
#Hashtag en’t interested in an open networking model. That would
ETHAN BANKS , CCIE #20655, is a hands-on networking practi-
make their relationships with customers more tenuous. tioner who has designed, built and maintained networks for higher
Opening Up
to Open Source
Representatives of Cisco and Arista have recently decried education, state government, financial institutions and technology
or at least deemphasized the impact white box is having corporations.
Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers

Q&A: Power Down

Minding the Herd

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   7

 zzzzzz

Home
#Hashtag
The Twitterverse chimes in on the mega Dell-EMC deal.
Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?

#Hashtag

Opening Up Michael Davis Scott Sinclair Dave Vellante B. Nyssen

to Open Source @Michael_EDavis   @Scott_Sin   @dvellante @bnyssen

Survey Says: On Only time will tell on Talking #Dell storage at I strongly believe that After Dell buying EMC
Virtual Servers the execution, but there #DellWorld, great tech. preserving the EMC / (#dellemc), it’s now
seems to be a clear Let’s hope it can find VMware brands is smart Western Digital buying
plan on integration a home in the new because EMC custom- #SanDisk. Megafusion
Q&A: Power Down of #dellemc among #DellEMC world order. ers trust the brand(s) once again... When is
all execs at #dellemc #Apple buying #VW ?
Minding the Herd @Dell #DellWorld ;)

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

Brian Abhimanyu
Paul Teich Vienneau Singh Michael Keen
@paulrteich  @bvTechie  @ManyuVsManyu   @michael_keen

@dvellante #DellEMC “Go big or go home .@forrester predicts #dellemc What world
likely prompting other baby!” @MichaelDell that the new Dell will does Dell/EMC want to
OEMs to hedge on about EMC acquisition either assimilate or spin create? What might be
VMware by increasing #DELLEMC #DellWorld off the EMC federation possible?
investment in @Open- companies relatively
Stack & other private quickly. #DellEMC
cloud alternatives

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   8

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

GONE ARE THE days of enterprises closing their doors to

open source—open source is a welcome guest at most IT
tables these days. But adopting open source can still be
challenging technically and financially, and often spurs
nuanced conversations about how best to bring it into
the fold.
What seems to be holding sway with corporate users
is the prospect they actually can build a solid business
case for investing in the technology that not only brings
meaningful ROI, but establishes a true business advantage
against competitors.
“I view this new wave of enthusiasm over the past
year or two as the second era,” said Angel Diaz, IBM’s
vice president of cloud architecture and technology, and

Opening Up a long-time veteran involved in many early open source

projects. “But this is not your grandparents’ open source

to Open Source process that [users] dealt with in the past.”

Forget grandparents’ open source, it’s not even your
slightly older brother or sister’s. For some time it has
Open source isn’t just about saving money been clear that incorporating open source saved larger
anymore—it’s about being strategic. companies huge amounts of money in server hardware
BY ED SCANNELL because they could shed expensive gear running Unix
and other proprietary operating systems in favor of less
expensive x86-based servers. The fact it also cut down on
RYCCIO/ISTOCK

HOME
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   9
 an enterprise’s financial risk made the c-level suite very
Home
happy.
Editor’s Letter
But building the business case for open source now
involves more than simple hardware decisions. It now
Why White Box necessitates developing or licensing open source appli-
Switching? cations created by 20-somethings that exploit the latest
Web-based technologies for mobile, cloud and analytics
#Hashtag platforms, along with the bread and butter applications
to be used internally.
Opening Up
to Open Source
“The benefits of open source used to be straight for-
ward, it just involved servers and which version of Linux
Survey Says: On was better,” said one IT professional with a large manu-
Virtual Servers facturing company in Minneapolis. “But the next phase
(for gaining business advantage) is with creating the new
Q&A: Power Down
applications. But not a lot of (end user) companies have
developed these types of apps yet, so it’s difficult to know
Minding the Herd
exactly how to build the case for it from that perspective,”
The Next Big Thing
he said.
In the Mix
THE PEOPLE PROBLEM
One of the first things to consider in building a business
case for open source is determining the why and the how
for doing so.
“The why side,” said IBM’s Diaz, is “to pursue opportuni-
ties in the mobile and cloud markets.” Part and parcel of
that is finding the skills to implement and deliver these
applications. “The good news is it’s much harder to obtain
those skills using proprietary technology than in the open
world. But not everyone lives in Silicon Valley, so getting
the proper talent can be a challenge,” he said.
Finding and retaining that talent requires companies
to make a solid commitment to participating in the open
source community by relying on both their IT profession-
als and in-house developers. The true value and power of
open source comes from the collaboration process among
many different end user organizations. Diaz says this
process is where true innovation and business advantage
is born.
“By leveraging technologies in these communities
you derive the innovations that allow you to focus on the
particular problem you can add value to,” Diaz said. “You
can also choose the vendor you want to work with, get
the skills and support you need to better compete against
these smaller companies out there trying to disrupt
things,” he said.
But making a strong commitment to participating in the
open source community can create risk on the business
side, according to some IT support professionals. They
point out that part of the obligation to the community is

n Incorporating open source has saved large companies huge amounts of money in server hardware.
HIGHLIGHTS n Building the business case for open source now involves more than simple hardware decisions.
n The true value and power of open source comes from the collaboration process.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   10

 volunteering your own IT support staff to help others in
Home
the community solve their technical problems with the
Editor’s Letter
code you have released. This can be a time suck, taking key
personnel away from dealing with their own company’s
Why White Box technical issues.
Switching? “I find people adopting open source has an impact
on support,” said Mike Drips, a solutions architect with
#Hashtag WiPro Inc. in Houston. “IT developers or power users of
open source often like what they are doing, but not a lot
Opening Up
to Open Source
of people say, ‘Boy, I sure would love to be a community
IT support guy.’ ”
Drips points out that when IT support people volunteer
Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers their time for the greater good of the community, the qual-
ity of their other work is not always the best, which leaves
Q&A: Power Down
some IT shops to deploy potentially vulnerable code.
“Any enterprise that has stock holder responsibility
Minding the Herd
can’t risk the health of that enterprise based on commu-
The Next Big Thing
nity supported software,” Drips said. “That has been my
problem with open source since day one.”
In the Mix
PUSHING AHEAD
Indeed, while many IT shops are edging closer to diving
into the open source pool, some just can’t seem to take the
plunge. The issues that have held them back for years are
still very much in play: no visibility or confidence in how
much ROI will be returned on their investment and, to a
lesser extent, the perpetual concerns regarding security.
“If you talk to mainstream people or late adopters, you
still see a surprising amount of push back. You still hear
concerns about the security of open source and risk,” said
Gordon Haff, cloud evangelist for Red Hat Inc. But he
believes those fears are unfounded. “A lot of these same
people are moving to SaaS [software as a service] anyway,
which brings in concerns about hosted software like
governance of data and, again, security. It’s a bit hard to
explain.”
THE TRUE VALUE AND
POWER OF OPEN SOURCE
COMES FROM THE COLLAB-
ORATION PROCESS.
Another thing that gives many larger IT shops pause
about implementing meaningful open source strategies
is how to best salvage the heavy investments made in pro-
prietary hardware and software platforms. It can prove a
tricky proposition to gradually integrate the proper blend
of open source with existing systems in a cost-effective
manner. One analyst describes this process as managing
one’s “technical debt.”
“Technical debt refers to the past products and prac-
tices you have deployed and the expenses associated with
making them work with your existing environments,” said
Geoff Woollacott, principal analyst and practice manager,
software and business intelligence for Technology Busi-
ness Research Inc. in Hampton, N.H. “Larger companies
have a ton of money tied up in legacy systems, so they need
to accommodate and mix it in moving forward.”
While this technical debt is something of a burden for
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   11
 larger IT shops, it is also one for legacy vendors hoping to
Home
diverge from decades-old product lines and develop and
Editor’s Letter
deliver new age products. There is a financial upside, how-
ever, for vendors that have driven deep hooks into larger
Why White Box end user companies under the umbrella of vendor lock-in.
Switching? Good for vendors, typically bad for users.
“It’s been vendor lock-in that has enabled legacy ven-
#Hashtag dors to survive if only because it has slowed down this
Opening Up
transformation of gravitating to open source,” Woollacott
said.
to Open Source
However, there does appear to be acceleration in the
Survey Says: On adoption of open source among larger, less risk-averse
Virtual Servers IT shops. For the most part, these shops have high per-
formance computing needs and are looking for technical
Q&A: Power Down
features that give them advantages in their particular
vertical markets.
Minding the Herd
“Users such as those in the financial sectors or insur-
The Next Big Thing
ance are buying into the idea of open source much more
aggressively, they have gone well past any of the FUD
In the Mix that open source is not secure,” Haff said. “They realize
open source will an important part of the IT landscape
but even they are still trying to figure out how to take best
advantage of it.”
Properly balancing the integration of open source with
proprietary technical assets can increase open up new
business opportunities of the digital economy, driven by
Web-based platforms, applications and services.
THERE DOES APPEAR TO
BE ACCELERATION IN THE
ADOPTION OF OPEN SOURCE
AMONG LARGER, LESS
RISK-AVERSE IT SHOPS.
It is these born-on-the-Web offerings—essentially rep-
resenting the new generation of IT systems of record—
that make adopting open source compelling.
“This time around the transformation is not just replac-
ing an older system of record with a new one, it is replac-
ing a system of record that is seamlessly integrated into
a company’s system of management,” Woollacott said. n
ED SCANNELL is a senior executive editor with TechTarget. Contact
him at escannell@techtarget.com.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   12
 w

Home
Survey Says
Storage remains a thorn in the side of virtualized servers.

Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?
D What storage challenges have D Why are you purchasing
you faced since virtualizing your more storage/backup/storage
#Hashtag
servers?* management tools?*
Opening Up
to Open Source
Expanding Technology
52% virtualization has improved
Survey Says: On Increased storage capacity demands
57% deployments 37% since our initial
Virtual Servers deployments

Q&A: Power Down 25% New Our old

applications/ systems don’t
Increased CPU and memory demands 49% sites/ 18% work well
Minding the Herd
demands anymore

The Next Big Thing

22% SOURCE: “STORAGE FOR VIRTUAL SERVERS” 2015 SURVEY;

44
BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 469 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS.

Decreased performance due to resource contention

In the Mix

21%
VM backup/restore issues
D Percentage of respondents who backup
virtual servers with the traditional
21% method: with a backup agent on each
virtual server
None of these

SOURCE: “STORAGE FOR VIRTUAL SERVERS” 2015 SURVEY;

BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 639 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS.
SOURCE: “STORAGE FOR VIRTUAL SERVERS” 2015 SURVEY;
*MULTIPLE SELECTIONS ALLOWED ON ALL QUESTIONS BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 591 IT AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   13

 Q&A: POWER DOWN

Home

Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?
Power Down
SPEC’s latest energy efficiency
#Hashtag benchmark tells you if your server
is more Prius or SUV.
Opening Up
BY MEREDITH COURTEMANCHE
to Open Source
Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers
Q&A: Power Down
MOST DATA CENTER benchmarks compare multiple serv-
Minding the Herd
ers’ performance—IT or otherwise. For instance, when
The Next Big Thing
it comes to energy efficiency, the Standard Perfor-
mance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) Power group’s
In the Mix SPECpower_ssj 2008 compares the power consumption
of servers running a fixed workload. But at the behest of
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, SPEC recently
created the SERT tool (Server Efficiency Rating Tool) to
measure overall server energy efficiency.
“One workload is a narrow focus [for a benchmark],”
said Klaus-Dieter Lange, SPEC’s board director and com-
mittee chair for SPECpower, as well as co-author and
co-editor of Server Efficiency—Metrics for Computer
Servers and Storage, part of the ASHRAE Datacom Series.
“When we design servers there are a lot of ideas behind
it, but at end of the day we have to show that we are more
energy efficient than competing servers,” Lange said. We
recently caught up with Lange about the state of data
center energy efficiency.
Is efficiency an important metric for average enterprise
data centers, or just the largest Web-scale companies
and hosting providers?
Efficiency is getting more and more important. There are
organizations looking at it from multiple points. When
you look at high density, power providers cannot handle
it. Financially, servers cost a lot of money to run. If you
make the investment in new servers, you neutralize the
cost [of the servers] with the power savings.
Governments around the world are implementing
energy standards like Energy Star—[we] want to guide
these programs. SERT can measure a lot of different kinds
of workloads. SERT is mandatory to run for Energy Star
[rating].
How have servers changed in recent years with regards
to performance and efficiency?
Innovation at every server vendor will continue to drop
[servers’] energy use per workload. [There is a] continued
trend of power use going down and energy efficiency
going up.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   14

 SPECpower_ssj2008 does not stress the storage subsys-
Home
tem; with the SERT suite you can measure the energy ef-
Editor’s Letter
ficiency of storage and evaluate [the product] based on it.
[But] efforts are taking place all over the place. When you
Why White Box have metrics to actually measure energy use, you can see
Switching? what works, and you can compete. With the expansion of
metrics for different workloads, everyone has to compete
#Hashtag
against the standard to claim market data [on the servers
that they sell]. It improves all areas: memory, compute and
storage efficiency. Now that you can measure it, you can
develop things more smartly. n
MEREDITH COURTEMANCHE is senior site editor for SearchDataCenter.
Contact her at mcourtemanche@techtarget.com.

Opening Up
to Open Source

Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers

Q&A: Power Down

Minding the Herd

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   15

IT OPERATIONS

Minding the Herd

Monitoring is just one of the operational
challenges that emerge when applications are
built out of microservices and containers.
BY ALEX BARRETT
MONITORING, LOGGING AND security are just some of the
responsibilities of an IT operations team. But as their de-
veloper counterparts increasingly adopt a microservices
model based on discrete, single-process containers, ops
teams must consider whether their usual operational
tools are sufficient for the task at hand.
In a microservices world, monolithic applications that
used to comprise multiple functions are broken apart in
to many smaller, discrete services. Now developers can
easily create changes to an application or business service
without having to overhaul it, and easily scale the service
up or down in the cloud on demand. Meanwhile, the
collection of microservices work in concert to deliver the
same functionality as the erstwhile “monolith,” and end
users are none the wiser.
Missing in this discussion, however, is the impact of
an influx of microservices-based applications on IT oper-
ations, and what those teams can do to ensure that they
are up and running and perform according to plan.
Motus, in Boston, offers a vehicle reimbursement
service for companies with large fleets of drivers. About
two years ago, the company decided to move a monolithic
legacy application built in PHP and re-architect it using
more of a microservices model.
F_/ISTOCK

HOME
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   16
 “The legacy PHP app wasn’t very flexible—it didn’t
Home
allow us to respond to the needs of our customers,” said
Editor’s Letter
Scott Rankin, Motus vice president of technology. Now
that the app has been rebuilt as a series of Docker con-
Why White Box tainers, “dev and QA can spin up new environments very
Switching? quickly, and servers have gotten a lot simpler,” because
much of the configuration has been moved out of Puppet
#Hashtag configurations and into Docker containers.
Opening Up
to Open Source
THE FLIP SIDE?
Survey Says: On “Complexity has skyrocketed,” Rankin said. Whereas
Virtual Servers Motus used to provide its service from just three physical
servers—one for PHP, Java and database—the company
Q&A: Power Down
now manages 30 services on a 12-node cluster running
Mesosphere, a container management and orchestration
Minding the Herd
platform.
The Next Big Thing
Besides the sheer volume of things to look after, visibil-
ity into the stack suffered from the transition to micros-
In the Mix ervices and containers. A New Relic user, the monitoring
service didn’t initially support Docker, and “we lost trace-
ability between apps and servers,” Rankin said.
As an early member of the Docker Ecosystem Technol-
ogy Program, New Relic soon added support for Docker,
fixing Motus’ visibility issues. With that support, Motus
n Not all monitoring tools are fully up to speed with Docker and containers.
HIGHLIGHTS n Docker metrics aren’t sufficient for telling whether the overall application performance is successful.
n A monitoring service must understand relationships between application components.
can turn to New Relic to evaluate containers to make
sure they are properly sized, to keep costs in check, for
instance.
But generally speaking, not all monitoring tools are
fully up to speed with Docker and containers, and no one
has fully solved the end-to-end visibility problem that is
created when you break up a large application into many
smaller components.
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
Getting any performance information about Docker
containers is a relatively new phenomenon. Back in Feb-
ruary, Docker released version 1.5, which introduced the
Stats API that provides real-time information about CPU,
memory, network I/O and block I/O utilization for a given
container.
The information exposed by the Stats API was warmly
received by operational tooling vendors, and “was a great
place to start,” said Scott Johnson, Docker senior vice
president of product management. Johnson said to expect
additional enhancements as time goes on, as well as new
additional partners to begin incorporating that informa-
tion into their tools.
But infrastructure metrics aren’t really the problem,
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   17
 said Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs,
Home
which develops infrastructure services for Docker envi-
Editor’s Letter
ronments. The infrastructure metrics that Docker pro-
vides are “fairly complete,” akin to the information you
Why White Box would get in, Windows Task Manager. “At this level, I
Switching? consider the problem reasonably solved,” Liang said.
Further, thanks to automation and best practices from
#Hashtag DevOps, containers can be monitored right out of the gate,
Liang added.
Opening Up
to Open Source
“Before, monitoring was deployed manually,” he said.
But now, because deploying container-based applications
Survey Says: On is so much easier, monitoring gets incorporated as part of
Virtual Servers the deployment process, he said, either by including an
agent as part of the container, or deploying it as a separate
Q&A: Power Down
container alongside it.
Likewise, organizations that run containers as part of
Minding the Herd
Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Con-
The Next Big Thing
tainer Service (ECS) also have monitoring built in, with
AWS CloudWatch. “You don’t have to worry about it—it’s
In the Mix just there and you can start using it,” Liang said.
What is a problem, however, is understanding rela-
tionships between individual containers, which is where
specialized monitoring players have focused their efforts.
Docker infrastructure metrics are sufficient for things
such as whether an individual service is up or not, but not
whether the overall application performance is sufficient,
said Amit Agarwal, chief product officer at Datadog, a
cloud-based monitoring service.
“This is the problem of pretty much any virtual envi-
ronment,” Agarwal said, and where the metrics provided
by Docker need to be complemented with other metrics.
For example, Datadog can help you see the relationship
between a database table scan, Web server connections
and cache hits, he explained.
In order to do that, a monitoring service must under-
stand relationships between services. For instance, Data-
dog takes into consideration “tags” that have been created
by users of ECS, as well as attributes such as machine type.
WHAT IS A PROBLEM,
HOWEVER, IS UNDERSTANDING
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN
INDIVIDUAL CONTAINERS.
The size, scope and dynamicity of many containerized
environments also demand more intelligence from their
monitoring tools, said Remmelt Pit, director of strategy
and engineering at Container Solutions, an application
design consulting firm in the Netherlands, and the engi-
neering muscle behind the Cisco’s Mantl.io microservices
platform.
“With monolithic applications, if a server goes down,
we care about that,” Pit said. “But with microservices the
pieces are so small that we don’t care about the separate
containers and processes anymore—they are ephemeral.”
To monitor what could be a very large environment in
Mantl.io, Container Solutions has evaluated a tool from
Ruxit, a division of Dynatrace. The product provides
automatic network discovery, and automatically adjusts
alerting thresholds, said Pit, adding that it calculates
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   18
 correlations between events using artificial intelligence intelligence dashboards. Further, they need to be sorted
Home
algorithms that learn usage patterns and top calculate in terms of importance. “Is it important to know that a
Editor’s Letter
correlations between events. service is going to run out of space? Yes, but it doesn’t
In practice, that means “Ruxit understands repetitive warrant getting up at 3:00 a.m.”
Why White Box behaviors like nightly backups that consume lots of re- In some ways, “we’re kind of going backwards with
Switching? sources, [but] do not trigger alerts, when they take place,” containers,” he said. What you want is for your systems
he said. and application and business metrics to all be correlated,
#Hashtag but with containers, processes are by definition divided up
in to ever smaller, self-contained units. And even though
Opening Up
to Open Source
CORRELATION EQUALS COMPLEXITY more apps are instrumented with monitoring by default,
Ultimately, the holy grail of any monitoring service isn’t thanks to automation, too often, those apps end up in
Survey Says: On whether an application is up or down, or even whether their own little silo, he said. “You want to retain data for
Virtual Servers the end user is a having a good experience, said Leon basically forever for better correlation and to trend and
Fayer, vice president at OmniTI, a Web development and predict data.”
Q&A: Power Down
architecture firm. It’s a lot, but on the bright side, “the problem is not
“As someone once said to me, ‘I don’t give a crap if our new,” Fayer said. “It’s just accentuated by the fact that we
Minding the Herd
data center is on fire as long as the business is still mak- are trying to divide up big units in to smaller ones.” n
The Next Big Thing
ing money,’ ” Fayer said. IT metrics need to be correlated
not just to one another and to end user experience, but ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Contact

In the Mix to business metrics such as those measured by business her at abarrett@techtarget.com.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   19

 THE NEXT BIG THING

Home

Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?
Can Your optimize overall Capex. So why haven’t we always used
clustered designs for everyday IT infrastructure? Large

#Hashtag Clusters cluster management and operations is quite complex, es-

pecially when you start mixing workloads and tenants. If

Pass Muster?
Opening Up
to Open Source
Make sure your big data clusters
Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers
don’t become cluster, er, failures.
BY MIKE MATCHETT
Q&A: Power Down
Minding the Herd
The Next Big Thing
CLUSTERED DESIGNS ARE everywhere these days. Popular
In the Mix examples include software-defined storage, virtual infra-
structure, hyper-convergence, public and private clouds,
and, of course, big data. Clustering is the scale-out way
to architect infrastructure to use of commodity resources
like servers and JBODs. Scale-out designs can gain capac-
ity and performance incrementally, reaching huge sizes
cost-effectively compared to most scale-up tools. But a big
challenge for IT is managing these big clusters effectively,
especially with bigger data, larger mashed-up workflows,
and the need for more agile operations.
Big clusters are appealing because they support large-
scale convergence and consolidation initiatives that help
you build a big cluster, you’ll want to make sure it gets used
effectively, and that usually means hosting multiple work-
loads. As soon as that happens, IT has trouble figuring out
how to prioritize or share resources fairly. This has never
been easy—the total Opex in implementing, provisioning,
and optimally managing shared clustered architectures
is often higher than just deploying fully contained and
individually assigned scale-up products.
When clustering in a virtualized infrastructure, it’s
the job of the hypervisor to enforce sharing, isolate noisy
neighbors, dynamically migrate and/or restart impacted
or suddenly demanding workloads, and generally play
traffic cop. We’ve seen great progress in this space over
the years, to the point where we can dynamically enforce
user-specified quality of service (QoS) at the level of the
virtual machine and virtual storage volume (e.g., VMware
VVOLs).
Of course, one could interpret the whole idea of an in-
frastructure cloud (e.g., OpenStack) as a large, optimally
managed cluster of resources. Still, virtual and cloud in-
frastructure platforms have taken years to mature and still
aren’t perfect. There are miles to go in developing cloud
management tools that make it as easy to implement these

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   20

 systems as it is to deploy dedicated equipment. And inside
Home
a virtualized environment, it’s still hard to ensure that an
Editor’s Letter
application in a virtual machine can deliver a guaranteed
response time to an end-user.
Why White Box
Switching?
CLUSTER MANAGEMENT KEY TO BIG DATA
#Hashtag Effective clustering is especially important to big data,
which is all about bringing HPC technology like clustering
Opening Up
to Open Source
at scale to enterprise IT. Hadoop, Spark and some scalable
NoSQL tools are designed to make distributed processing
Survey Says: On feasible for everyone. However, production big data ap-
Virtual Servers plications are just now requiring consistent application
performance. When big data applications underpin key
Q&A: Power Down
business processes, reliable operations and consistent
performance matter.
Minding the Herd
In vanilla big data tools such as a Hadoop cluster, every
The Next Big Thing
big data job competes for the same resources. Up until
now, many Hadoop clusters simply hosted a single big
In the Mix data process or served a small group of users, often in a
non-production data science environment. But as big data
clusters move into production, they are usually expected
to host multiple jobs and serve multiple tenants—just
like big virtualization or cloud clusters. And when that
cluster is shared—and it usually is—managing big data
performance becomes a big challenge.
It’s not surprising then to see new approaches to big
data cluster management and operations. Cluster man-
agement tools tend to fall into a couple of categories.
That’s led to cluster management companies like Bright
Computing, which got started in the HPC space but is now
being used in the enterprise to help deploy, provision and
manage large clusters from bare metal.
But the real trick is performance management, the
key to which is knowing who’s doing what, and when. At
a minimum, there are standard tools that can generate
reports out of the (often prodigious) log files collected
across a cluster. But this approach gets harder as log files
IT’S NOT SURPRISING TO SEE
NEW APPROACHES TO BIG
DATA CLUSTER MANAGEMENT
AND OPERATIONS.
grow. And when it comes to operational performance,
what you really need is to optimize QoS and runtimes
for mixed-tenant and mixed-workload environments.
For example, PepperData assembles a live run-time view
of what’s going on across the cluster, and then uses that
insight to dynamically control the assignment of cluster
resources. This assures priority applications meet SLAs
while minimizing needed cluster infrastructure.
At a higher level, big data deserves its own version of
application performance management (APM). One ex-
ample is Concurrent’s Driven, which tracks historical and
ongoing application execution, providing direct visibility
into business and application level workflows, their ap-
plication inter-dependencies, runtimes and failures. This
helps identify code bottlenecks, plan and fix workflow ex-
ecution windows, and even assists with data governance.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   21
 As more scale-out tools land in the data center, the
Home
value proposition for cluster management tools will
Editor’s Letter
grow—minimizing the Capex needed to share resources
while helping guarantee performance and other QoS to
Why White Box big data business processes. And in some cases, IT just
Switching? may not be able to stand up big data clusters effectively
without these cluster-specific tools.
#Hashtag Collectively we think that big cluster management will
mature much faster than the decade or so it’s taken for
Opening Up
to Open Source
virtualization management to handle high priority pro-
duction workloads. By learning from their virtualization
and cloud predecessors, they may even supplant them
with a more complete clustered data center vision. Let us
know of your trials, tribulations and successes in manag-
ing your large big data clusters in production! n
MIKE MATCHETT is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.
Contact him at mike.matchett@tanejagroup.com.

Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers

Q&A: Power Down

Minding the Herd

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   22

 IN THE MIX

Home

Editor’s Letter

Why White Box

Switching?
Evolve see with IT nowadays, and that’s ignoring business.
IT ignoring the business is why this whole cloud thing

#Hashtag or Perish
It’s time for IT to listen. Yes—listen.
Opening Up
to Open Source BY BOB PLANKERS
Survey Says: On
Virtual Servers
Q&A: Power Down
RECENTLY, I’VE BEEN giving a talk to various IT groups called
Minding the Herd
“Clouds are Magic,” partly because I’m a sarcastic kind
The Next Big Thing
of fellow and partly because if I titled it the way I really
wanted to, then no technical staff would listen. It’s touches
In the Mix upon clouds and transitioning to clouds, but it is mostly
about the non-technical issues and changes in mindset
folks like me need to survive this time. My goal is to give a
few of my listeners an edge based on lessons I’ve learned.
Someone recently called me out on the bait and switch,
complaining that a bunch of my talk was about project
management and requirements gathering, while another
large section was on managing expectations and aligning
with the business. “I was expecting more actual content
from you,” he said, undoubtedly referring to technical
content, as if the non-technical side of IT was irrelevant.
And in doing so he neatly exposed the biggest problem I
started in the first place. I know this because I’ve been
on the IT side of it for a long time, and acted like a high
priest of IT, holding the business hostage if I didn’t like
something that was going on. It’s become obvious that IT
cannot act that way anymore. At best, IT has a symbiotic
relationship with the host organization, each needing the
other to survive. More realistically, though, in the face of
cloud services, the host organization really doesn’t need
IT all that much, especially if IT is going to continue act-
ing the way they’ve always acted. C-level executives are
realizing this in droves, and the pendulum is swinging
fast away from IT.
As with all power shifts, though, the pendulum will
swing away, and then settle back in a reasonable middle.
The challenge for IT, though, is to survive that swing’s
apogee. With the current attitudes I’m seeing, it’ll be a
bloodbath. The business couldn’t care less about technical
issues, latencies and all-flash disk arrays. They want things
done fast, on budget, and securely, and they’re more than
willing to go outside IT to do it. To continue being relevant
in this climate, IT staff need to evolve their skills. Being
VMware certified is neat, but being a certified Project
Management Professional will get you further in your
IT career. Similarly, being able to gather requirements
well and communicate ideas to non-technical groups are

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   23

 important skills.
Home
The best post-secondary class an IT professional could
Editor’s Letter
take right now is a requirements gathering course. It helps
in three big ways. First, it gets technical staff thinking in
Why White Box non-technical ways, which is good for communication.
Switching? Second, it teaches IT staff how to coax requirements out of
users and management. This is especially important when
#Hashtag you’re trying to address shadow IT and siloes with reticent
users. Finally, it teaches IT pros how to organize and pri-
Opening Up
to Open Source
oritize requirements objectively, in ways that align with
the business’s goals. Being objective, or at least striving to
Survey Says: On be objective, is a great way for IT to build credibility with
Virtual Servers
management and with users.
There continues to be a place and time for technical-
ly-minded individuals in IT, but those areas are shrinking.
We all need to acknowledge this, and instead of complain-
ing about change, and complaining about the beds we’ve
made for ourselves, we need to accept it and move forward.
If we work to improve our relevance to the business itself,
through alignment and improved non-technical skills sets,
we have a chance at surviving this chaotic time. n
BOB PLANKERS is a virtualization and cloud architect at a major
Midwestern university.

Q&A: Power Down

Minding the Herd

The Next Big Thing

In the Mix

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • NOV/DEC 2015   24

Home

Editor’s Letter

Why White Box Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com e-publication.

Switching?
Margie Semilof, Editorial Director
#Hashtag
Alex Barrett, Editor in Chief
Opening Up
to Open Source Adam Hughes, Managing Editor
Follow
@ModernInfra
Survey Says: On Phil Sweeney, Managing Editor
on Twitter!
Virtual Servers
Patrick Hammond, Associate Features Editor
Q&A: Power Down
Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Minding the Herd

Joe Hebert, Production Editor

The Next Big Thing

Rebecca Kitchens, Publisher, rkitchens@techtarget.com

In the Mix
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