mletschin

Taking the EZ-Pass Lane to a Hybrid Storage Cloud

July 25, 2018 By mletschin

Everyone wants to get from point a to point b as fast as possible and transitioning from a traditional datacenter to a modern hybrid or all cloud based infrastructure should not be any different. Just like the EZ-Pass lanes at toll booths get you moving quicker, the new One-Click Deployment of NexentaCloud will move you from a traditional on-prem storage to a cloud based storage solution quickly and easily. The steps below will walk you through the simple wizard that is built into NexentaFusion to deploy NexentaCloud in less than 30 minutes for up to 300TB!

File Services for HCI and Block Storage Simplified

July 17, 2018 By mletschin

Check out our video “Deploying NexentaStor as a Virtual Storage Appliance“.

Today’s modern datacenter has a combination of compute, storage and networking options. This includes an ever-growing use of hyperconverged and block only storage systems. These systems are great for running virtual machines, but users and applications still require file services to conduct daily business. Deploying a file services solution for NFS or SMB connections can be a labor intensive and expensive proposition; to combat that, Nexenta provides a quick and easy way for administrators to add file services to their existing virtual infrastructure. One of the many deployment models of the NexentaStor solution is as a virtual storage appliance (VSA). To make this even simpler and faster for our end users, we have packaged NexentaStor as an OVF appliance. The NexentaStor OVF is installed directly from a single URL for the OVF:

https://prodpkg.nexenta.com/nstor/5.2.1.8/addons/NexentaStorVSA.ovf

Late Night Infomercials and the Data Center

August 15, 2017 By mletschin

Today’s storage administrators are looking for the best performance for the lowest cost to satisfy their enterprise data requirements. Performance is often improved by adding more solid state drives, but these come at a cost premium. For enterprises looking to save money and resources while meeting performance requirements- data reduction is a key component in creating the ideal solution.

Options for data reduction are classified into two main categories and each has their own purpose- data deduplication and compression.

3 Simple Ways To Protect Your Data From Ransomware

June 28, 2017 By mletschin

By: Michael B. Letschin, Field CTO

Ransomware attacks have become one of the biggest threats to enterprise data. WannaCry was released just a few months back, and yesterday, an even more sophisticated attack was launched called Petya.

This new attack locks down a computer’s hard drive and demands payment in Bitcoin to unlock the user’s system. They claim it will send a password after payment, but there is a slim chance that a password that will ever arrive.

The one thing these attacks have in common is they are based on the EternalBlue tool that was leaked from the NSA. The tool specifically attacks vulnerabilities on Windows systems.

So how do you protect your corporate data? There are 3 Simple ways.

Is DevOps changing storage from simple to API?

October 14, 2016 By mletschin

“Storage should be easy. It should be that anyone can manage it, it’s something you put in the closet and forget about.”

This was the mantra of storage vendors over the last 10-15 years. We saw vendors like EqualLogic make a dent and then get acquired after selling on simplicity. Then, EMC announced the VNXe and invited a third-grader to come onstage and configure it.

This worked well when selling into the small to medium business space, and many companies jumped on the bandwagon, but is it the future? As we see cross-cloud integration like VMware announced at VMworld, and the rise of containers into the enterprise, is simplicity really the key selling point?

I would argue it is not. The new paradigm is another one of the buzzwords of the past few years: DevOps.

If you are like most people in the market, you are still trying to figure out exactly what DevOps means. Do you need to have programmers on staff even though you sell insurance or auto parts? You don’t. In fact, you just need staffers that understand the underlying concepts.

The most general definition I have found was on Wikipedia: “A movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.”

For this purpose, think about the integration you need as you move from an isolated enterprise to one that works with SaaS tools and newly developed applications. There is a glue that holds all these components together and allows us to achieve tight integration — that is the API.

“API” can be a scary term for many SysAdmins, since they are used to a GUI that lets them manage everything (back to the third-grader deploying storage). However, it does not need to be scary anymore, since more companies are making it easier than ever to work with an API.

The Open API Initiative (OAI) has influenced vendors to keep APIs more consistent and simpler for everyone. Combining the REST APIs with something like Swagger UI tool gives the general admin a simple representation of what an API can do. Swagger even provides a public-facing demo, “Swagger Petstore,” so that any administrator can understand how easy an API can be to use.

Most of the newer storage companies, and specifically those touting “software-defined,” utilize something like the Swagger UI as a web interface to clearly detail exactly what you need to put in a script to make the storage do what you want.

Take the Petstore example: When you use the “Try It Out” under the store inventory, it produces a new command to run

curl -X GET –header ‘Accept: application/json’ ‘http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/store/inventory’

No longer is a developer needed; you simply go to a website and cut and paste into the script. This impact can be felt throughout the data center.

This shift to a simplistic API, and even more importantly a simplistic and powerful interface to those APIs, can be used by enterprises to change the way the SysAdmins of today work. This will not eliminate the need for vendors to make simple, easy-to-navigate graphical interfaces, but it will give the freedom and flexibility that is needed as enterprises move more and more into the software-defined data center.