Mar

29

2011

Cisco announces intent to acquire NewScale

Hot off the press… although that phrase doesn’t make much sense in a digital world – http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2011/corp_032911.html.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 29, 2011 – Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately-held newScale Inc., a leading provider of software that delivers a service catalog and self-service portal for IT organizations to select and quickly deploy cloud services within their businesses. Based in San Mateo, Calif., newScale allows commercial and enterprise customers to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis.

“Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical,” said Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president of Cisco Services.  “With the acquisition of newScale, Cisco will be able to accelerate the deployment of cloud services through a service catalog and self-service portal that allows customers to easily manage their IT infrastructures.”

Cisco’s cloud strategy is to harness the network as a platform for building and using clouds and cloud services.  newScale will complement and expand existing Cisco and partner software offerings in IT and cloud management and automation. Cisco remains committed to supporting flexibility and choice in management through a broad ecosystem of technology partners, and newScale delivers an additional option the company can provide to its customers.

Financial terms of the transaction are undisclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the second half of Cisco’s fiscal year 2011. Upon the close of the acquisition, the newScale team will report into Cisco’s Advanced Services organization.

So Cisco could have Tidal and NewScale which have already shown themselves to work well together.

Could this be the standard automation platform that Vblock has been waiting for?

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Mar

23

2011

Nexus 1000v password recovery

Lately, I’ve been working a lot with the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch. As you’d expect, probability dictates that I’d manage to lock myself out – and I did.

So how do you reset the password on a Nexus 1000v?

First thing’s first, you need the Nexus 1000v ISO image and an agreed period of possible disruption as you’ll be losing your VSMs for 5-10 mins whilst they reboot.

If you have dual VSMs for HA, you have to ensure that one of your VSMs is powered down for the duration of this process.

Once you’ve shut the secondary VSM down, attach the Nexus 1000v ISO to what is now the primary VSM VM, ensure that it’s connected during power on then power off/power on your VM. You might need to edit your BIOS config to ensure that you boot from CD before local disk.

After powering on your VSM, you should be shown the following screen, select ‘Install Nexus 1000v and goto vsh shell’ (note that this is the option specified in the Cisco docs, however I’ve also used the ‘only if the disk is unformatted’ option and that also appears to work).

image

After loading, you’ll be presented with the boot image command line. This is where the new password is entered.

switch(boot)# conf t
switch(boot-config)# admin-password password-here
switch(boot-config)# exit

Next, the system image that you’re using needs to be loaded. In my case, nexus1000v-mz.4.2.1.SV1.4.bin. Hint – tab completion works here!

switch(boot)# load bootflash:/nexus1000v-mz.4.2.1.SV1.4.bin

image

You’ll see the image uncompress and load and then be prompted for your login and password. This will be admin and whatever you changed the password to above.

Check that the running config is what you had before using:

sh run

Once happy, save the running config to your startup config (with your new password) using:

copy run start

Finally, power on your secondary VSM.

That’s it… password changed!

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Feb

16

2011

SRM Upgrade Method

I noticed on twitter today that VMware Site Recovery manager 4.1.1 has been released (release notes here).

There’s a few fixes but the most interesting snippet of text was this:

To minimize the upgrade outage, start with the production site.  Even if the upgrade doesn’t work for some reason, or if you take too long, and a DR event occurs, you will still be able to fail over since that doesn’t require the protected site to be running.  Both sides must be at the same version and build to work together so do not forget that.  Once you start your upgrade work until you are finished!  Remember to upgrade the SRM plug-ins too.

Whilst the above may be obvious when you consider how SRM functions, for those who have done upgrades in the past to any other systems, it’s counter intuitive.

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Feb

14

2011

IT, meet the Business

I saw an amazing tweet last week. The tweet was a comment by @BlueShiftBlog on a presentation made at VMware PEX.

image

This tweet resonated with me as I had been thinking this for a while.

IT is maturing at a faster rate than I have seen in my relatively short career. IT is being transformed from a supporting service to a fully fledged enabler. Rather than the cumbersome, expensive behemoth that was – we are seeing the potential of good IT to be a business differentiator. And for arguably the first time, the promise is that these advancements will be accessible to companies of all sizes and budgets.

One issue with this transformation however is that IT does not integrate itself. This new generation of IT capabilities will require a new set of skilled employees. Whilst the more traditional ‘Nerd Knobs’ will still be needed in various forms (this term appears to have stuck, more on this in a later post), perhaps the jewel in the crown will be what I’d like to call a ‘Nerd Knob on Steroids’ (NKoS?). A technical body who understands the business and its needs. Someone who can apply business requirements to IT and understand the ramifications that a decision at a business or technical level may bring. A technical architect/business analyst hybrid if you will.

Sounds like fun to me.

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Feb

01

2011

Cisco Live Europe 2011 Opening Keynote

In case you didn’t know, Cisco Live is taking place all week at Excel in London. Today marked the opening keynote which started with a lot of London love. I took some notes during the keynote so apologies if this is poorly written.

imageFirst up was a rendition of a few of the songs from Oliver, the musical. I wasn’t particularly expecting street urchins on the stage, a tad random but entertaining none the less.

Following this, Amanda Jobbins – the VP of Technology Marketing hit the stage, with again more London love with some cockney rhyming slang, a mention of the 2012 Olympics and a brief chat with Roger Black. She also mentioned the collaboration and partnership with BT, the event’s diamond sponsor before introducing John Chambers.

image

Continue Reading

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Jan

18

2011

The EMC VNX family

Share photos on twitter with TwitpicAs the marketing has been going on for months (for example, broken records being sent out to industry bods advertising the launch… which wasn’t necessarily the best bit of marketing foresight), its no surprise that the VNX part of the announcement hasn’t necessarily been the best kept secret. Still, it makes it interesting doesn’t it.

Traditionally, EMC have always had very distinct product lines when it came to block (Clariion/Symmetrix) and file (Celerra). However, since the launch of Unisphere in Q3 last year, the view has shifted to a more unified approach with simplicity and efficiency in mind.

So what is VNX? Well, to put it simply, it’s a new EMC hardware platform that further executes on their vision. It promises to bring everything you’d expect from a new platform launch – additional power, greater efficiency and further simplification across the board.

The VNX family consists of the VNX series, a midrange storage platform targeted at customers who would previously have bought CX4/NS, and VNXe, a SMB/ROBO solution similar to the AX4 with the ability to replicate to VNX. Whilst the VNXe is receiving more attention (new market, new product), I’m going to concentrate specifically on the larger platforms. Continue Reading

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