Cloud UCC Stacks coming soon to a VoIP device near you.

The UC Forecast Calls For More And More Clouds

by Wes Durow

Oct 17, 2013

Attributes of Cloud UC and Associated Models

Recently Infonetics issued their 2013 UC Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey and the report brought to light the fast growth emerging in the Cloud-based Unified Communications (aka Hosted VoIP, Cloud Telephony, UCaaS) segment.  

Specifically, 22% of their survey respondents already have implemented portions of their UC architecture in a private cloud, and 19% have done so in a public cloud.   Further, their VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers report forecast a 32% growth of hosted PBX/UC seats in North America in CY13.  

While the Cloud UC segment represent singles digits as part of the overall market the report from Infonetics calls for continued growth in double digits while premise-based solutions remain flat.  Frankly, I'm surprised that the Cloud UC market hasn't taken off even faster.

The traditional pushback has been that telephony features are way too important to put into the Cloud. That is nonsense, what makes telephony any more important than personnel data, customer data, or financial data?  My belief is that companies like Success Factors, salesforce.com and NetSuite have paved the way for the emergence of a new Cloud-based model to take hold in the communications space.  

e most common driver in moving to Cloud UC is typically cost savings.  Early adoption has been driven by the smallest of small businesses as their barriers to transition are relatively low and the immediate impact of cost savings can be substantial versus traditional premise-based solutions.  As the market has matured over the last couple of years you now see more midsize and large enterprises starting to trial and deploy Cloud UC in controlled environments.  Sonus has a unique vantage point from which to observe the emerging Cloud UC phenomenon.  

Specifically, we enable many of the markets leading Cloud UC providers - whether they are leveraging a BroadSoft platform, a Microsoft Lync platform, or an open source/Asterisk type platform.  My own career has spanned across Cloud UC as well as traditional enterprise PBX vendors so I will share my fair and biased opinion on the state of the Cloud UC market.  This is a large topic so I will break my blog post into four separate entries. 

With today's entry, I will focus on attributes of Cloud UC and primary deployment models. In a few days, I will cover the cost savings component followed shortly thereafter by the added capabilities that Cloud UC solutions typically deliver. And finally, my final post on this topic will cover the common myths, mistakes and challenges of moving to Cloud UC.
 

Attributes Of Cloud UC

So what is Cloud UC?  Much like established cloud computing models, I believe Cloud UC is characterized by four key attributes:

1. SHARED RESOURCES - The first attribute is that the physical resources (e.g. network infrastructure, real estate, support) are shared.
2. ENDLESS ENDPOINTS - The second attribute is that network access will come through a seemingly endless spectrum of endpoints ranging from desk phones, computers, smartphones, tablets and so on.
3. DEPLOYED DYNAMICALLY - The third attribute is that resources are deployed and provisioned in a dynamic manner.  This approach allows for effective expansion and contraction of services as needed.
4. METERED USAGE - And finally, the fourth attribute is the notion that usage is metered, reported and billed in such a manner that customers have a clear view as to how much they're using and how much they will be charged, allowing them to manage expenses accordingly.

FULL STORY :

http://www.sonus.net/company/blog/2013-10-17/uc-forecast-calls-for-more-clouds-part1

S O N U S    N E T W O R K S

CLOUD 3.0 - VMWorld 2013 Presentations - VMware 5.5 & The Road to SDN Everywhere

VMworld 2013: The Road to SDN Everywhere
- 
What's New in VMware 5.5

This presentation will take a high level look into the latest release of VMware vSphere. Every release of vSphere delivers over 100 new capabilities so it is important to understand the most important elements that may impact or improve your vSphere environment.

VMworld 2013: Session NET7388-S - Network Virtualization

When server virtualization first came to market, few understood the implications of its disruptive nature. Now, with tens of billions of dollars in customer savings achieved, and over 80 percent of all workloads virtualized, it's clear server virtualization has fundamentally changed the way the IT operates, and in turn, transformed our industry. Network Virtualization promises the same transformative impact to change data center economics.


To date, the network virtualization conversation has focused on well-documented and customer-proven benefits of agility, flexibility and cost improvements. This is the story of the last few years. In this talk, Martin Casado will outline the next horizon for network virtualization.


He will detail how network virtualization will enable advanced capabilities such as network visibility and troubleshooting, security and network-wide policy. Attendees will leave with the knowledge and understanding of how this next chapter in the evolution of virtualization technology will unfold.

The future of the hybrid data center : NSX

 

       Interview with Bruce Davie about VMware NSX at VMworld 2013

VMWARE 5.5 CONFIGURATIONS MAXIMUMS

CLOUD 1.0 Part Deux - The 3 Dimensional Architect - BigData vs BigMemory

The Revenge of Client Server Two Phase Commit


"...one approach is to problem of big data is a dispersed database like HADOOP  or any of the mainstream NoSQLs another approach is large powerful  in memory database like SAP HANA.  

Although it obvious that dispersed database will eventually win out. 

There exist  business scenarios where in memory database like SAP HANA is not only desirable - but extremely profitable for system integrators and MSP...." 

In Memory Databases 101
----
 Vishal Sikka on How to Architect 

for SAP HANA

5 part series from SAP TechEd. During the ASUG pre-conference seminar.

How to Architect for SAP HANA, Dr. Vishal Sikka provided some sneak peeks into SAP HANA

and took questions from the audience.

Rest of the series - http://www.youtube.com/user/ASUGtv

SAP HANA 1.0 Architecture By Shabbir Khan
.

CLOUD 3.0 - IT Skunk Works Project

CLOUD "SKUNK WORKS" PROJECT

CLOUD 1.0  - Publiic PaaS IaaS SaaS

CLOUD 2.0 - Hybrid PaaS IaaS SaaS (Where U are now ...)

CLOUD 3.0 - SDN Everywhere

CLOUD 3.0 - Part Deux - Secure SDN Everywhere ( Where I am... )

A revolution as big as the Switch from DC to AC current....


More : http://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/Question-of-the-Day-for-103013.html

Founded 10/31/13 in Toronto  a division of CSNA

CLOUD 3.0 - Making the Case for Dispersed Storage

 "...Todays world of compute anywhere with access to all  my data and social interactions, will drive storage demand  exponentially.  

The  recent availability cost SATA and soon SSD storage installed in commodity servers will require a rethink of  enterprise storage architecture. 

Legacy vendors look out here comes DISPERSED STORAGE... " 

-  Karl Preddie

Article by George Grump Storage Analyst

Traditional storage systems ( SAN, NAS,  DASD)  leverage traditional RAID architectures to maintain data availability which, unfortunately, are not particularly well suited for PB-scale environments. This is especially true when configured with the highest capacity hard drives possible to keep cost per-GB low. And even with these high capacity drives, there is still the requirement to support hundreds (or thousands) of spindles.

Unfortunately, hundreds of high capacity hard drives creates the ‘perfect storm’ for RAID. With this many drives the cloud storage provider has to work under the assumption that there will always be a hard drive failure (the laws of probability). When there is a failure to a hard disk in a RAID group, the RAID controller logic must rebuild the entire disk, sector by sector, even if the drive is mostly empty. The larger the drive gets, the more time it takes to perform this rebuild; with disk capacities of up to 4TBs this can stretch into days.

Long rebuild times plus the likelihood of constant rebuild efforts creates additional challenges for these large scale data centers. First, the longer the rebuild the longer the period of time that the applications or users connected to that array have to endure the degraded performance caused by I/O intensive rebuild traffic. Second, and more importantly, the longer the rebuild time the longer the data center is vulnerable to complete data loss caused by a second or third drive failure (depending on whether RAID 5 or RAID 6 is deployed).

These factors encourage storage designers to create highly redundant RAID systems with powerful controllers. The problem is that doing so leads to reduced hard drive efficiency, increased costs and poor space utilization. Despite these extra steps the systems are still not completely trusted and storage managers will often augment them with disk backup systems, replication and tape. In the highly competitive cloud or service provider market the combination of all of these problems has driven storage managers to find new alternatives.

The Object Storage Solution

The first attraction of object storage is its ability to deal with millions upon millions of objects or files. Object based storage allows providers to overcome a key weakness of traditional file systems which can have file count restrictions due to their limitations with handling metadata. These metadata problems often force large infrastructures to add storage systems prior to using all the capacity available with current systems. Object storage solves this problem with its ability to support a nearly unlimited number of objects.

When it comes to data protection, object storage systems also have the advantage of being granular to the object or file level. This means that a user can control the number of copies of data that are made on a per-object (or group of objects) basis. This is typically done via a replication policy that simply copies objects to other storage nodes in the environment.

With a dispersed storage system, if a disk fails, the system uses another copy of the object stored on a separate node/disk. It then replicates this data to another device in the system to bring the object to full reliability. Performance is also improved because dispersed storage requires no complex XOR function, like RAID has, in order to identify lost files.

The Object Storage Challenge

While a replication based strategy enables simple protection with rapid recovery it does present several challenges to the storage designer. First, this type of “1: X” protection scheme, with X being the desired number of redundant copies, is very capacity inefficient. Assuming that a data center would like to keep three copies so it can still access data even if two nodes have failed, their storage capacity requirements would triple. Further levels of protection only exacerbate the problem.

The second challenge is performance. Since each object copy is uniquely contained on a storage node, performance is limited to the capabilities of that node. In other words per-object performance will not scale as more nodes are added to the environment.

The Dispersed Storage Solution

To solve these problems companies like Cleversafe have leveraged data erasure coding and dispersal algorithms that parse data into multiple segments and then distribute these segments across multiple nodes in the storage cluster. In the case of Cleversafe these nodes can be self-contained, all in one building or data center, or can be geographically distributed.

At a high level erasure coding is similar to RAID except that the parity calculations are applied at the file (or object) level instead of at the disk level. When a rebuild is necessary, the segments that compose a file can be reproduced much more easily than having to rebuild an entire disk drive.

This level of protection can be dialed up or down by increasing the delta between the number of segments generated and the minimum number of segments required to reconstruct the data, which can be based on attribute policies such as age, data type, popularity, etc. The result is a level of protection or an effective redundancy much higher than even the two-drive-failure protection provided by RAID 6, with far less capacity overhead.

Also, multiple storage nodes can deliver their data segments in parallel, which helps with read performance. And, the system has the intelligence to provide data from the closest or fastest set of nodes.

The Dispersed Storage Advantage

Another significant advantage with dispersed storage is that the storage manager is now managing just one copy of data that is fully protected. The algorithm automatically makes sure that enough segments are dispersed both locally and remotely to provide the level of protection it’s configured for.

Compare this to legacy storage where data has to be stored with especially inefficient RAID algorithms, like RAID 10, copied to a secondary local disk backup system, then replicated via a separate process to a remote facility and finally copied to tape for the "restore of last resort" copy.

Dispersed storage simplifies management and data protection all while reducing cost, space, power and cooling requirements. In the cost-competitive provider market, this is exactly what’s required to meet demands, while enabling providers to continue on-boarding new customers without escalating costs.