Skip to main content

Been in Geneva doing a datacenter build out

Built out our new datacenter, I was in Geneva for the last 12 days. We are getting ready to move our US hosting facility to Geneva to get ready to merge the MFG and sourcingparts environments. Its going to take several months overall, but the first steps are going to occur in the next few weeks. Everything went really well, we installed and moved a lot of gear, servers, F5 Big-ips, (Unknown Vendor) HA firewalls, and a nice Netapp 3040 dual head cluster.

The only issue was that we got a quad 1gig card in it versus the 10G copper card we wanted. Netapp only makes a 10G fiber card, so we had to buy different switch modules as well. Netapp ate the extra cost on the cards for us, which was nice. We also can't run LACP on the 10G fiber cards, so we lose switch redundancy.

The Netapp is currently serving Vmware ESXi over NFS, and it screams. We also are using iSCSI for our MSSQL clusters. The speeds on Vmware and iSCSI are very good even with the current 4G we are running until we get the new cards in. Working perfectly, and very happy about it.

The new network and server design is nice and clean, and its working perfectly as well. Still have a lot to build in the 1st environment we are working on, as well as the other environments we have to build out. Going to be back in Geneva to finish the last physical moves in Feb or so, but we'll be doing things remotely, and moving as much as possible as well. My team over there has been doing great, as well as the US team who was responsible for most of the implementation and design. Great job to all parties involved, I'm very excited by the progress, and the flexibility we'll have with our new 70 disk Netapp system, networking improvements, and the larger Vmware environment.

More later.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Wow this is so exciting Jonah!
Thanks for sharing!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 3:54:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dynatrace Growth Misinformation

For my valued readers: I wanted to point out some issues I’ve recently seen in the public domain. As a Gartner analyst, I heard many claims about 200% growth, and all kind of data points which have little basis in fact. When those vendors are asked what actual numbers they are basing those growth claims on, often the questions are dodged. Dynatrace, recently used the Gartner name and brand in a press release. In Its First Year as an Independent Company, Gartner Ranks Dynatrace #1 in APM Market http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/06/prweb12773790.htm I want to clarify the issues in their statements based on the actual Gartner facts published by Gartner in its Market Share data: Dynatrace says in their press release: “expand globally with more than three times the revenue of other new generation APM vendors” First, let’s look at how new the various technologies are: Dynatrace Data Center RUM (DCRUM) is based on the Adlex technology acquired in 2005, but was cr...
10 comments
Read more

Misunderstanding "Open Tracing" for the Enterprise

When first hearing of the OpenTracing project in 2016 there was excitement, finally an open standard for tracing. First, what is a trace? A trace is following a transaction from different services to build an end to end picture. The latency of each transaction segment is captured to determine which is slow, or causing performance issues. The trace may also include metadata such as metrics and logs, more on that later. Great, so if this is open this will solve all interoperability issues we have, and allow me to use multiple APM and tracing tools at once? It will help avoid vendor or project lock-in, unlock cloud services which are opaque or invisible? Nope! Why not? Today there are so many different implementations of tracing providing end to end transaction monitoring, and the reason why is that each project or vendor has different capabilities and use cases for the traces. Most tool users don't need to know the implementation details, but when manually instrumenting wi...
2 comments
Read more

IBM Pulse 2008 - Review

I spent Monday-Wednesday at IBM Pulse in Orlando. It was a good show, but quite a few of the sessions were full when I arrived. It was frustrating because they didn't offer them more than once. The morning sessions were mostly pie in the sky, and not very useful to me. I got to spend a lot of time with senior people in engineering, architecture, and acquisitions/strategy. I also got to meet people I knew from online or other dealings with IBM. Overall, the show was a good use of my time, and I found it enjoyable. Here are some of my highlights: ITM 6.2.1 improvements including agentless capabilities and such. New reporting framework based on BIRT which will be rolling forward. New UI which is being pushed and was on display from TBSM 4.2. Hearing about what other customers are up to (mostly bad decisions from what I've seen). Affirmation of ITNM (Precision) as a best of breed tool, with a excellent roadmap. Some things which are bad and make no sense: Focus on manufactur...
6 comments
Read more