Hyper-convergence and Open Networking: A Match Made in Cloudy Heaven

A lot of the early hype around cloud computing focused on grand visions related to there being only 5 or 6 extremely large cloud providers across the globe. While public clouds continue to grow at a breakneck pace, private clouds are also starting to see immense traction, especially in key verticals like financials, SaaS providers, and telecom service providers.

Over time and through extensive trial and error, the marketplace is realizing that there are two key requirements for successfully implementing cloud computing:

• Simplicity: This primarily refers to breaking down silos that have plagued IT departments of all sizes, allowing for a unified framework across compute, storage and networking.
• Infrastructure automation: Ranging from automated provisioning to full lifecycle of infrastructure, implemented in a software defined manner. Often referred to as Infrastructure as Code, or Idempotent IT.

Simplicity and infrastructure automation have been extensively covered by leading IT analysts and, along with application-level paradigms like Hadoop, have often been referenced as the way to achieve the extraordinary scale and success of Web scale IT shops like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

But until now, having the entire set of components and knowing how to assemble and automate them effectively still required open Continue reading

Using New Relic Server Monitoring With Cumulus Linux

One of the most visible trends on the Web today is the “SaaS-ification” of the enterprise. Major productivity functions like email and calendaring, customer relationship management (CRM), and IT systems management are gaining greater value by being deployed as cloud-based services. IT and systems monitoring companies like New Relic are thriving in the cloud as well.

Another major trend, one that Cumulus Networks is at the forefront of, is the transformation of the “switch as a server.” If you aren’t familiar, check out Cumulus Networks engineer Leslie Carr’s excellent PuppetConf 2014 presentation. Since Cumulus Linux supports Debian-based packages out of the box, we decided to take New Relic’s Server Monitoring product for a spin. We wanted to see how Cumulus Linux extends Server Monitoring’s functionality to monitoring switches.

Once logged into Cumulus Linux, installing the server agent takes just a few minutes, as expected. Leveraging the documentation and installation guide allowed us to get up and running in minutes.

Since it’s SaaS, there is obviously no server deployment required, so all you have to do is to log in to your New Relic account and start looking at the performance data that is automagically pushed to your dashboard. Here’s Continue reading