ANZ Pied Piper

 In the previous article we showed how organizations can leverage modern automation tools to deliver Storage-as-a-Service on-prem to provide end users with a comparable experience to that of public cloud at a fraction of the cost and with the added benefits of easier security and compliance.  The STaaS demo leaves no one indifferent. What we see often happening is that the viewer’s mind starts to extrapolate and comes up with the logical question: "Can I do this with other IT resources?" After all, the IT organization owns more resources than storage and of course, public clouds offers all their services in the same way, directly to the end user through a self-service catalogue The answer is “YES”, it can be done (and it should be done) for other IT resources. For example, a basic offering for everyone should be Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Both IaaS and STaaS were the original services provided by AWS 14 years go and are to this date the bread and butter of public cloud

In this previous article we discussed how to leverage PowerStore's powerful API to collect audit logs and send them to a Syslog server . We used Logstash to do that because of its extensive list of plugins Sometimes I come across organizations that still have a requirement to send storage array Alerts to SNMP. As in the Syslog case, ultimately most modern monitoring tools today support collecting information via REST API because that's the way the application world is going, i.e. the cloud native way ... it would be fun to see Prometheus monitoring Kubernetes via SNMP :) However there is still some requirement out there for SNMP traps, so we will explore how to do it. For simplicity we will use the same toolset that we used in the previous article. I encourage you to revisit quickly the article as we did an extensive introduction to Logstash, with practical examples as well as a description of the logs available in PowerStore. I won't cover those aspects in this article I

In today's article I wanted to share some work I have been doing recently, specifically a prototype for an on-prem Storage-as-a-Service with DellEMC PowerStore A few years ago we used to hear a lot the "we have a cloud-first policy" and this of course meant "public cloud". The promise of lower cost pay-per use, self-service and automated IT consumption attracted many customers. Many of these organizations discovered the hard way that the financial aspect of it was not exactly "low cost". Public cloud makes solid sense for a bursty application but your average workload can typically run on-prem for up to 50% less However the self-service and automated IT consumption capabilities changed everyone's perspective of how IT resources should be consumed. Organizations nowadays expect that capability on-prem as well. If they succeed in getting it they will have the best of both worlds: empower the end users, operational efficiency and financial savings The

PowerFlex (formerly ScaleIO and VxFlex) has long be one of the best choices for Kubernetes persistent storage. For a long time, ScaleIO was one of the handful of storage drivers available in-tree, even when CSI was not around. The thing is that PowerFlex is a scale-out software defined solution, much like Kubernetes itself. This makes it a great match. But also, in a world where we keep deploying scaled out high performance containerised applications such as ElasticSearch, MongoDB or Cassandra there is an ever increasing requirement for high IO low latency persistent layer. PowerFlex is a great choice for these workloads  With that in mind a colleague of mind has put together a series of videos showing how one can leverage modern DevOps tools like Ansible and Terraform to deploy such solutions easily and efficiently. Terraform is used here as a provisioning tool and Ansible for Configuration Management In the first video Jonathan uses Terraform to deploy a number of Virtual Machines on

In this article we will explore how to get the logs from a DellEMC PowerStore array to a Syslog server. For this purpose we will use the PowerStore’s REST API, which is a great piece of engineering and a joy to work with as a developer. If you want to learn more about the PowerStore REST API I strongly recommend you quickly skim through the 2 articles I have written about the REST API. Part 1 - http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2020/08/intro-to-dellemc-powerstore-rest-api.html Part 2 - http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2020/08/powerstore-rest-api-best-practices.html In particular the second article demonstrates the capabilities of the REST API query language. This is a great feature I will use heavily in the last section so I strongly recommend you read that one at least As a side note, Syslog was developed in 1980. So this year it has turn 40 years old! That is a long time by any measure ... many of my colleagues were not even born in 1980. But in the technology scale it looks even scarier. 198

In a previous article we introduced the concept of "cloud data co-location" and we presented a demo video that automated the provisioning of a Virtual Machine in vSphere and some storage from both Unity and PowerFlex. At the time we mentioned that the prototype works with public cloud providers but we showed vSphere instead as we didn't have an array plugged in to the public cloud via direct connect service available. Recently, we had to work that required that kind of setup so we took the opportunity to record a video. It is very cool and lasts less than 3 minutes, so make sure you don't miss it!

Today we live in a world powered by REST APIs. And when it comes to REST API’s, PowerStore’s is fantastic. Why? An important thing to understand is that PowerStore is a REST API first system, which means all functionality that is exposed externally has been made available through the API. This also means that other interfaces such as the CLI or the GUI are in fact consumers of the REST API. This is the second part of a a recent blog post and a video I published explaining some of the most important features of the PowerStore REST API. Blog - http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2020/08/intro-to-dellemc-powerstore-rest-api.html Video -  https://youtu.be/xMzKUuTasWY?list=PL_zWoydWWqp4AfdYNkTkAxCvr5tGl9JzR In this article we will use Postman to show you how to query the API. Postman is a great tool to explore REST API’s and can be downloaded for free The Postman collection for PowerStore that I am going to show in this article can be found in https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision Project Vis