ANZ Pied Piper

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...

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!

I recently recorded a video introducing the PowerStore REST API. The API in PowerStore is great. It is very comprehensive and addresses all management aspects of the array Documentation for the API is available through Swagger UI. But if you like the old fashioned API reference guide, you can also get it here The video shows also how authentication works and the advanced request parameters, which allows developers to perform powerful queries with the REST API The demo uses a Postman collection from Project Vision. You can get this and other collections for other DellEMC products from this GitHub repo: https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision I hope you enjoy the video

Today I wanted to share a video that my colleague and fellow Avenger Masanori Nakamura has created. He is a presales engineer in Japan and is very knowledgeable with our VxFlex product. DellEMC VxFlex is a software defined storage solution that can be deployed either on a 2-tier or as a a hyperconverged architecture. It is typically consumed through appliances or as a fully integrated rack solution (formerly called VxRack Flex) However, since it is a software defined solution, it can be deployed on top of virtually any IaaS. In this case, Masanori-san deploys it on top of GCP.

Kubernetes can be hard work. The success of distributions like Openshift, Rancher or PKS is due to the promise of making it easier. Still a large part of the user base (in fact this still has the largest market share of any on-prem Kubernetes distro) choose to deploy plain vanilla Kubernetes to take advantage of the super fast-paced innovation However this is usually a path that leads to long hours trying to figure how to make things work and overcome many problems. This is painful even though the community out there is massive. With this in mind one of my colleagues ( Deepak Waghmare ) took upon himself the task of simplifying and streamlining some of these tasks as much as possible. He created an Ansible collection with several roles. This collection is now published in Galaxy The collection is primarily aiming at the the simplification of the installation of the CSI driver in DellEMC storage arrays. All these arrays follow the same pattern by using Helm, so with a littl...

The Ansible community is massive, so it is no surprise that version 2.9 came out with more than 3600 modules. This number keeps growing and it is motivating a change in how modules are distributed in the future. To read more about these changes you can read from Jeff Geerling himself However sometimes still you will come across with either: some functionality that hasn't been implemented on a module or a target for which there are no modules What do you do then? You have a few options: create your own module. This can be done in Python and even if you are not a Python guru you can find many tutorials that don't look intimidating at all you use the "shell" or "command" modules to run some other script if your target can be managed through a REST API then you can use the "uri" module REST API's are the basis for many automation tasks nowadays. An advantage of building automation through the API is that the workflow you build...

The cloud data co-location use case is a very interesting one. Potentially the biggest reasons why organizations choose not to move a workload to the cloud include: compliance / regulatory requirements lock-in risks and difficulty/costs of migrating to another public/private cloud unpredictable and/or high costs These reasons also play an important part in the ongoing workload repatriation activity we are seeing in the market. The idea that "cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model" is finally sinking in. But, when we talk about destinations, it doesn't all have to be public or private. There is a third location that plays an interesting part Last year I participated in a project that studied the feasibility of implementing "cloud data co-location". This basically consists on hosting a traditional storage array in a datacenter that is physically close to a public cloud and connect to it through a high-throughput low-latency link. Some ...

Traditionally, if you wanted code against a REST API your first point of call was the reference guide. This is typically a  several hundred page PDF document (the largest I have seen was 850 page). Sometimes it is hard to navigate and more often than not it requires you to jump a lot between different parts of the document to find how to format the "body" of a POST request. This is part of the reason I worked on Project Vision and leveraged Postman's ability to export/import collections. This can be a very . You can read more about Project Vision here: http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2019/12/postman-collections-for-dellemc-block.html Postman is by no means unique. Nowadays it is more common to see tools that allow you explore API's in a more friendly and interactive way. One great option is Swagger. I work for DellEMC and I see the trend where new products are coming with Swagger UI packaged, which is nice to see ... just to clarify, this is usually in addition to th...

In a  previous post I introduced Project Vision, which is a set of Postman collections for DellEMC storage arrays. I have now recorded a short video and uploaded it to Youtube so that you can get an idea of how it works and what API calls are covered. Enjoy! ***Update 17-June-2020 - A new Postman collection has been added for PowerStore https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision

After a frenetic 6 weeks rush, where 10 team members sacrifice lots of sleep hours and family time, the Tech Summit had arrived. This is an event where all Australia and New Zealand DellEMC presales community get together, along with partners and some international speakers and guests, including most of the global management team, for a total of 350 people. This year was hosted at the Cypress Lakes hotel in the Hunter Valley, a wine producing region in the state of New South Wales ... I have always said that wine and hacking go very well together ! Despite all the preparations we had to cram lots of activity at the last minute: All components of the architecture (except the "Time Keeper") seen in the diagram below relied on the Mongo database. Since Pivotal Web Services currently doesn't offer a production grade Mongo database in their Marketplace we decided to move our database to an external provider. We bought the lowest tier of clustered Mongo database (aka M1...