Glyn Heath, Founder of Centiq Ltd, speaks to IT Advisor.

The benefits of IT monitoring and the early warning of system issues.

monitoring, managing and mitigating risk

Following a bit of reading (turns out not enough), including an article on Cloud performance on the thebitsource ,  we concluded that our small scale development app which relies on a single MySQL server would be more than catered for by a RackSpace cloud server. We needed a small (but consistent) IO requirement and modest memory/CPU. 

The first month of service was a complete success and we began to consider migration of live systems to cloud servers; then we where suddenly hit by a dramatic IO performance drop lasting 6 hours making the instance unusable during the online day. 

We all like reports.  Reports that include graphs and pie charts are even better!  One thing we don't always consider is how fresh the data in we are looking at is?  In a typical Business Intelligence scenario, the data we can access is normally already a day old.  For long-term planning this is probably acceptable, but nowadays is day old data really enough to be competitive?  What if manufacturing efficiency suddenly drops in your factory or your online sales suddenly boom and threaten your stoke levels?  Do you really want to wait until tomorrow to find that our?  SAP don’t think so.

SAP HANA was developed to plug these gaps in reporting (as well as other ventures in the future).  HANA stands for "High performance ANalytic Appliance".  It uses custom In-Memory computing techniques to offer extremely high query performance.  Unlike BWA, HANA supports SQL and MDX giving it far more flexibility.  However, like BWA, HANA is an appliance, meaning it can only be ordered from and installed by specialist partners like Centiq.

With SAPs release of the High Performance Analytic Appliance, SAP HANA, I wanted to know...

How fast is SAP HANA?

Gen3 XIV Storage -  8Gb front end, infiniband back end, more cache (24GB per module), Nehalem chipset (4 core) and potential for SSD caching yes, yes yes!

So what's the price of the gen3? £737,978.69 for a (55TB) up to £1,697,338 fully loaded gen3 (161TB)

This compares with £636,415.65 for the Gen2 base model (55TB) and of the same capacity and £1,464,560 for the fully loaded gen2.(161TB)

IBM are gradually releasing the features from the next generation of POWER7 VIOS. In short VIO servers will be able to participate in a cluster outside of a single frame (across multiple boxes). This will mean that you can present virtual disks to LPAR's from one VIO server and make them available to another server via another VIO server at the same time without using NPIV. This reduces the dependency on feature rich storage (and cooperative storage teams!) will prove useful for the scale-out clustering technologies and for partition mobility.

They are planning to build in some useful auto-provisioning, Snapshot, cloning and thin provisioning features at the VIO cluster level all controller by director. Making it much more flexible to work in a virtualised environment with multiple systems.

If you are up to date with your VMware versions and you are using the latest in backup software (Netbackup 7, TSM6 veeam, vRanger etc) you will enjoying the pleasure of vmdk image backups without client software in each VM.

There are some good reasons for wanting to do VMware image backups:

Whilst the legal battle over Oracle removing development on the Itanium chip rumbles on IBM are increasing market share by offering a number of solutions to those customers who are fed up with either Oracle, HP or both.

Fed up with Oracle? IBM continue to develop and support the DB2 database platform on Itanium

As of AIX 6.1 TL4  an ISO image file can be directly mounted as a File System.

I've been asked this question quite a lot lately, and to be honest I've been a bit stumped, other than a  gut feeling that monitoring from the OS as well as the VMware layer is a good idea, I had little else to offer the argument. So I figured I should take a more serious look at the monitoring available within VMware vCenter and come up with a more compelling argument. Perhaps the more seasoned VMware admins out their could comment to offer their thoughts on the topic?

vCenter for VMware provides an excellent selection of performance graphs enabling you to track the CPU, memory, network and I/O consumption for each VM as well as the ESX host itself. You can also set "alarms" that trigger e-mail notifications. So why would I ever need an additional agent based OS monitoring package? What more could you possibly need? Do the OS metrics become less important in a VM world?