One of the more interesting projects I’ve been working on lately is an Encryption as a Service (EaaS) offering for our cloud service provider (CSP) partners. After the NSA domestic spying program was revealed and there was a global uproar about privacy and protection in the cloud, I decided to design a service offering that will allow our CSP partners the ability to offer a completely encrypted (at-rest or in-motion) private, public, or hybrid cloud experience. Well before the NSA story broke we started to see an uptick in the Healthcare and Financial verticals for movement of their workloads to cloud and its no longer just test/dev, they’re looking to move business and mission critical workloads to the cloud for a variety of reasons. With the strict regulatory compliance requirements from HIPAA and GLBA, many institutions are turning to encryption solutions to make cloud a reality. While community clouds are a great solution, we haven’t see that many true community clouds popping up in the CSP space, but when they do our offering will definitely be a great addition to their cloud security strategy.

When laying out the design for the EaaS offering, we had a few major requirements. First, it had to be easily scalable, otherwise it would be a management nightmare for the CSP partner. Second, it had to be granular, otherwise the CSP partner would either have to stand up a separate silo to meet the demand (Field of Dreams approach) or to encrypt their entire existing environment, thus monetarily penalizing those workloads that didn’t have an encryption requirement. Lastly, it had to give the customer choice to control the encryption keys in a non-propriertay way. I’ve see Business Associate Agreements (BAA) that cover provider or tenant in control of the keys, it appears to depend on the size of the company and the requirements from their auditors.

The AFORE CloudLink Platform met all of our requirements and the fact that it works with multiple clouds (AWS, Azure, vCHS) was a huge bonus. After determining the technology met our offering requirements, we got to work with the AFORE team to make it a reality. When delivering a service offering, its more than just standing up a technology and hanging a sign on the door. We needed to put together a complete go-to-market package for the provider that would enable both their technical and sales teams. I’ve seen too many providers stand up technically sound offerings, but their sales teams were inadequately trained on positioning and objection handling, so the offering really never takes off leaving the provider with stranded assets on the floor. Also, because the tenant has the choice to be in control of the encryption keys we required training materials to be created for this as well.

One challenge I see with quite a few ISVs is product licensing. Many companies are still only offering annual or perpetual licensing models for their “cloud” products, when I brought up this subject with the AFORE team they were more than happy to listen and take action. Going back to my Field of Dreams comment above, we can no longer expect our partners to spend their precious CapEX to acquire technology and wait for the workloads to come, they need to purchase like their customers purchase, by the drip.

All of the hard work in creating the EaaS offering has paid off and I’m pleased to officially announce the CloudLink Powered EMC EaaS Offering.

Please let me know if you’d like further details on this offering or any of our CSP partners that will be offering it. Thanks.

Chris

As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback. I encourage you to join the conversation.

As with other traditions during the holiday season, being a geek you also have to expect to get at least one or more technology support request from a friend or family member. It ranges from setting up new devices (PCs, DVRs, cameras, etc…if it has a battery or plugs in…lol) or installing/configuring different applications or it’s the slightly more involved “could you diagnose, fix or upgrade” something for me. Either way, I’m always happy to oblige although it may take a little while due to my somewhat erratic travel schedule for work.

This year I brought it on myself by talking my best friend into buying a RAM upgrade for his daughters Acer netbook. It came with decent processor, but with only 1GB of RAM and as a result his daughter barely used the device as it was pretty sluggish. For $20 he was willing to see if doubling the RAM (1GG – 2GB) would improve performance. I recently purchased Dell mini’s for my wife and daughter and upgrading the RAM to 2GB made a world of difference. I started asking myself why netbooks generally only came with 1GB if the user experience was so poor. These days RAM is fairly inexpensive (to the manufacturer), but it comes down to being competitive in the marketplace and a low price point to attract customers….okay, we’re getting a little off topic….back to the RAM upgrade.

The memory upgrade on the Dell mini’s I purchased was simple and took about 5 minutes apiece, the documentation was very easy to find and it only involved three screws. As I embarked on the Acer Aspire One Happy RAM upgrade I started to get a little concerned. I couldn’t find any documentation so I contacted Acer support and it’s their policy NOT to supply their customers with this type of documentation and recommended I find an authorized repair facility…yeah right. I took to Google and found a video on YouTube that was for a similar model Acer Aspire One, not the Acer Aspire One Happy I had in front of me and it literally had you stripping down the entire netbook to the chassis as the RAM was on the underside of the motherboard…WTF? At least supply a small hatch on the bottom for easy access!

Well, as I got started disassembling I found it was a much simpler procedure than I was expecting and because I couldn’t find the instructions anywhere I thought I would share them here…

Step One

Power down the device and remove the battery. Next, with a very thin, flat-head screwdriver pop off the keyboard by pushing in the five (5) retention tabs across the top, then insert the screwdriver in between the keyboard tray and fascia to lift it out. When removing the keyboard please be aware of the short ribbon cable and small retention clip (sorry no pic, but it’s fairly self-explanatory). With the clip removed pull out the ribbon cable and set keyboard aside.

Step Two

Remove the four (4) screws labeled “Door 1” and place aside.

Step Three

With your screwdriver insert it in to the hole labeled “2” and depress the internal tab to release the large door on the bottom.

Step Four

Once you have the door removed, you will be able to easily access and replace the RAM by depressing the retention clips at the top of each side.

Step Five

With the RAM replaced and secure in its socket follow these easy steps to finish the upgrade.

1. Replace the door and the four (4) associated screws.
2. Insert the keyboard ribbon cable and retention clip, snap in the keyboard across the top and sides.
3. Replace the battery and power up.
4. Enjoy.

Disclaimer

This may void your warranty. Individual success may vary and is not guaranteed. Not liable for broken or missing parts.

Having attended different technology conferences over the years it was no surprise that I would lose a little sleep this year at VMworld, but little did I know that everything changes when you work the conference. This year I volunteered to assist with working both the EMC and VCE booths, the show floor hands-on-labs (the only labs on the show floor by the way) and developing a canned demo for Chad’s keynote with Pat Gelsinger, which at the last minute was changed to be live onstage….no pressure, right?

I had such a great time interacting with people on the show floor, putting faces to the names of people I chat with 140 characters at a time, meeting up with old friends and networking with new ones. Some of the down sides to being new to working a conference, I was only able to attend one session and I was unable to pump out a few live blog posts as I hoped I would have time for (writing this one on the plane home), but I wouldn’t trade the experience in a million years. In one day I was able to meet Steve Herrod, have a discussion with Pat Gelsinger and briefly share the stage with Chad Sakac…I’m going to have to work pretty hard to top that experience next year.

Fortunately, I work with some of most dedicated people in the industry. Sharing the same passion for technology it was easy to see that my team works as hard as they do, not entirely because they have to, but because they want to…they thrive on it. For this, among many other reasons, I’m extremely proud to be called a vSpecialist!

If you know Moore’s Law (if you’re reading this there’s a good chance you do) then you understand it no longer just pertains to the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit, but to a whole host of things like processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.   

Getting back to the data center…if you stop to count all of the technologies in use in a common data center today the list could go on and on and if you think of all of the processes and procedures put in place with these technologies your head will start to spin. As the data center of the future exponentially evolves from a technological standpoint, the team that manages it better evolve as well or risk being left in the dark. Almost every customer I visit still operates their data center in silos…with a network team, a storage team, a server team, and so on…even though they’ve adopted an aggressive virtualization plan to transform their physical infrastructure they rarely have a plan to transform the teams that manage it. And when planning most major projects these teams rarely bring in stakeholders from the other teams and if they do it’s usually an afterthought or at the very last minute. 

Now that physical consolidation in areas such as networking, servers and storage is hitting a good stride and the hardware stack is starting to getting simplified, the focus will start to shift to be more focused on the management tools of the virtual data center or now what the industry is referring to as the “cloud”. I know what you’re thinking…great, now I need to learn even more management tools…well, don’t start running away just yet…I didn’t hear too many complaints when vCenter was first introduced.   

One important concept of cloud management will be the adoption of a reduced set of management tools that access the APIs of the existing tools that you use today to manage common elements, such as arrays, servers and switches, the elements that make up the physical infrastructure for example. This shift will dramatically change the way that resources are provisioned, managed, monitored and consumed. Also, the further adoption of these tools could have a very important ancillary affect, they should start to pull together teams that historically don’t speak to each other on a regular basis and start to help transform them into “The Data Center Team of the Future”.