#CFD4 | The vGeek Blog

Cohesity Technology Update – Helios

19. November 2018 · Write a comment · Categories: Technology, Uncategorized, VMworld 2018 · Tags: #CFD4, cohesity

This post is a follow-up to my previous one written in August after my participation to Cloud Field Day 4. In that post, after a brief introduction of Cohesity and the problems their technology solves, I went deep dive on the Cloud-specific features showcased at CFD4.

As a matter of fact, just a few days after returning from CFD4, Cohesity made an impactful announcement, presenting Cohesity Helios. Back then I did not have the time to look into the announcement and write about Helios, but attending a private briefing (presented by Rawlinson Rivera) at VMworld Europe 2018 gave me the opportunity to focus on the solution and briefly report about it.

Cohesity at #CFD4 – Secondary Storage is now Cloud Enabled

27. August 2018 · Write a comment · Categories: Tech Field Day · Tags: #CFD4, cohesity, events

Cohesity: a short intro

Cohesity, since its foundation in 2013, has become a popular name in the Enterprise Storage vendor landscape; although initially Cohesity might have been labeled like “just another backup vendor”, this misplaced and simplistic description has certainly been very unfair to them. Cohesity’s completeness of vision goes way beyond that of being just another backup solution provider, putting them instead at the forefront of the “Battle for Secondary Storage”.

The problem that Cohesity is trying to solve is one that is unfortunately very common: the sprawl of unmanaged, uncorrelated and often unused secondary copies of data endlessly generated by organizations. Multiple copies of the same data are created for backups, archives, test and dev, analytics and DR purposes, resulting into unmanageable, inefficient and complex data siloes. Cohesity can ingest all this data, consolidate it efficiently into one single logical container and make it available for any possible use you might think of. Cohesity is a true DataPlatform meant to enable efficient use of secondary storage. While this goal was initially achieved with software defined, hyper-convergent, scalable appliances, the next inevitable step for Cohesity was to abstract the platform’s capabilities from “the iron” and to develop a Virtual Edition of DataPlatform to address ROBO and IoT use cases and, lastly, a Cloud Edition capable of running on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. All of these implementations share the same distinctive SpanFS File System and the same API-driven, policy-based management interface, enabling Cohesity’s capabilities to extend to any location your data lives on.

Aviatrix, the Cloud Networking solution designed around real-life use cases

21. August 2018 · 2 comments · Categories: Tech Field Day · Tags: #CFD4, aviatrix, cloud, events, techfieldday

I came across Aviatrix for the first time a few months ago, while I was knee-deep in the preparation of AWS Associate Exams and at the same time researching for a cloud migration project. AWS networking was a major topic of the exams and also an important research area for my assignment at work. It was very clear to me from the very beginning that Cloud Networking is inherently different from traditional networking. Of course, they share the very same foundations but designing and managing networks in any Public Cloud is a very different business than doing the same in your Data Center. In the Cloud there are no routers or switches you can log into, there are no console cables nor SFP connectors, but you have VPCs that you can literally spin up with a few lines of code with all their bells and whistles (including security policies for the workloads they contain).

This implies a few considerations. First and foremost, the expectations of Cloud Engineers are very different from those of Network Engineers: Cloud Engineers can set up VPCs in minutes but they can be easily frustrated by their on-prem Network counterparts lagging weeks behind to provide VPN connectivity and BGP route distribution to the Data Center. Then there is the skills gap to be filled: Cloud Engineering Teams are usually small and manned by all-round technologists rather than specialists, very often there is no Network Guru in Cloud Teams capable of citing RFCs by memory, so there is a need to keep things simple, yet they must work “as they should”. Finally, in Public Clouds is very easy to lose control and become victims of the VPC sprawl; managing Cloud Networking at scale is probably the biggest challenges of all.