VMUG UserCon 2015 - St. Louis

The St. Louis area VMUG UserCon event was held last week at the Hyatt Regency at the Arch in downtown St. Louis. This one day event allowed numerous vendors to come and speak about the trending topics in the IT space.

Overall, I felt this event lacked diversity within the vendor space but given the notice and changes, the VMUG leadership putting this event together did an amazing job.

The overall theme seemed to go between hyper-converged infrastructures and flash based storage technology providers (I counted six companies offering flash based arrays).

The two biggest nods go to Simplivity and NUTANIX in my opinion. Both offering their own 2U platform that provides both compute, network, and storage capabilities. However, Simplivity impressed me slightly more by offering a UCS platform running on a C240 server that could be managed by UCS Manager (a later release being managed by UCS director is forthcoming).

With the costs of convergence being extremely high with big name vendors and OEMs like EMC, Dell, NetApp, etc. companies like Simplivity and NUTANIX shine with a product that can deliver the high capacity that your organization needs with performance and cost in mind. This will only go down in cost as the costs of storage disk based technologies (specifically those around flash based storage) decrease over time.

All in all, I was really impressed with the event and the attendance. I was told over 400 attended by a VMUG leader coordinating the event. Huge thanks go out to them and everyone else responsible for the setup and coordination of that event.

Below is some additional information about hyper-convergence (i.e. software defined data centers) from Matthew Brisse at Gartner that I found interesting and I think is a great read and guide.

1. Define the application use cases and entry points for SDDC. Select use cases and entry points for SDDC such as self-service provisioning of IT infrastructure resources in support of cloud-based applications, improved IT and business process automation. Note: Software-defined security and policy-based orchestration can reside with a cloud management solution above the SDDC layer.
2. Identify the abstracted infrastructure layers required by application and process use cases. Expose the layer of abstraction and virtualization requirements for storage, networking, compute and facilities components. Define infrastructure implementation requirements based on application and process pain points. Administrator-based requirements may be focused on a single data center pain point such as storage provisioning, while applications often require multiple data center technologies to be abstracted for end-to-end provisioning. Note that SDDC is an optional enablement architecture, and as such, not every component has to be abstracted or virtualized.
3. Define abstracted/virtual infrastructure service. Define detailed data center services based on application and process requirements, not on current infrastructure capabilities. Examples of storage services can include provisioning, thick or thin logical unit number (LUN) assignments, snapshots, replication, cloning, and data deduplication or other data services. Implement services providing the greatest value to speed of execution with increased agility in support of cloud services provisioning and automation.
4. Perform an infrastructure assessment focusing on use case requirements and data center services. Determine if infrastructure or architecture alternatives can fill gaps based on the ability to deliver abstraction, instrumentation, programmability (API), automation, policy-based management and orchestration capabilities. Hyper-converged integrated systems may be leveraged for faster time to value and increased agility. Facility-based operational technologies such as monitors and sensors should be integrated as part of workload placement based on power, temperature and other sensor metrics.
5. Define abstracted/virtual policies. Define policies for infrastructure services and process requirements leveraging northbound and southbound APIs, policies and automation. Test and implement API interoperability extensively because the lack of SDDC maturity could see API instability impacting data center operations.
6. Implement software-defined data center components. Implement the software-defined components based on use case. Test northbound and southbound APIs associated with the control and data planes to ensure infrastructure interoperability. Validate that policies and services can be automated within each infrastructure component. Perform IT service continuity and disaster recovery testing for each software-defined component.
7. Integrate software-defined security. Identify and standardize on well-established processes and patterns that have to be secured throughout the entire SDDC environment. Each data center component will have infrastructure-specific security that must be orchestrated through API or scripting to ensure interoperability and workflow processes. Programmatically enforce security-based policies to ensure the workflow models are enforced across the infrastructure layers.
8. Integrate policy-based orchestration and management. Select and implement an overarching policy-based solution to provide management and infrastructure orchestration. Policy-based orchestration and security requirements may be provided by a cloud management layer that resides above the SDDC. For example, OpenStack can help orchestrate the infrastructure by enabling a standard set of APIs and providing templates for common tasks.