In his latest piece, ‘Welcome to the Hyper Wars,’ Sreedhar Kajeepeta explains that this disruption is driving a need for multihypervisor environment and management tools that will work with several hypervisors to allow businesses to harness the latest innovation of multiplicity. Additionally Kajeepeta explains, “If you can make a strong case for multiple hypervisors, budget for a hypervisor neutral management console that has support for unified security, backup, disaster recovery, and load balancing and related migration of VMs.”

At Contegix, this disruption was not MiraCloud^TM. Our desire to design a product that would enable our customers to decide for themselves which solution best suits their unique work loads – all inside one unified infrastructure for added convenience and freedom of choice – was prompted by their expressed desire for more options. Our platform delivers options and makes cloud computing easier for everyone, especially those who need a cohesive solution, with varying levels of storage, redundancy and management.

The industry is slowly recognizing the basic truth behind workloads for cloud computing, which is – workloads are not equal. Businesses are extremely diverse, even within the same industry. We are focused on empowering our customers through our innovation. We invite you all to look for additional features to MiraCloud rolling out in 2012 geared toward making our multihypervisor approach to cloud computing even easier for our customers, and, ultimately, their users.

The holidays are a hectic time for everyone, in our personal lives, as well as in our business lives. At Contegix, we are especially tuned into the needs of our e-Commerce clients, who, at this time of year, are hopefully experiencing increased spikes in website traffic due to online shoppers. Andrew, one of our Engineering Team Leads says, “There are several components to capacity management for e-Commerce sites, but the most important aspect is the partnership between ourselves and the customer. Without great communication and the ‘team’ approach, it would be much more difficult to manage.”

Indeed. The process of onboarding for our customers often includes evaluations conducted on the client side, but also on ours. We like to plan ahead for web traffic spikes as much as we can, which often results in temporarily adding to a client’s infrastructure to handle seasonal spikes. Andrew explains, “Many times we will spin up cloud instances to manage these spikes, adding additional nodes to the same load balancer to facilitate seamless communications between dedicated physical servers and virtual servers. It’s an exciting part of my job because creating these types of infrastructures means we are providing true hybrid hosting for our clients who need it.”

Knowing what your business needs are, is certainly helpful in the communication process with us, because it helps our technical engineers design appropriate infrastructures rather than selling you capacity that isn’t necessary. “We are most successful with a combination of measurement provided by our e-Commerce clients that include traffic data from previous years and predicted levels for the current year. On our end, we plan for ultimate flexibility, leveraging our cloud assets within MiraCloud^TM, we can spin up and scale back capacity based upon system performance,” said Andrew. “Our managed clients have the security of knowing that their sites are constantly monitored 24/7/365, which allows us to get out ahead of any bandwidth or throughput issues that could arise due to seasonal traffic spikes.”

If a football team took the field without having a backup QB on the bench, you might wonder about their chances… and their choices.

Now apply that to data.  Too many times, companies choose not to back up data, or when they do, back it up poorly. But no one wants to lose data, whether it’s important documents, customer or compliance information.

This is why Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is so important. In a recent CIO LinkedIn Marketpulse survey, 42% of CIOs said that they believe their current data management practices are outdated. Those feelings aren’t unwarranted. Right now, the world’s information is doubling every two years, with a colossal 1.8 zettabytes to be created and replicated in 2011. As Mashable says, that amount of data would require 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads to store. With the huge influx of data created by enterprises alone, this level of activity has broken traditional back up processes.

At Contegix, we take Data Loss Prevention seriously. We offer a number of ways to help our clients protect their data. We have an onsite Storage Area Network (SAN) that helps ensure that data is readily available and quickly accessible for fast backups and, more importantly, fast restorations and recovery. Both our SAN and optional Offsite Tape Storage back-up system are powered by our team of Backup & Data Recovery Specialists along with CommVault, the industry leader in data protection software.

CommVault creates and stores copies of data that can be immediately accessed for rapid recovery. It also utilizes multiple recovery points for added protection and provides hot backup capabilities for modern databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft Exchange among others.

We don’t stop there. If your business requires offsite archival, Contegix has you covered. Stored by a trusted third party in a secure location, your tapes are categorized and labeled. This effort will increase your business’s restoration capabilities in the case of a disaster.

And we go one step further with our DLP by offering Multi-Site Data Replication across facilities.

Data Loss Prevention is just that – Prevention. When our customers recognize the need for data loss prevention services, such as backups, at Contegix, we are empowered to manage this huge responsibility for our clients. Ultimately, this is our way of empowering our clients by removing the burden of technology systems backup from their shoulders.

At Contegix, one of our most important core values is “respect for people, data and time.” We are focused on adding value to our customers’ organizations by becoming part of the team. Our data loss prevention plans are designed with this purpose. Think of us as that insightful coach, looking at what’s needed on all parts of football field and thinking one, two even five plays ahead and our DLP team is that forceful offensive line capable of preventing quarterbacks from getting sacked.

Couchbase and Contegix would like to invite you to our upcoming Meetup in St. Louis on Nov. 7, 6:00-8:30pm. There is no charge to attend, AND pizza, drinks, and a t-shirt souvenir will be provided!

Matt Ingenthron of Couchbase will be there to discuss “Everything Couchbase: Server, Mobile and Modeling Apps.”

You can sign up for free here: http://couchbase-st-louis-meetup.eventbrite.com

The meetup is at HALE Communications located on 1099 Milwaukee St. in Kirkwood.

About Matt Ingenthron:

Matt heads up the Developer Solutions group for Couchbase and has years of background in developing the backend systems for many large-scale, consumer facing web applications. For Couchbase, Matt leads the team developing client libraries, samples and docs for developers.  In recent years, he has been a core developer on Membase and Couchbase, a contributor to the memcached project. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences including JavaOne 2011, MySQL 2011, MySQL 2010, OSCON 2010, Erlang Factory, Cloud Camp San Francisco, Silicon Valley Code Camp, and many others.

About Couchbase:

Couchbase is one of the leading NoSQL database software projects, with code, binaries and community residing at www.couchbase.org.  Couchbase, powered by Apache CouchDB, Membase and memcached Open Source projects, runs on everything from large-scale clusters in cloud compute environments down to iOS and Android mobile devices.  Its primary development is backed by Couchbase, Inc.

Naysayers, be warned. Technology analysts say cloud computing is here for the long haul.

Forrester expects cloud computing will increase from approximately $41 billion this year to more than $240 billion in 2020.

Analysts from Gartner are seeing a similar trend, forecasting that the cloud services industry will make an estimated $177 billion in revenue by 2015.

As we look deep into the crystal ball, the makeup of a business workforce will continue to become more mobile. Globalization is accelerating the need for more secure data and more efficient IT systems. Applications are as likely to be delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS) as they are via desktops. And companies of all sizes need to be able to scale their businesses to meet real-time demands. All of these factors, among countless others, contribute to the exponential growth of cloud computing.

But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to the cloud. Some companies want to maintain private clouds for their VPNs. Start-ups, SMBs and enterprises are all integrating SaaS applications at different rates, and few companies are willing to move ERP systems to the cloud. This means businesses need customization.

One of the benefits of cloud computing is that with it, companies can choose the most efficient architecture to meet their unique needs. Think of it like a mix and match, from colocation to completely managed by an external provider and anything in between. With cloud providers like Contegix, businesses can even choose which applications and areas of their business to move to the cloud and can select their level of service.

Regardless, of each company’s cloud migration strategy, there is no denying the growth of cloud computing. Now is a good time to set a path in the cloud. As the famous H.G Wells once said, “Adapt or perish.”

Discover How MiraCloud^TM Can Help You Get Back to What You Do Best

We are excited and proud to announce that our new cloud platform offering – MiraCloud is now available. MiraCloud is designed for anyone who is searching for a powerful, flexible and customizable solution to address their unique cloud computing requirements. With a truly multi-tiered platform including options that range from self-service computing, to private enterprise cloud, coupled with the ability to choose elements from each tier for specific mission critical needs, MiraCloud is the first cloud offering of it’s kind. Making our customers’ lives easier is our top priority, which is what we challenge ourselves to achieve in all of our development projects. MiraCloud was born from the desire not only to reach this goal, but also to exceed well beyond it, and with all the features our offering provides, we are sure this platform will not disappoint.

We value innovation at Contegix, because in delivering advances on our technology offerings, we provide additional freedom to our clients. For example, MiraCloud offers three classes of service, including Convenience, Business and Enterprise Classes. To provide additional freedom, the three classes of MiraCloud can be combined in various configurations, allowing customers to mix and match the instances that work best for their specific needs.

With MiraCloud, our desire was to design a product that would enable the success and growth of our customers, who are constantly telling us that they need more options to meet the demands of their workloads. We know that the truth about workloads for cloud computing is that there is no equality, which creates an exciting challenge. Our tiered approach, including the ability to utilize all three tiers inside one unified infrastructure is meant to address this inequality. To learn more about the differences between the classes of MiraCloud, click here.

Within all tiers of MiraCloud, customers receive technical features such as operating system support; secure AJAX console access, a flexible pricing structure, dynamic scaling, custom ISO and a powerful API. We didn’t mess around with storage either; all MiraCloud instances provide persistent storage with additional storage on demand and volume snapshots. Network and Security features are covered in all tiers as well, with direct network and user VLANs, software load balancer integration, VPN support, software firewall integration and additional IPs on demand.

If you are interested in MiraCloud, but aren’t sure where to start, give us a call to discuss your needs with our experts at 877.4.CONTEGIX.

As the balloons and our egos deflate, we are left reflecting how we got here. We are maturing as a company and one million tickets is a testament to that. We may not have severed the billions as Mickey-D’s, yet, but this is certainly a milestone for us. Congratulation Contegix and to many more millions of tickets to come.

Zach, one of our Technical Engineers, shares his thoughts on system tools

In the Linux world, we love having choices: choices about our kernel configurations; choices about our desktop environments and window managers; choices about which tools we want to utilise for various tasks. As Systems Administrators and Engineers, we heavily rely on the availability of logs regarding system performance (CPU utilisation, available memory, disk I/O, et cetera). Subsequently, we need to ensure that the tool we select for logging system information is tailored to the specific needs for each respective environment in which we work. Fortunately, we have a large pool of logging tools from which we can choose.

Though there are many such applications, we are going to focus on two prominent ones: sar and collectl. As some basic background information, sar (an acronym for ‘system activity reporter’) is arguably the “standard” system performance monitoring tool as it is provided with the widely-available SYSSTAT toolkit.  Sar not only monitors the aforementioned basic statistics, but is also capable of logging information regarding network activity for all interfaces, TTY device activity, process creation, and much more. Collectl is a similar monitor/logging utility that can be run interactively or as a daemon, allows for fine-grain tuning of data reports (even in sub-second intervals), and can format its output in a multitude of different ways.  So, which is the “correct” tool?  That’s a question that is largely dependent on your intended usage.  Below is some information regarding basic usage of each tool.

Sar

Sar relies on the system activity data collector (sadc), and essentially reports the information gathered by sadc.  Sar stores all of the data gathered over a 24-hour period in an individual file located at/var/log/sa/saXX, where XX is the two-digit day of the month (e.g., 02 or 19). As one might suspect (given that the full date is not listed) these logs rotate each month. Therefore, if saving the logs for more than a month-long period is pertinent, there should be a cron job that archives them to a different location.

Using sar is fairly straightforward if one simply wants to see all of the information contained in a particular log. To see the data that has been collected thus far in the current day, simply issue sar without any options. To see the logs from a particular day other than current, use the -f option. For example, a snippet of the provided data from the 19th of the current month might look like the following:

# sar -f /var/log/sa/sa19

06:20:01 PM       CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     %idle
06:30:02 PM       all      0.08      0.00      0.42      0.00      0.00     99.50
06:40:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
06:50:01 PM       all      0.08      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
07:00:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
07:10:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.47
07:20:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.01      0.00     99.48
07:30:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
07:40:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
07:50:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
08:00:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.47
08:10:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.47
08:20:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.42      0.00      0.00     99.49
08:30:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
08:40:01 PM       all      0.08      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.49
08:50:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
09:00:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.42      0.00      0.00     99.48
09:10:02 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.47
09:20:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.41      0.00      0.00     99.50
09:30:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
09:40:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.47
09:50:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.01      0.00     99.48
10:00:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.42      0.00      0.00     99.48

10:00:01 PM       CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     %idle
10:10:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
10:20:01 PM       all      0.08      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.49
10:30:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.48
10:40:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.42      0.00      0.00     99.49
10:50:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
11:00:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.01      0.00     99.48
11:10:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.44      0.00      0.00     99.47
11:20:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
11:30:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
11:40:01 PM       all      0.08      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
11:50:01 PM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
Average:          all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48

Without specifying any additional options, sar reports information regarding CPU utilisation, and stats related to I/O. If only data from a certain time span are needed, the -s and -e options can be used. Using the above example, one could get just the data from 08:40 until 09:20 by issuing:

# sar -f /var/log/sa/sa19 -s 08:40 -e 09:20
08:40:01 AM       CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     %idle
08:50:01 AM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
09:00:01 AM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
09:10:01 AM       all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48
Average:          all      0.09      0.00      0.43      0.00      0.00     99.48

Though all of the options can be found in the man page for sar (man sar), one more important option is -A, which shows an incredibly large amount of additional information including but not limited to I/O, paging stats, block device activity, queue length, load activity, used cache entries, and used file handles.

Collectl

Collectl offers similar functionality to sar, but also includes a few additional metrics and configuration options. In order to simply start collectl in interactive mode and have it start logging immediately, just issuecollectl at the prompt. After a few seconds, data similar to the following will appear:

# collectl

#<--------CPU--------><-----------Disks-----------><-----------Network---------->
#cpu sys inter  ctxsw KBRead  Reads  KBWrit Writes netKBi pkt-in  netKBo pkt-out
  37  37   382    188      0      0   27144    254     45     68       3      21
  25  25   366    180     20      4   31280    296      0      1       0       0
  25  25   368    183      0      0   31720    275      2     20       0       1

and the stats will continue to be piped to stdout.

Like sar, collectl has myriad options that can be passed to it in order to manipulate the types and format of reported data. Collectl can also be started in the same manner as any other service, using service collectl start or /etc/init.d/collectl start, and it will run in the background. One of the most interesting options is -p or -plot, which generates output in a format that is space delimited, which works nicely with plotting applications like gnuplot. In addition to all of the information sar collects, collectl is able to gather information about many other subsystems by appending them with the -s option. For instance, to see data regarding NFS and Lustre, pass the option (using +/- format) -s+fi (+ to add a subsystem, f for NFS, and i for Lustre).

Conclusion

Now that you have seen a very brief introduction to two of the more prominent system performance loggers, which one should be used on a regular basis? The short answer is both. The long answer obligates one to investigate each tool extensively, and utilise each one for various situations. Both are lightweight applications, and offer incredibly detailed data regarding system health. Sar comes standard with RHEL and derivatives, while collectl will either need to be installed from within the distribution’s package manager or compiled from source. Collectl offers multiple polling intervals not available from within sar (without custom wrappers), but can be a bit daunting for basic monitoring. In Linux, we love our freedom of choice; do your research, make an educated decision about which utility best fits your needs for a particular situation, and go for it!

Here’s a clip from COSE Update article:

With the cloud acting as your server or your software, you always have uptime. You get sophisticated applications and a smart infrastructure. You get the stuff  you maybe couldn’t afford when you were upgrading servers or other computer hardware and software…

“At the end of the day, the questions are, ‘What does this do for my business?’ and ‘How do I drive value from cloud computing compared to the way I was doing things yesterday or 10 minutes ago?’” said Matthew Porter, the chief executive.

The mental barrier that’s still tough to grasp:  What’s up there? What’s in the cloud? “You see a commercial with a barista and all of a sudden he has three friends and a big business because they all went to the cloud,” he said.

Matthew went on to explain that choosing a cloud provider should be the same process as choosing any other vendor. Making sure your vendor is committed to your cloud infrastructure and works around the clock to make sure your data is safe is key to a successful relationship. Understanding the response time of the provider is the best indicator of the level of service a business can expect.

Read the full article here

NAME

HypericCheck – resource checker for Hyperic resources

SYNOPSIS

HypericCheck.sh [-d] [-h] [-p defaults-file] [-s AEID] [-r RID]

DESCRIPTION

HypericCheck is a java wrapper for Hyperic measurement plugins specifically intended to perform on-demand checks of net services plugin resources. The wrapper uses several classes and methods from Hyperic to call the actual code that the Hyperic agent uses to collect metrics on a resource in a consistent and reproducible manner. Multiple AEID’s and RID’s can be specified on the command line to check multiple resources with one invocation.

OPTIONS

-d        Enable DEBUG logging

-h        This help message

-p        defaults-file

Use an alternate properties file as the configuration source. Defaults to ~/.hq/client.properties

-s        AEID

Specify a resource to collect metrics on via AEID. AEID’s can be found as the last 5 digits on a resource’s URL within the Hyperic GUI

-r         RID

Specify a resource to collect metrics on via RID. RID’s can be found using the hqapi.

FILES

~/.hq/client.properties

The default configuration file. Expects the file to conform to Java’s syntax for properties files and takes values in the <key>=<value> form.

Sample config:

host=monitor.mynetwork.com

port=7443

secure=true

user=hqadmin

password=hqadmin

Aside from the default options for hqapi in the client.properties file, the following HypericCheck specific options are expected:

hc.pdkDir       Full path to the lib/pdk directory that came with this utility

hc.pluginDir  Full path to the lib/plugins directory that came with this utility

The following options are optional and apply to the usage of the PasswordBouncer utility so that no passwords need to be on your filesystem. If you use these options, the password key need not have a value.

hc.password.source           Only accepts \”pb\”.

hc.password.port    Port that PasswordBouncer is listening on. Defaults to 10127.

hc.password.host   Address that PasswordBouncer is listening on. Defaults to localhost.

hc.password.string String that PasswordBouncer expects prior to returning a password. Defaults to MYPASSWORD.

hc.metricsetSet this to “all”, “availability”, “throughput”, or “utilization” to see metrics of a different category.

BUGS

None found yet

NOTE:  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT SUPPORTED BY VMWARE/HYPERIC.

AUTHOR

Greg Walters <allrightname at gmail>