Calsoft Blog

Cisco Live 2016 is just around the corner and it's ready to rock in Las Vegas this time. Cisco Live is known for providing the knowledge enterprises need to flourish in their respective digital business.  Other than being an inspiration, Cisco Live also brings opportunities to meet numerous technology innovators, thousands of education sessions, IT visionary leaders, important partners of Cisco, and various opportunities to connect with relevant people and flourish business. This year at Cisco Live you can explore topics and sessions, like Enterprise Networking, IoT, Network Management systems, Network Transformation, Cloud, Digitization, Data center and many more. Calsoft recommend attending all keynotes to comprehend cisco’s strategy on new technologies. Also, do not miss out on Cisco Live’s innovation Talks. It talks about contemporary innovations and its challenges in important areas like security, cloud, network technology and collaboration. Key attractions for this year C...

Nowadays industry is giving a lot more importance to User Experience (UX) to keep their users happy. Everybody, right from the business decision makers, marketing to product managers are focusing on an easy, intuitive and interactive User Interface (UI).  It has become a De-facto in product or service based industry. Before moving ahead let us define UX. What is User Experience (UX)? According to the International Organization for Standardization, User Experience can be defined as “person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and or anticipated use of a product, system or service”. In simple terms UX is how a user feels while interacting with a digital product. That digital product could be a website or a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for a software product. UX depends on many factors, some of them can be controlled by designers and developers while others are user preference. Some of these factors include: Utility (How useful is the product) Usability (How easil...

In recent times there are many storage players embarking into the market and the competition is fierce. Storage vendors would not like to be behind in offering rich features in their products to attract customers. In addition, there are FUDs around dealing storage in a traditional ways due to advent of many disruptive technologies and the trend is going to grow upward in coming days. This blog focuses only on data reduction features offered by primary storage vendors in general and its benefits and downsides. Data reduction in storage means attempt to store lesser data in disks versus the amount of user data generated. This implies increasing storage efficiency in terms of capacity and hence reduced costs. Let’s understand further on this and its implications to customers. Data reduction in storage can be achieved using several techniques. De-duplication and compression are the two prominent techniques being used since backup storage times and they have gained much significance in p...

In 2010 Rackspace and NASA came together with a vision to create an open source platform which will help in building and managing various cloud platforms for public and private cloud ecosystem. They went ahead to create OpenStack, a free, open source platform with many groups of interconnected projects that enable processing of storage and networking resources throughout a data centre. OpenStack has evolved over the years and has reached to a new level of maturity. OpenStack and its ecosystem have shown good improvement in the recent past to expand their users. Leading research firms like Gartner and IDC are predicting an upward trend in adopting OpenStack ecosystem. Even the OpenStack community has started addressing the complexity and skills issues. Mirantis, recent funding of $100M in 2015 has cemented its growth. Why OpenStack is different? There are various reasons why OpenStack is placed differently and is worthy of your attention. Reason 1: Open Source The first and foremos...

DockerCon 2016 is just a week away and the excitement is soaring! There are many new additions this year and the Docker community looks forward to witnessing a fruitful and informative event. Containers have in the recent past become an inevitable part of application deployment and management. This aspect will only grow in the near future.  Exciting aspects to make the event more fun filled and jovial have been incorporated. Hack rooms, Mosaic Photo Wall, Sticker Swap Table are all part of this year’s DockerCon. The after party of DockerCon is always the most sorted thing and this year it’s no different. The party will be held in Space Needle and Experience Music Project Museum; the attendees will have to take the historic Monorail system built for the 1962 World’s Fair to the party. They will have to board it at Westlake Center Mall station located at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street. The conference badge will serve as the ride fare. DockerCon attendees will have full access ...

File system is one of the most essential components in any storage appliance especially in NAS storage appliances. It plays a significant role in data reduction technologies such as; compression, de-dupe, thin provisioning, data integrity, security, data protection, and many more. Because of this tremendous dependency on File Systems; its performance and behavior has been a major focus area for most of the storage ISVs. This also prompts us to understand some of the basic rules while designing and planning the file system test executions. This not only increases the product quality but also turns out to be a good ROI. What is file system and why it is important to storage stack? File system is a software component managing on-disk layout of storage and facilitates I/O between user applications and the underlying storage subsystems and disks. File system intermediates the file-level I/Os at the top half and block-level I/Os at the bottom half layers in the stack. Also, File system pl...

Before we move ahead let’s get an understanding about Network Function Virtualization (NFV). What is Network Function Virtualization (NFV)? A basic definition of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) states that it is a type of network architecture that virtualizes different network node functions into building blocks which may connect, or chain together, to form a communication service. Primarily it separates network services like (network address translation (NAT), firewalling, intrusion detection, domain name service and caching) from the hardware that delivers them. With the help of NFV we can deliver these services through software and can deploy on non-critical general purpose appliances. This helps enterprises in designing and managing a lot more flexible network services. NFV – Since Inception Networking community was looking to reduce cost and accelerate the roll out of profitable networking services. Expensive and complex hardware-based network appliances, were limiting ...

Storage can be costly and inflexible. Enterprise storage devices with high performance and availability are very expensive portions of infrastructure in data centers. They are also quite inflexible as organizations need to purchase sufficient storage to meet ultimate storage requirements, whether for a year or a day. Until recently, IT departments had to purchase their own storage space for a given time frame to cater to the organizational needs. This not only locked capital for the said amount of time but also rendered unused resources wasted at the end of the engagement. Storage as a service is nothing but a framework where- in large storage providers offer storage space from their own infrastructure to clients. This space is rented out on the basis of cost-per-gigabyte-stored and cost-per-data-transferred basis. It is a more convenient set up for enterprises availing the services as they can completely do away with tape and HDDs storage and save lot of overhead costs. The data from...

IOT World commenced 3 years ago on a street in Palo Alto. The event this year saw a footfall of 10000 people.  In his welcome speech, ” Gavin Whitechurch, founder of IoT World said “It’s been an amazing journey over 3 years. We started three years ago. We set it up for 350 people, but actually got 700. Last year, in San Francisco, it was 5,800. And here, we’re expecting 10,000 people. That shows you the amazing growth of the IoT space. In the next years, you’re going to see many enterprise deployment of IoT.”  IOT this year took place in Santa Clara Convention Center, California. It was sponsored by Avenet, Hitachi, Microsoft, SAP and a few more.  Panel discussions and presentations on industrial IoT, autonomous cars, wearables, smart homes and cities, intelligent devices, and healthcare were in dull swing. The whos who of the industry viz:. Samsung, Apple, Microsoft ,Intel, Uber, Zipcar and, Lyft, participated in a a panel discussion titled “Embracing shared mob...

  Almost a year from now one of the leading research firm mentioned OpenStack to be a “science project”. Right now it is expected that OpenStack Revenue will cross $3.3 Billion by 2018. A research done by one of the leading IT organization shows that 88% of enterprises either have or expect to adopt DevOps, compared to 66% in a similar survey taken last year. We have witnessed a definite surge in the adoption rate of DevOps . So what are the key driving forces for this mass adoption? The answer is very simple – DevOps is providing benefits. Based on my reading and interaction with number of industry leaders I can list down a few of them: It ensures faster time to market, hence improves ROI. It paves the way for better collaboration between teams. Stable/reliable operating environments. Early detection and faster correction of defects to ensure customer satisfaction. Continuous Release and Deployment, Testing, and Monitoring. Time to focus – thus improving quality. Bu...

Change is inevitable and so is applicable to datacenters. Trends show that datacenters are adopting new changes as many disruptive technology vendors embark into the datacenter business. Players ranging from flash storage to software defined storage, viz., Pure Storage, Nimble, Nutanix, Simplivity, etc., are all boarding this technology. Storage technologies have shown great prominence in adopting new methods of data reduction, data protection, encryption, virtualization to cater business needs. However, the last few years have witnessed storage evolving in a new form factors known as hyper-converged infrastructures that is a whole new definition of Software Defined Storage (SDS) . Hyper-convergence is translating a bunch of technological silos in traditional storage into meaningful adoption wherein the customers choose one stop solution over traditional storage vendor. What is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure? According to Wikipedia, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is a software defined...

OpenStack Summit this year witnessed a footfall of 7500 odd participants which was an overwhelming number considering the fact that not long ago when the summit commenced for the first time; there were just 75 participants. The summit commenced with keynotes that served as food for thought ranging from Bimodal IT as the Foundation for Digital Business, Running Kubernetes on OpenStack at LivePerson to Building a SmartCity with IoT and Improving UX with OpenStackClient.  The vendor display included names like Cisco Systems, EMC, HP, IBM, Dell, Intel to name a few. OpenStack is definitely posing as the next big opportunity.  The summit was a place that provided a platform to deep dive into the technology and network while learning niche and new things about developing applications in cloud and on containers by workshops or discussions. Sessions like “OpenStack Infrastructure for Beginners” were packed with no room for more attendees after a point in time.  As soon as...

I was keeping a close watch on VMware even before the inception of Calsoft Inc .  It was exciting to watch VMware growing from a young Silicon Valley startup to a formidable force in the enterprise market space. It is still growing at a rapid pace even after its merger with EMC and later will Dell. Forbes positioned VMware as the fifth largest software companies last year. VMware has always taken the inorganic approach to strengthen its portfolio. From Trango, a mobile virtualization company that VMware acquired in 2008 to the recent Boxer acquisition in October 2015, VMware bought over two dozen companies. As always in the long list of acquisitions, a few didn’t align with company’s mission and some become the game changer for the company. Same thing happened with VMware as well. Here is a brief analysis of five acquisitions that I feel had created significant impact on VMware: 1) Nicira – Acquired in July 2012 This is one of the most strategic acquisitions made by VMware...

According to Wikipedia - DevOps is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software, can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably However DevOps means more than adopting a few automation and CI/CD practices-- without culture, technology and in many cases organizational change its true benefits are rarely realized. Enterprises are using the flexibility of this software and rapid pace of its development to drive greater differentiation. 2016 will be a big year for DevOps. According to me these will be some of the key trends which will define the future roadmap of this technology. Large enterprises will get onboard fully Enterprises are familiar with DevOps now. it is not an a...

Testing of Network Attached Storage (NAS) Arrays is a challenging subject & many OEMs face a daunting task when it comes to performing non-functional testing such as Performance. Another challenge is to test how scalable their product is in-terms of maximum simultaneous connections. Both these kind of testing needs thorough knowledge of not just the filesystem protocol, but the backend filesystem running on the NAS filer as well as the knowledge of client side functions to measure the performance as exhibited by the NAS sub-system. Scalability testing requires gamut of filesystem clients of different kernel version supporting different protocol version & also multiple such clients supporting similar kernel/protocol version. This raises the IT budget for procuring Bare Metal or Hypervisor served VMs, thus increasing the input cost for Product Development team to build, test & release the product under development. With the re-invention of Linux Containers & it...

Why a GUI Framework ? Enables easy-to-use tabular syntax for creating test cases in a uniform way Is platform and application independent Supports creating data-driven test cases. Provides tagging to categorize and select test cases to be executed. Typical steps for automation of a GUI feature To know more email: blog@calsoftinc.com Contributed by: Manish Doomra| Calsoft inc

India’s Economy is growing rapidly. There is massive migration of people from rural to urban areas.  Cities are expanding in all directions. Local government is pressurized to expand and increase the physical infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population.  Government of India has initiated an ambitious Smart Cities programme to make cities livable.  This programme tries to solve the problem of rapid urbanization. It includes developing new cities and modernizing existing cities. The focus is on improving core infrastructure services like water supply, sanitation, solid waste management, transportation, affordable housing, power supply and robust IT connectivity. The Smart city should enable citizen’s participation and provide good governance. Building infrastructure needs domain expertise and huge capital expenditure. Local government bodies have to ensure that all these facilities are optimally used by citizens. The Smart City prog...

vSphere Virtual Storage Appliance [VSA]: VSA is created for SMBs that either don’t have the budget to buy shared storage hardware or lack the skills to manage a more complex storage environment. Without access to a SAN or NAS array, SMB aren't able to use top features which are available in VMware virtual infrastructure like HA and vMotion etc. With the help of VSA, SMB can now use many vSphere features without having to purchase a SAN or NAS device to provide them with shared storage. VSA works by using the hard drives from the server hosts (ESXi or ESX servers) into a pooled storage, which is fault tolerant similar to an accumulative RAID device. If a single hard drive fails in a host, the RAID configuration within that host will keep providing the data.  VSA mirrors data among multiple nodes (multiple ESXi or ESX server hosts). If a server fails, data contained in it will still be available from the hard drives of other ESX servers being used in the VSA configurati...