Tag Archives: infrastructure

Event: The Future of Scale Out Storage – by Ken Claffey VP&GM @ Seagate – 2 March

Seagate Technology, in conjunction with PuneTech and Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) presents a talk on The Future of Scale Out Storage by Ken Claffey, VP & GM of the Storage Systems Group at Seagate Technologies, on Monday, 2nd March, at 6pm, in Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

Abstract of the Talk

Big Data is changing the nature of storage infrastructure, traditional SAN and NAS systems are becoming obsolete. This disruption is creating opportunities for next generation scale out storage systems and converged infrastructure. Seagate as the world’s preeminent supplier of Disks Drives and Storage enclosures has a unique view point of this transition and the technology underpinnings that will be the foundation of a new data infrastructure designed to meet the challenges of big data. Seagate will present its view on this transition from the storage I/O device level all the way up the I/O stack to the application layer.

About the Speaker – Ken Claffey

Ken Claffey is Vice President and General Manager of Seagate’s Clusterstor™ HPC & Big Data business. Mr. Claffey led Seagate’s HPC initiative that started in 2009 and has led the successful execution of this strategy ever since. Mr. Claffey has also held senior management roles in Business Management, System Architecture, Business Development and Product Management functions at Xyratex, a storage and HPC technology company that was later acquired by Seagate. Prior to that, he held management positions at Adaptec and Eurologic Systems where he established and grew new businesses.

Venue

The event is from 6pm to 7pm on Monday, 2nd March, at the Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, Senapati Bapat Road.

Fees and registration

The event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here.

Excerpts: Interview with Hinjewadi Industries Association

Hinjewadi is easily the most important part of Pune as far as software technology is concerned, and there are many associated infrastructural problems that do not get the attention they deserve. The Hinjewadi Industries Association is an association of industries that is trying to change that.

The Economic Times has an interesting interview with SK Kulkarni, President of HIA. Here are some excerpts:

About Hinjewadi, and the HIA

Hinjewadi contributes around 60 per cent of Maharashtra’s total IT exports. As of now we are able to generate the revenue of Rs 35,000 crore. This area has around 90 companies employing people and generating revenue however, around 50 companies are part of HIA. The major players in this area includes Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, TCS, Persistent, KPIT Cummins along with Accenture and many others.

About the Industries in Hinjewadi

This area has around 85 per cent of IT sector; around 5 per cent of Biotechnology (BT) sector and remaining 10 per cent is manufacturing sector.

What is the objective of the Hinjewadi Industries Association?

The basic objective of the HIA is to have a structured growth of infrastructure, security and facilities for its member companies and their employees. Even today the major issues like security, traffic safety needs to be address.

For more, see the full article.

Invisible Bugs or Why Every Developer Must Understand Details of IT Infrastructure

(This article is adapted from a very interesting post written by Sunil Uttamchandani, Co-founder and Director of Services at Mithi Software, a Pune-based Software Products company specializing in software for email, collaboration and other enterprise products. The article first appeared on the Mithi Blog and is adapted & reproduced here for the benefit of PuneTech readers with permission.)

Most of the education of a Software Developer is centered around programming, and keeping their code clean and maintainable and debuggable, and well-tested and ensuring that customers don’t run into bugs, and if they do, the bugs are easy to find. However, in real life, one of the most difficult category of bugs to find is the “invisible” bug. The first thing you notice about such a bug is that a customer complains about a bug, but you are unable to reproduce it in your environment. Now, if there is one thing you cannot convince a customer about, is that the bug is caused due to some misconfiguration of the software infrastructure in the customer environment. All bugs are bugs in your product, irrespective of what actually caused the bug.

In the Blog of Mithi Software, Sunil Uttamchandani talks about how their products (which deal with email servers and other enterprise collaboration software) often have to deal with “Intangible/Invisible Network Obstacles” when dealing with customer bugs.

Here he describes a recent experience.

A Ghost In the Network

Recently during a POS (proof on site) exercise with a prospective customer, we had to perform a test in which an email client would send mail to a large number of recipients from our cloud email setup and capture performance test results. As a regular practice, we setup the SMTP controls on our server to allow this test, did a test from our environment and then asked the client to repeat the same test in their environment.

The test failed in the client environment.

We enabled the SMTP scanning engines for their source IP to capture detailed information (which would slow down the mail flow naturally), and we found that the client could deliver a few mail, but would give up after a little while. It would simply show the progress bar, but would not move ahead. The logs on our server showed that there was no more connections coming from that client. As a first point of troubleshooting we eliminated the scanning controls and simplified the SMTP rules in our product to speed up things by making no checks for their source IP address. We did another round of testing, but we had similar results. Just a few more mails went through and the process hung again. During this phase, we couldn’t successfully send mail to all their recipients at all. After a few mails, the system would simply do nothing and client would eventually time out.

On the face of it, all looked well in the client’s environment, since the other users/programs in the client’s environment were going about their business with no issues.

Without assuming anything, we performed the test from our office to eliminate any issues on the server side. Once we did this successfully, we re-did the test from our environment, with the client’s data and that too went through successfully. All pointers were now to the client’s environment!

There obviously was some firewall policy, some proxy, or some other transparent firewall in the network which was disabling the test through the given Internet link. On our request, when the firewall policies were bypassed for connections to our servers, the test went through successfully.

This shows two things. Network administrators, and firewalls often interfere with the web connections in complicated, and difficult to debug ways. And, the job of determining the root cause of the problem always falls upon the product vendor.

More Examples of Real Life Network Problems

If you think this is an isolated problem, think again. Sunil goes on to point out a bunch of other cases where similar ghost bugs bothered them:

Several times, our help desk receives tickets for such “intangible” problems in the network which are difficult to troubleshoot since there is some element in the network, which is interfering in the normal flow. Clients find it difficult to accept these kind of issues since on the face of it all seems to be well. Some real life examples of such issues we face:

  • At one of our customer sites, address book on the clients’ machines suddenly stopped working. Clients connect to the Address book over the LDAP port 389. We found that while a telnet to the LDAP port was working fine from a random set of clients, still the address book was not able to access the server over port 389. It turned out to be a transparent firewall which had a rate control.
  • Several of our customers complain of duplicate mail. This typically happens when MS Outlook as a client sends a mail, but retains the mail in the Outbox when it doesn’t receive a proper acknowledgement from the server. It then resends the mail and may do so repeatedly until its transaction completes successfully. On the face of it, it appears to be a server issue, while actually its a network quality issue. Difficult to prove. I’ve personally spent hours on the phone trying to convince customers to clean up their networks. One of our customers, after a lot of convincing, did some hygiene work on their network and the problem “magically” vanished.
  • One of our customers complained that their remote outgoing mail queue was rising rapidly. We found that the capacity of Internet link’s (provided by the ISP) to relay mail had suddenly dropped. So mails were going, but very slowly, and hence the queues were rising. Apparently there had been no change in the network which could explain this. After some analysis, We were quite convinced that the ISP had probably an introduced an SMTP proxy in the network, which had some rate control or tar pit policies. The ISP refused to acknowledge this. To prove our hypothesis, we routed the mail from our hosted servers over a different port (not port 25 – which is default for SMTP). As soon as we did this, the mail flow became normal, even though we were sending through the same Internet link. As of the time of this writing, the ISP is still to acknowledge that there is an impediment in the path for port 25.

These and several more incidents show that problems in the network environment are challenging to troubleshoot and accept.

So What Next?

In other words, to be able to keep customers happy, software developers need to have a very good and detailed understanding of the various IT infrastructure environments in which their product is likely to be deployed, and be able to come up with inventive strategies by which to isolate which part of the infrastructure is actually causing the problem.

Pune Startup launches Vaultize – Cloud-Based Enterprise Backup & DR

Pune Startup Anoosmar Technologies, has just come out of stealth mode, and announced the public beta of Vaultize, which they describe as:

Vaultize is next generation data protection: cloud-based backup and disaster recovery that also enables collaboration between users, synchronization of devices and sharing over web. Vaultize turns your zero-returns investment in backup into an asset that improves availability, increases productivity and makes sharing easy.

Anoosmar Technoloies has been founded by Anand Kekre and Ankur Panchbudhe, both of whom are Pune old-timers, with an ex-Veritas (Symantec), and ex-McAfee background. Both of them have been in the data protection, security, and storage space for over 10 years, and have deep expertise in enterprise infrastructure software. Between them they have 64 US patents.

Before you dismiss Vaultize by comparing it with Dropbox, or , remember that Vaultize is not a consumer product – it is targeting the enterprise space. In that sense, I see Vaultize as more of a competitor to Pune’s Druva. However, given the backgrounds of the founders of Druva and founders of Vaultize, I would be tempted to guess that Druva is likely to be more interested in enterprise backup, and replication and generally areas more to do with performance and availability in an enterprise, while Vaultize is likely to move more in the direction of archiving, and e-discovery and generally areas more to do with risk management and legal compliance. But that’s pure speculation – I might be wrong.

Also check out the customer case studies page and the management team page.

Druva is one of the few Pune software product companies that has received funding from well known VCs, and hence, Anoosmar, which has a similar pedigree and similar target markets, is a company to watch closely.

IBM Pune Tivoli Users Group Meeting – 6th June

IBM Global Services
Image via Wikipedia

What: A meeting of the Pune Tivoli Users Group – with presentations on various Tivoli products
When: 9:30am to 12:30pm, Saturday 6th June
Where: Meeting Room M4 (Video Conference Room), 7th Floor, Tower (B), Tech Park One (TPO), (Panchshill), Off Airport Road, Near Don Bosco School, Yerwada
Registration and Fees: This meeting is free for all to attend. Register here.

Details:

The agenda for this meeting is as follows:

Agenda:
0930-1000 hrs: Welcome and Introductions (Aleem Subhedar, Barclays)
1000-1030 hrs: IBM Tivoli Monitoring – Universal Agent (Himanshu Karmarkar, IBM)
1030-1100 hrs: Introduction to Tivoli Security Operations Manager-TSOM (Boudhayan Chakrabarty, IBM)
1100-1130 hrs: Hands-on TSM Installation and Configuration (Bharat Vyas,IBM)
1130-1200 hrs: DEMO – Tivoli Identity Manager (TIM)- Provisioning Policies (Deepak Kaul, IBM)
1200-1230 hrs: TUG Members Networking and Working Lunch (Pizza)

As usual, see the PuneTech calendar for other tech events in Pune this week.

Pune Tivoli Users Group Meeting – 18 April

IBM Global Services
Image via Wikipedia

What: This is the first meeting of the Pune Tivoli Users Group – with introductory presentations on various Tivoli products
When: 9:30am to 1:30pm, Saturday 18th April
Where: Meeting Room M4 (Video Conference Room), 7th Floor, Tower (B), Tech Park One (TPO), (Panchshill), Off Airport Road, Near Don Bosco School, Yerwada
Registration and Fees: This meeting is free for all to attend. Register here.

Details:

Come along to the first ever Pune Tivoli User Group meeting and meet like minded people. Your presence will help to make this group a success !

Agenda:

9:30am – Introduction for Tivoli User Group members. What do YOU want to get out of YOUR group
Topic #1 – TSM FastBack : Introduction & Architecture
Speaker: Chanchal Ghevade, IBM
Topic #2 – Introduction to Tivoli Identity and Access Management
Speaker: Deepak Kaul, IBM
Topic #3 – Introduction to Tivoli Storage Manager
Speaker: Rahul Sharma, IBM
Topic #4 – Introduction to IBM Tivoli Monitoring
Speaker: Himanshu Karmarkar, IBM
Topic #5 – IBM Support Assistant (ISA) tool for Tivoli products

Feedback & close
Lunch and networking.

As usual, see the PuneTech calendar for other tech events in Pune this week.

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Company Profile: Amberpoint

Company profile of AmberPoint from the Punetech wiki

AmberPoint is a provider of middleware for governing the runtime of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. Utilizing a policy-based approach to managing the health and well-being of SOA-based applications, AmberPoint’s software offers comprehensive capabilities for visibility into and control of loosely coupled systems.

Contents

[edit] Main Features

[edit] Application Discovery

Automatically figure out what all SOA applications exist in an environment and determine their capabilities. Upload this information to a central repository. Keep the repository updated as applications come and go and their capabilities change. Track dependencies between various applications.

Knowing what applications are deployed, and the dependencies between them is the first step towards managing the applications properly.

[edit] Policies

Once applications have been discovered and cataloged AmberPoint allows administrators to specify policies which need to be enforced against the applications. And enforce them. Also, architects can define approved policies and make them available to their SOA developers. Developers can select the policies they need to implement and attach them to their services on the fly, without any additional coding effort.

[edit] Monitoring

Reports: Monitor the various components of the SOA in real time. Produce reports about things like: throughput, availability, response times, and errors/faults. This is achieved without requiring any modifications to existing services (no code changes), or any extra development time. And with low overhead.

Composite service monitoring: In addition to monitoring a single component, you also want to be able to monitor the same parameters for a composite service created using these components.

SLAs: The ultimate aim of this monitoring is to ensure that Service Level Agreements are being met.

Visualization: Show pretty pictures to get an idea of who is using what. And how much. And the dependencies between various components. And the flow of data.

Early warnings: Based on information about the existing SLAs and how the applications are composed of sub-components, it is possible to figure out which SLAs are likely to get violated based on the predicted trends for some of the low-level measurements taken at one or more of the components. This can help in catching problems before they become problems. Also, using the same basic information, traffic spikes can be prevented by throttling can be applied at the appropriate places at the apropriate times.

[edit] Exception Handling and Root Cause Analysis

Provide an integrated view of message flows that occur across the various components of the system. Thus allow a single interface where administrators can search for errors/issues by message type, content, client credentials, and even tie the low level messages to higher-level business transactions. This eliminates the need to manually piece together a message flow by searching multiple log files.

Also, allow for rule-based routing of exceptions to various exception handlers. It integrates with existing exception-handling resources such as in-house exception-management frameworks as well as exception-handling workflows and process-management systems.

[edit] Testing

When one component changes, it is possible that the composite service might break. And testing for this is difficult because of the distributedness and loose-coupling that is inherent in a service oriented architecture. Using AmberPoint, administrators can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a changed service against applications that consume it and the services on which it is dependent. Additionally, they can perform “what-if” runs to see the potential impact of management policies (especially security) as they change within the runtime environment. AmberPoint also allows simulation of services for testing purposes using actual production traffic and realistic performance characteristics.

[edit] Regulatory Compliance

AmberPoint provides pieces needed for complying with regulations in the financial industry, health industry, credit card industry and the SOX regulations. Examples include multi-factor authentication, role based access control, etc..

Website: http://www.amberpoint.com/

(Editor’s note: Occassionally I will be posting such quick’n’dirty profiles of Pune-based companies. These will essentially be information collected from the company website. This is not intended to be an in-depth look at the technology. It is more directed towards people how might not know about the existence of the company, or not know what it does.)