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NETWAYS Blog

Monthly Snap June: NetApp FAS 3140; News about OSMC and OSBConf; Katello; Open-Stack-Tage

June started with Georg looking for a new home for a used NetApp FAS 3140 we received from a client. The beautiful device is in good condition and can be fetched at our office, if you make a camerasmall donation.
My humble self, told you all you need to know about the Hackathon at OSMC and started the OSMC countdown with the presentation “OSMC 2014: From monitoringsucks to monitoringlove, and back” by Kris Buytaert. I also introduced the complete speaker lineup of Open Source Backup Conference to you.
Dirk introduced you all to Katello, the Foreman Plugin for Softwaremanagement and reported on why you should have a look at it, if you don’t have a provisioning and Configuration Management yet.
And Bernd wrote about what happed at his visit of Open-Stack-Tage in Frakfurt.

Guest Post by Alan Robertson: How The Assimilation Project Got Started

Back in about 2010, I was working on a highly custom supercomputer research project with about 2.2 million cores called Cyclops64. It was a joint project between the University of Delaware, IBM and the NSA. It was interesting in a lot of respects, but what its most unusual feature was its networking. Each system was directly connected to 6 other systems by high-speed interconnects forming a cube, and only a few systems on one of the cube faces were connected to a “normal” ethernet network. The cube was 24x24x24 and each system had 160 cores (total: 2211840 cores).
As I thought about it, I realized that the way conventional monitoring systems like Nagios or Icinga work would be absolutely horrible in this environment. Imagine that the monitoring system was in one corner of the cube. Then each “Are You OK?” message would have to through 24 systems up, then 24 systems to the right, then 24 systems forward. The return message would have to follow the reverse return path – meaning that each round trip would touch 144 systems. Of course, the network in the vicinity of the central system would be totally destroyed by this traffic if it happened at any reasonable rate.
After thinking about it, I realized that it would be much better if each system monitored its six neighbors instead – delegating these “Are You OK?” queries to the machines being monitored. This totally changed the complexity of the task, and the network load – no network hot spots, and the central system had nothing to do most of the time – an amazing difference! I also realized that more conventional systems have these same problems of network congestion and ever growing centralized workload.
So, I adapted this idea to “normal” systems, and the Assimilation Project was born – providing greater scalability than any predecessors, while being incredibly simple. To keep the same topology-awareness that the original idea had, I realized that I needed to discover network connectivity. Once I’d done that, I realized that I could easily discover what services the system had which would eliminate manual configuration. Further, I could discover dependencies, which are essential to tracing problems to their root causes. Then I realized that this was all really a huge graph, so I adopted the Neo4j graph database. Lots of other valuable capabilities quickly became obvious results of having comprehensive and scalable discovery.
magic+unicorns-1200About this time, I realized that discovery was the real value and doing things like monitoring, and security compliance, network management and many other incredibly valuable applications naturally fell out from being able to easily know basically everything about everything and putting it into a graph-based configuration management database (CMDB).
So, it goes without saying that I’m excited to return to the OSMC in Nürnberg and talk about all the exciting new things we’re doing in the Assimilation Project. After all, the last time I was there, I had a great time and my talk got some pretty cool tweets.
*The Cyclops64 has special monitoring hardware making this unnecessary.


The Author Alan Robertson

Alan Robertson is an open source project leader and speaker on security, availability, discovery and monitoring. He founded Linux-HA (Pacemaker) and the Assimilation Project which maintains a scalable configuration management database driving monitoring and security.


OSMC 2015: Der Countdown läuft – nur noch 140 Tage

Kris Buytaert eröffnet den diesjährigen OSMC-Countdown mit seinem Talk „OSMC 2014: From monitoringsucks to monitoringlove, and back“

OSMC? Was soll das denn sein und wer sind die netten Menschen in diesen Videos? Die Open Source Monitoring Conference (kurz: OSMC) ist die internationale Plattform für alle an Open Source Monitoring Lösungen Interessierten, speziell Nagios und Icinga. Jedes Jahr gibt es hier die Möglichkeit sein Wissen über freie Monitoringsysteme zu erweitern und sich mit anderen Anwendern auszutauschen. Die Konferenz richtet sich besonders an IT-Verantwortliche aus den Bereichen System- und Netzwerkadministration, Entwicklung und IT-Management. Und die netten Menschen, die Ihr in unseren Videos zur OSMC seht, gehören dazu. 2015 wird die OSMC zum 10. Mal in Nürnberg stattfinden.

OSBConf 2015: Speaker online

OSBC_Events
Am 29. und 30. September sind wir wieder mit dass IT in Köln auf der Open Source Backup Conference unterwegs. Unser ganz persönliches Gastspiel in der Domstadt ist dabei vergleichsweise bedeutungslos – wirklich ein Anlass zum Zünden von Feuerwerken, sind hingegen unsere zauberhaften Referenten. Und genau die haben wir jetzt allesamt online!
Mit dabei sind:
 
Philipp Storz und Stephan Dühr
Als einer der Köpfe des Bareos-Projekts berichtet Philipp Storz sozusagen aus erster Hand, wenn er sich mit seinem Vortrag dem Backup von VMware Snapshots mittels Bareos, zuwendet. Stephan Dühr steuert, als einer der Schreiber des Plugins, wertvolles Insiderwissen bei.
 
Alberto Giménez
Alberto Giménez, SysOps Engineer beim spanischen Systems Engineering Dienstleister CAPSiDE, widmet sich hingegen der Frage, wie man eine AWS VTL nutzt um Bacula Backups local zu cachen und auf S§ und Glacier zwischenzuspeichern.
 
Marco Weiss
Marco Weiss, seines Zeichens CEO der Kessler GmbH, wird in einer Live Demo git, salt und Bareos verknüpfen.
And many more…
Außerdem sind noch Daniel Neuberger, Christoph MitaschStefan Neff und Niels de Vos  mit von der Partie.
Den totalen Überblick gibt es natürlich, wie immer, online!
 
Tickets für unser Festival fabulöser Fachmänner gibt es hier.

OSMC 2015: first Hackathon at OSMC!

Logo_DateFor the first time in OSMC history, we will give you the opportunity to stay for four days with us in Rostbratwurst* city. If you book one of our workshops on Monday the 16th, in addition to the conference package with talks on the 17th and 18th of November, you can now add the hackathon on November 19th to complete your excuse for staying in the capital of the best breweries of Bavaria even longer.
Developers like Gerhard Laußer, Michael Friedrich, Michael Medin and Thomas Gelf will be there (not at the brewery, but at the hackathon) to work with you on new projects. Then, when the hackathon is over, you will have the whole Friday and the weekend to find out what Schäuferles are!
Does that sound like a deal?
Get even more information about the hackathon here and don’t forget to register until June 30th for the discounted Early Bird rate!
thats-all-folks-porky-pig
And that’s all folks!

*very delicious small sausages – a Nuremberg specialty