Versiera Blog

Versiera needs a new home to accommodate its growth, business and technology requirements. The search for new home has proven to be interesting and worthwhile to share with others that may be in the same situation.

Three options: host everything ourself, procure data centre facility or consider one of the emerging clouds. Primary is a need is for a secure data centre facility with plenty of redundancy, reliable Internet access and power. Simple enough, we are down to two options.

Versiera is moving towards fully supporting IPv6, so this was one of our infrastructure requirements. Canada is known for its technology, innovation, and leading adoption of emerging technology. To my surprise in early 2009 none of the top-tier data centre operators in Canada were offering or even had an IPv6 implementation project in 2009. I recognize that IPv6 traffic may be marginal in North America in 2009 so there may not exist the strong business case for deployment. For all those that agree with that, stop deceiving yourselves and start implementing IPv6. Here are some clues: Internet IPv4 addresses will run out sooner than later – yes it’s going to happen shortly. Companies and Internet service like Versiera will need IPv6. Even the US Government is deploying IPv6. Be proactive and differentiate yourselves – IPv6 is not that complicated. The good news, two major data centre operators heard the call and are implementing IPv6 for fall 2009.

Now to Clouds. They are here and are not just marketing hype. There are big names behind them including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, AT&T, Rackspace and lots of others. Make no mistake, Clouds are real and they are going to change how enterprises deploy infrastructure computation and data. The marketing name may be new but the concept is not. We have come full circle. Recall way back when enterprises bought data and computational processing on mainframes from the likes of IBM? Yep…full circle. So why now, why clouds? Simple, commoditization. Computer and the Internet have become fast, cheap. Operating systems are now treated as applications through virtualization. Moreover, the Internet has emerged as a gobal fabric for interconnection, access and exchange of data. The cost of implementing and operating technology is going up. Cutting costs by moving technology, operations and staff to third world countries have unforeseen issues and are not ideal. Also, though most don’t like to admit it, many enterprises do a terrible job of implementing and running technology services. Anotherwords, a need to reduce costs and simplify. Enter the Clouds. Specialist organizations have emerged with services that can economically operate vast farms of computational power, data storage and are omnipresent across the Internet. They are good at what they do, and can make things happen quickly. Bottom line they can offer computational and data service for a few cents on the dollar at the flip of a switch. Their differentiators are also the convenience, speed of deployment and flexibility of technology capabilities. Clouds are very new and they are far from perfect. What exists are essentially their first generation. Issues exist with respect to capabilities, flexibility, performance and security. In time they will be addressed as customer demand drives these services forward. In our case, having looked at some of the offerings, we look forward to consider the next generations of Cloud services.

Our primary focus with Versiera services are response time. Versiera is primarily CPU bound for managing SSL communications and I/O bound for its database. The replacement of physical servers with virtual hosts in the cloud will require more virtual hosts than physical and control will be lost on optimizing the CPU and I/O performance. Our estimates show that moving to a cloud would yield negligible real dollars in saving for Versiera. Also most of the clouds do not yet offer services like load distribution which are important to Versiera. With lots of competition, cloud services are changing quickly and we will continue to follow their progress.

Conceptually Versiera agents act as a mechanism for the collection of information for a given system or environment. The central Versiera system, apart from storing the collected information, includes monitoring and compliance features that allow for review of the collected data against a set of rules or policies that are intended to assert operational status or adherence to policy. To communicate important information Versiera may use email, SMS and pager notifications. From a high-level perspective using Versiera allows you to see what is there, how it may be changing, and whether you should be attending to anything. An important component in any successful systems management practice is documentation. The documentation should not only be restricted to system elements, but should include a documentation work-flow and collaborative features. Work is in progress to integrate the Rees Ticketing System with Versiera. The integration process will permit Versiera monitoring or compliance events to automatically generate tickets in Rees for assignment to operators. System operators in the same, or remote sites can individually or cooperatively create and work on Rees tickets. The addition of Rees to Versiera will broaden the information work flow from identifying problems, to their documentation, resolution and historical record keeping.

Computers on the Internet communicate with one another based on each other’s IP addresses. Since it is easier for humans to remember computer names rather than IP addresses, Domain Name System (DNS) came about to facilitate the translation or mapping of fully qualified domain names (FQDN) such as www.versiera.com into their Internet IP address (216.176.62.87). DNS must be manually administered to manage the translation mappings for computer names and their respective IP addresses. Dynamic DNS enables automatic updates of DNS records by remote computers whenever their IP address changes and to populate or update the changes in DNS. The frequent updates of computer IP addresses are usually the result of Internet facing computers configured to receive their IP address from Cable/DSL Internet Service Providers (ISPs) using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Versiera will shortly be adding to its list of features Dynamic DNS (DDNS). Users of Versiera will have the ability to assign alias names (i.e. mycomputer.locate-ip.com) to Versiera registered hosts and place them into one of several available domain zone files. Versiera agents residing on remote computers will be responsible for maintaining updated DDNS records whenever the computer’s IP address changes (more precisely the source Internet IP address seen by Versiera). Computers with a static Internet IP address that are not already referenced in any Internet DNS zone file can also benefit by using Versiera DDNS to allow for their referencing by an assigned alias name in Versiera. To locate or connect to your computer from another location on the Internet, Versiera users will only have to remember the name they have assigned their particular computer i.e. PING mycomputer.locate-ip.com.

To now, Versiera has provided passive monitoring services for tracking the operation and health of host devices on the hosted Versiera Internet service. Active monitoring using SNMP has been reserved for corporate environments that acquire the Versiera Enterprise appliance. Passive monitoring does have limitations and there are situations where active monitoring is necessary to ascertain whether Internet facing services are functioning correctly. Internet services such as Domain Name Service (DNS), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Mail Service (SMTP), and Website Uniform Resource Locator (URL) need an active monitoring component to test the operation of their Internet service functionality. The testing of Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN), Website URLs and Mail Delivery will comprise the initial set of active monitoring functionality and will be added to the Versiera Professional hosting service. The active monitoring of these services will be restricted to registered hosts running Versiera agents.