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Jay Weier

May 11, 2020 by Jay Weier

The motivation to move to digital workspaces has made many organizations re-imagine their workforce and how their business operates. From the enhanced business agility and flexibility to the reduced overhead costs digital workspaces promise, businesses across the board are feeling the push to make the digital workspace a reality for their organizations.

However, designers and engineers relying on graphics-intensive applications, data scientists running compute-intensive workloads, and knowledge workers using increasingly graphics-intensive office productivity tools often feel tethered to their physical workstations.

Virtual desktops un-tether users to work from home, on the road, or anywhere by moving acceleration hardware from on-location workstations to virtual environments powered by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

VMware Horizon 7 with NVIDIA GRID

A leader in virtualized infrastructure and software-defined data center solutions, VMware’s Horizon 7 with NVIDIA GRID securely delivers an immersive GPU powered experience across a variety of user devices and locations. Professional graphics users, engineers, and knowledge workers can productively collaborate in real-time—on a global scale—with other professionals, no matter the size of the dataset.

With true GPU hardware acceleration, NVIDIA GRID enables sharing across multiple virtual desktops, without compromising the graphics or compute experience. Because work that was typically done by the CPU is offloaded to the GPU, demanding engineering and creative applications can be supported in a virtualized and cloud environment for a more flexible user experience and reduced stress on the data center.

VMware Horizon 7 is also optimized for the software–defined data center and provides complete workspace environment management. This enables your IT administrators to control all graphics and compute resources, efficiently manage those resources, and accelerate their delivery to end users.

Carrying the Weight of the Workload

Moving the graphics-acceleration hardware from the workstation to a centralized system provides users and businesses with a wealth of advantages. With appropriate network bandwidth and suitable remote client devices, designers and engineers can manipulate complex models and researchers can run simulations, using very large data sets, from anywhere, freeing them from the limitations of fixed workstations and processors. Hardware acceleration also reduces CPU usage for less demanding basic desktop and published application use, and for video encoding or decoding.

Businesses grow faster and innovate quicker when they take advantage of the agility and flexibility modern digital workspaces provide. Enabling users to work on any device means businesses can save on CapEx and OpEx with fewer expensive location-based workstations and the overhead required to maintain and manage them. Moving acceleration hardware from on-location workstations to virtual environments also gives graphics users, engineers, and knowledge workers the performance of a physical workstation with the cost-effectiveness of GPU sharing across multiple users. Giving your team the opportunity to work remotely also strengthens their ability to innovate freely and drive growth for your business.

VMware Horizon 7 with NVIDIA GRID Benefits

Provides consistent performance – Substantially improves latency, bandwidth, and frames per second, while decreasing CPU utilization and increasing users per host, enhancing workspace productivity for geographically dispersed teams regardless of network conditions.

Optimizes resource utilization – A single GPU can be shared among multiple VMs and/or multiple GPUs can be assigned to a single VM, to power the most demanding workloads.

Accelerates professional workflows – By enhancing operational efficiency—from faster graphics rendering to data intensive simulations­—organizations can increase user productivity and reduce time-to-market.

Enhances visibility – Gives administrators a clear view into workflow details, and make changes if necessary, using the unified management console wizards and dashboards.

Boosts scalability – No time-consuming installation process, instead users can easily connect to remote desktops and applications from various devices at various locations. Users can be up and running in minutes

Reduces CapEx and OpEx – Standard workstations have high acquisition and maintenance costs that can cut into your bottom line. VMware Horizon 7 with NVIDIA GRID reduces capital and operational costs, minimizes downtime, and requires less costly management and support.

Streamlines IT support – Administrators can patch and upgrade applications and operating systems without touching a user’s physical PC.

Strengthens security footprint – You can reduce the risk of lost or compromised data by restricting access to the virtual desktops and apps residing on your servers. You can also prevent sensitive data from being downloaded onto a remote employee’s home computer.

Elysian Makes IT Easy

Change is hard, especially when it comes to moving graphics-acceleration hardware from workstations to servers. At Elysian, we get it.

Our team of engineers has hands-on experience architecting and deploying virtual desktops for manufacturing, engineering, architecture, education, and healthcare environments. From helping you evaluate the cost/benefit of transitioning your team to virtual desktops through supporting your technology investment, we’re here to help.

The key to successful adoption of new technology and a new way of working is two-fold: it must provide an exceptional user experience and it must enable you to realize greater revenue opportunities, both now and for the long haul. We help drive that success.

Jay Weier is an Implementation Manager at Elysian Technology. Jay has been working in the IT space for over fourteen years. His career has exposed him to small, medium, and enterprise businesses while working in the private, healthcare, and academia industries. When he’s not on the road solving client’s problems, he enjoys spending time with his daughter, riding motorcycles, and skiing.

Filed Under: blog, VMware

July 26, 2018 by Jay Weier

At Elysian Technology, we have a unique vantage point. We get to see customer cloud adoption and trends across a wide variety of industries and sizes. We also get to work closely with manufacturers and distributors to understand their roadmaps for cloud services.

In those discussions one thing is for sure…everyone is talking about cloud computing and cloud storage. When we meet with customers, we’re finding many of them have had similar experiences and/or difficulties in adopting cloud. And when we meet with manufacturers, they are wondering why cloud isn’t being adopted even faster. That’s why we thought it would be helpful to put you at ease with 9 things to know:

  1. SaaS is the gateway drug – When most people hear “cloud” they think of public cloud providers like AWS or Azure. However, we’ve found that most businesses are entering the cloud via SaaS offerings such as Office 365. These models have lower barriers to entry and present less perceived risk. Many organizations are adopting a SaaS first model as opposed to the older public cloud first model. If you are currently using SaaS, your move to the cloud is less of a leap and more of a hop.
  2. Backup and DR is driving public cloud adoption – Targeting the public cloud for backup and disaster recovery workloads is also incredibly popular. Many organizations do not have a second site for backups or replication and public cloud solves that problem. For many organizations, their only use of the public cloud is for backup and/or DR (and that’s ok!).
  3. But then come the accountants – Imagine trying to decipher the cable or cell phone bills for everyone in your entire organization. That’s what accounting departments are facing when they receive 20+ page AWS/Azure invoices, which makes identifying costs and charging them to the proper department almost impossible. Unfortunately, this has stunted many organizations adoption of the public cloud and frequently requires strict policy or third-party tools to ultimately conquer and control. This situation would be when we’d suggest an AWS health check, to help you sort and organize this information.
  4. Security is no longer an excuse for ignoring public cloud – With AWS and Azure boasting a laundry list of ever evolving compliance certifications, the odds are likely that their environment is a step up in security versus a step down. The cloud can be a dangerous place, but that is mostly controlled by you. When you read the “scary” articles about cloud breaches be sure to ask yourself if it still would’ve happened even if it was on-site.
  5. Businesses are lifting and shifting – Tech Republic reports 85% of AWS spend is made up of 4 Cloud Services – EC2, EBS, RDS and S3. We are seeing this with our customers as well. Few businesses have the time and money to rearchitect their applications to be cloud native. However, being unable to rearchitect your applications shouldn’t be a roadblock for the cloud. Many organizations have lifted and shifted their servers to learn, experiment, and evaluate public cloud offerings. In fact, the whole idea of the public cloud is to iterate repeatedly. So don’t worry if you don’t get it quite right on the first try and remember, you’re not alone. We’ve helped business of all sizes, in a variety of industries migrate to the cloud. We don’t scare easily, and we’ll be with you every step of the way.
  6. Don’t forget, you know how to IT – Frequently, organizations feel paralyzed by the public cloud. Remember, you weren’t paralyzed when you deployed that new software on-prem for the first time. Don’t let the cloud intimidate you. The cloud is LITERALLY built on forgiving mistakes. Also, don’t forget your on-prem tools, policies, or knowledge when you do adopt a public cloud, it’s just another data center.
  7. Your staff is about to get more expensive – According to IDC, demand for labor is already constrained and only looks to get worse as graduation rates for Computer Science degrees have only increased 10% over the past 10 years. This means that more budget should be allocated to improving operational efficiencies. Therefore, leveraging automation, cloud and *aaS offerings should be at the top of your priority list.
  8. But you’re about to solve more problems – Each cloud offering presents unique strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing cloud offerings on a per solution basis will enable your organization to improve their capabilities and flexibility. With the technology broadening and evolving constantly, the problem you have today could be in your rear view a month from now. The whole idea of the cloud is to be elastic, therefore your cloud policy shouldn’t be static.
  9. IoT is here to stay – IoT is the most overused and annoying term in the industry right now. However, IoT solutions are naturally aligned well with public cloud solutions, and the amount of money being poured into R&D is astonishing. Fight the urge to ignore this buzzword, IoT is here and we’ll all have to manage it. How can your business leverage IoT?

Hopefully some of these items made you feel a little more comfortable with your cloud journey (or lack thereof). Everyone is moving at their own pace and some people just need a little boost of confidence or experience to take that next step. The cloud is fundamentally different, but if thought of as another tool in your IT toolbox it removes a lot of the stigma and opens up new and unique opportunities for your business.

Enjoy the journey!

 

Jay Weier is the Implementation Specialist at Elysian Technology. Jay has been working in the IT space for over twelve years. His career has exposed him to small, medium, and enterprise businesses while working in the private, healthcare, and academia industries. When he’s not on the road solving client’s problems, he enjoys spending time with his new born daughter, riding motorcycles, and skiing.

Filed Under: AWS, Azure, Cloud, IoT Tagged With: AWS, Azure, Cloud, Cloud computing, Cloud Storage, IoT

March 28, 2018 by Jay Weier

Amazon introduced the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification to provide an entry, high-level certification in the AWS certification track. Specifically, the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification was released with the expectation that the entire AWS sales staff could pass it and would all benefit from a common foundation of knowledge. In addition to sales staff the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification is also targeted at middle to upper management. This will allow them to know the basic services and support that AWS offers so they can help guide their organizations towards the best choices for them.

Although this isn’t pointed directly at “in the trenches techies” I found that it was a great place to start my AWS training. I was tasked with earning my AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification and stumbled across the Cloud Practitioner certification while exploring study resources for my SA – Associate. My theory was that the Cloud Practitioner training and studying would lay the foundation for my SA – Associate. And, although there would be overlap between the two certifications I felt that repeating some content would help drive it home and make up for the lack of real-world hands on experience. So my next step was putting together a learning and studying plan.

Learning & Studying

I reached out to several colleagues and asked them where I should begin. Surprisingly, they all instantly said A Cloud Guru. A Cloud Guru is an online training service that specializes in anything related to cloud, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Amazingly, the entire A Cloud Guru platform is built on AWS and is completely serverless. It was nice to see someone practice what they preach!

So, I signed up for an “all you can eat” membership at a whopping $29/month (by far the cheapest IT training I’ve ever encountered). Since I like to be extra careful I decided it was worth the time to warm up with the Intro to AWS course. This is entirely optional, but I found that it was relatively worthwhile if you’re new to cloud computing.

After completing that course I moved directly into their Cloud Practitioner course which is roughly 5 hours long. This course involved a fair amount of lecture in the beginning but then we got into some labs. It also seemed like it was fairly up to date and accurate. Before I knew it I was hosting a load balanced, highly available WordPress site on AWS. Between this and the overview of the plethora of services that AWS offers I started to get really excited about the possibilities! So, I poked my way through various services and tried to find a real or fake use for each of them so I could expose myself to them. This isn’t really necessary but it helped keep me interested and re-enforced what I had learned. The next step was how to prepare for the exam.

Exam Prep Tips

  1. Make sure you actively participate and complete all of the A Cloud Guru labs in the two courses. Don’t just watch Ryan complete them.
  2. Think of real world applications where you could practice the labs further. For example, I moved a personal website to S3 and re-architected another site to run on AWS behind a load balancer.
  3. Take notes throughout the courses. I found it helpful to break them down by topic (i.e. EC2, Storage, Databases etc.)
  4. Read the Certification Blueprint & complete the (free) sample exam questions from Amazon – https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/
  5. Read the Architecting for the Cloud whitepaper from Amazon.
  6. Study the default and custom backup options for RDS and DynamoDB. A Cloud Guru doesn’t touch on those subjects but there were numerous exam questions pertaining to them.
  7. Purchase and practice the Udemy practice exams. These questions were much more difficult and more accurately reflected real-world exam questions.
    1. The AWS practice exams aren’t recommended as they don’t contain many questions and you aren’t told which questions you answered incorrectly.

Exam Format

  • Somewhere around 55 multiple-choice questions
  • 90 minutes to complete the exam
  • Ability to flag questions and return to them later in the exam
  • No notes or access to electronics

Exam Topics

All of the questions I faced were very high level and mostly fair. Very few, if any went into deep technical detail. A lot of them were scenario-based questions on the following topics:

  • Choosing the most appropriate solution or service.
  • AWS support options and the differences between them.
  • Consolidated billing.
  • Regions vs. availability zones.
  • Moving data into and out of the cloud (Glacier, S3 etc.)
  • What a specific AWS service is used for.
  • The different types of instances (on-demand, spot, reserved, dedicated) and the pricing models.
  • The differences, availability and durability of S3 storage (S3, S3-IA, RRS & Glacier).
  • The different types of databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB etc.)
  • What Trusted Advisor is and when to use it.
  • The shared responsibility model.

Results

You will find out if you’ve passed or failed immediately. However, it will take up to three business days for you to receive you score and breakdown.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a SysAdmin looking to dip your toes into AWS, or you would just like to add some Certs to your resume, this is a good place to start.  If you have any questions, or would like some advice, feel free to email me at [email protected].

Filed Under: AWS, Cloud Tagged With: A Cloud Guru, AWS cloud practioner, Azure, certifications, Google Cloud

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