Hyperconverged

Infrastructure
for Cloud
 The Gorilla Guide To...

Hyperconverged
Infrastructure
for Cloud

Scott D. Lowe • David M. Davis

Author: Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media

Editors: David M. Davis, ActualTech Media
Hilary Kerchner, Dream Write Creative

Book Design: Braeden Black, Avalon Media Productions

Geordie Carswell, ActualTech Media

Layout: Braeden Black, Avalon Media Productions

Copyright © 2017 by ActualTech Media

All rights reserved. This book or any portion there of may not be reproduced or used
in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2015
ISBN 978-1-943952-02-1
ActualTech Media
Okatie Village Ste 103-157
Bluffton, SC 29909
www.actualtechmedia.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction to Hyperconverged Infrastructure  3

Hyperconverged Infrastructure from 30,000 Feet 6

Resources to Consolidate 8

Chapter 2: Hyperconvergence & the Public Cloud 11

Why Is Cloud so Desirable?  11

The Public Cloud  13
On-Premises Reality  16
Private Clouds  17
Hybrid Cloud  19
The Intersection of Cloud and
Hyperconverged Infrastructure  19
About the Author xxii

About the Editor xxii

About ActualTech Media xxiii

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise xxiv

Gorilla Guide Features xxv

ii
 1
Introduction to
Hyperconverged
Infrastructure

In recent years, it seems like technology is changing faster than it used

to in decades past. As employees devour newer technologies such as
smartphones, tablets, wearables, and other devices, and as they become
more comfortable with solutions such as Dropbox and Skype, their
demands on enterprise IT intensify. Plus, management and other
decision makers are also increasing their demands on enterprise IT to
provide more infrastructure with less cost and time. Unfortunately,
enterprise IT organizations often don’t see much, if any, associated
increases in funding to accomodate these demands.

These demands have resulted in the need for IT organizations to

attempt to mimic NASA’s much-heralded “Faster, Better, Cheaper”
operational campaign. As the name suggests, NASA made great
attempts to build new missions far more quickly than was possible in
the past, with greater levels of success, and with costs that were dra-
matically lower than previous missions. NASA was largely successful
in their efforts, but the new missions tended to look very different
from the ones in the past. For example, the early missions were big and
complicated with a ton of moving parts, while modern missions have
been much smaller in scale with far more focused mission deliverables.

What is NASA?
NASA is the United States National Aeronautical and Space
Administration and has been responsible for helping the U.S.
achieve success in its space programs, from the moon landing
to recent high quality photographs of Pluto. NASA has faced
serious budget cuts in recent years, but has been able to retool
itself around smaller, more focused missions that cost less and
have achieved incredible results.

The same “faster, better, cheaper” challenge is hitting enterprise IT,

although even the hardest working IT pros don’t usually have to make
robots rove the surface of an inhospitable planet! Today’s IT depart-
ments must meet a growing list of business needs while, at the same
time, appeasing the decision makers who demand far more positive
economic outcomes (either by cutting costs overall or doing more work
within the existing budget).

Unfortunately, most of today’s data center architectures actively

work against these goals, because with increasing complexity comes
increased costs — and things have definitely become more complex.
Virtualization has been a fantastic opportunity for companies, but
with virtualization has come some new challenges, including major
issues with storage. With virtualization, enterprise IT has moved
from physical servers, where storage services could be configured on
a per-server basis, to shared storage systems. These shared storage
systems, while offering plenty of capacity, have often not been able
to keep up in terms of performance, forcing IT departments to take
corrective actions that don’t always align with good economic practices.

4 Chapter 1
For example, it’s common for IT pros to add entire shelves of disks, not
because they need the capacity, but because they need the spindles to
increase overall storage performance. There are, of course, other ways
to combat storage performance issues, such as through the use of solid
state disk (SSD) caching systems, but these also add complexity to what
is already a complex situation.

There are other challenges that administrators of legacy data centers

need to consider as well:

• Hardware sprawl. Data centers are littered with separate in-

frastructure silos that are all painstakingly cobbled together to
form a complete solution. This hardware sprawl results in a data
center that is increasingly complex, decreasing flexibility, and
expensive to maintain.

• Policy sprawl. The more variety of solutions in the data center,

the more touch points that exist when it comes to applying con-
sistent policies across all workloads.

• Scaling challenges. Predictability is becoming really important.

That is, being able to predict ongoing budgetary costs and how
well a solution will perform after purchase are important. Legacy
infrastructure and its lack of inherent feature-like scaling capabili-
ty make both predictability metrics very difficult to achieve.

• Desire for less technical overhead. Businesses want analysts and

employees that can help drive top line revenue growth. Pure-
ly technical staff are often considered expenses that must be
minimized. Businesses today are looking for ways to make the
IT function easier to manage overall so that they can redeploy
technical personnel to more business-facing needs. Legacy data
centers are a major hurdle in this transition.

So, with all of this in mind, what are you to do?

Introduction to Hyperconverged Infrastructure 5

Hyperconverged Infrastructure from
30,000 Feet
An emerging data center architectural option, dubbed hyperconverged
infrastructure, is a new way to reduce your costs and better align
enterprise IT with business needs. At its most basic, hyperconverged
infrastructure is the conglomeration of the servers and storage devices
that comprise the data center. These systems are wrapped in compre-
hensive and easy-to-use management tools designed to help shield the
administrator from much of the underlying architectural complexity.

Why are these two resources, storage and compute, at the core of
hyperconverged infrastructure? Simply put, storage has become
an incredible challenge for many companies. It’s one of— if not
the — most expensive resources in the data center and often requires a
highly skilled person or team to keep it running. Moreover, for many
companies, it’s a single point of failure. When storage fails, swaths of
services are negatively impacted.

Combining storage with compute is in many ways a return to the past,

but this time many new technologies have been wrapped around it.
Before virtualization and before SANs, many companies ran physical
servers with directly attached storage systems, and they tailored these
storage systems to meet the unique needs for whatever applications
might have been running on the physical servers. The problem with
this approach was it created numerous “islands” of storage and com-
pute resources. Virtualization solved this resource-sharing problem but
introduced its own problems previously described.

Hyperconverged infrastructure distributes the storage resource among

the various nodes that comprise a cluster. Often built using commodity
server chasses and hardware, hyperconverged infrastructure nodes and
appliances are bound together via Ethernet and a powerful software
6 Chapter 1
layer. The software layer often includes a virtual storage appliance
(VSA) that runs on each cluster node. Each VSA then communicates
with all of the other VSAs in the cluster over an Ethernet link, thus
forming a distributed file system across which virtual machines are run.

VM VM VM VSA VM VM VM VSA VM VM VM VSA

Shared Storage Pool / Storage Namespace

Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor

Figure 1-1: An overview of a Virtual Storage Appliance

The fact that these systems leverage commodity hardware is critical.

The power behind hyperconverged infrastructure lies in its ability to
coral resources – RAM, compute, and data storage – from hardware
that doesn’t all have to be custom-engineered. This is the basis for
hyperconverged infrastructure’s ability to scale granularly and the
beginnings of cost reduction processes.

The basics behind hyperconverged infrastructure should be

well understood before proceeding with the remainder of
this book. If you’re new to hyperconverged infrastructure or
are unfamiliar with the basics, please read Hyperconverged
Infrastructure for Dummies, available now for free from
www.hyperconverged.org.

Introduction to Hyperconverged Infrastructure 7

Resources to Consolidate
The basic combination of storage and servers is a good start, but once
one looks beyond the confines of this baseline definition, hyper-
converged infrastructure begins to reveal its true power. The more
hardware devices and software systems that can be collapsed into a
hyperconverged solution, the easier it becomes to manage the solution
and the less expensive it becomes to operate.

Here are some data center elements that can be integrated in a hyper-
converged infrastructure.

Deduplication Appliances
In order to achieve the most storage capacity, deduplication
technologies are common in today’s data center. Dedicated appli-
ances are now available which handle complex and CPU-intensive
deduplication tasks, ultimately reducing the amount of data that
has to be housed on primary storage. Deduplication services are
also included with storage arrays in many cases. However, dedupli-
cation in both cases is not as comprehensive as it could be. As data
moves around the organization, data is rehydrated into its original
form and may or may not be reduced via deduplication as it moves
between services.

SSD Caches/All-Flash Array

To address storage performance issues, companies sometimes
deploy either solid state disk (SSD)-based caching systems or full
SSD/flash-based storage arrays. However, both solutions have the
potential to increase complexity as well as cost. When server-side
PCI-e SSD cards are deployed, there also has to be a third-party
software layer that allows them to act as a cache, if that is the desire.
With all-flash arrays or flash-based stand-alone caching systems,
administrators are asked to support new hardware in addition to
everything else in the data center.

8 Chapter 1
 Backup Software
Data protection in the form of backup and recovery remains a crit-
ical task for IT and is one that’s often not meeting organizational
needs. Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point ob-
jectives (RPO) — both described in the deep dive section entitled
“The Ins and Outs of Backup and Recovery” — are both shrinking
metrics that IT needs to improve upon. Using traditional hardware
and software solutions to meet this need has been increasingly chal-
lenging. As RPO and RTO needs get shorter, costs get higher with
traditional solutions.

With the right hyperconverged infrastructure solution, the pic-

ture changes a bit. In fact, included in some baseline solutions is
a comprehensive backup and recovery capability that can enable
extremely short RTO windows while also featuring very small
RPO metrics.

The Ins & Outs of Backup & Recovery

There are critical recovery metrics – known as Recovery Time
Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RTO) that
must be considered in your data protection plans. You can
learn a lot more about these two metrics in Chapter 4.

Data Replication
Data protection is about far more than just backup and recovery.
What happens if the primary data center is lost? This is where rep-
licated data comes into play. By making copies of data and replicat-
ing that data to remote sites, companies can rest assured that critical
data won’t be lost.

To enable these data replication services, companies implement

a variety of other data center services. For example, to minimize
replication impact on bandwidth, companies deploy WAN accel-

Introduction to Hyperconverged Infrastructure 9

 eration devices intended to reduce the volume of data traversing
the Internet to a secondary site. WAN accelerators are yet another
device that needs to be managed, monitored, and maintained.
There are acquisition costs to procure these devices; there are costs
to operate these devices in the form of staff time and training; and
there are annual maintenance costs to make sure that these devices
remain supported by the vendor.

10 Chapter 1
 2
Hyperconvergence &
the Public Cloud

This chapter will help you understand the ways by which you can
leverage cloud services as a part of your hyperconverged infrastructure
solutions. It will also help you better understand the concept of
“private cloud” and how that fits with hyperconvergence. Can a
hyperconverged solution deliver some of the things that cloud can give
you?

Why Is Cloud so Desirable?

You will learn more about what defines cloud a little later in this
chapter. Before getting into the various definitions, though, let’s
discuss the traits inherent in cloud systems which make them a popular
and desirable choice for service deployment.

The Economic Model

Everything eventually comes down to money. Business decision
makers are constantly on the lookout for ways to reduce costs while
also boosting efficiency and outcomes. This is often a seemingly im-
possible task described as “doing more with less.” IT was supposed
to be an enabler, but for many companies, it has become a money
 pit — an expense center to be minimized. Obviously, when lever-
aged properly, IT can be an incredible enabling function, but even
in these cases, no one wants to spend more than they have to.

When you buy your own data center hardware and software, you
incur pretty significant CapEx. This initial cash outlay necessary
to procure a solution can be pretty high and can result in the need
to cut corners or even delay upgrades if there is not enough cash
available.

When you decide to start consuming resources from the public

cloud, there is no initial cash outlay necessary. You don’t incur
capital expenses. Sure, you might have to pay a bit in the way of
startup costs, but you don’t have to buy hardware and software.
You simply rent space on someone else’s servers and storage.

Business decision makers love this shift. They don’t need to worry
about huge capital outlays, and they know that they’re paying for
what they use. They’re not paying for extra hardware that may
never end up actually being leveraged to help solve business needs.

Scale
When you build your own data center, you have to scale it yourself.
Sometimes, you can scale in increments that make financial sense,
while other times you have to add more than you might like due to
predefined requirements from your vendors.

When you use the public cloud, you don’t have to worry about
inherent scaling limits or increments. Remember, you pay for what
you use. As your usage grows, so does your bill, but you don’t gen-
erally need to manually add new resources to your account. It can
happen automatically.

Scalability granularity often isn’t a problem with the public cloud.

You grow as you need to. There is no practical limit to how far you
can grow as long as the cloud provider still has resources.

12 Chapter 2
 Geographic Diversity and Disaster Recovery
Building multiple data centers can be an expensive undertaking,
but it’s one that is being executed more and more as companies
seek ways to protect their data and ensure continuity of their busi-
ness in the event of a disaster striking the primary data center. The
separate data centers are generally geographically diverse so that a
single natural disaster can’t take out both sites at the same time.

Public cloud providers often already have systems that can quickly
enable geographic diversity for applications that are already run-
ning on their systems. Enabling geographic diversity is often as
simple as clicking a mouse button and, most likely, paying some
additional money to the cloud provider.

The Public Cloud

It’s hard to avoid the term cloud today. It’s everywhere. For many, the
term itself has become synonymous with “Internet” or is just another
way to described what used to be called “hosted services.” However,
there are a number of traits that make a public cloud a public cloud.

First, in general, public cloud systems are comprised of multi-tenant

environments operated by a service provider with the hardware and
software located in the provider’s data center. In these environments,
the customer may not always even be aware in which provider data
center the services reside, nor does the customer have to be aware. The
beauty of these systems is that workloads can move around as necessary
to maintain service level agreements.

Cloud service providers generally build their systems with the

assumption that hardware will likely fail, which means the you, as the
customer, can avoid the need to buy expensive failover and availability
systems on your own.

Hyperconvergence & the Public Cloud 13

For scale, the cloud provider can provide grid-like scalability to great
levels so that you don’t need to worry about how to grow when the
time comes.

For public cloud, there are a number of pros and cons to consider. On
the plus side, cloud will:

• Enable immediate implementation.

• Carry low to no initial deployment costs.

• Provide a consumption-based utility cost model.

• Provide more cost effective scale than would be feasible in a pri-

vate data center.

However, there are definitely some downsides to cloud as well, which

include:

• Potentially unpredictable ongoing usage charges

• Concerns around data location; many do not want data stored

in US-based data centers due to concerns around the NSA and
PATRIOT Act

• Charges across every aspect of the environment, from data stor-

age to data transfer and more

• No control over underlying infrastructure

• Care needs to be taken to avoid lock-in

14 Chapter 2
 The faces of the public cloud
Here is a brief look at the different kinds of public cloud
services that are available on the market.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
From a customer perspective, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is
the simplest kind of cloud service to consume as it is basically
an application all wrapped up and ready to go. Common SaaS
applications include Salesforce and Office 365.

With SaaS applications, the provider controls everything and

provides to the customer an application layer interface that
only controls very specific configuration items. Because all
of the infrastructure and the fact that most of the software
is hidden from the you as the customer, you don’t need to
worry about any underlying services except those which may
extend the service, such as integrating Office 365 with your on
premises Active Directory environment.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Sometimes, you don’t need or want a complete application.
In many cases, you just need a place to install your own
applications but you don’t want to have to worry at all about
the underlying infrastructure or virtualization layers. This is
where platform-as-a-service (PaaS) comes into play.

PaaS provides you with infrastructure and an application

development platform that gives you the ability to automate
and deploy applications including your own databases,
tools, and services. As a customer, you simply manage the
application and data layers.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
In other cases, you need a bit more control, but you still
may not want to have to directly manage the virtualization,

Hyperconvergence & the Public Cloud 15

storage, and networking layers. However, you need the ability to deploy your
own operating systems inside vendor-provided virtual machines. Plus, you
want to have the ability to manage operating systems, security, databases, and
applications.

For some, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) makes the most sense since the
provider offers the network, storage, compute resources, and virtualization
technology while you manage everything else.

On-Premises Reality
Even though public cloud has a number of desirable traits, there are
some harsh realities with which CIOs and IT pros need to contend:

• Security – For some, particularly those in highly-regulated or

highly-secure environments, the idea of moving to a multi-tenant
public cloud is simply not feasible.

• Bandwidth – Many areas of the world remain underserved

when it comes to bandwidth, and companies can’t get sufficient
bandwidth with sufficiently low latency to make cloud a feasible
option.

• Cost – There may come a point at which cloud may become

more expensive than simply building your own environment.

These challenges are reasons that many organizations are turning to

private cloud environments.

16 Chapter 2
Private Clouds
The term private cloud is often, well, clouded in confusion as people
try to apply the term to a broad swath of data center architectures. So,
let’s try to clear up some of the confusion.

First and foremost, a private cloud environment generally resides in

a single tenant environment that is built out in an on-premises data
center, but it can sometimes consist of a single tenant environment in a
public data center. For the purposes of this chapter, we’ll focus on the
on-premises use case.

Private cloud environments are characterized by heavy virtualization

which fully abstracts the applications from underlying hardware
components. Virtualization is absolutely key to these kinds of envi-
ronments. Some companies go so far as to offer internal service level
agreements to internal clients in a cloud-like manner. The key phrase
there is “internal clients” — that is the customer in a private cloud
environment. For such environments, being able to provide service
level guarantees may mean that multiple geographically dispersed data
centers need to be built in order to replicate this feature of public cloud
providers.

Heavy use of virtualization coupled with comprehensive automation

tools reveals an additional benefit of private cloud: self-service. Moving
to more of a self-service model has two primary benefits:

• Users get their needs serviced faster

• IT is forced to build or deploy automation tools to enable

self-service functionality, thereby streamlining the administrative
experience

Hyperconvergence & the Public Cloud 17

As mentioned before, many companies want to keep their data center
assets close at hand and in their full control, but they want to be able
to gain some cloud-like attributes, hence the overall interest in private
cloud. As is the case with public cloud, there are a number of pros and
cons that need to be considered when building a private cloud.

In the pros column, private cloud:

• Provides an opportunity to shift workloads between servers to

best manage spikes in utilization in a more automated fashion.

• Enables ability to deploy new workloads on a common infra-

structure. Again, this comes courtesy of the virtualization layer.

• Provides full control of the entire environment, from hardware

to storage to software in a way that enables operational efficiency.
In other words, routine tasks are automated and repeatable.

• Allows customers to customize the environment since they own

everything.

• Provides additional levels of security and compliance due to the

single tenant nature of the infrastructure. Private cloud-type
environments are often the default due to security concerns.

As with everything, not all is a perfect picture. Private clouds do have a

number of drawbacks, including:

• Requiring customers to build, buy, and manage hardware. This

is often something that many companies want to reduce or elim-
inate.

• Not always resulting in operational efficiency gains.

18 Chapter 2
 • Not really providing what is considered a cloud computing eco-
nomic model. You still have to buy and maintain everything.

• Potentially carrying very high acquisition costs.

In short, private clouds are intended to have some of the architectural

characteristics of public clouds while offering internal clients cloud-like
economic outcomes when chargeback processes are implemented.
Even if the central IT department providing the service doesn’t really
use “the cloud,” as internal clients are able to provision and consume
resources on demand — at least to a reasonable point — there is the
beginning of a private cloud.

Hybrid Cloud
Increasingly, people are choosing both cloud options – public and
private – to meet their needs. In a hybrid cloud scenario, the company
builds its own on-premises private cloud infrastructure to meet local
applications needs and also leverages public cloud where reasonable
and possible. In this way, the company gets to pick and choose which
services run where and can also move between them at will.

The Intersection of Cloud and

Hyperconverged Infrastructure
If you’re wondering what all of this talk about cloud has to do with
hyperconverged infrastructure, wonder no more. Depending on the
hyperconverged infrastructure solution you’re considering, there are
varying degrees of association between the hyperconverged infrastruc-
ture product and both public and private clouds.

Hyperconvergence & the Public Cloud 19

 Economics
Everything you’ve read so far leads to money. The potential to
completely transform the data center funding model is one of the
key outcomes when you consider hyperconverged infrastructure.
With easier administration comes lower staffing costs. With the
use of commodity hardware comes lower acquisition costs. With
the ability to scale linearly in bite-size chunks, companies can get
the beginnings of a consumption-based data center equipment
acquisition model that enables closer to pay-as-you-go growth than
traditional data center architectural models. As your environment
needs to grow and as users demand new services, you can easily
grow by adding new hyperconverged systems.

Scale
Agility implies some level of predictability in how workloads will
function. Public cloud provides this capability. For those wishing
to deploy a private cloud environment, these needs can be met
by leveraging hyperconvergence’s inherent ability to scale linearly
(meaning, by scaling all resources including compute, storage, and
networking simultaneously). In this way, you avoid potential
resource constraint issues that can come from trying to manually
adjust individual resources and you begin to achieve some of the
economic benefits that have made public cloud a desirable option.

Scaling the data center should not result in scaling the complexity.
In order to attain the full breadth of economic benefits that go
with cloud, you have to make sure that the environment is very
easy to manage or, at the very least, that management is efficient.
This means that you need to automate what can be automated
and try to reduce the number of consoles that it takes to get things
done.

With hyperconverged infrastructure, management efficiency – even

at scale – is a core feature of the solution. You are able to manage

20 Chapter 2
 all of the elements included in the product from a single console
and you are also able to apply a breadth of consolidated policies to
virtual machines.

Geographic Diversity and Disaster Recovery

Also on the economics front, the value of disaster recovery cannot
be overstated. One of the benefits of the cloud is the geographic
diversity that can be achieved to protect against natural disasters.
With a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that has data repli-
cation as a part of the core offering, multisite redundancy capability
is baked in as part of the solution.

For those that have opted to build hybrid clouds, some hyper-
converged infrastructure solutions can leverage that public cloud
deployment as a replication target. In other words,
rather than going to the expense of building out a second physical
site, the public cloud can be used to achieve data protection goals.

Hyperconvergence and the Private Cloud

Building a traditional private cloud is hard. It takes a lot of work to
get all the pieces aligned. Hyperconverged infrastructure can allow
you to deploy private clouds in a fraction of the time it would
normally take. Everything is built into the individual appliances,
including centralized management, data efficiency, replication, and
the ability to scale in incremental units. These are core needs in
building an agile private cloud environment.

Hyperconvergence & the Public Cloud 21

About the Author

Scott D. Lowe, vExpert

Scott Lowe is a vExpert and partner and
Co-Founder of ActualTech Media. Scott
has been in the IT field for close to twenty
years and spent ten of those years in filling
the CIO role for various organizations. Scott
has written thousands of articles and blog
postings and regularly contributes to
www.EnterpriseStorageGuide.com &
www.ActualTech.io.

About the Editor

David M. Davis, vExpert

David Davis is a partner and co-founder of
ActualTech Media. With over 20 years in
enterprise technology, he has served as an
IT Manager and has authored hundreds of
papers, ebooks, and video training courses.
He’s a 6 x vExpert, VCP, VCAP, & CCIE#
9369. You’ll find his vSphere video training
at www.Pluralsight.com and he blogs at
www.VirtualizationSoftware.com and www.
ActualTech.io.

xxii
About ActualTech Media

ActualTech Media provides enterprise IT decision makers with the

information they need to make informed, strategic decisions as they
modernize and optimize their IT operations.

Leading 3rd party IT industry influencers Scott D. Lowe, David M.

Davis and special technical partners cover hot topics from the soft-
ware-defined data center to hyperconvergence and virtualization.

Cutting through the hype, noise and claims around new data center
technologies isn’t easy, but ActualTech Media helps find the signal in
the noise. Analysis, authorship and events produced by ActualTech
Media provide an essential piece of the technology evaluation puzzle.

More information available at www.actualtechmedia.com

xxiii
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is an industry leading technology
company with the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning
the cloud to the data center to workplace applications. HPE tech-
nology and services help customers around the world make IT more
efficient, more productive and more secure.

Early in 2017, the company acquired SimpliVity and now offers HPE
SimpliVity hyperconverged systems, complete hardware-software
solutions that are designed, built, and supported by HPE.

Visit www.hpe.com

xxiv
Gorilla Guide Features

In the Book
These help point readers to other places in the book where a
concept is explored in more depth.

The How-To Corner

These will help you master the specific tasks that it takes to be
proficient in the technology jungle.

Food For Thought

In the these sections, readers are served tasty morsels of
important information to help you expand your thinking .

School House
This is a special place where readers can learn a bit more
about ancillary topics presented in the book.

Bright Idea
When we have a great thought, we express them through a
series of grunts in the Bright Idea section.

Dive Deep
Takes readers into the deep, dark depths of a particular topic.

Executive Corner
Discusses items of strategic interest to business leaders.

xxv