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Why are you still delivering OS as a device?

June 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 Once upon a time, you delivered an operating system to your employees on their desktop devices – or maybe you still are. You had applications and user profiles on your desktops too. And of course, your service level agreements (SLAs) were tied to the hardware as well because the hardware counted most. If it broke, the OS was gone, the applications and profile were gone. Hardware was king.

 Then a funny thing called virtualization happened. With all your layers of abstraction transferred to your data center, particularly your organization’s OS, you’re now able offer that OS as a service to any device, anywhere, anytime. It doesn’t matter if your employees are on a PC or Mac, an iPad or iPhone, a BYOC system, next door to your data center or halfway around the world. Virtualization has made hardware – and where that hardware physically sits – incidental in a very real way. Software, it turns out, is king now.

 And because you’ve standardized user profiles, [Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , ,

With storage, what’s old is new again.

June 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Open Systems Availability: Virtualization’s First Frontier

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun… – Ancient proverb

 Server virtualization has brought great advances in flexibility, efficiency and responsiveness to today’s always-on, web-enabled data centers.  Although that is what most people think today when they hear the word “virtualization” it is simply a current application of an old principle.

 When open systems technologies, UNIX and Windows in particular, came on the scene in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s they represented much more affordable ways for business to use technology.  How we work today is a direct result of the productivity advances made possible through these technologies.  However, they had one great downfall. 

 Compared to the much more expensive mainframe and mini-computing technologies of their day, early open systems were less reliable and full of single points of failure.  Disk drive reliability was addressed by [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: , , , , ,

BYOC: It’s easier than you think now.

June 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 Important considerations with BYOC strategy

 Employees who are given laptops by their company might use their hardware eight hours a day. The remaining eight hours of awake time, in the evening or on in transit, they might connect to the office to check email or catch up on work they didn’t get a chance to do during the day but realistically they’re going to use it mainly as a personal device – watching YouTube, gaming, surfing, listening to music, writing their long dreamed of novel.

Now an increasing number of IT decision makers are asking: If I’m giving employees a $1,000 laptop or a $500 thin client, and I’ve virtualized my OS, applications and user profiles and they’re all running in my data center instead of locally, why not go a step further? Why offer users the option to buy or bring in their own laptop – HP, Sony, Mac, iPad, whatever they like – and give them an allowance or stipend that represents the 50% time they’ll use the device for company work.

In fact, the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) model being considered or adopted by an increasing number of organizations as a way to significantly cut costs. Employees are given a pre-determined amount to buy their own device and often asked to sign up for a maintenance plan with the laptop’s manufacturer – the theory being that if there’s a hardware problem, the hardware company gets a call before the IT help desk. So the organization saves two ways – in terms of capital costs and dependency on IT.

Before you jump into BYOC, it’s a good idea to consider some guidelines: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , ,

Manage servers in your sleep.

June 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Further reducing routine maintenance of your environment with dynamic provisioning and automation.

 In the last post, I likened the virtualized application model to an organism of sorts, where each individual component can work together virtually as a dynamic pool of resources. But what happens when something isn’t working as it should?

 Well, that’s really where the next logical step in your organization’s virtualization evolution comes in, one central management console that understands all the pieces plugged in – in essence, one single point to look at where you can automate and resolve issues and reduce routine maintenance of your environment, what we call: dynamic provisioning and automation.

 For instance, say a server turns off in the middle of the night. Where you are already in your virtualization evolution, you’ve written the required rules to ensure that your applications move through or are taken over by other functioning parts of your organism, other servers, and they continue to run like before. This sort of automation ensures that you won’t have to do anything immediately. You may get notified so that first thing in the morning you can have a look at the physical environment and do some troubleshooting via your central console, but you essentially bypass the usual human remediation process and let the software handle the issue for you.

 The same goes for provisioning the amount of resources needed for any given application to run on a server. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: , , ,

Rolling out a ‘virtualize first’ rule for new IT applications.

June 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 Virtualize first: The #1 rule for new IT applications.

 There are a ton of things you can’t completely predict when it comes to the growth, responsiveness and success of your IT infrastructure. But one that you can bet on, if you’re going to keep pace with change and become or remain a highly efficient and competitive organization, is the need for new applications. Whether it’s an enterprise resource planning tool, a purchasing tool, an HR tool or anything in between, applications will continue to expand in your data center.

 And no matter what tool, service or application you integrate into your IT infrastructure, one rule that should trump nearly everything else is its ability to be virtualized. Because as I’ve mentioned if you’ve adopted a one server per application model, it turns out you’re wasting a lot of resources that most organizations these days really can’t afford to. You’re stepping backwards in terms of your opportunity to be efficient and maximize your capital expenses over the long term.

 So how do you do it? How do you make a ‘virtualize first’ rule work when you’re looking at introducing a new application or service to your IT environment? Realize that with a one server per application model, you’re probably actually going to have to [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: , ,

Why buying servers for each application won’t cut it.

June 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Still buying servers for each application? It’s time to get on board with virtualization.  

Inertia can be a powerful force. Whether it’s the inertia that comes from a lack of understanding and fear of the unknown or the kind that comes from believing something ought to be done a certain way because, heck, it’s always been done that way, so why change? Either way, inertia on the IT front is a recipe for watching your business fall behind.

The reality is, at least when it comes to virtualization, if your organization is not on board in a very real way, and you or your organization still believe that it makes sense to buy a server for every application you’re using, someone’s missing some of the most basic efficiencies that virtualization offers – for instance, needlessly increasing electrical consumption disproportionate to the value of the application and needlessly increasing administrative burden on IT staff. What that means is you can be seriously overspending and under-delivering for your organization. That’s the bottom line – literally and figuratively.

But, you might be thinking or dealing with people in your organization who resist, telling you: “I heard that not all applications can be virtualized, so why bother? It’s just too risky.” That may be one of the most common misconceptions of virtualization and it happens to mostly be wrong. The truth is, if diligence is done to properly design an environment for an application, there are very few that cannot be virtualized. And even if there is some risk [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: , ,