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Softchoice CIO Interview: How to ride the cloud-wave without wiping out

July 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

How to ride the cloud wave without wiping out

Everyone has an opinion on the best way to leverage cloud technology. And with all the hype out there, it’s hard to know what’s just hot air and what you can actually use to your organization’s advantage. Our CIO Kevin Wright sat down with the Softchoice Advisor to give some straight talk on successfully riding the cloud computing wave.

Q: With a lot of breakthrough innovations, there’s often a lot of initial hype then a reality check. Where’s the cloud on the so-called hype curve?

Coined by Gartner, the hype curve – or cycle – represents the stages of maturity, adoption and social application of technologies. It starts with a breakthrough, then reaches a peak of inflated expectations, then enters a trough of disillusionment as some hyped expectations aren’t met, followed by more practical enlightenment and productivity. Where the cloud sits on this curve really depends on which part of the cloud you’re talking about. Software-as-a-Service (Saas) has already reached a comfortable and proven level of maturity for the right types of businesses, while Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is getting more mature and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is really still in its infancy and, therefore, still more prone to hype. For me, the cloud sits somewhere between 3D television and e-book readers. With technologies like 3D televisions, you’re still not sure if they’re going to live or die. With the cloud, the economics and technology drivers are unquestionably here to stay.

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Automation: Virtualized Storage’s Amplifier…Rock On!

July 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.

 - Bill Gates, Microsoft Co-Founder 

 In earlier posts I touched on the benefits of networked storage, tiered storage and storage virtualization. All of these great advancements were brought on by conditions within business and the economy where people were creating and using data at a breakneck pace while reducing their willingness to invest in the infrastructure to support these habits.  The result of these innovations over the last decade was making great improvements in efficiency in the overall storage network.

 While the last two decades brought about great advancements in infrastructure technologies, another phenomenon was taking place – the true integration of technology into business.  Technology is no longer thought of as a “back office” function for one or two areas within a business.  The majority of business leaders, while not always personally proficient with technology, understand the impact it can have when applied strategically to solve a business problem or improve operational efficiencies.

 We have entered a day where the application is king and everyone has “an app for that”.  Infrastructure architects that understand this are worth their weight in gold.  Too many in the vendor community today have lost sight that even though infrastructure technology is our business, it is not our clients’ business.  I always tell our team that our customers don’t buy infrastructure because they want to.  They buy it because they have to!

 Today, technology is irrelevant outside of the context of the application it supports.  The advances in storage have made storage environments more efficient, IT more responsive and enabled companies to match their investment in storage to the value of the application and its data.  Even with these advances, there is still a significant amount of management of storage infrastructures taking place.  [Read more...]

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Storage Virtualization: An attempt at making the complex simple.

July 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Want to extend the life of your IT assets? SAN virtualization might be for you.  

 The explosion of data growth over the last decade put a lot of demands on IT in an era when budgets, particularly IT budgets, were under great strain.  While it was good news for all of us that most of the predictions of the Y2K era did not come true, IT suffered a setback in many organizations when it came to their ability to make sweeping changes in infrastructure. 

 While data continued its rapid growth, many IT departments suffered staff reductions.  With organizations operating at minimal staffing, the question of the day moved from, “How do I do more with less?” to, “How do I do more with the same?”  This still holds true today.

 Because most organizations in the early 2000’s were not looking at making big technology investments IT departments dealt with their growth in storage by implementing storage tiers and integrating additional discreet storage arrays.  Each array became a new point of management adding increased management complexity. 

All of the incremental complexity added up and the idea of storage virtualization was born.

 With storage virtualization you put an appliance with a layer of abstraction in front of the various discreet storage arrays in the environment.  The benefits, when done right, are tremendous.  Some of the benefits provided by storage virtualization include:

  •  Simplifying storage management by providing a single storage interface for all storage devices
  • Adding new software functionality (replication, cloning, snapshots, etc.) that adds to or improves on a storage asset’s capabilities.
  • Extending the life of older assets by allowing capacity to be redeployed.
  • Reducing the overall storage spend.

 You may ask, if it is so great, then why isn’t it everywhere.  I’m glad you asked.  Some of the earliest products in this space had [Read more...]

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Not all data is created equal.

July 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

SAN’s and Storage Tiering: Difficult Situations Inspire Ingenious Solutions.  

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” - Thomas Jefferson, US Declaration of Independence 

While it is self-evident people are created equal, it is also self-evident to IT professionals managing application infrastructure that not all data is created equal.

In the late 1980’s through the 1990’s, Information Technology was only used by a small number of distinct applications – Financial Systems, Document Creation and one or two custom applications, all with dedicated hardware.  Data sets were small.  For most companies, the number of applications that pushed the performance envelope could be counted on one hand.  The primary purpose of consolidated storage platforms in that era was enabling high availability for applications by providing redundant storage architecture and supporting clustering at the server level.

As database technologies, ERP applications, Electronic Data Interchange, Web-Enabled ecommerce applications, Business Intelligence, Multimedia and now social media have been integrated into all aspects of the enterprise, both the performance and capacity limits of storage architectures have been challenged.  [Read more...]

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Doesn’t matter where you’re working

July 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

WAN optimization: the same network experience for all.

 As virtualization and cloud computing drive more and more traffic over wide area networks (WANs), end users are expecting and demanding connectivity to access their applications from anywhere and any device, any time. This in spite of the fact that poor application response times at remote sites are one of the biggest perceived hurdles to moving to the cloud in the first place.

 The challenge for IT then is to take on this performance and perception challenge by making the experience as seamless as possible for the end user, both in terms of application response and data transfer time. WAN optimization technologies are an effective way increase bandwidth and deliver application, data and experience consistently, scalably and cost-effectively so that users have the same network experience.

 Part of this challenge is not only to make the experience device-aware but bandwidth-aware too, so that you have the ability to change the way content is delivered based on the bandwidth that’s available. There are also a variety of techniques that can reduce, [Read more...]

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Optimize the management of network resources

July 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Containing virtual sprawl by optimizing management of network resources.

As environments being more and more virtualized, the cost of computing goes down, efficiency, uptime and productivity increase and application performance is optimized. But, as with any major technology shift or revolution such as this, there are bumps in the road. That’s certainly true in the evolving data center. More flexible and scalable environments are being formed, to be sure, but there are a ton of challenges – adequately managing network resources for systems that were supposed to make our lives easier, for instance.

Why did this become a challenge? While the number of physical servers and related parts were being reduced, a potential new enemy was created: sprawl in the number of virtual machines – potentially hundreds of thousands of them. And with that sprawl, increased time and difficulty in provisioning virtual storage pools and virtual network resources. 

If you’re a network engineer or data center manager, you need to make sure business-critical processes are working properly – after all, you don’t have a lot of time to spend cataloging everything on the network. It’s not uncommon for me these days to have a conversation with overworked IT folks asking how they’re managing IP addresses – something that would normally be static and, in the past, could be done manually in a notebook or spreadsheet but which today simply doesn’t scale in this new virtual frontier. What’s needed are provisioning tools that can [Read more...]

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