Features

Requirements for Capacity Management in Virtual Environments

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:15:00 EST

Any data center with a virtualized environment has a real need for effective capacity management. This article discusses the reasons why capacity management is critical to achieving the benefits of server virtualization and outlines the three key requirements to consider when evaluating capacity management systems. A major advantage of virtualized environments is their ability to improve resource utilization by running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the physical servers in a shared infrastructure. With such an architecture, utilization can increase from as low as 10% for dedicated servers to 60% or more for virtualized servers. The enhanced resource efficiencies make it possible to more fully utilize ever-increasing server power and provide significant savings in capital expenditures, power consumption, rack space and cooling. This concept of greater efficiencies through resource-sharing is not new. Mainframe systems have long employed time-slicing to enable multiple applications to run concurrently. With mainframe systems, the dedicated and quite sophisticated “capacity planning” is performed by the operating system, which ensures that no application can cause any others to suffer from resource contention issues. The high cost of mainframes created a strong incentive for IT departments to maximize mainframe resource utilization by running as many concurrent applications as physically possible.

Cloud Wars: Why History Will Repeat Itself

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:30:00 EDT

Battles over formats and standards in the technology industry aren’t new. Whether it was e-mail, word processing, graphical images or even some more current like the apps on your smart phone, each new innovation typically starts out somewhat proprietary and incompatible. Today we live in a world where a lot of those battles have been fought and won while some are only starting to heat up. Formats tend to resolve themselves through standards so that things like e-mail and web pages “just work.” That or at a minimum the technology we use evolves and hides it all from us via various forms of automatic conversion. In a world where so many technologies seem to get along - why shouldn’t clouds? The answer isn’t so simple and, as is often the case, history has a way of repeating itself. Just as email initially emerged inside of private datacenters, so has cloud infrastructure. It was initially based on virtualization technology and, depending on what kind of IT shop was involved, you most likely ended up on VMware if you were trying to make your core datacenter more efficient by virtualizing legacy servers; Xen if you had a significant Linux or Java developer presence where the need to rapidly provision test and develop machines was important; and maybe even Citrix if you were using Metaframe for serving up applications to remote users or thin clients. For some companies, cloud adoption started outside the corporate datacenter inside of the VMware vCloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Breaking the Storage Array Lifecycle

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:45:00 EDT

Anyone who purchases storage arrays is familiar with the many advantages of modular storage systems and storage area networks. However, they may also be familiar with one of the less desirable attributes of storage arrays: the typical three- to five-year lifecycle that forces decommissions and mandates upgrades on a regular basis. With many organizations expanding their need for storage by 20-60% on an annual basis [1], outgrowing capacity of existing storage arrays is a regular occurrence, effectively rendering upgrade cycles to be a fact of life. Although decommissioning and upgrading a storage array may not appear all that daunting, the process includes a number of cumbersome aspects.

Desktop Virtualization: Right Idea – Wrong Tool

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

Financial analysts, industry analysts, and CIO-focused publications all agree that Desktop Virtualization will be one of the most strategic business initiatives over the next few years. Many organizations have a VDI implementation or project in place solely because of the success they have had with server virtualization. However, Desktop Virtualization has a completely different value proposition than server virtualization. Server virtualization is all about CAPEX (capital expenditure) reduction while Desktop Virtualization is all about OPEX (operation expenditure) reduction. There are three dollars of OPEX spent for every PC acquisition dollar spent. The whole value proposition is of Desktop Virtualization centralizing desktop images and management in the data center or network operations center. In other words, IT manages one copy of Windows and one copy of each application centrally instead of thousands of copies of Windows and applications on each PC.

A Four-Stage Journey to Cloud Computing

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:30:00 EDT

For almost a decade now, organizations of all sizes have been leveraging server virtualization, but few have fully gained the flexibility and efficiencies it promised. The emergence of cloud computing and the promise of delivering on-demand resources has introduced new challenges and opportunities. A company’s level of virtualization adoption maturity correlates to its readiness to deliver an on-demand, real-time infrastructure through a private cloud. An effective virtualization and cloud management solution can ease the journey toward that end.

Online Data Backup Expert Tips: To Virtualize or Not to Virtualize?

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:15:00 EDT

Often times one mental hurdle that can hold businesses back from the modernization of their IT infrastructure through the use of the relatively new phenomenon of cloud computing is the simple feeling of being afraid to “jump on the bandwagon” too early. After all, there have been many trends in business and technology that seemed unstoppable at one time, only to be eclipsed by something else and then subsequently forgotten. How is one to judge where exactly the current cloud computing data revolution is headed? There have been several recent surveys regarding the increasing popularity of online data backup and cloud computing. One of these polls conducted by Forrester Research found that 53% of businesses worldwide were interested in virtualizing their IT infrastructure and making the full transition into the cloud. When asked why they felt this way, the responses were quite varied, with some claiming cloud computing’s potential to save them money on IT equipment costs as being their number one reason, while others cited the flexibility of data access that cloud computing could bring about for their businesses.

Dealing with Application Deadlocks

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

A deadlock is a situation where two or more threads are blocked while waiting to obtain locks that some of the other threads in the deadlock are holding. Deadlocks can occur when multiple threads need the same locks, at the same time, but obtain them in different order. For instance, if thread 1 locks A, and tries to lock B, and thread 2 has already locked B, and tries to lock A, a deadlock arises. Thread 1 can never get B, and thread 2 can never get A. In addition, neither of them will ever know. They will remain blocked on each of their objects, A and B, forever. The most common way of detecting whether your application is deadlocked is by analyzing thread dumps of the Java Virtual Machine while its in the state of appearing hung. A thread dump is a snapshot of the virtual machine's current state, including stack traces for each Java thread.

Cloud Computing & Virtualization: Hot Trends Organizations Can’t Ignore

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDT

The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent. Virtualization and cloud computing go hand-in-hand, and virtualizing servers is just the tip of the iceberg. The trend to virtualize everything from servers to processing power to software offerings actually started years ago in the personal sector. In the recent past, it was common for individuals within major organizations to use virtualized services or cloud computing when at home, but at work they weren’t using those services at all. Why? Because corporate IT didn’t trust the lack of security of the cloud and they weren’t sure it was a hard trend – something that was definitely here to stay. Today, we know better.

Building a Cloud Factory

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:45:00 EDT

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as “legacy,” as some organizations are now doing, underscores the fact that the only thing constant in the data center is change. To deal with change of this magnitude, which can involve transforming the workload hosting model of an entire organization, some industrial-strength thinking is required. In order to tackle this challenge, it’s important to properly frame the cloud transformation problem. Many associate cloud with agility, flexibility, cost transparency and other end-user-oriented benefits. But many of these attributes are primarily associated with new infrastructure requests, and specifically, the use of self-service portals to “spin up” infrastructure to host new applications or host transient processing demands. When it comes to migrating hundreds or thousands of existing workloads into cloud infrastructure, agility is not a benefit that is typically experienced. In fact the opposite is often the case: because clouds require a higher degree of standardization (i.e., a finite catalog of sizes and software options), migrating existing physical and virtual servers into cloud models can actually be quite difficult. In other words, the very features that make clouds agile for new workload deployments can actually make them less agile from a transformation perspective.

Why Perfomance Management Is Easier in Public than On-Premise Clouds

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Performance is one of the major concerns in the cloud. But the question should not really be whether or not the cloud performs, but whether the Application in question can and does perform in the cloud. The main problem here is that application performance is either not managed at all or managed incorrectly and therefore this question often remains unanswered. Now granted, performance management in cloud environments is harder than in physical ones, but it can be argued that it is easier in public clouds than in on-premise clouds or even a large virtualized environment. How do I come to that conclusion? Before answering that let’s look at the unique challenges that virtualization in general – and clouds in particular – pose to the realm of APM.

Best Practices for Cloud Workload Management

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:00:00 EDT

The biggest issue for the today's enterprises is the ways and means of measuring their computing / processing workloads that need to run their business and then work on the ways and means of optimizing the same. Workload is the amount of work assigned to, or done by, a client, workgroup, server, or Internetwork in a given time period. For example if we take a manufacturing organization, a workload can be a combination of: Interactive or Network Intensive Workloads: The amount of online entry of sales orders, program planning, warranty claims that are referred to a help desk and similar interactive applications. Content or Storage Intensive Workloads: The amount of huge content management systems that stores TBs of data, especially engineering drawings, CAD, CAM related.

Charting the Future of Small Data Centers

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:00:00 EDT

Every week a new data center hits the news with claims of greater than 100,000 square feet at >300 watts/square foot, and levels of security rivaling that of the NSA. Hot and cold aisle containment, marketing people slinging terms such as PUE (Power Utilization Efficiency), modular data centers, containers, computational fluid dynamics, and outsourcing with such smoothness and velocity that even used car salesmen regard them in complete awe. Don’t get me wrong, outsourcing your enterprise data center or Internet site into a commercial data center (colocation), or cloud computing-supported virtual data center, is not a bad thing. As interconnections between cities are reinforced, and sufficient levels of broadband access continues to find its way to both business and residences throughout the country – not to mention all the economic drivers such as OPEX, CAPEX, and flexibility in cloud environments, the need or requirement to maintain an internal data center or server closet makes little sense.

Testing the Cloud

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:45:00 EDT

Cloud computing has now passed the stage of hype to reality. More and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of remote hosting of IT services rather than local IT management, especially as managing and operating IT networks and services is not getting any easier. Managing IT networks requires a broad set of competencies in a growing number of technologies and products. It therefore makes sense that these competencies are centralized in larger data centers providing cloud services to a number of smaller enterprises for which IT is not a core competency. Larger data centers also means larger installations with higher-speed interfaces as well as an obligation to maintain service availability. This requires extensive test and management capabilities to ensure service “up-time.” However, will test and management of cloud services differ from how they are performed today? What are the special challenges that cloud service providers face in this regard?

Ensuring Application Availability in a Virtual Environment

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:15:00 EDT

Virtualization is quickly gaining traction in IT departments around the world. According to Symantec’s recent Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud survey, 76 percent of enterprises are at least discussing virtualization. In the wake of the recent recession, the benefits are too valuable for businesses to ignore. Virtualization can reduce capital/operational expenditures, allow for faster deployment of computing resources, and facilitate management of business processes. Applicable to more than just servers, virtualization is becoming more common in a variety of different IT applications, including storage and desktops. Despite the inroads the technology has made in the data center, however, organizations have remained reluctant to virtualize business-critical applications.

Installing a Guest Operating System on a Virtual Machine

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:30:00 EDT

Virtualization has been widely accepted as a technique to conserve resources. Virtualization is the process of running a guest operating system on a virtual machine, which is created in a virtualizer running on the host operating system. Large companies do not have to install 100 different host computers for its employees as they may create 100 different virtual machines running different guest operating systems on a single host computer. VMware is one of the main vendors of Linux virtualization solutions. VMware Player may be used to run 32-bit and 64-bit Linux operating systems including openSUSE, RHEL 5, and Ubuntu. VMware also offers Virtual Appliances, which are prebuilt software solutions comprising of virtual machine/s. Virtual Appliances are available for Ubuntu, Red Hat and openSUSE, though an appliance for the latest versions may not be available. For the latest version of openSuse, 11.2, it is recommended to install the openSUSE directly onto the VMware Player. In this article we shall install Oracle database XE in openSuse 11.2 as a guest operating system running in a virtual machine (VM) on a Windows host operating system.

Availability Concerns for a Virtualized Environment

Wed, 18 May 2011 15:00:00 EDT

Numerous vendor surveys around virtualization projects show that a chief objective for datacenter virtualization is to improve business continuity and disaster recovery. The virtualization platform, or “hypervisor,” provides an impressive set of availability options for general-purpose servers, but does not always excel at providing application-aware protection and coordinating availability among the multiple tiers of today’s complex business systems. The truth is that most hypervisors can’t detect an OS crash, failed application or degraded performance, meaning most companies can’t feel confident that their systems will always stay up and running. Here, we’ll take a look at the limitations of the basic high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities in today’s major virtualization platforms and then provide options for a more holistic approach to protecting today’s virtualized mission-critical applications.

Making the Shift to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:00:00 EDT

With an extensive history dating back to the 1960s, virtualization has evolved with the changing business and IT landscape and continues to be a relevant tool in helping companies align their business and IT objectives. After adopting and realizing the benefits of server virtualization, many companies are now looking toward the next logical step: desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), decouples the desktop from the physical machine by hosting desktop operating systems, data and applications in “virtual desktops,” which in turn are hosted on remote servers in a data center. These virtual desktops can be accessed through thin clients, as well as traditional desktop computers. By centralizing this software, Desktop virtualization offers users the full functionality of a conventional physical machine, without the hassle application updates or computer failures typically entail.

From Virtual Machine to Cloud Deployment: An Appliance Deployment Guide

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:45:00 EDT

The one sure constant in the application deployment space is change. Over the last decade, many software OEMs have gone from shipping only packaged software to offering turnkey physical appliances, and more recently to providing packaged virtual appliances. The evolution from packaged software to appliance deployments, both physical and virtual, gives end users and IT departments a more streamlined approach to deploying and managing specific services in their environments, leading to better customer experiences and reduced support costs. So what changes when virtual appliances move to the cloud? More and more, customers are looking to move services into the cloud to reduce their physical infrastructure and cost. Several things change, however, when customers no longer control the physical hardware on which their critical services run. Moving virtual appliances into the cloud requires new strategies for development, provisioning, maintaining, and updating virtual appliances. In this article we will discuss the four core elements required for moving virtual appliances to the cloud and how software OEMs and ISVs can achieve cloud migrations with minimum impact on their development resources.

Forecasting Conditions for the 2011 Data Center

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:45:00 EDT

They say you can’t predict the weather. Like so many clichés, however, this one isn’t quite true. Meteorologists have a host of tools at their fingertips that help them recognize, track and analyze weather patterns in order to support predictions that are often accurate, or at least reasonably close. The same is true in the computing industry, where patterns emerge in data centers and enterprises much as cloud formations become apparent in the skies. With a careful eye and extensive knowledge informed by years of experience and frequent conversations with frontline IT professionals, we can predict future trends with a relatively high degree of accuracy. The beginning of a new decade is an opportune moment in which to forecast where virtualization – the primary IT initiative of our time – will encounter stormy weather and where it might be welcomed by clear skies.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter – A Detailed Guide / Stage 4

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:15:00 EST

In parts one, two and three of this article, we provided a brief overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity lifecycle, and focused on the server consolidation, infrastructure optimization, and automation & orchestration stages of the lifecycle. The capabilities described in each of those stages provide an essential foundation for a dynamic datacenter, which is an IT environment that not only supports the business but, at times, is part of the product delivered by the business. It is an agile IT environment, built on top of an optimized and automated virtual infrastructure, that is: Service oriented: Delivering on-demand, standardized services to the business (internal customers, partners, etc). Scalable: With the ability to span heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud environments. Secure: Providing security as a service to internal / external customers.

Dataflow Programming: A Scalable Data-Centric Approach to Parallelism

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:00:00 EST

There are two major drivers behind the need to embrace parallelism: the dramatic shift to commodity multicore CPUs, and the striking increase in the amount of data being processed by the applications that run our enterprises. These two factors must be addressed by any approach to parallelism or we will find ourselves falling short of resolving the crisis that is upon us. While there are data-centric approaches that have generated interest, including Map-Reduce, dataflow programming is arguably the easiest parallel strategy to adopt for the millions of developers trained in serial programming. The blog at http://www.thevirtualcircle.com/2010/01/why-should-we-care-about-paralle... gives a nice summary of why parallel processing is important. Let’s start with an overview of the supported parallelism available today in modern processors. First there is processor-level parallelism involving instruction pipelining and other techniques handled by the processor. These are all optimized by compilers and runtime environments such as the Java Virtual Machine. This goodness is available to all developers without much effort on our part.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter - A Detailed Guide / Stage 3

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 06:15:00 EST

In parts one and two of this article, we provided an overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity life cycle, and focused on server consolidation and infrastructure optimization. IT organizations that have successfully consolidated and optimized their virtual infrastructures face a unique set of virtualization management challenges. Server provisioning that used to take weeks can now be achieved in minutes, and results in increased virtualization adoption within the business. This increased adoption results in 'VM sprawl’ (the problem of uncontrolled workloads), increased provisioning and configuration errors, and the lack of a detailed audit trail – all of which significantly increase the risk of service downtime.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter - A Detailed Guide / Stage 2

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 07:30:00 EST

IT organizations today are experiencing pressure to not only adopt new and emerging technologies like virtualization, but also reduce costs and do more with fewer resources (thus reducing CapEx) – all while delivering assurance of capacity and performance to the business. In the first part of this article, we provided a brief overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity lifecycle and focused on the server consolidation stage. Although server consolidation helps efficient use of available compute resources and reduces the total number of physical servers in the data center, organizations that have successfully consolidated their server environment and are progressing on their virtualization journey often find it difficult to virtualize tier 1 workloads. They also face significant challenges in utilizing the hosts at a higher capacity. This happens because they lack the confidence to move critical applications onto the virtual environment, or utilize servers to capacity. In this second part of the article, we focus on building and maintaining a mature and optimized infrastructure that is essential for IT organizations to virtualize tier 1 workloads and achieve increased capacity utilization on the virtual hosts – thus helping them reap the true CapEx savings promised by virtualization.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter – A Detailed Guide

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:30:00 EST

Virtualization has the power to transform the way business runs IT, and it’s the most important transition happening in IT today. It promotes flexible utilization of IT resources, reduced capital and operating costs, high energy efficiency, highly available applications, and better business continuity. However, the virtualization journey can be long and difficult as virtualization brings with it a unique set of challenges around the management and security of the virtual infrastructure. Most organizations struggle, sooner or later, with workload migrations, visibility and control, virtual machine (VM) sprawl, and the lack of datacenter agility.

Realizing Next-Generation IT with Your OS Migration

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:58:00 EST

Deploying operating systems is expensive, complicated and time-consuming. So you might appreciate why I’m perplexed by so many analyst reports and predictions about the world rushing to get Windows 7 rolled out in 2011. That isn’t to say that people don’t want to use Windows 7. I think most individuals and organizations want to make the move – a few already have. Some will get it done in 2011, but the vast majority will follow in 2012-2014. There are a lot of moving parts to address, and there is some baggage that has accumulated during the many years that organizations have been running Windows XP that creates risk for organizations. But there are things businesses can do to mitigate that risk and help accelerate deployments without adding significant expense. Because of the confluence of technologies and market forces, this may also be the right time to rethink IT strategies and make this migration a time to start realizing broader changes to infrastructure to optimize IT and the business for the long term.

Breaking Through the Virtual Glass Ceiling

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

“Virtualizatio...all the cool, smart kids are doing it!” Or at least that is the message being pushed by the virtualization vendors. Mostly this is a true statement. There are plenty of market studies that show that more than three quarters of medium to large enterprises are leveraging server virtualization technologies of some kind. What is not evident in that statement is that for most enterprises, their overall use of the technology is not as widespread as is implied by the statement. For many organizations, virtualization utilization is in its infancy (from a maturity of use perspective) or not a material percentage of the overall IT infrastructure. Even with the exponential growth of virtualization usage over the last few years, the majority of applications have been based on simple consolidation ROI and used primarily in areas of low risk (IT assets, or test-development environments). Recently the term “VM Stall” has been thrown out along with some research that identifies some of the top reasons why organizations have initially deployed virtualization at a high rate but then significantly slowed that pace down – a virtual “glass ceiling” built on a number of common factors. The good news is that all of these concerns are addressable, and organizations can continue deploying virtualization and reap not only the simple consolidation ROI, but also start moving toward the operational efficiencies promised by utility or cloud computing. The following sections will outline some of the most common areas of concern and provide some guidance on how organizations can break through that ceiling and achieve their virtualization goals.

Cloud Expo Keynoter on Four Critical Steps to Datacenter Transformation

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:00:00 EDT

A global 2000 Enterprise IT group is caught in a groundswell of chaos. The current economic malaise is forcing a challenge from the business to IT to cut operating expenses by 20 percent or greater while preserving capital ferociously. All this while the IT team is faced with another reality, the main corporate datacenter has six to 18 months left in terms of shelf life.

Direct Indexing Enables Management of Legacy Tape Data

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:00:00 EDT

This might be a typical storage manager’s response when questioned about a company’s backup tape stockpile. These tapes are often created in response to a key objective of any IT organization - to protect enterprise data assets. Thus a mountain of old backup tapes has been amassed, largely tapes that have long outlived their disaster recovery purpose. Why not recycle or destroy all these old tapes? Federal regulations forbid it. Data on these tapes “may” be necessary to support current or future litigation. What data? A very, very small percentage of what exists, typically less than 1 percent. Why then keep all these tapes? Because it has been next to impossible to separate the useless data from what legal requires. Sometime down the road, if not already, specific data from backup tapes will be requested by legal. Some corporate legal teams have proactively issued a mandate to not touch tapes; others have been forced to do so. Either way, stricter regulations are forcing the issue. The June 2009 California Electronic Discovery Act, for example, declares all electronically stored information should be accessible and requires it to be produced. In January 2010 Judge Scheindlin, the judge on the groundbreaking Zubulake v. UBS Warburg case, issued an opinion where she denied the use of the burdensome argument, called out the defendant as grossly negligent, and issued sanctions against UBS Warburg for not collecting data from backup tapes to support the case. The courts are ruling more frequently against firms that do not produce data, including tape data, in a timely manner. Many cases exist today where fines have been imposed against the botched collection of historical files and email. Will your company be next?

Virtual Packet Loss: The Silent Killer of Network Performance

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:05:00 EDT

As many enterprise IT managers have come to realize, server virtualization is both an operational blessing and a curse. On the upside, virtualization enables IT managers to consolidate servers, create efficiencies, and reduce infrastructure costs. It’s the foundation of the next-generation, highly dynamic data center – an agile infrastructure capable of supporting today’s always-on and ever-demanding business operations – and a pathway to an internal cloud. On the downside, virtualization often makes already overly complex IT environments even more so.

Adapter for Multiple Hypervisor-Based Virtualization

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 09:01:00 EDT

Large organizations use multiple hypervisors to manage virtualization. The choice of hypervisors is based on complexity of virtualization and cost of hypervisors. Some of the commonly used hypervisors are VMWare ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. These hypervisors have their own interfaces to manage VMs. This creates a need for an adapter which can provide a common interface irrespective of underlying hypervisor. Figure 1 shows a simple representation of virtualization using multiple hypervisors.

An SMB-Friendly Path to Infrastructure Virtualization

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 11:45:00 EDT

Virtualization – like so many other technologies that have traveled the path from cutting-edge innovation to ubiquitous deployment – is now within reach for companies of almost any size. But small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) looking to adopt virtualization technologies still struggle in determining the proper approach. With so many virtualization options available, how should an SMB choose? And is it even necessary for SMBs to virtualize their infrastructures? There are, of course, benefits and drawbacks to any technology acquisition, but virtualization presents a level of flexibility, return on investment (ROI) and low risk that SMBs cannot afford to ignore. By now, perhaps, many large companies can recite from memory the catalog of virtualization’s benefits. These have certainly been discussed by sizable enterprises for some time. What has been less frequently discussed until recently is that these advantages are now in reach for smaller businesses, as well.

The World of Secure, Virtualized Networking

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:00:00 EDT

The x86 architecture has become the CPU of choice not only for network appliances, but also for embedded communication equipment in wireline and wireless networking. As the need to cater to higher-performance networking while supporting security and virtualization becomes more prevalent, the x86 will need to be complemented with a network flow processor capable of handling network packets securely at very high performance rates. The combined solution is heterogeneous in nature: the x86 takes care of application processing, control plane processing and management, while the network flow processor manages the packet- and flow-based network I/O subsystem.

A Maturity Model for Measuring Data Virtualization Platforms

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:45:00 EDT

Data virtualization has become a hot topic as enterprises and government agencies add this maturing technology to their data integration toolkits in pursuit of greater IT agility and lower costs. Rising key performance indicators (KPIs) for both demand and supply clearly tell this story. With demand exploding fivefold[1], and ETL, ESB and BI vendors extending their existing data integration offerings and bringing new data virtualization wares to market, enterprises and government agencies are seeking a way to measure and compare the data virtualization platform offerings available, to determine which is the most appropriate for their information architectures.

Practical Steps for Building and Managing an Internal Cloud

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:30:00 EDT

If you are reading this article, chances are that you are one of the 50% of x86 architectures that (according to Gartner) will be running in virtual machines by 2012. Organizations of all sizes are exploring virtualization because it enables them to increase server utilization and reduce hardware costs and complexity, as well as the overall total cost of ownership. Here at Ipswitch we haven’t purchased a single server in almost three years now, so we are going to walk you through the steps that we have taken to build and manage our internal cloud. As a full disclosure, we are the makers of WhatsUp Gold, a suite of IT management solutions, but the checklist and tips that we are sharing in this article are vendor-neutral.

No RAC, No RISC, No Problem

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:15:00 EDT

Having fended off challenges from Linux for several years now, the RISC-Unix platform is now under siege on another front – x86 servers. Long dismissed as workgroup and departmental servers, or as platforms for low-level enterprise applications, x86 servers are making serious inroads into corporate data centers. Earlier this year, analyst firms Gartner and IDC issued studies showing that sales of and revenue from RISC-Unix servers were continuing their slide against x86 boxes. The Gartner study showed a 28.5 percent decline in the number of units shipped and a 26.9 percent drop in revenue from them. The IDC study released in May of this year cited a “perfect storm” of circumstances, including the recession, the purchase of Sun by Oracle, and potential hardware upgrades by other vendors inducing delays in purchase decisions, all leading to the lowest level of spending on RISC servers IDC has ever recorded. Also encouraging the move away from RISC-Unix for many applications is the combination of a gathering virtualization groundswell in the data center and the rapidly improving performance capabilities of the x86 platforms.

The IT Services Delivery Revolution

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:35:00 EDT

Need a pair of shoes, an airline ticket, or a book? Looking for 100 servers to get you through an online sales rush? No problem. Go online and your needs are (nearly) instantaneously fulfilled. Instant gratification may be the single greatest driver in the revolution that is fueled by virtualization and the delivery of software and services from the cloud. The impact is only beginning to be understood. Some obvious advantages are driving cloud-based development, such as eliminating the expense and endless cycle of procurement and upgrading of a long list of IT solutions, and the never-ending fight for priority with IT to move an innovation forward. The cloud provides a world in which the end user has complete control over their client/server, web-based, and computing solutions – allowing them to choose what they use, where they use it, and where they get solutions from. It is the culmination of a 25-year end-user computing revolution that began with the introduction of the PC. Each phase of this revolution has created terrific efficiency gains and cost reductions for businesses, moving from the mainframe to the PC, from the PC to client/server, to the web and now to the cloud.

The Impact of Virtualization on IT Organizations

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:45:00 EDT

In the Part 1, I discussed the benefits of virtualization. In Part 2, I will discuss how virtualization impacts the IT organization and the various areas where virtualization plays a key role. Over the long run, consolidation and virtualization are sure to yield financial results for the organization. But the challenge is in the initial stages where the investment could be high – owing to new purchases of hardware, software, new / additional datacenter facilities, etc. Also there is an investment on change management activities – training for the IT staff, process redefinition, etc., that has to be expended before the actual consolidation activities can take place. But once the initial investments are made, the returns are going to be ongoing.

Cloud Is More Secure

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:15:00 EDT

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides compelling cost and strategic benefits. These include scalability with reduced capital expenditure, more efficient use of IT resources, and the ability for an organization to focus on their enterprise’s core competency. Despite fears to the contrary, many well-established security technologies and procedures can be applied cloud computing and provide enterprise-class security. In many cases the cloud vendor may even provide better security in a virtualized environment than the individual enterprise can achieve in a purely physical architecture.[1] The most effective security is a comprehensive, layered defense based on a framework. A cloud platform can leverage specialized tools to protect the integrity of virtual machines and Internet communications. Virtualization creates logical abstraction layers that allow for multi-tier security policies in order to provide true defense in depth. Enterprises with limited IT resources may not be able to afford the same security measures as a cloud provider and remain competitive. Deploying cloud-based IaaS represents an opportunity for the enterprise to build in security from the ground up.

Specialized HPC Clusters in the Cloud

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:45:00 EDT

There are hundreds of life science labs in the U.S. using next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics, proteomics, and molecular modeling to identify the genes behind, and potential drug targets to cure, many diseases including diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. With increasing data coming off of modern scientific instruments, the demand for compute power to analyze the data is increasing dramatically. Currently, life science researchers in bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, and molecular modeling need to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy server clusters to run their scientific calculations. High performance computing (HPC) has come a long way for life sciences. Twenty years ago, expensive parallel supercomputers were required to render proteins in three dimensions and run software that helped researchers understand their shapes. Now 3D rendering can be done on graphics cards in workstations, laptops and even phones.

Cost Reduction + Scalability + Efficiency = Virtualization

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:30:00 EDT

There is a marked difference in the way IT infrastructure has been seen and used over the last few years. During the last decade, the focus was to build an infrastructure that would last for the foreseeable future supporting key business objectives. While the trend of the day is to have a more dynamic infrastructure, which can scale-up and scale-out with much ease, IT is expected to be dynamic and scale at the same speed as business expects it to. Moreover, with the acquisition and maintenance costs becoming comparatively lower, the rate of change has increased. With technology supporting such rapid changes, an adaptive environment is the order of the day. The relevance of technology has increased manifold in this decade and it serves as a jump start for business growth. Such a massive spurt in technological advancements also comes with a demand for continuous change and the competitive advantage of using technology. Phenomena like cost reduction, agility, and optimization have come to drive the businesses and technology is expected to be “malleable” to achieve these goals.