Microsoft Windows 7 was released to manufacturing in July this year and corporate customers have access to the code today (with the public-facing debut occurring next month). For many organization, this marks the first major desktop operating system upgrade in 10 years, leaving them with the daunting task of determining when and how to best migrate to this new operating system.

According to an April-2009 report by Dimensional Data in which they interviewed 1,142 IT professionals on their timeframe to upgrade to Windows 7 they found that...Click here to finish reading this entry at virteratech.com.

Author: Lucian Lipinksy De Orlov, VIRTERA

Certainly a lot of press has been made of the potential impact of the H1N1 virus.  

According to the World Health Organization, "Many countries could see swine flu cases double every three to four days for several months until peak transmission is reached, once cold weather returns to the northern hemisphere.  Winter months tend to see increases in diseases such as influenza as people tend to stay indoors more and are in closer proximity to one another.  Southern hemisphere countries such as Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Australia have been experiencing dramatic increases in infections and deaths."

To make matters worse, the CDC recently reported that there is a shortage of school nurses.  The CDC recommends a workload of 1 nurse per 750 students, but an analysis puts the national average at 1 per 971 students. Why is this important?

As students become ill they will be asked to stay away from school.  With confirmed H1N1 infection there will be no other option but home care.  A parent will be required to stay home and care for their child.  That, in turn, increases the likelihood of the care giver getting sick.

But the press has not had a great deal of coverage around the flu's impact on business...Click Here to finish reading this entry on www.virteratech.com.

With Windows XP approaching end-of-life and Windows 7 just around the bend, one thing is for sure: over the next few years the desktop is going to be different. Advancements in server-based computing have customers revisiting the idea of centralized desktop and application management. That's right - you heard me - we are going down that road again. I know you are going to say, "We already tried to do this years ago with Citrix and it worked great for some things but now I mainly just use them for remote access."

I too was part of that campaign to stop managing operating systems and applications at the endpoint and move them into the datacenter. When working for a previous employer, we designed and implemented a solid server-based application delivery system. We had fantastic meetings to congratulate ourselves on our brilliance and our new solution. 

A Letter to CxO's... - Jul 13, 2009

This isn't another product pitch, nor is it another plea for needing an elaborate tool to track virtual machine usage metrics and calculate how much you should charge a business unit for X usage of a system.  Instead, my purpose here is to discuss exactly why you need to consider a chargeback strategy early when deploying virtual infrastructure.

Virtual infrastructure, whether deployed on an old standby like VMware or on an up-and-coming platform like Hyper-V, has costs associated with it just like all IT assets.  In most organizations, business units that require server infrastructure to support an application will typically pay for that hardware as part of the project.  The Business Owner will request a new system from IT and supply the software vendor's recommended hardware requirements for the system.  IT will then procure the hardware required for the system and charge the business unit for the assets as part of the project.

So, you've already virtualized all the easy stuff. You've replaced that rusty old hardware off of your datacenter floor and migrated legacy applications to a virtual infrastructure. You've even toyed with creating a disaster recovery plan that relies heavily on virtualization offerings from VMware and Microsoft. But that's so 2006. Which servers remained after that first go-around? What was taboo during your first consolidation project? What prevented you from moving every piece of hardware on the datacenter floor to a VM? Early on, many administrators used virtualization solely as a consolidation tool - a platform for squeezing as many low-end servers onto one piece of hardware as the CPU and RAM would allow. But now that the technology (and its users) matured, the important question to ask oneself is: do the same barriers exist that prevented virtualizing those once "taboo" workloads?

In working with a wide variety of clients, we've recognized that one of the most frequently excluded services from the initial virtualization initiative is e-mail. Be it uncertainty of performance levels, lack of knowledge about migrating e-mail, or fear of virtualization in general, e-mail had not traditionally been a primary candidate for consolidation. However, in the last 1-2 years, we have seen a much greater adoption rate for virtualized e-mail services - especially those moving to Microsoft Exchange 2007 environments. Exchange 2007 took gigantic steps forward in both performance and availability with its new feature set and its 64-bit-only architecture.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting with a client for a virtualization project. While speaking with them I caught notice of an e-mail upgrade project and learned that the customer was moving to Exchange 2007. As always, it was important to get an understanding of the client's current environment, their pain points, and the business drivers behind the upgrade. It turns out that they had experienced a catastrophic failure of their existing e-mail environment resulting in a corrupt mail database (information store), corrupt backup data and ultimately lost e-mail messages. The restoration process that ensued took several days and even then, there were countless messages that could not be restored. As a result crippling the organization's ability to conduct business for several days, upper management put down a strict rule set for recovering from such a failure. The objectives included the following:

·        -A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours in the event of data failure / system failure

·        -A Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 6 hours in the event of data failure / system failure

·       -Site redundancy (Disaster Recovery)

·       -Ability to meet ongoing / increasing demands for data retention

The IT department matched these requirements to Exchange 2007 and its rich feature set. One of the most attractive features of Exchange 2007 is...Please click here to finish reading this entry.

Author: Daniel Beveridge, Director of Virtualization Strategy - VIRTERA

Central to the promise of virtualization is the ability to decouple workloads from their underlying layers of technology. In the case of hypervisors, this means that the OS can have a common set of drivers while freely moving between hardware platforms. For application virtualization, the same mobility allows dynamic delivery and execution of software across a range of operating system versions. Major vendors such as VMware actively market virtualization as a way to avoid vendor lock-in at the server level. Companies have welcomed the new freedom, reveling in their new found ability to negotiate more aggressively with hardware vendors who must now account for the ease of migration to new hardware platforms.

The virtualization market has matured over the last few years and the freedoms associated with virtualization of the technology stack have expanded and increasingly become a requirement for companies looking to make investments in the datacenter. What was previously just a possibility has rapidly become a necessity. Ironically, major virtualization vendors have not fully grasped the implications of the revolution they unleashed. Product strategy lags customer expectation by continuing to bundle products in a manner out of step with the elimination of vendor lock-in promised. Companies feel cornered into virtualization investments that may free them from physical server lock-in only to encumber them with hypervisor and associated technology stack lock-in. 

A Letter to CxO's... - Jul 13, 2009

Even after working on green IT projects for the past four years, I keep being amazed how one's intuition is insufficient to fix data center air flow and cooling issues.  I'm reminded that data always needs to be collected and reviewed in order to fix problems.

Recently, I was asked to take a look at a small 1,800 square foot data center running at about 100 watts per square foot.  It contains 29 servers and 6 computer room air conditioners (CRAC).  As data centers go, this is pretty simple.

The problem was that about 20% of the data center is running hot - hot being better than 90 degrees F and 99 degrees F in a few places.  I was asked how many new CRACs should be installed, and where should they be placed.  The question on the surface certainly appeared reasonable - even to me.

I collected information about the data center's environment and reviewed a air flow and temperature model which I sat down and studied.  Nothing really jumped out at me.  The servers running hot were 18 feet in front of a CRAC with nothing between the two.

Then it hit me.  The data center is actually not hot enough!

I looked at all the CRACs and they are all thermostatically controlled and set at 75 degrees F.  One of the CRACs return air was only 73.7 degrees F.  The result?  It was never turning on.  The unit was blowing hot air into the data center.

Now it made sense.  The 74 degree F air was being raised 20 plus degrees by the servers resulting in the 90 degree F and hotter temperatures.  So I thought of a crazy idea.  Why not see what happens if I turn off that one CRAC.

WHOA! The servers cooled down.  Without 5,000 CFM of 74 degree F air being blown around by the CRAC that never got hot enough to turn on to cool its air, the data center actually cooled down.

So, I was asked how to fix a hot-spot problem by spending money and increasing monthly operational costs. I fixed the problem by turning a CRAC off and saving the client about $10,000 in annual maintenance and operating expenses.

The moral of the story?  Base your decisions on facts and measurements and model machine room air flow so you can properly manage it.

Learn more: http://www.virteratech.com

A Letter to CxO's... - Jul 13, 2009

As an ex-CTO of a global Financial Services company in New York City, I worked through Y2K, the dot-com bubble, and the emergence of x86-based server virtualization.  Our first introduction to server based virtualization occurred in early 2001 after consolidating several data centers into a single global data center. As a result of the consolidations, we were in need of finding ways to reduce the environmental impact that the consolidations introduced or face expansion of the production data center. To address these environmental issues we adopted a virtualization strategy for our test / dev environments late that same year.

While not highly scalable, the benefits we realized were fairly significant and based on our early successes, we quickly evaluated data center ready hypervisors when they were introduced in late 2003/4. We became the first financial institution to leverage virtualization in a production data center in early 2005.

Many companies today are faced with some of the same environmental and business challenges that I faced back in 2003/4. However, unlike several years ago when there was a single vendor solution, the virtualization landscape has become more crowded and complex, the TCO / ROI more elusive and the focus on "quick wins" even more important, especially in today's economic climate.

Prior to 2005, virtualization was used more as a desktop tool for IT staff to run multiple desktop operating systems or as an inexpensive way to contain test / development environments. In 2004 a production-ready hypervisor based solution emerged and organizations began to evaluate and its ability for supporting production workloads. Early implementations and success stories increased the awareness and adoption of virtualization. However, VIRTERA believes that we are still in the early stages of the virtualization lifecycle and refers to the current state of as v 1.0 for several reasons.

Firstly, virtualization to date has been more about server containment and not server consolidation. Organizations are still faced with supporting and maintaining the same number of servers as they had prior to virtualizing their environment. Moreover, they have now introduced other operational and management challenges that didn't exist prior to virtualization.

Secondly, virtualization has been viewed by many organizations, and the industry as a whole, as a tactical solution as opposed to a strategic initiative to transform the way in which IT services are delivered to the business.

Lastly, it was a product centric solution with little or no documentation for success from a management and operational point of view.

As a result much of the software was never installed and the promised ROI never realized.

For those organizations that have successfully navigated the choppy waters and deployed a solid virtual infrastructure, many are left with the question of "What do I do now that I have virtualized?" or "So what, I've virtualized. How can I take this to the next level?"

VIRTERA solution architects are helping clients develop a strategy to create further infrastructure transparency through the use of virtualization technologies. The end result being The Next Generation Data Center.

There are several key functional areas that have recently been introduced which will help clients get there including:

• I/O (fabric) virtualization
• Storage virtualization, and
• Systems and Operations Management including provisioning / delegated automation.

I/O virtualization is the consolidation of Ethernet and Fiber Channel networks. This is an integral piece of virtualization and will enable further mobility and agility of the IT infrastructure. Benefits include:

• Flexible, dedicated I/O paths for virtual machines
• Reduced number of cable connections and adapters
• Fewer network switches and therefore fewer points of management, and
• Consistent policies and security profiles across your network fabric.

Companies that are leading the charge in this space include 3Leaf Systems, Xsigo, Brocade and Cisco with their Nexus line of switches.

Storage virtualization will allow organizations to simplify the management of their infrastructure and consolidate multi-vendor physical storage systems into what appears to be a single storage resource that is centrally managed. This is yet another key fundamental building block to drive asset utilization of your storage array and provide greater flexibility and transportability of virtual machines across storage platforms or geographically across data centers.

• Increased storage utilization (today's typical storage system utilization is between 20% and 30%)
• Simplified management of heterogeneous storage systems
• Improved application availability (insulates host applications from changes to physical storage infrastructure)
• Delivers significant efficiencies, cost savings and power / cooling benefits.

Companies that are leading the way in this space include IBM, Hitachi, EMC, NetApp and Data Core.

Over the next few months a few lines will be drawn in the sand as to where all of these player fall.                                                                                                            

The final piece to the puzzle towards the Next Generation Data Center is Systems and Operations Management. There are several companies within each of these categories that have capable products.

The demands on today's data center are growing and the cost associated for delivering these services is ever increasing.   The major drivers for this are:

1.       The install base of servers is expected to grow 16% or 41-43 million servers by 2010.

2.       Higher load densities will contribute to higher energy costs which are currently increasing at 16% per year.

3.       Energy consumption per server is growing by 9% as growth in performance pushes demand for energy.

The diagram below depicts the breakdown of average IT cash costs at a typical company (by percent).
 

So what are the characteristics for the Next Generation Data Center:

Conclusion

Virtualization as an industry is maturing and the next few years look to be the most formative as manufacturers combine forces to deliver on the promise of virtualization.

Cisco and EMC / VMware have strengthened their relationship as they look to drive the design and architecture for the Next Generation data center.  They each own substantial market share in the data center along with the core infrastructure components (including Management with EMC SMARTS) to create a comprehensive solution for customers.  Cisco continues to deliver virtualization capabilities with their Nexus line of switches and recent announcement of their Unified Computing System.

Microsoft, with the upcoming delivery of Hyper-V R2 candidate is looking to give clients an alternative hypervisor platform.  Their Systems Center suite of products also provides a mechanism for managing a physical / virtual IT environment based on multi-vendor hypervisor technologies.  Several recent announcements by Microsoft and Citrix have pointed to a strengthened partnership to address the virtual desktop space, a platform that Microsoft and Citrix have owned for a long time.

So, the next few months look to be interesting with all of these announcements and alliances beginning to gel and become clearer.
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