Virtualization Strategies News, Analysis, White Papers and Case Studies on Virtualization Software and Hardware Strategies

This week at AFCOM’s Data Center World event in Las Vegas, the AFCOM Data Center Institute announced it’s Five Bold Predictions for the data center.  These predictions are:

1)      By 2015, the talent pool of qualified senior level technical and managerial talent to run data centers will shrink by 45%. This is alarming when you consider the dramatic growth in business data processing. The economy can be to blame as training programs are often quick to be cut. The other challenge is fewer students are opting for collegiate programs in high density computing. Companies like Data Center Journal offer excellent data center training programs.

2)      By 2010, more than half of all data centers will have to relocate to new facilities or outsource some applications. This is great news for firms that build date centers as well as colocation and managed services companies Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization News

IBM introduces its cloud computing portfolio this week and showcased a few partners and customers. Big Blue’s cloud strategy remains focused on the enterprise; so you can’t pay by the minute with credit cards, like you can with Amazon Web Services and other general purpose cloud offerings.

For enterprise IT, cloud computing promises dramatically better ease of use, economies of scale and much greater flexibility in sourcing and adapting to change. The technologies comprising cloud computing - virtualization, SOA, Software as a Service, are technologies that IBM claims to have invented or are least, well-known for excelling in. IBM intends to help its clients and partners realize their cloud computing goals in three principle ways:

• Build their own cloud environments for internal and external use
• Deliver cloud services and software to be consumed by clients and partners directly
• Build an ecosystem of developers, partners, vendors and universities to further cloud computing and standards adoption

The partnership and strategy include: Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews

There has been a lot said this year about cloud computing. One could say the the whole subject is “a little cloudy.” This video from rPath does a great job of explaining cloud computing in plain english. It’s only 5 minutes long and worth your time if your trying to understand the connection between cloud computing and virtulaization. It also does a great job contrasting cloud computing with Software as a Service or SaaS.

I like the analogy of SaaS being like buying a car, where Virtualization is more like leasing a car and Cloud Computing is like having a taxi at your service. If you see other useful video’s like this please comment below or send me a link. Thanks!

Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, SaaS, Virtualization Video

At the Gartner Data Center event this week in Las Vegas, Thomas Bittman, a Gartner data center research vice president predicted the installed base of virtual machines will grow tenfold between 2007 and 2011. By 2012, the majority of x86 server workloads will be running in virtualization software.

“Virtualization is the most important and impact trend in IT infrastructure and operations through 2012-changing how you manage, what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan, how you charge. It also shakes up the industry, in terms of licensing, pricing and component management,” Bittman said.

Virtualization, however, is merely an enabler to some other important future trends, he said. Because virtualization creates a pool of manageable, flexible capacity, automation should take that pool of resources and do useful work, based on business policies and service-level requirements.

Also, the decoupling created by virtualization combined with defined service offerings and automation is a great enabler of cloud computing, Bittman said.

Bittman laid out the following eight bullet points that describe the nature of computing and storage virtualization over the next five years: Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Strategies

We’ve always viewed computer systems as a “necessary evil,” specially for small and medium businesses that have limited IT support.  No doubt computers are essential for our business, but there’s always something to be fixed or updated. And it seems that every month, we have to buy or install something new. Help is on the way. IBM announced plans to help free growing businesses from the headaches, limitations and costs of IT maintenance with a new appliance — called IBM Lotus Foundations Start — that offers buinesses an easy way to collaborate, as well as the option to reliably run Microsoft Windows on a virtual machine with VMware technology. The new “plug-and-play” appliance combines software and hardware and is designed to allow employees to begin working together within one hour of initially booting up.

The IBM Lotus Foundations appliance has everything a customer needs to quickly set up a reliable IT infrastructure. The software uses the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino collaboration platform to enable employees to create, share and print Lotus Symphony documents, and work with email and calendar functions. Its automated design — self-configuring, self-healing, and self-managing daily systems operations — eliminates the need for routine maintenance and helps to ensure that critical data is protected through an integrated disk backup technology. Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, IT for Growing Businesses, Virtualization Products / Reviews

IDC finds demand for Storage-as-a-Service has very strong commercial demand among small, mid-size, and large firms that are facing budgetary and IT staffing pressures. Companies are evaluating online services for backup/disaster recovery, long-term record retention, business continuity, and availability.

In both the commercial and consumer segments, the availability of storage-as-a-service is disrupting traditional storage software markets as it changes how individuals and firms access storage capacity and procure software functions. But, more importantly, storage-as-a-service is a precursor to the longer term cloud storage and cloud computing opportunity. Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, SaaS, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies

Why have only one server when you can have as many as you need, on demand? That’s the premise behind cloud computing, harnessing data centers of processor and storage power without actually having to provision them yourself. But if you’re without the right tools for the job, it’s that much harder to reap the full gamut of benefits from working in the cloud.John Foley at Information week does a great job exploring the tools you have at your disposal which are likely to be limited, if not dictated entirely, by the cloud computing service you’ve chosen. A good deal of this is due to cloud computing interfaces — the application programming interfaces mainly — not being interchangeable. The applications themselves that are run in the cloud, the stuff you provide, are only part of the picture. How you get it into the cloud, and deal with it from that point on, is also crucial. Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing

North Carolina State University and IBM today announced plans to provide every student in North Carolina access to advanced educational resources through NC State’s Virtual Computing Lab (VCL), a cloud computing-based technology. Through this cloud - which is a set of Internet-based resources - students at K-12 schools, colleges around the state and the University of North Carolina system campuses themselves will have access to the most advanced educational materials, select software applications and computing and storage resources. NC State also announced that the code for its VCL technology is available through the Apache open source community for free, and is in discussions with a number of universities across the globe that wish to replicate this cloud computing model.

In support of this effort, the NC State Department of Computer Science and Office of Information Technology announced the creation of a Center of Excellence in Cloud Computing, an applied research and development facility on the NC State campus that that will spearhead collaboration projects between NC State and the IBM “Blue Cloud” development team, helping improve the quality of education provided through the VCL platform and ensure reliability.

Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News

Research company IDC today released it latest study on Green IT. For the second year in a row IDC has found IT managers’ leading reason for adopting Green IT technologies has to do with reducing energy cost. Even though recent economic issues have reduced oil prices back down to $80 a barrel, energy cost are still a major concern for data center managers.

Other interesting finding from the study are that most IT managers expect to pay more for Green IT products. This makes sense as IT managers will get a better ROI from a high capacity virtualized server, than several lost cost dedicated servers. In the end the IT manager can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs. This is good news for the IT vendor community as well because a high end virtualized blade servers has a higher margins.

Other reason IT manager are looking to “go green” with their IT planning is from pressure from upper management. This may have a lot to do with the fact that “being green” is good for a company’s reputation. More and more customers are looking for green suppliers of their goods and services. There is also a concern that governments will regulate a companies carbon foot print and use of renewable energy.

Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, Green IT, Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software, Virtualization Strategies

Gartner Analyst concludes that virtualization is the most strategic technology trend for IT and business. Each year Gartner analyst examines the latest industry trends during their symposium and highlights the 10 most impactful technologies.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

In forecasting the impact of the economy on IT spending, Gartner put virtualization near the top of must-have technologies. To date much of the focus has been on server virtualization, but virtualization also has many benefits in other areas such storage. Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said that in storage, for instance, virtualization allows users to “to combine different kinds and generations of storage technology.” That gives them the freedom to mix and match storage technologies based on competitive bids.

Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Green IT, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Strategies