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

Blade.org announced the results of a virtualization adoption survey which show that both large enterprises, and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) have moved rapidly to adopt virtualization technologies using blade servers as their preferred hardware platform.

“Blade.org’s survey found that 82 percent of large IT organizations have implemented or are planning to implement virtualization on blade servers in the data center,” said Lisa Galish, Blade.org Marketing Committee chairperson. “However, even in SMB organizations, 28 percent have already virtualized on blade servers with an additional 36 percent in the planning stage. Blade servers have fundamental advantages in infrastructure consolidation, ease of management and cost reduction features that make them an ideal platform for virtualization technologies.” Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News, virtualization

Sun Microsystems announced that it has expanded its portfolio of small and medium-sized business (SMB) solutions with the introduction of two new virtualization solutions that combine Sun’s x64 server and open storage products with VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V software.

Sun said it’s SMB initiative delivers uniquely designed solutions for virtualization deployments, while reducing total cost and complexity. Sun’s SMB solutions portfolio includes Windows Essential Business Server (EBS), Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 upgrade, MySQL database and Sun’s secure web server solution. Sun’s overall commitment to open source software and industry-standard hardware make it easier and more affordable for SMBs to access Sun’s leading products. Customers can choose from a wide range of products and platforms like the Sun Fire x64 servers and Ultra-SPARC processor-based servers; multiple operating systems like Solaris 10, Windows and Linux; and industry-leading databases like Sun’s MySQL database. Sun’s SMB initiative continues to deliver customer value across a range of industries from media and entertainment to education and technology. Sun SMB customer case studies can be found at http://www.sun.com/customers/. Read More…

Posted under Desktop Virtualization, SMB Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Products / Reviews

This week Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT management research and consulting firm released a research report which provides data and advice on managing virtualization deployments more effectively. The report is called: “Best Practices in Virtual Systems Management (VSM): Virtualization Metrics and Recommendations for Enterprises”

As with all major IT revolutions before it, virtualization has introduced new and difficult management challenges. Traditional management tools and processes are less useful for virtualization deployments, and without new approaches to Virtual Systems Management (VSM), enterprises will suffer from increased downtime, higher costs, staff shortages, lack of flexibility, competitive disadvantage, and many other problems.

Enterprise Management Associates’ research indicates that better response times, faster provisioning and improved efficiency are just of the few improvements seen with the use of specific VSM toolsets and best practices. Here are few other results a company might expect from following VSM best practices: Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Hardware Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software, Virtualization Strategies

In today’s business climate, the need to protect critical IT systems is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. Providing a high level of data protection while keeping costs at a minimum can be a challenge for many organizations. Just ask Endocare,  an innovative medical device company, that lost their parent domain controller in July, 2007. The situation was a candid reminder that Endocare needed a real-time way to recover from a disaster.

Endocare solved their disaster recovery problems with two technology vendors, Double-Take Software and VMware, who provided virtualization solutions to consolidate and reduce hardware requirements to solve this exact business problem. VMware provides the virtualization platform while Double-Take Software provides the real-time data replication and recovery software. In this case, using virtualization with Double-Take Software allowed Endocare to implement a real-time disaster recovery solution that would otherwise be cost prohibitive in a non-virtual environment. Read More…

Posted under Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies

Sometimes it takes either a significant service outage or major change in your business (or the economy), to get business leaders to re-examine whether your IT infrastructure and resources are performing efficiently and effectively? All too often, businesses only re-examine their IT infrastructure when a major snafu has occurred or some external force has turned the business model on its head.

It’s not surprising that many IT managers shy away from reviews of their IT systems and react only when upset customers are wondering why an order is late or a database has been compromised. The good news is IT projects often challenge traditional Return On Investment (ROI) analyses, since the gains in productivity and service quality can be elusive to capture on a spreadsheet while the costs are all too apparent. With IT budgets often consuming 10% or more of revenue, many managements seize the temptation to simply cap IT spending at a fixed percentage of total budget.

No IT executive can reasonably expect a CEO or board of directors to sign off on an IT project without hearing a solid business case for the investment any more than they would authorize a capital expenditure or new subsidiary without scrutiny. Yet, a study by the Gartner Group revealed otherwise. Gartner found that only 20% of organizations undertaking large systems projects and only 50% embarking on a re-engineering of their systems ever developed a business case for the project. And of those that did, even fewer checked back to see if the projects ever hit their goals.

Read More…

Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Software

Quite a lot according to a Dennis Chung, an IT Pro evangelist based in Singapore. Dennis recently, profiles a server virtualization project that he did for O2Micro where his client saved an estimated $115,000 in three years.

Here’s is an overview of this server virtualization case study. As an IT Manager, Dennis’ client Bernard needed to meet the business process needs with IT infrastructure that is cost effective, and positive ROI. In the past months, he’s been working on virtualizing his computing environment. Bernard was to planning to increase computing availability from 18 to 70 computing servers world wide distributed across 6 geographical locations. The computing infrastructure needed to be efficient, cost effective, easy to manage and deploy, saves power and maximizes utilization of hardware.The current server utilization stood at at an average of 15% to 25%.

Read More…

Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Products / Reviews

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

HP recently launched free online classes and this one is very valuable to all business small and large. It gives a detailed over view of the benefits of virtualization, compares disaster preparedness through virtualization with other business continuity plans and provides the business benefits of deploying a virtualization IT strategy.

Virtualization Can Help Keep Your Business Running in the Case of Disaster

Virtualization, as it relates to disaster recovery, is about simplifying the disaster recovery infrastructure requirements and reducing costs through eliminating the need for redundant hardware. You can think of virtualization as making a single physical device (such as a storage device, server or operating system) appear to function as multiple logical resources or making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices and servers) appear as a single logical resource.

Without virtualization, a business continuity plan is time consuming, expensive, complex, slow and unreliable.

Read More…

Posted under Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Strategies

Virtualization has become a very hot topic in IT organizations. As more and more solutions enter the market the discussion is shifting away from if it should be used and toward how it should be used and what vendors should you work with. CiRBA recently published an excellent white paper designed to help IT executives choose the right virtualization technologies for their business.

All virtualization technologies help towards the common benefits of optimizing the utilization of hardware, and software leading to benefits like cost reductions, more flexibility and better business continuity.

The challenge in all this is that each virtualization technology operates in a slightly different manner, and these differences are more or less pronounced depending on how they are used. This is compounded by the fact that every IT environment is different, each having unique operational patterns, technical compositions and business constraints. To cap this off, every virtualization vendor is highly motivated to win business in their own way, which changes the economics of the situation. Of all the trends currently emerging, the desire to avoid an expensive solution when a cheap one will do is relatively high on most people’s lists. Read More…

Posted under CiRBA, Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Products / Reviews, Virtualization Strategies, White Paper, virtualization