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

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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%.

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

GoVirtual.org is great new community site for academics and others research virtualization technologies. The site is devoted to the research and advancement of virtualization topics including:

• Hardware Virtualization
• Energy and Cost Savings
• Security
• Grid Computing
• IT Resource Management
• Virtualization Software

This is a community site which enables the sharing of ideas, case studies, and white papers with the goal of accelerating the advancement of virtualization technologies. GoVirtual.org is underwritten by VMware (if I were only so lucky).  Read More…

Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Software, Virtualization Strategies