My colleagues were telling me my site needs a more identifiable logo. Something with impact.
What do you think?
New Logo for Virtualization Strategies
Posted under Uncategorized
This post was written by admin on November 4, 2008
Don’t Rush a Virtualization Roll Out
Virtualization projects have so many benefits and pilot programs are generally easy to execute. These pilot program often show great promise which can lead an IT manager (or their boss) to make the most common virtualization implementation mistake - a rushed full scale roll out. This often leads to disastrous results.
“Jumping the gun and rushing a virtualization project across IT will serve only to bombard staff with more work than necessary and fewer results,” say Nick Portolese, senior manager of data center operations at Nielsen Mobile. Portolese’s advice starts with this: Don’t rush a roll-out until you have done your homework and know your environment inside out.
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 20, 2008
Virtualization Keeps Your Business Running Through a Disaster
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.
Posted under Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 17, 2008
How to Choose the Right Virtualization Technology for your Organization
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
This post was written by admin on October 16, 2008
Tips for Planning a Successful Virtualization Migration
Migrating systems to a virtualized environment can deliver significant efficiency gains and cost savings, but it has to be planned carefully. Martin Courtney explains how IT leaders can improve the odds of success
Server virtualization, which allows multiple virtual machines to run separately on a single physical computer system, has become a priority for many IT departments, thanks to the multitude of benefits it delivers. But IT manager considering deploying the technology need to be aware of how different priorities can affect their implementation plans.
A key question to ask is what are the primary goals of your virtualization project? Consolidation is the most common driver for adopting server virtualization. Other goals reduced hardware maintenance costs, or more in the “Green IT” area such as reduced energy consumption or a company’s carbon footprint. Read More…
Posted under Green IT, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 10, 2008
Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Strategies
Virtualization is a technology that can benefit just about any business. Thousands of IT executive around the world—including all of the Fortune 100—use virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Here are a few of the top benefits to developing your virtualization strategy.
1) Server Consolidation and Optimization: Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher sever utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and avoiding the need for one server for each application model.
2) Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you 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.
3) Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance. Read More…
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by Kevin Normandeau on October 7, 2008
Virtualization will drive SaaS Adoption
Growth in virtualization has increased adoption of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, with “three-quarters of organizations” believing that “server virtualization will drive adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)” in the future. This according to survey of 100 IT directors commissioned from Vanson Bourne by web hosting firm Hostway.
The study found that the lack of available virtualization technologies had held back the uptake of SaaS products. Prior to the emergence of virtualization technologies, service providers faced a number of difficulties around offering SaaS affordably and reliably as an outsourced business service. Read More…
Posted under Cloud Computing, SaaS, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 6, 2008
Benefits of Virtualization
Business and IT leaders are faced with the challenges of delivering cost-effective and secure IT infrastructure that must nimbly adapt to the business. These business operations and the applications often run around the clock. Server virtualization is entering the mainstream of business computing precisely because it can help in today’s IT world of feverish change and decreasing budgets.
Virtualization was introduced in the 1960s on mainframe hardware but only recently has emerged to address the vast quantities of highly underutilized x86 servers. These servers are seemingly everywhere—from data centers to hall closets, and they typically house just one application. Virtualization helps solve this costly epidemic of excess capacity by turning one server into ten or twenty by separating the server’s operating system and applications from the underlying physical hardware. This decoupling is possible for desktops and servers and applies to various application in networks and storage. Virtual infrastructure refers to the decoupling of a system and its services. Hardware is managed separately from the operating system and applications as a single pool of processing, storage and networking power, which can be dynamically allocated to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them and the administrator manages and optimizes resources globally across the enterprise.
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 3, 2008
Virtualization: Does It Matter?
Gartner, Inc. certainly thinks so. In fact, they feel virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. Gartner research feels virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.
Virtualization is hardly a new concept; storage has already been virtualized — albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures — and networking is also virtualized,” said Philip Dawson, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, as both server and PC virtualization become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT.” Read More…
Posted under Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 1, 2008
Virtualization Technologies Increasingly Embraced By Most Enterprises
Over the past year, virtualization has moved to a mainstream technology that is being embraced by most enterprises. The evolution is due to the potential cost savings and increased flexibility that server virtualization can provide.From a cost-savings perspective, virtualization has the potential to reduce IT spending and improve server utilization which reduces power and cooling cost. Yet what is most exciting to IT managers is the increased flexibility virtualization can enable. IT team can deploy virtual servers faster than dedicated servers which increased their ability to react to ever changing business needs.
The challenge has been that IT applications are continuously expanding. Past solutions often involved a single application on each x86 server to avoid crashes or performance problems. Given tight IT budgets, very low utilization, and the high costs associated with low server utilization, virtualization has emerged as a way of controlling costs through consolidation while increasing the flexibility of IT. Read More…
Posted under Green IT, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on September 29, 2008
