virtualisation - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• VM Stall: How to avoid a sneaky virtualisation project enemy

  Virtualizing and consolidating data-center servers provides such clear a financial benefit that there are few companies of any size, in any industry that shouldn't virtualize at least some of their servers and applications, industry analysts say. But companies that start virtualization projects looking for cost savings, without planning for a second phase of migration that requires spending more on new tools than the project might save in short-term costs, will get stuck in phase one -- saving money on hardware, but getting only a fraction of the benefit of the virtualization products they've bought, analysts add.
  The cost benefit of getting as many as 10 or 20 virtual servers for the price of one physical box drove many companies to migrations that covered as much as 25 percent to 35 percent of all the servers targeted for conversion, before hitting "VM stall," a virtual halt in migrations caused by the most subtle cost- and organizational issues that affect virtualization projects directly, according to James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester research. "Companies can get close to the 50 percent point [in a P2V migration] still using the same thinking they did in the physical world," Staten says. "Obvious costs like licenses, how many machines you can take out of an environment, how many VMs you can put on a host all make one cost picture. Beyond that you get into issues about performance and capacity management, and the amount of effort needed for support -- a lot of companies don't take those fully into account."

• Virtualisation management tips that will never go out of style

  Neither cloud computing nor virtual servers were intended as agents that would change traditional IT organisations, says Rachel Dines, a researcher at Forrester Research who specializes in IT infrastructure and management. But IT organisation and management issues are turning out to be nearly as important as the technology itself to making large-scale virtual-server migrations effective.

• CIO priorities reflect NBN opportunities in ANZ: Gartner

  Organisations are looking to make the most of opportunities associated with the National Broadband Network (NBN), with Gartner Executive Program’s annual CIO agenda survey showing that networking, voice and data communications are a higher technology priority in Australia and New Zealand than globally.

• 5 Ways You Waste Money on Virtualisation

  More than three quarters of U.S. companies virtualize at least some of their x86-based servers, but few get their full money's worth out of virtualization efforts--due to management blunders, analysts say.
  The biggest misconceptions focus around three issues: how closely to manage virtual machines, how to plan the capacity and workload of the virtual infrastructure and how to go beyond technical configuration to keep operational costs from running out of control, according to analysts.

• Virtualisation on mobile devices: What's taking so long?

  Despite years of marketing pressure and products that are simpler to use and more widely available, desktop virtualisation hasn't taken off to the extent that vendors and analysts expected even a few years ago.

• Cloud computing and the Kindle paradigm

  One of the most interesting things we encounter when my consulting company works with clients is their reaction to the infrastructure architectures of cloud providers. When we explain that they achieve robustness by keeping multiple copies of data on commodity hardware, rather than the traditional model of investing in expensive hardware to improve device robustness, we observe a visceral shudder in people.

• Virtual offices on the go

  Sumit Dhawan, vice president, desktop virtualisation, Citrix Systems, leads strategy and plans for Citrix's desktop virtualisation product line, Citrix XenDesktop. Dhawan has been one of the key leaders in driving product, marketing and go-to-market strategy for XenDesktop product and has positioned Citrix as a leader in the desktop virtualisation market. In his current role, Dhawan is also responsible for key strategic alliances for Citrix in the desktop virtualisation market, including partnerships with Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Dell and HP.

• Ways to cut datacentre energy costs

  As the global economy is recovers, pent-up business demand for new apps and market initiatives is driving server investments. Forrester finds that 25 percent of organisations expect server spend to grow by 5 percent to 10 percent, and 6 percent expect it to grow by 10 percent or more. And to reduce operating and capital costs, improve disaster recovery, and accelerate time-to-market for new apps, organisations are turning to server virtualisation.
  But a new motivator to expand and improve the use of server virtualisation is bubbling to the surface: reducing energy consumption. Why? Forrester finds that there are three primary motivators:

• Private cloud shakes up traditional IT roles

  Rather than a traditional datacentre, the private cloud uses highly virtualised pools of compute, storage and network capabilities to optimize IT performance and utilization while providing the business with services that improve efficiency and agility. This offers organisations a way to circumvent the increasing complexity, inflexibility and cost of IT environments to be more competitive in the market place through greater efficiency, control, choice, quality of service and, most importantly, business agility. We need to spend more of our budgets on building new value and assets rather than spending precious dollars on, "keeping the lights on." Introducing the cloud!
  However, the journey to the private cloud can also be hazy. It is not only fundamentally changing the way technology is built, sourced, governed and consumed, but also transforming the traditional skills IT professionals need to deploy and manage private clouds.

• Virtualisation management: Five tools that matter most

  Long ago, when servers still came one to a box, "sysadmins" spent all their time running from one machine to another, with boxes of tools and utilities designed to squeeze out every bit of performance and stability from physical servers.
  Now, virtual servers outnumber the physical in most datacentres. And neither budgets nor toolboxes are over-provisioned with resources for fine-tuning virtual infrastructures.

• VM stall: The next big ' virtualisation challenge?

  There appears to be a challenger to 'VM sprawl' as the scourge of virtualisation success - a problem I call 'VM stall'.
  We know about 'VM sprawl' - because new virtual machines are so easy to deploy, organisations can end up with more VMs that they can handle, or even use. This has the potential to cause severe problems to availability, performance, compliance, costs, security, and more.

• Catching the virtualisation and cloud computing wave

  The pitch: Having data in silos makes storage complex, says Manish Goel, NetApp's executive vice president of product operations. Goel says the company's software allows enterprises to manage different types of storage systems, such as network-attached storage (NAS) and fibre channel storage area networks (SANs), as a single infrastructure. NetApp bets that its approach will give it an edge as customers deploy virtual storage or move their data to cloud providers.
  To better serve these customers, NetApp last year released Data OnTap 8, an operating system designed to make a company's storage platforms scale more easily to many petabytes while still being managed as a single system. With its planned acquisition of Bycast, NetApp is taking aim now at what it sees as a fast-growing market: multi-petabyte global repositories of unstructured data such as video. Bycast will bring technology that lets companies expand such repositories, as well as software for searching the data, Goel says.

• Desktop virtualisation: What frustrates IT

  Virtual desktops - once the most rigid, least friendly way to put applications in front of end users - have become a hot topic by promising to deliver the security and easy maintenance that was always desktop virtualisation's strength. The trouble: Desktop virtualisation now comes in so many varieties that even vendors confuse terms referring to the flavours.
  Market leader Citrix Systems, now working hard to expand virtual desktops into roles that the company hasn't traditionally filled, rolled out a version of its Xen Desktop solution last fall that allowed customers to choose any of six major delivery methods.

• Five technology security myths busted

  Think you can hide behind the privacy of an "unlisted" mobile phone number? Think again. Maybe you believe you don't need security software on a Mac or iPad. You'd swear that Firefox is the safest browser in town. Wrong on both counts.
  Most of us don't think about security for our digital devices until something goes wrong, or it's time to renew an anti-virus subscription. But what the security experts like to call the threat landscape changes all the time, and keeping up is hard to do. So we'll save you some time. Here are five current facts that you probably don't know about digital security --but should.

• Beware the cloud boomerang

  I was talking to a colleague who works for a large technology vendor. His company offers products to enable IT organisations to construct cloud infrastructures inside their own data centres - to turn existing stable, static computing environments into ones that support scalability, agility, and dynamic applications. The company's progress on its products has been impressive, early implementations successful, and interest from their customer base (infrastructure groups within large IT organisations) high. However, he shared an apprehension with me regarding product adoption. "I'm concerned that while our customers are working on a very deliberate plan that will take a couple of years - doing their research, performing a pilot, evaluating the economics, making the capital investment business case - that the apps side of the house will just charge ahead using on-demand public cloud providers like Amazon." While he was worried about this trend from the point of view of how it will affect the prospects for his company's products, my mind moved toward a different outcome: the boomerang.
  With regard to the issue he's worried about, my sense is that his concern is quite valid. Many software engineers have moved to cloud environments for development due to immediate resource availability and low cost. It's widespread. I noted in a blog post a few months ago my amusement regarding one large software vendor's senior executive's rant. He and I were both on a cloud computing panel and in his remarks he railed against developers using Amazon, citing intellectual property concerns. After the panel was over, as the participants were chit-chatting, he said that he found it frustrating because developers in his own company were using Amazon quite widely, despite being warned against it, because it was so much easier than getting computing resources through the official channels. The phrase "hoisted on one's own petard" sprang to my mind.