- Reducing IT Costs in the Datacenter with System Center
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A few weeks ago my colleague Brett Williams and I presented, “Reducing IT Costs with System Center Datacenter Management” as part of the Microsoft Thrive Live! series. The webcast is now available for viewing on-demand through Microsoft TechNet Edge.
The webcast focuses around the War On Cost research that Microsoft undertook using a double-blind study, which effectively means that participants did not know that Microsoft was behind the questions. Focusing on 6 key workloads including email, collaboration and more, the research really highlights how implementing activities around automation of server management, virtualization of workloads, and integration of systems management can really help drive down the cost of running and maintaining a business’ IT architecture.
If you are interested in finding out ways where you can demonstrate return on investment and increased productivity with IT, this information presented within this webcast is a must. You should also take a look at this Microsoft site, which focused on how you can save costs with Microsoft, and presents a huge amount of useful information, news, reviews, and more!
To see how and where System Center can assist you with implementing the cost-reducing activities presented in our webcast, browse our website on System Center solutions for dynamic datacenters or contact your Microsoft account team or Microsoft partner.
Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters
- Configuration Manager and Intel vPro integration
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Hi everyone, recently at the Intel Developer Forum, we sat down with our friends at Intel and recorded a demonstration of the integration between ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 and Intel vPro. The video is now live, and is available here on Edge. I hope you find it useful.
For more information, please visit:
System Center Configuration Manager website
Technical Documentation on vPro integration
Intel vPro Expert Center website
Great blog post on vPro planning and deployment
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
- The System Center team is heading to Europe
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Hey everyone, the System Center Team is heading to Amsterdam for the week of Feb 8th. We will be in town presenting to the EMEA Infrastructure, Deployment and Management Council at the Microsoft Netherlands Schiphol Office. 
While the event is not open to the broader public we are around and would love to meet you! If you are a customer or partner of the System Center products, and would like to talk about anything, please feel free to contact us at the below information.
Even if it is just for a coffee, we would love to hear from you…
Kind regards
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
- Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector Update
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To help our customers accelerate their testing and deployment of Windows 7, we are really pleased to announce an update to the ACT Connector for Configuration Manager. The Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector (ACT Connector) assists administrators with collecting the necessary computer and application compatibility information to help plan for a Windows deployment.
With this connector update, Administrators will be able to utilize valuable Application Compatibility information right from within the Configuration Manager console. The ACT Connector provides the following functionality within the Admin console:
- Inventories installed software applications and creates reports that will assist with determining which applications are Windows compatible.
- Retrieves device driver compatibility for installed devices and creates reports that will assist with determining which device drivers will need to be upgraded to support the Windows operating system.
The ACT Connector can be downloaded here.
Here are some additional resources:
Thank you
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
- System Center Configuration Manager Reporting Dashboard Beta released
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We are pleased to announce the Beta release of our Dashboard Solution Accelerator.
The System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Dashboard lets customers utilize a browser based graphically rich reporting experience that showcases the robust reporting capabilities of the world’s leading system management product. The dashboard will help you stay informed of application and operating system deployments, security updates, system health status and more; whether on the plasma screen in your operations center, or your administrative desktop.
Some key benefits of the Dashboard are:
- Provides dependable, timely access to key information: The dashboard lets you easily stay on top of deployments, security updates, client health, and compliance status.
- Easy to install and configure: The dashboard allows customers to quickly integrate your data in just minutes. Utilize either the base set of datasets “out of the box” or choose your own.
- Easy to customize: The dashboard can easily be customized to meet the needs of your different departments. Any dataset in the Configuration Manager database can be presented on the dashboard, in chart, gauge, and table formats.
- Flexible & interactive: Administrators can easily filter data and create ad hoc, custom views. Filters allow users to quickly drill down from high-level to more specific data.
We welcome you to download and evaluate this add on to Configuration Manager 2007 today. Here are some key links and resources:
- System Center Configuration Manager Dashboard website link
- Direct link to the Connect site for the Dashboard beta program
- Link to send feedback
- System Center Configuration Manager website
Thanks for your time
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
- Hear of new/updated Management Pack releases via new Twitter hashtag (#mpreleases)
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One of the more common requests we receive from you regarding management pack availability is to communicate when new and updated releases become available. While we are looking to improve such an announcement capability in Pinpoint (the site of our new System Center Catalog – see my earlier blog for more information) the product team recently created a Twitter hashtag, #mpreleases, to help communicate of new and updated management packs.
Of course, given the open nature of Twitter it’s not just for Microsoft to leverage. Our partners, such as members of the System Center Alliance, MVPs, and more, can also leverage Twitter to announce and post links to more information about their management pack releases.
For more information on Twitter, check out http://www.twitter.com. Details on hashtags can be found here.
Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters
- Toolbox.com Chat, this morning: Join us!
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Hi everyone, Kenon Owens (@ms_int_virt) and Jeff Wettlaufer (@jeffwettlaufer) are live in Toolbox.com chatting today this morning about all things System Center. Come join us, the entrance is free, and there is a LOT of great discussion happening.
Here is the link to join us……
Kind regards
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
- Happy Data Privacy Day … from System Center
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Yes, it really is an established day. Check out http://dataprivacyday2010.org/:
Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information. In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements, and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask – who is collecting all of this – what are they doing with it – with whom are they sharing it? Most of all, individuals are asking ‘How can I protect my information from being misused?’ These are reasonable questions to ask – we should all want to know the answers.
This is a great day to think about “How private is your backup?”
System Center Data Protection Manager has quite a few capabilities that support this kind of goal.
Is your data protected on Tape? Are the tapes encrypted?
It seems like a simple question, and the process is straightforward. You check the box that says “Encrypt Tapes”. But so many folks forget or choose not to. Sometimes, these kinds of settings are mandated at corporate, but seem to be forgotten by the time that the backup administrator actually is clicking the boxes.
Thankfully, DPM 2007 and DPM 2010 are PowerShell controllable. So, consider running a PowerShell script that reaches out to the list of DPM servers and setting the “Encrypt Tape” option after the fact. This way, no matter how the initial jobs are done, you can push out corporate policies to ensure that your backup tapes are private.
We covered this and several other easy PowerShell DPM management scenarios in a webcast quite a while ago at http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032353820
And while we are looking at tape…
What happens if your tapes are lost in transit?
I often joke as to “Why should you pay some guy in a truck to come lose your tapes for you?”. That is not a knock against all courier and vaulting providers (though it is a ding on a few). My point is to challenge, why ship tapes when you can replicate the data offsite and then create the tapes there?
DPM 2007 and DPM 2010 provide the ability to replicate from an on-site DPM server to an off-site DPM server. Once the data is at the off-site DPM server, THEN do your backups. Regardless of SOX, HIPAA, GLB, CO-OP or any other regulation, the tape is in a different geography than where your production server is. It is an off-site backup tape. The regulations and compliance guidance doesn’t say “you must pay a third-party to ship tapes”. The goal is simply to ensure a recoverability capability that will survive a catastrophic site crisis.
And if you don’t have two sites to replicate between, or even if you do but would prefer to outsource these processes – DPM has partnered with one of the best names in the business for offsite vaulting and data preservation, Iron Mountain. To check out our partnership around DPM, please check out www.microsoft.com/DPM/cloud.
Is your data private over the wire during the backup itself?
For that, consider an easy IP SEC policy that can be mandated within Active Directory Group Policy. It can be as easy as configuring a policy where, “Any network traffic going to IP address 192.168.0.91 should be encrypted”, where that IP address is the DPM server. Data to and from the DPM server is encrypted, while other traffic remains unscathed. Some routers support this capability as well.
Thanks for reading …
- Update – Cumulative Update for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 available in all localizations
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Further to my blog on the consolidated updates for Operations Manager a couple of days ago, I’m pleased to announce that the team has pushed through the final localizations [Chinese (Simplified and Taiwan) and Portuguese (Brazil)] for the Cumulative Update for Operations Manager 2007 R2.
The details of what is included in the update can be found at KB974144, and all localizations can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center by selecting your language from the drop-down box.
Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters
- Bang Your Head!!!
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Sometimes it can be annoying when a song gets stuck in your head, but pretty hard to avoid – especially when you have a habit of fixating on things like I do. When my daughter asks me to download some new songs for her Zune, I end up getting the latest songs by Justin Bieber, Katy Perry or Taylor Swift stuck in my head for at least a day. Sometimes I get the new edgier stuff my son listens to stuck in my head – something of the “Screamo” nature. I like to consider myself a “hip” dad, so I fight the urge to make comments like my dad used to make when being forced to listen to my Ted Nugent or Aerosmith albums, “You call that singing? That’s not singing!That’s just screaming!” Actually, my dad was pretty good to let me work my music in rotation with his Andy Williams or Debbie Boone tapes on long family car trips. Heck, he even threw in some Al Di Meola, which we ALL liked. I suppose it’s healthy to cleanse the musical palate every now and then, anyway.
If music is the soundtrack of our lives, then I’m guessing that for many IT admins working in smaller IT departments, the classic ‘80’s Quiet Riot hit, “Bang Your Head” is on their Top 10 stuck-in-my-head playlist. What’s driving this playlist is likely the 70% of time spent dealing with “desktop” (PC or laptop) issues. So, why is this such a big time hit and worthy of head banging? Based on my conversations with our customers, I’d have to say the following factors are driving this situation:
- IT departments in midsize businesses tend to be under-staffed compared to larger enterprises
- These IT folks work more as “generalists” who need to react to whatever IT issues come up, when they come up
- There aren’t a lot of great desktop management solutions on the market for midsize businesses, so much of the work to keep employees’ PCs up and running requires going “desk-side” to troubleshoot and manually fix problems. This can really be time-consuming when you have to support branch offices
- Dealing with updates and software deployment without an integrated management solution (or manually) is time-consuming
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Microsoft is launching great solutions to help the IT departments in midsize businesses fill their Top 10 playlists with songs like “Easy” by the Commodores, or maybe “I Gotta Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas, to be more current. System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010 provide an easy to use and integrated solution for managing and backing-up these PCs and laptops to cut the time spent reacting to desktop issues and keep everyone productive. With this System Center solution you can:
- Monitor PCs and laptops for software and hardware alerts like application health, operating system health, disk space usage and link to troubleshooting information if a problem should arise. In many cases there are in-line links to click and remotely fix issues
- Centrally configure update policies to deploy Microsoft AND third-party software updates, plus things like BIOS and other hardware updates
- Automatically gather hardware and software inventory for all your managed PCs and laptops
- Easily and quickly package and deploy MSI and EXE based software including the Office suite of products – no more time consuming long roll-outs to branches and remote offices
- Quickly and safely back-up and restore your Windows based laptops and PCs
So, click on the product links above to download the betas and give them a try. Not only will you be able to reduce IT costs, improve IT availability, and improve IT service quality – you can optimize the efficiency of those desktops and stop banging your head!
"Goodbye" (Spice Girls)
David Mills
Sr. Product Manager
System Center
- Delivering Solutions Built on Next Generation Infrastructure-to-Application Models with HP
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Hi everyone, recently Microsoft announced a joint investment agreement with HP to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive integration of a technology stack to date, from infrastructure to applications, through sales and services. It is exciting to think about how this will substantially improve customer experiences developing, deploying and managing IT environments.
But what does this mean? 2 large IT solution companies, 1 entrenched in software from consumer to enterprise – the other an industry leader in hardware and software+services? The goal of the relationship is converged application platforms, comprehensive virtualization solutions and integrated management offerings. But what does that mean?
Well, I managed to get some time with Brad Anderson, Microsoft CVP, who was the lead on the Microsoft side driving the discussions and agreements. We got a short video of our discussion, which goes through the main components of the agreement, and what it means to our customers, our partners and each other.
Brad emphasizes a few main areas of focus.
The big area of interest where we have seen twitter streams (#HPMSFT), account team traffic and public commentary around is the convergence of server, storage, network and application resources in an aligned software roadmap. There will be more to come on this - this is just the beginning of a multi year effort.
A second focus of the agreement is around improving business application experiences (Exchange, SQL, SharePoint) through an optimized, deeply integrated infrastructure-to-application environment that is shipped directly from the HP factory to provide “push-button” simplicity in deployment and management. Clearly a benefit of the H/W relationship.
Driving the growth of virt through integrated and interoperable virtualization management tools that allow automatic provisioning, management and continuously self-tuning services is another area of focus, where both Microsoft and HP have part of the recipe.
Both MS and HP will also increase their investment by10x globally to drive new opportunities for 32,000 HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners. Partners will support customers in modernizing their environments through a combination of software and hardware infrastructure-to-application packages and services.
And, in addition to the Partner community, 16,000 Microsoft certified HP Technology Services, and Microsoft Services professionals will drive service offerings through workshops, ROI and business value services.
More information can be found here.
This is a link to the video with Brad.
We blog regularly at our team site here.
Thanks for your time…………
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
- Are You A Collaboration Basket Case?
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As an old-school backup guy, one of my favorite sayings is:
“If you are putting all your eggs in one basket, it better be a good basket”
It’s true for Virtualization (which I will talk about in a future post) and it’s true for collaboration platforms like Exchange or SharePoint. And when I refer to the “basket” being good, I am not talking about the SharePoint platform or the Exchange platform or the Virtualization platform – I am talking about your backup.
Are you confident that once you put all of your good information into your collaboration platform, will you be able to protect it, how will you restore it, is it supported?
That is the question that I ask everyone who is planning their deployment of:
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Exchange 2010
- SharePoint 2010
- Hyper-V R2
I am especially interested when you are planning to do a large and (keyword) distributed SharePoint farm, or when you are planning on using DAG in Exchange 2010 (or CCR/SCR in Exchange 2007). Because, those are some of the scenarios we most often hear hesitation from customers that use legacy backup solutions.
In fact, one of the main reasons that Microsoft originally entered the backup market with System Center Data Protection Manager is to ensure that when Microsoft customers were planning their deployment of one of our premier server products, they would have confidence that they would be able to back up and successfully recover their data.
Last week, I gave a webcast called Get Ready for DPM 2010 Release Candidate to about 500 of my new best friends. The RC software is expected in the first week of February, so we wanted folks to start planning for it. We talked a lot about the new features, including enhancements that we made for these newest server technologies from Microsoft. We also talked about new features around Windows Client protection and Disaster Recovery. If you get the chance, please check it out the on-demand webcast.
But for those of you who cannot wait to deploy DPM 2010, I wanted to draw your eye to some DPM guru’s out in cyberspace that are doing some great work around using DPM to protect and recover your collaboration platforms:
Chris Whitehead is a Premier Field Engineer for SharePoint in the UK and a fan of DPM. He recently posted a series of blogs on SharePoint and DPM. One of the things that I like about Chris is that he has a different point of view.
- We in the DPM team think about “backing stuff up” … and what is necessary to protect each workload, such as SharePoint.
- Chris thinks about SharePoint … how to architect it, how to deploy it, how to manage it, how to troubleshoot it, as well as how to back it up.
Chris’ perspective has helped us build a better protection and recovery experience for SharePoint, and hopefully his blogs will help you too.
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 1 - A love/love relationship
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 2 - How does DPM protect SharePoint data?
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 3 - How does DPM restore SharePoint data?
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 4 - Why do I get this error?
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 5 - What's coming next?
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 6 - What about Search?
· DPM and SharePoint - Part 7 - OK, you've convinced me, where do I find out more?
Thanks Chris !!
And the Exchange feature owner in the DPM development team recently started blogging about what is coming in DPM 2010 for Exchange 2010, and especially why you still need backup – even when you are running DAG.
Check out his post on the DPM team blog.
Another of my new favorite sites is SCDPMonline.com, which is run out of the UK who is becoming scary good at helping DPM do things even better than how it comes out of the box – between his new Management Pack, as well as scripts and customizations. But I digress…
So, before you become a “Basket Case”. If you are deploying a collaboration platform, let me ask you …
How are you going to back it up ?
Thanks for reading.
- Cutting through the FUD: Facts you should know about Hyper-V and System Center
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I originally posted this on my Virtualization Planet blog but I wanted to post it again here because of the importance of the message. Recently, there have been a number of articles and blog posts that I feel are overly critical of Hyper-V and System Center to a fault. While it’s within anyone’s right to post their opinions on Hyper-V, lately, there has been a lot of comparisons and opinions that I feel fall into the FUD category. That’s why I felt compelled to write up something to respond.
When I meet users and customers, especially at shows like TechEd EMEA and VMworld, I often get asked "why do comparisons to VMware at all?" The honest answer is that we get asked for comparisons against VMware and often, we have to respond to negative attacks on Hyper-V.
What is FUD? I think a lot of people forget what FUD really stands for. FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. FUD is when people make assertions or statements that simply are trying to scare people away from what they are attacking. FUD is not simply an argument that you don’t agree with.
I do want to make clear that not everyone is pushing FUD. There are many articles and bloggers out there, including Pro-VMware ones, that are not pushing FUD. I read many of them regularly and I respect and appreciate what they write (even if I don’t always agree :) ). Unfortunately, lately, there still seems to be articles and posts, that people keep highlighting due to their provocative titles, that are more FUD than fact.
The issue is that the FUD being spread about Hyper-V is for one purpose, to get you not to try Hyper-V and System Center. Very few of the FUD articles say something like “Try both solutions out and compare". They all basically say “It’s not worth your time to try it, trust me” or “You might try it a little but don’t deploy it as it’s very risky and your business might suffer because of it.” This goes against the most basic point that I make on my site, which is to try Microsoft Virtualization , evaluate it, deploy it for workloads, ask others who have deployed it, and see for yourself.
What I want to do today is not address specific articles on Hyper-V. I want to address a couple of key facts to help sort through the FUD that is being posted. So let’s start:
- You do not need to remove or replace your existing VMware installation to deploy Hyper-V
This is probably the most important fact that seems to be missing when reading the FUD articles. Those articles work on the premise that you have to dump your VMware investment, that the Microsoft solution requires you to remove your VMware systems.
At the most basic level, you can deploy Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization side by side with any VMware installation. Virtualization is a growing technology and there are plenty of opportunities in most businesses to deploy both hypervisors. It is NOT an all or nothing proposition.
More importantly, the management stack for Microsoft Virtualization supports managing VMware systems also. Virtual Machine Manager supports managing VMware servers and the integration points to the rest of System Center allow you to take advantage of the features of Microsoft Virtualization Management, even if you only have VMware and do not deploy Hyper-V. And it’s not just about managing and integrating VMware with System Center, but also providing key Microsoft unique features such as In-Guest Monitoring, End to End, Physical to Virtual to Application Level management, and advanced features such as Performance Resource Optimization (PRO). In a VMware environment, Microsoft System Center is a compliment to the existing VMware infrastructure, not a replacement for the VMware tools.
In fact, if your organization already uses Windows Server or System Center, you may already have the infrastructure to deploy and manage Hyper-V. Microsoft Virtualization is built so that it doesn’t require you to build an entire new IT infrastructure to support it. Rather, it leverages as much of your existing IT infrastructures as possible, whether it be physical or virtual, Microsoft or VMware, or even Desktop or Server. Trying out Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization is easy to do.
- Hyper-V is Enterprise Ready
There seem to be a lot of people out there that have what I call checkbox-itis. Checkbox-itis is the tendency to focus on feature checkboxes rather than on features and business cases that apply to real deployments. Checkbox-itis often is used by those who try to tell you what is “Enterprise-ready” based on feature sets they feel are important. Hyper-V and the rest of Microsoft Virtualization is “Enterprise ready” for hundreds of companies today. You can read the case studies on our Microsoft Virtualization site for some great examples of that. The features and capabilities of Microsoft Virtualization provide benefit to all those customers.
The truth is that “Enterprise ready” is only applicable to YOUR Enterprise and YOUR requirements. Simply attempting to look for features in software and NOT mapping them to your requirements needs is the wrong way to evaluate if a software meets your needs.
Many of the FUD articles keep citing features that VMware has that Hyper-V does not as an example of what is required for Enterprise readiness. In this worst case of checkbox-itis, they don’t even discuss what the applicability of those features are or even the limitations. They just simply tell what the features are, that Hyper-V doesn’t have it, and because of that, Hyper-V isn’t “Enterprise Ready”.
The truth of the matter is that some of features are new to VMware also. If those features are truly required to be “Enterprise Ready”, does that mean that older versions of VMware like ESX 3.5 are not “Enterprise Ready” any longer? Should people be worried that their existing installations are somehow in danger? Of course not.
That gets right back at the FUD issue. Trying to scare people with checkbox-itis to not trying Hyper-V. The importance of features is based on each company’s requirements, not someone’s list of features. Try out Hyper-V, look at its feature set, and try it. If it doesn’t meet your requirements for certain workloads, deploy VMware for those workloads. But for the majority of workloads, I believe that Hyper-V will meet the requirements. And don’t forget, either way, you can manage both the VMware servers and Microsoft servers using the Microsoft management stack.
- Virtual Machine Manager is not a replacement for vCenter
Whenever the FUD articles actually acknowledge that Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) manages VMware, they always cite specific features that VMM doesn’t do to VMware environments. The simply answer to this is that VMM wasn’t designed to replace vCenter. It’s designed to be the centralized, day to day virtualization management tool for multiple hypervisors, such as creating VMs, moving VMs, configuring VMs, and optimizing the placement of VMs.
More importantly, many of the features that people cite as missing in VMM are found in the other System Center tools. Why is that? That is because the Microsoft philosophy is that one tool set, one management infrastructure, should be used to manage both physical and virtual. We believe it doesn’t make much sense to have both a physical AND virtual monitoring tool, a physical AND virtual backup utility, a physical AND virtual update and software deployment tool. In the end, tt’s not really about Physical OR Virtual management or even Physical AND Virtual management. It’s about IT management as a whole and if virtualization is to become a core feature capability of everyday IT, the management of virtualization needs from a specialization to a model like System Center has adopted.
Finally, as with Hyper-V and the rest of System Center, VMM is not an either/or implementation. VMM integrates with vCenter with existing WebAPIs. In fact, when you initiate an action in VMM against a VMware server, VMM tells vCenter to perform the action. Thus, work done in VMM against a VMware server is shown in vCenter because vCenter does the work and work done in vCenter shows up in VMM via the APIs. You do not need to stop using vCenter to use VMM. The systems are not mutually exclusive. Even some past behavior in VMM 2008, such as creating new port groups in vCenter, have been changed in VMM 2008 R2.
- Hyper-V is a mature, safe, secure hypervisor
This is probably most cited point by the FUD articles that have been written. They claim Hyper-V is somehow unsecure, unreliable, immature compared to VMware. Most of those articles never actually cite specific instances, issues, or problems that would confirm those points. The true test is to try Hyper-V and perform the necessary test and evaluations against both it and the competition. While no software is infallible, the growing track record of Hyper-V and the rest of the Microsoft Virtualization solutions speak for themselves.
My final point is one that based on my conversations over the years, that many of you agree with me on. Virtualization and Hypervisor choice is not like going to war. You don’t have to pick one side only and you don’t have to destroy the other side to successful. People take it way too seriously. Virtualization is a great technology but it’s simply that, a technology. Something we use to make our lives easier and better.
As I have stated throughout this post and in most of my posts, try Hyper-V and the Microsoft Virtualization products for yourself. That is the only way to determine what Microsoft Virtualization can do for you.
Edwin Yuen
Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
- HP and Microsoft Team up for the Next Generation of IT
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Hi all - Today Microsoft and HP
announced a $250 million engineering, sales and services partnership to advance
cloud computing and help customers better use IT for business success.
You can read the press release and watch videos of executives commenting on the
agreement here.
This is a broad agreement with many components, building on our 25 year
partnership with HP. As someone closely involved, I thought I would
provide some insights about what it means for customers and partners.
This is clearly a big commitment on our part. Overall, our intent is to
deliver no less than a next generation computing platform. The goal is to lead
the adoption of cloud computing while helping companies to realize immediate
business benefits through IT. With this partnership the two companies are
working toward new models for application delivery, hardware architecture and
IT operations.
Together HP and Microsoft plan to deliver a deeply integrated IT stack for
business applications. We are driving architectural innovation that connects IT
infrastructure to applications for better performance, reliability and
availability of the industry's top business applications with push-button
simplicity - all at a low cost of ownership.
For example, pre-integrated hardware, software and application solutions, based
on HP Converged Infrastructure optimized for Microsoft Exchange 2010, will give
customers better uptime, performance and data protection at a low cost per
mailbox.
Key to this deal is integrating virtualization and systems management across
heterogeneous datacenter and cloud environments. Seamless management for both
physical and virtualized systems will provide automatic provisioning and
self-tuning, which will help customers automate application deployment, system
monitoring, power management and server performance.
Another example: We're working to improve administrator productivity and
simplify management through deep integration of HP's Insight Software and
Business Technology Optimization software portfolio with Microsoft's System
Center suite. Customers can automate the maintenance of virtualized IT services
in mixed datacenter environments.
We're excited about our joint engineering roadmap and commitment to innovation
for both today and the future. This partnership will result in
greater customer confidence to deploy new business capabilities that leverage
existing IT investments and take advantage of the new world of private and
public cloud resources, based on Windows Azure.
The partnership also includes big investments in HP Technology Services and
Microsoft Services to provide design, implementation and support for our joint
solutions. We are also increasing our joint investment in our
HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partner network by 10 times, empowering partners
to help customers implement and manage the solutions.
We think this partnership will usher in a new period of opportunity and
possibilities for customers and partners worldwide.
Let us know what you think!
David Greschler
Director of Integrated Virtualization & Management at Microsoft
- The Medium IS the Message?
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In case you haven’t noticed yet, the current BIEB campaign theme is “Improve Communications and Collaboration.” This means I spent some time this past weekend thinking about what an impact either really effective or ineffective communication can have on businesses or society as a whole (yes, I tend to get philosophical over the weekend). I also thought about how my birthday is this week and wondered whether I’d effectively communicated my gift ideas to friends and family – guess I’ll find out soon enough. Anyway, the year I was born Marshall McLuhan became famous with the publication of Understanding Media, in which he states right at the beginning that a medium is "any extension of ourselves”, or most importantly, he defines media as technological extensions of the body. He passed away in 1980, but maybe he imagined us in the 21st century running around with our laptop and phone “technological extensions” texting, IM-ing, emailing, Facebook-ing, Twitter-ing, etc…
So what ARE the IT communication and collaboration “mediums” a medium-sized business depends on and how do we improve them? (Note my use of the homonym “medium” – hahaha-choke). If you read Jeff Wettlaufer’s blog on this topic from last week, you’ll notice he really hit the nail on the head identifying the shift in communications and collaboration mediums taking place in larger companies AND midsize businesses today: “Emails are no longer the only way people talk. VOIP, Instant Messaging, email extensions to hardware like unified communication telephone systems, and social networking have simply become the way offices stay in touch.” Since pretty much every IT admin I talk to who works in a midsize business says that communication (email, VOIP, IM, etc.) is the #1 most critical piece of IT infrastructure keeping the business up and running, we know we have to deliver the right tools to help our customers better manage this part of IT.
Jeff also mentioned a lot of the really powerful technology our System Center solutions offer to help larger companies keep the lines of communication going, but most people don’t realize we have the very same underlying technologies built into our midsize business solution (read SCE 2010 + DPM 2010). SCE 2010, designed with a single unified console to manage your Servers, PCs, hardware and services, also uses Management Packs to analyze performance availability, configuration and security settings, as well as the status of communication application and server resources. Together with the physical and virtual data protection capabilities of DPM 2010, this solution enables:
- Increased messaging availability with end-to-end management of physical and virtual environments
- Improved compliance through best practice automation
- Optimization through specific configuration and performance monitoring capabilities at the application level
- Continuous data protection of resources like Exchange servers and Sharepoint content databases
So, as you head into 2010, you might want to take stock of the IT “mediums” your company depends on to effectively communicate and collaborate, then see how the benefits of integrated virtualization and management can help you cut costs and improve your company’s bottom line. And, since the “medium is the message”, outages or performance issues can have a far greater impact on today’s business than ever before - let’s be careful out there.
Trivia: More than ten years after his death Marshall McCluhan was named the "patron saint" of Wired magazine.
Once again, thanks for reading this post!
David Mills
Sr. Product Manager
System Center
