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Guest post: Hyper-V gives every Windows shop a free pass into “innovation”
Hi, my name is Matt Lavallee and I am the Director of Technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc., based in Massachusetts. Although you may not recognize the company name, we are one of the 700+ multiple listing service (MLS) companies that provide data warehousing for the Real Estate industry in the U.S. As my company took the early step to virtualizing our environment on Hyper-V last year, Microsoft asked me to share my opinion on the results of its recent survey on the state of IT infrastructure investments, conducted by Harris Interactive. One point that stands out on the survey — and should surprise no one — is the shift to belt-tightening in IT: 84% of US respondents cited improving business efficiency (51%) and reducing IT costs (33%) as their priorities in light of the economic downturn. However, I personally disagree that this new mindset is a direct reaction to the economy or that the decreased allocation of IT budget to innovation (29% in the US) are necessarily bad things. First, let us consider that the IT budget is a relatively fixed value year over year — while it may respond to inflation and some cyclical purchases, the vast majority of budget is spent on payroll, annualized licensing, backups, ISP costs, and the regular refresh of equipment. To me, this eliminates a significant stratum of budget from consideration for “innovation” unless you just built your environment last year on five-year-old technology. Second, the actual varying allocation of budget goes to “special projects”, which, for lack of a better term, includes “innovation”. Here is where the survey findings drew too many conclusions and where I feel the indication is astray from real trends. Read More...
Posted 22 June 09 07:39 by porourke | 1 Comments   
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HP releases Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center
Hello - I’m Zane Adam, senior director of System Center and Virtualization marketing at Microsoft. I wanted to share some exciting news related to Microsoft’s virtualization and System Center offerings and HP’s Insight Control Suite for System Center. Read More...
Posted 02 June 09 10:00 by porourke | 2 Comments   
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SCVMM and VMware ESX management
The threat of virtualization sprawl. That was a theme my colleagues heard last week at IDC's "Directions" conference in San Jose. And true to IDC's form, they backed up their predictions with some numbers. Here's an excerpt from one article: Virtualization has often been seen as something of a magic bullet to this problem, promising to consolidate a number of low-utilization servers onto a single piece of hardware. But the average number of virtual machines per server is only five, Bailey noted, with that number going to eight by 2012. So much for the vision of consolidating dozens of servers onto one machine. More important, though, was that IDC found that just going from five virtual machines to eight means there will be 100 million new servers by 2012, and "all of them still need to be managed." That's a problem, she said, since the tools to do this are not keeping pace. Our customers have referred to this issue as "islands," referring to the need for different management tools, interfaces, etc. to manage their heterogeneous environment. After all, customers and partners tell us, they're trying to manage services, no matter if the applications run on Windows or non-Windows, physical or virtualized. For those of you in that last camp, like Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mamut and Maxol, you know that Microsoft and some other systems management vendors are creating tools to keep pace with heterogeneous hypervisors and VMs, and as well traditional physical systems and non-virtualized applications. System Center is one such management tool; VMware vCenter isn't (yet, according to Alessandro). To elaborate on this point, check out RakeshM's latest blog post here. Read More...
Posted 10 March 09 03:43 by porourke | 5 Comments   
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Guest post: virtualization requires the proper perspective
In the past few weeks following the Microsoft virtualization launch event in Bellevue the virtualization buzz keeps growing louder and louder. We keep hearing more and more from customers that virtualization is a key component of their IT infrastructure strategy. IT organizations fall across a wide spectrum of virtualization implementation and sophistication. Some have been doing it for quite some time, while others are just starting or even just starting to think about it. One thing that keeps coming up over and over, however, is the notion of using virtualization as an enabling technology, rather than an end in itself. This means aligning your IT strategies to your business strategies. Ultimately it’s not about how many virtual guests you can run on a physical host, or how cool your underlying infrastructure is – it’s about using these technologies to achieve better business outcomes. Whether the specific goal is to use virtualization to save money, reduce data center footprint, gain competitive edge, drive business continuity and availability, or go green by reducing power and cooling, it all comes down to using virtualization as a means to reach these goals. OK, so that makes sense – so how do I do that? One of the key things that HP and Microsoft recognize is that it is the management tools that really enable you to take advantage of the underlying virtualization technologies. Microsoft System Center, especially with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, will provide easy to use tools that will allow you to manage your physical and virtual environments from a single pane of glass. This means customers won’t have to use one set of tools to manage their physical infrastructure and another set to manage their virtual environment. Read More...
Posted 10 October 08 06:09 by porourke | 5 Comments   
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