Windows Virtualization Team Blog : guest blog post

Guest Post: All Eyes on SteelEye with DataKeeper Support for Hyper-V

porourke — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:10:00 GMT

Hi all,

My name is Dave Bermingham and I’m the director of Windows product management for SteelEye Technology, a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. I’d like to thank Microsoft’s Virtualization team for the opportunity to guest blog on SteelEye’s continued support for Hyper-V as well as exciting new features coming in support of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2.

I can’t believe it is almost a year ago since I demonstrated SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition at the Microsoft Virtualization Launch event in Bellevue, WA. In the past year we have seen the interest in our Hyper-V disaster recovery products increase dramatically and with the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2, I believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg!

SteelEye’s mission is to “Replicate Any Data, Protect Any Application.” We pride ourselves on our commitment to provide the Windows marketplace with flexible, scalable and cost-effective solutions that are enterprise-grade yet customizable for any size business. Most recently SteelEye identified an opportunity to extend Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering (WSFC) by delivering SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition, a real-time data replication solution that integrates seamlessly with WSFC to enable multi-site clusters while eliminating the single point of failure traditionally associated with shared storage resources. A comprehensive and cost-effective disaster recovery solution, DataKeeper Cluster Edition helps supports improved productivity and availability of your Hyper-V VMs.

SteelEye soon will be announcing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and the highly anticipated “Live Migration”. As our Windows team continues to develop and build additional capabilities for enhanced disaster recovery support of Hyper-V, we welcome your comments and suggestions. To learn more about the latest developments for Hyper-V support, take a look at our FAQs or visit the SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition page on our website.

Thanks,

Dave

R2 Veeam Too

porourke — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:36:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Doug Hazelman and I’m the director of the Global Systems Engineers Group at Veeam Software. I’ve been with Veeam for almost two years, and prior to that I was with Aelita Software (which was acquired by Quest Software) where I worked with the same management team now behind Veeam Software. I’d like to thank Microsoft for this opportunity to guest blog on Veeam’s direction around Hyper-V.

Veeam’s tagline is “listening to you, building the tools you need.” We’ve heard your requests and we’d like to announce now that Veeam is committed to fully supporting Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. While Veeam has continued to build some of the best software for data protection and management of VMware infrastructures, we realize that customers are now faced with more virtualization choices. By fully supporting Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, Veeam can help you manage heterogeneous hypervisor deployments and clouds with the innovative solutions you’ve come to expect from Veeam. The management and R&D teams at Veeam have a long history of working with Microsoft going back to the Aelita days, and we’re all excited to be working with Microsoft again.

The Veeam engineers are currently focusing a lot of time and energy on how we can provide the best support for Hyper-V. Look for more information in the coming weeks as we disclose more about Veeam’s plans for Hyper-V. And congratulations to Microsoft for releasing R2.

Thanks,

-doug

Blog: http://www.VeeamMeUp.com

Twitter: @VMDoug or @Veeam

Guest Blog: The Role of IT in an Economic Downturn: Spend Smarter, Not Smaller

porourke — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Hello everyone, Richard Campbell here from Campbell & Associates based in Vancouver, BC. I am not only the host of RunAs Radio (www.runasradio.com) but also a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP.

It’s fun being an IT consultant during boom times – my clients are only focused on getting more customers, expanding territories and getting new products to market. There’s no time to worry about costs, it’s time to spend and grow. Speed to market is key and building in lots of capacity so that you can keep serving your new markets is essential.

Looks like that fun is over for the moment, and I’m back in a role I’m comfortable with also: Focusing on return on investment. When the boom times end, it’s time to get back to efficiency and profitability. And there’s lots to do. Whether my clients are technology centric (a company with a retail web site) or technology supported, IT can play a huge role in making the business more profitable and more efficient. Apparently I’m not alone, according to a survey commissioned by Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business (www.microsoft.com/infrastructure) the majority of IT professionals recognize that improving end-user productivity is a key reason for innovation in IT.

Ultimately, information technology can benefit a business two ways: It can improve the performance of the business by making it possible for more revenue to be generated for the same cost or the same revenue for less cost. A new order entry system might allow sales clerks to process two hundred orders in a day where they used to only process one hundred – that’s a great boost in efficiency and profitability. The other benefit technology can bring to a company is better instrumentation: Allowing the management of the business to see more clearly where revenue is made and expenses are incurred. This information then is turned into changes of behavior that increase the profitability of the business.

In an economic downturn, the challenge for the IT Pro is getting back to the concepts of return on investment for technology. This involves studying in detail how the business makes money and where the expenses are incurred. Once those facts are known, then the next step is to find opportunities to improve. It’s really as simple as that. However, the challenge is gathering those core facts – perhaps a better instrumentation system is needed to be able to find opportunities to improve. Maybe that means you need a consultant to help guide the way, or you have the skills in-house, either way the job is clear: spend smarter, not smaller. Don’t focus only on reducing your spend, but on spending on the things that makes your company more profitable and more efficient.

-Richard

Guest post: Hyper-V gives every Windows shop a free pass into “innovation”

porourke — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:39:00 GMT

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.

Consider my environment: We recently made the switch to virtualization and the broad deployment of Hyper-V. This included a change in direction for our hardware refresh (bigger servers), incremental SAN purchases, and some new investment in networking (10GbE)… perhaps enough to reflect the 25% investment in “innovation”, per the survey. A balance sheet, however, would not reflect that we redesigned the entire infrastructure and now run up to 60% more efficiently: all you will see is a marked decrease in operational overhead at the end of the year (i.e., improved business efficiency and reduced IT costs, as the survey reflected).

So why is there no correlation between advancing the infrastructure and innovation spending? I believe that the technology ecosystem has afforded smarter IT spending, particularly with the (dramatic) rise in computing density, the problems it has solved and challenges it introduced, and the tools that were created (or improved) to meet those challenges. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and “green” concepts were alien just five years ago, but now dominate most datacenter conversations. Virtualization via Hyper-V gives every Windows shop a free pass into “innovation” and grants us many new opportunities that were previously out of budgetary reach.

Some question whether this change indicates that IT is no longer aligned with business goals and driving success… I offer that our current focus clearly demonstrates that we are doing exactly what the business needs us to do.

Matt