Data Center Strategies

Which Reminds Me…

I was just reading an article about IT’s desire to better understand costs (see here). The article reminded me that back in July, I posted (here) an invitation to a survey that Burton Group was conducting as part of my ongoing research on data center cost models. At the time I promised to share some of the results on the blog. Before I go into the details of the survey I’d like to link to some additional information that may be helpful.

1. If you are Burton Group customer, you can download “Counting the Cost of the Elephant in the Data Center”  which contains a more detailed look at cost modeling and also includes a sample spreadsheet that can be used a starting point for looking at infrastructure costs (i.e. what does it cost each year to run a server).
2. There is a recording of my 1/2 day workshop on data center economics from Catalyst 2009 which is available to anybody with a browser. In the interests of full disclosure, this is $199 to purchase.

And while I’ve got your attention, if anybody is interested in talking to me about data center cost models and how they are used in your business, please get in touch via email to nsimpson@burtongroup.com.

Anyway, on the results of the survey…

The 80+ respondents to the study were well distributed across industry segments and company size:

• Participants in all major IT sectors including; education, government, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, energy and consulting.

• Companies ranging in size from less than $50 million to greater than $10 billion in annual revenues.

Out of all the companies surveyed, less than 25% had a comprehensive model for their data center costs. A similar number had no cost model of any kind. The rest of the companies surveyed had some form of cost model that was limited in scope and application.

Of the companies that did not maintain a cost model or only maintained a limited model, the key problems were either lack of motivation (i.e. costs are not a major part of the decision making process) or difficulty in collecting the necessary information because of it’s spread across multiple fiefdoms within the organization (i.e. facilities, purchasing, human resources, etc.)

As to the contents of the data center cost model, at least 25% of those using a cost model did not include any information about power, cooling, or facilities costs. This represents a serious shortcoming as these costs are a significant part of the overall IT costs.

Another point that emerged is that the old idea that a data center should be expected to last twenty years is no longer valid. Of the survey respondents, more than 85% had built or upgraded a data center since the year 2000, with 45% having done the work in the last year to 18 months. Yet 65% of the respondents expect to outgrow their current facility within five years. The major factors dictating data center life were limits on floor space and power distribution, with cooling coming in a distant third.

The biggest gap in terms of data required for a data center cost model was in the area of power. Only about 25% of respondents could track power consumption down to the individual piece of IT equipment, rest had varying levels of insight into their power usage. Interestingly this 25% figure was mirrored almost perfectly by the number of respondents who had calculated PUE for their data center.

Another weakness common to the majority of respondents was the availability of detailed purchase price information for equipment in the data center. Roughly 20% of respondents had the purchase price information in the corresponding Configuration and Management Database (CMDB) entry for the equipment. Another 23% had a spreadsheet that has to be maintained by somebody in the IT organization. But over 50% of respondents would have to track down the information from other sources in the company such as a purchasing department.

Overall, the survey indicated that many IT organizations are not in a position to fully understand the costs of running their data center. The lack of a complete understanding of data center costs creates a potentially dangerous hole in the IT decision making process, especially because IT decisions are increasingly cost driven.

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Storage is too complex

Advanced storage features that  seem whimsically inviting in individual storage systems may prove to be sources of great complexity in a large and a diverse storage infrastructure. Little involvement with business process stakeholders, IT architects and administrators, enables the purchase of “coolest” storage arrays that collectively grow into an unruly management mess.  The lack of proper oversight and adult supervision can result in an inefficient and dysfunctional storage environment so twisted that no team of rocket scientists can unravel it without pyrotechnics.(regards to Robyn Hitchcock – Uncorrected Personality Traits).

hey, cheer up!

In a past blog I touched on the importance of managing information across an enterprise, identifying its value and mapping it accordingly onto storage hardware. Ok, I’ll admit that is not easy, but anything is better than nothing. Even if all storage hardware performed the same with no differentiation, one would still need to ensure that information is properly secured, privatized, discoverable and discarded. None of those is easy to figure out, so let’s turn to another part of the problem:

Storage tier definition

I get asked a lot about the definition of a storage tier. The theory being that once armed with a clear storage tier definition, an organization can place their orders with <favorite vendor here> for tier 1 through tier x. Oh, if only it was so easy, it is not. Storage tiers are in the eye of the beholder. Each organization must set its tiers of service and group storage hardware appropriately. Tier “one” storage to a health insurance records processor is tier “unusable” for a financial institution processing stock transactions.

complexity makes life interesting and ensures full employment.

One truism in the storage industry continues to be, well, ah, true: there is no shortage of storage product to pick from when defining a storage tier. Vendors and technology abound, innovation lives. But in that innovation lies the seeds of confusion and poor choices. Like the Cambrian explosion, many possible forms of storage products simultaneously coexist, but someday their diversity will diminish as market forces willow down the weak contenders.

I need to be careful here lest I rile anyone’s feathers but to test the “complexity” theory open the web page of your favorite top tier storage vendor. I mean companies like IBM, EMC, NetApp, HP, HDS and the like. Count the storage product offerings. On one site I counted 22 major product families and countless model numbers. Talk about covering your bases! Now of course all these models exist because someone is buying them – a testament to good selling techniques. But really, can’t things be simplified? Does the perversity of products help end customers of just allow vendors to inextricably infuse themselves into IT infrastructure? 

Not to let the less-than-giant vendors off the hook, they too attempt to fill every nook and cranny hoping to either make it big (a few do) or get bought by bigger companies (win the lottery) or just fade away to oblivion. [quick side note: I did a briefing with KOM Networks recently which makes archive equipment. They’ve been in business for 40 years! amazing.] Again these “ less-than-giant vendors” slice and dice the storage market to the slimmest of  differentiation.

Narrow your choices

Look at your data and service-level requirements to begin narrowing down the useful storage technologies. Is a unified Ethernet in the cards or do you need to carry along a legacy infrastructure? For most, considerations for an existing infrastructure must be made. Think of the future state of where a storage infrastructure needs to be. Plan out the obsolescence of existing equipment and its replacement candidates. If high transactions rates are called for, then a tricked out SSD product is in your future. But don’t put any service on high performance storage without a justification. Unless proven otherwise, services belong on “good enough” storage. Maybe that’s NAS, maybe that's iSCSI or maybe your server virtualization needs will drive the decision.

In any case, keep the “storage tier” count small. Drive down complexity by pushing a “one size fits all” approach. Avoid mixing vendors in a common tier – this can only lead to heart ache. Now that’s not likely to fly but at least the lunatic fringe case will surface and can be dealt with.  As many vendors offer multiple and significant performance levels in a common frame consider these products to span as many service levels as possible

to simplify your life.

Backup and archive will loom large in any well thought out environment. Apply deduplication and recognize that replication across sites or systems (for disaster recovery) will often lock down a common vendor choice between systems to make the replication work efficiently.

Now you may be thinking, I know this, tell me something new. Well, that’s the trouble we know but do not act. Set a plan in motion to minimize the storage product count in your storage environment. And, don’t ever allow a application to be released into the IT wilds without an information and storage mapping plan. Taking this approach should make a CIO smile, knowing that tangible efforts are being taken to drive down costs and align IT infrastructure with business processes.

Posted by Gene Ruth

VMworld Europe Day One Thoughts

The VMworld Europe day one keynote featured VMware CEO Paul Maritz outlining VMware’s future vision, with particular attention paid to the cloud.  Maritz’s session is already available online, so I’m not going to write a point-by-point summary of his keynote. Instead, I’ll focus on a few key thought-provoking topics:

• Standards-based vs. proprietary cloud architectures
• Security and compliance in the cloud
• VMware/Intel client hypervisor announcement
• Mega merger in the works?

Standards-based vs. Proprietary Cloud Architectures

Maritz spent time on the need for public and private cloud standards that promote application migration between different cloud platforms or service providers. By migration, I’m not referring to any type of live migration. Instead, interoperability should remove lock-in to a particular cloud provider and provide enterprises with greater negotiating leverage when evaluating service providers or renewing existing contracts. VMware is painting a very nice vision here.

Security and Compliance in the Cloud

A number of cloud providers (terremark, IT Structures, EngineYard, and Logica) took the stage to describe their technology, which is built on VMware infrastructure. In each case, the service provider described an easy-to-use management model, but not one provider talked about the issue of regulatory and security compliance. Our clients have continued to indicate the compliance remains the primary barrier for enterprise cloud adoption, so I was surprised that none of the providers addressed this concern. If providers want enterprises to seriously consider their platforms, then they will have to do a better job articulating a solution to the existing compliance and security concerns around public shared infrastructure. Reading between the lines, I think it’s implied that cloud service providers currently do not have a working solution for compliance validation on shared infrastructure. If a provider does have such a solution, I would like to hear it.

Ideally, I would like to see a DoD-like standard security model for cloud service providers. For example, assume that the following options were available:

• Level A: Dedicated physical and virtual infrastructure, including dedicated server and networked storage assets.
• Level B: Dedicated virtual and physical server infrastructure, shared/logically zoned storage infrastructure (clients receive dedicated LUNs, but data traverses a shared physical SAN).
• Level C: Shared virtual and physical infrastructure, isolation provided by dedicated virtual security appliances (e.g., VM firewalls, IDS, IPS).
• Level D: Shared virtual and physical infrastructure, no appliance-based segmentation and isolation (isolation provided via VLANs).

I like the tiered model because it can be easily consumed by an enterprise’s security auditors. Am I being overly simplistic here? Sure. But we need something. And the time to start defining a cloud security model is now. Until that happens, I expect our enterprise clients to continue rolling their eyes each time public cloud infrastructure  is mentioned in a vendor keynote. My sample model is meant to be just a starting point for discussion. We need something, and a tiered model would work.

VMware/Intel Client Hypervisor Announcement

VMware announced collaboration with Intel on a client hypervisor. This announcement was almost identical to a similar announcement from Citrix and Intel last month. To be honest, I was hoping to hear from VMware that they would be doing a little more than Citrix – i.e. – upping the virtual ante. Instead, my impression that was Intel is treating VMware and Citrix as equal citizens. Nothing in the VMware-Intel announcement shows any more innovation by VMware over Citrix. Still we’re far too early down the client hypervisor road to declare a leader, since neither Citrix nor VMware is shipping a product. In fact, the only vendor shipping a client hypervisor today is Neocleus.

Mega Merger in the Works?

As time continues to pass and VMware looks at its hole in the enterprise management space, I see the question of a merger with a major enterprise management vendor as now being about when and not if. Here’s what I’m thinking – a BMC merger or acquisition with either VMware or one of its major partners (i.e. Cisco) makes sense on a number of levels. VMware needs a management and orchestration stack that addresses the physical infrastructure (and so does Cisco for that matter). If VMware wants to be a major player (and not a role player) in the future data center, it will need an enterprise management solution. If we take this one step further, what would the impact of a VMware-BMC-Cisco-EMC merger be? Alessandro Perilli has done a nice job covering Cisco acquisition rumors on virtualization.info (see here and here). Personally, I don’t see the public mutual respect between VMware, BMC, and Cisco as nothing more than a needed group hug. Is the fact that Bob Beauchamp (BMC CEO) has been predominantly quoted in the recent NY times article on Cisco’s data center plans a coincidence? I doubt it. In fact, I can see a Cisco acquisition of BMC as a real possibility. Stay tuned. The drama that is good enough for a virtualization reality show is only going to intensify in coming months.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

VMware's Leadership Change - The Dust Settles

Last week while my colleagues were debating the impact of Paul Maritz replacing Diane Greene as VMware's CEO, I was relaxing on a beach in North Carolina's outer banks. I prefer to be "unplugged" while on vacation, so I didn't hear of the news until I returned home last Saturday. My colleagues Drue Reeves (see VMware: Welcome to the Game) and Richard Jones (see VMware CEO Ousted) did an excellent job covering the leadership change, and after having spoken to Paul on Tuesday, I think it's a good time to weigh-in with my thoughts regarding VMware's executive leadership change.

Diane Greene, in my opinion, did a tremendous job in bringing VMware to where it is today. VMware ships the industry's gold standard for x86 server virtualization, has strong sales, and is continuing to push the innovation envelope. This all happened on Greene's watch. In addition, Greene had VMware strategically positioned to continue broadening the company's growth and market presence. With that being said, it shouldn't be surprising that folks inside and outside of VMware felt that a leadership change at this point was a bad move. Alessandro Perilli uncovered much of this turmoil with the following posts on Virtualization.info:

• Was Diane Greene really approved by VMware employees?
• EXCLUSIVE: VMware employee reveals details on CEO firing, exposes Tucci and Maritz confidential emails
• VMware loses its CEO – Updated

Complacency has never been an effective strategy against Microsoft, so I must say that I understand the timing of the move. VMware has to move forward with a sense of urgency, and dare I say desperation. A complacent VMware would likely get steamrolled by Microsoft. History has proven that time and time again. NetWare and Word Perfect are two good examples of best-of-breed products that eventually succumbed to the Microsoft juggernaut. As Microsoft's previous successes have shown, they don't have to have the best technology to win. "Good enough," combined with low total cost of ownership and simple, effective management has historically worked very well.

Now let's get back to the leadership change. I see it as a good move. Many don't like Maritz's lengthy history with Microsoft, but that's exactly why I see him as the right leader at the right time. Maritz was part of Microsoft's core executive team that took Microsoft from dismissed start-up to dominant force in office applications, desktop operating systems, and server operating systems. Maritz knows how to take on and defeat large companies with well established product lines. Yes - VMware has the dominant hypervisor today, but VMware's future depends on much more than hypervisor dominance. VMware's future will ultimately be tied to the value it brings to applications.

At the end of the day, what matters most is whether or not our applications are available to users. Microsoft realized this long ago, and when you look past virtualization, Microsoft has a better application management story than VMware today. VMware has the best virtualization management solution going, but in the end I don't see that as being enough to hold out against Microsoft. I mentioned in my Apple - Opportunity is Knocking post that the desktop as we know it is in a state of transition and opportunity exists for a more innovative solution to eventually supplant Windows desktop operating systems. Five years out, the desktop operating system will be fundamentally different. The same can be said for the server, as the OS is trending toward being a thinner, modularized foundation for running applications. Just look at Windows Server 2008 core and the success of Linux-based virtual machine appliances to see that. In addition, we'll be seeing some core IT services transition to cloud-based computing. The cloud may be external to the organization, and I believe many organizations will have their own centrally managed clouds as well (essential to meeting the organization's security and compliance requirements).

Nearly all elements of the traditional data center are in flux, and while this is exciting, it has to worry Microsoft. Microsoft sees the transition and is developing their own next generation application, client, and server solution set. For VMware to win, they will have to deliver a fundamentally superior solution to Microsoft, and do it sooner. Of course, this will initially be a complement to existing Microsoft products. But if VMware has its way, many core IT services will transition to cloud-based offerings and virtual appliances. In the mean time, it's clear that Microsoft isn't sitting on it's hands. If you want proof, take a look at the Live Mesh Technical Preview. Live Mesh is a very intriguing cloud-based desktop delivery solution and should have VMware's attention.

As an analyst, I can afford to be wrong once in awhile and still keep my job. Maritz, on the other hand, likely doesn't have this luxury. That being said, if I was in Maritz's shoes, I would immediately do the following:

• Lower the prices of the entire VMware product line
• Accelerate development on a soup-to-nuts solution for the SMB space
• Accelerate development on VMware's virtual desktop solution
• Focus the company's messaging around the application and the total solution

Microsoft and Citrix are both competing against VMware on price. If VMware refuses to lower prices, vendors such as Microsoft, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell, and Sun will gladly take the market share that VMware concedes. If VMware wants to take away those market opportunities, then it must drastically lower prices immediately. Short term, a substantial price reduction would hurt. However, over time, denied opportunities for VMware's competitors would equate to more sustained revenue for VMware.

Microsoft has long dominated the SMB market and feels strongly that Hyper-V will do well there. When you factor in the System Center management suite and Data Protection Manager, by the end of the year Microsoft will have a very good management and backup solution to complement Hyper-V (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has yet to ship). Microsoft is saying that Hyper-V runs on "the Windows you know and love," but if you configure Hyper-V in the recommended deployment on Windows Server 2008 core, I'm not sure how much love you'll be feeling immediately. I've found a Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 core installation to be more complex than either VMware ESX Server or Citrix XenServer. VMware should capitalize on this, and Microsoft should counter by simplifying the Hyper-V/Windows 2008 Core installation process (yes - it's easy to enable the Hyper-V role, but setting up the network, storage, domain membership, etc. on Windows Server 2008 Core will take additional time). To win the SMB, VMware needs to be cost competitive and offer equivalent SMB management features. I think adding a solution that rivals Data Protection Manager would help.

Some see the virtual desktop as an irrelevant tangent, but not me. Microsoft eventually won the server war due to its integration with the desktop, and I see virtualization as playing out similarly. Citrix is gaining a lot of momentum in the virtual desktop space and Microsoft is telling anyone who will listen to go with the Citrix solution. So VMware has an uphill battle here. VMware has some great ideas for virtual desktop delivery and I feel that they will need them on the street sooner rather than later in order to keep Citrix at bay. Losing the virtual desktop battle may not cost VMware the virtualization war, but it will definitely make their road to success all that more difficult.

Microsoft's core messaging has focused on the solution, while I feel that sometimes VMware places too much emphasis on its individual technologies. When you have a best-of-breed product, you tend to want to brag about the little things that you can do that no one else can. So I understand why VMware is proud of it's individual products. Still, what I want to see from VMware is more about how they are adding value to the entire application stack (management, availability, performance, etc.). Sure, VMware doesn't do it all, but combined with its major partners in the management space, VMware plays a major role in the complete solution. Give us a solution web page that shows how you do it. Better yet, give us a web 2.0-based site that allows anyone to design a fully virtualized data center using products from VMware's core management partners (e.g., BMC, CA, Dell, IBM, HP). The best technology doesn't always win out in the end, but the best story often does.

VMware - tell us your story.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

Catalyst Day 2 Virtualization Highlights

The second day of virtualization coverage at Catalyst focused on virtualization as an enabler to workload mobility and orchestration, as well as standards-based management for the virtual data center.

For me, the highlight of the day was the DMTF unveiling the public release of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard as a work in progress. In addition to the OVF announcement, DMTF president Winston Bumpus also announced the launch of the Virtualization Management subcommittee. Winston also announced that live demos of vendor OVF integration would be shown at Catalyst for the first time publicly. In terms of the best integration that you can use right now, Novell and VMware are at the top of the list. Novell is currently leveraging OVF in their ZENworks Orchestrator management suite, and VMware has supported using OVF to import VM appliances into Virtual Center since the end of last year. OVF is an XML-based virtualization metadata format and is fully extensible. All vendors that are contributing to OVF have very large long term plans for the spec. Look for OVF to start its transition from a standardized metadata format for importing VM appliances to the industry standard format for VM runtime metadata. There's no technical reason why this cannot happen, so to me runtime metadata seems like OVF's next step in its logical evolution. So it's foreseeable that proprietary VM metadata file formats such as .vmc (Microsoft) and .vmx (VMware) could be replaced with a .ovf file. The fact that OVF is extensible means that vendors can leverage OVF to define custom components of their virtualization stack. So even as virtualization architectures evolve, OVF has been designed to evolve with them.

Neither Citrix nor Microsoft had an OVF implementation at the show that is usable today. Instead, Citrix had developed a tool solely for the purpose of providing a demo, and expects its OVF implementation to be shipping early next year. While I would have liked to have seen more from Microsoft and Citrix, final work on the OVF standard is just wrapping up. So once the standard is ratified I expect all vendors to step up efforts to further support OVF. While there wasn't a shipping OVF solution for Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V at the show, Citrix previewed an internal tool that facilitates Hyper-V to XenServer migrations, and vice-versa. With the tool, I could create a VM on Citrix XenServer, migrate it to Hyper-V and boot it up (the reverse process works too). All that's required is that you preload the paravirtualized device drivers for each hypervisor in the VM's guest OS once it's created. When the VM boots, Windows plug-and-play would load the appropriate drivers for the underlying hypervisor and the VM would be good-to-go. To Microsoft and Citrix's credit, they were the only vendors that were showing how to use OVF to facilitate hypervisor interoperability at the live demo. Still, with the spec nearly complete, it's time to see real implementations and not just a demo specifically prepared for Catalyst. Microsoft missed an opportunity to support OVF in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (it's still beta, but it's too far down the development path to add new features).

VMware CTO Steve Herrod offered an insightful glimpse of OVF's evolution and its future role in virtualization management. Key points highlighted in Herrod's session included:   

• OVF's initial implementation is as a distribution format for virtual machines
   
• Packaging and deploying VMs via OVF includes several advantages:      
        
  • Validation         
              
    • Verify licensing, security, integrity
                
    • Resource requirements and placement
                
    • Application Properties (IP addresses and passwords)
         
  • Conversion         
              
    • Convert virtual disks to run-time format
             
  • Installation         
              
    • Provide runtime environment for application (customization and localization)
                
    • Provide installation feedback to user
 
• Several VMs that are part of an OVF package can be instantiated as a single service object in the virtual infrastructure inventory
   
• OVF helps the industry deliver vendor-independent VMs that are easier to deliver and deploy

I presented a session on VM Mobility and Orchestration, with much of the focus on today's barriers to mobility. Those include:

• Live migration remains unavailable on several platforms (e.g., Hyper-V, Solaris Containers)
   
• Outside of VMware's DRS, dynamic VM load balancing technology is still maturing. Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) and Platform Computing's VM Orchestrator (VMO) are examples of further innovation in this space. Orchestration products from vendors such as Computer Associates and Novell are also providing innovative methods for automating VM relocation in response to changes in workload demands.
   
• Dynamic VM load balancing is going to transition from a reactive technology to a proactive technology, with vendors such as CiRBA providing intelligence to top level orchestrators to migrate VMs in anticipation of expected workload peaks based on historical workload performance patterns
   
• There's no technical reason why vendors cannot agree on a standardized virtual hard disk format. Such a format, in my opinion, would ease third party vendor integration and deployment of virtual appliances. Also, this standard format could include embedded checksums and tokening information that cause the disk to be authorized before it is mounted. This would provide a safeguard against theft of a virtual disk file.
   
• Differences in hardware-assisted virtualization remain a mobility barrier, forcing organizations to standardize physical clusters on AMD or Intel hardware.
   
• Several management issues, such as SLA assurance and compliance are difficult to effectively audit in virtualized environments.
   
• Improvements need to be made in physical server power management before running servers in a suspend state or at a reduced power mode will be an option. Ideally, organizations would like to run servers at a reduced power state as workload needs dictate in order to save on power and cooling costs.

That's it for Catalyst North America 2008's virtualization highlights. I hope to see some of you at Catalyst Europe in the October.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

Microsoft Unveils GSNW 2.0

The big news at today's Microsoft Management Summit was the unveiling of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 beta, which includes the ability to manage VMware Virtual Infrastructure environments. Microsoft can call its VMware management capabilities whatever it wants, but I like to call it Gateway Services for NetWare (GSNW) 2.0. Why?

If you've followed Richard Jones' post Virtualization wars, what can VMware learn from the past, you probably see the analogy. GSNW provided interoperability between Windows and NetWare file serving environments, with an ultimate goal of facilitating NetWare to Windows migrations. Microsoft's addition of VMware virtual infrastructure support to VMM 2008 is fully analogous to GSNW. Adding VMware management support will get Hyper-V into organizations quicker, while familiarizing organizations with Microsoft's virtualization management stack. If all goes as planned, Microsoft believes that over time organizations will migrate off of the VMware ESX platform in favor of Hyper-V.

System Center provides management of the entire software stack: application, OS, hypervisor, and hardware. Hyper-V doesn't have to beat ESX feature-for-feature, as long as the technology is "good enough" and compliments Microsoft's management stack. Microsoft's System Center management solution will present a major challenge to VMware. After all, there's more to the data center than the virtual infrastructure. Management of physical resources, applications, and operating systems is equally as critical, and represents a clear distinction between the Microsoft management solution and that of VMware.

Microsoft's eventual dominance over NetWare has shown that great technology alone is not always enough. Ease of management and tightly integrated OS and application management is important to many organizations, and the release of the VMM 2008 beta, or GSNW 2.0, is Microsoft's first shot over VMware's bow.

Today Microsoft fully unveiled its plans and strategy for taking on VMware. Granted, Hyper-V has yet to ship, but its release is just months away. VMware has time on its side. Virtualization is a core infrastructure technology and it's not something you just rip and replace. VMware has a very loyal user base that trusts critical workloads to the VMware virtualization stack. That being said, Microsoft has shown its hand to VMware. VMware knows Microsoft's strategy, and it's now up to VMware to convince its devoted user base that VMware is the company that should both provide the hypervisor and manage the virtual environment. For VMware, this is not a time for over-confidence. VMware needs to make a compelling case as to why organizations should stick with their solution long term; otherwise, as Richard Jones had predicted, history will once again repeat itself.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

Recession. What to do?

The talk around thousands of water coolers and coffee machines across the nation rages about a very important topic - the economy.  Recently Jack Santos (one of our Executive Strategists) blogged  on this subject taking a look at what had happened in the past while overlaying the change in IT's position within businesses.

At Burton Group, we have all been discussing what's happening and we are postulating as to what it may mean for the future.  Ken Anderson, another Executive Strategist, made the following observation: 

During times of rapid growth, IT organizations focus on methods to deploy services as fast as possible to ensure they are not hampering the company's growth. They position their organization as the key corporate growth enabler.  A good analogy is that of laying train tracks as fast as possible in front of the corporate locomotive racing down those tracks.  However, in times of recession, corporate growth stalls, and heaven forbid, may even shrink.  At this point, what do IT organizations do?  IT is no longer tactically laying tracks as fast as they can.  The IT solutions and infrastructure that were built during expansive times were built as quickly as possible and not necessarily with a focus on cost efficiency and agility.  Now is the time to refocus IT efforts on strategic architecture.  During times of rapid growth, the balance of effort is on tactical rapid deployment compared to strategic initiatives.  During times of recession, the efforts should focus on strategic initiatives that prepare the organization and its IT architecture for future growth while containing immediate costs.

In this light, Data Center Strategies has focused our research efforts on those strategic architectures that lead to the Dynamic Data Center vision; agile computing to enable businesses to respond quicker and more cost effectively than ever before to changing market needs and opportunities.  In times of economic slowdown, competition is fiercest. In these times it is imperative that enterprises respond quickly to opportunities before competitors snap them up.  Agility is crucial.

This year at Burton Group's Catalyst Conference, DCS is focusing on agile initiatives with workshops in Server Virtualization, Business Continuity, and iSCSI deployment as well as session themes on Server Virtualization: Beyond Consolidation, Storage for the Virtual Data Center, Data Center Efficiency: Energized, Miniaturized and Highly Available, and Data Center Management Automation.  Furthermore, Burton Group's Consulting Services (BGCS) organization has recently added Rob Schafer, a noted META group analyst and data center veteran.  BGCS has outlined its strategic focus for Data Centers with the introduction of the Infrastructure and Operations Architecture and Sourcing  practice area.

So when your IT organizations are faced with changes in direction this year, Burton Group is ready to help you.

[Posted by Richard Jones]

Netapp's purchase of Onaro and other musings

Netapp’s purchase of Onaro (maker of storage network management software) closed Tuesday, 1/29. See the previous announcement here. The big  fish eats the little fish….Netapp has about 6600 employees, Onaro has about 50.

Onaro claims penetration into 32% of the Fortune 50 – that will include some mighty big storage area networks (SANs). Having Netapp backing them up should definitely put some muscle behind Onaro’s development teams. 

Onaro, for those not in the know, monitors the coming and goings of a SAN, measuring the traffic through, say a fibre port, and keeping track of what’s connected to what. One of the neat things about the software is its ability to verify that the leg bone really is connected to the knee bone… for instance, say you want to launch a new VM or hook a server to the SAN but you’re not sure everything is connected correctly to do that – well, that’s were Onaro’s software comes in. It provides a picture of the parts and pieces in a SAN so that you can tell what’s what and lets you know when things change. Nice.

Maybe not coincidently, Onaro recently announced expanded support for server virtualization and NAS network storage environments – adding “end to end” visibility to the NAS topology as well as the SAN.

So now put it all together and you’ve got a pretty decent way to peer into the bowl of SAN and NAS spaghetti and keep tabs on all of it. And maybe best of all, given that Onaro’s software provides topology intelligence, when the datacenter folks start switching SAN cables or equipment around, Onaro’s software will help prevent inadvertently bringing down a VM environment and getting to find out just how good that disaster recovery plan really is.

Now the question – will Onaro disappear into the Netapp labyrinth? And how will customers, not inclined to deal with Netapp, get at it? This is often an issue when small independent outfits get recognized for their good works and end up in the hands of a big player.  Certainly Onaro is a nice gem to add to Netapp’s collection, assuming Onaro scales down to smaller environments,  but one has to wonder what will happen when non Netapp shops come looking for this snazzy piece of software.

All in all this could be a big win for Netapp. It ties nicely into ReplicatorX, for instance, making sure the necessary SAN topology is in place to create replicates. As long as NetApp can keep the current Onaro base happy and bring in new players, who may not want the whole Netapp package, life will be good.

On a slight tangent, given that Onaro can help insure levels of service within a SAN topology, here’s a suggestion: marry the Onaro offering to a business continuity platform such as offered by (cleverly named) Continuity Software - a little startup (aren’t they all) out of Israel.

Think consolidation.

Continuity Software sells a package intended to scan an environment for databases and email to, first of all, know that they are there, and then secondly, to point out the sometimes embarrassing fact that some of those data sets are not being replicated as thought. It easy to get in this situation when moving data hither and yon in the course of doing business as is likely when deploying virtual machines and new storage.

Replication schedules may be in place but incomplete – leaving out data sets that have been added or moved. Imagine if an admin can not only get a handle on the SAN topology hooking servers and storage together but also, as an added bonus, ensure that data protect schemes are properly replicating the right stuff connected by that topology.

So, as Onaro tracks a SAN’s topology, performance bottlenecks and changes to it, in similar fashion, business continuity software could, as offered by Continuity Software, be tracking data additions and changes and whether that data is properly hooked into a protection scheme. From a business continuity consolidation point of view, combining these two functions into a common pane of glass could be a nice step towards SAN management consolidation and simplification.

Comments?

[Posted by Gene Ruth]

Welcome to Data Center Strategies

Hello everyone and welcome to Data Center Strategies – DCS for short -- Burton Group’s newest service offering. My name is Drue Reeves, Research Director for DCS and it is my pleasure to introduce the content and people who comprise our coverage for data centers.

As Richard stated in his blog, e-commerce and the information age have catalyzed the explosive growth of compute and storage resources within the data center. IT administrators are struggling to keep pace with the power, space, and storage requirements to accommodate business demands. In addition, data center management remains chaotic, forcing IT administrators to push aside other important tasks such as disaster recovery planning. Today, the data center has reached a breaking point. IT organizations are facing a cold-hard fact: data center infrastructure, power, space, and budget are limiting the ability to conduct business.

But, as the adage goes -- necessity is the mother of invention. New technologies such as server and storage virtualization are driving data center consolidation efforts. The cost-effectiveness of iSCSI is increasing SAN deployments and new power-thrifty processors are driving the “greening of the data center”. Are these technologies ready for the data center? We’ll find out, as we journey through DCS together.

The coverage areas for DCS are broken into four areas that we at Burton Group call “threads”.

• Compute: The compute thread includes data center technologies such as: server architectures and blades, high-available clusters, processor technology, server operating systems, compute grids and high performance computing. Analyst Andrew Kutz will be your guide through the DCS “compute” thread.
• Storage: The storage thread in an interesting one because it includes a wide range of topics from storage platforms and protocols to data management. Data management is the life-blood of IT. After all, “data” is the first word in “data center”. Keep a close eye here as Nik Simpson illuminates this strategic field.
• Virtualization: Could there be a hotter topic than virtualization? A few years ago, server and storage virtualization was considered bleeding edge, worthy of lab projects and testing environments. Today, virtualization is a serious – if not the foremost -- consideration for almost every data center consolidation project. Chris Wolf is the man covering virtualization for DCS.
• Operations and Management: Compute, storage and virtualization resources in the data center must be maintained, managed and placed into operational modes that create a flexible IT infrastructure for business. The O&M thread includes data center manageability, IT processes, power and cooling, outsourcing, co-lo, and operational modes such as disaster recovery that mold data center resources into IT operations. Richard and I are the primary analysts here but, all DCS analysts have some responsibility here.

Once again, welcome to DCS. Enjoy. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]