bcs – The Chartered Institute for IT

On my journey reading and collecting information that is important to me, and it might be important to you too, I came across a write up or article that gave some more insight to the virtual IT world that many of us are living in, or moving into, please take your time to read it.

There is a lot of very good things, and it is not so technical, I think many people writing about virtualization dives too deep into the technical topics. This article is high-level and bring the history into the picture as well:

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.9428

In simple terms hardware virtualisation involves the emulation of hardware components and the ability to make an operating system believe it’s the real thing.
There are many more types of Virtualisation:

• Storage virtualisation
• Desktop virtualisation
• Network Virtualisation.
• Security Layer Virtualisation
• Network Name Virtualisation
• Last but not least Application Virtualisation
  

Just an sample of some of the area covered by the article.

The article is written by Frank Boesche, he is a manager with PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada. He leads currently a national thin client/utility initiative and is an active advisor to that industry

CIO Digest Preview: Green Virtualization

Alan Drummer, creative director at the NAVAJO Company, provides an overview of the CIO Digest magazine article, “Green Virtualization.” Alan expands on ways organizations can see huge savings in power and cooling while putting less strain on the environment.

Listen to the podcast from Symantec

http://www.symantec.com/business/products/podcasts.jsp?pcid=pcat_business_cont&pvid=sv_sol_pro_1

"I can just right-click and say, ‘build a new machine,’ and it will go out to the hypervisor and build it

I came across this article when reading about companies that has been doing virtual infrastructure for some time now, and I thought that I should share some highlights of this article.

HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. — An Electronic Systems Center pilot project will help officials here evaluate the full potential of virtualization, which allows computer resources such as memory, processing, network and disk space to be partitioned and efficiently redistributed

A virtualized infrastructure represents the physical resources of the entire IT environment, aggregating computers, storage and networks into a unified pool of resources, according to Ray Smith, an administrator on the implementation team. Resources are then delivered dynamically and securely, offering higher levels of utilization, availability and automation.

With the right implementation, down time can also be eliminated, Mr. Smith said.

The first test of this new capability will come later this month when MITRE officials host a Technical Exchange Meeting in which they will bring their systems to the CEIF on DVDs and portable drives. Many other users are lining up, as well, and the next CWID interoperability trials will test this capability in earnest in June.

"We’re excited to see how users react and to be able to chart the gains from this more efficient use of computing resources," Mr. Smith said.

Make it easy to get it resources – keep the cost down, be smart about your infrastructure. Read the full arcticle here:

http://integrator.hanscom.af.mil/2009/December/12102009/12102009-04.htm

Gartner Says 60 Percent of Virtualized Servers Will Be Less Secure Than the Physical Servers They Replace Through 2012

Gartner research indicates that at the end of 2009, only 18 percent of enterprise data center workloads that could be virtualized had been virtualized; the number is expected to grow to more than 50 percent by the close of 2012. As more workloads are virtualized, as workloads of different trust levels are combined and as virtualized workloads become more mobile, the security issues associated with virtualization become more critical to address.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1322414

89% of all applications sits on vmware platform

According to Gartner, at the end of 2008, 89% of all applications in the world that had been virtualized, were virtualized by VMware solutions.

Would you like to get a jumpstart into some of the things that Gartner says about virtualization, then here is a good start.

http://www.pressebox.com/pressemeldungen/gartner-deutschland-gmbh/boxid-289567.html

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(pressebox) München, 17.09.2009, Gartner has published its first hype cycle for virtualisation. The hype cycle outlines 36 technologies at different stages of development. It identifies six technologies that will have a business transformational impact within the next five years. Among them are the virtualisation trend as a whole, x86 server hypervisors and the PC virtual software appliances.

In the next two to five years, Gartner predicts that virtualisation as a whole will have a transformational business impact.

copyright Gartner.

We were drowning in our own costs

We were drowning in our own costs – we were basically a break even company. But by virtualizing our datacenter with VMware, our profitability has increased more than 30% year-over-year. That’s money in the bank. We haven’t needed to grow our infrastructure to increase our profitability or hire new people because we are able to do so much more with what we already had.”

Shaul Swartz, CEO, Netkeepers

To maintain a competitive advantage over the long-term, you need to generate consistently profitable growth, which means lowering costs and boosting productivity.

One can only grow capacity and increase speed with a responsive business infrastructure. That will become your platform for capturing new opportunities and converting them into success.

Also, it is your job is to anticipate obstacles, and you must be confident that your organization has the tools to move past them with a minimum of disruption.

All of these points sum up why agility has become the watchword for today’s businesses.

The CO2 talk! Action or “Business as usual?”

Do we care , or do we just pretend to care?
It is not my game to jump into talk about politics, and tells who is right and who is wrong. Due to the line of business and the company I work for, some things become more obvious than others, and the same question pops up in my mind from time to time. Can we make a differences? Can change? Will we change?
Reading Tom Deweese’s website http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/2009/11/barack-obamas-suicide-mission-to.html many new questions see the light of the day, but do we even dare to talk about what and how we can change?
Could we / should we enforce changes that will make a difference to the climate, and can we make it globally? Here is a list of items we could talk about enforcing to change
1-person-driving-the-car: We could enforce that in rush hour you would only be allowed to drive if there is 2 or more people in the car
every-second-street-light: We should switch off every second streetlight in the major streets and in industrial areas
truck-on-the-train; We should demand that trucks that needs to travel more than a defined distances must go on a train
datacenters-must-be-virtualized; We could enforce that industries must have a virtual first policy, and demand that every physical server must have min 10 virtual systems
Cut the power consumption by 50%, easily!!
if all organizations looks to use virtualization software in their data centers then we could easily save 50% of the power used in our data centers today, imagine what that could / would do to the environment!

IS YOUR DATACENTER USING VIRTUALIZATION? If not WHY???

Virtualization: Smart IT Investment in a Tough Economy

Given today’s weakened economy, CIOs are naturally reconsidering their IT budgets, wondering if the spending priorities they set earlier in the year are still appropriate. But if the CIOs interviewed for the Goldman Sachs IT Spending Survey of July 2008 are representative, those priorities make even more sense now than they did before the recent downturn.

They identified their top three spending initiatives over the next 12 months (in order of priority) as server virtualization, server consolidation and cost cutting.

Considering the well-known advantages of data center virtualization, which arise in large part from its ability to support server consolidation and reduce operating expenses, there’s certainly no reason to reprioritize that spending mix.

But CIOs who focus solely on those aspects of virtualization could still find they have the wrong investment mix after the economy emerges from its slump. That’s because consolidation and cost-cutting are just the first step in the virtualization journey that leads eventually to cloud computing: a completely abstracted, highly flexible and agile IT infrastructure that can deliver any content to any device (servers, storage, applications) anytime, anywhere.

interesting article from

January 27, 2009

By Dave Trowbridge – read more here; http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/ts_012709.html

Two Tips That Pay Dividends

• Look at all aspects of server virtualization potential to define ROI benefits that might be overlooked if they are not specifically enumerated. For example, virtualization might let your agency toss out old, outdated equipment that’s too expensive and difficult to maintain, while concurrently allowing new functions that previously had not been considered because of the legacy equipment’s limitations.

• Although virtualization can help squeeze more output from less equipment, it won’t do anything to alleviate the reluctance of some organizations within an agency to share space on the same equipment. Bottom line: To reap ROI, you will need to resolve any culture, turf or security issues.

ROI/ROD/ROE – the basics!

So let us begin, I thought about this post as a starting point to the ROI part of my blog, my intention is to add much more about ROI and it should all be related to virtualization from a management perspective – it is after all what my blog is about. It does not hurt to define what I am talking about.

ROI is ‘return on investment’ and is the CXX’s (CIO/CTO/CFO) yardstick for revenue generated from investment made. It is a strict quantitative measure.

ROO is ‘return on objectives’ and is probably more widely used in the event space. I look at the two as being complimentary. The former is lot more difficult to measure at events.

ROE is ‘return on engagement’ and is an extremely powerful metric for events. Tradeshows and events are face to face opportunities and the engagement factor as it relates to future purchase is significant.

Apart from accountability and justification of your program, it’s important to measure because trade shows do show positive return on objectives, investment and engagement

Inspiration and thoughts;

• Mr Ian Sequiera, Executive Vice President, Exhibit Surveys, Inc – interview about his session that he was going to deliver in “Total Solutions Marketing” show.
• ROI’s Dirty Little Secret by Michael Shoemaker – good dive into the ROI talk.