Results tagged “SMB”

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft's Bob Muglia mentions that even facing VMware's huge headstart Hyper-V is gaining marketshare. Of course, specifics are lacking, but he did let slip that it's making substantial gains in the SMB market, which is unsurprising considering that the market's traditionally been one of the company's strong suits. Looks like a significant number of SMBs haven't been taking the advice of Dell's Erik Dithmer's to skip virtualization tech, to Microsoft's delight.

He also let slip this very interesting nugget captured by Eric Savitz of Barron's:

Finding that many companies to do side-by-side adoption of MSFT's Hyper V and VMware. In side-by-side, we have a 90% win rate, he says. What we are seeing, he says, is doing side-by-side as customers add incremental servers to existing VMware installations.

Muglia also shares an interesting statistic, revealing that roughly 20 percent of all servers shipped are virtualized. And while enterprise adoption skews higher, it still means that the vast majority of servers are likely running underutilized. But Microsoft doesn't seem to be sweating it. Why? Azure, the software giant's cloud computing platform.

While betting on the cloud might pay off, it's not without its risks. In his report on Azure at GigaOM Pro (sub. req'd), Derrick Harris zeroes in on a potential speedbump to widespread adoption: trust. Can Microsoft win over customers in an arena where openness rules? That's just one of the issues it has to wrestle with.

Mind you, he has servers to sell, so salt, grains and all that good stuff...

Erik Dithmer, general manager of Small Medium Business Americas for Dell is telling SMB's to hold their horses on virtualization. Gene Marks, author of "Penny Pincher's Almanac," writes in BusinessWeek:

For many small businesses like mine, Dithmer doesn't recommend it. Thanks, Erik. I completely agree. Virtualization refers to the process of installing multiple "virtual" servers on a single computer. The idea is that instead of having a bunch of machines operating at only a fraction of capacity, put a single machine more fully to use. IT guys and computer companies have been drooling over this stuff for years.

Why? Because many IT guys are just like Balloon Dad. They like to make claims about virtualization to suit their own personal aims. Balloon Dad seemed to be pitching a new reality TV show. For IT guys, the aim is to persuade clients, particularly small business clients, to panic and fly into action and adopt an unnecessary technology just to make a few more bucks for themselves.

Obviously, this article was aimed at the technologically unsophisticated SMB set. If you have a handful of well-managed and reliable systems in your server room/closet, then it's simply not worth upsetting the balance. However, some SMBs are small businesses in name only.

While the employee count may be minuscule, some small businesses control some massive IT resources, and it's these that can really benefit from the virtualization's energy saving potential. Also as one commenter noted, other benefits include the redundancy and flexibility that comes from decoupling operating systems and critical apps from hardware.

The lesson? Just like no two small businesses are the same, neither are their IT requirements. Do your research, dabble in the technology (VMware and Microsoft have freebies and trials that give you a sense of what the tech can do) and go into your meetings with vendors informed.

Today Dell made of flurry of virtualization related announcements. Among the most intriguing are two, quasi-turnkey virtual infrastructure packages, one for full-fledged datacenters and another for SMBs:

Data Center Virtualization Configuration: The unified virtualization platform with pre-configured architectures combines Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS6000 iSCSI storage technology, with Cisco Catalyst networking switches, VMware vSphere 4 and Platespin Migrate from Novell to achieve an intelligent, automated data center.

Small and Medium Business Virtualization Configuration: The Dell virtualization configuration combines the PowerEdge R710, Dell PowerVault MD3000i, PowerVault DL2000 powered by Symantec for backup and PowerConnect networking technology together with Microsoft's virtualization suite, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Essentials and System Center-Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to reduce cost and simplify management of virtualization.

Notice the platforms for each, VMware for larger enterprises and Microsoft for SMBs... Interesting, but not unexpected.

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