Results tagged “virtualization”

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.

Apple poaches eBay data center guru - The Register

Impressed with the greenmindedness of Olivier Sanche, Dave "Green Data Center" Ohara believes he is "the absolute right guy for Apple at the right time." But part of him is little wistful. "I am sad in some ways," he says, "as eBay has been quite open to discuss its data center practices."

How to Recycle Virtualization Resources for Better Data Center Optimization - eWeek

The current economic realities have shifted IT's focus modestly from green IT to cost savings. But there remains an ultimate, if utopian, goal associated with accomplishing both at once. A properly functioning virtual environment constantly reduces, reuses and recycles, which serves to drive the cost savings associated with virtualization. But many companies do not have an active virtual recycling program in place.

Dell to Reap $5.8M in Energy Savings at Facilities Worldwide - Reuters

Dell expects to rake in an estimated $5.8 million in annual savings as a result of energy efficiency measures that range from PC power-downs and simplifying IT to retrofitting facilities and setting green building standards for all new company-owned sites.

Solid-State Drives Get Warmer Reception From Businesses - Bits - NYT Blogs

Wine.com, an online retailer, switched to H.P. using SSDs from Fusion-io and has never looked back. "We have an incredible holiday volume spike. We're shipping 20,000 orders a day," said Geoffrey Smalling, the chief technology officer at Wine.com. Before using SSDs, it took four minutes to post a batch of 100 invoices. "After Fusion-io, it was 10 seconds. It was the first time that every night we were able to post everything from order to invoice to general ledger," he said. Over all, the upgrade resulted in a 400 percent improvement in speed, according to Mr. Smalling.

SNIA makes case for green storage - DatacenterDynamics

Companies that own and operate data centers are not alone in their desire to reduce their energy use. Utilities will provide significant rebates to companies that deploy solutions that increase their energy efficiency and environmentally conscious regulators work with industry groups - such as SNIA, the Green Grid and the Uptime Institute - to draft legislation that will reward firms that seek out more efficient solutions and punish those that do not.

And don't forget more fresh-off-the-Web Green IT links at GigaOM Pro.

Tips for an effective data deduplication implementation - SearchStorage.com

For example, one significant argument is whether inline deduplication is more efficient than post-processing dedupe. While dedupe requires processing, which takes time and resources, the issue is where to spend the time: at the start of the backup process or the end; and which CPU you want to absorb the processing overhead.

Climate Savers power management seminar transcript now online - GreenTech Pastures - ZDNet Blogs

Energy costs account for about 10 percent of a typical IT budget. For some more color, I just got off a call where it was suggested to me that energy accounts for about 30 percent of an organization's operational costs.

Cisco Plays Both Sides of the Virtual Coin - Virtualization Review

It was code-named "California" and is expected to link computing, network, storage, access and virtualization capabilities together into one cohesive system. Now known as the Unified Computing System (UCS), the new platform from Cisco Systems Inc. has moved the company beyond pure-play networking into the server space with virtualization as the defining feature.

Start-up Hexagram 49 has unveiled an engine dubbed RethinkDB. The company says it's optimized for SSDs, claiming it can deliver performance ten times faster than existing databases.

The FAA is nearly finished with a modernization project that relies heavily on virtual machines to process messages for the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, segmenting data for federal and civil air traffic and bringing legacy functionality and newer IP systems under one umbrella.

DailyTech reports that the project allows the agency to replace decades-old mainframes with quad-core Xeon servers from Stratus Technologies. Fitting, right?

And while evolving technology is all well and good, other efficiencies are being gained by the approach:

Virtualization also is helping the system with its upgrade needs. States Mr. Mcneill, "It's travel to a facility for a hardware installation, power modification, training -- it's very costly and time-consuming to have to do all that. Now with this common server using virtualization, we can have a template for an operating system and provision a new service in days, requiring no facility upgrade or travel."

And as one eagle-eyed commenter points out, the tally for the entire project is $860,000. Money well spent indeed.

Source

Wondering what CA has in store for virtual servers and private clouds running vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V hardware?

CA today announced that it is streamlining the management of VMware vSphere 4 platform on Cisco Nexus 1000V infrastructures by adding support for both in the company's Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager offerings. Under the management platform, administrators get a unified view of affected hardware and virtual servers; a system that prioritizes and traces events to their root cause resulting in fewer alarms; and real-time monitoring and automation capabilities.

CA's object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter(TM) Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

The consolidation of physical and virtual management is inevitable. Expect the lines to blur even further.

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Companies Report That Virtualization Investments Are Indeed Paying Dividends - eWeek

The most recent example: San Francisco-based IT services provider BEAR Data Systems, a Cisco Systems gold-certified partner, revealed June 24 that its hardware and virtualization tools are enabling clients to achieve energy savings of 30 percent or more.

Energy-efficient servers earn a star -- but so what? - Computer World

But the Energy Star label doesn't tell the full story on servers and their energy consumption. The current specifications measure energy use only under limited circumstances and for specific types of machines. Blade servers, so popular in enterprise data centers, don't qualify, for example.

How to green your storage - SearchStorage - TechTarget ANZ

Avoid overspending and overprovisioning.

It's obvious that spinning disk is the source of most storage power consumption, and unused spinning disk represents wasted energy. But there are several challenges in growing storage incrementally, including the organisation's ability to accurately forecast storage capacity needs. Beyond capacity planning, it requires a relationship with a vendor who can support the incremental storage growth. The technology must also allow the storage to expand easily and with minimal disruption.

Gartner Zooms in on Key Cloud Computing Attributes - eChannelLine

The first of the attributes is that it's service-based. According to Gartner, "Consumer concerns are abstracted from provider concerns through service interfaces that are well-defined. The interfaces hide the implementation details and enable a completely automated response by the provider of the service to the consumer of the service..."

Who uses cloud computing? Startups do, VCs don't - VentureBeat

Cloud computing is a trendy term right now, but how widely is it actually used? During the venture capital panel at today's Structure 09 conference in San Francisco, VCs offered two pieces of anecdotal data that create a nice contrast between who is and isn't on the cloud.

Games are taxing enough on PC hardware, why would you want to add virtualization's overhead?

Over at Gamasutra, Neil Gower writes that capable, modern-day hardware makes virtualization something game developers should consider for their development environments and all but the most GPU-intensive efforts.

Overall, virtual machines provide a surprisingly capable platform. In fact, for pure number crunching (CPU and memory) you're only paying a tiny penalty for the conveniences provided by the VM. If you are I/O bound, things aren't quite as cut-and-dry, but still worth considering. For example, if you want to set up a build server on a VM or virtualize your development environment, you'll want look into the disk optimization features of the virtualization host. For much of what we do with our computers though, we don't actually max out the performance of the hardware (at least not for very long), so the VM overhead is not a big factor.

I suspect it will be a while before you and I can run Crysis smoothly on a VM (yes I went there). Or will it?

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Busting the nine myths of cloud computing - Computerworld

Myth No. 2: All you need is your credit card If you're a lone developer with time to burn, configuring a virtual bare-metal server from the command prompt may be no problem. But if you have a business to run, installing and configuring the OS, multiple applications, and database connections could get in the way of generating revenue. And if you're big enough to have any standards for security, data formats, or data quality, someone has to do that work, too.

Cool Eco-Innovations Highlighted at Intel's Research Day - Treehugger

Intel has worked diligently to keep a focus on the environment. Not only do they work to innovate in all areas of computer technology, but they also encourage the next generation of thinkers to get techy, and push the IT industry to green up as well. Part of that eco-focus is shown off in the innovations at Research Day.

Another view on Red Hat's Virtualization Portfolio - Virtually Speaking - ZDNet Blogs

It appears that Red Hat has a good technological base for moving forward. It also faces a steep, up hill climb, if it hopes to capture industry mindshare from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. Many organizations have already standardized on products from one or more of those suppliers.

Compliance and Cloud Computing at Enterprise 2.0 - Compliance Building

Compliance Logs.

Whether you're in the midst of an audit or an investigation, thorough logs are the key to proving compliance. So how do you prove your organization is (or was) compliant when you aren't able to maintain logs? Audit trails must be auditable.

Platform Brings Big-Business Grid Rep to the Cloud - GigaOm

With ISF, the company is targeting medium- and large-sized businesses, and, according to founder and CEO Songnian Zhou, it already has a "substantial number" of large companies signed up for beta testing and expected to go into production. When asked why Platform doesn't appear to be struggling for customers like so many other cloud vendors, Zhou summed it up thusly: "This is really not a startup game, pure and simple. A startup is supposed to get some good VC money and develop a point product to solve a real, focused problem. This is data center integration in enterprises. [It is] very complex [with] many, many moving parts."

Release Candidates 3.3.2 and 3.4.1 - Xen.org

For the uninitiated, it may be hard to tell the difference between emulation and virtualization. The overarching concept is similar to a degree, but as you can probably already tell, they are worlds apart when talking about their purpose and implementation in modern computing.

Computerworld's Russell Kay helpfully explains:

Emulation:

Emulation is important in fighting obsolescence and keeping data available. Emulation lets us model older hardware and software and re-create them using current technology. Emulation lets us use a current platform to access an older application, operating system or data while the older software still thinks it's running in its original environment.

...and Virtualization:

Virtualization is a technique for using computing resources and devices in a completely functional manner regardless of their physical layout or location. This includes splitting a single physical computer into multiple "virtual" servers, making it appear as though each virtual machine is running on its own dedicated hardware and allowing each to be rebooted independently.

There's more, of course, and well worth the read or link-to for your non-virtualization-savvy coworkers (hopefully not making decisions for your IT shop). Bottom line: emulation is for obsoleting obsolescence and virtualization is for combating energy-robbing underutilization.