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All Posts Tagged With: "Virtualization"

At ESG we’ve teamed up with Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, and Intel on the Virtualization Tour show that’s all over North America (for now)! From September 29th pretty much every day through the end of October, we’ll be in a US city! The content is excellent – based on some killer ESG research and analysis [...]

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The Storage Area Network (SAN) is now a key component of most reasonably sized IT Infrastructures. The SAN we rely on today evolved from very humble beginnings into a mission critical Enterprise IT component. The first SANs were introduced to handle small numbers of enterprise scale systems (zSeries and iSeries computers from IBM) being connected [...]

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I received a very thought provoking article about the relative merits of FCoE and Fibre Channel storage networks from Christian Illmer, Senior Director Application and Solution Management Enterprise, ADVA Optical Networking – 8G FC versus FCoE – distinguishing myth from reality. I publish the article here in it’s entirety and add a bit of analysis [...]

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I am giving the Cloud Summit Keynote at Virtualization World (co-located with SNW Europe in Frankfurt on the 27th and 28th October), my subject will be a familiar theme to readers of the hot aisle – The  Data Center of the Future – M&E plant to Cloud. I am also chairing a couple of panels, [...]

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Containerized data center provides flexibility to balance capital expenditures and operating expenses while rapidly meeting needs for incremental, scalable capacity delivering Total Value of Ownership Verari Systems, a premier developer of data center scale blade-based computing and storage platforms with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced that Qualcomm selected [...]

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For some time I have been saying that a real IT shop would be ill advised to attempt consolidation to a single hypervisior. Why? My sense is that we have two types of workload, the mission critical, drives the business applications and services that cannot fail. These are the Fedex Logistics platform, the eBay portal, [...]

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The hypervisor is the new critical area of focus in the cloud. Enterprises cannot afford to adopt a “single hypervisor solution fits all” approach yet they do need to  understand and manage the many problems and issues that this outcome exposes. Early virtualization adopters will have a large VMware ESX estate largely accomodating the massive unstructured [...]

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Software licensing just hasn’t caught up with the realities of the modern IT Operation. Software vendors rightly need to monetize the customers valid use of their intellectual property, however it is in neither parties long term interests to increase operational costs by doing this. Many software licensing terms focus on an actual link between the [...]

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I have just finished a call with Adam Hawley, Oracle’s Director of VM Product Management, the guy who owns the whole Oracle Virtualization story and technology. It got me thinking about the Hypervisor marketplace, the players, product strengths and weaknesses as well as ability to execute. My colleage and friend, Mark Bowker (the Virtualization Guru) [...]

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I am used to writing online here at the hot aisle but yesterday, the 14th July 2009, I managed to deliver the lead story in a supplement on Efficient IT that was included in the Times, the UK’s leading newspaper. In the article, I discuss where efficient IT goes from here and point to a new “super-charged” approach. I advises CIOs to look [...]

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Cloud computing changes things, it makes administration and management of an X.86 environment easier and more automated. But until now the real goodies of VMWare’s product set, VMotion and VSphere have been limited to the small number of organizations that can afford to install a SAN. You see shared storage is a necessity in VMWare’s [...]

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There are some pretty big movements happening right now resulting from the Cisco announcement of California – Unified Computing System (UCS) – their networked server offering. Politically this has partially alienated HP and IBM, who have big Server businesses and also buy a ton of Cisco equipment. So we are seeing a polarization of network [...]

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I have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived. There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with [...]

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Yesterday, Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4B.  While it is very clear Oracle wants to roll up and control the database software market, Oracle executives also stated their intent to invest in the server (Solaris) and storage businesses with the latter be an “expanding market for us over the years to [...]

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I have been in Milford MA with my friend and colleague Steve Duplessie of the Enterprise Strategy Group this week working with Steve and his team around a number of key announcements from Cisco on their entry into the Data Center Server market. There is a lot of information to take in but here is [...]

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I recently met with Mark Shirman, CEO and Founder of Glasshouse Technologies and had the opportunity to get another exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mark is uniquely placed to comment on the recent changes in the Data Center and Storage markets with particular emphasis on Green issues. For many years Glasshouse has been the leading independent [...]

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IT Infrastructure specialist Richardson Eyres recently issued a press release to help drum up some consulting business in the Retail market but make some generally applicable and interesting points worth looking at. Even though most organizations are making energy cuts a top priority for 2008/9, many are not taking green issues seriously enough and are adopting a [...]

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I just picked up a really neat article from Eric Siebert – When Not to Treat VMs like Physical Servers. The basis of the article is common sense really (but common sense is often left at home by us in IT), mostly we can treat Virtual Machines just like Physical Machines but there are a [...]

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So we have a sub prime credit crisis that looks like it might turn into a global recession. IT is expensive and highly visible as well as often seen as non core. If you don’t get your budgets cut this year then you are very lucky and very unusual. I thought that you might like [...]

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Fellow blogger Steve Duplessie at Steve’s IT Rants has picked up on the fact that Diane Green has left VMWare after a bad set of financial results. Steve writes a good article and it’s worth a read. Diane is a victim of heroism via unexpected consequences. Pretty much single handed VMWare has raised the CPE – Compute [...]

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Phase 2 – Design End State If we are not careful, data centre moves are seen as just another big IT cost, and a pretty open ended cost at that. Anyone with experience in this space knows that many moves go off the rails and that the planned dates, costs and benefits are not met. [...]

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Phase 1 – Discovery Anyone who knows about Data Centres understands something of the complexity of moving services to a new site. Usually this needs to be done in a hurry, with no service disruption and at minimum cost. The drivers for data centre moves are: * Mergers and Acquisitions * Geographic Consolidation of Sites [...]

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Interview with Haroon Malik – DCS Magazine   Malik – Do you think that, as yet, many businesses have a sufficient understanding of the importance of the human aspect of IT within the data centre? ie writing policies, managing infrastructure, making mistakes etc… O’Donnell – It may be a bit unkind to some of my [...]

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