Tag Archive | "Virtualization"

Road Trip – Gartner Infrastructure & Operations Mgmt Summit

Tags: Availability, Best Practices, BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Change, CIO, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Gartner, IT Management, ITSM, Mobile, Monitoring, Service Level, Service Providers, Service Value, Social Media, Spending, Transformation, Trends, VDI, Virtualization


I traveled the globe from October to February meeting with customers and our sales teams discussing NetIQ’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) value and solutions, then I traded in wings for a bit.  Now it’s time for one of my favorite battery re-charging conferences of the year, the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM).  I enjoy the Summit to see old friends in the vendor community as well as many old analyst friends, but this year there is a lot of buzz around the Summit and ITOM has become the talk of the town again.  Here are few quotes and phrases from the opening pages of the Summit Agenda:

  • “Delivering Accelerated Business Value:  Cloud, Mobility and More”
  • Hot Topics:
    • Enterprise mobility
    • Private/Public cloud computing
    • Moving beyond server virtualization
    • Cost optimzation
    • Data center space, power and cooling
    • ITIL and process improvement
    • Improving IT service quality
    • Business value
  • “The reign of the PC is over.  A new era is emerging, one that will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver services to users.”

There are many sessions on the power of these emerging technologies, how we will manage them, how we will deliver value to the business and how technology is no longer just operating the business – technology is powering the business.  At least that’s what our businesses are expecting in the coming couple of years and how the competition with the service providers is stacking up and pushing the IT Wake Up call.

I’m jazzed to start my day tomorrow with 3 back to back keynotes with a couple of old friends:

  • 10 Emerging Trends that will Impact Infrastructure and Operations – David Cappuccio
  • Applications 2020:  The Impact on Infrastructure and Operations of Current and Emerging Trends in Applications – Valentin Sribar
  • The IT Operations Scenario – Ronni Colville & Deb Curtis

 

Then we move into lunch, come see us at the NetIQ solution showcase to chat about the sessions with my old friends and how we see their insights coming to life in our every day worlds.  I’ve been posting on the need for IT to better align in how it speaks of technology in the business as services and driving top line revenue rather than just bottom line with cost savings for a while now.  In the last bullet above from the opening pages of the agenda, the one thing that did strike me odd is “deliver services to users”.  I would restate that as it is how we will “deliver services to our customers”  to drive revenue.  Yes, driving efficiency into the organization is part of the IT balancing act, but the first focus has shifted to the customer and value.

Then I’ll finish the afternoon with:

  • Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012:  Will You Be Able to Manage Them? (Before They Manage You?) – Cameron Haight
  • Compuware, VMware and Dell will provide simultaneous session with a App Performance, Cloud Mgmt and a CIO Panel, repsectively – How will I choose?
  • 2 More Choices to Make:
    • VDI and other Virtualization Strategies to Securely Support and Manage a Dynamic Workforce – Neil MacDonald & Philip Redman
    • Leveraging Mobility, Content and Communication in you Business Processes – Bern Elliot
  • 2 More Final Choices to Make:
    • Lessons Learned from Early Adopters of Social IT Management – Jeffrey M. Brooks & George Spafford
    • Networking and Mobility Trends for the Next Decade – Tim Zimmerman

Then we are back to wrap up at the NetIQ solution showcase with a head spinning with many new viewpoints and ideas.  I look forward to speaking with many of the attendees to gain their insights into the sessions, stop on by and join the conversation, follow us in real-time on Twitter and send your comments to these posts.

As you can see from my agenda for just the first day, many new trends to wrap our management arms around to provide flexibility with balance of controls.  Change is coming fast and furious and managing it with controlled risk will be the key to the successful in the coming year.   I have some choices to make tomorrow regarding the sessions I can attend, but look forward to hearing about the risks and value of new technologies applied to our business challenges.  You even see a little Social Media has creeped into IT Management.  Wonder what that’s all about?  🙂

I’ll send a few early comments on Twitter tomorrow during my adventures.  Follow:  @BSMHub this week and catch the real-time insights, at least my perspective, of the conference.  I’ll post my take aways each evening.  Drop me your comments, I’d love to hear what’s happening out there in the real-world.

Michele

Cloud Computing Tools: Improving Security Through Visibility and Automation – CIO

Tags: Best Practices, BSM, Business Service Management, CIO, Cloud, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Service Level, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Nice article last week walking through many of the security and management considerations when evaluating services appropriate for public cloud.  Security and Operations are coming closer together as architecture for services are considered for organizations.  This discussion illustrates the transformation that is occurring within organizations – the movement from operations to innovation.

The decision to move services to the cloud considers business impact and value in architecting and deploying services as well as security and management.  The service provider is providing the infrastructure, but the service is still owned by the contracting business and must be instrumented for management.

Likely not a thought of the author, but management of systems and services has always been a follow-on to new technology deployment and use.  I found the irony in the article that security was first and the management discussion followed.  The race to the cloud is fueled by the notion it is cheaper, but when the fall back is we can do it manually, write a few scripts, manually keep track of configurations and compliance, etc. I have to ask, how much cheaper can it be if automation and management are manual.

Management tools available today were built with different technologies and uses in mind.  The right management tool for the right technology should still be used, but what is surfacing is the requirement to stitch the fabric of the service, how it is deployed and managed together to gain a holistic view of the service.  The days of an atomic service on a single platform are long gone and waiting on management to catch up to manage all combinations of solutions and platforms will be an endless wait.  The best approach will weave together the fabric of service components with the proper management tools.

How are you stitching together your cloud strategy and is management an afterthought?

Michele

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CSO — Many enterprises are reluctant to move critical cloud applications out of their own data centers and into the public cloud due to security concerns. Yet the same automated, consistent provisioning that is essential to managing either public or private clouds (as well as to the process of thinking through a cloud deployment) can also offer the fringe benefit of improving security.  (Read Full Article…)

VMware Launches Cloud Foundry

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, Monitoring, PaaS, Virtualization, VMware


Business Service Management Commentary on IT Service Management, Service Level Management & Performance ManagementVMware announced that it is launching Cloud Foundry, a move that will put the company smack dab in the center of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market. The project is in Beta for now.

As I wrote in Understanding the Different Levels of Cloud Computing, PaaS “…provides a platform on which you can build applications usually linked to a particular vendor.” VMware is traditionally known as a company that provides the software to build out virtual machines, a key component in building and deploying private clouds, so this takes them in a new direction.

Geva Perry, writing on his Thinking Out Cloud blog, says what’s interesting about this offering is that it offers a series of VMware branded services such as data and messaging services, but also uses an open architecture that enables enterprises to link other non-VMware services. This is in contrast to Salesforce.com, whose PaaS offering is really designed to lock you into the Salesforce platform (which is fine if that’s where you’re working, not everyone is about customer relationship management).

This is an intriguing offering for any IT pro because it provides a central place where you can build your cloud infrastructure with a mix of public and private services. Now what’s really interesting here is the open nature of this platform. If it’s truly open, and depending on how flexible the API is, perhaps you could also connect the whole kit and kaboodle to your monitoring tool. Imagine how that would be?

I’m not certain this is possible having just seen the picture of the architecture in the blog post, but if it were, it opens up some interesting possibilities as it would allow you to have the means to monitor your entire system from a single view, a pretty attractive idea.

If it’s not that easy to connect to an external monitoring system, it should be because this type of connectivity has to become a priority. IT pros need to have the tools to monitor the whole system wherever it resides and a tool like this that mixes services should provide that.

Photo by jenny-bee on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

To Unlock the Power of the Cloud, Rethink IT Management – Forbes

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Integration, IT Management, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

This is a nice synopsis of the challenges of moving to the cloud and virtualization into production.  I enjoy the start of the article regarding when we lost our switchboard operators and the shift we’ve made with the telephone.  Just a year ago, the east coast was hammered with 3 – 3 foot snow storms leaving me to telecommute from my home, built 30 years prior.  I learned far more about the telephone than I wanted and my favorite acronym was POTS (plain old telephone system).  Yes, it is true. Long story short, I went through a full upgrade to fiber, digital phone service and a full duplex digital phone to better enable my communication capabilities from the home office.  There were multiple components to consider and upgrade to gain the full performance I was expecting.

What this article subtly uncovers is the usual cycle of management following new technology adoption.  The short term bang for the buck with new technology is generally the removal of short term hardware and software costs with physical components and licenses.  This time the challenge is further aggravated within the organization through competition with the service providers that are going directly to the business and bypassing IT knowing they can make IT as the bad guy and obstacle.

The article uncovers the flexibility cloud and virtualization bring to an environment, but also the requirement for an integration platform to make sense of the configurations and the monitoring alerts at the component level into business services as they are consumed.  This is the driving force behind the business service management imperative this year that the author also notes.

Operations is holding the business back from the promise of cloud computing because operations is struggling to manage the infrastructure and have no visibility across the infrastructure to insure availability and use the cloud for the agility of improved availability.  Business is demanding the intelligence and communication of service performance, not components, and are seeking to leverage the cloud strategically in their organization as a growth enabler and it is imperative that IT seek to support and make the initiative successful.

If IT continues as the obstacle, the competition is knocking on the business door to take that business.  It is not a single management technology that will solve this challenge, it is the integration platform that provides the end-to-end view and enables building in intelligence to set thresholds to monitor service performance aligned to objectives.  I like to call  it, “the glue and a view” that will make sense of the environment that is the imperative to successful IT operations management in this coming year.

What’s your strategy for Glue and a View?

Michele

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It’s been nearly 50 years since the telephone switchboard, staffed by an “operator,” was phased out as automated phone-switching technologies were introduced. In automating the process of making a call, phone companies removed a burdensome manual hindrance from what was soon to become a much more convenient and ubiquitous part of modern life.  (Read Full Article…)

Cloud CIO: 3 Private Cloud Use Case Scenarios – CIO

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Transformation, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Bernard has put out a great piece for operations and development teams pragmatically discussing the development, implementation and operations of cloud projects.  Development of new services is the fit for new technology, otherwise, it becomes disruptive and costly to the whole of the IT organization.  Goes to that old addage, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.

Business service management practices help you to weigh the cost and value and most importantly, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  Until an existing service outlives it’s usefulness or becomes a costly support burden, these services are not suitable targets for cloud infrastructures.

The three use cases are accurate and eye openers for the operations folks.  The time for push-back is over and it is time we work to become agile organizations.  In this case, Platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers exist and are easily accessible with a credit card.  This is an expensive bypass, but the options exist and the crafty developers will most definitely go around operations to develop new services.  Then the time comes as Bernard points out, when the service needs to go into production and the infrastructure isn’t there and operations is not able to monitor, manage and support the new service taking more of a black eye.

The one thing 2011 has is an abundance of sourcing options and is the year we work toward common business goals and put the management systems in place that will help us to achieve these goals.

How agile is your operations team?

Michele

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Organizations looking to deploy private clouds must understand where they’re headed. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but consider these three scenarios for how use of your cloud will evolve — for better or for worse….. (Read Full Article…)

Cloud Computing: A Sustaining or Disruptive Innovation? – CIO

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Innovation, Transformation, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Today, I might agree that Cloud is somewhat disruptive, but for the right vendors it will be sustaining.  The mere fact that Amazon led the charge to change the purchasing model indicates that there is a desire for change in the industry just as they changed online purchasing forever.  The conversation that shifts this from disruptive to sustaining is the business service management discussion regarding cost and value and the appropriate deployment option.

This comes down to the planning and the best use of service providers and technology in your environment to deliver high quality services and drive value (revenue) for your organization.  We tend to focus way too much time (85% of the IT budget – 1-2% of revenue) on just operating rather than driving revenue and innovation for the business.

It’s not about The Cloud, it’s about using technology to drive revenue and differentiating services for your business.

What are you doing to drive growth for your business?

Michele

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If you’ve read this blog over the past couple of years, it should be no surprise that I am a huge advocate of the theories of Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Christensen and his book were brought to mind this week by the cover story in Forbes about his severe health problems, his experience with the U..S healthcare system, and his prescriptions for how to fix it.  (Read Full Article…)

Virtual Business Service Management

Tags: Availability, Best Practices, Business Service Management, Performance, Service Value, Virtualization


I had a meeting with a customer the other day which was centered on virtualization and private cloud and a funny thing happened: it morphed into a Business Service Management (BSM) discussion.  The discussion got me trying to put my arms around “BSM in a virtual environment” and what it means.

In a traditional BSM scenario, you are managing your IT from a business perspective with the ability to drill into the business models until you can isolate and correlate the technology supporting the business service.  But in a virtual environment, you’ve abstracted another layer, right?  For example, my order processing is running slow.  Which is of more value to me?  The first layer down tells me that the virtual database server is experiencing a performance hit or knowing that the underlying network-attached storage is living in a network segment that is currently overloaded due to end of the month processing?

To be honest, I’m not sure there is a clear answer.  I think if I am the “break/fix” guy, I need to know at the lowest level so I can attack the problem in the infrastructure.  And of course, the business unit wants to know at the highest level that order processing is experiencing a slowdown.

What my conclusion was is that at the highest level, BSM hasn’t changed.  You are still mapping out your business processes to show the health of the process flow and the performance of the service.  But, to accurately or perhaps more appropo, usefully, map the technology to the business process, you need to have the virtual abstraction layer, which has the actual infrastructure mapped to it.  This could lead to some interesting analysis, such as response times across the virtual environment compared to response times in the physical environment and how they both correlate to performance of the business service.  Just some food for thought.

I’d be interested to hear about some real-life examples.  How are you monitoring the virtual?

Virtualization And The Cloud: The Trouble Is Troubleshooting – Forbes

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Forbes, IT Management, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

In this survey, more than half the respondents have implemented some form of cloud computing (thus virtualization) citing increased flexibility and decreased costs in hardware, power, heating and cooling.  The challenge the article highlights comes in managing the network and pinpointing root cause of incidents, much less finding signs of trouble.

Management is always overlooked when trying to take advantage of the short term cost savings.  As my dad always told me, “short cuts never got anyone anywhere fast”.  Service enabling the infrastructure is a must from the development and implementation and never more so than now with the future being right sourced with hybrid implementations of private, public and physical infrastructures.

When I speak to folks about Business Service Management practices and tools, I’m often met with eye rolls and shrugs, but it is so hard.  I always respond, no it isn’, it’s only as hard as you want to make it.  It can be achieved a service at a time and can provide the real success in your cloud and virtualization projects with a bigger bang for the buck with short term savings and real value add up front.  All it takes is a little foresight to integrate the sources of data you have already to paint the picture that will help you manage in real time with a live view of the environment to manage both practively and with speed during an incident.

How are you service enabling your cloud and virtualization infrastructure?

Michele

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More companies are taking advantage of cloud computing and virtualization technologies to streamline their network operations, but significant management challenges remain, according to Network Instruments’ State of the Network Global Study.

The company’s fourth annual study surveyed 265 network engineers, IT directors and CIOs, located in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia.  (Read Full Article…)

Cloud Computing brings Chance of Showers – SCMagazine

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management, SCMagazine, Service Providers, Service Value, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

The author points out great security points in making the leap to the cloud and part of those warts not mentioned is the management of those VMs in the cloud from an end-to-end business service management perspective to manage against the risk he points to.  How risky is it to have that VM in the cloud?  How secure should you make the data and management of the VM?  What business services are at risk?

It is the end-to-end service view that needs to also be considered up front when architecting your plans for cloud deployment and that should be based upon the service value and risk of the overall service.  Mapping those services, understanding cost, risk and value will aid in making these decisions, architecting the VMs and putting the proper monitoring, management and measurement of the VMs and services in total.

Check out my Feature Post on classifying services.

Michele

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Over the past few years, we have seen a gradual transition from traditional computer center with dedicated resources to virtual machines and cloud computing.  During this time, people have realized some of the value of virtualization in termsof savings and resource optimization.  Unfortunately, there are still a number of warts in the virtualization that have followed the migration to the cloud.  (Read Full Article…)

The Intelligent Management of Computing Workloads – Quocirca

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Quocirca, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Business Service Management practices need to be baked into the workloads as they are configured and deployed just as you would instrument applications and hardware as it is deployed into production environments.  The difference in this situation is that the workloads are a bit more dynamic and potentially paid for with a subscription on outside infrastructure.  Management to decommission workloads is as important as deploying additional resources during peak periods to monitor costs appropriately.

Management practices are often the last applied when moving or changing services into production.  However, in order to be properly instrumented for monitoring and management, the management must be planned and implemented during the planning and configuring stage in order to properly test and move to production.

How intelligent are your workloads?

Michele

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The rapid increase in the availability of on-demand IT infrastructure (infrastructure as a service/IaaS) gives IT departments the flexibility to cope with the ever-changing demands of the businesses they serve. In the future, the majority of larger businesses will be running hybrid IT platforms that rely on a mix of privately owned infrastructure plus that of service providers, while some small business will rely exclusively on on-demand IT services.  (Read Full Article…)

Is Business Service Management ready for the cloud?

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management Tools, Managing, Measuring, Virtualization


This is not the first article about Business Service Management and cloud computing, and it will certainly not be the last. The one thing I’ve learned about the cloud, both private and public, is that this is new technology, and it is constantly changing. Companies setting up private clouds are adopting different technologies to make their lives easier, while public cloud providers are updating their products and APIs on a regular basis to improve and accelerate the transition. This leads to an exciting, dynamic environment that causes more challenges when implementing a BSM solution…or does it?

How exactly should BSM work with the cloud? Once cloud resources are incorporated into a company’s IT infrastructure, there needs to be a way to tie these virtual/cloud resources into the company’s business service views. Then the health of the business services will reflect all of the IT resources. And voila, problem solved. Now, I have been told I sometimes over simplify things, but when it comes to BSM, I don’t think people should look at “the cloud” as some complex, unknown entity. The cloud should simply provide another data source to be incorporated into a business service view.

BSM is only as powerful as its underlying integrations. How can one look at the availability of a service or the root cause of a service breach unless these metrics are driven by ALL of the underlying IT resources that make up this service? The resources in the cloud should not be treated as different, special data sources. Cloud resources need to be integrated with all of the existing underlying technology that drives the business service. Given how fast cloud computing technology is growing and changing, this will force BSM products to continue to create and enhance their underlying integrations. Of course, this is nothing new for BSM vendors, or any software vendors who integrate to third party software.

The cloud will continue to bring change to BSM, and BSM products will need to grow and evolve along with the cloud technology. But since BSM is based on underlying integrations, BSM is ready to go “to the cloud”.

How is the Cloud Changing the Way We Measure IT Services?

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management Tools, Measuring, Virtualization


Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment:  public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

I heard a great quote a couple of months ago: “Every company in the IT industry with revenue of less than $100m is currently changing their strategy to focus on the cloud.” If you combine that assertion with the fact that every company in the IT industry with revenues over $1 billion is modifying their strategy to make it “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-ready”, it becomes difficult to support the naysayers who are claiming that the cloud is just a fad. It’s here to stay whether or not you want to accept it.

So the question for this audience becomes “What does that mean for Business Service Management?” From my experience with a very large service provider who is aggressively moving into the public/private cloud space for their internal operations as well as their external customers, Business Service Management becomes a necessity instead of a nice to have. Adoption of the cloud exacerbates the technical challenges that spawned the BSM industry in the first place: namely IT heterogeneity, physically/geographically dispersed data centers and the need for IT organizations to provide higher levels of service at lower costs. At the most simple level, the ability to co-locate two virtual machines on one physical server cuts costs in half. However, this cost savings brings along complexities in terms of resource sharing, how the virtual machines got provisioned to the box, how they are being independently and jointly monitored and how they will be managed moving forward. Additionally, cloud adoption may very well increase the number of systems management tools that an IT organization needs to deploy, manage and monitor.

The ability to provide IT operations and management a single pane of glass view into all of these complexities, focused on the most critical business services, becomes necessary to ensure that the costs of these complexities do not overcome the costs savings enjoyed through virtualization.

How are you measuring your services in the cloud?

Kevin

From Virtual Sprawl to Virtual Stall – ITBusinessEdge

Tags: Business Service Management, IT Management, IT Management Tools, ITBusinessEdge, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary_

Management instrumentation required, service enable during development.  New technology getting ready for production, but not ready for production creates the virtual stall.  Service enabling, instrumenting and an integration strategy will keep management on track.  Old management tools are no going to provide the data required for virtual infrastructures.  It will be a combination of the virtualization and traditional management tools that will provide the end-to-end view through an integrated strategy that will break the stalemate of the virtual stall.

Michele

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We’re hearing a lot about “virtual stall” these days. Supposedly, this is what happens when too many virtual machines clog up both physical infrastructure and traditional management systems, bringing productivity to a halt. This places an artificial cap on the amount of virtualization the typical enterprise can handle, and, by extension, its ability to leverage cloud technology.  (Read Full Article…)

Myth: Virtualization Increases the Speed of Delivering IT Svcs–ZDNet

Tags: Business Service Management, Cost Reduction, Virtualization, ZDNet


The Hub Commentary_

Ahhh the yin and yang of new technology.  The short sided cost saving and time saving view, we don’t have to buy and configure hardware and the longer term view of operationalizing the workloads by service enabling them to be supported.  Virtualization should be embraced and deployed as a cost saver, absolutely.  As with any techno gadget, it should be evaluated for good use and enabled to be supported to reap the greatest rewards.

Technology for the sake of technology and the short cut returns, never gets anyone anywhere very fast.  Measure twice, cut once and you will reap even greater cost savings.

Michele

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While the delivery of virtual machines is indisputably faster than deploying physical machines, it is often assumed that this also streamlines the process of deploying IT Services (applications).  (Read Full Article…)

Tomorrow’s forecast… cloudy

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Configuration, IT Management, Service Level, Virtualization


To cloud or not the cloud, that is the question .  Todays IT needs to be agile and responsive to their customer, most of the time the customer is internal and they need more processing power added to existing services or the need new services provisioned.   There is also a high expectation that change within the enterprise is done in a safe manner to avoid future outages.   Managing the enterprise from a Service perspective, understanding the individuals parts that make up the entire service is a fundamental requirement.

One of the ways for IT to be able to quickly grow or shrink the footprint of the services is to adopt virtualization and build an internal cloud and/or leverage outside cloud providers.  Virtualizing is a way to have well known configurations rolled into production and in turn reduce risks to outages.  Virtualizing also provides a type of Disaster Recovery (DR) it also provides a way to add more nodes to an overtaxed cluster quickly.   I’m not saying virtualization is for everyone, but there are many value-adds it brings to IT as well as value to the business.

Tobin

Virtualization Tech Moves Forward as New Year Begins – Internet.com

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Integration, Trends, Virtualization


The Hub Commentary __

New technology that removes hardware and thus tangible cost savings is always a short term win.  Managing it long term is generally the afterthought.  Not that I’m against the virtualization and more efficient use of hardware resources, I’m for it.  I am encouraging of planning for the upfront service enablement of it with proper management, however.

Management technologies will be the secondary market, more specifically the integration platform and strategy that brings an end-to-end view of the physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure delivering services.  Many articles are about IT organizations seeing virtualization and cloud as a problem where I see it as just another technology to embrace, deploy and and manage.

Client virtualization is an even more complex environment that will dictate integration, management and the end-to-end visibility of the infrastucture.  The cost savings are great and with a bit of planning to implement the right visibility, those savings can be realized without pain.  Remember the customer calls in because they cannot access something or something is slow, they have no idea how they connect, what runs where, that their desktop image is really a virtual machine running on some server, etc.  The job of the service desk to pinpoint and restore service is impossible without the proper visibility.  So thus, management/integration platforms will become the secondary market of the virtualization explosion.

Regarding the midmarket, I find this curious as they have minimal IT staff and have been in the cloud far longer than most.  Remember the Intuit crash last summer (2010) for several days, that was all about the Quick Books subscribers in the midmarket.  Enterprise organizations could take a queue from the midmarket on embracing the cloud and virtualization.

2011 is going to be an interesting year for us in the data center without a doubt!

Michele

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The new year is starting off well for VMware, which saw its stock jump to a new 52-week high of $94.19 Monday. It then dipped a bit to close at $92.97, which is approximately 4.6 percent higher than its previous closing price, Investors.com reported.

(Read Full Article…)

Managing the cloud – Problem SOLVED!!!

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Service Level, Virtualization


I like to do searches on the internet from time to time to see the type of hits produced around specific terms such as Business Service Management and Cloud Computing.  Sometimes just changing the search slightly, you get drastically different results.   So today when I searched on “Managing the cloud”, I noticed that the most recent article was from Feb of 2009, in fact, many of the results were from 2009.   My first thought was the problem must have been solved if there are no recent search results.  I think it is that we are at the point that we have a better understanding of the cloud and are not as worried about it as much as we were before.  Sure, there are still some concerns, in fact many areas of concern, but they are manageable.

I know I am probably simplifying it, but managing the cloud has a lot of the same characteristics of managing the enterprise.   You need to be able to control access to the data/system/server, you also need to be able to keep tabs on the health and availability of things running in the cloud (internal or external cloud).    The cloud and business service management are related in some manner, where and how you run your services includes the term cloud, and how you manage those services is within the Business Service Management space.   Vendors that provide tools for managing the enterprise are going to end up being some of the same vendors that provide tools to managing the cloud, but keep in mind, monitoring the health of the server or service running in the cloud is only one part of it, there are other areas of managing such as service elasticity, governance, compliance and general provisioning.  It is time to start to look at a more holistic approach within IT to solve some of these management problems.

Tobin

2011 tech priorities: Private cloud beckons – NetworkWorld

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Cloud, NetworkWorld, Trends, Virtualization


The indisputable economic benefits of cloud computing for certain applications drive businesses to consider building clouds of their own, but they need to make sure they are prepared before jumping into the cloud.  (read more…)

The Rise of the Stealth Cloud – CIO Update

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, CIOUpdate, Cloud, Service Providers, Trends, Virtualization


Shadow IT has worried CIOs for decades. The practice is often defended as a source of innovation and a faster-than-normal way for users to get their jobs done but this off the radar technology use by employees presents serious dangers to the corporation ranging from increased security threats to compliance issues.  (read more…)