http://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-03-21T08:00:00ZBig iron is under relentless pressure to prove its value in an x86 world. We look at five ways to bring it into the distributed data center. http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/mainframes-in-the-age-of-the-cloud/240151286?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- Mar. 21, 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/032113s?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/054/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 21, 2013" title="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 21, 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/032113s?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a><br /> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/032113s?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the <em>InformationWeek</em> April special issue on mainframes</a>, distributed in an all-digital format (registration required).</strong><br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / Mar. 21, 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/054/054SUP_cover_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Mainframes In The Age Of The Cloud" title="Mainframes In The Age Of The Cloud" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> <P> Not long ago, x86 servers couldn't compete with the reliability of mainframes. Those x86 servers failed. They were time-consuming to recover. Their memory chips died; their hard disks went south. Insurance, banking, telecom and other industries that needed rock-solid transaction processing, resource segregation and security had little choice but to buy big iron. Mainframes were expensive, but their uptimes were, and still are, measured in years.</p> <P> That was then. In today's virtualized world, x86 systems compete with mainframes on price and functionality. And with tight budgets the rule of the day, mainframe shops are being asked: Can migrating to x86 save us money?</p> <P> Consider several factors in answering this question: your sunk investment in hardware, software and management, as well as IBM's recent z/OS investment and its focus on hosted Linux.</p> <P> Three-quarters of the 256 respondents to <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/8845/data-center/research-2012-state-of-the-data-center.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130321" target="_blank"><i>InformationWeek</i>'s 2012 State of the Data Center Survey</a> say their organizations have at least some applications running on mainframes or proprietary RISC systems, and of those shops, 28% say this percentage will increase and 48% say it will remain the same. Drilling down, 27% of the 534 respondents to our most recent <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9259/Storage-Server/research-state-of-servers-full-fast-and-diverse*.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130321" target="_blank">State of Servers Survey</a> say they have IBM zSeries architectures in use and plan to keep them.</p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- inline Report Promo --> <div class="inlineReportPromo right"> <div class="reportHeader"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9259/Storage-Server/research-state-of-servers-full-fast-and-diverse*.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130321" target="_blank">Research: State of Servers: Full, Fast and Diverse </a> </div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/054/054CSmainframe_reportcover.jpg" width="175" height="110" alt="Report Cover" title="Report Cover" class="reportCover" /> <div class="reportInfo"> Our report "<a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9259/Storage-Server/research-state-of-servers-full-fast-and-diverse*.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130321" target="_blank">State Of Servers: Full, Fast, And Diverse</a>" is free with registration<br /><br />This <strong>40</strong>-page report includes action-oriented analysis, packed with <strong>39</strong> charts. What you'll find: <ul> <li>How big hardware vendors are differentiating themselves</li> <li>What's required of leading edge serverss</li> <li>The move toward 10-Gbps Ethernet</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9259/Storage-Server/research-state-of-servers-full-fast-and-diverse*.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130321" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> <!-- / inline Report Promo --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> In hopes of putting the brakes on defections, IBM budgeted more than $100 million starting in 2006 to refresh its flagship System z mainframe lines. That investment showed clear returns with System z revenue increasing 56% last year over the previous year's revenue. IBM saw mainframe growth in emerging markets and with mainframe hosted Linux in particular, IBM senior VP and CFO Mark Loughridge said on the company's January earnings call. </p> <P> Some of that growth came from pent-up demand among customers waiting for the refresh, but big iron is still holding its own in certain sectors against racks of commodity x86 systems. And it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are several ways, as we'll review later in this article, to integrate your existing mainframes with x86 systems to increase your overall ROI.</p> <P> <strong>The Mainframe Advantage</strong></p> <P> Mainframes, which generated $1.8 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of 2012, still account for 12.3% of all server revenue. Behind those figures is the fact it's still a challenge to engineer virtualized systems to match the reliability and integrity of mainframes for OLTP, DB2 and other workloads. For a credit-card processing center or a banking transaction posting engine, the mainframe has a strong value proposition regardless of whether the rest of the infrastructure runs in a newfangled hybrid cloud. Companies are also loath to write off their sunk investments in mainframe applications, especially where they're still doing the job. </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center><strong>To read the rest of the article,<br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/032113s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">download the <em>InformationWeek</em> April special issue on mainframes</a>.</strong></center><br clear="all" /></p> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2013-02-20T08:00:00ZRather than dismissing the idea of automating processes like failover, embrace it. The alternative is more interest in IaaS.http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/management/automation-is-good-for-the-business-and/240148699?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/049/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Feb. 20, 2013" title="InformationWeek Green - Feb. 20, 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a><br /> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire <em>InformationWeek</em></strong> February special issue on disaster recovery</a>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative<br /> (Registration required.)<br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Conventional wisdom says that automation is one of those "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" projects that, for the lucky few who can buy in, will eventually make in-house IT obsolete. But conventional wisdom is wrong: Automation is affordable, and it's not going cost you your job. </p> <P> It's easy to see why some of us worry. In manufacturing, automation translates directly into staffing cuts -- if Detroit auto assembly line workers could have nixed the robots, they sure would have. But if you're resisting IT automation because you're afraid of becoming redundant, stop. You're not only hurting your company's bottom line, you're risking just what you're trying to avoid.</p> <P> The fact is, computers respond more quickly to changing conditions than people can ever hope to. And if we can detect infrastructure problems in real time, we can orchestrate a response that occurs before anyone notices. A "faster than human" action may in itself generate a concrete ROI, depending on the transactional load and value of the application in question. If a server that processes customer orders at a rate of 100 per minute, at an average value of $20 per order, is down for 15 minutes before IT notices and responds, that's a $30,000 outage. Even if 75% of users come back later to place those orders, that's still $7,500 of bottom-line revenue, plus whatever difficult-to-quantify value your CEO places on customer irritation. That outage just gave IT a black eye and may make the business look twice at an infrastructure-as-a-service provider that promises five-nines uptime and strong SLAs.</p> <P> Unfortunately, I still see IT pros failing to champion automation projects. Nearly half, 43%, of respondents to our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220" target="_blank">2013 Virtualization Management Survey</a> cited "no perceived value to decision-makers" as the major barrier to an automation project. Is this lack of perceived value real and based on an honest analysis, or is it the result of IT being shortsighted?</p> <P> <strong>Automation Reality</strong></p> <P> With automation projects, the work happens on the front end, which garners increased control and predictability on the back end. The amount of work is the same, but the value proposition is about delivering excellent service rather than hair-on-fire fixes. </p> <P> The people who sign checks like to invest in concrete value propositions, so begin with a problem statement that tallies the cost and frequency of the average outage: "When this server goes down, which happened once last year, we lose an average of $30,000 in orders." Or, "Last year we had seven midnight outages that cost us an average of $5,000 each in labor." Then discuss the cost to fix: "By automating this system, we could avert 75% of those outages, saving $26,250 per year. We have a quote from a vendor that can accomplish the automation necessary for $15,000. Even with a 25% buffer for a total cost of $18,750, we're paying for the system in the first year and generating an additional savings of $60,000 over three years."</p> <P> It's that kind of proactive thinking that will make the business realize the value of in-house IT pros who understand your customers, systems and processes better than any cloud provider could. </p> <P>2013-02-20T08:00:00ZDon't let data, WAN and integration challenges knock automated failover off course.http://www.informationweek.com/storage/disaster-recovery/how-to-beat-3-disaster-recovery-roadbloc/240148648?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/049/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Feb. 20, 2013" title="InformationWeek Green - Feb. 20, 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a><br /> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire <em>InformationWeek</em> February special issue on disaster recovery</a></strong>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative<br /> (Registration required.)<br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/049/049SUP_Cover_flat_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="3 Disaster Recovery Roadblocks" title="3 Disaster Recovery Roadblocks" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> <P> Not so long ago, <i>InformationWeek</i> surveys showed that many companies' disaster recovery plans were largely incomplete and unproven. For example, among 420 respondents to our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/2/5294/business-continuity/research-2011-backup-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220" target="_blank">2011 Backup Technologies Survey</a>, just 38% tested their restoration processes at least once a year for most applications. Only half backed up all their virtual servers every week. </p> <P> Since then, things have improved, particularly the technology. This shift has come about because the applications that IT fields are increasingly central to business operations, and downtime means serious money lost. That translates into budget for business continuity and disaster recovery programs. Eighty percent of respondents to our new <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9898/Storage-Server/research-2013-state-of-storage.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220" target="_blank"<i>InformationWeek</i> 2013 State of Storage Survey</a> have strategies in place, and half of them test regularly.</p> <P> The next step is to automate the process of failing over to a warm backup site -- one where hardware is up and running and data is regularly replicated from the production site. Removing people from the equation streamlines the process and lessens the possibility of error and costly delay.</p> <P> We realize that many IT pros who priced an automation project just a few years ago came away with sticker shock. Between replication software, running systems in warm sites and bandwidth costs, bringing recovery times down from days to minutes costs more than most companies could justify. Implementing an automated recovery plan still isn't inexpensive, but prices have come down enough that, with some new technologies and careful engineering, we can often bring recovery times down to minutes for a reasonable price; we discuss some of these in our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/2/8561/business-continuity/research-bc-dr-and-the-cloud.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220">report on BC/DR and the cloud</a>.</p> <P> But while tech advances have handed IT pros a plethora of new tools to streamline failover to a warm site, complexities remain. Three areas in particular can derail automated disaster recovery: not having complete data sets in place for critical applications, a lack of bandwidth and incomplete integration. </p> <P> <strong>Fresh, Hot Data</strong></p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- inline Report Promo --> <div class="inlineReportPromo right"> <div class="reportHeader"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9898/Storage-Server/research-2013-state-of-storage.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220" target="_blank">Research: 2013 State of Storage</a> </div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1357/357CS_Reporcover.jpg" width="175" height="110" alt="Report Cover" title="Report Cover" class="reportCover" /> <div class="reportInfo"> Our full <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9898/Storage-Server/research-2013-state-of-storage.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220" target="_blank">2013 State of Storage report</a> is free with registration. This report includes <strong>53</strong> pages of action-oriented analysis, packed with <strong>45</strong> charts.<br /><br /> What you'll find: <ul> <li>Technology and software trends</li> <li>Six recommendations for the year ahead</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/9898/Storage-Server/research-2013-state-of-storage.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130220" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> <!-- / inline Report Promo --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Getting an application up quickly at a warm site means that its data must be there, ready and waiting. In manual failover scenarios, data can be a little dated: A stakeholder decides on reasonable RPO and RTO (recovery point and recovery time objective) metrics and agrees that some data might be lost. But for automated recovery of applications to work, completeness and integrity of the data at the recovery site are critical. </p> <P> Primary array replication is the best way to mirror data from one site to another without human involvement. However, the licensing and storage costs associated with replication have tabled many a failover project. In the last couple of years, we've seen a number of changes: The commoditization of enterprise storage, the emergence of upstart providers of appliances and software, and the introduction of managed replication services have dramatically driven down the cost, regardless of the platform or technique used. In fact, our State of Storage report shows the percentage of respondents using replication on a widespread or limited basis ticked up three points since last year, to 70%. </p> <P> But replicating data to a warm site still requires bandwidth, and plenty of it, which brings us to our second roadblock.</p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center><strong>To read the rest of the article,<br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/022013s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">download the <em>InformationWeek</em> February special issue on disaster recovery</a></strong></center><br clear="all" /></p> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2012-12-14T16:56:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/Virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-11-15T16:55:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/1/9098/Application-Performance-Optimization/fundamentals-application-early-warning-system.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-11-07T08:00:00ZOur <i>InformationWeek</i> 2013 Virtualization Management Survey shows automated service delivery is the future -- unless you want to find yourself managing cloud providers.http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/virtualization/a-shaky-virtual-stack/240012632?ct=1022?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAs we enter 2013, the technology foundation of our businesses is changing dramatically as every layer of the network and service delivery stack can now be abstracted. The final holdout of genuinely "hard" hardware was the network, but even that's going virtual. When we asked about software-defined networks in the <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/Virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html" target="_blank"><i>InformationWeek</i> 2013 Virtualization Management Survey</a>, we found more interest in SDNs than in our SDN-specific survey just a few months earlier.</p> <P> Higher up the stack, 42% of the 320 business technology respondents to our virtualization survey say their companies use multiple hypervisors, up from 36% in August 2011, and 11 of the 13 hypervisors we asked about are in use by more than 10% of respondents, compared with eight hypervisors two years ago. In this year's <i>InformationWeek</i> Global CIO Survey, 92% of respondents say they plan to increase their use of server virtualization, even ahead of expanding business intelligence (85%) and improving information security (84%). In our <i>InformationWeek</i> 2012 IT Spending Priorities Survey, improving security, increasing server virtualization, and upgrading the network and storage infrastructures came in atop a list of 16 projects competing for budgets.</p> <P> However, the end goal of all of this virtualization--flexible, service-oriented IT that can respond quickly to business needs--is still a precarious proposition because it requires extensive automation and orchestration. That's a big worry for IT teams faced with coaxing performance out of highly virtualized, highly fragmented stacks using management technologies inadequate to the task. </p> <p> </p> In fact, confidence in next-generation virtualization technologies is low among many IT professionals we work with, even as use rises. Why? For one thing, the hypervisor wars aren't over--they're escalating. While VMware remains king of the hill in terms of functionality and market share, Microsoft's Hyper-V continues to gain momentum, with nearly one-third of survey respondents citing some level of use. Improvements in Windows Server 2012 will keep that growth going. Citrix and Oracle are holding their own, and we're only talking server and desktop virtualization here. Never mind the number of hypervisors from vendors competing in virtualized storage, network, I/O, and applications. </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div style="float:right;padding-left:10px;"> <div style="width:210px; border:1px solid #000000;"> <div style="margin:0; padding:5px; background-color:#CC0000; text-align:center; font-size:1em; color:#ffffff; font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121112" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Research: 2013 Virtualization Management Survey</a></div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1350/350CS_reportcover.jpg" width="175" height="104" style="margin:15px;"> <div style="font-size:.9em; margin:0px 1px 0px 10px;">Get the full report on our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121112" target="_blank">2013 Virtualization Management Survey</a> free with registration. <br /><br />This report includes <strong>34</strong> pages of action-oriented analysis, packed with <strong>28</strong> charts. What you'll find: <ul class="normalUL"><li>Trended adoption levels for 13 hypervisors</li> <li>Why virtualization must be core to compliance efforts</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121112" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center><br /></div> </div> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> This isn't all bad for IT. Competition has driven core virtualization technology costs down by about 75% since the debut of server virtualization in the early 2000s. Even storage and application virtualization have started shedding their price premiums. A proliferation of new products and vendors also fosters innovation.</p> <P> But hypervisor fragmentation has a killer downside: a lack of standardization that makes integrating dissimilar silos--an absolute requirement if we want to get to automated service delivery--nearly impossible. A main goal of automation is self-service, empowering business users to provision the IT assets needed for a given project. That goes beyond just server cycles; if the whole stack isn't working in unison, you don't have efficient resource use, self-healing, improved application availability, better power management, preplanned responses to contingency scenarios--all the stuff that makes automation worth the cost and effort. </p> <P> <strong>People Power</strong></p> <P> One often overlooked issue is that virtualization technology has changed so quickly that only the largest and most progressive companies have the skill sets to maintain it. Respondents to our survey cite a moderate to high degree of difficulty in training or sourcing the professionals necessary to solidify the stack. The traditional IT team structure is changing, too, as we deal with networks inside servers, applications rolled from virtualization management platforms, and server teams that provision their own storage. </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1350/350CS_chart1.jpg" width="585" height="466" alt="chart: Virtual Vision" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P> <P>The status quo can even be downright obstructionist if teams fight over who will control which resources and own new responsibilities. </p> <P> Organizational difficulties aside, we don't yet have the management tools to bring next-generation virtualized networking, I/O, application, and storage technologies under one, or even two or three, panes of glass. Unified management of all these virtualized resources is a bridge our vendors must cross: A large, distributed enterprise infrastructure might mix three types of virtualized storage arrays, two different server hypervisors, a virtual desktop connection broker, an application virtualization controller, an I/O virtualization controller, and an SDN appliance. That's potentially nine management interfaces, not counting Windows- and Linux-specific agents. Without understanding at each and every layer how an application is delivered, it's almost impossible to quickly diagnose problems and maintain quality of service.</p> <P> Unfortunately, the present market is so diverse and so nonstandard that managing such a large infrastructure leaves little time to understand how applications on virtualized infrastructures are being delivered. This is an important point because IT teams are increasingly driven by the concept of business services, where compute, network, security, and storage are packaged and delivered on demand. When we analyze the state of virtualization, what we're really talking about is commoditization of an application or service, without care for the underlying infrastructure--freedom to distribute each and every service exactly where and when it's needed, with no wasted resources. This idea of total divorce from the physical at every level of the data center is what's giving rise to the latest virtualization paradigm of policy-driven, cloud-based automated service delivery. CIOs need to take this vision seriously if they plan to help business units implement new initiatives fast and match the "instant-on" computing resources offered by public cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace.</p> <P> Speaking of cloud, vendors including Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware are trying to help in-house IT compete with their new flagship private cloud offerings. The vision: Put a bunch of stuff in a room and let that stuff run your data structures, desktops, and application stack. Just tell it what you want (read: policies) and turn it loose. The infrastructure automatically operates at 100% efficiency and is always up. When it gets overcrowded with requests, it tells you that it needs more hardware, at which point you throw in another server or whatever, and the gear is dynamically absorbed and deployed where needed to deliver on performance guarantees. </p> <P> This scenario is a long, long way from current private cloud reality, where elasticity, scalability, and organization of services are a direct result of IT elbow grease, not automation. But it's where we need to be aiming. In fact, policy-based service delivery has been the end goal of most big hypervisor vendors since day one. But can they pull it off? </p> <P> Respondents are skeptical--11% flat out say they don't believe in this vision, and 27% confess ignorance. Of those respondents who have a positive opinion, only one-fifth think that a single virtualization provider can get them there. That's not exactly a vote of confidence in products, such as VMware's vCloud, that purport to deliver service-oriented IT in a single suite. Fully 41% of respondents say it's either too complex to attempt at present or that it will require multiple vendors--an opinion that we're inclined to agree with given the fragmented market. </p> <P> As to why IT's driving forward anyway, operational flexibility and agility ranked as the top driver for server virtualization and physical-to-virtual conversion among survey respondents in our 2011 and 2013 surveys. </p> <P> Never let it be said our respondents aren't an optimistic bunch. </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1350/350CS_chart2.jpg" width="585" height="370" alt="chart: How much is your company using these virtualization technologies?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P><strong>Automation Conundrum</strong></p> <P> To build a highly available infrastructure that responds in real time to changing conditions requires a few things. First, each level of the stack needs to communicate with the other levels. Second, you need policies to respond to scenarios and contingencies that may affect service delivery. Say a superstorm knocks out your East Coast offices, to use a painfully real-world example. Can your employees in Chicago still get to critical business data and applications? </p> <P> But most important, policy-based service-delivery systems depend on automation. Without automated application delivery workflows and orchestration techniques, IT can't hope to meet service-delivery goals.</p> <P> To that end, we saw healthier-than- expected levels of automation processes interacting with the 15 IT systems we asked about in our survey. At least 80% of respondents cite some level of automation for server virtualization, application virtualization, application deployment, application monitoring, backup and recovery, and network management. Analytics and data warehouses, at 74%, and directory services (76%) fell just shy.</p> <P> That's encouraging, but we know from experience that it's difficult to demonstrate a strong ROI for automation projects, especially those that don't involve mission-critical applications, which helps explain why only 15% of respondents to our survey have fully deployed automation suites vs. 45% with no plans. Without a common language, the level of manpower involved in automating service delivery schemes is simply too expensive for the current market to bear for anything except the most mission-critical applications.</p> <P> Another reason for weak adoption is the state of today's data center automation systems, even mature ones like those from BMC, CA, and IBM/Tivoli. Vendors essentially say: "This product can, with a huge investment of time, energy, and money, automate your systems to a certain extent." The value proposition isn't compelling enough unless the service in question is so critical that downtime would mean a massive monetary loss. </p> <P> The biggest barriers to adopting automation systems, cited by 81% of survey respondents, is no perceived benefit to IT (38%) or decision-makers (43%). Others cite inadequate skill sets (30%), the expense (21%), and integration difficulties (14%). </p> <P> We think the big reason IT teams are reticent to jump into service-oriented IT boils down to one fact: There are so many moving pieces at so many different levels of the stack, the promise of integrating them with one another and a service-delivery engine seems like an impossible dream. As IT veterans will tell you, the devil really is in the details. What do you mean these modules can't talk with one another? What do you mean we need a specialized programming team to make that happen? The more moving pieces involved, the greater the likelihood of running into a problem that just can't be solved, at least not at any reasonable cost. Multiply this challenge by the number of systems involved in delivering IT in a service-oriented way, and it's no wonder decision-makers are reluctant. </p> <P> When IT teams are rolling out automation and orchestration systems, they're doing it where the dollars are: business continuity and disaster recovery, automated performance tiering, and dynamic performance management for enterprise applications. All of these categories have a clear ROI: business continuity and disaster recovery for reasons of business survival and regulatory compliance. Automated performance tiering because there's a clear capital expense savings associated with using equipment better. Orchestration because it saves on manpower. And dynamic application monitoring because of the risk of losing sales or suffering bad PR if customer-facing services go south. </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1350/350CS_chart3.jpg" width="585" height="353" alt="chart: are you using tools to automate IT workflow or processes?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P><strong>The Road Forward</strong></p> <P> As you move toward a fully virtualized stack, don't be too quick to discard established IT organizational structures. Rigid delineation into service delivery teams with specific responsibilities came into being for a reason. One big driver: compliance. Delegation-of-authority initiatives demand accountability, and that demands data structures. Two-thirds of our respondents say they are subject to some form of regulation, and many also say server, storage, desktop, and application virtualization are important to maintaining that compliance. </p> <P> To ensure role flux doesn't adversely impact security, use virtualization-specific management tools to regulate, monitor, and log infrastructure changes. Embrace the role-based access control capabilities native to modern virtualization platforms, and use configuration profiles and policy management tools to confirm that controls extend throughout the stack.</p> <P> In addition, select supplemental I/O, application, and network hypervisors judiciously. While these technologies aren't being virtualized as fast as core resources such as storage and server, anywhere from one-fifth to nearly one-third of respondents are actively evaluating them. If we aggregate the "evaluating," "limited use," and "extensive use" categories, more than half of respondent companies are adopting the entire beautiful, fragmented virtualization stack, extending from storage and network right on up through servers, desktops, and applications.</p> <P> Yes, the "extensive use" category rankings are somewhat low. But for that, vendors have only themselves to blame. Data centers are suffering from the kinds of problems that these technologies could solve, if only IT felt comfortable that they could integrate everything. </p> <P> This statistic brings into sharp relief a problem we've already discussed but that bears repeating--you must make all these moving pieces work together in a way that is meaningful to service delivery. You can't depend on vendors here; the industry is handicapped by a lack of common hypervisor communication standards. </p> <P> While VMware has continued to revise and update its proprietary communications APIs, the adoption rate by other vendors is pitiful. When looking at storage-assisted virtualization operations, for example, only a few storage arrays are fully API compliant; we're looking at you, FalconStor and Hewlett-Packard. </p> <P> Our survey also showed a stall in storage virtualization use. Part of this is, we think, due to virtualization features being absorbed into standard array feature sets. Things such as deduplication, automated performance tiering, and dynamic I/O allocations are no longer found only in expensive virtualized arrays; commodity storage vendors are now offering such features on a variety of inexpensive equipment. </p> <P> Finally, while Oracle and VMware have attempted to supplement network and I/O virtualization capabilities with their acquisitions of Xsigo and Nicira, respectively, the only external network equipment with direct hypervisor integration that we're aware of remains the Cisco Nexus series, which is nearly 4 years old. </p> <P> In short, don't expect integration without extraordinary elbow grease. </p> <P> We admit to being floored by the number of respondents using network virtualization--11% say they're using it extensively and 24% on a limited basis. We're guessing the "limited use" category is data center-only deployments, but an aggregate 34% adoption rate of what is essentially an early-stage technology speaks extremely well for the future of SDN. </p> <P> It's clear why respondents see value in network virtualization--configuring services across disparate devices is extremely difficult without vendor-specific network management products. Network virtualization, therefore, figures strongly in compliance initiatives and can pay for itself via faster incident resolution and new deployments and lower management costs.</p> <P> Network virtualization also has a huge leg up on other virtualization technologies for one reason: OpenFlow. By embracing a standard network virtualization protocol stack, vendors have made it substantially easier for diverse devices to interoperate. Other virtualization vendors could take a lesson. </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1350/350CS_chart4.jpg" width="585" height="215" alt="chart: Does your company use more than one hypervisor in production?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P> <center>Go to the sidebar:<br> <b><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/automation-demands-tighter-vm-security/240012633">Automation Demands Tighter VM Security</a></b></center></p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9216/Virtualization/informationweek-november-12-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1350/smallcov2.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: Nov. 12, 2012 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Nov. 12, 2012 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9216/Virtualization/informationweek-november-12-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of <nobr><em>InformationWeek</em> magazine</nobr></a><br /> (registration required)</strong></div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> <P>2012-11-07T08:00:00ZPlan to let hypervisors spin up new virtual machines on their own? Then you'd better lock them down.http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/automation-demands-tighter-vm-security/240012633?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<P>From a security standpoint, basic server hypervisors have a lot of intrinsic strength. They work at a very low level within a given piece of hardware. They're hardened and task-specific, and the code base is relatively small. And it's a good thing, because the hypervisor enjoys a privileged degree of access to guest operating systems, especially via OS-native virtual machine tools, which allow the hypervisor all sorts of power. Compromising the hypervisor gives complete and total access to all of the data structures that comprise the system itself. But when we asked about hypervisor security, only 64% of respondents to our survey cited concern about this issue. That leaves a staggering 36%--greater than one-third of respondents--who have their heads in the sand. If a system runs code, it can be compromised, and if that code is running everywhere, there's a huge incentive to break it. There have been no fewer than 10 major hypervisor vulnerabilities disclosed this year alone, affecting a variety of platforms. Exploits range from remote code execution vulnerabilities (the most severe) to denial of service, and while VMware has yet to disclose a remote code execution vulnerability, it's only a matter of time. Earlier this year, for example, outdated source code for VMware's ESX hypervisor was posted.</P> <P> <P>We still see companies with a long way to go to integrate hypervisor awareness into their overall security mandates. The good news is that vendors have been preparing for this eventuality for some time, as we discuss in our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9088/Virtualization/research-2013-virtualization-management-survey.html" target="_blank">full report</a>. Also, about half of survey respondents (48%) have a hypervisor-aware security product in place. An additional 32% plan to adopt one. </p> <P> <center>Go to the main story:<br> <b><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/virtualization/a-shaky-virtual-stack/240012632?ct=1022">A Shaky Virtual Stack</a></b></center></p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9216/Virtualization/informationweek-november-12-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1350/smallcov2.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: Nov. 12, 2012 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Nov. 12, 2012 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9216/Virtualization/informationweek-november-12-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of <nobr><em>InformationWeek</em> magazine</nobr></a><br /> (registration required)</strong></div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2012-10-22T08:00:00ZMost IT teams have synthetic monitoring of their sites down. Now it's time to extend that vigilance to client-server applications.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/application-monitoring-beyond-the-web/240009327?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- October 22, 2012 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/102212/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1347/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - October 22, 2012" title="InformationWeek Green - October 22, 2012" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/102212/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/102212/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire Oct. 22, 2012, issue of <em>InformationWeek</em></a></strong>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative<br /> (Registration required.)<br /> <center><div class="innerGreenPromoText" align="center">We will plant a tree for each of the first 5,000 downloads.</div></center> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / October 22, 2012 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1347/347CS_cover_150_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Application Early Warning System" title="Application Early Warning System" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> <P> Ever feel like you're running blind, even with a costly and complex application performance monitoring system in place? </p> <P> The problem is that APM mostly focuses on Web applications. But most IT teams are responsible for vital business applications that aren't Web based and that must be available pretty much 100% of the time--and by "available" we mean near-instant response, not taking 10 seconds to refresh a screen. Think about an inventory database that salespeople and partners depend on. It's extraordinary that many shops are still in the position of not knowing performance is tanking until the help desk lines light up. And if you can't proactively monitor mission-critical applications hosted in-house, you're going to be in worse shape if (or when) they start migrating to public cloud infrastructure services.</p> <P> Most of the companies we work with have a good handle on how well their e-commerce applications and outward-facing websites are performing. Now the challenge is looking inward to head off problems with critical business applications before customers or employees notice. </p> <P> The answer to doing that is using synthetic transaction monitoring for those in-house applications. While previously synthetic transactions were only for Web applications, leading APM providers, like those listed in our vendor comparison on p. 11, are starting to offer real transactional automation integration. The key word there is "starting." The information in our comparison is based on data provided by the vendors; we have not lab tested these systems, so caveat emptor. </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div style="float:right;padding-left:10px;"> <div style="width:210px; border:1px solid #000000;"> <div style="margin:0; padding:5px; background-color:#CC0000; text-align:center; font-size:1em; color:#ffffff; font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/1/9098/Application-Performance-Optimization/fundamentals-application-early-warning-system.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121022" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Fundamentals: Application Early-Warning System</a></div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1347/347CS_reportcover.jpg" width="175" height="103" style="margin:15px;"> <div style="font-size:.9em; margin:1px 19px 10px 19px;">Our full report on <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/1/9098/Application-Performance-Optimization/fundamentals-application-early-warning-system.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121022" target="_blank">application monitoring</a> free with registration. <br /><br />This report includes <strong> 15</strong> pages of action-oriented analysis. What you'll find: <ul class="normalUL"><li>Preview of <i>InformationWeek</i> 2013 Virtualization Survey data</li> <li>Discussion of the next step: analyzing network elements in real time with correlation</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/1/9098/Application-Performance-Optimization/fundamentals-application-early-warning-system.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20121022" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center><br /></div> </div> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> We strongly suspect that most vendors are being, shall we say, overly optimistic in their assessments of their products' capabilities. Test in your infrastructure before assuming any APM system can support monitoring of internal applications.</p> <P> What are we looking for? Instead of having to manually run a test transaction, you have a process do it for you at measured intervals. The system records the time to completion, perhaps even the time between different steps in the transaction. An operation suddenly takes 30 seconds instead of five seconds and that delay happens three times over a five-minute interval? You have a problem--and an email letting you know exactly what's up. Then, runbook or scripted automation sequences take a flagging application server, indicated by a transaction monitor, tear it down from the server farm, and add a clone to the pool. Now you can investigate without end users being inconvenienced. To do all that, you need to know it's down, and the application monitor will tell you in a better way than any other monitoring tool.</p> <P> IT seems increasingly open to trying to achieve this level of automation. In our 2013 <i>InformationWeek</i> Virtualization Management Survey, which will be released in a few weeks, we delved into use of automation systems like Microsoft System Center, PuppetLabs, and Opscode Chef. While only 15% have this technology fully deployed, 40% are in the process. That's great news for IT and the business. </p> <P> Of course, advanced automation builds on baseline key performance metrics, because once you know an application is malfunctioning, you need to know why. </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center><strong>To read the rest of the article,<br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/102212/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the Oct. 22, 2012, issue of <em>InformationWeek</em></a></strong></center><br clear="all" /></p> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2012-10-18T01:14:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/13/9008/Outsourcing-Services/fundamentals-mobile-apps-from-concept-to-code.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-09-19T00:46:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/8860/Network-Systems-Management/informed-cio-private-cloud-automation.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-09-18T02:25:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/8831/Network-Systems-Management/research-anywhere-anytime-app-delivery.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-09-04T19:17:00ZThe OS suffers from a platform schism that can't be fixed with Win RT or virtualization.http://www.informationweek.com/storage/virtualization/windows-8s-unpleasant-split-personality/240006711?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWindows 8 is the spiritual successor to the OS that must not be named--you know, the one that forced Microsoft to keep the XP licensing desk open almost five years after its planned end date. <P> The issue isn't just that Metro (excuse me, "Modern UI") will, like Vista's UI, annoy users to no end with its bloated, full-screen or second-monitor interface with applications represented as varying-size cubes. Ever try to find the right icon on an overcrowded desktop? Add clashing primary colors to the mix. No, the big problem with Windows 8 is that Microsoft is not executing on tying touch and conventional computing devices into a single, unified OS. <P> An integrated PC/tablet/phone platform is a neat idea, predicated on the concept that IT can give users standard business desktop builds on their PCs and tablets. Great in theory, but problematic because these apps tend not to work on the ARM processors that modern tablets use; they're limited to x86/x64 architectures from AMD or Intel. ARM is here to stay--these processors have a substantially better power-utilization profile than x86/x64 microarchitectures, and power is the single biggest problem in mobility. Energy storage sucks, and processors are hungry. ARM chips are nearly 30% better on energy use than x64, and that's a big deal because the last major advance in battery technology was the invention of lithium ion cells by Exxon in the '70s. So why would anyone want to push lousier power efficiency chips into the tablet market when usage times are already abysmal? <P> Enter Microsoft's new "unified" development framework for desktops and tablets, Win RT. RT was supposed to remedy this defect in compatibility by providing a common framework for device application development, but it doesn't. Because Metro plug-ins are compiled for x86/x64 and won't run on ARM, you can forget about the plug-ins that are a large part of the new functionality of Win 8 on your ARM devices. But even worse, Microsoft has no plans to extend an intermediate software language layer, which would allow standard x86/x64 apps to run on Win 8 ARM edition. Further, .NET and Silverlight are not supported on ARM, so let's start rewriting everything that's in .NET for ARM. Or not. <P> Microsoft could write a layer of intermediary code to make apps cross-architecture-compatible; after all, it's done it before with Microsoft Intermediate Language for .NET. Intermediary languages translate higher-level application instructions into native architecture instructions in real time or through the use of a virtual machine, which essentially makes MSIL a form of local app virtualization. Yes, MSIL adds overhead and potentially headaches in maintenance and performance, but it's really the only way to get non-native apps on the ARM platform seamlessly. Of course it's possible to get any sort of application you want on any platform with a terminal or VDI delivery approach, but variances in screen size, lack of basic touch compatibility (or transport of touch gestures), and non-native interfaces make this a difficult value proposition at best, and a nightmare at worst.2012-08-17T15:52:00ZXsigo buy isn't about VMware and Nicira or challenging the hypervisor market leaders.http://www.informationweek.com/storage/virtualization/oracles-ioptical-illusion/240005796?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsOracle's recent announcement that it will <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/infrastructure/oracle-buys-xsigo-to-boost-cloud-prowess/240004558">acquire Xsigo Systems</a> was as much about redirection as anything, and in that sense, the move was a success. It's been widely chalked up by the analyst community as "keeping up with the Joneses" in the wake of <a href="http://www.networkcomputing.com/virtualization/vmware-buys-nicira-validates-software-de/240004227">VMware's intention to buy Nicira</a>, a network virtualization vendor with robust functional implications for VMware's existing network suite. Others attribute the move to Oracle's trying to run with the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/virtualization/why-hasnt-hyper-v-achieved-world-dominat/240004600">bigger dogs in the hypervisor market</a>. <P> Both reasons are at best incidental, and here's why. <P> For VMware, buying Nicira makes sense. VMware gets dramatically improved network abstraction and improved independence from physical network architectures. The new stack makes it easier to deliver its central value proposition: an elastic, scalable, commoditized, self-healing cloud. Plus, Xsigo is not Nicira in a different package. Nicira is a pure network virtualization suite that focuses on core network abstraction, elasticity, and dynamic service delivery, all while harnessing the power of OpenFlow. It promises the "death of the VLAN" and encapsulated, dynamically provisioned virtual network architectures. Nicira is a platform for building networks. <P> Xsigo, on the other hand, is a proprietary I/O virtualization suite that focuses on unified I/O delivery over InfiniBand. Sure, Xsigo supplies much-needed abstraction for diverse interfaces like 10 Gbps Ethernet and 4 Gbps and 8 Gbps Fibre Channel, as well as other perks, like dynamic provisioning. But what it really does is deliver storage, network, and other more-abstract I/O types in a unified fashion, yielding top-of-rack savings and improved I/O delivery by reducing I/O interconnect equipment and enabling central I/O provisioning and automation. Good stuff, but it's not Nicira. <P> As to the second item--grabbing yet another promising technology to fuel its claim to being a serious hypervisor vendor--let's be brutally honest. Oracle is not even a contender in the hypervisor war, no matter how much marketing hype it throws at the claim. The rebranding work Oracle has done to try to cast itself as a "real" hypervisor vendor has been both frenzied and expensive, yet it's hardly a blip on the radar to VMware. Our latest <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/5/8864/Cloud-Computing/research-private-cloud-vision-vs-reality.html"><em>InformationWeek</em> Private Cloud Survey</a> showed Oracle a good 40 points behind VMware in mindshare among respondents. Even Citrix is years ahead of Oracle in delivering a robust, feature-packed, market-tested hypervisor, and Citrix is hardly the market leader that VMware is. <P> Ever met anyone who runs an Oracle hypervisor in production for anything other than Oracle applications? Exactly. <P> Still, you don't get as big as Oracle by being stupid, and while I don't think Oracle bought Xsigo to keep up with the Joneses, I also don't think it's averse to conveying that impression. It also clearly hopes the purchase will convince those just starting virtualization projects--like small shops--that Oracle is an up-and-coming hypervisor vendor. That's attention its desperately needs to prop up a weak hypervisor product line. <P> But don't be fooled. Oracle bought Xsigo precisely because its gear is so I/O intensive. Oracle servers voraciously consume storage and network I/O. Its data engines are built to cluster and load-balance billions of transactions in dense, heavily utilized server farms--exactly the sort of environment that can benefit most from unified I/O delivery. And it's not like Oracle doesn't have inside sales teams poised to bundle Xsigo products with existing Oracle offerings to drive Xsigo sales. <P> But even if Xsigo flops in Oracle's existing customer base and generates no more publicity than it has already for Oracle's virtualization line, the buy is still a win in terms of overall market strategy. Despite a reputation for database that eclipses its numerous other competencies, Oracle has been frantically diversifying for years. In addition to its many acquisitions that provide deep synergy with relational databases, like enterprise search and business process management technologies, Oracle has been buying organizations with competencies in content management, voice recognition, event correlation, identity management, SIP communications, CRM, digital rights management, and a legion of business-focused services that run on top of its databases and drive core product sales synergistically. <P> So, while Oracle's Xsigo acquisition may not be what it first seems, it makes perfect sense. The company would have to lose three times over not to realize a benefit.2012-07-30T18:15:00ZMicrosoft is falling down on its patented copy/embed/propaganda formula. Where's Bill Gates when you need him?http://www.informationweek.com/news/240004600?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsDespite ongoing innovation by seated virtualization giant VMware, Microsoft continues to match core hypervisor features while competing strongly on price. No surprise, then, that Hyper-V is gaining market share. But I must confess that I'm a bit disappointed in Redmond's performance, in light of its track record for mercilessly crushing the competition, even in established markets where it previously held no competency. <P> It seems to me that Microsoft is not effectively applying its tried-and-true formula for seizing dominance. And that's a problem for IT, because the lack of a single industry-standard hypervisor platform is hurting the market from a standards and interoperability perspective. <P> Sure, competition is healthy; it drives down prices and fosters innovation. However, where server virtualization is concerned, how much innovation do we really need? VMware may have more or less invented the business-class server hypervisor, but Microsoft always wins these battles in the end. And honestly, isn't that a good thing? Businesses get a tolerable product that takes a ton of effort to keep running but is relatively inexpensive, so they can spend on expertise. Vendors get a standard platform on which to build and develop. Equipment manufacturers get a standard OEM hypervisor to deploy. And on a more personal front, we IT pros get excellent job security and the privilege of paying for expensive outsourced single-vendor technical support conducted in broken English. Not only that, but it's nice to have only one product to support, am I right? All these different hypervisors fragment staff expertise by requiring skilled professionals to handle different systems. When people ask IT about products Microsoft has killed (remember WordPerfect?) our response is simple: No one uses that, why should I know it well enough to support it? You're on your own, user! <P> So where has Microsoft fallen down on the job? Let's take a look at the formula and see why VMware is still around. <P> First, Microsoft enters into a lucrative market with established players by producing a copycat product and pricing it aggressively. Check. Second, it slipstreams the new offering into the Windows product line so that it's "built in." Check. Then it leverages seated market partners to make sure it's in everyone's face as soon as a piece of equipment is powered on. OK, so no failure here. These things Microsoft has done with Hyper-V. It's a robust clone of ESX server, it's aggressively underpriced, it's a part of server operating systems from the word go, and all the major vendors are offering licensing deals on it. <P> But the coup de grace elements of Microsoft's strategy are strangely missing. Where is the slur marketeering and propaganda campaign? The dirty licensing tactics? The aggressive litigation? <P> In point of fact, Microsoft is suing all sorts of people in a flurry of new cases centered on the mobile device market, patent infringement in the public cloud, and the Xbox gaming platform. Yet I don't see a single active lawsuit against EMC designed to undermine VMware's market dominance. And while Microsoft has been advertising Hyper-V and the latest iteration of Windows Server aggressively, I am not seeing the mudslinging that I've come to know and love from Redmond. <P> Finally, while Hyper-V is less expensive than the alternatives, Microsoft is hardly giving it away, as it's done in intense battles of the past. Come on, Microsoft! Without an effective anti-VMware propaganda campaign, how can you expect to continue to gain market share in the face of a product that still has an edge in both innovation and functionality? EMC is certainly not sitting still and waiting for your strategy to overwhelm it, so how can you expect to crush the opposition when you're not even applying all the gizmos in your tool chest to the problem? <P> Can someone tell me where Gates is? I think we need him back.2012-07-30T08:00:00ZNew VMware APIs are making snapshots and backups faster and easier for IT.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240004120?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/073012s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/supplement/033/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Digital Supplement - August 2012" title="InformationWeek Digital Supplement - August 2012" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a><br /> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/073012s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/073012s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire August 2012<em> InformationWeek</em> digital supplement on mobile device backup</a></strong>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative.<br /> (Registration required.)<br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> IT teams that have gone big on virtualization can take advantage of advances that simplify the process of backing up virtual machines.</p> <P> VMs are composed of fixed configuration and disk files, so it's easy to grab a copy of a machine's resource profile, snag the associated disk files, and spin it up anywhere, anytime. And VMware and Microsoft have improved this functionality. </p> <P> Do you store your VM images on a SAN? Want to back up your machines while they're still running? Snapshot-compatible backup applications that leverage vendor APIs to do the heavy lifting are available for the major hypervisors. They make API calls to take snapshots of VMs prior to starting the backup process. Changes are redirected to a change file instead of the original volume. The machine is backed up, even if clients are using it, and the snapshot is destroyed.</p> <P> VMware has performed backups this way since ESX 2.0, but it required the use of a VMware Consolidated Backup proxy server. This meant IT had to deal with tedious configuration requirements, and the underlying storage system was saddled with a significant amount of read I/O during backups. </p> <P> Users griped, so VMware has eliminated VCB in favor of an integrated API called vStorage APIs for Data Protection. VADP is invoked directly by a backup application and is a configuration-free feature of vSphere.</p> <P> Third-party virtualization backup providers such as Veeam have taken full advantage of VADP and its Microsoft equivalent, Volume Shadow Copy Service, to deliver low-cost, highly effective, VM-level backup at a reasonable price. </p> <P> <strong>Other Capabilities</strong></p> <P> Virtualization APIs can also grab flat-file backups from guest virtual machines, and products that already excel at flat-file backups can leverage the APIs to do so better and with a smaller footprint. But most exciting is underlying storage's involvement in the backup process. </p> <P> The latest storage APIs from VMware, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, use the horsepower of the storage arrays to make copies of data to be backed up. This approach works provided the storage array has enough spare capacity to accommodate the I/O. Doing the backup itself requires an API-compatible backup product for VMware. Acronis, CommVault, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Quest, Symantec, and Syncsort are API certified. Using hardware-assisted copy requires a SAN that's compatible with vStorage API for Array Integration. Three vendors have VAAI-ready SANs, according to the latest VMware hardware compatibility list: FalconStor, LeftHand, and HP.</p> <P> Other advances are transforming backup. For instance, imagine running traditional network- or agent-based backup over the internal hypervisor instead of across conventional network links. VMware's Virtual Machine Communication Interface allows machines on the same host to read data from one another at the speed of the internal machine bus. It's fast, particularly for large transfers or where the data is in running memory. One example is SQL Server, which is designed to keep as much data as possible in memory for faster reads and queries.</p> <P> Note that you'll need to upgrade to vSphere 4 or later to take advantage of these APIs. </P> <P> <em>Jake McTigue is president of McTigue Analytics. </em> </P> <P>2012-07-23T09:16:00ZBanking on black hats not targeting hypervisors was always a questionable idea. Now, it's downright dangerous.http://www.informationweek.com/storage/virtualization/virtualization-and-the-apple-effect/240004145?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsRemember when attackers ignored Apple products? Back when the platform was limited to industry-specific niches? Mac viruses are still rare, but the explosive popularity of iThings and Apple's growing market presence (now around 14% of total U.S. personal computing share) mean they're a growing concern. Hypervisors are also popping up everywhere, and not just in data centers. Even Microsoft's Xbox console sports an elementary hypervisor (not Hyper-V) to separate the system software from underlying hardware. And more popularity inevitably equals more attacks. <P> Some IT pros saw this coming. Back when vSphere was still called ESX server, I remember sitting with a group of network professionals and discussing how the hypervisor changed the security landscape by interjecting a new layer into the stack, thereby creating a new attack surface. The more senior members of our little group pointed out that because hypervisors were written by humans and consisted of code, they were inherently vulnerable. Most of my team scoffed--after all, in 2002, only a small percentage of IT shops had virtualized infrastructures. With hardware and implementation costs acting as a barrier to adoption and major vendors like Microsoft refusing to support widely used products like Exchange and SQL Server running on virtualized platforms, confidence in virtualized infrastructures and their ability to show a compelling ROI was not exactly high. But I remember thinking it was only a matter of time before attacks on the hypervisor went mainstream. <P> That time is now, and evidence of hypervisor vulnerabilities in 64-bit paravirtualized Xen hosts (<a href="http://support.novell.com/security/cve/CVE-2012-0217.html">CVE-2012-0217</a>) has brought home exactly how right those old-timers were. When it comes to market share, the hypervisor is king. Our <em>InformationWeek</em> <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/8845/Data-Center/research-2012-state-of-the-data-center.html">2012 State of the Data Center Survey</a>, fielded in April, shows just 14% of respondents (all involved with management or decision-making at data centers that are 1,000 square feet or larger) don't have a virtualization management or private cloud software stack in place; the top pick by far, with 53%, is VMware vCenter. At No. 2, with just 10%, is Microsoft System Center VMM. <P> With widespread adoption in every vertical and in industries of every size, the incentive to write exploit code for common hypervisor platforms is very compelling indeed. <P> The Xen vulnerability brings the matter of hypervisor security to our front door. An attacker who compromises an unpatched guest machine can now root the host itself on unpatched Xen implementations. The fact that CVE-2012-0217 exists means we can no longer ignore security at the hypervisor and rest easy at night secure in the knowledge that exploits simply don't exist. <P> Still, while the landscape just became a whole lot scarier, it's not all gloom and doom. VMware in particular has been proactively preparing for this moment since February 2008, when it launched the VMsafe initiative. The idea behind VMsafe was to get a small number of highly trusted security providers deep into VMware's hypervisor and collaboratively develop APIs and intercept code to mitigate and prevent hypervisor exploits. While VMsafe has been discontinued, its successor product line, vShield, is alive and well and has been the subject of considerable enhancement in vSphere 5. <P> VMware has also espoused the fact that a small, compact, and robustly tested hypervisor like vSphere is intrinsically difficult to write exploit code for, a statement with which most security professionals will agree. While Hyper-V continues to gain in market share, largely because of aggressive pricing, VMware's full-featured ESXi sports a 70-MB installed footprint versus around 3.5 GB for a corresponding Server 2008 R2 Core Hyper-V installation. This means that VMware is fully functional at one-fiftieth the amount of code, a significant attack surface advantage for the seated virtualization giant. <P> Even so, VMware has taken a few lumps. In 2008, a vulnerability dubbed CVE-2008-4916, which took advantage of faulty display code to enable execution of code on the host machine, was demonstrated; however, the vulnerability was only ever proved on VMware workstation, and VMware patched the bug before releasing vSphere 4.0. This year, a new vulnerability in VMware display drivers, CVE-2012-1510, enables local privilege elevation on a guest machine running the unpatched driver but does not threaten the host itself. Also this year, CVE-2012-1517 can crash the host VMX process and is listed as having the potential to execute privileged code on the host, even though a proof of concept has not been demonstrated. <P> Despite the lack of a corresponding case of guest-to-host escape like CVE-2012-0217, the virtualization giant has come close to a serious vulnerability more than once. <P> So what does it all mean? Simply put, despite VMware's best efforts to mitigate vulnerabilities and its visionary leadership in the area of hypervisor security, vulnerabilities are still becoming a fact of life in virtualized infrastructures. <P> And with the hypervisor being a critical component of everyday business strategy from enterprises both small and large, it's only a matter of time before the more enterprising members of the black-hat community start finding exploits for major hypervisor platforms with increasing frequency. <P> Network and security professionals would be wise to pull their heads out of the sand and start addressing virtual security before it's too late.2012-07-05T08:57:00ZThe problem with protocols is that when we need them most, they're least effective. Enter the age of the API.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240003166?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsWhenever we ask IT professionals about standards vs. proprietary, we get people professing their allegiance to network protocols. If my widget wants to communicate with your widget, they need to speak a common language, right? <P> The problem with standards is that they're the diametric opposite of innovation. As soon as you define a way in which a particular action must be taken, you eliminate other methods of taking that action. Sometimes support of a standard actually inhibits development of creative solutions to system problems. <P> Take OVF, the Open Virtualization Format for virtual machines. While almost all hypervisors are capable of doing basic functions with a standard .ovf file, VMware's proprietary--and, yes, innovative--VMDK file format brings a ton of additional features, like thin provisioning. However, a VM must be converted to a VMDK to take advantage. Yes, the OVF format remains useful for passing VMs from hypervisor to hypervisor in a standard, structured way. But the OVF format is also fixed, and because it's fixed, when VMware--or Citrix or Microsoft--wants to support a new feature that requires extension of the functionality at the virtual disk level, it can't do so in OVF. If it could, the standard would be broken and therefore useless. Even though OVF is extensible, if every vendor adds its own extensions to OVF, suddenly the thing is proprietary even though it's technically open. How will Hyper-V read VMware's proprietary OVF extensions? How will VMware read Hyper-V's? What if the extension carries critical machine data? <P> The kicker is, it's during periods of rapid change and intense innovation when we need standards the most. The move to private clouds and heavily virtualized and automated networks certainly qualifies as intense. But how does IT make the right bet in a world where technology is changing too fast to know what the "correct" standard will be a year from now? Maybe tomorrow some upstart will figure out a much better way to do X, and then standards are out the window, just like VMware tossed the first release of ESX Server. <P> While it's a challenging time for IT teams that need to integrate dissimilar systems to deliver tangible business benefit via integration, I can't help but feel bad for vendors. Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and others catch heat for "breaking" standards, but the reality is, they face a delicate balancing act between providing enough of a standard to promote far-reaching interoperability without hamstringing innovation. And virtualization has not made this difficult task any easier. <P> "Let's virtualize the network," says Company A. Engineers get to work and figure out that they want to use InfiniBand as a carrier interconnect. Company B has the same goals but prefers 10-Gbps Ethernet. Company C thinks PCI Express' SR-IOV is going to make life easier, so it goes with PCI Extension. Who's right? Which of these interconnects is going to win? The answer isn't always clear, and in the multivariate world of pervasive virtualization, unclear outcomes have become the rule rather than the exception. <P> I believe IT teams need to worry less about standards, or lack thereof, and focus energy on application programming interfaces, or APIs, that define the way outside elements can communicate with a given infrastructure element. Just as virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between a virtual machine and the memory it uses, an API provides a layer of abstraction between the request being made and the way in which the device accomplishes that request. I tell VMware to clone a machine with an API call, and vSphere uses its proprietary cloning technology to physically copy the machine. I can ask both vSphere and Hyper-V to do the same logical action: clone the machine. The way in which those two infrastructures actually get the job done could be radically different; if I'm using the right SAN, for instance, VMware can use another API to leverage the power of the storage array to do the task faster, and that's fine. This is the power of the API--and the reason APIs are becoming a standard feature of virtualized infrastructures. Tear down a machine, put a machine up, restart, failover, give me a new network interface. All these actions can be taken via API calls to underlying infrastructure elements without stifling the vendor's ability to innovate. <P> For networking pros, the problem with APIs is that they're invoked programmatically. And while there are plenty of code jockeys around, this programming is happening in a new place: the core infrastructure. That's scary. Code is buggy, and yet suddenly, the infrastructure team needs to know how to program, at least if your organization wants to leverage the power of APIs to provide concrete benefits such as automation, orchestration, and self-repair. Can you hire programmers to augment your infrastructure team skill set? Certainly. Do those same programmers understand the infrastructure well enough to work efficiently with the existing team? Maybe, but probably not. Time to start cross training? It is undoubtedly so.2012-06-22T08:00:00ZIt's not easy or inexpensive to implement, but without automation you'll never get self-service or self-healing, or realize maximum ROI. Here's how to get started.http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/management/private-cloud-automation/240002009?ct=1022?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsMajor public cloud providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Rackspace, have been driving hard toward automation since their services hit the market. The reason is simple: It improves both the bottom line and customer satisfaction. Now, automating an enterprise-class private or hybrid cloud is an entirely different affair from Amazon using its development muscle to let a user spin up an S3 instance. But that doesn't mean you can stay stuck in manual mode, because without automation, you don't have self-service, and self-service is one of the most compelling reasons for a private cloud. </p> <P> As with most complicated projects, you're better off building in automation from the get-go; retrofitting is more expensive and less effective. So we were somewhat discouraged with the results of our InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey. The good news is, this technology has reached a tipping point: 51% of 414 respondents are either building private clouds (30%) or have them in place now (21%). But when we asked those in the construction stage about nine critical steps, orchestrating automation across multiple subsystems came in dead last.</p> <P> Let's be clear: No automation, no cloud. How do we figure that? NIST defines cloud as having five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity or expansion, and measured service. Virtualization and solid WAN engineering will provide resource pooling, elasticity, and broad network access, but measured service and--most importantly--on-demand self-service aren't part of standard virtualization management suites. For these, automation is required.</p> <P> Self-service isn't the only benefit. More efficient use of data center resources, self-healing, improved application availability, better power management, and preplanned responses to various scenarios are among the other potential benefits of a solid automation deployment. </p> <P> Unfortunately, there isn't a standard way to do cloud automation; in fact, there isn't even agreement on what, exactly, it entails. While virtualization vendors have invested a lot of effort in developing APIs that provide extensibility and control, automating those infrastructures is simply not a part of the core virtualization feature set. And yet, controlling a virtualized infrastructure is going to be a key point of any automation strategy, because virtualization is where your resource pools and elasticity live.</p> <P> At the most basic level, cloud automation packages support runbooks that take preprogrammed actions when a trigger event occurs. But preprogrammed events are just the beginning; new and innovative products, like those we list on p. 25, take management to a new level by enabling policy-based automation. These products use multiple management engines to stay in touch with all aspects of the infrastructure and make policy decisions based on specific scenarios and self-service requests. </p> <P> Vendors are evolving these systems from workload management suites used to automate diverse virtualization and infrastructure components through a central policy engine. However, because the enterprise private cloud automation market is relatively new, there's no stock feature set, so what you'll be able to do out of the box varies dramatically. For example, while most of these suites have powerful central execution engines that can read data and act on it, some, like Moab, incorporate enhanced resource management for virtual infrastructures and self-service Web provisioning portals as well.</p> <P> Despite the immaturity of this market, it's worth evaluating these suites, because automating the cloud has huge potential to maximize your investment and slash operational and capital expenses--an important point, as 61% of survey respondents not using a private cloud cite reduced operational costs as a major reason to consider moving to the cloud, with capital expense savings (44%) and technical advantage (45%) as strong secondary factors. </p> <P> <strong>Build On Your Accomplishments</strong></p> <P> Successful automation deployments sit on top of strong virtualization deployments that provide high availability, scalability, and a degree of fault tolerance, or at least fault recovery. </p> <P> Still, the first step in preparing to automate is cleaning house. Automatic actions and self-service provisioning will exacerbate poorly configured virtual infrastructures. In addition, better engines help improve resource management, which is difficult to do if the infrastructure is already overloaded. If you don't have the spare capacity to maintain high availability, self-service provisioning may put core network services at risk.</p> <P> What exactly does housecleaning involve? Consider resource provisioning first. If demand spikes jeopardize the performance of mission-critical business services by starving application servers, that can be a problem. You must segregate workloads into resource pools and assign priorities to them--as self-service requests come in, critical servers must be given priority access to underlying physical resources. When selecting an automation management system, look for the ability to manage resource load in cloud environments, but be aware that just throwing resource management at a badly configured infrastructure is likely to net you a lot of angry help desk calls.</p> <P> In addition, make sure you have a method to track when a VM produced by automation becomes a mission-critical server. It's easy enough to increase its resource priority after the fact, but this is one area where you don't want to run blind. And don't spend on automation if the overall capacity of the infrastructure is lacking. If you're barely able to satisfy your current workload, the last thing you need is new machines being rolled out without human intervention. </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="inlineReportPromo"> <div class="inlineReportPromo_headline"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/8860/Network-Systems-Management/informed-cio-private-cloud-automation.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20120625" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Informed CIO: Private Cloud Automation</a></div> <div class="inlineReportPromo_inner"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1337/337F2_reportcover.jpg" width="175" height="107" style="float:right;"> Our full report on <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/8860/Network-Systems-Management/informed-cio-private-cloud-automation.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20120625">automating the private cloud</a> is available free with registration.<br /><br /> This report includes <strong>14</strong> pages of action-oriented analysis. What you'll find: <ul class="normalUL"><li>Ten IT success metrics and how well private clouds deliver</li> <li>Example goal sets and enabling processes and self-healing actions</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/8860/Network-Systems-Management/informed-cio-private-cloud-automation.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20120625">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> </center></p><br clear="all"> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P><strong>Set Goals</strong></p> <P> Determine what you want to accomplish with your automation initiative. Do you need self-service machine provisioning? Automated responses to changing infrastructure conditions? How about policy-based virtual machine and application life cycle management?</p> <P> If the intent is to monitor application performance and spin up additional application servers when demand peaks, the plan is going to be different than if self-service provisioning with departmental chargeback is the primary goal. Formulating a concrete set of objectives is essential to the evaluation phase of your automation project. </p> <P> Then, since product capabilities vary widely, map that goals list to feature requirements. How easy or difficult it will be to make that match depends on the underlying virtualization and management platforms you're dealing with. A full-featured automation product will need to plug into multiple silos to gather the information it needs to make policy-based automation decisions. This means integrating all relevant server, storage, and network virtualization technologies as well as maintaining accurate licensing and consistent configuration information. Depending on how your network is set up, every one of these resources could be a silo, making integration daunting. Survey respondents with a private cloud strategy underscore that point: 58% say integrating existing IT products with cloud is a major issue.</p> <P> Because integration can be such a challenge, it's important to delve deep into the compatibility matrix of any prospective product before writing a check. If a vendor provides few hooks, it may be impossible to link policy engines without an absurd investment in labor. How absurd? A 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 investment in expert consulting services or internal staff commitment vs. software costs before the benefits of automation are apparent isn't unheard of.</p> <P> <!-- Image Aligning Right --> <div style="margin:0; padding: 0 0 10px 1px; width:195px; float:right; text-align:center;"> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1337/337F2_productsnap_corrected.jpg" width="185" height="499" alt="same as caption" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" /> </div> <!-- / Image Aligning Right --> <P> Why? Again, a lack of standards. </p> <P> That brings us back to goal setting. When it comes time to dig into the details, automation requires that you have a very clear idea of what you want to accomplish so you can create workflows and processes that are repeatable, consistent, trustworthy, and (this is key) reusable. Take incident response: Say an application server has a meltdown that jeopardizes the availability of a key software system. If the application is in a well-constructed app server farm, other servers should continue to meet client demand, but at a higher load with reduced efficiency. If one goal of your automation initiative is a self-healing response to the loss or degradation of an application server, many variables must be considered before an automatic action is taken. We provide examples of goals and their related processes in our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/8860/Network-Systems-Management/informed-cio-private-cloud-automation.html" target="_blank">full report</a>. </p> <P> <strong>What You Get For The Money</strong></p> <P> For large enterprises, the cost of these suites can easily reach six figures and climb to $300,000 or more, depending on the level of automation and customization required and the size of the infrastructure. For your licensing investment, you get a task engine that can react to data by triggering workflows and whatever set of common integrations and functionality the vendor bundles; self-service provisioning Web portals, a virtual machine optimization scheduler, or some basic VM power management policies are commonly included.</p> <P> What you don't get are workflows specific to your network, application portfolio, and business processes. That's why the single most important step is to carefully scope goals and requirements, identify overlap, and conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis before tackling an automation project.</p> <P> Still, it's worth getting started. Survey respondents who have private clouds say they've gotten excellent results in terms of reducing operational and capital expenses as well as managing their IT teams' time. Better resource usage overall, life cycle management, and automated provisioning--all very achievable goals--can easily make the effort and expense worthwhile.</p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1337/337F2_whatsteps.jpg" width="492" height="452" alt="What steps has your company taken to build a privat cloud?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/81/8877/Business-Intelligence-and-Information-Management/informationweek-june-25-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1337/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: June 25, 2010 Issue" title="InformationWeek: June 25, 2010 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/81/8877/Business-Intelligence-and-Information-Management/informationweek-june-25-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of <nobr><em>InformationWeek</em> magazine</nobr></a><br /> (registration required)</strong></div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2012-03-07T02:07:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/8714/Data-Center/strategy-predictive-analytics-for-it.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2012-03-05T08:00:00ZBuilding a private cloud? Better get an early-warning system first.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232601938?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- Mar. 5, 2012 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/030512/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1326/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 7, 2011" title="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 5, 2012 " align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/030512/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/030512/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire Mar. 5, 2012 issue of <em>InformationWeek</em></a></strong>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/green/">Green Initiative</a><br /> (Registration required.)<br /> <center><div class="innerGreenPromoText" align="center">We will plant a tree for each of the first 5,000 downloads.</div></center> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / Mar. 5, 2012 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1326/326cover_flat_crop_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Predictive Analytics For IT" title="Predictive Analytics For IT" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> Manufacturing, financial, retail, and pharmaceutical companies have long used predictive analytics for everything from anticipating parts shortages to calculating credit scores. But across industries, the software can also warn IT organizations about potential system failures before they affect the business. </p> <P> For enterprise IT, we're not advocating all-purpose analytic workbenches that demand deep, and expensive, data mining and statistics expertise. Rather, we're recommending that organizations consider a focused analytics suite, such as Hewlett-Packard's Service Health Analyzer, IBM's SPSS-powered Tivoli product, Netuitive's eponymous offering, and systems from the likes of CA and EMC. All these products come with ready-made dashboards, reports, alerts, and key performance indicators set up for IT system and application measurement and prediction. </p> <P> Just tap into your data sources, tune the dials, and start seeing the future. </p> <P> <strong>Poised For Growth</strong></p> <P> "Everyone has expected an explosion in 'analytics for IT' for some time," says David Stodder, director of business intelligence research at TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute). "But from what I see, the usage is still fairly selective." However, embedding analytics in IT management consoles will help get these capabilities into more shops, Stodder says, as not only HP and IBM but also specialized application performance management providers incorporate analytics.</p> <P> David Menninger, research director at Ventana Research, agrees that adoption of predictive analytics systems--for IT or any other purpose--is still modest. Of the 2,400 organizations in Ventana's Business Analytics benchmark research, only about one in five is using predictive IT analytics. </p> <P> So most IT organizations have lived just fine without these suites until now. What's changed? </p> <P> The push toward private clouds and service-oriented IT, combined with an unprecedented number of data sources and the attendant complexity. A highly virtualized infrastructure, big data, and predictive analytics go together. In fact, big, clean, fast-moving flows of real-time information are the lifeblood of predictive IT analytics systems.</p> <P> Unfortunately, IT hasn't always been good at collecting operational data. In the age of single-server, single-application architectures, infrastructure fragmentation made it prohibitively costly to build data silos filled with accurate transactional information on which to perform analysis. But virtualization and the cloud model have changed everything. Centralization is back, and better than before. </p> <P> However, a cloud architecture--public, private, or hybrid--also brings complexity, which is the enemy of uptime. And this is the main reason we think predictive analytics will become a must-have for enterprise IT sooner rather than later. Consider that in our most recent <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/8350/Virtualization/research-virtualization-management.html "><i>InformationWeek</i> Virtualization Management Survey</a>, respondents ranked high availability No. 1 among a dozen features. Similarly, the most-cited driver for private clouds is improved application availability. </p> <P> Predictive IT analytics can get us to higher availability by helping us cut through the complexity inherent in modern cloud infrastructures, which are built one layer at a time, with each layer dependent on the one before it. This complexity makes it difficult for even experienced network architects to understand the interrelations among infrastructure components. It also makes failures substantially more difficult to troubleshoot. We'd better get a handle on this problem now, because complexity will only increase as enterprises adopt more advanced converged architectures. </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="inlineReportPromo"> <div class="inlineReportPromo_headline"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/8714/Data-Center/strategy-predictive-analytics-for-it.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20120302" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Strategy: Predictive Analytics for IT</a></div> <div class="inlineReportPromo_inner"> <center><strong>Just Like Magic</strong></center><br /> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1326/326CSreportcover.jpg" width="175" height="111" style="float:right;"> Our full report on <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/8714/Data-Center/strategy-predictive-analytics-for-it.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20120302">predictive analytics for IT</a> is free with registration.<br /><br /> This report includes 17 pages of analysis. What you'll find: <ul class="normalUL"><li>A deepdive into the inner workings of predictive IT analytics systems</li> <li>How to know if your network is ready to support analytics</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/8714/Data-Center/strategy-predictive-analytics-for-it.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20120302">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> </center></p><br clear="all"> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center><strong>To read the rest of the article,<br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/030512/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the Mar. 5, 2012 issue of <em>InformationWeek</em></a></strong></center><br clear="all" /></p> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->2012-01-24T22:17:00Zhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/8634/Virtualization/strategy-delegation-delivers-virtualization-savings.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors2011-11-14T08:00:00ZOur 5 steps can help you tame your server virtualization environment.http://www.informationweek.com/software/infrastructure/turn-vm-chaos-to-vm-control/231902468?ct=1022?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsVirtualization has changed the way IT does business. From the smallest server closets to the largest data centers, the use of virtual machines makes it easy for IT to quickly deploy applications.</p> <P> But to reap the benefits, you have to manage insidious productivity thieves, like server sprawl. That's when VMs are running on production systems without any good reason, sapping vital resources, including memory, disk, and power. What if these resources are suddenly needed? Say a physical server fails, and virtual machines attempt to move to another server, but it's clogged with unused VMs. As a result, applications can go down. Further, unused but active VMs can create unplanned network traffic, present additional attack surfaces, impose greater maintenance overhead, and add to software licensing costs.</p> <P> If your virtual servers are getting out of control, use our five-step methodology to restore order.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Keep 'em separated:</strong> Step one is simple: Split virtual machines into test and production resource pools. This should reduce the number of unnecessary VMs on production servers and help assure that resources will be available when there's a failure. While this may seem like IT 101, in our experience, administrators seldom effectively draw a line between test and production environments.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Plan for failure, test the plan:</strong> Systems fail. A high-availability architecture is supposed to serve as a bridge so that critical systems can continue to run in the face of a problem. But HA systems require maintenance; ignore them, and they may not be there when you need them. Thus, it's essential to test your HA environment. Pull the power plug on a critical server running production VMs (backed up, of course). If you haven't done this test in a while, we guarantee you'll learn something new about how your infrastructure responds to failure.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Get ahead of the business:</strong> Don't honor business units requests to provision a new application without considering other options. Could an existing system used by another division meet their needs with some adjustments? The key here is timing. If IT staff who should have been involved in the selection process are instead brought in after business decisions are made, that's a problem. Once a deployment requisition comes in for a specific application, it's generally too late. Make sure IT is part of any application discussion from the start.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Improve visibility:</strong> One way to gain insight into your infrastructure is with a network management system that enables automation by checking for IT-defined variables and taking actions based on certain conditions and thresholds. Furthermore, as predictive analysis becomes more commonly used, a network management system can serve as a repository to keep key data validated, clean, and in one place.</p> <P> <strong>&gt;&gt; Consolidate and automate:</strong> As server virtualization matures, the focus is shifting from pure consolidation to automation. And much of the automation within a virtual environment is driven by API scripting. For example, an API script might use a synthetic transaction to check application performance. If performance is poor, the script might spin up a new virtual machine in the application farm. This approach is convenient, but if your coding chops are rusty, consider a pro- gramming course to prepare your next-generation API scripting skills.</p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="inlineReportPromo"> <div class="inlineReportPromo_headline"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/tech-center/storage-virtualization/download?id=189700008&cat=whitepaper&cid=" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">The Zen of Virtual Maintenance</a></div> <div class="inlineReportPromo_inner"> <center><strong></strong></center><br /> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1316/316F2reportcover.jpg" width="175" height="105" style="float:right;"> Our full report <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/tech-center/storage-virtualization/download?id=189700008&cat=whitepaper&cid=">"The Zen of Virtualization Infrastructure Maintenance"</a> is free with registration.<br /><br /> This report offers action-oriented analysis on server virtualization. What you'll find: <ul class="normalUL"><li>How VM sprawl can affect high availability</li> <li>Five steps to build a robust, automated virtual environment</li></ul> <center><strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/tech-center/storage-virtualization/download?id=189700008&cat=whitepaper&cid=">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> </center></p><br clear="all"> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/8560/Storage-Server/informationweek-november-14-2011.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1316/smallcov.jpg" height="88" width="68" alt="InformationWeek: Nov. 14, 2010 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Nov. 14, 2010 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/8560/Storage-Server/informationweek-november-14-2011.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of <nobr><em>InformationWeek</em> magazine</nobr></a><br /> (registration required)</strong></div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->2011-10-31T08:00:00ZMissing standards, scant automation, and weak management tools make this next step beyond server virtualization a challenge.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/private-clouds-tough-to-build-with-today/231901247?ct=1022?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsLet's not spend time debating whether fully virtualized data centers will become the norm. They will, and sooner than you may think. You have bigger challenges than how soon you can get 50% or 75% or 99% of your servers virtualized.</p> <P> Almost half of companies buy into the broader vision of a private cloud, finds our <i>InformationWeek</i> 2011 Virtualization Management Survey of 396 business technology pros. By private cloud, we mean an internal network that combines compute, storage, and other data center resources with high virtualization, hardware integration, automation, monitoring, and orchestration. But getting there with today's technology will be tough. We'll look at the range of problems IT faces, such as multivendor environments, limited automation, and still-emerging technology and standards. </p> <P> Standards are scarce indeed, making every purchasing decision dicey. You must understand how every component interacts with every other component, but since extensive server virtualization has increased operational complexity, this can be an extraordinarily difficult thing to get your arms around. IT teams looking to conventional network and systems management products for help are finding that these expensive tools are inadequate to the task at hand.</p> <P> "The only savings realized from virtualization is fewer physical servers," says one respondent to our survey. "Costs have increased via more expensive servers with bigger I/O and more memory, added cost of the hypervisor, and a much more difficult time to resolve problems when they occur."</p> <P> VMware is still the go-to vendor when IT organizations talk enterprise-class server virtualization.Only 36% of the respondents to our survey have secondary hypervisors in use at their companies. But Citrix and Microsoft are closing the gap. </p> <P> Asked to rate the importance of a dozen virtualization features, survey respondents cited high availability as No. 1 and price a very close second. Both Microsoft Hyper-V R2 and Citrix XenServer offer high-availability features with a reasonable price tag. VMware also offers high availability in its entry-level packages, except that it doesn't bundle features like Distributed Resource Scheduler, for machine load balancing, with its low-cost vSphere Essentials, making it an incomplete offering.</p> <P> Other highly valued factors include live virtual machine migration (available from all major vendors), fault tolerance, load balancing, and virtual switching/networking. Citrix and Microsoft recently cozied up to Marathon Technologies to provide fault tolerance for their platforms. </p> <P> The features VMware offers that the others don't--like Storage DRS, which load balances data store I/O, and Storage vMotion--land in last place in our survey. VMware's decision this year to increase its price beyond a certain virtual memory allocation was met with such howls from customers that VMware raised the limit--but that move only delays a price increase that could drive companies to consider alternatives. If it's bells and whistles like Storage DRS and Storage vMotion that VMware expects to justify higher licensing costs, our survey respondents aren't buying it. "With steady improvements to Hyper-V and Xen, and Oracle's integration of Virtual Iron into their VM product, we have lots of alternatives to consider," says one respondent.</p> <P> However, mixing production hypervisors almost guarantees that companies won't have a unified, automated disaster recovery scheme. And it can require some deep expertise if you want one policy to govern all of your systems, a common goal.</p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1314/314CS_chart1.jpg" width="550" height="510" alt="What percentage of your company's production servers do you expect to have virtualized by the end of next year?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P><strong>Master Disaster Recovery Is Elusive</strong></p> <P> At first, it surprised us that automated disaster recovery was rated as the third-most-important feature. Currently, only VMware offers a reasonably mature product in this area, through Site Recovery Manager. Even that product, while it does provide an integrated "runbook" that can provide the status of some data center operations that you'd need to know during a disaster, won't fully automate disaster recovery without a serious implementation and integration effort.</p> <P> Then it hit us: Rising demand for automated disaster recovery speaks volumes about what IT expects from next-generation virtualization. VMware's offering tries to address the big picture of disaster recovery automation by integrating tightly with every component in the DR stack, starting with storage replication. VMware's goal is lofty: to provide fully managed and automated failover to a secondary site. That includes managing the state of replication, the virtualization infrastructure, connectivity, and the myriad other variables involved in a successful failover. VMware hopes to improve the already excellent value proposition of virtualization for disaster recovery and business continuity by increasing automation.</p> <P> Unfortunately, a big problem is the lack of standardization. While VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft all have APIs for their diverse virtualization portfolios, a lack of standards and protocols means it's difficult to integrate across hardware and software API boundaries.</p> <P> Worse, there's no clear road map for an automated, pervasively virtualized infrastructure. Who makes your hypervisor? Storage arrays? Servers? All of these vendors inject additional complexity and make supplying reliable cost numbers for automation projects nearly impossible. Setting up true automation becomes a nightmare of unbudgeted expenses, internecine warfare, and unforeseen roadblocks as software development and data center professionals try to integrate diverse hardware platforms, hypervisors, and application stacks into a resilient and, in theory, hands-off infrastructure.</p> <P> The good news is that vendors are starting to build in software API mechanisms to make automation possible. The bad news is that the cost of developing a fully automated infrastructure remains outside the reach of all but the largest companies, even if you can afford centralized storage, virtualization, load balancing, and high availability. Still, automation is an essential element of the ultimate goal: private clouds.</p><strong>Private Cloud Drives Virtualization</strong></p> <P> Private clouds promise an agile data center, where workloads can be moved around to different physical servers, storage, and networking gear to meet changing demand. And you can't have a private cloud without virtualization, since the private cloud architecture requires breaking free from physical network and infrastructure constraints. Forty-eight percent of our survey respondents are working toward private clouds, and another 33% are investigating them.</p> <P> IT vendors are introducing products aimed at private clouds, expanding virtualization's value. We see this innovation in interconnects, such as the PCI-SIG's Single Root IOV protocol for linking virtualized devices; in processors, with Intel VT-x and AMD-V; in storage, with hybrid cache mechanisms; in storage controllers with robust software APIs; in applications, with cloud delivery mechanisms, distributed processing, and encapsulation; in networking, with iSCSI/ FCoIP; and in wide area networking, with Virtual Private LAN Service and Cisco's Overlay Transport Virtualization.</p> <P> This innovation should be exciting for IT--and depressing. While the vendors are solving one problem of implementing private cloud, no one offers a good way to run this larger infrastructure. That shortcoming also makes it harder to spell out the value to the rest of the company. </p> <P> "Upper management, including within IT, has not fully grasped the concept of virtualization," says one survey respondent. "Requirements for properly implementing a private cloud still get questioned on an ROI-per-item-purchased basis, instead of the relative increase in capability the purchase would provide for the users of the cloud."</p> <P> The top driver for survey respondents who are working toward private clouds is improved application availability. We see a similar priority in another part of our survey, the measures of virtualization success, where application uptime and efficiency rate highly. The message is clear that this flexible data center needs to provide greater reliability--employees want unrestricted access to applications from anywhere and at any time. </p> <P> Operating savings is the No. 2 driver for private clouds (chosen by 37%), which isn't a big surprise. But it did surprise us that automated provisioning of resources came in as No. 3, selected by 31% of respondents. Honestly, should we be empowering finance to spin up eight or nine Oracle servers whenever it feels like it? We don't think so. </p> <P> Meeting variable workload demands is a driver for only 19%. At the bottom of the list of drivers for private cloud builders are compliance (8%) and chargebacks (3%). </p> <P> <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1314/314CS_chart2.jpg" width="550" height="378" alt="How do you manage VMs and Hypervisor hosts?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /><br /></center></p> <P><strong>Not All About Servers</strong></p> <P> Survey respondents ranked their virtualization priorities in this order: server, storage, desktop, and applications, with network virtualization far behind.</p> <P> Storage virtualization, in use at 57% of respondents' companies, has clear cost benefits. Savings come via deduplication, tiering, and functions such as hardware-side disk snapshots. But the real advantage of storage virtualization is that it finally gives IT organizations a fighting chance of managing their big, messy piles of storage as one resource, with policy-based tools. It's essential to tiered-storage strategies.</p> <P> Application virtualization, in use at 42% of respondents' IT organizations, is a big umbrella. It can refer to application delivery services such as XenApp, or application encapsulation and abstraction delivered via desktop virtualization (like VMware ThinApp). Or it can be a combination of the two approaches. Regardless of type, application virtualization accelerates app deployment, centralizes application management, and facilitates private cloud access. </p> <P> Desktop virtualization is in use at 44% of respondents' companies and under evaluation at another 42%. IT teams are struggling with the "bring your own device" movement, and serving desktops or applications from a centralized repository all but eliminates the BYOD security blues, because data doesn't reside on the machine.</p> <P> Just 10% of respondents' companies make extensive use of I/O virtualization and network virtualization-- 34% have no plans for the former and 44% have no plans for the latter.</p> <P> Look for these percentages to rise substantially over the coming year, because network and I/O virtualization will relieve a number of longstanding pain points. The higher density and fluidity of virtual infrastructures mean they demand network topologies that can be provisioned dynamically in the same way VMs are--without touching physical hardware. </p> <P> The main problem is the lack of standards and uniformity. While most I/OV vendors have settled on PCI as a transport mechanism, backed up by SR-IOV for virtualized adapters, others are using InfiniBand and 10-Gbps Ethernet with proprietary virtual breakouts. The same proliferation abounds in pure network virtualization offerings. If server virtualization still suffers from a lack of standards, I/O and network virtualization are even more embryonic.</p> <P> <strong>Standards In Play</strong></p> <P> It's unfortunate that there isn't more progress on standards. However, two have emerged.</p> <P> The Open Virtualization Format is a nonproprietary way of storing virtual machine disk files. VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft use proprietary formats for virtual machines, but their products can read and import OVF files. OVF provides a convenient format for moving machines to a different platform by exporting them to an OVF package first.</p> <P> The other fledgling standard is VMAN, a virtualization management standard developed by the Distributed Management Task Force, a virtualization standards body with broad industry support. VMAN purports to simplify virtualization management by abstracting common management tasks via a single protocol. However, we have yet to see usable VMAN-based products, despite the launch of the standard in 2008. Maybe it's time for enterprise IT groups to start applying pressure. </p><strong>Management Trends</strong></p> <P> With early virtualization deployments, IT shops tried to integrate virtualization into their existing management platforms. No longer.</p> <P> From last year to this year, our survey reveals a 16 percentage point jump--to 74%--in respondents using built-in or platform-bundled tools for virtual machine and infrastructure management. </p> <P> It's difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for this shift, but we suspect it's because it's hard to integrate virtualization management into the previous generation of network and system management suites. While many of those suites do offer management information bases to interact with major virtualization platforms, new hypervisor features come out so quickly that even large management vendors get behind in revising their core products. Delays drive admins back to the virtualization vendor's management tools, and they tend to stay there.</p> <P> Companies want automated management, our survey shows, so there's a big opportunity for whichever vendor delivers. Failure recovery is still as labor-intensive as it has always been. Server virtualization has, technically, made automation easier, but as we've discussed, it's also made things more complex. </p> <P> And that complexity only accounts for server virtualization. If you start to add virtualized storage, network, and I/O, the complexity of a seemingly simple failover operation can be enormous. Imagine trying to write an automation script that can talk to one or more storage virtualization controllers and one or more hypervisor platforms; can check the performance of multiple applications; and can communicate with an I/O controller. Just making decisions based on such a large amount of information is difficult; now try to incorporate that code into a legacy network and system management platform, and maintain and test it through moves/adds/changes and hardware and software updates. </p> <P> Add to this mess predictive analytics for IT operations, which depends on a good network management tool and event database, and the scenario becomes even more complicated.</p> <P> <strong>Make The Business Case </strong></p> <P> IT organizations are using a mix of benchmarks to gauge the success of their virtualization deployments. More than half of our survey respondents, 55%, cite cost savings, but we also see some of the private cloud drivers being used to measure the success of virtualization--like improved application uptime (39%) and improved operating efficiency (39%). </p> <P> "Clients are less interested in server virtualization and more interested in services automation," says an architect for a major IT integrator. "Business doesn't care about the technology. They want to know the business value in terms of go-to-market advantages."</p> <P> One striking survey finding is that 61% of respondents say they don't measure return on investment, relying instead on gut feeling. So how does that work exactly?</p> <P> Actually, that finding is a good indicator of how deeply embedded virtualization is in the modern IT mindset. Companies aren't measuring ROI for server virtualization because it's the industry standard. When was the last time anyone asked for ROI figures on a firewall?</p> <P> Yet while server virtualization may be a no-brainer, the same can't be said for I/O, network, and desktop virtualization. Even storage virtualization, while growing, isn't a clear pick for every company. </p> <P> Remember when you started virtualizing your server infrastructure eight or so years ago to get the basic benefits--consolidation, flexibility, and power savings--more or less automatically? In contrast, the next moves, like automated disaster recovery and the flexibility of private clouds, are immensely difficult to engineer, even with best-of-breed systems.</p> <P> The next wave of virtualization benefits could prove to be more dramatic than the first, but there's a lot of complexity to sort through, so don't expect them to come without some sweat. </p> <P> <strong>All Articles In This Cover Story:</strong><br> <ul class="normalUL"> <li> <b><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/231901240">Virtualization: A Look At The Problems Ahead</a></b> </li> <li> <b><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/231901247">Private Clouds: Tough To Build With Today's Tech</a></b> </li> </p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/8507/Virtualization/informationweek-october-31-2011.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1314/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: Oct. 31, 2011 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Oct. 31, 2011 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/8507/Virtualization/informationweek-october-31-2011.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of <nobr><em>InformationWeek</em> magazine</nobr></a><br /> (registration required)</strong></div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->2011-10-10T08:00:00ZProtect disk files and data to keep virtual machines humming.http://www.informationweek.com/storage/data-protection/get-vm-backups-right/231602346?ct=1022?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsVirtual machine backups encompass two data sources: the application data inside the VM and the disk files that make up the VM itself. You need to protect both to ensure that you can recover from a failure. This calls for a smart mixture of backup types to satisfy your data protection and recovery objectives as well as some unique considerations and techniques, including snapshots. </p> <P> <strong>Freeze Frame</strong></p> <P> Backing up a VM while it runs and serves clients is accomplished, regardless of the hypervisor platform, via the creation of a VM snapshot. When a VM is snapshotted, the hypervisor stops writing to its existing disk file and creates a new disk file to write changes to. If the machine is live, it also saves the contents of running memory to a separate file. This allows the backup software to copy the snapshot while letting the VM continue operating. Snapshots are also useful because they serve as VMs copies that can be reused if the original backup effort fails. Snapshots can also be used to restore a VM to a known-good state if updates or changes to the VM cause a glitch.</p> <P> While snapshots are useful, we can run into problems if we're not careful about management. For example, once an operation is successful, snapshots should be deleted because they gobble storage space. Yet time and again, I've seen administrators use snapshots as quasi-backups instead of how they're intended--as temporary safety nets. If enough snapshots accumulate on a production machine, the VM will run out of space and likely fail. Where there's very little data change, it may be OK to leave some snapshots in production, but be careful.</p> <P> In addition, disk file backups do not take the place of guest-based backup software agents that run at the VM guest operating system level. These agents provide several advantages over disk file backups. The agents are selective: You have the option to take only the data that's changed or the data you want. Backing up the operating system over and over again doesn't do you any good if all you care about is the application data on the machine.</p> <P> <strong>Best Practices</strong></p> <P> We recommend backing up the disk files of VMs once per week. Send these backups to a repository, such as a deduplicated SAN, that's also replicated to a secondary site. You can also back up VMs to a repository, such as autoloader, that you can physically move off site. Then, take daily guest-OS-level backups of application files and data. Store the daily backups on a mixture of disk, tape, or replicating storage; good backup products can easily accommodate all three.</p> <P> A word about deduplication: This process can happen in several places. If your SAN supports deduplication, the dedupe software lives at the controller level and automatically deduplicates data as it passes. You can also use a dedicated deduplication appliance. Finally, some backup agents that sit on the deduplication target can provide source deduplication so that only new data gets backed up. In a disaster recovery scenario, you can simply restore the disk files to a freshly provisioned virtual host cluster and spin up new VMs, bringing you right back to where you were during the disk file backup. Or you can update data on the bare-metal images with a restore from the data-only backup. </p> <P> Recovery accomplished.</p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center> <div id="inlineReportPromo"> <div class="inlineReportPromo_headline"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/5274/Virtualization/fundamentals-virtual-machine-backups.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20111010" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Fundamentals: Virtual Machine Backups</a></div> <div class="inlineReportPromo_inner"> <center><strong>Key Steps To Safeguarding Your VM Disk Files</strong></center><br /> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1311/311ExecSummary_coverreport_2_110.jpg" class="report110" /> Our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/5274/Virtualization/fundamentals-virtual-machine-backups.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20111010">full report</a> on key steps to safeguarding your VM disk files is free with registration.<br /> <br /> This report includes <strong>14</strong> pages of action-oriented analysis for IT. What you'll find: <ul class="normalUL"> <li>How to protect data everywhere</li> <li>How to build in resiliency</li> </ul> <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/5274/Virtualization/fundamentals-virtual-machine-backups.html?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20111010">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> </center></p><br clear="all"> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2011-10-04T13:54:00ZVirtualization-aware tools from Netuitive and, soon, IBM SPSS will help IT head off problems before they start.http://www.informationweek.com/predictive-analysis-not-just-for-stockbr/231700244?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAs IT infrastructures become more complicated and <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/20/7181/Network-Systems-Management/research-it-automation.html">automation technologies</a> move to the foreground, new technologies continue to emerge in the virtualization space to solve business problems. <P> One of the more interesting and practical developments in IT recently is the use of predictive analytics in a virtualization- and infrastructure-aware context. While <em>Fortune</em> 500 organizations have been using predictive analytics to answer key questions about customers, products, and services for years, applying predictive analytics techniques to infrastructure is new. <P> Predictive analysis works by applying statistical data analysis techniques to existing data silos. IT teams essentially give the analysis product access to a fully loaded network and systems management (NSM) system with a large data pool to analyze and let it go to work. <P> The predictive analytics software attempts to determine baseline operating data and find patterns. Then the use of regression analysis to write mathematical formulas that describe the relationship between data sets allows correlations to be easily drawn with small data volumes in memory, enabling rapid predictions. Additionally, advances in modern artificial neural networks are rapidly decreasing the time needed to detect patterns in large data sets. <P> So what's the payoff? Predictive analytics technology works on an existing data silo or silos and starts analyzing historical data. Ideally, the software stores only regression models of relationships between seemingly dissimilar infrastructure elements. After a discrete period of analysis, the product will begin to make predictions based on the current data set. For instance, the analytics software watches storage I/O statistics collected from an NSM system. At the same time, it watches network connectivity statistics from two buildings, 1 and 2. Buildings 1 and 2 are served by the same storage array. The analytics software notices that every Wednesday at 10 a.m., network I/O from building 1 rises. It also notices that when this occurs, the storage I/O from that particular array comes under contention -- and that during this time, help desk tickets categorized as "performance" issues rise sharply at building 2. <P> For the first two weeks of analysis we don't get any alerts. However, at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday on week three we get an alert: "Building 2 performance will be degraded in 30 minutes, confidence: 85%." <P> Analytics has discovered a causal, mathematical relationship between network I/O, storage I/O, time of day, and service desk tickets submitted at building 2. While the analytics system doesn't actually have any idea what network, storage, and help desk actually are, it doesn't need to. Because it's found the causal relationships between data and abstracted them to simple math, it's capable of prediction without specific knowledge of what the system under analysis does. <P> So far, there aren't a lot of companies offering this type of analysis. Netuitive, a predictive analytics vendor for IT, is the only one we're aware of that provides true regression analysis-based analytics of IT systems. Large vendors in the NSM space are quickly joining in, however, and will likely offer viable products within the next couple of years. IBM is probably the closest through its acquisition of SPSS, a small public predictive analytics company headquartered in Chicago. The SPSS acquisition dramatically strengthens IBM's analytics portfolio and positions the company to sell analytics into a very large customer base. <P> Predictive analytics is expensive now, but the technology is starting to make its way to more mainstream pricing. It's only a matter of time before vendors start offering "analytics as a service" at bargain rates. <P> <em>Automation and orchestration technologies can make IT more efficient and better able to serve the business by streamlining common tasks and speeding service delivery. In this report, we outline the potential snags and share strategies and best practices to ensure successful implementation. <a href="http://private-cloud-tech-center.networkcomputing.com/util/download.jhtml?id=189300002&cat=whitepaper?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe">Download our report here</a>. (Free registration required.)</em>