Taneja Group Blog

InMage builds a village with HDS to deliver their CDP solution

2009-09-01T12:51:00.008-04:00

The old saying, “it takes a village to raise a child” is true in the case of InMage, who has just signed an agreement with Hitachi Data Systems to offer their CDP solution as a HDS Program Product. InMage already has a number of customer wins under their belt, as well as an air of profitability to brag about, but they have yet to ring in the runaway success that their technology often times seems to warrant. The idea of being a one trick pony providing add on sales to the established major vendors has not proven as successful as the InMage team would like, so, it was time for a strategy change and partnering with HDS is just what they needed.

InMage, having been a player in the CDP space for over a decade, has awoken and realized they need an ecosystem “village” to provide complete solutions for their customers in today’s highly competitive environment. Moreover, partnering up is the only way some of the storage block bullies can build a complete solution with an ingredient as potent as InMage’s CDP. In this case, partnering enables both InMage and HDS to benefit. InMage gets access to the HDS sales force, services team, and installed customer base where they will undoubtedly be successful. Meanwhile, HDS previously only provided content replication within the same tier of HDS provided storage, so HDS gets a powerful heterogeneous replication and CDP tool to add to its arsenal. Now, in the area of CDP and replication, HDS has heavy weaponry matched to the competition with the likes of EMC with RecoverPoint, HPs with FalconStor-based CDP, IBM with SAN Volume Controller and Tivoli CDP for Files, and NetApp with Multistore and SnapMirror. HDS Professional Services team will undoubtedly use the InMage technology for migrations between other company’s storage and their own creating tiered storage solutions further increasing the HDS footprint within the data center. One of the more promising areas for the HDS team to focus on with the InMage technology is DR, delivering a HDS array into a secondary location thereby leveraging CDP to break the ties to the single vendor nature of most DR setups enabling end-users to benefit from leveraging multiple vendors to get the best solution.

With InMage being a HDS Program Product it enables HDS sales reps and channel partners to offer the InMage solution as though it was any other HDS software product, with the same terms and conditions, service and support.

Only time will tell if the child InMage has built a village for will best the storage block bullies. With the HDS partnership and prior wins in major verticals, InMage keeps going toe-to-toe, and it looks like they are winning their fair share of rounds.

Virtualization Energizes the Data Center Automation Segment

2009-08-26T00:16:00.002-04:00

At Taneja Group, we’ve long focused on the impact of virtualization on the application lifecycle, from development through deployment and maintenance. The rise of virtualization has occurred in parallel with a renewed interest in data center automation (DCA), driven in equal parts by the codification of IT processes into the ITIL framework (providing a roadmap to automation), the budgetary and headcount pressures on IT departments, and the challenges of patching and updating virtualized apps and machines that are mobile, transient, and/or built on demand.

Vendor solutions for DCA typically emerge from one of three competencies: server and system management platforms, application development/test/release solutions, and application-specific lifecycle management tools, such as those for collaboration suites or relational databases. When it comes time to automate IT processes, we recommend taking stock of your existing trusted vendor relationships as well as your most glaring pain points: do you struggle to keep operating systems and servers patched to the right levels to meet compliance? Have you already automated the management of business-critical applications, and can the tools you’ve used be easily extended? Or, is a key issue the time it takes to configure and deploy applications developed in house – the apps-to-ops transition?

We’re closely tracking both established players and exciting new entrants in the DCA space. HP continues to enhance the DCA suite it acquired with Opsware (now the HP Business Service Automation suite), and IBM and BMC offer broad automation platforms for business service management as well. Platform Computing is extending its tools for managing resource-intensive, high-performance apps into the virtual server and cloud worlds, and Stratavia is on the same path, building on its strength managing relational databases from Oracle, MS, IBM and others. VMware has made a bold leap into the app lifecycle market by acquiring SpringSource, and rPath also comes to the automation game from the software development and release side, extending its packaging and delivery tools to also support the deployment and maintenance phases of the app lifecycle.

There’s no single best path to automation, but an incremental, iterative approach will typically be the easiest to sell, generate the least resistance among IT ops teams, and provide more immediate ROI data to justify further automation efforts. DCA has always been a market segment rife with bold claims. The general-purpose platforms often do little out of the box and demand heavy configuration and training, while the more focused solutions are generally not as easily extended to other automation challenges as their makers suggest. We’re watching closely to see who can prove out solutions with real-world customer success stories.

Enter Primary Storage Optimization

2009-08-17T14:27:00.001-04:00

We have seen the onslaught of storage optimization technologies applied to secondary storage, i.e. backup/restore, archiving and disaster recovery, in the past six years. We call these Secondary Storage Optimization (SSO) technologies. The uptake of these technologies has been dramatic and we have seen paradigm-shifting influences in IT shops that have implemented these technologies. Today, backup processes are quicker and more reliable and restores from disk are almost guaranteed to work thanks to Secondary Storage Optimization technologies. IT is already keeping months of backups on disk and replicating deduplicated data to their DR site, using disk-to-disk replication. The role of tape is being dramatically re-defined in front of our eyes, but in the grand scheme of things we are still in the very early stages of data protection reform. It is hard to break thirty years of bad habits. Most IT shops, even the most advanced ones, are still 10-15% transformed in terms of using disk-based backup/restore solutions, especially with integrated data deduplication. Most are bringing additional application servers and data under the protection of disk-based solutions. The path is reasonably well defined by now and, in spite of the worldwide economic woes (or perhaps because of it), we see companies bringing more and more data under disk-based protection. As much as 40% of the companies that purchased these solutions in the past five years have added disk-to-disk replication already. That is a stunning statistic and speaks for the power of these solutions.

Enter Primary Storage Optimization. This is a relatively new area of endeavor for the industry. The thesis is “why not reduce storage requirements on primary storage, especially since it is the most expensive?” The idea has serious merit and all reduction benefits can theoretically be carried on to the secondary side, for a greater cumulative effect.

But wait just a minute. The rules for primary storage are very different. Applications are interacting with this data and application performance must not be impacted or IT would not buy it. This has led to the development of Primary Storage Optimization (PSO) technologies that work in a post-process method. That means data is shrunken in the background so application performance is not impacted. Some vendors have devised in-line products that can shrink data while it goes through the PSO appliance. Most work so far in the industry seems to be focused on file storage.

Technologies applied to PSO thus far have been unique, relative to SSO technologies. This was self-intuitive in that the problem being solved is different. Backups have a ton of duplicated data simply due to the way most backup software works. Extracting that duplication is different than extracting duplication from a primary data stream. At least so far we see vendors coming out with technologies that are developed from ground up to be for Primary Storage Optimization.

But even that is about to change. Several SSO vendors seem to have found a way to use the same technology in a different way to solve the PSO problem. While it is too early to call this, clearly there are benefits to having the same battle-tested technology applied to a new problem, assuming the efficiencies remain the same. We believe PSO is the next frontier in storage optimization. The activity under the covers in this area is extreme, just as it was six years ago for SSO technologies.

Our recommendation to IT is simple: As you implement SSO technologies and bring more and more data under disk protection keep an eye out for PSO technologies, especially those that will be synergistic with your SSO technology. The benefits of SSO are clear by now. We believe the benefits of PSO will be equally compelling. But it is the combination of the two that we are most excited about. Stay tuned!

Breaking Some Windows: VMware Acquires SpringSource

2009-08-12T01:10:00.003-04:00

Starting with the vSphere launch earlier this year, VMware has steadily built out its message that virtualization is the new data center operating system. As the leader in virtualizing Windows applications, VMware is arguably the most significant threat to Windows dominance. They've isolated the OS into a virtual container, decoupled it from hardware, network and storage devices, and taken control of managing it (vCenter has become as indispensable a management tool as anything from Microsoft in many data centers) - in many ways VMware has Windows right where it wants it: walled off and compartmentalized.

Starting from this tactical advantage, VMware launched vSphere as a "Cloud OS," claiming it was the first general-purpose computing platform ready-built for mobility. Meanwhile, Microsoft countered by reinforcing its message that virtualization was simply a feature of the operating system (Windows Server 2008 R2, to be precise). For dedicated Windows shops, this message will likely resonate: if your key applications are already in Windows, and you've invested in Windows training and administrative tools, why toss it all to leverage some mobility or to do a little consolidation, especially if virtualization is essentially a freebie?

Now, however, to grab the reins again, VMware makes its largest acquisition to date, of the open-source powerhouse SpringSource. SpringSource isn't about the operating system: it's all about the application: developing, packaging, and deploying applications built for a framework, not for a particular operating system. It's the open source rallying cry - portability! reuse! flexibility! faster cycles! - tied to the "new OS" VMware message, and it's a savvy move. With virtualization moving rapidly out of dev and test labs, into production, and out to the Cloud, data center operators have turned their attention from virtual machine provisioning and lifecycle management to virtualized application performance and management. And, enterprise developers as well as VMware ecosystem vendors are delivering more and more applications as virtual appliances.

With it's AppSpeed product, acquired last year with start-up B-Hive and launched in June of this year, VMware got a first toe-hold in the virtualized application performance management space. With SpringSource, the company makes an even bolder move, acquiring a comprehensive open source application framework, complete with tools to build (Spring, Groovy & Grails), run (Tomcat-based tc Server, dm Java Server), and manage (Hyperic HQ) Java-based applications. VMware has made an investment in open source at least as important as Citrix's XenSource acquisition in 2007, and while Microsoft is still striving to deliver basic virtual server platform features to level the playing field at the virtual server level, VMware's moved on to the application.

With this acquisition, VMware hopes to take advantage of the considerable developer momentum behind the SpringSource open source tools and application framework. The battle for virtual infrastructure dominance is clearly moving up the stack, and VMware understands that in the end, both the utility and pervasiveness of the vSphere platform will depend heavily on the strategic value of the applications that run on it. We believe that with this announcement, VMware has taken another important step toward creating a development and run-time infrastructure that can span enterprise and cloud computing domains, while helping to bring the latter closer to enterprise readiness.

Application Delivery and Virtual Convergence

2009-08-04T17:08:00.005-04:00

We've been discussing virtual convergence here on the blog recently, and the impact it has on IT operations. In particular, we've looked at the emergence of new types of administrators with cross-domain expertise and functionality. Virtualization owners with storage and server responsibilities, for example, or storage administrators who may take on a server role for virtualized workloads.

There are other communities in the mix, of course, and they're also facing new challenges. Development teams and application owners are rethinking their processes in a virtualized world as well. When the eventual target for an application might be a virtual machine from VMware, a physical server, or a cloud-hosted Xen-based farm, the development, testing, and validation process is more complex, requires new configuration and testing skills, and further strains IT support teams. We're rethinking infrastructure management - it's natural to rethink the application development, deployment, and lifecycle management process as well.

An interesting approach here is to rethink application packaging. Once an app is delivered to IT ops, the hard work usually begins: tweaking and tuning the server stack required to run it, including OS components, drivers, libraries, etc. Firms like rPath are building tools aimed at this challenge by developing a new packaging and release strategy that moves lifecycle management up the stack from the server to the application. With rPath, developers package up apps and bind them to the requires OS, data, and libraries they need, resulting in self-describing units that, theoretically, are ready to be deployed on nearly any virtual, physical, or cloud target.

Will this catch on? There are vested interests throughout the data center, and convincing infrastructure owners to give up some of that config and lifecycle control will take finesse. New release and source control systems can be a tough sell to the notoriously religious development community. But rPath and others are heading in the right direction. You can learn more from an actual client in this podcast interview with an rPath customer. Let us know what you think.

Podcast : Jeff and Dave discuss Virtual Infrastructure Optimization

2009-08-04T08:08:00.002-04:00

Several months ago, Taneja Group introduced the concept of Virtual Infrastructure Optimization (VIO) as a category of solutions hitting the mainstream infrastructure management market today. This blog post is a summary of an attached podcast (click through on the title for the podcast), where two Taneja Group analysts (myself and Dave Bartoletti) dive into an overview of VIO. Note, you can find written articles discussing this technology online at InfoStor.com and at SearchServerVirtualization.com.

For many years, infrastructure management has dealt with a stack of services that are often sharply divided, and give the manager little opportunity to holistically view what is happening across the entire infrastructure. Even within single domains - for instance the network stack - we have multiple tiers of equipment and limited visibility across those tiers. Within the familiar OSI model, the enterprise may use certain types of equipment for physical layer connectivity, mainstream network equipment for routing and switching, and specialized intrusion prevention or over the wire analysis equipment for upper layer protocols. This example holds true in storage and often in server management as well. The administrator's ability to consolidate and view events and performance across these different domains has been little more than a pipe dream.

As the virtual infrastructure storms onto the scene, what has been a major stumbling block in the past for operations management is now becoming a crushing blow. The capabilities of the virtual infrastructure simply cannot be realized without visibility into what is happening, and what the impact of changes are. Management can't be executed, and automation can unleash unpredictable monsters. With no ability to determine the IO impact of a given application, nor the IO load on a given storage array, how can an administrator take action? Faced with a cloudy and opaque infrastructure, administrators dare not make use of capabilities like storage vMotion, and deny themselves the benefits of a fluid and adaptable infrastructure.

A number of vendors have for a long while worked toward revealing more information about the infrastructure, but their efforts often focus on enabling more effective planning. Planning isn't sufficient for day to day operational management, where action might be required to rebalance an out of balance infrastructure, or to free up infrastructure for a service event or outage. But a number of vendors are focused on analyzing on-going performance and/or over the wire events to give the administrator a view of what is happening in the moment, and then a big picture view of what has actually happened over time. Using these tools as fundamental instrumentation, the administrator can better fly their day to day infrastructure. We've termed this category virtual infrastructure optimization in part because the virtual infrastructure exacerbates the issues of limited visibility, in part because the virtual infrastructure makes reported data actionable and even automateable, and in part because the virtual infrastructure provides additional and better hooks on top of which active analysis and management vendors can build solutions.

The vendors on our short list most often look like Virtual Instruments, Akorri, Blue Stripe, and a handful of others. But many are nipping at the heels of the best in this category, or well-poised with the fundamentals required to eventually deliver a competitive solution. This includes vendors like Reflex Systems with an advanced security and IP networking pedigree, some array vendors like HP with their Performance Pack tools for EVA and XP arrays, and even the InfiniBand vendor Voltaire, as they become increasingly mainstream with multi-fabric solutions, but at the same time bring to bear their deep-visibility oriented Unified Fabric Manager.

Meet Taneja Group at VMWorld in San Francisco

2009-08-03T16:14:00.012-04:00

Once again, Taneja Group will be all over VMworld Aug 31 to Sep 3 at the Moscone. If you're going, please let us know. We'd love to set up a time to meet you in person: just send a note to our intrepid schedulers, Nevin and Tara. We'll be running two Sessions this year. If you're registered, you can add them to your schedule now using the Session Builder: search on Taneja in the Speaker Company Name or VM3103 and DV2714 in the Session ID. We'll see you in San Francisco!

Tuesday, Sep 1, 11am-12pm: Session VM3103
How VMware Reduces Cost-per-Application and OpEx Costs

Speakers: Jeff Boles, Taneja Group; Alberto Farronato & Mark Chuang, VMware, Inc.

In today's economic environment, everyone is talking about saving money and lowering costs. It is generally understood that VMware solutions can lower capital expenses (CapEx), but how much does it really cost to deploy a VMware solution and what about savings on operational costs? And how does that compare to deploying other solutions? In a virtual environment, it's cost-per-application that really matters -- "How much does it cost for me to run my total set of business applications?" To calculate cost-per-application, one must factor in virtual machine density per host, hardware (servers, network, SAN), environmental (electricity, datacenter space), and administrative costs. This session will cover how to calculate cost-per-application and show how VMware solutions can deliver the lowest cost-per-application, even against so-called "free" solutions. It will also show how to quantify the operational / business savings from VMware capabilities like VMotion, Storage Motion, DRS, HA, FT, and SRM.

Tuesday, Sep 1, 2-3:30pm: Session DV2714
Optimizing VDI Storage with VMware View: Strategies for Success

Speakers: David Bartoletti & Jeff Byrne, Taneja Group

Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) bring end users many potential benefits, including increased user mobility and flexibility, higher levels of security, and reduced administrative and maintenance costs. While the foundational computing and networking technologies are now in place to support virtual desktop infrastructures, the performance and provisioning of storage remains a major challenge to deploying an effective VDI. Traditional approaches to storage in a virtualized environment – whether networked or direct attached – tend to suffer from a number of problems, including low capacity utilization, poor boot performance and slow and complex provisioning. In this presentation Taneja Group dives into the four major storage challenges in VDI environments and offers proven approaches to overcoming them that utilize the latest developments in the View VDI suite from VMware as well as new array technologies from the leading storage vendors.

Virtualize with Confidence: New Tools for Performance Management

2009-08-02T21:35:00.000-04:00

We've been discussing virtual environment performance optimization for a while, focusing primarily on the performance of the environment after it's been virtualized. But a quick scan of the virtualization administrator blogs will show you that, quite often, it's hard to get a handle on what constitutes good performance before an application is virtualized, or before a virtual desktop implementation is rolled out. And, of course, if you don't know in detail how things are performing today, or how much IT resource each app or user consumes - hourly, daily, on average, at end-of-month, etc. - you'll have a hard time proving you've maintained performance after a migration to virtual servers or desktops.

I've been watching this challenge closely, and two young vendors have shown me interesting tools lately. BlueStripe's FactFinder is an application performance management tool that installs quickly and monitors network connections to build a real-time map of application components and connections. You can drill down, hop by hop, to find bottlenecks or failures, but what I like best is the snapshot files it creates, which can be used to play back, Tivo-like, any period of time, in order to re-examine a performance problem. You can quickly benchmark the performance profile of an application, without much work, before you begin a P2V conversion. Once you're converted, run FactFinder against the new app and validate. The tool's not limited to monitoring virtualized application performance, like VMware's AppSpeed, so it's worth a look if you're still migrating critical applications.

New kid Liquidware Labs and its Stratusphere product monitors app performance in a similar way, adding its Connector ID technology to track connectivity to and from each virtual desktop in a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) environment. The company likens it to "caller ID" - you'll know down to the specific user who's using the most resources or doing something that's killing performance or response time. The maps in this case are specialized for VDI: Liquidware monitors performance for a while, then produces a report classifying desktops/users based on how suitable each is for conversion to a virtual desktop. They're working with leading VDI integration partners to lower the barriers to VDI adoption.

There's no need to virtualize in the dark: build a performance baseline without too much effort and you'll thank yourself later.

Moving Toward “Virtual Convergence” - Part 2

2009-08-02T20:49:00.002-04:00

Last week we wrote about virtual convergence, and how it's leading to changes in traditional IT roles and responsibilities. This week we spoke with a half dozen IT managers at medium-to-large North American companies who told us how this is happening in their own organizations. All of these companies have appointed one or more virtual server administrators to manage their virtualization (mostly VMware) platforms. In one case the virtual server administrator has also assumed responsibility for physical servers and storage, demonstrating the importance of his role in the IT landscape. But in the majority of cases, the firms are relying on a senior IT infrastructure director of one flavor or another to oversee the convergence. Most of these IT executives have put in place new organizational structures and processes to plan the evolution of their virtual infrastructures and to more effectively manage the touch points between physical and virtual as well as server, storage and networking domains.

How are these new management structures working so far? Based on our sample of six, the results are mostly positive, though not without growing pains. For example, in one case, a virtual server manager in a particular department figured out a way to fund his own networked storage, rather than work through his storage counterparts in central IT. But this type of behavior seemed to be the exception. For the most part, IT practitioners are adapting to their new roles and decision-making processes. In what I considered the best example of this adaptation in a large IT organization, the senior IT manager formed ad hoc teams that are responsible for planning the growth of their virtual infrastructures as well as resolving conflicts. Each team includes at least one server, storage and network administrator along with a virtual server administrator. The multi-disciplinary teams bring broader perspectives to problem solving, and given their representative nature, ensure that decisions are more readily accepted and implemented. Another advantage is that the composition of the teams can be altered over time to reinvigorate group dynamics and to facilitate the sharing of a steady stream of new ideas and experiences.

As I talked to several of the IT managers, I felt inspired by their human spirit and creativity. I believe that the most successful IT organizations are embracing the changes driven by virtual convergence, and are figuring out how to capitalize on the best that the new technologies have to offer. More importantly, senior infrastructure managers are learning how to mobilize their teams to adapt to these changes and to bring out the best in their people. I didn't intend to write on this topic again this week, but I found some of these stories and experiences quite compelling.

In my next post, I plan to look at the impact of virtual convergence on management tools and approaches.

Dev/Test Lab Automation Expands Your Cloud Options

2009-07-30T21:57:00.002-04:00

When virtualization first exploded on the scene, Data Center Automation (or DCA, or sometimes Run-Book Automation) enjoyed a renaissance within the vendor community. The push for IT process automation generally follows each major shift in technology. The story is usually, “you have to deal with new technology…why carry over labor-intensive and error-prone processes to manage it?” It’s a good story, and customers who plan for new processes to accompany disruptive technology implementations are shown over and over again to have much higher success rates.

This pattern is shaken up a bit when exploring how best to take advantage of off-premise or Cloud services, whether they are Infrastructure-, Platform-, or Application-as-a-Service (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS) offerings. If you’re looking at hosted solutions, does IT process management or automation mean much? Isn’t that up to your hosting provider? Isn’t that what you’re paying for? The answer depends on the type of application or activity you plan to outsource.

Consider development and testing. Many dev/test teams work in a sandbox of physical or virtual servers and generally don’t get the level of IT support given to production applications. Dev/Test can often be a wild frontier: there’s a lot of freedom, but not much support. If you break something, you fix it yourself. If you don’t employ any sort of dev/test lab management processes (manual, scripted, automated, etc.) to control machine configurations, utilization or resource contention, you can’t expect any of these to improve when handed off to a service provider.

The good news is that, since virtualization often entered the enterprise through the dev/test lab, there’s a high level of experience and confidence in virtualization there, and lab automation solutions have had several years to grow up. Lab management tools also come in several flavors: in-house, fully-hosted, and hybrids – matching the multiple flavors of cloud available. You can start to automate your dev/test lab in house, with a private cloud (like IBM’s CloudBurst and others) as your infrastructure foundation. You could layer that with VMware’s Lab Manager or VMLogix LabManager to automate, or you could explore Surgient for a fully hosted solution. When you’re ready to move to a hybrid cloud, most vendors will be ready with cloud editions that enable you to move all or part of your infrastructure AND processes, as needed, off site.

Regardless of the path you choose, you should be finding the time to automate as much of your lab processes as possible, because you can’t move manual or ad hoc procedures anywhere. Lack of automation doesn’t just hurt the development cycle; it will soon start to hurt your ability to take advantage of the cloud.

Who Owns Virtual Infrastructure Performance?

2009-07-29T02:14:00.002-04:00

As my colleague Jeff Byrne noted last week, widespread virtualization is driving the creation of new roles in the data center. These new roles span traditional operational silos and can help drive new levels of efficiency in the virtual infrastructure, but there’s a downside. Each new role adds another team member to every conversation, and can strain lines of communication that took years of experience and planning to construct. When all’s going well, these additional roles add new levels of expertise, and new perspectives. But, in the virtualized data center, when a tricky performance problem arises, who owns it? Is it a virtual server problem, a storage or network problem, or a new problem in any of these tiers caused by virtualization? Does the new virtual team have the right data or experience to troubleshoot?

Earlier this year, Taneja Group began calling attention to the next wave of virtual environment management solutions, which we termed Virtual Infrastructure Optimization, or VIO. VIO represents the natural evolution of management needs for a maturing technology. In the early days of virtualization, we focused on conversion and consolidation; then, as virtual machines proliferated, the demand for provisioning and change management ramped up, along with tools for self-service and sprawl control; today, production-class virtualization demands solutions focused on performance: base-lining it, measuring it, and maintaining it.

But who’s the buyer of performance management solutions? Which IT operations user community should vendors target, and does the community even have a name yet? The playing field is getting larger, with new solutions appearing monthly for virtual storage performance, virtual server tuning and optimization, and virtualized application and user response-time performance management. These offerings come from the leaders (Dell’s EqualLogic team, VMware’s AppSpeed) and a host of hot startups (vKernel, BlueStripe, Virtual Instruments), and each is promising on its own. The winners will be the ones who can target the true owners of performance problems in the virtualized data center, and I don’t think they’re easy to find just yet.

Moving Toward “Virtual Convergence”

2009-07-24T15:45:00.003-04:00

Most IT managers would agree that virtualization - in all its various forms - is a disruptive force that is permanently changing the IT landscape. Due in large part to its growing deployment on servers, virtualization is now affecting all major resources and functions in the data center.

In fact, virtualization is driving a convergence - of sorts - of servers, networks and storage. We don't mean literally, of course, at least not in the short term. But virtualization is forcing organizations to take a more holistic view of their overall IT infrastructures, both physical and virtual. This trend is widespread - it transcends industry boundaries and is affecting IT teams of all shapes and sizes. And the impact ranges from painful to blissful, sometimes in equal doses.

The impact goes beyond just data center resources, directly affecting IT managers, tools and technologies as well. As we talk to end users, we see the "convergence movement" manifesting itself in multiple dimensions.

The first of these is in IT organizational roles and practices. Virtualization has led to conflicts in IT organizations over the roles and responsibilities of previously segregated teams. The introduction of the virtual server administrator has helped to blur organizational lines, both between physical and virtual server teams, and between server and storage domains. Where does the "virtual" infrastructure end and its "physical" counterpart begin? And for that matter, how can a virtual server administrator properly do her job without some insight into networked storage, and vice versa? Companies are increasingly finding that you cannot effectively manage one IT component without visibility into, if not at least some responsibility for, the functioning of related domains.

A recent Taneja Group survey found that to address these issues, companies are creating new leadership roles that span servers and storage as well as physical and virtual platforms. These include mid-tier to senior level positions such as Directors of Infrastructure, Infrastructure Architects and the like whose responsibility typically includes management and/or oversight of physical and virtual servers, networks and storage. Such IT managers are given the responsibility and authority to bring together planning and administrative efforts for these diverse IT elements and ensure that they work together smoothly.

Next week, we'll look at the impact of virtual convergence on IT tools and technologies, including some new products and planning approaches that IT managers can adopt to make convergence work in their favor.

Don't get lost in the stack - keeping an eye on the ball, despite the cloudiness

2009-06-23T15:16:00.005-04:00

Maybe we need to call it the collaboration net or some other fancy word instead of the cloud, but I think more often than not we're starting to miss some of the interesting and tractable use cases for cloud-enabled IT. From my view, this is largely because we're distracted with the potential enormous complexity surrounding orchestration layers and the virtualized data center. While there is significant innovation going on in that space, it is often just that - pure innovation if not speculation, and not necessarily real products or real world solutioning. Meanwhile, the end user staring at out of control, often unuseable data along with today's economy needs some new solutions for their day to day business.

Unfortunately, within the cloudy cloud, the real solutioning in my opinion is happening at the fringes, rather than at the core, because the core is often circling around what to do with a pretty complex stack made up of infrastructure, applications, orchestration, and more. But at the core, there are some interesting products that are changing the way IT is being done. One example that crossed my radar today is Zoho, and Zoho in my opinion is giving us storage solutioneers a bit to think about.

Now I don't have any particular connection with Zoho and I haven't even used their product myself, but Zoho is a web-based office suite, similar to Google Apps. Zoho recently came out with a SharePoint connector. Users of Zoho can now put their Zoho office data into SharePoint in the form of office files, and still open and use their data with Zoho applications. The interesting part of this story is how it all rotates around unstructured data, and managing and leveraging unstructured data in a collaborative manner across the web.

I have long thought that SharePoint is going to be the killer cloud application - with the virus-like spread of SharePoint across businesses, all it takes is a good tiered storage and collaboration connector for Microsoft to rule the cloud. Why? SharePoint is an easy to understand enhancer of unstructured data, and it is also rapidly becoming a master gateway into all the data a business thinks is important. I think there is plenty of room for other vendors to add to this ecosystem, and potentially steal the limelight before slow-moving Microsoft spoils the party. Zoho's stepping up, and hinting at how they think it should be done.

The point is, I think the Zoho stuff is 1.0 of what will be a tremendously useful and accessible cloud solution. Talk about enabling the Netbook, Zoho and SharePoint would be one way to do it. While the stuff on the back-end will be what it takes to power the cloud, this space is about delivering solutions that make business 2.0 more capable, and for the storage industry, those solutions more often than not will revolve around making unstructured data more collaborative. With SharePoint in mind, can you leverage your approach to unstructured data to make SharePoint more collaborative? Or could your unstructured data storage solution replace the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint while providing more capabilities via the cloud? Footnote, Tarmin thinks they can, and there are a bunch of pretty cool components at play in their approach to unstructured data, the cloud, and collaboration.

Don't get me wrong, I like the speculation, conceptualization, and pioneering innovation around the cloud just as much as anybody else - it's a bit like conceptual lincoln logs for big boys and girls. But if I were doing it myself today, I wouldn't be investing my energy there. I'd be looking at how to get these real world, marketable solutions on the street. From my view, there seem to be hundreds or thousands of those solutions, but they are more often than not a marked change from the complex, big solutions that traditional vendors like to bring to market. It will be interesting to see how this change in the marketplace impacts the IT industry over the next decade.

Virtualization Management Communities 2.0

2009-05-29T22:25:00.004-04:00

It’s going to be a good year for virtualization administrators. They’ve spent the last few years consolidating servers, ramping up utilization, and slashing the time it takes to deliver new environments to users. Often, they’ve done it without much corporate support as both pioneers and evangelists. Much of their success has been due to the strong community they’ve built at places like the VMware Technology Network, where any number of peers is standing by to help resolve a complex problem or share a favorite script, just when you need it.

In the early years of the virtualization technology wave, there was a lot of talk about automation, and quite a few platforms were developed then quickly snapped up by the systems management heavyweights. Few of these platforms did much of anything out of the box – they were policy-based, but where were the policies? They were containers without content, and content always wins.

Over the past month, I’ve been excited to see the second generation of virtualization communities coming to life. Each of them is building on the VMTN model in its own way, leveraging the collective experience of the field to create intelligence organically. A few worth checking out:

vKernel’s SearchMyVM is a free download utility – delivered as a virtual appliance – that quickly indexes an entire VMware environment and fronts it with a Google-style search portal, complete with pre-built searches as well as a query builder. Think of it as a mini Splunk for virtual machines;

Vizioncore’s Virtualization EcoShell Initiative is a community portal – accessed through a freeware desktop app – for those who use Windows PowerShell to manage virtualization. Members can improve their PowerShell skills, or share and debug their own scripts;

TripWire’s vWire community leverages the vendor’s configuration management and security expertise, offering free Windows downloads to verify whether vMotion is working properly, for example, and whether your virtual machines pass VMware’s Security Hardening Guidelines.

The market will decide which communities will thrive, but I like the aggressive approach we’re seeing in this space: race to market with a free utility that solves a real problem, cuts a few key strokes, eliminates a manual job, or teaches something new. The challenge will be to invest enough energy and resources to keep the content coming and build strong ties between community members.

The changing data center landscape

2009-05-27T16:19:00.003-04:00

Recently, Taneja Group published what has become an annual report reviewing the state of InfiniBand in mainstream IT. Once again, the landscape has evolved in interesting ways this year, with the virtual infrastructure and cloud computing being a couple of the forces that are driving InfiniBand adoption in the enterprise data center. Long story short, InfiniBand has proved itself a capable platform for continued evolution, and vendors with products in this space have long ago figured out how to make the fabric into a platform. While us bleeding edge technologists speculate about what infrastructure as a service is going to look like, the most common names in InfiniBand have long ago turned the infrastructure fabric into a service enabled platform. Slightly different twists, but you need a service enabled platform behind your infrastructure as a service, and with a service enabled platform you can turn your own infrastructure into a well managed service, with granular and comprehensive management. I'll illustrate this in more depth, but first a link.

The Taneja Group InfiniBand publication is available on the InfiniBand Trade Association website - www.infinibandta.org - and will be up for download via the Taneja Group website soon.

Now back to the story - don't stop at this report and think that you have all of the story. How is InfiniBand service enabled? It is a bigger picture than just the mechanics of InfiniBand switching and how data is transferred to host processes. InfiniBand has been engineered for extensibility and can in turn be a platform for innovation. Take for example Voltaire. I've recently been given a tour of the Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) solution. UFM builds on the architecture of Voltaire switches in order to extend their capabilities with an even more intelligent management layer. That management layer can provide more intelligent routing in a layer above the fabric, while integrating with and leveraging core fabric routing and management technologies. More importantly, UFM can dive deep into the fabric to give real insight into total infrastructure activities and performance. So far, I haven't seen any other solutions claiming to be a "fabric manager" offer the sophisticated insight, resource management, performance trending, and core fabric function extension that UFM can. UFM is just one example, but it fully illustrates what a well architected fabric should be capable of. The fabric shouldn't be an invisible lower layer of connectivity, managed within a separate operational domain. The fabric should be integrated with all aspects of your infrastructure.

My take, all the hubub about new emerging fabrics is earning the ear of the enterprise customer. Whether those fabrics can deliver as a platform for extending enterprise computing capabilities will be judged in its own time. Meanwhile, these conversations are opening doors for new opportunities, and InfiniBand is poised to deliver, and with the door open, the differences between fabrics are starting to make themselves apparent. If the challenge is big enough to warrant a new approach, that's where we are finding users bringing InfiniBand into the mainstream enterprise.

Before Taking Off For the Cloud, Check Your Virtual Engines

2009-05-15T20:50:00.000-04:00

In March, McKinsey published a discussion document, Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing, and I’ve had several colleagues and clients mention its controversial nature. In my view, the only finding that can be considered controversial is the claim that current cloud services offerings aren’t cost competitive for larger enterprises – in other words, large data center total cost of server ownership is actually less than most EC2 pricing options, for example. I can’t argue the numbers, but the cart might be getting in front of the horse.

The more salient topic covered, one I find decidedly non-controversial, is that TCO discussions are mostly premature for any but the smallest of IT shops. The first question should be: “How virtualized are you, and how’s that going?” If the enterprise has only seen modest gains in utilization, or is having trouble sharing servers among business units, or is running into tricky new performance problems with virtual servers, it doesn’t help much to let them know they do, in fact, already have an ‘internal cloud’. This type of retroactive rebranding is all the rage, but I’d encourage vendors to step back a bit.

There’s a large and growing demand in virtualized enterprises to leverage, optimize, and control the virtual estate. Virtualization's capital cost savings - consolidation and utilization - are by now well-proven. The operating cost savings? We’ve only scratched the surface. Until enterprise operations teams have greater confidence in the run-time performance of a fully virtualized environment, they won’t be ready for even a partial lift-out. Smart vendors will focus on the tricky contention and performance issues keeping virtualization teams up at night. And those are the vendors that will be trusted to help deploy into private and public clouds when the time comes.

More Thoughts on Storage Tiering

2009-04-06T16:42:00.010-04:00

Historically, there have been two storage tiers: a primary tier on disk, and a secondary tier on tape. I've blogged before about how the requirements of storage tiering are changing, driven largely by economic considerations. Explosive data growth, combined with escalating retention and e-discovery requirements, are showing the weaknesses of a tape-based tier. These days, storage decisions are being driven largely by a flight to efficiency even as other considerations (performance, reliability, availability, etc.) still retain their importance.

Discussions with end users and vendors alike have given me a lot of food for thought. To the traditional three types of "functionally defined" tiers - primary, backup (defined to include DR), and archive - it may be valuable to consider a fourth "value driven" storage tier that can accommodate certain classes of both primary and secondary data. But what about the cost and complexity another tier may introduce? Well, let's run through this as a thought exercise first.

You really do have at least 4 kinds of data: the high performance primary tier, a lower performance primary tier, a backup tier, and an archive tier. Today, the high performance and lower performance primary tier data is all sitting in your highest performance array, taking up space for which you're paying the high performance premium. It's there because you don't want to move any data to your traditional other tier (tape) unless you know there's a very high probability that you won't need to access it. If you've implemented an "active archiving" tier that uses SATA disk as the storage medium (along with other technologies like scale out architecture, storage capacity optimization, "fancy" RAID 6+, replication, etc.) and migrated some of the data off your primary storage to it, does thinking about this as an "archive" tier limit its value? Forget about what we call it, let's think a little more about this SATA based tier...

End users point out that , while there is a need for high performance primary storage, a large percentage of the data they house there really doesn't need that level of performance, but it still has to be online and transparently accessible to them. Our data indicates this number is generally higher than 60%, and in some cases can approach 90%. Some vendors have catered to this by allowing end users to mix higher cost, higher performance FC disks and lower cost, lower performance SATA disks in the same arrays. Good idea, but not the most efficient approach, since you're incurring the cost of the high performance infrastructure in any array that might potentially house high performance disks (even if most of the disks in it are not).

On the other hand, the SATA based tier we've defined offers the performance, reliability, availability, and cost profiles that we want for both lower performance primary data and archive data. If on that platform you can define different namespaces that offer different features - some designed for lower performance primary data that do not require archive features (immutability, retention policies, data disposal, etc.) and some for data that does require archive features - then you may effectively implement this fourth tier. Because the SATA tier leverages a lower performance infrastructure that results in a lower overall average cost/GB, this is a more efficient place to put the lower performance primary data that comprises this fourth tier. Leave only the data that demands the highest performance on the high performance infrastructure, and move the rest to the lower performance SATA based tier that is housed in the lower cost infrastructure (i.e. the scale out secondary storage).

The point I'm making here is that if you are going to implement a SATA based secondary storage platform, you want to put as much of your data on it as you can while still meeting your performance requirements. Don't think about it as an "archive" tier, think about it as a "value" tier that can be used for some primary storage while at the same time supporting archive storage. Thinking about it in this way will help you to move as much data as possible off your high performance primary storage tier, not just your "archive" data. The more data you move off the high performance primary storage tier, the lower your overall $/GB gets.

Now back to the question on cost and complexity. There are scale out secondary storage vendors that let you define "value" and "archive" shares on the same physical platform. So you don't need another platform, you just define another tier (the value tier) and configure its functionality appropriately. It's agreed that it takes more work to define an additional tier even if it is in the same physical platform, but the payoff to moving more data off your primary storage is potentially large (and the additional work required quite small). And I think that there may be scale out secondary storage vendors that are underselling the value of what they may offer you (who'da thought that would ever happen?). Even if they don't figure it out, you can.

A quick word on the backup tier: minimizing your high performance primary storage tier minimizes time-consuming backup requirements (and hence backup infrastructure requirements). The value/archive tier still needs to be protected, but given the scale (hundreds of terabytes to petabytes for most companies over time) requirements, replication is the way to do this, not traditional backup. When you take the benefits of SATA technology and storage capacity optimization into account, you're looking at a cost profile for the relevant data of well under $1/GB not including a replicated platform, and slightly over it when you are. If ediscovery savings against your "archive" tier are used to cost justify this tier against a tape-based archive tier (which is feasible if you are regularly handling one or more lawsuits a year), you could effectively get to add the "value" tier for free. Not bad for a thought exercise...

Cisco's Virtual Awakening

2009-03-14T21:46:00.011-04:00

On Monday the 16th, Cisco is expected to announce its entry into the server market. This competitive assault by the king of networking is a game-changer and will shatter the comfortable territorial boundaries we've fortified in the IT market over the last twenty years. The headlines will read, "Network Giant Makes Aggressive Leap Into Server Territory," which is true. However, I think a more accurate headline would read, "Virtualization Forces Cisco To Redefine What A 'Network' Vendor Is."

The key driver for this bold move, in my view, is not to grab a larger portion of device marketshare, but to grab a significant chunk of IT buyer mindshare. Virtualization hasn't only shredded traditional IT architecture and deployment processes, it has also upset the balance of power in the data center. We're all comfortable with the silos of server, storage and network control and expertise, and vendors have relied on those silos to nurture and protect relationships. The rise of the virtual environment and the "virtualization administrator" changes the game.

Virtualization, at its core, is about abstraction and mobility. By redefining the links between applications and all types of devices they require, workloads are freed from server, array, or switch constraints. This freedom in turn drives the need for new IT management tools that operate at the virtual infrastructure level and ease the burden of juggling alerts and resource contention along three dimensions at once.

Cisco is doing more than adding servers to its product line Monday; it is repositioning itself as a virtual infrastructure management vendor. In my experience, the best way to compete in the management arena against well-established incumbents is to focus on the gaps. Cisco should deliver targeted point solutions quickly that solve the most critical server-network management challenges faced by virtualization-savvy customers, to accelerate Unified Computing from concept to reality.

VMWorld Highlight: Virtual Infrastructure Optimization

2009-02-27T01:53:00.004-05:00

The Solutions Exchange at VMWorld Europe confirms that many vendors are tapping into a key customer concern for 2009: the optimization of existing, growing virtual server estates and the integration of storage performance data into the administrator's dashboard. While many customers I've spoken to have made progress toward managing virtual machine sprawl, they struggle to identify, correlate, and diagnose performance problems for I/O-intensive production applications, problems that often span server to storage.

From the application through the I/O adapters and switches, to the arrays themselves, there's a lack of visibility into the I/O path for root cause analysis -- in real-time and at production scale. This is in addition to the problem of right-sizing: resource optimization at provisioning/set-up times. Both activities require deeper insight into the impact of virtualization on storage performance.

Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom, announced here this week, aims to provide this end-to-end runtime visibility and cut through the finger-pointing between server and storage vendors when performance issues arise in production. Their solution is worth a look, to augment in-place or other vendor solutions (there are plenty of excellent ones here to explore) that may provide insight only during the initial capacity planning and provisioning phases. It's clear that even the best-planned virtual environment often behaves differently at production scale; VirtualWisdom can tell you why.

Backup and Archive: Two Different Animals

2009-02-25T13:26:00.010-05:00

Are you using older backups as your archives? Are your archives sitting on tape? For years, this has been the norm because on the surface this approach looks cheap and easy. But like some other things that are cheap and easy, you may be in for a few unwanted surprises if you continue in your errant ways.

Historically, backup and archiving were mostly about making and retaining a copy of the production data. Many backup products in the 90s seemed to be all about backup, regardless of what that did to the recovery process. Archives, if people even had them, were about keeping data around as cheaply as possible, mostly to meet regulatory requirements (which meant that it was mostly done in certain industries with compliance requirements). Both used tape, so it was natural for a "backup" to become an "archive" and get shipped to some remote site after some period of time. But things have changed considerably:

1) With increasingly stringent requirements for RPO and RTO, the focus of data protection has clearly shifted to recovery
2) Operations have moved to a 7x24 clock, driving concerns about the implications of backup on production application environments
3) The focus of archiving has expanded to include accessibility, primarily to meet the demands of an increasingly litigious corporate environment

Pushing the envelope on tape technologies to try to address the first two items above led to another unintended consequence: people became very aware of the recovery reliability issues with tape media when used to meet backup requirements. Tape is a sequential access media, but backups and restores basically needed a random access media. Tape is also primarily an offline medium, a fact which meant it did not lend itself well to the types of discovery operations that had to be performed against archives to find responsive materials to deal with lawsuits. A study we did last year indicated that discovery operations against tape cost 10x as much as those same operations if they were performed against disk where computerized search could be leveraged. With the average cost of a lawsuit being in the range of half a million dollars for large enterprises, e-discovery could save hundreds of thousands of dollars if at least several lawsuits were being handled per year. Plus, imagine the judge's reaction when you can't produce some responsive materials that you clearly should be able to due to media reliability issues. Disk was the obvious answer, if its cost could be brought down significantly.

Today, backup is about recovery, archiving is about cost effective retention and searchability. The two business objectives drive different requirements, but there is a single medium which is well matched with their foundation requirements: disk. Different software functionality is required for each, but this raises the question again of whether your backups should just age into becoming your archives.

We recommend that backup and archive be managed separately. First, since most restore requests come from the most recent backups, the "backup" problem has more of a short term focus to it. Disaster recovery has less of a short term focus, mostly because of operational limitations about how to get that data to a remote site but also because of the requirement that it support multiple comprehensive recovery points. Archiving clearly has a long term focus but should NOT just be a process which occurs at the end of the backup data life cycle. To optimize your existing storage infrastructure for performance, cost, and protection, data should be archived well before it is no longer needed for backup and/or DR purposes. This drives very positive implications for managing primary storage and the costs associated with it (see my blog from February 24, 2009).

In dealing with end users on this issue, two conclusions are evident:

* Backups and archives should be managed separately, and you should seriously consider using disk-based options for both if you're not already
* Archiving to tape is NOT cost effective from an overall TCO point of view if you're dealing with multiple concurrent lawsuits on a regular basis

Pulling One Out Of The Hat

2009-02-24T18:05:00.006-05:00

Inertia is a fact of corporate life. If you're responsible for figuring out what you're going to spend your IT budget on in the next 12 to 18 months, it's likely that a very high percentage of your spend will be on projects that you were spending money on last year. When trying to find places to cut, many people think first about new projects and initiatives. But another great place to look are budgets that get a large relative percentage of your overall spend. And if you're like most enterprises in this era of exploding data growth and increasing retention requirements, your primary storage budget probably fits that definition.

If the corporate stars have aligned and everyone is already in agreement that you're going to spend "x" on primary storage this year, here's something to consider. The business objective is to meet the enterprise's requirements for primary storage capacity, along with the infrastructure requirements that go along with that (data protection, DR, security, etc.). As long as you meet that requirement within the budget, you may have some flexibility in whether you spend that on technology that meets the strict definition of "primary storage" as long as you meet the business requirement. It's a fact that for most enterprises, at least 70% of the data sitting in primary storage infrastructure today is rarely if ever accessed. But it's there on the off-chance that you might need it, and it hasn't gotten to the point that you're so sure you'll never need it that you've migrated it to some sort of tape archive. All that data is driving a lot of management overhead for you for performance optimization, redundancy, backup, etc.

More and more vendors have figured this out, and are offering what we at Taneja Group call "active archival storage". Basically, these are very scalable, disk-based platforms, generally accessible through industry standard interfaces such as NFS and CIFS, that leverage technologies like SATA and storage capacity optimization (file level single instancing, data de-duplication, compression, etc.) to store lots of data very cheaply. Permabit might have been one of the first to enter this game, but they've been joined by other vendors, small and large, and you can now deploy this capability either as a product or as a service (Iron Mountain recently announced a cloud-based archiving solution). Here's the thinking: you've already decided you need x TB of new primary storage this year (fill in your requirement) and that's going to cost y dollars (fill in your cost). Instead of buying more primary storage, take that y dollars and buy an active archiving platform (or start up one of the cloud-based services) and move the 70% or more of your stale "primary" data into it. That has several impacts:

1) now you need a lot less primary storage (and probably won't need to buy any more this year after you've freed up 70% of your existing primary storage capacity)
2) now you're backing up a lot less primary storage, so backups take a lot less time
3) now you're spending a lot less to store your data, since the new average $/GB is a blend between the $20/GB or more you're paying for primary and the $1/GB or less you'll be paying for this active archiving platform (think how much more active archive storage that $20/GB will buy)
4) the data is still online so end users can transparently access it, and because it's online it's now searchable for e-discovery purposes, a fact which we've seen save hundreds of thousands of dollars (relative to tape-based discovery) in just one year for large enterprises that deal with multiple lawsuits concurrently (which unfortunately is most of the Fortune 2000)

It's not all peaches and cream, though, since you'll have to manage another platform, which may or may not mean introducing a new vendor into your shop. But you can do this without asking for any additional budget and you'll be easing the backup burden while at the same time decreasing e-discovery costs in a big way, not to mention making it faster and easier. Data migration doesn't need to be done up front, you can just let the platform manage that over time according to policies you establish. If you're going to buy one of these platforms, though, you'll need sufficient scale, say around 80-100TB of primary storage with your data growing at a good clip, to cost justify it using the above example. Smaller companies may consider cloud-based offerings which will let you in for under 1TB.

Long term, most medium to large enterprises will be using an online secondary storage tier. Tape just can't meet evolving archive requirements, especially where e-discovery is a concern. With the economy the way it is these days, this is something to at least think about this year.

VMworld Europe 2009: Keynote Live Blogging

2009-02-24T15:31:00.005-05:00

VMware CEO Paul Maritz kicked off VMworld Europe today and fired a shot directly across Citrix's bow. You may recall Citrix's Jan 21 Announcement of a bare-metal desktop hypervisor to be developed in partnership with Intel. Now, just a little over a month later, VMware signals it's not ready to give up the desktop by making virtually the same announcement.

VMware's Client Virtualization Technology, leveraging Intel's vPro, is a direct match for Citrix's Project Independence. Maritz was clear that the desktop is key to VMware's 2009 strategy, adding that the View (VDI) suite announced in December will be fully rolled out by the end of 2009.

Also, Maritz premiered VMware vSphere, a blanket rebranding of the VI suite which seems to include (replace?) the Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS) branding of 2008. At first glance, the new brand aims to break down any distinction between internal, external and "private" clouds: they are all one extended virtual fabric infrastructure. This led to a sweeping vision of VMware's vCenter management strategy, but I'll save that for another post.

Citrix Storms the Beach

2009-02-23T14:38:00.005-05:00

Citrix hopes to shake things up here in Cannes by announcing a free version of XenServer, available in late March. The company claims the free product will include management features, resource sharing, and live virtual machine migration, making it the latest run at giant VMware's Virtual Infrastructure suite.

The vendor also announced Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, a suite of enterprise-targeted management components for lab automation, dynamic provisioning and storage integration, all blessed by Microsoft in an alliance release.

Details are sketchy, but Citrix is obviously seeking to tap into the economic constraints it expects buyers to face in 2009. A free enterprise-class server virtualization platform might be the teaser hesitant buyers need to keep virtualizing in a tough year. And, the vendor hopes, it could lay the foundation for upselling advanced management in the future, when budgets loosen.

I'll let you know what I think of this competitive attack later in the week: I'm sitting down with all three vendors here at VMworld. This flurry of competitive news is sure to make some waves, and with that I promise to drop the nautical metaphors for good!

VMworld Europe 2009: Kick-Off!

2009-02-23T13:56:00.002-05:00

VMworld Europe 2009 kicks off tomorrow morning in Cannes, France. Taneja Group is on site and will be blogging on the hot announcements, trends, and session highlights all week. As we've seen at other VMworld conferences over the past two years, partners and competitors alike will leverage the buzz generated here to reach a wider audience for their messages, from new releases to game-changing alliance announcements.

We're expecting exciting developments from the virtual desktop, network, and storage vendor ecosystems, along with a rush of entrants into the virtual environment management and optimization market. Watch this space as we filter through the noise to bring you the best of virtualization technology for 2009!

Top 10 Practices for AFTER the eDiscovery Sale

2009-02-20T13:44:00.002-05:00

With more and more eDiscovery processes being brought into the corporation, this is a good opportunity to remind eDiscovery vendors what to do after the sale – and what not to do. Note: I came out of IT and was in systems support for over a decade. Believe me, I know how customers can be. They still pay your bills.

Make sure your customer likes your support engineers as well as they liked your sales guys. No one expects the support people to be the charmers the sales reps usually are, but they don’t want Android Boy either. (Or Android Girl.)
Sit down with the customer and assign real dates to the deployment schedule. Stick to the real dates on the deployment schedule. When the customer takes too long to do something – and they inevitably will – adjust the schedule. When the project ends up being over time and over budget, guess who the customer will blame? That’s right, you. Make sure you are there, are available, and take real responsibility for the schedule.
Document milestones, especially important in a complex project. Remember point #2.
Don’t try inventing the feature that you promised the customer you had, but really didn’t. Presumably you didn’t promise them that in the first place, no matter what your boss said. If you did, I can’t help you.
Make sure your customer understands that most eDiscovery deployments are a pretty big deal. Both technology and processes are changing, and even in pilot deployments there is a big learning curve. Be there with training and hand holding. This is especially critical for the lawyers, but even IT needs to know what is available to them in the technology. “Just get it to work” is their battle cry, but you also want them to realize your product’s real advantages while keeping it simple to manage.
And speaking of learning: for heaven’s sake, don’t charge support hours for one of your people to learn your own technology. The customer environment and infrastructure, sure. Your own product, no.
Your support people need to understand not only the product, but also the ramifications of different types of matters. This doesn’t require that they be attorneys or litigation support specialists, but does require that they know the concepts and stages of legal eDiscovery and/or compliance workflows.
If the customer likes you and your product, do a customer case study or solution brief. Even with lots of companies going unnamed these days, you can almost always work up an unnamed customer scenario. Prospects love to see the proof in the pudding, and real-world examples provide that nicely.
Once deployment is a success, keep up with the customer and make sure they are happy. Even a matter as small as switching account reps can make or break the next upgrade or expansion project.
Congratulate yourself and your people for a job well done. It’s a tough world out there, and – with apologies to the vegans – you brought home the bacon. Now rev up the engines and go do it again.