Ok, I know its been a long time between postings but its been a real hectic summer! June was filled with industry shows and customer meetings along with closing business for our Q2.  July hasnt been any less hectic.  The main focus for us in July has been the introduction of our latest release of BalancePoint, V1.7.   This release enhances our support for virtualization technology from VMWare and Hitachi.  It also adds support for NetApps Fiber Channel and iSCSI interfaces.

I did take a week off in July to vacation with my family at Sunset Beach, NC.  My wife might disagree though that I actually was on vacation since my cell phone was on constantly.  If you like warm water and nice sandy beaches Id highly recommend this place. Theres really nothing more to do than sit on the beach and soak up the sun, unless of course youre back at the cottage on your cell phone!  I promised her that next year I wouldnt bring it!

One of the best trade shows for Akorri this year was the Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations & Management show held back in mid June.  Our booth was over-flowing with interested attendees and our VP of Marketing, Tom Joyce, gave a talk on virtualization best practices that was very well attended.  You can see Toms presentation here.

The point of Toms presentation was to say that if you have one or more of the 2.3 million virtual servers that IDC estimates were deployed in 2006 or if you belong to one of the 76% of enterprises that plan to deploy virtualization within the next year then you need to think about how you are going to plan, deploy, and manage that infrastructure.  First and foremost youll need to look at your entire virtual infrastructure as a complete system.  Youll need cross-domain analysis, an understanding of your infrastructures performance not just component level performance, youll need to understand how virtualization makes everything shared and that sharing causes contention points and hot spots, and youll need to understand how to dynamically load balance your infrastructure in order to meet performance and availability metrics.

If you are serious about deploying a virtual infrastructure then give thought not only to which virtualization vendor you are going to deploy but how you are going to manage that infrastructure in the long run.