Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Market and Industry Watch
By Lisa Crewe

Cloud Conference Freebie from Akorri

By Lisa Crewe

Akorri is offering Free Registration ($2500 value) for the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo on April 19-21, 2010 at the Javits Convention Center, NY.

While you’re there, attend Rich Corley’s session, Optimize While You Virtualize to Get to the Cloud.

Use the cloudspeakerguestVIPgold (case sensitive) coupon code to receive full conference pass for FREE!

Register here

March 1, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Akorri Channel Chief

By Lisa Crewe

Congrats to Akorri’s own Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Bill Simpson, for being named a 2010 Channel Chief by the Everything Channel’s CRN. Channel Chiefs are leaders in creating effective channel programs for solution providers.  They consistently defend, promote and execute effective channel partner programs and strategies.  This is Simpson’s second consecutive year being named as a Channel Chief.

CRN selected Simpson as a Channel Chief because of his recent accomplishments leading Akorri’s channel team. In the past year, Simpson helped grow Akorri’s channel program 120% and added over 30 partners in his first 6 months at Akorri.   Under Simpson’s leadership, Akorri launched PartnerPoint, its new channel partner program. The tiered program offers premier channel members additional marketing and sales support benefits as well as giving all channel partners better online education and certification, additional marketing resources, deal registration and margin protection to support the growth of Akorri’s channel partner business. Since Simpson joined the company in the second half of 2009, Akorri increased its Q3 2009 revenues by 50 percent over third quarter 2008 and Q4 2009 revenues 250% over Q4 2008 in a very difficult economic environment. Akorri’s BalancePoint software also recently was awarded Gold Storage Product of the Year by SearchStorage.com / Storage Magazine. 

As a 100% partner-focused company, this is a huge award for Akorri.  Congratulations again, Bill!

February 23, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Managing Virtualization on MSPtv

By Lisa Crewe

I just watched a new program from MSPtv called “Around the Channel.”  This month the topic is Managing Virtualization with special guest, Heather Clancy, a business journalist we’ve had several conversations with over the past year including a recent discussion on virtualization management.

This video presentation is a nice round up of the challenges, current state of virtualization, future plans and recommendations for solving the management conundrum.

A fact I found interesting is that one recent IDC market survey indicates that close to 80 percent of all organizations grappling with more than 50 virtual machines are planning to apply some sort of management discipline to the mix. I think any organization deploying virtualization should be considering a management solution even before virtualizing.  It’s an opportunity to baseline performance of your physically hosted applications before you virtualize so you can show you’re still delivering good application performance after vritualization.  It can also ward off some of the challenges later by putting performance metrics in place from the beginning.

Heather highlights the fact that virtual and physical servers are co-existing in the State of Affairs in the slide below.  This is something Akorri has recognized from the beginning and why BalancePoint monitors both virtual and physical servers as well as the storage environment together to give you control of the complete infrastructure.

Heather Clancy's Virtualization State of Affairs

Heather Clancy's Virtualization State of Affairs

So if you’re trying to figure out how virtual infrastructure management will fit into your overall services mix, check out this presentation.  You can also read Heather’s blog here.  Enjoy!

February 22, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

SearchStorage Gold Product of the Year

By Lisa Crewe

I’m very excited to share that Akorri BalancePoint 3.0 took Gold in the SearchStorage.com Product of the Year Awards.

This is the second time BalancePoint has won this award, taking the gold in 2007 when the product was first introduced. 

One judge said the tool “sets the bar for holistic capacity and performance-oriented infrastructure management.”  You can read the full article here.

February 2, 2010 | Filed Under Akorri News & Opinion | Leave a Comment 

New England VMware Users Group

By Lisa Crewe

Akorri was a sponsor of the New England VMware Users Group “Winter Warmer” last week.  It was extremely well attended with more than 800 people there. 

One of the major themes was around how to virtualize mission-critical apps.  Two of the vendors gave presentations on this topic – one sharing the results of a test environments running a large Exchange environment and the other talking about the strategy behind getting there. 

Dave Vellante with Wikibon blogged about the other major themes – consolidation ratios, storage, back up and security.  I’d be interested to learn whether these are the top topics on your mind. 

Overall a great event. Looking forward to attending the next one.

January 31, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Next Page »