Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Innovation Insights
By Rich Corley

The end of an era (and it’s about time!)

By Rich Corley

Today, Sony announced it was discontinuing the manufacturing of floppy disks in March 2011.  Isn’t it about time?  Can a 1.44 MB floppy disks really compete with 64 GB USB Memory Sticks?  And when was the last time you had a computer that was capable of taking a floppy drive? 

But still I remember how much of an impact floppy disks had on my career.  Floppy disks were the workhorse for most of us that “grew up” in the computer age.  Relatively small and portable the biggest advantage was they were also random access.    My first computer, a Heathkit H8, came with a cassette tape for a “mass storage” device.  As soon as I could though I saved my money and bought an external 5.25” floppy drive.  I think it held a total of 360 KB but that was a huge step forward over the cassette tape. 

Floppy disks allowed us to become mobile.  With the advent of 3.5” drives you could write your data to a disk, stuff it into your shirt pocket and walk down the hall to share with your friends.  It was this type of activity that spawned the phrase “sneakernet”.  Of course once the real net took hold it was only a matter of time that this activity would continue.

Floppy disks definitely made their mark on the computer world but I for one am glad to see them go in favor on newer, better technologies.  RIP.

April 26, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

The Metric Toilet

By Rich Corley

Dictionary.com defines regurgitate as “to give back or repeat, esp. something not fully understood or assimilated.”  That’s exactly what most IT management products in the marketplace do….they just regurgitate statistics and data from element managers without fully understanding the implications of that data. 

I was voicing my frustration with these types of products to a colleague of mine earlier this week when he nodded his head and stated “yup, these products are just metric toilets”.  What a great phrase….metric toilets.  That’s it in a nutshell.  I’ve added the phrase to my vocabulary!

IT administrators need more than metric toilets.  In todays world where we’re all trying to do more with less IT administrators need to understand the implications of all the wealth of information available to them.  It’s important to understand the relationships between all these metrics and how they are impacting the overall performance, availability, and security or their IT systems.  I think we should be challenging vendors to provide real data…real analysis of data.  Instead of telling IT administrators that a CPU is 90% utilized tell them how this fact is impacting their applications and if they are being negatively impacted what they can do about it.

If your management product doesn’t really help you solve your problems, if it’s just regurgitating data from the server, storage, or network device then flush it!  Get off the metric toilet.

April 2, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | 1 Comment 

Microsoft Demos IE9

By Rich Corley

At the MIX10 Developer Conference in Las Vegas earlier this week Microsoft previewed its new IE9 browser.  Microsoft has made some cool optimizations in IE9, adding hardware acceleration and a new Javascript engine but the most compelling thing I see in IE9 is Microsoft’s support for HTML5.

HTML5 has been slow to roll out….it’s been in works since June 2004.  Guys like YouTube already have an HTML5 based player but I think the adoption by Microsoft will bring HTML5 to the mainstream.

So what’s so cool about HTML5?  Well first of all it will be easier to design webpages using HTML5.  HTML5 introduces a new set of elements which make it much easier to structure pages.  The other main advantage is HTML5’s support for video and audio content.  It will now be easier to embed these objects into a webpage.  There will be no need to use Adobe’s Flash anymore to support video in your webpage.  Although I personally have no issues with Flash many do and I think the move to HTML5 will accelerate the development of richer applications.

The one potential downside of IE9 is that it doesn’t support XP.  I’m ok with that since I’ve moved most of my environment to Windows 7 but I can understand how that will give some people grief.  Microsoft has given no date for the delivery of IE9 but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

March 19, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Time Flys

By Rich Corley

Wow, it’s amazing how quickly a year goes by.  My marketing department has been on my case to start blogging again so I took a look and realized my last blog was over a year ago!

A lot has gone on in IT over the past year.  I think the most amazing thing I see is how the rapid adoption of server based virtualization continues at a mind boggling pace.  I haven’t seen any numbers from analysts lately but from the customers I talk with I’d say the majority of enterprises have adopted server virtualization in some form.  Some are still playing with it in their development labs but most have also deployed it into production.

Now that enterprises have laid the groundwork for dynamic infrastructure by virtualizing their infrastructure the next logical step is toward Services Based IT, or what many are referring to as the “Cloud”.  Over the coming weeks I’ll be blogging about what I see happening with Cloud and how products like BalancePoint are necessary for successful Cloud deployments.

It’s a great day here in Boston today…I think I’ll brush off the bike and go for a ride.

March 17, 2010 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Customer Support Matters

By Rich Corley

During the past year we have invested a great deal of time and effort in developing Akorri’s software maintenance and support capability.  There’s no question that support is one of the big differentiators between software companies that are loved by their customers and partners, and those that are not.  To quote Steve Jobs, one of our company goals has been to build an “insanely great” customer support capability, and we’re working really hard on it.

Our objective at Akorri has been to try to build a business that is innovative on multiple dimensions.  The top three dimensions Akorri is focusing on are (1) product, (2) channel, and (3) customer support.  We believe BalancePoint is an innovative product and are continuing to focus engineering on innovation while meeting customer and market needs.  With regard to the channel, my goal has been to become recognized by channel partners and their customers as their favorite company to work with in the virtualization management space.  With regard to the customer support dimension, I believe we have made excellent progress.  Every week now I get emails out of the blue from users and potential customers about how one of our support people (Paul, Robert, Don, James, Fritz, Rick, Mike, John, etc.) went the extra mile.  I love that! 

In terms of how we are trying to innovate in support, I don’t mean to suggest that our support offering is entirely unique, or perfect (yet), but there are a number of things we do that I think stand out:

  • When a potential customer evaluates our product, we provide them full access to our customer support and treat them exactly as if they were a paying customer.  Many companies don’t do this because it costs money, but the way we see it, you need to have a chance to evaluate not just the product but also the support.  Our support is available 24×7x365, and can be contacted by phone, email, through the support portal, or at www.akorri.com/support.
  • When we come out with new releases, upgrades have been covered under support, for both minor and also major releases.  When we came out with BalancePoint 1.5,1.7, 2.0, and 2.3 all our customers got upgraded.  Our next major release will be 3.0, and all our existing customers are going to get that without an additional charge.  Other software companies also do this, but many charge for major releases.  We have not done that.  As with 2.0, in 3.0 we will be offering major new functionality, and that is included under the support agreement. 
  • Customers get a login to our customer support portal and a very comprehensive knowledge-base, technical FAQs, documentation, updates, etc.  We also have online, on-demand training and certification.  Again, evaluation users get access to the support portal and get a login to the online training site during their eval period.
  • We do the installation for you, without an additional charge.  You can do the install yourself if you want, but we are happy to install the software.  We do this remotely from our headquarters.

Gartner Group recommends that a software company’s support capability be evaluated on four criteria: (1) installation support, (2) ongoing support, (3) availability, and (4) support reputation.  We are doing our best to build a support capability that exceeds expectations on all of these criteria.  Let me know how you think we’re doing at rich@akorri.com.

March 4, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Inside Akorri | Leave a Comment 

Next Page »