Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

A customer perspective on infrastructure optimization

By Lisa Crewe

One of Akorri’s customers, Kevin Brown, Infrastructure Manager with Service Corporation International, was nice enough to share his virtualization experiences with Daniel Kusnetzky of The 451 Group for his blog on ZDNet.

In the article, Dan asks what products were considered to help take virtualization to the next level and I thought Kevin’s response was great, so wanted to share it here.

No single product was compared which was a driver in selecting BalancePoint. We had several tools already, Microsoft MOM, VEEAM Report and other tools, Hardware Vendor tools and MS SQL tools.
IT was taking a full arsenal of tools and a team of people to try and get to a common conclusion on what was happening within the system. BalancePoint was picked because it was a common tool for diverse teams to use and get a collective answer.
The fingers could then point to the problem instead of each other.

In talking with our customers, a recurring theme is the need to tie together the virtual and physical worlds of their infrastructure and it’s great to hear that BalancePoint is being used as a tool to help teams better communicate, collaborate and manage service delivery.

You can read the entire post here. If you are a BalancePoint customer and would like to share your story, please contact me.

November 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

How to Convince Your Boss You Need a Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

By John Gavin

Gone are the days when simply telling your boss that you needed the coolest virtual infrastructure management product just like all the other cool companies doing production virtualization would get it for you . Let’s face it. That won’t work these days when layers of approval are common place, endless questions on capital purchases are the norm and budgets are tighter than ever with ROI and TCO part of every ones lexicon and reason for buying. Ok, so what do you do to get the boss into your camp? There are really three areas you should highlight to get your boss to say yes.

The first is an old standby – time to resolve problems. Your first line of defense is that the traditional element management tools you have for physically dedicated environments can be useful, but just don’t cut across all the devices and see the levels of virtual abstraction to give that integrated system view which is vital to understanding virtual environments. Those older tools aren’t designed to see through and track all the virtualized elements because they were designed to support one device type in a silo-like fashion. You know the endless hours that are wasted chasing data, going to meetings or sitting on conference calls trying to find the culprits involved in performance problems that are impacting critical application availability, could all be avoided. You suggest even a conservative assumption of reducing this wasted, always unplanned, activity by 50% would be worth the purchase alone. The average Akorri BalancePoint customer with 100 VMs can identify over $500,000 in staff productivity annually.
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October 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Identify Problems Before They Impact Your Business

By Lisa Crewe

BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software was recently reviewed by Lyle Applbaum, a systems administrator with the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, in Virtualization Review magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

BalancePoint can be used to monitor both virtual and physical servers, which is definitely a plus as we’re always trying to show return on investment to our superiors. In addition, BalancePoint is a Web-managed product that has loads of charts and features to maximize ROI. Installation is a breeze. The software is a VMware virtual appliance that can be run on an ESX host-and BalancePoint can additionally be installed as an add-on to VMware’s Infrastructure Client.

You can read the full review here. If you’d like to test drive BalancePoint, download the VM appliance demo at www.akorri.com/demo.

July 25, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Clouds: The Big vs Managed fight all over again?

By Rob Strechay

In recent weeks I have become very enamored with the whole ferocity for which Clouds have become the “IT” thing to talk about. Be it a private cloud, one which a company builds itself, or a public cloud like the ones Amazon, HP, Google or Microsoft have built. DMTF has a group looking at cloud management and interop as well. In fact Network World had an interesting article saying that “only 15% of corporate customers have adopted or are considering adopting cloud technology over the next year”. Based on the companies I’ve talked to recently, this sounds about right.

I found another story really interesting about a disagreement between Google and Microsoft at the Structure 09 conference back in June. As recounted by The Register, Gill from Google talks about how they view the Cloud as horizontal versus Microsoft’s tuning the applications and Cloud to better service the applications, Google’s “approach is a little more absolute than [Microsoft's],” Gill said.

Gill went on to say, “Not only does getting to the end user have to be fast, but the back-end has to be extremely fast too…[We are] virtualizing the entire fabric so you get maximum utilization and speed on a global basis as opposed to local fixes – putting one service in a data center”.

He later used this example, “if we (Google) make a minor change to, say, disk storage to get a three per cent gain, and we roll that out to the GFS library, suddenly the entire base of applications stored on GFS sees that gain.”

So why recount this discussion from The Register article? Because I think the missing part from both of these approaches is that a Cloud has multiple applications vying for finite resources. You really have two choices. The first is to keep increasing the infrastructure capacity to keep up and exceed demand. The second is to plan to optimize the “top talker applications” to play more nicely.
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July 23, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

The world does not revolve around VMWare!

By Rob Strechay

You know VMware is the 800 lb Gorilla in hypervisors, but there are others, citrix xen, IBM Lpars, Hp Npars, Sun Zones, and Microsoft Hyper-v (stop laughing this is serious).

I am going to let you in on a little secret. The Hypervisor is a commodity. What you are paying for are the software services on top of them. Yes you can argue some have more bells and whistles in the hypervisor, scale differently, support different OS’s better than others, or are cheaper. What you are paying for is the right to buy the software add-ons.

It will be interesting to see how each differentiates from each other over the next year. Who will say performance matters and deliver on service level guarantees? Which one will be the most cloud-ish? Will you care?

I think you will care, but I believe the one that builds the most complete eco-system will win. I believe it is like email wars; exchange vs notes. Most companies use exchange. Not because it has more bells and whistles or is the best “all-in-one” product. But because it is a very effective email and calendaring system. Where Lotus Notes was trying to be everything collaborative … MS gave you the options to pick off the Chinese food menu at a reasonable price.

Same will happen with hypervisors. You’re going to have the “all in one” vs the one with features core to the hypervisor (performance / stability) …

I would say the one place MS and others have never done well is management beyond fault and event. So who will be the differentiator in this space? Will it be build or buy? Who will care that not all the workloads will live in virtualized / cloud environments … many with the label of “business critical”?

I believe you will be looking once again for “best of breed” products. Products that were not meant to be panaceas or “single-panes-of-glass” but never got implemented. In my time in the IT industry I have seen people buy five or more single-panes and still never achieve any benefit. Like in the storage industry you will probably buy your element/fault management from the vender and get the rest from innovative vendors outside those vendors.

Editorial Note:
Recently some of the aforementioned hypervisor vendors have been saying they will provide you everything for your data center an even cook you breakfast in the morning. Most call this the “cloud” strategy. Clouds where you use the “services” … think web services … available. Problem is that you will not be able to simply write to one API can move workloads between “clouds”. For clouds, cloud suppliers, and such to be successful this will need to become reality. Supplying underlying infrastructure services with no easy way to write to them is only part of what would be a dramatic game changer. This is not to say “private clouds” in our IT shops will work, but leveraging “public cloud providers” will be difficult.

July 6, 2009 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | 4 Comments 

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