Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Moving Deck Chairs on the Titanic? Ionix Changes Hands … Partially

By Rob Strechay

In a very interesting move and one that makes perfect sense to me, EMC has sold assets (software, development and sales) to VMware.  I think this is an extremely shrewd move by both companies.  But what does this mean to the customers?  Chad’s Virtual Geek blog has a great break down of what went from EMC to VMware and why. 

My thoughts are this.  The Ionix deal went a long way to ensuring that EMC and VMware will not overlap or compete in the management arena as VMware transitions from a hypervisor company to a virtual server and application management company.

What I find very interesting is that this now disconnects the server and storage domains.  If you know Akorri , we’re all about servers and storage, or what we call cross-domain.  Now I am sure there will be overlap within the EMC and VMware portfolios in the future (probably on purpose).  Perhaps one will  leave off or even hand off to the other’s management software.  So does this mean you will need a multi-vendor solution for cloud and virtualization infrastructure management?  I argue yes.

What’s the likely overlap?  I’m thinking SMARTS ADM / APPSPEED and the rest of the SMARTS family.  Almost instantly APPSPEED becomes a formidable APM management platform.  No longer just being J2EE application mapping and performance.  Now it can start to competing with the likes of HP BAC, Dynatrace, AppDynamics,  Bluestripe, Solarwinds, and many more.

As Chad states in his blog on the subject, cross licensing and integration among the software vendors has happened for many years – especially the cross-licensing / OEM’ing of SMARTS by Cisco and others to improve their correlation and event management.

So what does this mean to the customers?  I really don’t think it changes too much in the way the products operate today.  In the future will they become more VMWare specific?  Doubtful.  In fact this could be very positive for the development of the software.  Moving from inside a hardware-come-software-company-lately to a pure software company may bring life and future development focus to the products. 

At the end of the day the winner seems to be VMware in this.  I think for EMC it is a push given the development money spent over the years, the rebranding, and the acquisition costs.  Customers may win too – but we will have to see.

I don’t think it’s necessarily “moving deck chairs on the titanic” but I do think that it draws a line in the sand for the companies and reveals where they are not going to compete.

March 4, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion | 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 

From Virtualization to Cloud Computing: Are You Ready?

By Rob Strechay

If you’re thinking about deploying an internal cloud for your organization then you might find this article interesting. The article explains the three stages of virtualization from Akorri’s perspective based on our work with customers including the evolution and steps to take to assure performance and manage service levels.  This is good stuff to use when you are going between the reality of deploying virtualization and the hype of cloud.  It may give you a few good ideas on line items for your resume too … as you are now a “Cloud Architect” … check it out.

 
Optimize While You Virtualize to Get to the Cloud
— Virtualization is the key technology for the cloud. Its ability to separate the OS and application from the hardware enable it to best deliver on-demand cloud services. Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT, said it best: “Without virtualization there is no cloud – that’s what enabled the emergence of this new, sustainable industry.” But, how can IT organizations leverage virtualization to create their own private cloud?

February 16, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | 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 

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 

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