Entries categorized under “Virtualization”

Right now the economy may be sick but if the recent results of Symantec's annual State of the Data Center survey are any indication, enterprise IT budgets look surprisingly healthy for 2009. 84% of enterprise companies with 5,000 or more employees responded that they plan to keep their current IT budgets intact and a full 50% plan to increase them to 2009. Adding to the validity of the report, Symantec's research was performed by a third party firm (Applied Research) that spoke to1600 enterprise companies (5000 employees or more) in 21 countries. (read more)

While there are many uncertainties for nonprofits during these times it is in no means a time to sit idle as, in many respects, nonprofit organizations play by the same sets of rules as for-profit organizations. Taking a look at their current technology infrastructure, processes and management, with an eye on budget, can help them find new and innovative ways to spend limited contributions which in turn helps them actually do more. (read more)

The ongoing success of virtual server environments is unprecedented in terms of shrinking the footprints of servers in data centers, decreasing the time to deploy new applications and delivering needed cost savings to corporate IT organizations. Yet one component of the virtual environment that is often overlooked, and that can introduce new levels of complexity, is the backup and recovery processes required to protect virtual server environments. In fact, it is only now that significant advances are occurring that are making the protection of virtual servers a simple and straightforward operation. (read more)

Those of us who cut our teeth on single-disk storage systems and were heavily involved in performance optimization often find it difficult to take the leap of faith required to trust many new technologies. I (James) can remember when RAID came out. At the time, I was working on Oracle databases and wondered why I needed RAID and if it would stand the test of time. After all, many database professionals were already manually striping data across discrete disks. With RAID technology we had to overcome our inherent need to control data placement and embrace the ease of deployment and gains in performance, reliability, and availability. (read more)

2009 is shaping up as the year of server virtualization. The hype around Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server is giving way to the reality of companies actually virtualizing their production servers as a means to improve energy efficiencies and slash infrastructure costs. But as companies virtualize these servers, many are leaving the familiarity of direct attached storage (DAS) and entering the world of networked storage for the first time. This is creating new challenges, especially for Windows servers using utilities such as defragmenters that will begin to operate on virtual machines (VMs) and defragment each VM's associated file system. (read more)

Organizations are challenged with the increasing consumption and cost of power to sustain hardware within the datacenter. With the cost of power increasing 400% for datacenters over the last 10 years, one would think datacenters should somehow curtail their consumption, especially when many datacenters are reluctant to deploy new servers just because of the associated power requirements and costs. (read more)

With all the debates going on out there today about which vendor offers the best deduplication approach, one wonders, "How is a customer supposed to make the right deduplication decision?" Of course, any approach that demonstrates real-life space reductions ratios makes the technology worth purchasing. But even in this scenario, there are several different camps about the best way to deduplicate data and where the deduplication should occur. Should companies deduplicate data on the client; should they do it using in-line processing; or, should they deduplicate data using a post-processing algorithm? (read more)

A few years ago an article appeared on TechTarget's SearchDataManagement site that examined the top 10 reasons that disaster recovery plans fail. Granted, that article is over three years old but the points that the author makes are just as valid now as they were then even though from a technology perspective a lot has changed. (read more)

An area that is often overlooked in an IT infrastructure, at least until it's needed, is the backup and recovery environment. Then when the realization hits the company that it needs backup software, it's typically complex to install, configure and maintain, even in small environments, because of the fact that backup consists of so many moving parts (backup servers, tape robots, disk-based arrays, SAN networks, etc.). The good news is that more hardware and software vendors are stepping up to the plate and partnering to take some of the complexity out of installing and configuring backup software in these size environments. The most recent announcement between Dell and Symantec is the latest in the growing number of symbiotic relationships between hardware and software vendors in the backup space. (read more)

One can hardly visit any storage system vendor's website without running into a reference to "Thin Provisioning" that is available either in their current product or on their product roadmap. However, how many operating system or volume managers/filesystems producers do you find using those words? Until recently, there were none. But now that Symantec has jumped with both feet into the Thin Provisioning arena, how companies use and manage thin provisioning in the coming years should change significantly. (read more)

There is no question that the recent economic uncertainty will impact organizations on a global scale. Already continents and countries as well as individual companies are being affected daily. Gartner notes that no one is immune with the United States and Western Europe being affected the worse. Examples include: Europe recently put $2.3 trillion on the line to protect the continent's banks in a unified response to the global financial crisis; Europe's largest economy, Germany, is on the edge of recession and poised to come to a halt next year; and, venture capital firms are issuing strict advisories for startups while established companies are trimming expenses. (read more)

In the computer industry, Diskeeeper is as synonymous with disk defragmentation as Microsoft is to Windows. In fact, any knowledgeable Microsoft Windows administrator knows that defragmenting a disk drive can provide application performance boosts of up to 176 percent, if you believe some reports. That makes Diskeeper a must-have in the eyes of some shops with performance intensive applications running on Windows servers. However as more enterprises virtualize their servers and disk drives, how does Diskeeper's technology remain relevant? To get some answers to these questions, I recently spoke to Derek De Vette, VP of Public Affairs for Diskeeper Corporation. (read more)

Breaking new ground or turf wars? That's the question that crossed my mind when I heard that Symantec combined its Backup Exec and NetBackup product groups into one new Data Protection Group earlier this year. One of two things can happen in a scenario when you merge the engineering teams of the two data protection product market leaders, NetBackup and Backup Exec, into one. You either get outright war where nothing gets done and everything devolves into turf wars; or the two teams put aside their egos so they can take advantage of the new synergies that come from working together and sharing common code. So far, it strikes me more as the latter. (read more)

Traditional clustering methodologies are severely limited in respect to scale, heterogeneous support, and distributed application support. Because of these limitations, clustering has primarily been the domain of shops with high-end applications with equally high-end budgets for the hardware and software needed to implement clustering. Symantec's announcement last week of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) One begins to change this scenario for any organization interested in extending the benefits of clustering to a greater number of their applications. And based upon what we saw in this first release of VCS One, we are now wondering who wouldn't be interested in clustering more of their environment, whether virtual or physical. (read more)

Since the inception of VCS (Veritas Cluster Server), end-users have had access to significant higher levels of reliability and availability on heterogeneous platforms such as AIX, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows for their critical, tier-1 applications. Now with a decade of clustering critical business applications under its belt, Symantec has the experience and understanding of what customers expect from high availability (HA) software and what they need to make it successful in their shops. (read more)

Before breaking off into a sprint, and hyperventilating with Microsoft's Hyper-V, it might be a good idea to take a slightly broader look at the purposes of virtualization and utility computing. When used properly, we can all agree that virtualization is changing the datacenter in a positive way by providing operational and economic benefits. Yet virtualization by itself does not create economic benefits. After all, virtualization is just the ability to abstract and hide the physical computing resources through the creation of a virtual machine (VM) with no initial cost benefit in doing so. In fact, in many environments virtualization may increase costs long term due to the new licensing and administration overhead that VMs create. (read more)

A recurring theme in terms of what I hear from users is how VMware adds new complexities to their day-to-day management tasks. For instance, even before server virtualization came in vogue, companies were already complaining that their physical servers reproduced like rabbits. Server virtualization just makes server growth that much easier to occur since now companies don't even need to purchase a new physical machine anymore - it now is little more than a copy-and-paste like exercise to create a new virtual machine (VM) once server virtualization is in place. (read more)

As I write this blog entry, I am currently on a flight to New York City to attend the last day of the fall 2008 Storage Decisions conference. While I intend to post a blog entry about my experiences at SD this Friday, the flight is giving me some time to go back to last week and share some additional thoughts and insights I gained while attending the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) Tech Forum in Las Vegas on Monday, Sept 15. While infiniband was obviously covered as part of this forum, it was done so in the larger context of what virtualizing the corporate infrastructure means and how that will contribute to how companies construct and manage their data centers in the future. (read more)

My time at VMworld came to an end yesterday morning and while I only had one meeting (a roundtable discussion with F5 executives, end-users, analysts and F5 product and marketing managers) prior to my departure, the roundtable was a great capstone to my stay at VMworld. More than anything else, it encapsulated the user infatuation with VMware that is blinding them to some of the major problems that early adopters of server virtualization are encountering. The main thoughts that I took away from this roundtable as well as from VMworld in general included: (read more)

Day 2 at VMworld has come and gone and probably my biggest regret was that I had to miss this morning's keynote by VMware's new CEO, Paul Maritz. In reading through some other blogs this evening about the event and assuming Storagezilla called it right, it was a doozey essentially declaring open war on other operating systems. In any case, my day was focused on catching up with a number of vendors to get some of the latest behind the scenes scoop in the storage world. In fact, as one walks into the exhibitor hall in VMworld, it is hard not to mistake this conference for a storage conference. (read more)

It's day one at VMworld in Las Vegas and while the day for me began in Omaha NE at 4:30 am CST before landing in Las Vegas around 7:30 am PST, I did not join the throngs basking in the VMworld love fest. Instead I spent the day educating myself more about the topic of Infiniband by attending the InfiniBand Trade Association's (IBTA) annual tech forum that was held at Harrahs (Harrahs is adjacent to The Venetian where VMworld is being held). The reason that I elected to first attend the IBTA Tech Forum and not VMworld is simple. Everyone already knows that server virtualization is the BIG thing. What everyone doesn't know or understand is why Infiniband is making a case to become the next big thing in another form of virtualization: Virtualizating server I/O. (read more)

Enter FalconStor with its NSS Virtual Appliance, which is the first software vendor to receive this ratification from VMware in the SRM landscape. FalconStor brings a very open approach to this solution. By placing a FalconStor NSS appliance in between the ESX Server's and the storage farm the solution can now become truly hardware independent as the FalconStor appliance can virtualize some or all of the storage on the back-end. (read more)

Several years ago when I still worked at a Fortune 500 company I came to realize that my company would need to develop the capabilities to provide information to anyone at any place at any time. What I did not fully comprehend at that time was how significantly that the corporate IT infrastructure would need to evolve to deliver on that concept. Now the type of infrastructure needed for that concept has emerged and it even has a name: cloud computing. (read more)

After a receiving a briefing on today's announcement on HP Data Protector's enhanced integration with VMware, one has to wonder why HP is making any noise about this new functionality at all. While Data Protector's enhanced integration with VMware virtual machines (VMs) provides some nice integration and recovery features for its HP EVA storage system as well as EMC's DMX storage system, it appears all HP did was take a feature it now offers for physical machines and make it available for VMware VMs as well. Further, we saw little in this announcement that would make us think Data Protector is well suited to provide improved levels of recovery for companies that are anything but primarily homogeneous HP shops. (read more)

In an effort to provide the highest level of support and performance to end users, corporate IT has often acquired and deployed software and hardware solutions that, over time, are unable to meet the increasing demands for application performance and scalability. Issues such as vendor lock-in and high administrative overhead continue to increase costs and reduce ROI. For this reason IT departments have realized and embraced the advantages of commodity hardware and open source solutions. (read more)