Entries categorized under “Virtualization”

This past week nearly 120 million people cast their vote in the US presidential election. But another election that is privately ongoing in many enterprises right now is how they are going to vote with their pocket book in terms of which private storage cloud they are going to deploy. This week after attending the HDS Influencer Summit in Santa Clara, CA, and seeing what HDS has to offer, HDS has for now edged out its competitors and earned my vote for having the best private storage cloud for enterprises. (read more)

SNW 2012 revealed a dynamic industry that is innovating across all storage tiers. From incorporating super-low-latency flash memory into the data center to new tape formats that essentially turn tape libraries into high-latency disk drives, lots of talent is being applied to meet the growing demands that enterprises have for their storage systems. (read more)

To say "All virtual machine (VM) backup software is the same" is like saying "All birds can fly." While VM backup software solutions can and certainly do protect VMs, the techniques they use, what hypervisors they support and how they manage backup and recovery vary greatly between them. Understanding and quantifying these differences becomes especially important for those organizations looking to select the best solution to protect the growing number of VMs in their environment. (read more)

Delivering high availability (HA) to applications classified as "business critical" in recent years has been as much a technical obstacle as a financial one that organizations have struggled to overcome. The latest version of Symantec's Veritas Cluster Server addresses these concerns. Now any application running on either a physical or virtual machine may recover almost immediately to a virtual machine (VM) giving enterprises the high availability (HA) they have sought without the hardware costs or VM reboot wait times. (read more)

In the last few years VMware has added a number of features to its core vSphere platform to address organizational concerns about the availability and uptime of their virtualized applications, to include High Availability (HA), vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vMotion. Yet there are still other aspects of delivering on the uptime requirements of mission critical applications that enterprises want that VMware does not offer. It is these gaps that Symantec's upcoming release of Veritas Cluster Server fills. (read more)

KISS - "Keep IT Simple, Stupid" - is the objective of almost every small and midsized business (SMB) on the planet. However SMBs and storage providers sometimes define "simple" in very different ways, especially when it comes to performing tasks like data protection and business continuity. Taking this challenge head-on, VMware has tightly integrated EMC Avamar technology in its new vSphere Data Protection offering to provide SMBs with the level of simplicity that they expect and need. (read more)

Many SMBs are interested in moving beyond virtualization's upfront consolidation and cost reduction benefits to also achieving improved availability, data protection and business continuity for their applications. But to date the costs and technical complexities of pursuing those goals have held many of them back. VMware's recent vSphere 5.1 Data Protection release changes that as VMware leverages EMC's deep backup and recovery expertise to address these specific SMB needs. (read more)

It is no longer a matter a question of "if" most organizations are going to implement a private cloud; it is more a matter of "when" and "how to best proceed." This is where it can get a little hazy as it is not always clear what path an organization should follow to ensure it ends up with a private cloud that meets its needs. While this path is not the same for every organization, there are three principles that organizations may follow to have a high degree of assurance that they will end up with a private cloud that meets their needs. (read more)

The IT infrastructure that most enterprises want is pretty obvious: it is a private cloud. Less intuitive, however, is how enterprises will transition from simply hosting file, print and web servers in their private clouds today to hosting business critical applications tomorrow. Successfully navigating this transition requires that enterprises introduce a new set of proven technologies that deliver the agility and cost-savings that they have come to expect from private clouds with the availability, performance, manageability and visibility they need for their business critical applications and data. (read more)

As businesses and enterprises of all sizes adopt and implement virtualization and the cloud, they expect the future of their IT data centers to be much brighter in terms of driving down infrastructure costs while improving agility. Yet the global findings coming out of Symantec's September 2012 State of the Data Center Survey suggest that complexity is doing more than surviving and thriving in today's virtualized data centers. The promised benefits of virtualization and the cloud are failing to fully materialize. (read more)

In the week that has passed since VMworld 2012 ended, I have had some time to contemplate the best technologies announced or on display at the show. In reflecting on what I saw at the show and while constructing my short list of what I considered the "Top Two," it struck me that the premise upon which many of these technologies are based has changed. They are less about filling the gaps that VMware vSphere leaves. Instead they focus on capitalizing on the vSphere platform that VMware has built. (read more)

When I attended my first VMworld a few years ago the excitement at the event was palpable. One could almost hardly wait until the opening keynote or to go to another breakout session because everyone innately sensed that whatever they thought they knew about how computer and/or data management was done could change dramatically as a result of attending yet another session and you dared not miss it. Fortunately or unfortunately, that experience changed at this year's VMworld 2012 as its "Right Here, Right Now" theme implied. (read more)

Virtual storage appliances (VSAs) are emerging as an ideal way for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to keep their storage hardware costs under control while retaining the benefits that networked storage systems have to offer. But as VSA offerings proliferate, determining which vendor's VSA solution is the right one for an SMB to adopt becomes more difficult. Helping to make that decision easier is the latest series of enhancements that HP adds to its StoreVirtual VSA making it arguably the best VSA solution available today. (read more)

Backup appliances are HOT right now with organizations of all sizes loving the flexibility and ease with which these appliances enable them to get backup up and running in their environment. But as DCIG's research into backup appliances uncovers, they are not all created equal with features like deduplication, SSD support and application integration emerging as key differentiators. It is these features and more that Eversync bundles in its new, recently announced line of data protection appliances. (read more)

Once the term "virtualization" overcame the stigma of being "evil", VMware was arguably the largest beneficiary of the corporate transition from the physical world to the virtual one. But as competing hypervisor platforms from Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat mature, VMware finds its status as king of the virtualization hill under assault with storage vendors publicly sharing they are seeing more customers implementing multi-hypervisor environments. Never one to be put on the defensive, VMware has since moved beyond being a "virtualization-only" provider and is positioning itself in a broader context: A software management solutions provider that can help bring about an end to the schizophrenic state of corporations. (read more)

The accelerating increase in the amount of unstructured Electronically Stored Information (ESI) is leaving IT organizations struggling with how to store and manage all of this new information. Aside from needing to provide the underlying storage infrastructure to host this amount of data, companies are also faced with the task of properly managing their Big Data file stores to meet both existing and emerging governance, risk and compliance (GRC) obligations. To do so, there are five initial steps they can take now to get their organization in front of these demands. (read more)

Few IT administrators willingly want to refer to themselves as "backup gurus" under the best of circumstances. But as organizations virtualize their environments, even grizzled veterans who were previously comfortable with their backups are now unsure of the best way to proceed so their backups are completed quickly, easily and within designated backup windows. (read more)

In a little over ten years server virtualization has resulted in organizations virtualizing their application servers in growing numbers. However these same organizations are still coming to grips with the emerging complexities associated with protecting and recovering their newly virtualized applications. Rectifying this requires that companies put in place software specifically tailored for virtual machine (VM) protection that automates and simplifies backup without re-introducing its costs and complexities back into the mix. (read more)

Crawl. Walk. Run. That progression pretty well summarizes how most people look to take advantage of cloud service providers over time though, in cloud services terminology, the progression may be better summed up as: Archive, Replicate, Recover. Today I conclude my conversation with American Internet Service's VP of Network Engineering, Steve Wallace, as we examine how many of AIS' clients initially get their data into the AIS cloud and then expand their use of AIS cloud services over time. (read more)

To say with any degree of certainty what technologies will be hot in the next 6 - 12 months generally takes equal amounts of smarts and industry insight coupled with a little bit of luck sprinkled in to get it right. So as I compare what I forecast earlier this year to what I see taking place now, I was certainly right on some points but premature in predicting others. So today with the midpoint of 2012 upon us, I thought I would take a look at the five specific technology trends impacting organizations right now. (read more)

Just about a month ago Symantec released the global findings of its 2012 Disaster Preparedness Survey which, as expected, generated a good amount of attention in terms of its results. But what always piques my interest in these reports is the nuggets of information that I find when I dig deeper into them. This report did not disappoint as it provided some key insights into other key trends going on within data protection. In particular, it revealed how most companies are now using one team to manage the protection and recovery of their data. (read more)

NetApp's entrance in the storage industry 20 years ago could be no more humble: it started by offering a fast, reliable and simple to manage purpose-built appliance targeted at engineering workgroups. Since then it has continually innovated and evolved with the objective of becoming the predominant storage player with offerings for all size organizations - small or large. This week at its annual Analyst Days event NetApp laid it out for all to see that in order for it to achieve that objective it has effectively broken its storage infrastructure offerings in two. (read more)

Dell has made a number of acquisitions over the last few years as it seeks to transform into a storage company. But after attending Dell Storage Forum in Boston this past week it is evident that it is well down the path of becoming something far more compelling than just a "storage" company. It is on track to becoming an infrastructure company. (read more)

The full-on message at this year's EMC World 2012 is Transformation. Be it how the cloud is transforming business, transforming IT or transforming you, everything that EMC is talking about at this conference somehow points back to transformation. But maybe the most poignant message coming out of EMC CEO's Joe Tucci's keynote on Monday, May 21, was how EMC has transformed itself over the years to remain a relevant and leading player in information technology. (read more)

The allure of client virtualization is increasing in the eyes of enterprise organizations. Aside from its obvious benefits of eliminating the management headaches and upgrade cycles of corporate desktops and laptops, organizations can better meet the growing demands of employees who want to bring their own devices (BYOD) to access corporate networks. However client virtualization can result in enterprises simply swapping one set of problems for another unless organizations first assess what their requirements are so they may put a solution in place with the right framework for their environment. (read more)