Bladewatch.com

IT World Canada

Hosted IT infrastructure and applications online can bring benefits, but attendees at this week’s first-ever Canadian Cloud Computing Conference heard more about the challenges for corporations

TORONTO – Data portability, lack of trust and privacy issues are just some of the barriers to wider enterprise adoption of virtually hosted hardware and software, experts told Canada’s first Cloud Computing Conference on Wednesday.

While the hype around cloud computing may have been tempered somewhat by the worldwide recession, one of the bigger challenges may begin among technology professionals themselves, said Reuven Cohen, founder of Toronto-based Enomoly. Part of this comes from a lack of clarity around what cloud computing actually is, he said, but there is also a wariness around putting mission-critical data in a service provider’s hands.

“On the one hand there are these legacy IT department guys who want control,” Cohen said. “On the other hand you have these business units who want more flexibility to be able to rapidly deploy these applications.”

An interesting article, when we say IT though, this can include not only the infrastructure guys, but also the application support and development teams. The issue being more of control and process than anything else, if it’s in-house as an application manager I know I can walk into the CIO and say your infrastructure’s rubbish I want this fixed. As we move to a cloud, or indeed buying in functionality, we ‘loose’ control and concerns of delivery arise. It’s in many ways simpler to virtualization, I understand a physical box that runs my application, it’s my comfort zone, therefore getting me to go on a shared infrastructure a cloud or grid scenario, requires a degree of sales pitch:

• What about the ownership – who owns it – what happens if…?
• How is it billed, and what happens to costs if I want more?
• Who works out capacity?
• What are the rules of engagement – if I need a specific MDAC or oracle client, what happens?

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Brian Madden

I just got out of my first breakout session here at VMworld Europe 2009. It was a session about the cost savings of VDI. The presenter was good and the content was basically good. In the session, the presenter walked step-by-step through a comparison of a traditional fat-client desktop computing model with a VMware View 3-based VDI model. She covered capex and opex expenses and looked at all the reasons customers could save money (both hard and soft costs) by going with VDI.

I agreed with MOST of the content of the session. However, I think VMware left out two very, very important things. In fact these omissions are so great that they would “break” VMware’s VDI cost savings model. But instead of addressing them, VMware just ignored them. (They weren’t even mentioned!) Most of the audience was new to VDI (as evidenced by the number of hands that went up when the presenter asked how many people had heard of VECD and who had used ThinApp.)

Check out this article about VDI, it was very interesting, I know the main driver for one of the organizations I spoke to for VDI was simply to reduce the amount of time and effort expanded on the desktop. The users got a virtual machine which could be re-imaged on demand in minutes, rather than spend time managing desktop assets, windows versions and licenses.

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Slashgear

Fujitsu have announced a compact server that uses less energy than a desk lamp and offers a variety of RAID setups for home-office and small business users.  The Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX120 S2 resembles a compact desktop PC, but uses Intel’s latest power-saving Core 2 Duo processors paired with up to 16GB of RAM and remote ServerView Server Management control.

Both the P8400 (25W) or T9400 (35W) CPUs are available, using 25-percent less power than rival systems.  As for storage, the TX120 S2 can be fitted with either four 320GB SATA or 146GB 15,000rpm SAS hard-drives. Nonetheless, according to Fujitsu it’s still whisper-quiet at 27dB.

This is great news, the more we innovate the compact server for small/home businesses, the more opportunities for revenue and choice for the customer. I’m off to check out more, might be ideal for those small businesses where you need a file server/email server. It’s always great to read about what the different vendors are offering if only to be better informed about the market place.

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My MacPro is telling me I have updates to apply, since it’s Microsoft Security update week, I thought I would remind you to click the apple button on your mac and run software update, it’s important to keep you mac as up to date as you would your pc.

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Fierce Finance IT

When most people think about the downside of virtualization, the standard knee-jerk reaction is to start talking about speed and latency. But there’s a better documented concern out there: Sprawl. You may have noticed that the huge rise in virtual machine (VM) capacity in the financial services industry has led to the proliferation of virtual machines without adequate control. At some point, the buildup of these underutilized machines can really cut into the ROI.

A recent customer study by Embotics found that even in reasonably well controlled environments, at least 30 percent of the VMs were redundant. In some cases, the figure was as high as 50 percent, at a cost of between $1,000 and $3,000 per machine depending on its configuration. (More on the findings here).

Financial service IT executives seem to be more aware of theses costs than their colleagues in other industries. Some will not scale their virtual environments until they have an effective VM lifecycle control and management system in place first, notes David Lynch, Vice President of Marketing for Embotics. This presents an opportunity for the likes of Embotics as well as Fortisphere, ManageIQ and most recently, DynamicOps.

Check out this article talking about virtualization. There’s been a lot written recently talking about virtual sprawl or another one I read recently about how it meant a more complex infrastructure. But then I’ve always thought that you should be managing your virtual world just as you would the physical one, issues of server management and security, of decommissioning and utilization remain just as important – that you aren’t virtualizing a ghost server.

One thing to remember – you only knew you had ghost servers in your data center when an engineer walked around and checked for servers powered off, at the start up screen etc, the only difference in the virtual world is that it’s so much easier to provision a new server and report on it.

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bmighty

If you work at a small or midsize business, you probably haven’t seen a so-called “thin client” for a long, long time. If you’ve ever even heard of them, you may have thought they were almost extinct, living on only in the dusty corners of huge bureaucratic organizations that never got the memo about personal computers. Well, Wyse Technology says they’re ba-a-a-ck! Sort of.

It certainly will be interesting to see if thin client whether it’s at home or the small business becomes more mainstream. More and more, I see it as appealing for me. Ultimately my digital life is on my trusted MacPro, everything else is either online or can be streamed to whatever device I’m using. With this in mind I wonder when we’ll see the home type thin client solution using VMware or something similar?

By 2012 will we find the MacLeod household in sunny England powered by a VMware and DL380 type device with all my clients ‘thin’ terminals? Will I have an in-house virtual infrastructure? For families it would be perfect, I could allocate my child a part of the pc, have them isolated from my Outlook, my pictures, my documents and know that by installing application7, playing online or re-installing that game won’t cause me to loose data.

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www.lyquidity.com

London, New York, immediate release: Lyquidity Solutions,www.lyquidity.com providers of ComplyXL for enterprise spreadsheet compliance and risk management today announce a faster way to ensure immediate access to critical spreadsheet management information.

ComplyXL, the innovative solution for enterprises to manage and control the information held in spreadsheets, now continuously monitors and reports on the activity within critical spreadsheets as a desktop utility. Managers can see and be notified immediately from the ComplyXL system tray when critical spreadsheets have been changed, wherever they are, which acts as an additional safeguard, protecting data.

The ComplyXL system tray utility is instantly available with one click and acts as a continuous monitor so managers can be confident they are immediately aware of changes to spreadsheets, who changed them, what changed and why.   ComplyXL can be scheduled to check for changes at whatever interval the manager chooses, whether every minute, through to every four hours, with a note popping up as soon as changes are made.  This system tray capability also provides the added benefits of:

- Managers can view critical spreadsheets in a way that has been previously chosen, so they can quickly access the information about spreadsheets in a view that is familiar

- Managers can also control what will happen when a workbook is selected.  The ComplyXL system tray utility can create an email containing a reference to the selected file or have it open the original spreadsheet in Excel so that Managers can choose what further actions, if any, to take.

- Collaboration by different areas of the business can be controlled in a way that doesn’t interfere with the user experience.  Managers can send a web link to users not on the local network so they are able to download, change and upload a set of spreadsheet changes as a once-only action and without having ComplyXL installed locally.  This helps organizations with numerous offices upload changes in a clearly defined way which complements their business processes, such as monthly figures needed by head office.  As standard, these changes can go through the Manager Approval Process in a secure, traceable controlled way.

I suspect we will see an increase in the demand for those tools and solutions that can improve our ability to manage or view our risk, whether it’s something developed in house or bought-in, particularly as many ‘applications’ are written or based on Excel. I keep hearing about Excel as a server application (the rumors come around every now and again, I wonder if we’ll ever see it).

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Cisco.com

Cisco Breaks New Ground in E-mail Security

SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 3, 2009 – Cisco today announced new managed, hosted and hybrid hosted e-mail security services that provide the industry’s most versatile set of e-mail protection offerings. As businesses demand greater agility and flexibility in how they collaborate, the Cisco® IronPort® Email Security services are aimed at providing them with complete choice and control over where their e-mail security is deployed and managed, whether it be on premise, off-site, in the cloud or a combination of the three.

This does sound cool, I’ll need to read up more about it, as more small/medium businesses come online these kind of tools not only become useful, but also a necessary cost of doing business.

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PC Pro

Verdict: A well built rack mount NAS appliances with above average performance and plenty of features suited to small businesses

With its latest RS408 NAS appliance, Synology steps in line with the competition by delivering a rack mount version of its DiskStation products. The new RackStation is aimed at small businesses and offers hot-swap RAID-5 and dual Gigabit ports whilst the RP version also has dual redundant power supplies.

Synology supplied the review unit with a triplet of 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disks as proof it can support them. However, you can start small and grow with demand as drives can be replaced individually with larger models and the RAID controller will rebuild the array. Build quality is up with Netgear’s rack mount ReadyNAS and certainly superior to Buffalo’s TeraStation Pro II Rackmount which still doesn’t support hot-swap and uses a fatter 2U chassis.

An 800MHz processor is in the driving seat and this is partnered by a useable 512MB of DDR2 memory. The two USB ports at the rear can be used for connecting external storage devices or sharing printers over the network. The Linux OS needs to be loaded on the drives and this is handled neatly by the Assistant utility which prepares the hard disks and installs the kernel from the CD-ROM. The appliance’s web interface is a cut above the rest as Synology’s Ajax-based Disk Station Manager 2.0 interface is very slick.

An interesting review of this NAS appliance, it’s always great to see what other people think of the products. The more options there are in the NAS appliance, the more competition and innovation of the platform which has to be a good thing for the end user and the market for NAS type applications.

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Inquirer.net

MANILA, Philippines–HP says software-as-a-service (SaaS) is slowly making its way into corporate information technology systems but is mum about how EDS would figure in its services strategy.

HP acquired EDS in May last year in a deal valued nearly $14 billion. EDS provides outsourced software services and could play a role in HP’s SaaS delivery model.

In a briefing Friday, regional HP executives, however, declined to comment about concrete plans for EDS.

Mark Sarbiewski, senior product director for HP Software, said EDS can do application testing services for end-users.

HP is aggressively building its software business, acquiring companies in recent years such as Mercury Interactive and Opsware.

With EDS, HP looks to bolster its standing as an integrated software and services provider like IBM.

An article talking about Saas and HP, it will certainly be interesting to see how the hardware and software vendors address the rise of the concept of cloud, of buying elements of the infrastructure, or buying capacity/service – I’ll have 300 cpu hours per week for three weeks. It remains a challenge and an opportunity, as ever, the problem for corporates remains an organizational one, an issue of how we fit it around organization rather than a technical one. As with VMware or grid, I can get the technology in, I can get it to work, it’s the buy-in, the billing and issues over ownership.

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