Bladewatch.com

Business Wire

MENLO PARK, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pano Logic®, the leader in virtual desktops, today announced its participation in the TechTarget Desktop and Application Virtualization Online Seminar taking place June 18, 2009 from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. EST at http://events.techtarget.com/virtualdesktop/. The virtual event will also be available on-demand for one month beginning June 19. The Desktop and Application Virtualization Online Seminar will examine how IT organizations can leverage desktop virtualization to deal with the unrelenting daily demands of provisioning, administering, securing and supporting hundreds and thousands of corporate desktops – offering road maps for IT managers developing strategies for the future. Pano Logic will have staff available for live interaction in the virtual exhibit hall throughout the event.

“The VDI Online Seminar is a great way for IT managers to familiarize themselves with the benefits of virtual desktops, as well as the desktop virtualization landscape, without traveling to a traditional conference,” said Bryan Cox, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at Pano Logic. “In the Pano Logic virtual booth, we will showcase our solution, including the new Pano Remote, and illustrate how easy it is to get started with the Pano System and virtual desktops.”

Desktop virtualization is becoming ever more important in the enterprise whether it’s in the health sector for data security or abstraction from the client, or to enable technical teams to connect to the organization remotely using a virtual machine on a usb stick rather than issue laptops. I’m off to check out the seminar, it looks interesting.

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Business Wire

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DataSynapse, a leading provider of dynamic application service management (DASM) software, will host a webinar on July 1 at 12 noon ET entitled “Internal Clouds – Bringing Cloud Computing In-House.” To register, go to: http://www.datasynapse.com/content2398.

In this free one-hour live webcast, industry analyst James Staten of Forrester Research will join DataSynapse in a discussion of the requirements, operational challenges and enabling technologies required for enterprise IT organizations to provide cloud computing services internally to its business stakeholders.

Attendees of this Webcast will learn about:

* Definitions and segmentation models for cloud computing

* Delivery models for cloud computing (IAAS/PAAS/SAAS)

* How DataSynapse platform can be used to deliver PAAS for Internal Clouds

* Application requirements for internal clouds

According to an April, 2009 Forrester Research Report “Delivering Cloud Benefits Inside Your Walls”, “by deploying an internal cloud, you provide your developers with a safe place to experiment and deploy new applications that accelerates their time-to-market while ensuring that corporate policies and protections are in place.”

I’ll need to go and register for this webinar, it will be interesting to see what is said and how we see cloud adding value in the enterprise, do check it out.

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Data Domain

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — June 15, 2009 — Data Domain, Inc. (NASDAQ:DDUP) today announced that its Board of Directors, after careful consideration with its outside financial advisor and legal counsel, recommends that Data Domain stockholders reject EMC Corporation’s (NYSE:EMC) offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Data Domain common stock for $30.00 per share in cash and not tender their shares of common stock to EMC pursuant to EMC’s offer at this time. The basis for the Board’s recommendation is set forth in Data Domain’s Schedule 14D-9 filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At this time, the Board reaffirms its recommendation that Data Domain’s stockholders vote in favor of the adoption of the revised merger agreement with NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) that is described in the Registration Statement on Form S-4 that NetApp has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As previously announced, on June 3, 2009, Data Domain and NetApp entered into a revised merger agreement under which NetApp will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Data Domain common stock for a combination of cash and stock. Based on NetApp’s closing stock price on June 12, 2009, the transaction would be valued at $30 per share, or approximately $1.9B, net of Data Domain’s cash.

“Our Board is committed to enhancing stockholder value and, after careful review with our outside advisors, determined that the $30 per share EMC Offer is not in the best interests of our stockholders at this time,” said Frank Slootman, president and CEO of Data Domain. “We are pleased with the revised terms of NetApp’s acquisition offer and feel it will provide great value to our shareholders and customers.”

There’s been a lot in the news about the Data Domain deal involving NetApp and EMC, this is the latest update on the deal and recommendations that the “EMC offer is not in the best interests of our stockholders at this time”, there seems to be positive feedback for the NetApp offer, we’ll have to see where the deal goes and what new organization, products and services arise from this transaction.

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Information-age.com

The success of a server virtualisation project at UK supermarket chain Tesco has led the company to pursue an almost all-virtual IT infrastructure strategy.

“Our overall goal is to have everything running on virtual, with the exception of only a couple of systems,” Nigel Chubb, IT service manager for the company’s operations and infrastructure division, told Citrix’s iForum user conference today.

But just one year ago the company felt very differently. “At that point we had no intention to virtualise,” said Chubb.

That was changed by an independent review of its data centre capacity, which Tesco had believed to be sufficient for the following five years’ requirements. “The review found that we had less than a year of growth in our data centres,” said Chubb. a finding that made the company reassess virtualisation

The topic was made all the more pressing due to the planned roll-out of Tesco‘s Real Time Sales application.“If we hadn’t done something drastic, we would have had to build another data centre,” said Chubb.

The company decided to virtualise its 1500-strong Wintel server farm, which was then a significant drain on resources, consuming 30% of all data centre power but with utilisation as low as 6%.

It plumped for Citrix’s XenServer product, Chubb said, because of the company’s dedication to the project. As well as deploying virtual technology, the company replaced all of the physical infrastructure supporting its Wintel systems excluding the network. It adopted HP blade servers, housed in a hot aisle containment unit from APC.

I was checking out Information Age and came along this article talking about Tesco using virtualization of their wintel server estate to assist with their data center capacity issues which included looking at HP blade servers and technologies from APC. It’s always great to see what technologies are being used and what benefits they are bringing in terms of power and space in the data center, do check it out.

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Daily Mail

Barclays customers have been blocked from withdrawing cash and using internet banking after a computer glitch affected its network.

Sources said a ‘hardware failure’ had impacted on various areas of the business, causing all of its ATMs in the south of England to stop working from 1pm.

Customers attempting to log on to online accounts were also met with a message which said Barclays was ‘currently experiencing technical problems’ and were asked to try again later.

An article talking about customers having issues withdrawing cash or using internet banking, as IT gets more integrated to the actual services we provide, ensuring that we have adequate business continuity, that we can manage customer needs during a system failure becomes ever more important. It’s an issue that’s industry wide, interestingly the article mentions issues relating to disk arrays being reported.

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Greenme

Moores Law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor will double about every two years. The law has held up pretty much since Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, first published his paper on the subject in 1965. With the increase in chip capacity came a rise in speed and therefore processing power. We have powerful computers today because of the technology and innovation that drives chip design and production. When the first men landed on the moon it sometimes said that there was less computing power on the spacecraft than there is on a modern mobile phone. So we’ve come a long way in 40 years or so.

For the stand alone home or office computer or laptop the amount of energy consumed is large in itself. Now consider taking an individual computer with all it’s associated processor technology and less the peripherals, such as the screen and mouse, and multiplying that by hundreds, maybe thousands of similar devices in the same room. These rooms are eupehmistically termed a ’server farm’,  where lines upon lines of individual servers get stacked together to process information. This scenario presents processor designers at the front end and building services engineers at the back end, with the same problem, how to dissipate heat and minimise power requirements. The reason server farms exist in the first place is because our world is becoming more data driven. And in the world of 24/7 data requirements then the server farm is indeed a practical solution.

Grouped servers or server farms generate huge amounts of heat and because the servers must be kept cool relative to their operating limits then a huge amount of energy must be expended on ventilation and air conditioning. As the energy demand goes up, so too does the cost. And because more and more companies are using these server farms to process and warehouse data, then the demand for both the faster technology and energy is rising in parallel. As the world is increasingly becoming more speed and data driven, increasing data requirements are driving demand for more server capacity and therefore larger and more complex storage locations. This is both a problem and an opportunity.

An interesting read, but a few things come to mind around the green IT space, firstly we need to move the applications to what I call the BIG THREE, Web, Citrix/application streaming and Grid/DataSynapse/Platform etc. If they aren’t one of these three media, then the possibilities around them are going to limit what we can achieve (excluding the database of course). By that I mean, if I have a proprietory application, which cannot for whatever reason be upgraded to a web platform, be streamed in a Citrix or online java type application, or have the workload converted into a grid type application, we will need to maintain the server, the switch, the storage for the individual application server nodes.

What we need to do is:

• Tier the application – how available does the application need to be and to what performance levels – if it’s a train service status in a developing economy that runs three times a day and is accessed by mobile phones, does that need the same level of service as the same application in New York accessed by thousands of iPhone users in rich media?
• Tier the data center – do we need that many data centers all acting like tier 1, super cool, super available, load balanced? Can we not have the data center running at the relevant temperature for the application or availability, if it’s Tier 2 or Tier 3, (by that we mean world ending but not brand affecting or catastrophic), can we not have those data centers slightly hotter on the basis that it might save me millions of pounds for availability that isn’t needed, that by having tier 3 running at 30 degrees, I might save a few million pounds a year in power and cooling, but have marginal affect on availability, and any support cost offset by the power saving. In this case for example, I could have data center 7 (which is 9-5 only) be powered down to low availability on minimal servers at the weekend, and then bring all nodes online on Monday at 7am in a controlled fashion.
• Virtualize the application – abstract it to it’s component parts in workloads, data feeds and user inputs, so that we can move it around the relevant load balanced platforms working on a shared infrastructure basis
• Virtualize the infrastructure towards shared infrastructure models where I buy the workload, the capacity availability, performance or reliability I need, I only pay on use, on the basis of application availability and reliability.
• Virtualize the storage and set standards to offline more data as it becomes less needed online, by that I mean, we need to keep say 30 days trade data on the server disks, the trade data going back three years is wonderful in terms of onlineness, but is inefficient use of power and storage. At the same time, this means we need a backup and recovery process that:
  • • Works
    • Is on time
    • Is scalable and enables recovery in hours not those, “Michael’s at lunch, we’ve ordered the tapes, sometime next Thursday”
  • With a working backup, I could offline more data to cheaper and more energy efficient storage, it might simply mean tape, it might mean cheaper disk backups for your last 6 months data, everything else on tape etc – more efficient storage on a per application basis
  • Work with deduplication of data – how much space is taken up on the shared storage with user profiles, with static application data or copies of Office or other applications for user access, it might be more efficient operationally, but is this again because it takes too long to rebuild a pc? Without limits on user profiles we could be copying gigabytes of history, temporary files and user data around the network which might get backed up several times along the way.

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Business Wire

SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Double-Take® Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) today announced that it will host a webinar with VMware on June 17, 2009 from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm Eastern Time, focused on how businesses can maximize their VMware vSphereâ„¢ 4 deployments and optimize their workloads to meet business needs. Featuring Double-Take Software director of solutions engineering Bob Roudebush and VMware staff technical alliance manager Paul Vasquez, this webinar will examine solutions that combine the cost savings of virtualization with comprehensive, non-disruptive migration, backup and recovery.

The webinar will cover:

* VMware vSphere 4 overview

* Managing virtual workloads with unlimited VM licensing

* Zero downtime migrations and conversions

* Granular workload availability and disaster recovery

* Workload backup and easy recovery

Roudebush and Vasquez will discuss how organizations of all sizes can reap the benefits of virtualization, such as simplified management, reduced infrastructure, and operational cost savings, while eliminating concerns around physical workload migration and backup.

Webinar Details:

What: VMware vSphere and Double-Take Software: Optimize While You Virtualize

When: Wednesday, June 17, 2009; 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET

Who: Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering, Double-Take Software, and Paul Vasquez, staff technical alliance manager, VMware

Where: http://tinyurl.com/mh2sa5

For more information, go to www.doubletake.com or register for the webinar here.

Check out this webinar featuring VMware and Double-Take Software with a focus on management within the virtual infrastructure space on vSphere 4, I’m off to register now, it’ll be interesting to see what is said.

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Investors

PALO ALTO, CA, Jun 09, 2009 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — VMware, Inc. (VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that healthcare providers are using VMware View(TM) to furnish medical staff with reliable access to their desktops, applications and information as they roam from room to room and floor to floor within hospitals to care for patients. Healthcare organizations including Norton Healthcare, St. Vincent’s Catholic Hospital and Riverside HealthCare are using VMware View to help deliver cost-effective, flexible, highly available IT services, ultimately improving patient care. Healthcare provider “follow me” desktops from VMware deliver the medical information they need to care for patients, while giving IT staff the ability to easily provision, secure and manage desktops and applications from the datacenter.

VMware View lets businesses run virtual desktops in the datacenter which are then accessed using thick or thin clients. End users see a familiar desktop environment with all their productivity and clinical applications available in a single view. In healthcare environments, where minutes or seconds can make a difference in patient care, it is crucial for staff to be able to quickly and reliably access medical information. VMware View enables healthcare organizations to host virtual desktops on servers in a central location, protecting valuable medical information, while providing secure, mobile desktop environments for medical staff as they care for patients throughout a hospital. Administrators also benefit from being able to manage, provision and update desktops from a central location saving valuable time and resources.

Desktop virtualization is going to be the next big thing and already is for many businesses. Crucially with health care and other sectors where we need to access and update data remotely, being able to stream down the desktop, to abstract that operational activity from a local laptop or desktop with a local disk, can be a tremendously freeing activity for the end user and IT operationally and in terms of data protection. If I can have a thin client which connects to my desktop when I need the information, to have everything stored centrally and securely, I can prevent those data loss issues, and improve IT’s ability to perform, the traditional barriers to getting a desktop might not be the best part of a day or two, I might just configure a new thin client to connect to desktop 7 which is then duplicated and mounted for use. An interesting read, do check it out.

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PR Newswire

MUNICH, Germany and FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 9 /PRNewswire/ — DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced that the chief finance office in Koblenz, which oversees 26 revenue offices in the federal state of Rheinland-Pfalz, depends on storage virtualization from DataCore Software. DataCore partner SHE Informationstechnologie AG replaced the existing storage area network (SAN) with Dell hardware and SANsymphony(TM) storage virtualization software from DataCore.

Destined to unify and simplify financial administration in Germany, German fiscal authorities have introduced a uniform IT platform for their 650 revenue offices around the country – standardizing on EOSS (Evolutionary Oriented Tax Software). The SANsymphony implementation at the main revenue office in Koblenz was part of the EOSS project. A rollout of this size will take until 2012 to complete and is expected to cost federal government hundreds of millions of Euros.

In the past, each upgrade of the EMC Symetrix DMX 1000 disk subsystem required significant budget and had to be accompanied by an official, open “call to tender.” Over time, the SAN system had grown to 16 terabytes, which represented the final stage of expansion. The required next phase of storage expansion needed not only offer additional capacity for the migration of EOSS, but also provide SAN virtualization and hardware independency. Plus, the team faced a short implementation window – the entire project needed to be concluded within three months.

IT service provider SHE Informationstechnologie AG, a DataCore partner, was awarded the contract for its virtualization proposal. In the first stage of expansion, four Dell MD1000 systems with 15 SAS hard disks apiece and a net capacity of 10 terabytes (TBs) was implemented. DataCore’s SANsymphony 6.0 runs on two Dell R900 storage domain controllers. The hardware is located in two data centers and redundantly connected via Fibre Channel. Surprisingly, the combined costs for both hardware and software for the project came below the budget threshold and so did not cause the necessity for an official call to tender to be released – dramatically decreasing the project time frames.

It’s always good to see how organizations are using technologies, what barriers to success they are having and how they have resolved them, this article is talking about DataCore providing assistance to this organization is using their software as part of a virtualization and disaster recovery platform, I’m off to read up more.

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We often hear about the need to adopt virtualization or server consolidation (or both) to be more efficient with our data center space and power, to reduce the number of servers we have, to bring us a more dynamic infrastructure, abstracting the application from the underlying hardware. Before we do this though, we need to verify our inventory not just in terms of the servers we have, linked with the applications, but with the applications we have with the servers, so that we can clean and verify the data we have, to ensure that however we virtualize, that we understand all the elements of the ‘production’ or application chain, the feeds, the storage and server as well as the network.

Let’s step back then for a second and use the example that I am virtualizing a data center comprised of 1500 production, development and uat servers.

• Obtain a list of servers and applications compare with a list of applications and their servers – you would be surprised what didn’t add up – oh that’s not a web server for FX, it’s shared – I can decommission it then?  No, it’s an FX server, part of our core web platform for staging. This is crucial particularly in business where cross charging is in place, where you pay per server, there is often the situation where we’ll make everything shared to reduce the server count, the support cost, but this can affect your strategy.
• Decide how we virtualize – doing in-house IT, validating the concept, getting technical backing and support can prove invaluable before starting on ‘real life applications’. Do we virtualize everything by hardware platform? By data center location, environment like production or development, or do we carry out a per application virtualization process encompassing all platforms? Which would enable the most volume of virtualized hardware at the least cost?
• Consider the process, ownership and next stages, we might start off with 3 ESX or Hyper-V servers, what happens when they’re getting full, who pays? What’s the lead time? What’s included in a virtual machine? How do we sell it internally? We need the help desk processes, the how do I, what happens when, billing and chargeback maths so it’s affordable, avoidance of the marginal cost, one virtual machine must not cost a new ESX servevr.
• What are the barriers to entry on production? What do we need in place, are their ownership issues in terms of the hypervisor layer, or monitoring that’s needed, what level of shared virtual infrastructure do we have? If we have several shared virtual infrastructures, for example one for Asset Management, one for Risk, another for Back Office, what are the rules of engagement? How do we stop one business line’s lack of investment from impacting other business lines and avoid any perception or delivery issues with the platform?

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