Processes

http://www.publictechnology.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=16220

Bracknell Forest Borough Council, which provides support services to over 115,000 residents in Central Berkshire, Southern England, has used VMware’s virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, to drive down operating costs, be more flexible, improve business continuity and disaster recovery, and accelerate the delivery of new applications and services to the public.

Among the new services rolled out on VMware Infrastructure are an Integrated Children Services (ICS) system, which is used in the delivery of cutting edge social services to children at risk and in care, and Pericles, a government-sector Revenues and Benefits application, which has allowed the council to streamline its council tax and benefits application and payments processes.

Following an audit of the Council’s infrastructure, which showed that its server farm was running at only around 10 percent of capacity, the management team saw an opportunity to streamline its operations and boost utilization using virtualization. The IT department built a business case for virtualization as part of the Council’s ‘Invest to Save’ initiative, which funds projects that deliver savings in the longer term. Working with technology partner Sol-Tec and Intercept-IT, Bracknell Forest began deploying VMware Infrastructure 3 in June 2007.

“VMware has had a tremendous effect on our IT infrastructure and has drastically improved our ability to deliver applications to the organization much more quickly,” said Richard Dawson, IT Services Manager, Bracknell Forest Borough Council. “On cost savings alone, the benefits are huge – we will save around £75,000 a year on our annual server hardware refresh, while our power and cooling costs have been reduced by around 20%.”

Very cool, it’s always great to see how people are benefiting from the technology, as well as the technologies they have used to achieve this, interestingly the article mentions the power and management benefits. That being able to deploy systems in shorter timescales, allowing IT to be more responsive to the end user needs, very cool. Do check it out.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/governmentFilingsNews/idUKN2630634220080626 

BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it started selling its new server virtualization software about six weeks ahead of schedule, putting pressure on market leader VMware Inc.

Server virtualization software allows one machine to perform the work of multiple servers, letting companies save money on equipment, electricity, maintenance and other costs.

Microsoft says it charges $28 per server for its software, dubbed Hyper-V, which was put up on its website for download on Thursday. The company previously said it would make the product available in August.

VMware said it charges $495 for the most comparable software in its product line, which is known as ESXi.

I’m genuinely excited about Hyper-V, it does look very cool. Oh there will be those that have an alternative view, but let’s abstract ourselves from any emotional statements and welcome another vendor into the virtualization market, recognize the value of another viewpoint, another solution for the end user, and the furthering of the business processes, the technology and the platform. That one product has functionality over the other, that one product is more innovative than the other (regardless of your personal viewpoint), can only encourage further investment, innovation and integration of the platform which has to be a good thing. Understanding that there might not be one virtualization platform for an organization, for a business line, that we might use one platform for one project, one use, and another platform for another, that what matters is the functionality, the benefit for the end user, everything else is just noise.

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2008/6/16/corpit/20080616111514&sec=corpit

KUALA LUMPUR:At a time when every IT vendor is talking about virtualisation as a strategy for saving power, cooling and space costs, none seem to be offering customers a full choice of ways to go about virtualising their IT infrastructure.

Except for Sun Microsystems which offers four different approaches to server consolidation, claimed the company’s regional eco director Mark Stanton.

Virtualisation is the process of separating the pieces of IT infrastructure — hardware, operating system, and applications — to enable these savings. It is not just servers that can be virtualised but also storage, desktops, datacentres, networks and applications.

Check out this article talking about virtualization and Sun. It’s always interesting to see what the different vendors opinions are, what their approach to the challenges, to the solutions, what their value proposition is, an interesting read. Virtualization of the infrastructure can enable not just in terms of cost, of energy efficiency, but in business empowerment through abstraction of the end user, from the individual components of the IT infrastructure, that a memory chip, a bad disk might not cause an outage, that the workload can be moved around the infrastructure to meet the business need, to maintain service delivery.

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2392443.html

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 18 — AMD today announced that a four-socket server from Dell with Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors has achieved the top score for virtualization performance based on the VMmark benchmark from VMware. The Dell PowerEdge R905 with Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors notched an official top score for four-socket servers of 14.17 and achieved a score of 10 tiles or 60 virtual machines.

“The VMmark results on Dell’s PowerEdge 905 further solidify AMD’s position as the industry leader in performance and performance-per-watt for multi-processor servers,” said Patrick Patla, general manager of the server and workstation business at AMD. “Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors offer customers many unique features that can help deliver near native application performance on their virtualized servers, including Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI). AMD is committed to working with Dell and the industry to continue developing more performance indicators that demonstrate the full suite of virtualization capabilities, such as RVI, which are available to customers today.”

Very cool, the newer processors are bringing more opportunities for performance and scale which has to be a good thing for the virtual movement. An interesting read, do check it out.

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/it-infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208402360

A combination of forces — including the quest for greater energy efficiency in the data center — is spurring a surge in adoption of virtualization and commodity hardware on Wall Street. Most large firms have several virtualization projects on the drawing board, and exhibitors at the SIFMA Technology Management Conference this week are all over the trend. Exhibitors’ virtualization activity is backed by market projections. IDC predicts that the virtualization services market will reach $11.7 billion by 2011, nearly double the size of the market in 2006.

Check out this article which is talking about desktop virtualization. It can transform the way you provide the IT user experience if you link it to application virtualization including grid, Citrix and web. If we can abstract the user from the application and from their desktop we can manage workloads much more effectively, centralizing the support and management, reducing liability (from data loss) and avoiding the concept of a trader being ‘tied’ to their desktop.