Since I started on the topic of consolidation and virtualization, here’s my take on server virtualization and the 8 things you should be aware of: (more…)
Archive for the ‘Consolidation & Virtualization’ Category
8 things you should know about Server Virtualization
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Measuring Datacenter Transformations
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Most people uses the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a metric to measure how efficient is their data center. However, increasingly, the DCiE (Datacenter Efficiency) metric is becoming more and more accepted as the metric of measurement.
Both metrics were proposed by the Green Grid in 2007, as a means to estimate the energy efficiency of their datacenters and to compare the results against other datacenters as well as to determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made. (more…)
Data Centre Asset Planning
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009A recent Quocirca Insight report which was derived from 301 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers shows what we have already experiencing in most data centres: Crisis point as data centres runs into space and power constraints through years of uncontrolled growth, expansion and contraction.
Some salient points from the report:
- While the server sprawl continues, as much as 87% of IT budgets aren’t growing in real terms to alleviate the pressure.
- 28% of respondents does not know the exact number of servers they have, 22% said it could take up to a day to find a server that had gone down, another 20% will take longer than a day, and 11% of data centres will run out of space within a year, while 14% have already hit a power supply limit.
- Lack of communications and human factors contribute to the crisis, e.g. IT and facility managers aren’t talking enough.
- Power-saving approaches such as virtualization and automation, exists in abundance but they require up-front investment before the savings can be realised. Justification is challenging where data centres aren’t charging for their costs.
- Good asset planning tools can help data centre managers to manage the complex environments in their facility, but not all have access to such tools.
Understanding Data Deduplication
Thursday, November 12th, 2009As we look at the many ways to improve storage utilization, data deduplication often pops up as a potential technique. Data deduplication, or sometimes referred to as “intelligent compression” or “single-instance storage”, is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data. Deduplication is quite similar to data compression, but it looks for repeating sequence of very large chunks of data across very large comparison windows. Long sequences are compared to the history of other such sequences, and where matched, only one unique instance of the data sequence is actually retained on storage media. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to that first unique data sequence copy. 
For example, a typical email system might contain 300 instances of the same two megabyte (2 MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 300 instances are saved, requiring 600 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 600 MB storage demand could be reduced to just 2 MB. Imagine the huge economic benefits! Of course, in a storage system, this is all hidden from users and applications, so the whole file is readable after having been written.
Speaking @ Jakarta
Thursday, November 5th, 2009I’m scheduled to speak at a Sun briefing event entitled “Turn Obstacles into Opportunities” in Jakarta on Nov 24th. The agenda will be about achieving efficiency and maximizing ROA (Return on Assets) through future-proofing data centers, consolidation, virtualization of IT environment to maximize utilization and improve efficiency.
In business terms, ROA is defined as an indicator of how profitable a company is in relative to its total assets. In other words, ROA measures how efficient a company’s management is at using its assets to generate earnings.
Taking this into the IT perspective, most of the time, IT is viewed as a cost and most of the time, IT is leveraging on technology assets to enable and support the business. Maximizing efficiency, utilization of technology assets or being able to support the critical business functions with less assets are ways to achieve ROA in the IT context.
I hope to share some of these insights with our Indonesian friends and clients during this event. See you all there!
Virtualization – why you cannot ignore Storage?
Friday, October 30th, 2009There are many ways to optimize the data center. But as with all things good, it is necessary to take each step in moderation. Consolidation and virtualization is one way to achieve higher utilization of IT assets. But shrinking the IT assets by more than 30% overnight will create a sudden over-capacity at the physical facility layer. The way to achieve a sustainable overall efficiency in the data center is through finding the right balance between optimization the physical facility and IT consolidation & virtualization.
Virtualization technology coupled with the right management tool is a powerful method to help reduce the total number of IT assets by consolidating multiple workloads into each IT asset, hence, maximizing its utilization, reducing the complexity and management of disparate s
erver hardware and OS platforms. Nonetheless, server virtualization is only one component in a truly virtualized enterprise infrastructure. The other critical component is storage virtualization. Both of these works in tandem – one addresses the compute side of the equation, while the other addresses the data side of it.
RESTful APIs for Cloud
Monday, October 12th, 2009Over the past month, I have put together some thoughts around the components that should make up the composition of a Cloud Computing service, from a service producer’s perspective, in what I termed as the Big Picture. That posting can be found here and a more extended description posted on my web page here.
For this week, I’d like to shift my focus on some of the ingredients that make up the Cloud service. Lets start peeling off the skin of this onion..
The 2009 Data Center Purchasing Survey Report
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Between June and September of 2009, SearchDataCenter.com conducted the Data Center Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. For this 2009 survey, they had a total of 920 respondents, identifying themselves as IT managers, IT administrators, data center facility managers and IT executives. Respondents were primarily U.S.-based (43%), but the survey also included participants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More than half of respondents’ organizations employ more than 1,000 workers, and more than 25% of the companies have more than 10,000 employees.
Compared with last summer, data center budget growth screeched to a halt this year. In 2008, 30% of IT shops said they were increasing budget 5% to 10%, and 26% said they planned to increase budget more than 10%. Less than 15% of respondents were decreasing budget at all.
Virtualization Security
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Andreas Antonopoulos of Network World wrote an article “Virtualization Security: so far nothing” earlier this year and he remarked that only 9.6% of companies are deploying security tools specially designed to deal with virtualization, 21.2% expect to do so within the next three years, and 69.3% have no plans at all to secure their virtual environments. Antonopoulos further wrote that many of the threats that are unique to virtualization are overlooked and companies might be trying to shoehorn existing security models and practices into a vastly different environment. He believes there is a great risk that these threats will translate into attacks before companies re-examine their security policies, architectures and implementation. Lastly, he states that there are many innovative security solutions for virtualization and probed what are companies waiting for?
I do agree that very often, security is overlooked. But I do not believe that we can merely buy a security solution or product or tool and able to mitigate the security risks altogether. It takes much more than a tool or product to address the virtualization security subject. (more…)
Virtualization in the real world
Friday, September 25th, 2009One of the benefits of virtualization technology is to enable rapid provisioning of a new operating system virtual environment. With this ease and rapid speed which new virtual environment can be provisioned, it brings about a new challenge. Organizations may find themselves moving from a physical server sprawl to a virtual server sprawl.
A study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) showed that only 30% of companies are completely satisfied with their deployments of virtualization technology. This is partly due to the rise in complexity and challenges in managing and maintaining control over their IT environment.
Monitoring Operational health in a Virtualized Environment
Thursday, September 24th, 2009Virtualization technologies are becoming more advanced today and their adoption are growing. Increasingly, IT services are being delivered using virtualization technologies to derive higher cost efficiency and optimization. In the past, x86 compute hardware were designed to run a single operating system and a single application workload. As IT begins to realize that their compute assets are under-utilized and there are beginning to have so many of these under-utilized compute assets in their data center, they begin to explore using virtualization technologies to run multiple independent operating systems images (or virtual machines or VM) on each physical compute hardware. This allows sharing of resources on a single physical compute hardware with multiple environment. Not only that, you could have different virtual machines running different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical compute hardware.
Transforming IT through Infrastructure Consolidation
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009I have just published an article on the definition of Infrastructure Consolidation, business drivers, key success factors, inhibitors, and recommended approach in such a project. The way I view such a transformation is to holistically address not just the technology aspect, but the processes, people as well as the organizational barriers or politics too.
Read more about this article here.
