November 19th, 2009

Delta Sonic Car Wash systems deploys Vyatta

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Consumer use of Virtualization, Network Virtualization, Virtualization

Tags: Network, Credit Card, Credit Card Transaction, Delta Sonic Car Wash Systems Inc., Vyatta, Delta Sonic, Financial Services, Sales Channel, Networking, Finance

From time to time, I spend some virtual time with someone using technology developed by one of the suppliers I track. This time, the victim, errr, the person is Matthew Mackes of Delta Sonic Car Wash Systems who has deployed products from Vyatta.

Please introduce your organization and your role at Delta Sonic Car Wash.

I am Matthew Mackes, Network administrator at Delta Sonic Car Wash Systems. Delta Sonic is a family owned Car Wash business that also offers oil changes, gas, and convenience stores. We have 28 locations across NY, PA and IL.

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November 13th, 2009

Service Corporation International - Akorri Customer Profile

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Consumer use of Virtualization, Managing virtualized environments

Tags: Service Corporation International, Database, Data Center, Performance, Sanmina-SCI Corp., Tool, Akorri BalancePoint, Data Centers, Storage, Productivity

In the post “Examining datacenter operations with Akorri BalancePoint“, I had a chance to examine Akorri’s BalancePoint and asked the company to provide a customer reference. Shortly thereafter, I had a chance to communicate with Kevin Brown,  Infrastructure Manager with Service Corporation International. Here are his comments.

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November 12th, 2009

FusionStorm Datacenter Summit

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Consumer use of Virtualization, Virtualization

Tags: Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Data Centers, Storage Management, Utility Computing, Hardware, Storage, Data Management, Dan Kusnetzky

Vince Conroy, Chief Technology Officer, of FusionStorm, invited me to speak at their Datacenter Summit in Las Vegas. After speaking with him, I’m looking forward to meeting.  I’ve discovered that many Datacenter executives are well versed in facilities issues, including power, cooling and the like, but are not quite as familiar with what’s going on inside of their many computers.

My plans are to speak to them about virtualization and what it means to them, how the increasing adoption of various virtualization technologies combined with the desire many organizations have to cut costs at almost any cost leads to the consideration of cloud computing.  I’m also hoping to get quite a bit of feedback from them on the use of both virtualization and cloud computing in their organizational IT infrastructure.

The attendees and I are also going to visit Switch Communications’ SuperNAP in Las Vegas.

I’ll let you know what I learn.

October 30th, 2009

Eco-IT

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 5:03 am

Categories: Consumer use of Virtualization

Tags: Information Technology, Power Consumption, Organization, Strategy, Virtualization, Management, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to listen to the dry runs of analyst presentations for the upcoming 451 Group customer conference. I’ve learned something of interest in each of the sessions. Andy Lawrence, Research Director of the ECO-IT practice, helped me to become more aware of the role power and carbon emissions are likely to have on IT in the coming years.

It’s as if IT is seeing the beginnings of a perfect storm that will be felt by every major user of IT. Although this isn’t a comprehensive list, the following are each pushing organizations to reconsider their current strategies.

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October 21st, 2009

Site Uptime Network experiences

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Consumer use of Virtualization

Tags: Network, Information Technology, Atlanta, Uptime, Power Supply, Data Centers, Strategy, Storage, Hardware, Data Management

I’ve been attending the Site Uptime Network meeting in Atlanta this week and have speaking with a number of people who manage large and very large datacenters. Being a software person myself, I typically work with the assumption that someone is taking care of the computers, power supplies, storage devices, cooling equipment and the like. I guess I was ignoring what a big job that actually is.

I had the opportunity to tour through a huge Tier 4 facility in the greater Atlanta area and was impressed by all of the details that had to be accounted for in planning for that site. A Tier 4 facility, by the way, has been designed to eliminate any single point of failure. This means having redundant power supplies, communications links, cooling systems and, of course, is only really need to support the most critical of business operations.

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October 19th, 2009

Uptime Institute Seminar

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Consumer use of Virtualization

Tags: Data Center, Uptime, Uptime Institute, Institute, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Dan Kusnetzky

I’m on my way to the Uptime Institute’s How to Plan, Justify, and Manage a Major Data Center Project seminar in Atlanta, GA. I hope to meet some of the attendees as well as members of the Institute’s staff.

Who is the Uptime Institue?

Here’s how the Institute describes itself.

The Uptime Institute provides education, publications, consulting, certifications, conferences and seminars, independent research, and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals.

Founded in 1993, the Institute pioneered the creation and facilitation of end-user knowledge communities to improve reliability and uninterruptible availability—uptime—in data center facilities and Information Technology organizations. Today, the 100-plus members of the Institute’s global Site Uptime Networks® are mostly Fortune 100-sized companies having multiple data centers averaging 50,000 square feet of computer room area and consuming six megawatts of utility power. Members learn from each other and from the Institute via closed members-only conferences, site tours, benchmarking programs, best-practice sharing, abnormal incident collection, FLASH Reports, and shared metrics.

Here’s how the Uptime Institute describes this seminar

This interactive seminar and practical tutorial illustrates the most successful approaches used to get a new data center project off to an optimal start. This includes knowing how to develop the ‘right’ requirements, getting the necessary sponsors, and having the “right” schedule and budget. As with many once-in-a-career projects, the most serious pitfalls occur in the very beginning before management knows enough to clearly define the project’s life-cycle objectives. As a result, an alarming number of multimillion-dollar data centers recently built, or currently in design or construction, have insufficient capabilities or flexibilities to achieve a fifteen-year useful life. In fact, most of these data centers will become functionally obsolete within the next five years.

What I hope to learn

I’m hoping to meet some of the key decision makers and learn what changes virtualization technology is or is not imposing on them. I also hope to meet some of the Institute’s staff while there. I’ll let you know what I learn over the coming days.

October 14th, 2009

Apptis Technology Solutions, an eGenera Partner

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Consumer use of Virtualization, Managing virtualized environments, Virtual machine software, Virtual processing software, Virtualization

Tags: Egenera Inc., Apptis Inc., Apptis Technology Solutions, Dell/PAN Solution, Data Centers, Storage, Cloud Computing, Hardware, Data Management, Dan Kusnetzky

I like to present the views of people actually using technology as well as examining the moves of the suppliers of that technology. Jim Smid, of Apptis Technology Solutions, answered a few questions for me about his organization’s use of technology from eGenera and Dell.

Please introduce your organization and tell us about your role there.

Jim Smid, Director, Data Center Practice for Apptis Technology Solutions.

Apptis Technology Solutions is a technology solutions provider and value-added reseller for government and industry. We offer advanced and secure solutions for data center, unified communications, network infrastructure and client computing. Our interactive approach, engineering expertise and product knowledge provide customers with secure solutions that are precisely aligned with business and budget requirements.

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October 12th, 2009

WSJ Cloud Computing Quiz

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Consumer use of Virtualization, Off topic

Tags: Wall Street Journal, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

William M. Bulkeley, of the Wall Street Journal, just published an interesting quiz “How Well Do You Know… the Cloud?“. It apears that the good Mr. Bulkeley has a good grasp of cloud computing in its current stage of evolution. Although it appears that this article is not based upon a strict framework or taxonomy, it serves a really useful service. That is, introducing the concepts of cloud computing to the audience of the Wall Street Journal.

I suspect that many business decision makers would learn useful tidbits about this approach to computing by reading the article.

October 6th, 2009

HP Answers Thin Client Questions

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Consumer use of Virtualization, Desktop virtualization, Virtualization

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Thin Client, Thin Clients, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

NOTE: The good folks at HP pointed out that I had used an old version of my document and some factual errors crept into my post.  This is a revised version of the post with those errors removed (and quite possibly new ones inserted).

On September 16th, a member of the ZDnet audience sent me a note asking for some hard data about HP’s thin clients. I just finished a very enlightening discussion with some of HP’s best including David Bryant, Master Technologist, Desktop Solutions Organization of HP’s personal systems group (PSG);Tom Flynn, Chief Technologist, Desktop Solutions Organization for PSG; and Jimmy Johnson, Analyst Relations for HP’s PSG.

As a reminder, here are the questions the HP customer asked:

Do you happen to know what the bandwidth requirements are for the HP Thin clients? We are considering deploying them (30) at each of 5 locations and just having one central thin client server. These remote sites are joined to the main site by T1s.

If it’s like Remote Desktop at 64Kbps then we have 24 workstations

64*24 =1536.

that’s practically a T1 right there.

I heard that this will tend to spike when people do printing, I was wondering how much extra bandwidth would be consumed adding in printing.

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October 2nd, 2009

Thin Client Questions - some reader replies

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 1:53 am

Categories: Access virtualization, Consumer use of Virtualization, Desktop virtualization, Virtualization

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Network, Thin Client, Wyse Technology Inc., Thin Clients, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

Back on September 15th, a ZDnet reader posed a few questions about network bandwidth requirements imposed by HP’s Thin Clients. As mentioned in the post Thin client questions? Still waiting for HP’s answers, the reader had trouble obtaining answers from HP. Wyse, on the other hand, was happy to provide answers for their environment (see Thin client questions? HP still quiet, but Wyse replies). Since that time, HP has responded and we’re to speak later on today.

Several ZDnet readers took the time to add their comments and insight to the discussion. Although I’ve not been authorized to copy their comments here, I have taken the liberty of summarizing some of the comments I’ve received.

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