Any data center with a virtualized environment has a real need for effective capacity management. This article discusses the reasons why capacity management is critical to achieving the benefits of server virtualization and outlines the three key requirements to consider when evaluatin...

Battles over formats and standards in the technology industry aren’t new. Whether it was e-mail, word processing, graphical images or even some more current like the apps on your smart phone, each new innovation typically starts out somewhat proprietary and incompatible. Today we li...

Anyone who purchases storage arrays is familiar with the many advantages of modular storage systems and storage area networks. However, they may also be familiar with one of the less desirable attributes of storage arrays: the typical three- to five-year lifecycle that forces decommiss...

Financial analysts, industry analysts, and CIO-focused publications all agree that Desktop Virtualization will be one of the most strategic business initiatives over the next few years. Many organizations have a VDI implementation or project in place solely because of the success they ...

For almost a decade now, organizations of all sizes have been leveraging server virtualization, but few have fully gained the flexibility and efficiencies it promised. The emergence of cloud computing and the promise of delivering on-demand resources has introduced new challenges and o...

Often times one mental hurdle that can hold businesses back from the modernization of their IT infrastructure through the use of the relatively new phenomenon of cloud computing is the simple feeling of being afraid to “jump on the bandwagon” too early. After all, there have been many ...

A deadlock is a situation where two or more threads are blocked while waiting to obtain locks that some of the other threads in the deadlock are holding. Deadlocks can occur when multiple threads need the same locks, at the same time, but obtain them in different order. For instance, i...

The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent. Virtualization and cloud computing go hand-in-hand, and virtualizing se...

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as “legacy,” as some organizations are now doing, undersco...

Performance is one of the major concerns in the cloud. But the question should not really be whether or not the cloud performs, but whether the Application in question can and does perform in the cloud. The main problem here is that application performance is either not managed at all ...

The biggest issue for the today's enterprises is the ways and means of measuring their computing / processing workloads that need to run their business and then work on the ways and means of optimizing the same. Workload is the amount of work assigned to, or done by, a client, workgro...

Every week a new data center hits the news with claims of greater than 100,000 square feet at >300 watts/square foot, and levels of security rivaling that of the NSA. Hot and cold aisle containment, marketing people slinging terms such as PUE (Power Utilization Efficiency), modular da...

Cloud computing has now passed the stage of hype to reality. More and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of remote hosting of IT services rather than local IT management, especially as managing and operating IT networks and services is not getting any easier. Managing IT net...

Virtualization is quickly gaining traction in IT departments around the world. According to Symantec’s recent Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud survey, 76 percent of enterprises are at least discussing virtualization. In the wake of the recent recession, the benefits are too va...

Virtualization has been widely accepted as a technique to conserve resources. Virtualization is the process of running a guest operating system on a virtual machine, which is created in a virtualizer running on the host operating system. Large companies do not have to install 100 diffe...

Numerous vendor surveys around virtualization projects show that a chief objective for datacenter virtualization is to improve business continuity and disaster recovery. The virtualization platform, or “hypervisor,” provides an impressive set of availability options for general-purpose...

With an extensive history dating back to the 1960s, virtualization has evolved with the changing business and IT landscape and continues to be a relevant tool in helping companies align their business and IT objectives. After adopting and realizing the benefits of server virtualization...

The one sure constant in the application deployment space is change. Over the last decade, many software OEMs have gone from shipping only packaged software to offering turnkey physical appliances, and more recently to providing packaged virtual appliances. The evolution from packaged ...

They say you can’t predict the weather. Like so many clichés, however, this one isn’t quite true. Meteorologists have a host of tools at their fingertips that help them recognize, track and analyze weather patterns in order to support predictions that are often accurate, or at least re...

In parts one, two and three of this article, we provided a brief overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity lifecycle, and focused on the server consolidation, infrastructure optimization, and automation & orchestration stages of the lifecycle. The capabilities described i...

There are two major drivers behind the need to embrace parallelism: the dramatic shift to commodity multicore CPUs, and the striking increase in the amount of data being processed by the applications that run our enterprises. These two factors must be addressed by any approach to paral...

In parts one and two of this article, we provided an overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity life cycle, and focused on server consolidation and infrastructure optimization. IT organizations that have successfully consolidated and optimized their virtual infrastructures...

IT organizations today are experiencing pressure to not only adopt new and emerging technologies like virtualization, but also reduce costs and do more with fewer resources (thus reducing CapEx) – all while delivering assurance of capacity and performance to the business. In the first ...

Virtualization has the power to transform the way business runs IT, and it’s the most important transition happening in IT today. It promotes flexible utilization of IT resources, reduced capital and operating costs, high energy efficiency, highly available applications, and better bus...

Deploying operating systems is expensive, complicated and time-consuming. So you might appreciate why I’m perplexed by so many analyst reports and predictions about the world rushing to get Windows 7 rolled out in 2011. That isn’t to say that people don’t want to use Windows 7. I think...

“Virtualizatio...all the cool, smart kids are doing it!” Or at least that is the message being pushed by the virtualization vendors. Mostly this is a true statement. There are plenty of market studies that show that more than three quarters of medium to large enterprises are leveraging...

A global 2000 Enterprise IT group is caught in a groundswell of chaos. The current economic malaise is forcing a challenge from the business to IT to cut operating expenses by 20 percent or greater while preserving capital ferociously. All this while the IT team is faced with anot...

This might be a typical storage manager’s response when questioned about a company’s backup tape stockpile. These tapes are often created in response to a key objective of any IT organization - to protect enterprise data assets. Thus a mountain of old backup tapes has been amassed, lar...

As many enterprise IT managers have come to realize, server virtualization is both an operational blessing and a curse. On the upside, virtualization enables IT managers to consolidate servers, create efficiencies, and reduce infrastructure costs. It’s the foundation of the next-gener...

Large organizations use multiple hypervisors to manage virtualization. The choice of hypervisors is based on complexity of virtualization and cost of hypervisors. Some of the commonly used hypervisors are VMWare ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. These hypervisors have their...

Virtualization – like so many other technologies that have traveled the path from cutting-edge innovation to ubiquitous deployment – is now within reach for companies of almost any size. But small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) looking to adopt virtualization technologies still strug...

The x86 architecture has become the CPU of choice not only for network appliances, but also for embedded communication equipment in wireline and wireless networking. As the need to cater to higher-performance networking while supporting security and virtualization becomes more prevalen...

Data virtualization has become a hot topic as enterprises and government agencies add this maturing technology to their data integration toolkits in pursuit of greater IT agility and lower costs. Rising key performance indicators (KPIs) for both demand and supply clearly tell this st...

If you are reading this article, chances are that you are one of the 50% of x86 architectures that (according to Gartner) will be running in virtual machines by 2012. Organizations of all sizes are exploring virtualization because it enables them to increase server utilization and redu...

Having fended off challenges from Linux for several years now, the RISC-Unix platform is now under siege on another front – x86 servers. Long dismissed as workgroup and departmental servers, or as platforms for low-level enterprise applications, x86 servers are making serious inroads i...

Need a pair of shoes, an airline ticket, or a book? Looking for 100 servers to get you through an online sales rush? No problem. Go online and your needs are (nearly) instantaneously fulfilled. Instant gratification may be the single greatest driver in the revolution that is fueled by ...

In the Part 1, I discussed the benefits of virtualization. In Part 2, I will discuss how virtualization impacts the IT organization and the various areas where virtualization plays a key role. Over the long run, consolidation and virtualization are sure to yield financial results for...

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides compelling cost and strategic benefits. These include scalability with reduced capital expenditure, more efficient use of IT resources, and the ability for an organization to focus on their enterprise’s core competency. Despite fears to...

There are hundreds of life science labs in the U.S. using next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics, proteomics, and molecular modeling to identify the genes behind, and potential drug targets to cure, many diseases including diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. With increasing ...

There is a marked difference in the way IT infrastructure has been seen and used over the last few years. During the last decade, the focus was to build an infrastructure that would last for the foreseeable future supporting key business objectives. While the trend of the day is to hav...