Server OEMs tend to be missing part of one index finger because they tend to tap it on the table and say, “This year the blade computer will take off.” It hasn’t happened yet, but virtualization just might be the reason why they might finally be right.

Blades are a very interesting type of system. More than a decade ago, they were the big buzz in the industry. The idea of discreet computing resources allocated independently of each other, with great flexibility in scalability, and providing the ability to mix needs and prices accordingly was very promising. In the end, the market has seen that the only way to fully realize the potential of a blade-based environment is to have a fully saturated rack of the devices.

Today, however, a new picture is taking shape. A company embracing private cloud computing, with a need for a high-density datacenter as their architecture, can easily benefit from blade servers. In other cases, traditional rack-mounted servers are a better option. For example, a single rack (using DELL’s 600 series) could host between 3000 to 5000 VDI sessions in theory (scalability estimated using 6 to 10 instances per core; depending on the number of simultaneous applications per instance, the networking and storage architecture will most likely reduce the number ).

In a recent conversation with Rob Mallicoat from Quest Software (www.quest.com), he mentioned an interesting model his company has been working on, managing blades to address the limitations of traditional desktop virtualization approaches.

Desktop virtualization refers to the use of virtualization technologies for session virtualization (Terminal Services), application virtualization (application sequencing), or hosted desktop systems (VDI), and possible combinations of these technologies. In Microsoft’s world, this would be RDP, App-V or Hyper-V as options.

Application compatibility is a limiting factor in many of these solutions. Not all applications work well in a session virtualization environment or they can’t be sequenced. VDI solves many of those problems, but it has limitations on performance due the added layers provided by a hypervisor and limits on the number of VMs per core available in the physical machine.

What Rob has done with some of his customers is to have a full rack of blades, with a different operating environment per blade if needed. Rob lets the end users connect to this environmetn via a thin client session (like Remote Desktop on Windows).

On the negative side of this solution, we have the cost per blade, many OEMs build them as servers, and then it is a solution justified by a high-performance requirement. Once you select a manufacturer, you tie yourself to them for the full rack.

The benefits of this approach are:

• There is no application incompatibility; applications are running in a full OS and system environment.
• There is no performance penalty; the OS is running on bare metal.
• It is ease to reach a full rack situation, so the economies of scale start to pay off for the blade architecture.
• Since you can mix different types of blades and add resources independently, you can scale each user’s environment according to their specific needs (more cores, memory or disk, different CPU architectures or OS).
• There is centralized management of high-performance systems
• There is “cloud” enabled access.
• You can mix server, full desktop, and virtualization solutions in a single rack.

That last point, I think, is the one that makes the solution attractive: As applications evolve to be more virtualization friendly, blades can be re-purposed as needed.

Information Overload, Platform Value Assessments, and Mount Everest

About a year ago I was talking with the sponsor of an Advaiya Platform Value Assessment (PVA) I’d completed. This sponsor, who was the CIO of a large international organization, said, “Don’t give me more ways to communicate. Give me the ability to figure out what communication is important.”

I understood exactly what he meant. In an effort to improve communication, organizations sometimes feel they are drowning in a sea of technologies devoted to communication: cell phones, email, Instant Messaging (IM), SMS, voicemail, blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS feeds, portals, video conferencing, or virtual meetings. People simply don’t have enough time in a day to consume all the information they get, let alone assign some kind of relevance to the information.  Add to that the fact that many people blend their personal and professional tools—so your aunt’s bread recipe might carry the same relevance as an alert that your datacenter is underwater and you have a system that is unsustainable—or even dangerous.

Platform Value Assessments

So how did I respond to this CIO’s predicament? I helped him understand his company’s platform and how such an understanding could show him a direction that would benefit the entire organization. Let me explain.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you want to climb Mount Everest; a non-trivial undertaking to be sure. So before you pack your things, buy your tickets, and find yourself gasping for air at base camp, you figure it might be a good idea to talk to your doctor.

Your doctor will have you breathe into things, run on a treadmill, give blood and ask you any number of questions, some of which may be awkward or uncomfortable to answer.

The doctor then works with you to help you break bad habits that won’t suit you for your trek; set some exercise goals for you to target; and possibly give you a prescription to either get better if you’re ill or improve your odds of not getting ill on your journey.

You might think I’m stretching things when I say that an Advaiya PVA is not very different from this scenario, in terms of preparation, diagnostics, and getting results.  But consider that your IT platform’s health is as important to your organization’s success as your body’s health is to your ability to reach Everest’s summit. Your IT platform consists of all the technology elements of your infrastructure and everything necessary to make IT work. (The Platform Vision architectural model of IT infrastructure can help you see what I’m talking about here; see www.platformvision.com.)

When we perform a PVA, we engage with our clients and learn their specific business.  We look around at how things are done and use interviews and other tools to surface the habits, both good and bad, as well as the health needs of an organization.  We then compare our data against the goals and objectives of the organization.  Armed with this information, we develop a plan that will not only help the organization achieve its goals, but ensure that the plan makes good and rational sense at all business levels.

In this case we discovered that the CIO really had a few  big problems:

1.       She was working with a large number of legacy systems that didn’t integrate well with each other so there was a lot of redundant information flying around

2.       They’d installed a lot of great new technology, which is to say they deployed it, but they never adopted it.  For example, they never trained their users on when to use email or IM or when to publish things to a dashboard instead of sending an email alert.

When we entered the PVA process, the CIO assumed our results would involve yet more investment in technology and services.  What we came back with was a plan to simplify the environment by eliminating redundant legacy solutions as well as a training outline to help the teams understand, not only how to use the new solutions but when to use them as well.

The PVA process isn’t designed to tactically solve an organization’s problems.  It’s designed to highlight the problems in a way that makes sense in their terms and illustrate what approaches will net them the biggest reward.

The CIO, upon reading our recommendations, was highly intrigued.  She met with her direct reports and began scheduling meetings to discuss our recommendations.  Maybe more importantly to her, however, was that she’d made the right decisions about what technology to deploy and simply needed to adopt that same technology as part of the character of the organization to be successful.

At the End of the Climb

It should go without saying that organizations face common tactical challenges.  This is borne out as obvious trends appear everywhere we go: reduce costs, reduce complexity, improve offerings, and enable new business and business agility. These challenges are perennially at the top of almost every organization's list of priorities.

Our trek up Everest would meet with peril if we tackled it thinking we only needed the gear and the knowledge of how to use it.  What we need to summit is a commitment to understanding what problems the gear solves, how the gear keeps us safe and an intrinsic drive to use our gear and training effectively.

As you prepare for your own ascent by investing in your gear be sure you are fully committed to making the summit.  The committed get to plant a flag on top and wave at the world, those who aren’t committed?  Well, maybe we’ll find them in the spring.

When is it time to change your IT platform? How do you decide if a point solution in your architecture should follow your current vendor offerings or that it’s time to add something new? Let me give you my perspective on this important question.

I recently worked on a project for a large company that was considering upgrading components and services in its infrastructure portfolio. The issue was whether to expand the footprint of the existing vendor’s solutions or replace some technology with a third-party solution that would eventually replace large portions of the infrastructure.

From the technical point of view, both possibilities satisfied the need. So that area was irrelevant in the discussion.

Investing more in a particular platform would increase the size of the company’s datacenter and consequently increase the desktop footprint. This translates to a higher cost of moving away from that platform. 

The cost comes in two areas. One of them is operations expertise and training: The more I have of one vender, the less I will know about the intricacies of another solution. In addition, if this is a solution that involves desktops, the cost of training end users on new systems will also grow.

Another cost comes from implementation when you’re replacing an existing solution (the cost of implementation for both solutions per se is a given). Replacing a datacenter solution tends to be simple, particularly in a cloud computing environment (for example with a hosted services provider), where little or no touch to the end users’ environment may be required.  When it comes to the desktop, even with centralized configuration management tools, the cost can quickly add up.

Therefore, at this point, keeping the current vendor and expanding the footprint seems like it may be the right direction. Of course, there is the long-term penalty of being tied to the platform, but in the short term, it makes sense as a cost-conscious solution.

So what other factors can aid in the decision? Use the value equation, where value equals the benefit of the platform divided by the total cost of ownership (TCO). In this case, the analysis differs from a traditional value case in the sense that we want to understand the benefits of replacing a dominant infrastructure vendor on our platform.

TCO is an overused term. Every single vendor claims its platform does better than anybody else’s. Here, it simply means “my cost of operations in the current environment.” If that cost constantly crosses above my replacement cost (as described above), the time has come to replace the platform.

Now, it’s obvious to say that, in a perfect world, the new solution would have an equal or better TCO. However, the cost of adding more to the existing platform and therefore creating a deeper dependency on a single vendor may offset a less-than-desirable initial TCO with the new solution. 

Benefit is more elusive, since as I mentioned before, both solutions were technically speaking equal and both satisfied the business needs IT asked for.  This is where you need to do a business analysis of the vendors that are looking to provide the solution. You need to get answers to questions like the following:

 ·         Where do I go for additional technology components?

·         Who provides support or licensing terms or models?

·         What is the supplier’s business viability?

You need to think about such considerations from a long-term point of view. Thinking this way provides reassurance that whatever your decision is, especially if you’re switching, you will not create a problem when you expand the new platform.

In summary, as indicated, pure datacenter decisions are easier. You may already have an unequal mix of vendors in place, and in that case, the effects of migration can be limited to the IT organization.  It is in the best interest of the vendor—and not yours—to expand the footprint, increasing the cost of replacement and locking all other solutions out. Multiple platforms imply a more educated (and expensive) IT staff, but this cost can be offset by having a broader set of technology options to choose from (and more negotiation power). On the other hand, when end users are involved, the cost of training them may surpass any benefit. This can be an argument, then, in favor of private cloud computing, centralizing services and applications into the datacenter while standardizing the user interface into a browser.

I am, therefore I travel.  I travel across the country and around the world working with large enterprise customers and looking at the business value of various IT strategies.  Of late my focus has been on Unified Communications (UC) and its potential for improved collaboration and cost savings and as a platform for innovation and competitive advantage. 

UC has been discussed for many years, but it has now finally evolved to real solutions with demonstrable cost-savings and productivity improvements.  In this era of decreasing budgets and increased competition no one can afford to ignore these benefits, therefore most organizations (probably yours) are either developing their UC strategy or are well along the way to UC implementation.  And, they are all recognizing that UC means a lot more than just throwing some voice over IP.  Thus, it requires a well thought-out road map to ensure maximum benefit across all aspects of their business.

In this environment, it is critical to ensure that you are taking full advantage of all the resources available to you to maximize the benefits of this planning/implementation process.  Microsoft has a well thought-out UC strategy that combines multiple communications platforms into a single end-user experience, building from the familiar installed base of Microsoft applications already running at most enterprise organizations. 

Whether you ultimately decide to use Microsoft for some or all of your UC strategy, it makes sense to take advantage of the company’s resources to build a comprehensive UC roadmap for the future.  Yes, I know they are a “Vendor” with capital V, but I have seen a lot of companies leave money on the table (sometimes a lot of money) because they haven’t leveraged their existing Microsoft relationship as a tool to help in this UC evaluation process.  With this in mind, here are 5 steps you can take to improve your Microsoft interaction and take advantage of available resources.

1. Obviously, the first step is to consider Microsoft as a key player in the UC arena.  You probably already have Exchange/Outlook for messaging and perhaps OCS for IM/Presence.  Why not build from this familiar base to develop a UC strategy?  While you may not have thought of Microsoft as a voice provider in the past, the company has an interesting approach to PBX integration and migration that makes excellent sense in an era of decreased capital budgets and helps reduce hardware obsolescence issues.

2. Talk to your Microsoft account team.   Make sure your Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Mapping is up to date and then and ask for their support in building a UC roadmap.  With an up-to-date IO Map and your account team’s knowledge of your business and culture, they can navigate the wealth of information available at Microsoft to bring the right tools and information for your evaluation.

3. Also, work with your account team to leverage interaction with the Microsoft partner ecosystem and even other customers to gain further insight into the UC evaluation/implementation process.  These introductions will help you gain valuable third-party information in support of your UC efforts.

4. Make sure you're using all the benefits of your SA or EA agreement. Are you using the free support calls that your agreement provides? If not, you should be.  Don’t be afraid to request UC information and white papers.  Ask how your current implementation could be enhanced and migrated to take advantage of new UC capabilities.

5. Finally, do you have Exchange Deployment Planning Services (EDPS) funds left for this year?  You can now use this resource for UC strategy development and have access to both Microsoft and third-party consultants for the process.  Many of the engagements I’ve had over the past year have been paid for in this manner.

Since you’re already looking at your UC strategy, why not take these simple steps to improve your Microsoft relationship, garner additional support for the development of your UC strategy, and save money?  When you do, please keep an open mind to the new avenues that UC will open up for your business.  For example, the ability to save time, travel, and facilities costs by empowering your people to work anywhere. 

During one of my recent engagements, I asked the CIO for his input regarding working from home.  His response was, “I absolutely support my people working from home – after they’ve spent 8 hours in the office.”  Obviously corporate culture plays a role, but UC will be a powerful tool for your organization and a platform for innovation going forward.