IT Solutions Blog

Addressing your Enterprise NAS Priorities

While there are naysayers who think that the NAS market is on the decline, there are others that forecast continued and expansive growth in the NAS market. One company suggest that the enterprise NAS market will hit 62,000 petabytes some time in 2012.

What does that mean for your enterprise? Well, for one, it means that the big NAS vendors, from EMC to HP to IBM to Dell, will all be competing for your business, alongside the traditional NAS market leaders. It also means an opportunity to take advantage of innovations in the area of file virtualization systems, and with cloud storage solutions that meet the NAS needs of your enterprise in unconventional ways.

It also means that you need to get your Enterprise NAS priorities in order. You need to recognize the problem areas in your NAS implementations. The biggest problem for the vast majority of enterprises is the rapid growth of your installed storage systems base.

You need to be able to make your NAS systems as efficient as possible in many areas, from power to cooling to footprint. How do you do that? While every enterprise has its own unique situation, there are some general guiding principles you can follow to address this enterprise NAS priority:

•    Maximize your storage resource management tools. Use those tools to measure your NAS capacity and efficiency. Even starting with something basic like the File Server Resource Manager built in to Windows Server 2008 is a start. Most enterprises should consider implementing a more robust storage resource management tool, however. IBM, HP and all of the major vendors offer these kinds of tools, and there’s bound to be one that will work well in your environment.

•    Focus on optimization. There are a number of optimization tools out there, as well. Specifically, you want to use storage optimization tools that will not only give you data on your environment, but be able to use deduplication and comrpession technologies, as well.

•    Increase virtualization. Virtualization of your enterprise storage environment lets you use intellegent tiering of your storage, moving your less-used data to lower-cost storage systems accordingly.

•    Move valuable data with infrequent access to the cloud. There are a number of solutions that allwo you to move applications to the cloud, including your storage management, optimzation and virtualization tools.

Implementing these kinds of changes will help you meet the rapidly-changing needs of your organization while making sure that your NAS solutions don’t overcrowd the resources of your data center.

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Desktop Virtualization Primer for CIOs

One of the most talked-about topics for many IT executives right now is desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization comes on the heels of server virtualization, which has been a tremendous boon for many organizations. CIOs see desktop virtualization as the rightful heir to server virtualization, and they have high hopes. They want to save money and improve the efficiency of the IT function all at once.
Still, there are some important concepts you need to grasp as a CIO before you dive your department directly into the desktop virtualization world:

•    Desktop virtualization is more than just virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI is based on the idea of centralized desktops hosted on a server. Desktop virtualization more broadly includes technologies like terminal services, blade workstations, application virtualization and even streaming workstation.

•    Desktop virtualization can save you money, but not in the same way as server virtualization. You’re going to save on operating expenditures which are often where the highest spending is in IT. Chances are that desktop virtualization probably isn’t going to save you money on capital expenditures in the way that server virtualization did. There’s no data center footprint, and the physical desktop is already self-contained.

•    Business continuity and disaster recovery become an important question in a desktop virtualization world. Virtualization offers a great way to help with BC/DR, because virtual desktops can be more easily backed up and replicated.

•    Compliance and discovery are aided by desktop virtualization. If you had to do discover on thousands of PCs, the costs can be astronomical. If all the data is backed up and replicated in your data center, you can do whatever legal discovery you need to do and verify whatever regulations apply to your business are being complied with.

•    Desktop virtualization is a boon to the support department. There’s no process of pulling someone’s machine, trying to restore their data and configs. You just swap the hardware and push the virtual desktop back out to the user.

•    Secure, versatile access is one huge benefit of desktop virtualization. Providing secure access to your Network Engineer from his home laptop at 3 AM means less downtime and a happier Network Engineer. For a distributed sales force, it means real-time access to all of the important business data they could ever want, from sales materials to inventory.

The question isn’t whether desktop virtualization is a good idea. The question is whether the current offerings can meet your business’ needs.

Desktop Environment Assessment

Unitiv’s Desktop Environment Assessment will enable you to implement a solution that centralizes the management of your virtual desktops to a regional data center – without compromising the end user experience.

Click here for more details. 

5 Ways the IBM i Series Helps Your Enterprise

The IBM i series is the latest in a line of cutting-edge enterprise technologies from IBM. Whether you’ve been using IBM up to this point or not, you should consider taking a look at the IBM i series.

Here are just some of the ways that the IBM i series can help your enterprise:

1.    Increased availability. With IBM i series, unplanned outages can be a thing of the past. A number of different technologies, from PowerVM to various redundancies like disk clustering can help keep your users plugging away during times of hardware failure. Even planned outages are kept to a minimum as you can perform hot upgrades simply by moving an application off a given server and back once the upgrade is complete.

2.    Server consolidation. Whether you have IBM i series or x86 servers in place, you can use an IBM BladeCenter solution to bring those disparate systems together in a single hardware solution.

3.    Increased performance. Both IBM i series and IBM System Storage environments benefit from newly improved SAN support. In addition, you can add Fiber Channel Adapters to give your Power System performance over the SAN that is comparable to a localized disk. You’ll also see increased performance for both WebSphere and Java applications with IBM i series.

4.    Easier management. Web-based management vis the IBM Systems Director gives you a way to manage a heterogeneous server environment. In addition, Systems Director offers a web-based Performance Data Investigator to put performance data at your fingertips.

5.    More efficient virtualization. Power VM VIOS allows a IBM i series partition to support a number of storage systems solutions, making your SAN available to a wider range of partitions than it otherwise would have been. In addition, you can create test or development environments using virtualization, allowing you to reduce costs and simplify new implementations. Power VM Active Memory Sharing also helps the flow of memory between partitions in order to increase both utilization and flexibility in virtualization.

IBM i series is one of the quickest and most effective ways to make sure your enterprise information technology environment is as efficient as it can be, and to experience maximum availability across the enterprise.

Register for a Server Consolidation Assessment

With Unitiv’s Server Consolidation (SCON) Assessment, you can get a total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) demonstration of potential savings through an IBM Systems consolidation.

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How to Do More with Less in Enterprise Storage

It’s true that there are some signs our economy is starting to turn back around, at least in some areas and some sectors. Still, it’s going to be a while before IT has the kinds of resources it had access to just a decade ago. The storage management component of IT, while it may see some growth due to things like increased need for compliance and demands for greater storage capacity, is going to be asked to do more for less. Enterprise storage personnel are asked to move the organization forward without investment, or with minimal investment.

Cost Avoidance and Cost Savings
If you are being asked to cut your enterprise storage expenses, you’re going to look at those cuts in terms of the impact they have on the organization. Cuts fall into two camps:

•    Cost savings reduce your budget today. They product quick and tangible results, right now. Examples would include reducing or eliminating a service contract or lowering your contracted throughput with an outside vendor.

•    Cost avoidance reduces your budget in the future. It lets you put off costs or even eliminate costs that you anticipated would hit in the future. This is the kind of cost “cutting” that politicians like to discuss, and doesn’t represent spending less but rather not spending more.

Obviously, cost savings have the most visible impact. Arguably, cost savings is also the real measure of whether you’re doing more with less. Cost avoidance is more like doing less with the same, or even doing the same with less.

In practical terms, what are some of the ways to avoid costs in enterprise storage? Things that come to mind include improving capacity utilization. Many enterprises find their used to usable ration at around 20 percent, which means there is plenty of extra space that can be put to good use. Cleaning up data, eliminating unnecessary copies, getting rid of temporary files, utilizing compression and deduplication technologies will all help us to avoid buying new disks or arrays and expanding infrastructure.

Cost savings are harder to come by in the enterprise storage environment. Dropping an existing expense probably means breaking a lease, returning equipment or worse. In many cases, getting tough in negotiations with your vendors may lead to cost savings. Unfortunately, one of the most rapid ways to save costs is to eliminate personnel. The problem, of course, is that this move can dramatically impact service.

There are some other ways to realize immediate costs savings. Converting capital costs to operational costs is one way. This usually involves bringing in service providers. Rather than choosing to replace a server, for example, you hire a vendor to provide managed services. This lets you take the old equipment off the floor, reducing power and maintenance costs out of the gate.

Ultimately, if your organization is asking you to do more with less in terms of enterprise storage, you’re going to have to get creative about making the most of what you have and finding new solutions that don’t increase costs.

Rethinking Business Continuity

Almost every business organization understands that successful operations depend on the continuous availability of its applications. Most companies rely on internal applications – ranging from enterprise resource planning to payroll systems – to keep the wheels of the organization turning. They also depend on external-facing applications for everything from selling products to their customers to automating the supply chain with suppliers and partners. The failure of any of these business-critical applications could be catastrophic to a company.

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Business Benefits of Data Center Automation

Today’s data center has to contend with more technology, more different applications and more physical servers than ever before. Simply managing your data center inventory can be a significant chore, and it’s one that your IT personnel are paid way too much to do. Add to that the fact that IT departments are being told their data center needs to provide higher levels of service at a lower cost, and you can see why many folks in IT management are extremely frustrated.

Fortunately, there are ways to lower costs and improve your data center. Technologies like virtualization are enabling data centers to avoid overutilization, at least to some degree, and make the most of the assets they have.

Data center automation is another way to cut costs while increasing service levels. Automation takes a variety of repetitive, manual tasks and turns them into automated processes.

What are the direct benefits of data center automation? Here are just a few:

•    Data center automation increases compliance and standardization. If, for example, you have a manual patch process, you’re always going to run the risk that there is one old server in a corner somewhere that got missed. That server gets out of sync and then it has a ripple effect throughout the data center. Automating processes like patching allows you to ensure compliance.

•    Data center automation increases server efficiency. Underutilization is a problem. In environments where virtualization hasn’t been effectively implemented, underutilization has been a failsafe of sorts to help insure service levels are maintained. When you implement automated virtualization processes in the data center, you can actually anticipate server and infrastructure demand and allow the system to adjust itself on the fly to meet real time needs.

•    Data center automation uses staff more efficiently. You don’t really need to pay your server guru insane amounts of money in order to do a simple upgrade. Automation frees up your staff to focus on big-picture items such as new technologies, projects and finding even more ways for your data center to offer more services for lower costs.

Data center automation, in short, increases the reliability, performance and efficiency o your data center, while providing a lower TCO.

Lower Operational Costs Through Process Automation

Download the white paper for:

• An introduction to orchestration and process automation
• Making the business case for automation and orchestration
• Process Automation and Orchestration Use Case Scenarios

Creating a Top-Down Virtualization Strategy

Virtualization is one of the best ways for an organization to increase its IT service levels while reducing expenses. Whether you’re talking about server virtualization, desktop virtualization, cloud computing or server consolidation, there are many areas that virtualization can impact a business.

The challenge, for many organizations, is to be able to virtualize in an organized, comprehensive and strategic fashion. To do that, you need to be able to create a top-down virtualization strategy.

That’s not always as easy as it sounds. If technology is easy to adopt, people are more likely to get excited about it. Because of that, you need to create your strategy over time, and implement some very specific steps:

1.    Address virtualization at the demand layer. Find out what the users want. Find out what the applications need. Understand where the data goes, where processing done, and go from there. Your virtualization efforts will not only be met with resistance if you don’t do this, chances are pretty good that they’ll be either ineffective or inefficient.

2.    Next, you need to virtualize the supply of IT resources. This means you virtualize the network, storage, computing power, memory and IO. Each component of the IT supply has to be virtualized if a top-down strategy is going to work. Your virtual servers have to be across the board, and won’t mix well with other physical components.

3.    Now, you need to incorporate the life cycle management of your virtualization platform. Essentially, you need to look at both the virtualized demand and the virtualized supply and match them with the right virtual resources. Further, you need to determine how they are matched and provisioned.

Performance, cost and efficiency are key in the virtualization process, as well. As you move through these stages, you need to always go back to those three principles. You need to look at your business processes, from most critical to least critical, in terms of those factors. From there you can decide where business needs aren’t being met, and establish priorities for moving forward.

When to Virtualize Servers

If you haven’t started using virtualization or you haven’t fully virtualized your IT environment, here are five steps to determine when you should make that move.

Click here to download white paper

 

5 Characteristics of IBM iSeries

If you’ve been running in solely Windows and/or Linux environments, you may be ready to move up to a more robust solution. For more than 20 years, IBM i series has provided solutions not only to larger and medium sized businesses, but to small businesses as well.

Here are some things you should know about IBM i series if you’re thinking about making a move:

1.    IBM i Series Uses an Object-Based Kernel

IBM i series has always been created using an object-based kernel. This means that you will find some features in the IBM i series that you won’t find in other operating systems, such as single level storage. In turn, these features provide increased stability and security for your enterprise.

2.    IBM i Series has Broad Integrated Component Offerings

There are a number of core operating system functions that come with the IBM i series. They include web application servers and web services servers, a fully integrated file system, DB2 for i RDBMS (relational database management system), as well as other tools. In fact, the integrate components can perform over 300 tasks, from backup and recovery to operations to communications and security.

3.    IBM i series Provides Efficient Administrator interfaces

When you’re running a Windows or Linux environment, you often need a wide range of tools from a variety of vendors to get the most from your systems administration efforts. With IBM i series, you can rely on IBM autonomic technologies to perform many mundane tasks, and can sue a streamlined interface for the rest of your administration needs.

4.    IBM i Series Lets You Have Fewer Physical Servers

Virtualization technologies, such as PowerVM, mean that you don’t need as much hardware cluttering up the data center. This, in turn, reduces the complexity of administration as well as your energy costs. You can balance your workloads across all of your system resources, including processor, memory and I/O. You just can’t do that as evenly on an x86 server. In turn, you’ll experience a significant increase in your overall capacity.

5.    IBM i Series Offers More Efficient Partitioning

VMware, Hyper-V and Xen have their limitations. Chief among them is that their virtualization techniques are software-based, rather than firmware-based. This means that your workload management features aren’t going to be integrated as closely with your partitioning, leading to a degradation of performance. To get the most bang for your partitioning buck, you need a firmware virtualization solution, and IBM i series offers you just that.

The State of Solid State Storage

It wasn’t that long ago that the experts told us solid state drives would replace high-speed disk drives. Some vendors, probably in hopes to fulfill their own prophecy, guessed that this would happen before the end of 2010. While it’s not likely that we’re going to see the death of HDD any time soon, SSDs are on the rise. Many people now believe that SSDs will serve a more complementary role to HDDs, rather than replacing them altogether, at least for the foreseeable future.

Benefits of SSDs

SSDs offer organizations a viable storage solution. The most attractive part about SSDs has to be their speed. There is no comparison between a HDD and an SSD. SSDs have no spinning parts, which means that seek time is next to nothing. Even the fastest HDDs can hit around 300 reads per second, while SSDs range between 5,000 and 20,000 reads per second.

Because SSDs have no moving parts, there is no risk of mechanical failure. They’re also not as susceptible to heat or humidity as HDDs, which makes them idea for more rugged or extreme environments. They also use about half of the power of a comparable HDD.

What’s Not to Like

There are some drawbacks to Solid State technology, of course. The biggest of those is price. You’re looking at paying between 5 and 10 times the price for a drive with comparable capacity when comparing with a HDD.

Writing is an issue for SSDs, too. Their write speed is slow – relative to their read speeds. Using parallel architecture can help this problem, but it doesn’t solve it. Add to that the fact that the SSD cells can only be written a limited number of times, and you’re looking at a higher rate of replacement for most implementations.

When Solid State Makes Sense

SSDs do make sense in some situations. If you’re talking about an enterprise environment where speed, energy and durability are more important than cost, for example, you need solid state.

An example might include the SSDs included as onboard storage for HP BladeSystem Servers. The environment is hot and it’s limited in its space. It just can’t support HDDs. Another example would be applications that need quick access to data, such as those that use fast image rendering.

What’s Ahead?

SSDs give you around 100 times the access speed to your data for only 5 times the price. It won’t be long before the enterprise can realize a ROI when investing in SSD. Few people want to really step out on a limb, however. Data center managers know that, in tough economic times, a decision to increases costs can be fatal to their career. Mass adoption is probably a few years away, largely for this reason.

Relief from Data Storage Overload

For many companies, success in the "information age" means information overload. Data Storage requirements are exploding - whether it's the amount of data, the number of users, or the types of data being stored. For CIO’s,that means data storage needs are starting to monopolize IT budgets and resources.

Click here to download the CIO Magazine article: Relief from Data Storage Overload

A Look at HP Storage Solutions for Oracle

While Oracle and Sun continue to try to blur the lines between their solutions and wedge businesses into relying on Sun hardware for Oracle support, many businesses recognize that there are other valid and, in some cases, superior, options. One of the alternatives is HP Storage Solutions for Oracle. HP offers industry-leading performance combined with robust management tools to give you the fast and easy access to your business data that your organization needs.

HP offers a number of solutions for Oracle, and gives you full control over all of your server, network and storage resources. You can use HP OpenView storage software to make your infrastructure management less complex, to increase productivity, and to reduce the cost of storage maintenance.

Here are some of the solutions HP offers Oracle users:

•    Business continuity. One of the biggest concerns for any organization is downtime and the loss of data. Even more so than just a few years ago, loss of data and downtime will negatively impact your bottom line. You can use HP StorageWorks in your Oracle environment to provide both continuity and availability. These solutions are available across the board, from small businesses that use DAS to large enterprises with multiple sites and ridiculous amounts of data.

•    Business intelligence. HP provides a number of pre-integrated solutions that utilize their industry partners to give you the kind of insight and decision-making resources that you need to make your business as smart as it can be.

•    Compliance solutions. No matter what kind of business you have, there are going to be varying requirements for your keeping of electronic records. HP solutions help you to mitigate your risk by designing an infrastructure that supports your compliance requirements.

•    Storage consolidation. With consolidation solutions, you can add significant value to your business. You can use HP storage solutions with oracle to both simplify and standardize your storage infrastructure in a way that provides you with maximum flexibility and efficiency.

•    Storage resource management. The IT storage environment is unpredictable on a good day. Accordingly, you are constantly looking for better ways to manage that storage. Whether you’re talking about securing your storage, keeping tabs on the quality of service for your storage, or keeping on top of change management, HP storage solutions for oracle help you get the control you need in order to make your organization’s information available to who needs it when they need it.

There are a number of business benefits to using HP Storage Solutions for Oracle. You will have greater agility  in responding to changing business conditions. You’ll have increased value out of the IT function, while mitigating risk. You can manage your IT server and storage management in a unified environment. You’re also relying on industry-leading and cutting-edge technologies.

For more information, go to www.hp.com/storage/oracle. 

HP StorageWorks Solutions for Oracle Technologies. Click here to download the brochure. 

Simplify Storage Administration with Oracle

It’s completely natural that, moving forward, Oracle would focus on building upon the success of Sun and StorageTek. After all, those two companies bring a combined 40 years of experience, expertise and leadership in enterprise storage solutions to the table. This perfect storm of experience and value has created a dynamite environment with innovation, increased efficiency, stellar performance and scalability for almost any environment.

Oracle provides a broad portfolio that includes robust and cost-effective solutions. From disk, tape and software to solutions and services, Oracle offerings can be tailored to your business’ particular needs. Whether you’re building on existing storage infrastructure, implementing new and cutting-edge architectures or just deploying a new solution, Oracle has something you can use.

What is it about these solutions that your organization needs? There are four areas that Oracle can benefit many organizations in terms of their storage administration:

•    Lower cost of ownership. Oracle solutions consistently provide customers with state-of-the-art solutions that fit their particular environment for a lower cost than the competition. While Oracle solutions aren’t the “value” tier of solutions, they provide higher-quality solutions for a price that’s near the value tier.

•    Support of heterogeneous environments. The Oracle storage administration solutions work well in a mixed environment. This means you can effortlessly administer your storage infrastructure no matter how varied your systems and technologies. Whether it’s Linux or Windows, SAN or NAS, Oracle solutions can manage it effectively.

•    Cutting-edge innovation. With the power and expertise of Sun and StorageTek behind them, Oracle solutions lead the pack when it comes to innovation. Oracle storage administration solutions support the latest technologies and seamlessly integrate them into your existing environment.

•    World-class support. You can trust Oracle to give you the kind of support for your storage administration solutions that you have come to expect. They are dedicated to making sure your storage administration needs are met, and in such a way that you’re happy with the final outcomes.

 

Download: Oracle's Full Line of Integrated Sun Servers, Storage, and Networking Systems.

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