Monday, November 28, 2011

Register now to hear HP experts on latest support strategies for unique challenges of virtualized and cloud environments

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation. Keeping virtualized servers that support mission-critical applications and databases at top levels of performance 24 x 7 is a much different problem than for maintaining physical servers in traditional configurations.

That's why HP has made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware implementations a top priority. And while the technology to support and fix these virtualized environments is essential, the people, skills and knowledge to manage these systems are perhaps the most decisive elements of ongoing performance success.

Live discussion

To find out more, I'll be moderating a live deep-dive discussion on Dec. 7, with a group of HP experts to explore how to make the most of the available people, technology and processes to provide an insurance policy against systems failure. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The stakes have never been higher for keeping applications and business up and running.


Register now as seats are limited for this free HP Expert Chat.

In this discussion, you'll hear latest recommendations for how IT support should be done -- even amid a rapidly changing IT landscape of virtualized, hybrid and cloud computing. First in the hour-long multi-media presentation, comes the inside story of how modern service and support works from one of HP's top services experts, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution & Quality for VMware Products, who has 27-plus years experience with HP, and eight-plus years supporting VMware.

After Cindy's chat, viewers will be invited to participate in the interactive question-and-answer session with actual HP VMware experts. Moreover, both questions and answers will be automatically translated into 13 major languages to demonstrate how service and support services know no boundaries, time zones or language barriers.

Register now as seats are limited for this free HP Expert Chat.

You may also be interested in:
at 12:38 PM 0 comments

Thursday, November 17, 2011

HP experts to explore advances in service and support for highly virtualized VMware data center environments

Most enterprises, service providers and governments have ramped-up their use of virtualization over the past several years, with many impressive results. Those paybacks can only continue, however, if the overall service and support of these complex and dynamic environments keeps pace.

The problem of effectively troubleshooting issues across virtualized data centers consisting of many products from many suppliers is daunting. But there's an added element. The stakes have never been higher for keeping applications and business up and running. Indeed, a businesses' IT systems are increasingly the actual business itself. It's hard to separate them.

The stakes have never been higher for keeping applications and business up and running.



HP has made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware implementations a top priority. Keeping virtualized servers that support mission-critical applications and databases at top levels of performance 24 x 7 is a much different problem than for maintaining physical servers in traditional configurations. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Indeed, advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation. And while the technology to support and fix these virtualized environments is essential, the people, skills and knowledge to manage these systems is perhaps the most decisive element of ongoing performance success.

Live discussion

To find out more, I'll be moderating a live deep-dive discussion on Dec. 7, with a group of HP experts to explore how to make the most of the available people, technology and processes to provide an insurance policy against failure.

Register to reserve a place for this free HP Expert Chat on Dec. 7.

Overall, you'll hear recommendations for how IT support can and should be done -- even amid a rapidly changing IT landscape of virtualized, hybrid and cloud computing. First in the hour-long multi-media presentation, is the inside story of how modern service and support works from one of HP's top services experts, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution & Quality for VMware Products, who has 27-plus years experience with HP, and eight-plus years supporting VMware.

She will provide a short overview on the HP/VMware relationship and how the HP/VMware software support model uniquely enables always-on support for enterprises, service providers and governments. She’ll also present several case studies of how the HP Call Center global support process has solved problems in VMware environments.

After Cindy's chat, viewers will be invited to participate in the interactive questions and answer session with actual HP VMware experts. Moreover, both questions and answers will be automatically translated into 13 languages to demonstrate how service and support services know no boundaries, time zones or language barriers.

Leading these interactive sessions to answer the audience's questions live will be several additional HP-VMware support experts, including Patrick Lampert, a Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader responsible for delivery and management of VMware Technical Services for Fortune 500 HP Custom Mission Critical Service Customers.

He'll be joined by Sumithra Reddy, Virtualization Engineer with HP Technology Services in the Global Competency Center, a 27-year veteran of software support, with a current focus on VMware. Other experts will join from Europe and Asia.

Register to reserve a place for this free HP Expert Chat on Dec. 7.

In sum, attendees will see how the breadth of virtualization is extending from servers to networks, desktop clients, storage, and mobile clients. All must operate in conjunction with the rest, especially as virtualized workloads come and go based on dynamic demand. This means that understanding how VMware and its ecosystem of vendors supporting these advanced environments relate. Problems in these environments must be solved from an over-view and neutral perspective, with all the interdependencies considered and managed.

So join the online presentation, discussion and question-and-answer sessions in nearly any major language worldwide. This is the first in a series of Expert Chats that I'll be moderating and that will tackle serious IT issues, with full global language support.


You may also be interested in:
at 11:10 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Germany's largest travel agency starts a virtual desktop journey to get branch office IT under control

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Our next VMworld case study interview focuses on how Germany’s largest travel agency has remade their PC landscape across 580 branch offices using virtual desktops. We’ll learn how Germany’s DER Deutsches Reisebüro redefined the desktop delivery vision and successfully implemented 2,300 Windows XP desktops as a service.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference in Copenhagen. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here to tell us what this major VDI deployment did in terms of business, technical, and financial payoffs is Sascha Karbginski, Systems Engineer at DER Deutsches Reisebüro, based in Frankfurt. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Why were virtual desktops such an important direction for you? Why did it make sense for your organization?

Karbginski: In our organization, we’re talking about 580 travel agencies all over the country, all over Germany, with 2,300 physical desktops, which were not in our control. We had life cycles out there of about 4 or 5 years. We had old PCs with no client backups.

The biggest reason is that recovery times at our workplace were 24 hours between hardware change and bringing back all the software configuration, etc. Desktop virtualization was a chance to get the desktops into our data center, to get the security, and to get the controls.

DER in Germany is the number one in travel agencies. As I said, we're talking about 580 branches. We’re operating as a leisure travel agency with our branches, Atlasreisen and DER, and also, in the business travel sector with FCm Travel Solutions.

IT-intensive business

Gardner: This is a very IT-intensive business now. Everything in travel is done though networked applications and cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services. So a very intensive IT activity in each of these branches?

Karbginski: That’s right. Without the reservation systems, we can’t do any flight bookings or reservations or check hotel availability. So without IT, we can do nothing.

Gardner: And tell me about the problem you needed to solve. You had four generations of PCs. You couldn’t control them. It took a lot of time to recover if there was a failure, and there was a lot of different software that you had to support.

Karbginski: Yes. We had no domain integration no control and we had those crashes, for example. All the data would be gone. We had no backups out there. And we changed the desktops about every four or five years. For example, when the reservation system needed more memory, we had to buy the memory, service providers were going out there, and everything was done during business hours.

We now have nearly about 100 percent virtualization. ... So it's about 99 percent virtualization. ... So the data is under our control in the data center, and important company information is not left in an office out there. Security is a big thing.

Gardner: What were some of the things that you had to do in order to enable this to work properly?

Karbginski: There were some challenges during the rollout. The bandwidth was a big thing. Our service provider had to work very hard for us, because we needed more bandwidth out there. The path we had our offices was 1 or 2-Mbit links to the headquarters data center. With desktop virtualization, we need a little bit more, depending on the number of the workplaces and we needed better quality of the lines.

So bandwidth was one thing. We also had the network infrastructure. We found some 10-Mbit half-duplex switches. So we had to change it. And we also had some hardware problems. We had a special multi-card board for payment to read out passports or to read out credit card information. They were very old and connected with PS/2.

Fixed a lot of problems

So there were a lot of problems, and we fixed them all. We changed the switches. Our service provider for Internet VPN connection brought us more quality. And we changed the keyboards. We don’t need this old stuff anymore.

Gardner: How has this worked out in terms of productivity, energy savings, lowering costs, and even business benefits?

Karbginski: Saving was our big thing in planning this project. The desktops have been running out there now about one year, and we know that we have up to 80 percent energy saving, just from changing the hardware out there. We’re running the Wyse P20 Zero Client instead of physical PC hardware.

We needed more energy for the server side in the data center, but if you look at it, we have 60 up to 70 percent energy savings overall. I think it’s really great.

Gardner: That’s very good. So what else comes in terms of productivity?

The data is under our control in the data center, and important company information is not left in an office out there.



Karbginski: In the past, the updates came during the business hours. Now, we can do all software updates at nights or at the weekends or if the office is closed. So helpdesk cost is reduced about 50 percent.

... We're using Dell servers with two sockets, quad-core, 144-gigabyte RAM. We're also using EMC Clariion SAN with 25 terabytes. Network infrastructure is Cisco, based on 10 GB Nexus data center switches. At the beginning the project, we had View 4.0 and we upgraded it last month to 4.6.

The people side

Gardner: What were some of the challenges in terms of working this through the people side of the process? We've talked about process, we've talked technology, but was there a learning curve or an education process for getting other people in your IT department as well as the users to adjust to this?

Karbginski: There were some unknown challenges or some new challenges we had during the rollout. For example, the network team. The most important thing was understanding of virtualization. It's an enterprise environment now, and if someone, for example, restarts the firewall in the data center, the desktops in our offices were disconnected.

It's really important to inform the other departments and also your own help desk.

... The first thing that the end users told us was that the selling platform from Amadeus, the reservation system, runs much faster now. This was the first thing most of the end users told us, and that’s a good thing.

The next is that the desktop follows the user. If the user works in one office now and next week in another office, he gets the same desktop. If the user is at the headquarters, he can use the same desktop, same outlook, and same configuration. So desktop follows the user now. This works really great.

The desktop follows the user. If the user works in one office now and next week in another office, he gets the same desktop.



Gardner: Looking to the future, are you going to be doing this following-the-user capability to more devices, perhaps mobile devices or at home PCs?

Karbginski: We plan to implement the security gateway with PCoIP support for home office users or mobile users who can access their same company desktop with all their data on it from nearly every computer in the world to bring the user more flexibility.

Gardner: If you were advising someone on what to learn from your experience as they now move toward desktop virtualization, any thoughts about what you would recommend for them?

Inform other departments

Karbginski: The most important thing is to get in touch with the other departments and inform them about the thing you're doing. Also, inform the user help desk directly at the beginning of the project. So take time to inform them what desktop virtualization means and which processes will change, because we know most of our colleagues had a wrong understanding of virtualization.

They think that with virtualization, everything will change and we'll need other support servers, and it's just a new thing and nobody needs it. If you inform them what you're doing that nothing will be changed for them, because all support processes are the same as before, they will accept it and understand the benefits for the company and for the user.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

You may also be interested in:
at 1:13 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Case study: Southwest Airlines' productivity takes off using virtualization to enable 'IT as a service'

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

The next BriefingsDirect case study interview focuses on Southwest Airlines, one of the best-run companies anywhere, with some 35 straight years of profitability, and how "IT as a service" has been transformative for them in terms of productivity.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from a recent VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to share more about how Southwest is innovating and adapting with IT as a compelling strategic differentiator is Bob Young, Vice President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer at Southwest Airlines. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: We have heard a lot about IT as a service. How have you at Southwest been able to keep IT squarely in the role of enablement?

Young: As we are taking a look and trying to be what travelers want in an airline, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve Southwest Airlines and make it better for our customers, that's really where virtualization and IT as a service comes into play.

People want to be able to get on Southwest.com, make a reservation, log on to their Rapid Rewards or our Loyalty Program, and they want to be able to do it when they want to do it, when they need to do it, from wherever they are. And it’s just great to be able to provide that service.

We provide that to them at any point in time that they want in a reliable manner. And that's really what it gets right down to -- to make the functions and the solutions that we provide ubiquitous so people don’t really need to think about anything other than, "I need to do this and I can do it now."

At your fingertips

Gardner: I travel quite a bit and it seems to me that things have changed a lot in the last few years. One of the nice things is that information seems to be at your fingertips more than ever. I never seem to be out of the loop now as a traveler. I can find out changes probably as quickly as the folks at the gate.

So how has this transfer of information been possible? How have you been able to keep up with the demands and the expectations of the travelers?

Young: If we talk about information and the flow of information through applications and services, it really starts to segment the core technical aspects of that so the customer and our employees don’t really need to think about it. When they want to get the flight at the gates, the passenger is on a flight leg, etc., they can go ahead and get that at any moment in time.

What we want to be able to do is provide it whenever they want it, whenever they need it, at the right cost point, and to meet their needs.



... The same is true of how we provide IT as a service. What we want to be able to do is provide IT whenever they want it, whenever they need it, at the right cost point, and to meet their needs. We've got some of the best customers in the world and they like to do things for themselves. We want to allow them to do that for themselves and be able to provide our employees the same.

Gardner: How in IT have you been able to create common infrastructures, reduce redundancy, and then yet still ramp up to meet all your requirements?

Significant volume

Young: What we've been able to do and how we have been able to meet some of those challenges is through a number of different VMware products. One of the core products is VMware itself, if we talk about vSphere, vMotion, etc., to be able to provide that virtualization. You can get a 1-to-10 virtualization depending on which type of servers and blades you're using, which helps us on the infrastructure side of the house to maintain that and have the storage, physical, and electrical capacity in our data centers.

But it also allows us, as we're moving, consolidating, and expanding these different data centers, to be able to move that virtual machine (VM) seamlessly between points. Then, it doesn’t matter where it’s running.

That allows us the capacity. So if we have a fare sale and I need to add capacity on some of our services, it gives our us and our team that run the infrastructure the ability to bring up new services on new VMs seamlessly. It plugs right into how we're doing things, so that internal cloud allows us not to experience blips.

It's been a great add for us from a capacity management perspective and being able to get the right capacity, with the right applications, at the right time. It allows us to manage that in such a way that it’s transparent to our end-users so they don’t notice any of this is going on in the background, and the experience is not different.

It's been a great add for us from a capacity management perspective and being able to get the right capacity, with the right applications, at the right time.



... We started our virtualized environments about 18 months ago. We went from a very small amount of virtualization to what we coined our Server 2.0 strategy, which was really the combination of commodity-based hardware blades with VMware on that.

And that allowed us last year in the first and second quarter to grow from several hundred VMs to over several thousand, which is where we're at today in the production environment. If you talk about production, development, and test, production is just one of those environments.

It has allowed us to scale that very rapidly without having to add a thousand physical servers. And it has been a tremendous benefit for us in managing our power, space, and cooling in the data center, along with allowing our engineers who are doing the day-to-day work to have a single way to manage it, deploy, and move stuff around even more automatically. They don’t have to mess with that anymore, VMware just takes care of the different products that are part of the VMware Suite.

Gardner: And your confidence, has it risen to the level where you're looking at 70, 80, 90, even more percent of virtualization? How do you expect to end that journey?

Ready for the evolution

Young: I would love to be at 100 percent virtualized. That would be fantastic. I think unfortunately we still have some manufacturers and software vendors -- and we call them vendors, because typically we don’t say partners -- who decide they are not going to support their software running in the virtualized environment. That can create problems, especially when you need to keep some of those systems up 24 x 7, 365, with 99.95 percent availability.

We're hoping that changes, but the goal would be to move as much as we can, because if I take a look at virtualization, we are kind of our internal private cloud. What that’s really doing is getting us ready for the evolution that’s going to happen over the next, 5, 7, or 10 years, where you may have applications and data deployed out in a cloud, a virtual private cloud, public cloud if the security becomes good enough, where you've got to bring all that stuff together.

If you need to have huge amounts of capacity and two applications are not co-located that need to talk back and forth, you've got to be much more efficient on the calls and the communications and make that seamless for the customer.

This is giving us the platform to start learning more and start developing those solutions that don’t need to be collocated in a data center or in one or two data centers, but can really be pushed wherever it makes sense. That could be from wherever the most efficient data center is from a green technology perspective, use the least electricity and cooling power, to alternate energy, to what makes sense at the time of the year.

That is a huge add and a huge win for us in the IT community to be able to start utilizing some of that virtualization and even across physical locations.

It allows us to deploy that stuff within minutes, whereas it used to take engineers manually going to configure each thing separately. That’s been a huge savings.



Gardner: Is there a centralization feature to this that also is paying dividends?

Young: That’s a huge cornerstone of the suite of tools that we've been able to get through VMware is being able to deploy custom solutions and even some of the off-the-shelf solutions on a standard platform, standard operating systems, standard configurations, standard containers for the web, etc. It allows us to deploy that stuff within minutes, whereas it used to take engineers manually going to configure each thing separately. That’s been a huge savings.

The other thing is, once you get the configuration right and you have it automated, you don’t have to worry about people taking some human missteps. Those are going to happen, and you've got to go back and redo something. That elimination of error and the speed at which we can do that is helping. As you expand your server footprints and the number of VMs and servers you have without having to add to your staff, you can actually do more with the same number of or fewer staff.

Gardner: How you feel about desktop virtualization?

Young: What’s really driven us to take a look at it is that around our environment we can control security on virtual desktops, etc., very clearly, very quickly and deliver that in a great service.

New mobile devices

The other thing that’s leading to this is, not just what we talked about in security, is the plethora of brand new mobile devices -- iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Galaxy. HP has a new device. RIM has a new device. We need to be able to deliver our services in a more ubiquitous manner. The virtual desktop allows us to go ahead and deliver some of those where I don’t need to control the hardware. I just control the interface, which can protect our systems virtually, and it’s really pretty neat.

I was on one of my devices the other day and was able to go in via virtual desktop that was set up to be able to use some of the core systems without having all that stuff loaded on my machine, and that was via the Internet. So it worked out phenomenally well.

Now, there are some issues that you have to do depending on whether you're doing collocation and facility, but you can easily get through some of that with the right virtualization setup and networking.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

You may also be interested in:
at 3:16 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 7, 2011

The Open Group, SABSA release white paper on aligning enterprise, security architecture to achieve business goals

In an effort to provide clearer guidance for enterprise and security architects in aligning security and risk management with business goals and objectives, The Open Group and the SABSA Institute have released a new TOGAF SABSA Integration Whitepaper.

Intended as a practical guide, the whitepaper views security architecture as an integral part of how enterprise architecture should be approached. While TOGAF, The Open Group Architectural Framework addresses security, it doesn't give concrete advice on how to achieve those goals. This whitepaper is designed to plug that gap. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of Briefings Direct podcasts.]

“For too long, security and risk management have been considered a discipline separate from enterprise architecture, which has led to increased costs, reduced interoperability and less productive organizations," said Jim Hietala, VP of Security for The Open Group. "This guide empowers enterprise architects to apply a holistic, business-driven approach to IT security decisions.”

The SABSA methodology was chosen for integration with TOGAF based on its objective of developing security architectures that facilitate the business, much like TOGAF’s business driven approach and open methodology. Utilizing the SABSA Business Attributes Profiling method, the integrated methodology enables the creation of better architectures that drive tighter alignment between business and IT within enterprises.

Common languages

“In the past, security and enterprise architectures have been designed and acquired in silos, without common architecture languages that help tie both to broader business objectives,” said John Sherwood, Head of the SABSA Academy, a division of The SABSA Institute. “We’re proud to integrate SABSA with TOGAF finally to provide structure for the relationship between enterprise and security architectures, and help create more efficient, cost effective and productive enterprises.”

The whitepaper includes detailed guidance on how to produce business and risk management-based security architectures, along with practical approaches to improve the integration of information security across the enterprise. Within this context, a main objective of the paper is to spark debate in the enterprise architecture community about the evolving role of enterprise architects in enabling the business to manage operational risk.

The whitepaper marks the culmination of an 18-month effort spurred on by requests from Open Group members.

Get a copy of the whitepaper (registration required).

You may also be interested in:
at 10:33 AM 0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)