Tuesday, August 30, 2011

VMworld Case Study: City of Pittsburgh's IT success and the beneficial synergy between virtualized servers and desktops

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

O
ur next VMworld case study interview focuses on the City of Pittsburgh’s Information Systems organization and how they’ve deeply embraced virtualization at the server level and now increasingly at the desktop level. We’ll see how critical city services in Pittsburgh are being supported using VMware View 4.6 and the new View 5.0 version and how the beneficial synergy between virtualized servers and desktops is shaping up.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas the week of August 29. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to share his story on bringing VDI to his employees is Alex Musicante, the System Security Architect in the City Information Systems department in Pittsburgh. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Your environment is almost 100 percent virtualized on the server side. First, why is there such a holistic embrace, and how has that provided the confidence for you to move now aggressively into the desktop virtualization space as well?

Musicante: The City of Pittsburgh decided to embrace virtualization five years or so ago, and we did this in a development environment with VMware. The confidence was not there for the server virtualization, and we decided it's a good place to offer development to our internal engineers.

From there, we kept building and building, and we decided to put our first production system on there. Without a problem, everything started going. What virtualization had to offer for us was higher availability, higher reliability.

When we were remote, we had full console access. We were able to offer higher reliability on our development than our production. That was what led us to go to production. It's very difficult in this day and age with budgets and all that. We're now doing more with less. In order to be able to accommodate that and be able to handle the increased workload with fewer people, it has been embracing server virtualization, and virtualization in general.

In server virtualization we currently have 16 hosts, 98 percent virtual. There are about 250 or so virtual machines (VMs) between two data centers; and we are using VMware Site Recovery Manager to replicate or to bring up the replicated site in the event of a disaster or any planned maintenance that we need to perform at one data center versus the other.

Gardner: I’d like to hear more about your desktop virtualization strategy, but let's learn a little bit more about the scope and scale of your mission-critical set of services.

Musicante: The City of Pittsburgh’s City Information Systems Department, which I work for, has about 3,000 users that they support. That ranges from all public safety -- Police, Fire, EMS, and Building Inspection -- to the branches of government -- the Mayor’s Office, the City Council, and Controller’s Office as well as other important departments like the Finance Department, Personnel, Human Resources, and Parks and Recreation. That's who we're supporting, and each and every one of them has their own little caveats of technology that they need.

Gardner: You’re also of course concerned about security, performance, disaster recovery, which you’ve already mentioned. How has virtualization helped you not just in cutting cost, but in making these more hardened, more resilient services?

Musicante: In terms of hardening and security, when we took our virtualization approach, we started out by saying that we were going to physical-to-virtual (P2V) and migrate a lot of these machines. As we proceeded and matured in that environment, we decided that we were going to build fresh and build new.

So when we did our server virtualization, we looked at virtualization in general. It became an opportunity for us to evaluate how we were going to harden things, how we were going to secure things, and since now we don’t have to support that many physical servers, we can expand on our current capacity, and hardware.

We’re able to separate things, where servers that were multi-functional servers, database server, file server, web server, all in one, now get to be three different servers, and only allow communications to the specific application and supports what they need.

Storage came about and offered a lot more flexibility and a lot of benefit to the City of Pittsburgh, but it was not without hassle.



Gardner: Any issues around storage? Has that been something that you’ve been able to wreak some efficiencies out as well?

Musicante: Storage was very interesting for the City of Pittsburgh. They were coming from an environment where everything was on direct-attached storage (DAS), and going to a storage area network (SAN) environment, which they had. They had an array with an HP 6000, but they were only using 500 gigabytes at the time. So storage transition was huge in terms of reliability, but as well as cost at the same time.

It was an unexpected thing from the city’s perspective, as they were not in the market for an array where everything is central. It was all individual and unique to each host and physical server. So storage came about and offered a lot more flexibility and a lot of benefit to the City of Pittsburgh, but it was not without hassle.

Gardner: So you’ve gone through that process -- 98 percent is very impressive on your server, and your infrastructure. What prompted you to now take the additional step to use VMware View and move into desktop virtualization?

Musicante: The City of Pittsburgh moved into desktop virtualization with very similar characteristics as we looked at the server virtualization as how can we offer higher reliability and higher support, give us more management from a central standpoint back at our remote offices, and offer them to the clients and given them the same if not a better level service for additional benefits from administrative.

Security provisioning

There were a bunch of reasons, and those are like pushing out software updates without downtime for the users. They just log off and get a new one. It was security provisioning software, keeping all the storage and everything is back in our data center, so nothing leaves the facility.

Those were motivating factors as well as keeping administrative cost down. That was the push, and it actually took off. It took some time, but it's being embraced more than I ever would have thought it would have been.

Gardner: Let's learn a little bit more about the nature of your distribution requirements. Obviously, you have City Hall. You’ve got some centralization. You’ve got police headquarters and fire headquarters, but you’ve also got a lot of distributed sites around the city. So let us better understand your distribution requirements when you’re going to desktop virtualization?

Musicante: There are 175 remote facilities, and they range from connectivity of facilities that are on dark fiber, with 100, 200, 300, 500 users, to these individual remote offices that are located in the park facility, and they have one or two employees that are coming across the DSL line.

One of the major complaints was the problem with connectivity where people are on DSL. They would load the roaming profile or pull documents or upload files and they would see this huge lag where it took them upwards of 30 minutes to start their day off. They're now able to go into View, sign-in, and they're in. So we pretty much recovered 30 extra minutes for some of these employees on a daily basis.

Currently, we're in a mixed mode. We have two environments which we're trying to expedite to move off of.



Gardner: How are you leveraging the PCoIP bandwidth improvements for the WAN?

Musicante: Very well. With each version it's definitely gotten better. Still from a management side we do maintain an IPSec tunnel to all of our facilities.

So PC-over-IP has been what we’ve been using for our remote facilities, even back in the 3.0 days. When 4.1 PC-over-IP came out, 4.5, 4.6, it's been progressively getting better and has higher availability with more response. When 4.6, matured, they gave us the View Security Server, and even now with 5, it has increased and lowered the actual requirements necessary for traffic. So some of our facilities are not feeling the same same pain that they were prior to.

Gardner: As you’ve been making this transition, it would be good to understand better how you’ve adopted version 5. To what degree are you using version 5 for View on your desktop virtualization installations?

Musicante: Currently, we're in a mixed mode. We have two environments which we're trying to expedite to move off of, but we currently have a 4.6 environment and a 5.0 environment. Right now with our 5.0 environment we are embracing Persona Management for some of our EMS employees.

Gardner: That’s another one of those ancillary benefits that people don’t always appreciate but it’s pretty important.

Everything is identical

Musicante: Absolutely. It wasn’t something that we were expecting, but at the same time, when we go back with 20/20 hindsight, we reevaluated and said that that makes sense. Everything is now identical. We use non-persistent machine. So every time they log in, it's a brand-new machine and it’s configured identically the way we want it. The only factor that’s different for each user is their profile.

Gardner: You know how to resolve them, it’s not starting from scratch.

Musicante: Absolutely not starting from scratch. That’s also one of the beautiful benefits. As we move and as we mature with the product and as the product matures itself, we seem to be taking a very parallel progression between the two -- the City of Pittsburgh and VMware View. Persona Management right now has been doing wonders for that.

Those departments that have migrated over and wanted to take this “experiment” of Persona Management have been pleasantly surprised. Definitely, that’s also a point to bring up. When you hear problems from people, when end-users complain, there’s always something that they target. It was networking at one point. Then it moved on to virtualization and everyone said it was the promised virtualization, whether it was or wasn’t.

With View, it actually stands alone. It an outlier. Our users call and they say, "I would like to be on View. I would like to be on that system." For an end-user come back to us and request that blows our mind. We appreciate it. It means we’ve done something right. And it also has to be attributed back to VMware. They’ve done something right.

Gardner: Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, and then some, with 5.0, what are some of the other salient benefits?

So every time they log in, it's a brand-new machine and it’s configured identically the way we want it.



Musicante: That’s going to give us extra 5 percent. There is always that server virtualization where you’d only get that 95 percent, although we got past that. There’s that 5 percent that you couldn’t for or you wouldn’t for whatever reason. That’s the same market for the desktop virtualization and 5 percent was for high graphic intensive people. We're able to now start to achieve that and we're looking to try to achieve that.

We've not gone through some of the advanced 3D accelerated graphic things that are now out with 5. We are in the process of testing, but it’s currently in our test labs within our department. It’s also in terms of deriving the benefit. We have all of our infrastructure. We're going to with a more green approach. So we're going with zero client. They're currently Dell FX 100s. So they may take one tenth of the power, but there is very little there.

I know that VMware View 5.0 3D acceleration is going to be there and is going to help out, but those people are going to be using the repurposed machines, taking their machine, putting a stripped down version of 7 and use it from there. So we're trying to achieve that, but it’s multiple facets.

Gardner: When we think about your adoption pattern around virtualization, you took your time, learned through your development environment, walked in, made some progress and then really ramped up on adoption for your server side. You’ve followed a similar pattern now with desktops.

What’s next? Is there an additional synergy between a private cloud implementation, where you can get even better synergy efficiency? Tell me what you think about this fear and moving towards even higher plane of efficiency and productivity on that overall delivery from a central data center environment?

Going toward the cloud

Musicante: It’s really unclear where we're going to go. As far as cloud and where the cloud is taking the City of Pittsburgh and where the City of Pittsburgh is going with cloud, City of Pittsburgh currently is in the process of taking that last two percent of our system that isn’t virtualized, which is Exchange, and we are currently in the process of going towards the cloud. So it’s actually going to be going to Google Apps for government for mail.

As far as cloud within ourselves, the City of Pittsburgh is using its resources that we’ve regained or recouped from all of our consolidation purposes, especially with the government processes and mentality of doing more with less. There is a lot of fellow government agencies that we're now going to be partnering with to provide them infrastructure as a service.

That’s where some of the other product lines come in like vCloud Director, to be able to allow them to still manage their infrastructure to use our resources, and we can now ourselves be a cloud provider, which I have been marketing as Cloud9 because there are nine entities including the City of Pittsburgh -- nine entities that we are going to consolidate.

Gardner: I'm impressed with the fact that you’ve been able to move through this progression, recoup those savings, and then apply it to the innovation that get you yet more productivity and savings that you can further apply. That’s commendable. Any words of advice for folks that are perhaps not as far along as you’ve been on this progression? What 20/20 hindsight and words of wisdom might you supply them?

Musicante: With server virtualization, everyone is involved in it, and that is the easy part. Desktop virtualization, is where we got hit hard and the lessons that will be learned is that end-user’s matter. Every step of the way, you need their input. It’s not just an administrative decision saying this is the right thing. You need to be good at psychology to convince your users that this is what they want, and getting them to the point of seeing that this is the best approach or getting their input.

The only thing that I could say is to involve your users. Get them in the proof of concept from the beginning.



That really makes all the difference in the world. You’ll have the same end result and you’ll get to the same target, to the same place, but you need their input. It was not the same with server virtualization. That was for the administrators. They owned it. It was their territory. These desktops that you're taking from the users, yes, they’ll have a better reliability, better up-time, better everything, and better end-user experience, but they feel that that’s theirs, and rightly so.

The only thing that I could say is to involve your users. Get them in the proof of concept from the beginning. Get their input, what they need, what they want, how they want to access it, and with that it’ll no doubt be a sure success.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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VMware unveils new cloud, virtualization products designed to build growing synergy between cloud and VDI benefits

Looking to drive another nail in the coffin of the desktop PC, VMware Inc. has announced several new products at VMworld to advance cloud computing and virtualization.

A global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, VWware unveiled several new products and cloud-based services today at the Las Vegas convention, all aimed to “help organizations break free from device-centric legacy desktop models and accelerate their journey to a new way to work in the post-PC era.”

The key announcement was the upcoming release of VMware View 5, and enhancements to VMware Horizon. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Available in a few weeks, VMware View 5 promises to simplify IT manageability and control, while providing a high fidelity desktop virtualization experience. Users can expect to realize protocol enhancements that will provide as much as 75 percent bandwidth improvement over LAN and WAN connections; advanced support of 3D graphics; scalable unified communications integration for voice and video media services; and virtual desktop personalization with integrated persona management.

“As our customers begin to embrace this shift to the post-PC era, we offer a simple way to deliver a better Windows-based desktop-as-a-service that empowers organizations to do more with what they already have,” says Christopher Young, vice president and general manager of end-user computing at VMware. “At the same time, we are investing in expertise and delivering the open products needed to accelerate the journey to a new way to work beyond the Windows desktop. This combination of empowered users and flexible IT as a service, enables a new working style that leads to a more connected enterprise.”

VMware’s vision is to deliver a more user-centric, IT-as-a-service experience for the connected enterprise. In this new model, enterprises leverage hybrid cloud resources, while maintaining a managed, secure environment, and providing new ways for employees to collaborate across applications and data from any device, where and when a user needs it.

As our customers begin to embrace this shift to the post-PC era, we offer a simple way to deliver a better Windows-based desktop-as-a-service that empowers organizations to do more with what they already have.



Enhancements to VMware Horizon extend the benefits of cloud-based application management to virtualized Windows applications and connected mobile workspaces.

During the opening keynote address yesterday at VMworld, VMware CEO Paul Martiz said that IDC research now shows that more servers running on virtual than physical server environments. What's more, a new server virtual machine is created every 6 seconds, more than the pace of live births in US, said Maritz.

Maritz also alluding to the post-relational database (RDB) era, which follows fast on the post-PC era. He said that the new requirements and architectures of the cloud and mobile trend lines mean that data stuck in RDBs won't bee able to keep up. A new layer is needed, and he pointed to VMware's Cloud Foundry, with open source licensing, as the new best option. Furthermore, Foundry's open framework will be portable across most clouds, he said.

Martitz also announced vSphere Essentials, data center appliance in a box, aimed at SMBs.

Maritz painted a vision of post-PC and post-RDB worlds, with cloud and mobile as key drivers. VMware clearly has it's sights set on being the de facto standard infrastructure -- the picks and shovels -- that enable this new architecture.

Other product announcements

B
ut there are plenty of other product announcements coming from VMware today as well. Here is a run-down on other releases or enhancements:
  • Leveraging the application virtualization capabilities of VMware ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager will now offer a centralized console to help organizations manage access, deployment and updates to virtual Windows applications regardless of the type of device or the underlying operating system. These new capabilities will be available in beta by the end of the year.
  • Based on the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) technology previewed earlier this year, VMware Horizon Mobile will offer new features that establish and securely manage an employee’s connected mobile workspace in isolation from their personal mobile environment. This will enable an employee to choose a single Android device for both personal and work use.
  • Future releases of VMware Horizon will marry the management of existing Windows applications via application virtualization and publishing technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, with the management of mobile and cloud-based applications. In addition, VMware Horizon will enable the secure delivery of cloud-based, personal and enterprise data resources.
VMware also previewed two new end-user computing technologies – code named Projects AppBlast and Octopus – that advance the company’s vision for enabling universal application and data delivery:
  • Project AppBlast will provide the universal delivery of any application -- including Windows-based applications -- to any device supporting HTML5. This will enable instant remote access to applications.
  • Project Octopus will leverage data sync technology from VMware Zimbra and Mozy to enable enterprise-grade collaboration and information/data sharing. Project Octopus will also offer easy integration with VMware Horizon, VMware View and Project AppBlast to create a secure enterprise cloud service.

    VMware Horizon Mobile will offer new features that establish and securely manage an employee’s connected mobile workspace in isolation from their personal mobile environment.


And as discussed above, available in the coming weeks, VMware View 5 is a family of products, including:
  • VMware View 5, Enterprise Edition: includes VMware vSphere 5 for desktops, VMware vCenter Server 5 and VMware View Manager 5, a flexible desktop management server enabling IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access. VMware View 5 Enterprise Edition is priced at $150 per concurrent connection.
  • VMware View 5, Premier Edition: includes VMware vSphere 5 for desktops, VMware vCenter Server 5, VMware View Manager 5, View Client with Local Mode, VMware ThinApp 4.6, VMware View Composer and VMware vShield Endpoint to enable integration of offline capabilities, image management optimization, application virtualization and centralized anti-virus protection with virtual desktop delivery and management. VMwareView 5 Premier Edition is priced at $250 per concurrent connection.
Fastest thin client

In other VMworld news, Wyse Technology is introducing its fastest thin clients ever, the Wyse Z90D7 and Z90DW, are now shipping.

Wyse also introduced two new Linux-based members of its Z class family – the Wyse Z50S and Wyse Z50D. The Wyse Z50 is the high performance thin client family based on Wyse Enhanced SUSE Linux Enterprise. It is the industry’s only enterprise-quality Linux operating system, which Wyse execs say combines the security, flexibility, and market-leading usability of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, with Wyse’s thin computing optimizations in management and user experience.

The heart of the Wyse Z class thin clients is a new engine, where all the major system elements – CPU cores, vector engines, and a unified video decoder for HD decoding tasks – live on the same piece of silicon. This design concept eliminates one of the fundamental constraints that limit performance.

These units also include the first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity in a thin client, which enables the newest peripherals and speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0. Customers benefit from having more display options than ever before including DisplayPort and DVI.

HP has delivered a big presence at VMworld, including early show announcements in virtualization support infrastructure. But HP has also announced enhancements to its HP FlexNetwork architecture.

HP FlexNetwork is part of the HP VirtualSystem suite, and enables organizations to flatten their networks from 3-tier to 2- or 1-tier. This should aid with performance, increase throughput, and lower network latency.

HP officials say the new FlexNetwork products deliver a reduction of up to 50 percent of the cost, and 85 percent of the complexity of 3-tier architectures.



HP officials say the new FlexNetwork products deliver a reduction of up to 50 percent of the cost, and 85 percent of the complexity of 3-tier architectures. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

This should come as good news for organizations that have multi-tier systems architectures, and are struggling to implement a cloud computing environment with ease and simplicity.

“Organizations with a proprietary multi-tier network infrastructure create lock in that drives up cost and management complexity. As a result, implementing new applications and services is difficult and slow, reducing overall productivity,” an HP spokesman says.

HP has taken a number of steps to increase the delivery of applications and services through virtualization with the new enhancements to HP FlexNetwork. These include server connectivity, switching, management, and security.

In making the announcement, HP officials were quick to discuss the changes that virtualization makes to data center traffic patterns, and how the enhancements to FlexNetwork are addressing that.

Server traffic

“According to Gartner research, by 2014, network planners should expect more than 80 percent of traffic in the data center’s local-area network (LAN) to be between servers,” the HP spokesperson says. “However, to improve business agility, enterprises rely on virtual machine mobility, which can burst data rates up to 9 gigabits per second and significantly slow data transfer between servers.”

HP’s product response is HP FlexFabric solution for the data center, which includes HP Virtual Connect, and the HP 5800 and HP 12500 series switches. The company is aiming to eliminate unnecessary network layers and costly bottlenecks with a 1-tier network fabric approach. It provides wire-once direct connections to thousands of virtual, physical and storage components.

HP also announced the release – or pending release – of:
  • The new HP 5830 top-of-rack switch series, which delivers high-density server access connectivity, as well as flexible application and storage deployment. Powered by the HP Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF), the HP 5830 top-of-rack 48 port switch is available now starting at $11,990.
  • HP Virtual Connect as first wire-once technology that simplifies the job of implementing a cloud computing environment by eliminating 95 percent of network cables and reducing cost by up to 65 percent.

    Introduced in 2007, Virtual Connect recently passed the 5-million-port milestone and accounts for 16.2 percent of all 10Gb ports shipped worldwide, according to company officials. New Virtual Connect v3.3 firmware upgrade provides customers with greater flexibility and capacity – and can support more than a thousand VLANs per server (eight times more than the previous version). It also holds promise for six times greater network capacity per server network interface card (NIC). Virtual Connect v3.30 firmware will be available for download in September 2011.

    Network planners should expect more than 80 percent of traffic in the data center’s local-area network (LAN) to be between servers.


  • HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC 5.1) is the industry’s first single pane-of-glass network management platform. It manages both virtual and physical environments across heterogenous networks; and it automatically discovers VMs and switches, and identifies their relationship to the physical network, enabling clients to simplify administration and gain control of their assets. HP Intelligent Management Center 5.1 is expected to be available fall 2011 with a list price of $6,995.
  • HP TippingPoint and VMware are co-developing next-generation security solutions. The aim is to deliver pervasive security in the cloud with unified management and automated scanning for identifying and blocking potential threats. HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), with Controller+Firewall solution, is available starting at $40,000.
(BriefingsDirect contributor David Weldon added research and reporting to this post.)

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Monday, August 29, 2011

From VMworld, cosmetics giant Revlon harnesses the power of private cloud to produce impressive savings and cost avoidance

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

Today’s consensus is no longer around an "if" for cloud computing, but the "when" and what types of cloud models are best suited for any particular company. The present challenge then is about the proper transitions to leveraging cloud for improved IT and for far better business results.

This week at VMworld, as part of the main keynote address Monday, one company and its design and implementation of a private cloud rose above the rest. Revlon and its CIO were in the spotlight for such impressive returns on their cloud. In just two years, Revlon has benefited by nearly $70 million from savings due to cost avoidance and reductions.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas the week of August 29. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to tell us about how private cloud such savings emerged and to describe one of the most efficient enterprise private cloud implementations in the world is David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO at Revlon. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Is there a reason for doing private cloud holistically, completely, rather than piecemeal? What’s the benefit for doing it that way?

Giambruno: From a technology standpoint, we look at ourselves as doing oneness. We pick one way and we get very good at. We own that technology, so we can command it. It’s really about the density of our skill sets and our capability around that order to execute for the business.

When you look at that, it drives a degree of simplicity of execution, because at the end of the day, what we're really focused on is delivering IT capability back to the business faster, cheaper, better. That’s essentially what our cloud was planned to do and has delivered.

Gardner: And this is no small undertaking. It's over 530 applications, 15,000 automated moves a month. Give us a sense of what you’ve done with this singular approach to full competency at this particular data center and your approach to private cloud?

Giambruno: It’s not a data center. It’s the globe. That’s important for everyone to understand. Revlon’s cloud covers all of Revlon’s presences globally. It’s not just a single data center. We have a core data center and then we have little data centers around the world that everything replicates between and things move between.

Entire ecosystem

We’ve built this entire ecosystem to deliver our applications. We started this about five years ago with this whole idea of oneness. We re-ITed the planet. We have one DNS and DHCP structure. We have one global directory. We have one SAN globally. We have one desktop image. We have one server image. That simplicity allowed us to use the cloud as a competitive advantage.

We've saved or avoided $70 million in last two years. If you go by a simple timeline, the first 18 months was laying that oneness foundation. We did that in 18 months. The second 18 months was the virtualization of the servers, the network, and the storage systems globally.

At the end of the 18 months, we were done. That was the first three years. We’ve been running this way for the last two years. We're not in the "I think" mode. We're looking now at how we continually extend the capability of our cloud.

Gardner: Our listeners might be familiar with Revlon, your brand, but tell us more about the scope of your operations and the extent to which IT is supporting your business.

Giambruno: Revlon is a global cosmetics, hair color, beauty tools, fragrance, skincare, anti-perspirant/deodorants, and beauty care company. The vision of Revlon is to deliver glamor, excitement, and innovation through high-quality products at affordable prices.

We didn’t spend any additional money, other than our normal capital refresh. The thing that we did was change the way we're spending our money



We are arguably one of the strongest consumer franchises in the world. Our brand is incredibly powerful. We've got offices around the world. Our global headquarters are in New York. Our flagship manufacturing facility is in Oxford, North Carolina, and our consumers are women around the world. Our products are sold in more than 100 countries.

So we are big, as far as our reach and our capability. Essentially, our cloud delivers roughly 95 percent of all Revlon IT services around the world. We've got a couple of systems that aren’t in there yet. They will be shortly, but for all intents and purposes, we operate everything off of our cloud.

Gardner: Let’s go back to how you got to this point and how you're able to enjoy such significant savings. You have a comprehensive virtualized approach of servers, network, applications, and services. Why is that important?

Giambruno: Again, it’s that density of skill sets. Through this whole implementation, we only used about 10 percent professional services. We didn’t spend any additional money, other than our normal capital refresh. The thing that we did was change the way we're spending our money.

We took that leap to do things differently, because at the end of the day -- I always say this just to keep my and my team’s frame of reference -- we make cosmetics and personal care products. We have lots of brands, but it’s the idea of simplicity.

Faster, better, cheaper

We're not a revenue-generating piece of Revlon. How we can add value back to the business is by doing things faster, better, cheaper? If we're not spending that money, we're avoiding spending money, or giving money back, that means it can go into new product development. It can go into R&D. It can go into marketing. All activities focused on driving profitable growth.

Getting technology to facilitate the business and do things faster and more effectively is really important. To me, it’s the most material thing we’ve done - if you look at your projects. We’ve increased the number of projects we complete every year by 300 percent. When you talk about the business alignment, getting what they want done faster, cheaper, better, to me, that’s it.

Gardner: And you're talking about spanning the cycle from full development to implementation. What’s the role that the cloud has played in terms of increasing the ease in which you move from development to operations?

Giambruno: I have a couple of buckets. We have reliability. Currently, our cloud has been operating at north of six nines uptime, which has allowed me to take resources out of operations, put them into projects and working with the business.

That’s resulted in speed. If you want a server, if there is a demand for new application or testing something, our cycle time for getting a server up is anywhere from 15-20 minutes and there isn’t the associated cost. For us, a server is just a file. If you want one, great, here you go.

One of the greatest things that we monitor is our ratio of physical to logical servers. When we started this, our server ratio was 1:7. We are now 1:34.



And we manage capacity on the top line. So we essentially move that infrastructure barrier and cost. We’ve disconnected it. One of the greatest things that we monitor is our ratio of physical to logical servers. When we started this, when we first went live three-and-a-half or four years ago, our server ratio was 1:7. We are now 1:34. That’s essentially a 500 percent increase in capacity without the cost.

That makes a material difference in the business not having to pay for things. The speed at which we can nail up applications and the accuracy at which we can do it has made a material difference in our ability to deliver projects to the business.

Gardner: In addition to improving this cycle for development flexibility and resources, you've also devoted significant improvements to disaster recovery (DR). Tell me a little bit about why the private cloud has helped you in DR.

Giambruno: One of the things that we’ve learned very quickly was rate of change. When you're on a cloud, every time someone hits a keystroke on a keyboard, that’s a change in your cloud. Our rate of change is anywhere between 20-30 terabytes a week.

We made a conscious decision as we don’t tier anything in DR; we literally copy everything. There are two pieces of things. I'm most impressed with what my team has done.

Cheaper storage

One is if you take that rate of change and attach it to storage growth, you're roughly at $27 million a year. Through a series of technologies that we employ, we turn that $27 million into $400,000 of storage that we actually have to pay for. So, our shareholders get that benefit, because I don’t think anybody else’s shareholders would have that interest in place.

The second thing is that it does allow us to copy everything. Roughly a month ago, we lost our factory in Venezuela to a fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but from the time someone made a phone call, two hours and 40 minutes later -- and roughly two hours of the time of finding people, because it was a Sunday afternoon -- we moved the country of Venezuela up into our DR side, had everything running, and we're giving the users virtual desktops so they could keep working. That’s the power.

Gardner: Peace of mind and trust.

Giambruno: And it’s not fake. We’ve done it. Globally, we are minus-15 minutes replication in their stuff. That’s a little longer or little shorter depending where it is and time of the day, but it goes back to the simplicity. We just copy everything so we don’t have to worry about it.

Gardner: All right. Let’s see metrics-wise what this gets for you in data reduction. What sort of volumes have you been able to improve?

We keep finding ways to squeak more out, because, again, the less money we can use, the better for the business.



Giambruno: We’ve run about 96 percent data reduction for everything from compression and de-duplication. As we’ve gone through this, we've also learned that with different storage protocols, block versus CIFS, you get better compression. Running at NFS you pick up 15 percent utilization over block.

Everybody has different business cases for why they need either, but we keep finding ways to squeak more out, because, again, the less money we can use, the better for the business. The more efficient and effective we are, the better for the business, and the less they have to spend on this.

Conversely, we keep leveraging those capabilities in extending our cloud. So we can sling a Windows 7 desktop to an iPad, or we're enabling our cloud so people can use resources wherever they are, regardless of the device. That just makes their lives easier and their ability to do business better, so we can support people growing the company.

Gardner: It’s really impressive to me, David that the more value that you derive from you architecture and approach, the more it contributes to other things. For example, what you’ve described is great for DR, but you’re also reducing your racks, restructuring your server licensing, and also getting to improve asset utilization. So it’s sort of a snowball, but in a virtuous way.

The asset is never cold

Giambruno: It’s interesting because in our DR site we run our test and dev. So the asset is never cold. We're actually using the virtual servers while they are not being used for DR to run all our tests and dev. It just contributes to the uptime. The data is already there.

We reuse assets all the time, and as we go forward, we have plans to go active-active. So now end-of-life servers that are coming out for maintenance, we just throw them in DR, because they can just stay there forever. It doesn’t matter to us if one dies a year. So what? It’s really that ability to keep using those assets to extend capabilities.

Gardner: How about the stack? Can you describe some of your products and what they’ve done for you? Are you venturing to some new areas around either management or governance to try to continue to tweak this to get more bang for the buck?

Giambruno: The bang for the buck for us is that we're working really hard on essentially creating an internal marketplace, like the Apple marketplace or the Android marketplace.

We’ve got desktop virtualization, but we see huge value to the business in creating this internal marketplace. We know a user. We know their devices. We know the applications they're supposed to be using. Depending on the device that they connect, we can format the application they are using and its view to that device to deliver them in context.

To some degree, it’s like going from a LAN to a trusted WAN, where we know the device that’s registered to you. We know you as a user so we can deliver very securely your information, and that information never leaves my data center. So you are only ever viewing the information they are working with.

When that device comes out, our cloud will understand context. We'll be able to deliver that application in the context of the person.



Gardner: You're also now creating an application marketplace. How does that benefit from your cloud infrastructure?

Giambruno: Our cloud can send them anything. The applications are already running on the cloud. Essentially, when that device comes out, our cloud will understand context. We'll be able to deliver that application in the context of the person. You've got a highly secure environment. We're not moving data anywhere. We’ve got control of the device. We understand who the person is, and so we can deliver in context what they are supposed to have access to, regardless of where they are.

If you have an iPad or anything like that, you have an icon on the front. You’ll have a Revlon marketplace. You open that up, and there will be a list of applications that you have access to that are already authorized for you to have access to, and we will start sending you those applications.

Gardner: What’s your advice for folks getting started?

Giambruno: I tend to live by "isms" to make very clear pictures, because I had to move own organization through them. Two things: trust or verify, which maps into the second, which is just try. They are very symbiotic.

Trust and verify that you’re delivering the capabilities that the business needs and that you know they need.



As you look at this, just try, and as you go through that, trust and verify that you’re delivering the capabilities that the business needs and that you know they need. As you go along that path, you can build trust and confidence in yourself and your capabilities, your team can build trust and confidence, and you can show that to your business units.

That's like that snowball that you get rolling. Once everybody realizes that it can be done, it’s more of a human experience thing than it is the technology. The technology works, and we’ve been doing this for a couple of years. I couldn’t imagine operating any other way any longer until the next big geometry train comes, but that’s probably another 10 or 15 years.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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From VMworld, NYSE Euronext on hybrid cloud vision and strategy behind the Capital Markets Community Platform vertical cloud

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

When we hear about cloud, especially public clouds, we often encounter one-size-fits-all services. Advanced adapters of cloud delivery models are now quickly creating more specialized hybrid clouds for certain industries. And they're looking to them as both major sources of new business, and the means to bring much higher IT efficiency to their clients.

We'll learn here about how the NYSE Euronext recently unveiled one such vertical offering, their Capital Markets Community Platform. We’ll see how they built the cloud, which amounts to a Wall Street IT services destination, what it does, and how it’s different from other cloud offerings.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas the week of August 29. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to tell us about how specialized clouds are changing the IT game in such vertical industries as finance is Steve Rubinow, Executive Vice-President and Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: I’d like to hear more about how you put your cloud together. You're supporting these services both inside your cloud as well as your clients'. Why have you done it this way?

Rubinow: It’s the convergence of a couple of trends and also things that our customer started to tell us. Like a lot of companies, we started to use cloud technology within our own company to service our own internal needs for the reasons that many people do -- lower cost, more flexibility, more rapid spin up, those kinds of things, and we found, of course, that was very useful to us.

At the same time, we've talked to a lot of our customers via our commercial division, which we call NYSE Technologies. By virtue of all the turbulence that's happened in the world, especially in the financial markets in the last couple of years, a lot of our customers -- big ones, small ones, banks, brokerages, and everyone in between -- said the infrastructure that we traditionally have supported within our own companies, is a new model that we could adapt, given these technologies that are available, and given that we NYSE Technologies wants to provide these services. We asked if we should take a different look at what we are doing and see if we should pursue some of these things.

What it comes down right down to is that many of these companies said that maintaining their own infrastructure is not a competitive advantage for them. It’s really a cost of doing business like telephones and office furniture. It would be better if someone else helped them with it, maybe not 100 percent, but like we propose to do, and everyone wins. They get lower cost and they get to offload a burden that wasn’t particularly strategic to them.

We say we can do it with good service and at a good price, and everybody comes away a winner. So we launched this program this summer, with one offering called Compute on Demand, which has a number of attributes that make it different than your run-of-the-mill public cloud.

Higher Requirements

In the capital markets community, we have some attributes of infrastructure, a higher requirement, that most companies wouldn’t care so much about, but in our industry they are very, very critical. We have a higher level of security than an average company would probably pay attention to.

And reliability, as you can imagine. The markets need to be up all the time when they are supposed to be open. A few seconds makes a big difference. So we want to make sure that we pay extra attention to reliability.

Another thing is performance. Our industry is very performance-sensitive. Many of the executions are measured in micro-seconds. Any customer of ours, including ourselves, are sensitive to make sure that any infrastructure that we would depend on has the ability to make sure that transactions happen. You don’t find that in the run-of-the-mill public cloud because there just isn’t a need for the average company to do that.

For that reason, we thought our private offering, our community cloud, was a good idea. By the way, our customers seem to be nodding their heads a lot to the idea as well.

Gardner: Why have it as a hybrid model?

We're a very rich source of market data, as one might imagine. We generate a lot of market data ourselves because of the large marketplace we are.



Rubinow: In the spirit of trying to accommodate all the needs that people will have, for many of the cloud services, you get the most leverage out of them, if you as a customer are situated in the data center with us.

Many customers choose to do that for the simple reason of speed-of-light issues. The longer the network is between Point A and Point B, the longer it takes a message to get across it. In an industry where latency is so important, people want to minimize that distance, and so they co-locate there. Then, they have high-speed access to everything that's available in the data center.

Of course, customers outside the data center certainly can have access to those services as well. We have a dedicated network that we call SFTI, Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure. That was designed to support high speed, high reliability, and high resiliency, things that you would expect from a prominent financial services network. Our customers come to our data centers over that network, and they can avail themselves of the services that we have there too.

Historical data

We have historical data that lot of our customers would like to take a look at and analyze, rather than having to store the data themselves. We have it all here for them. We have applications like risk management and other services that we intend to offer in the future that customers would be hard-pressed to find somewhere else, or if they could find it somewhere else, they probably won't find it in as efficient a manner. So it makes sense for them to come to us to take a look at it and see how they can take advantage of it here.

Gardner: Tell us about your organization, your global nature, and where you expect to deliver these cloud services over time.

Rubinow: The full name of the company is NYSE Euronext, and that reflects the fact that we are a collection of markets not only in the United States but also in Europe. We operate a number of cash and derivative exchanges in Europe as well. So we talk about the whole family being part of NYSE Euronext.

We segment our business into three segments. There is the cash business, which is global. There is the derivatives business, which is global, and those are the things that people would have normally associated our company with, because the thing we've been doing for many years.

The newest piece of our business is the piece that I've referred to earlier and that's our commercial technology business, which we call NYSE Technologies. Through that segment of the business, we offer all these services, whether it be software products we might develop that our customers take advantage of or services as we've already referenced.

Over the years, we've been offering these services to our customers, and then a couple of years ago we decided to do it in a much bigger way, because we realized the need was there.



In a small way, over the years, we've been offering these services to our customers, and then a couple of years ago we decided to do it in a much bigger way, because we realized the need was there. Our customers told us that they would take advantage of these services. So we made a bigger effort in that regard. Right now, the commercial part of our business is several hundred million dollars a year in terms of revenue.

Question of latency

I have to add one note in terms of latency. For people who aren't familiar with our obsession with latency, the true textbook cloud profile means that one could execute cloud-like services. If we had 20 data centers across the world, they could be executed across any of those data centers and transparent to the customer as long as they get done.

In ours latency-sensitive world, we are a little bit constrained with some of the services that we offer. We can't afford to be moving things around from data center to data center, because those network differences, when you're measuring things in micro-seconds, are very noticeable to our customers. So some of our services could be distributed across the world, but some of our services are very tied to a physical location to make sure we get the maximum performance.

To add further to that, one of the cornerstone technologies, as we all know, of cloud computing is virtualization. That gives you a lot of flexibility to make sure that you get maximum utilization of your compute resources.

Some of the services we offer can't use virtualization. They have to be tied to a physical device. It doesn't mean that we can't use a lot of other offerings that VMware provides to help manage that process, but some are tied to physical devices, because virtualization in some cases introduces an overhead. Again, when you're measuring in micro-seconds, it's noticeable. Many other of our services where virtualization is key to what we do to offer the flexibility in cost to our customers.

So we have kind of a mixed bag of unique provisioning that's designed for the low-latency portion of our business, and then more general cloud technologies that we use for everything else in our business. You put the two of them together and we have a unique offering that no one else that we know of in the world offers, because we think we're the first, it’s not among the first, to do this.

You put the two of them together and we have a unique offering that no one else that we know of in the world offers.



Gardner: So this is a rather big business undertaking for you. This cloud is really an instrument for your business in a major way.

Rubinow: That's right. Sometimes we think the core of our business is trading. That is the core. That's our legacy That's the core of what we do. It's a very important source of our business, and it generates a lot of the things that we've been talking about. Without our core business we wouldn’t have the market data to offer to our customers in a variety of formats.

The technologies that we used to make sure that we were the leader in the marketplace in terms of trading technology and all the infrastructure to support that, that's also what we're offering our customers. What we're trying to do is cover all the bases in the capital markets community, and not only trading services, which of course is the center of what we do and it's core to everything that we do.

All the things that surround that our customers can use to support their traditional trading activities and then other things that they didn't used to look to us to do. These are things like extensive calculations that they would not have asked the NYSE to do, but today they do it, because we provide the infrastructure there for them.

Gardner: What are some of the underlying numbers perhaps of how this works economically?

Rubinow: From a metrics standpoint, it's probably too early to provide metrics, but I can tell you, qualitatively speaking, the few customers that we have that were early adopters are happy to get on stage with us and give great testimonials about their experience so far. So that’s a really good leading indicator.

Again, without offering numbers, our pipeline of people wanting these services globally has been filling very nicely. So we know we've hit a responsive chord. We expect that we will fulfill the promises that we’re offering and that our customers will be happy. It’s too early, though, to say, "Here's three case studies that show, our customers are saying how it’s gone, because they haven’t been in it long enough to deliver those metrics.

Many of the things needed to be done from scratch, because we didn’t have models to look for that we could copy in a marketplace.



When we were putting together our cloud architecture and thinking about the special needs that we had -- and I keep on saying it’s not run-of-the-mill cloud architecture -- we we’re trying to make sure that we did it in a way that would give us the flexibility, facilities, and cost that we needed. Many of the things needed to be done from scratch, because we didn’t have models to look for that we could copy in a marketplace.

And we also realized that we couldn’t do it ourselves; we have a lot of smart people here, but we don’t have all the smart people we need. So we had to turn to vendors. We were talking to everyone that had a cloud solution. Lots of vendors have lots of solutions. Some are robust, and some are not so robust.

When it came down to it, there were only a couple of vendors that we felt were smart enough, able enough, and real enough to deliver the things to us that we felt we needed to get started. I'm sure we will progress over time, and there will be other people who will include the picture.

Top of the list

But VMware was at the top of that list of technologies that we have been using internally for several years, been very happy with. Based on our historical relationship with VMware and the offerings that VMware have in the traditional VMware space, plus the cloud offerings, things like Cloud Director and other things, that we felt that those were good cornerstone technologies to make sure we have the greatest chance of success with few surprises.

And we needed partners to push the envelope, because we view ourselves as being innovative and groundbreaking, and we want to do things that are first in the industry. In order to do those with better certainty of outcome, you have to have good partners, and I think that’s what we found at VMware.

Gardner: What did you learn? Is there any 20-20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterback types of insights that you could offer to others who are considering such cloud and/or vertical specialty cloud implementations?

Rubinow: It goes back to the comments I just made in terms of choosing your partners carefully. You can’t afford to have a whole host of partners, dozens of them, because it would get very confusing. There's a lot of hype in the marketplace in terms of what can be done. You need people that have abilities, can deliver them, can service them, and can back them up.

You can’t afford to have a whole host of partners, dozens of them, because it would get very confusing.



Every one of us who’s trying to do something a little bit different than the mainstream, because we have a specific need that we’re trying to service, has to go into it with a careful eye towards who we’re working with.

So I would say to make sure that you ask the right questions. Make sure you kick the tires quite a bit. Make sure that you can count on what you’re going to implement and acquire. It’s like implementing any new technology It’s not unique to cloud.

If you're leading the charge, you still want to be aggressive but it’s a risk management issue You have to be careful what you’re doing internally. You have to be careful who you’re working with. Make sure that you dot your I’s and cross your T’s. Do it as quickly as you can to get to market, but just make sure that you keep your wits about you.
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Priming the private cloud pump, HP releases VirtualSystem for VMware at VMworld

HP is taking full advantage of the VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week to make a series of major announcements around its virtualization and cloud computing products. One of the most important is the announcement of HP VirtualSystem for VMware.

While there is growing adoption of cloud computing, many organizations find the cloud to be a hard thing to grab hold of. HP is promising to help simplify and speed the process of implementation with the new releases. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP is tackling the problem with three different products within the HP VirtualSystem suiteHP Converged Storage, HP BladeSystem Servers, and HP Insight software. Taken together, HP hopes to be offering “best in class, at every level of the rack,” according to Tom Joyce, vice president of marketing, strategy and operations at HP StorageWorks.

Joyce took the opportunity to discuss the features and importance of the VirtualSystem release in a pre-VWworld briefing, along with Mike Banic, vice president of global marketing, and Michael Nielson, director of product solutions, both at HP Networking.

VirtualSystem has been three years in the works, according to Joyce. And it comes in response to struggles that many organizations have had with migration toward cloud computing. VirtualSystem for VMware is being promoted as “a highly optimized, turnkey solution that gives organizations a virtualized infrastructure that speeds implementation and provides a foundation for cloud computing.”

As virtualization has gained adoption, multi-tier network architectures, virtual sprawl, inflexible storage, unpredictable workloads and security concerns have increased complexity and limited broad deployment.



“As virtualization has gained adoption, multi-tier network architectures, virtual sprawl, inflexible storage, unpredictable workloads and security concerns have increased complexity and limited broad deployment,” an HP spokesperson says.

Specifically, VirtualSystem for VMware suite aims to help:
  • Accelerate virtual machine mobility by up to 40 percent, while doubling throughput and reducing network recovery time by more than 500 times. It does this using the new HP FlexFabric virtualized networking solution.
  • Cut capacity requirements by 50 percent, double virtual machine density, and speed deployment, all using HP LeftHand and HP 3PAR Storage Systems.
Remote trouble shooting

Using HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter Server, the new system also allows for remote trouble shooting and management, which should help improve virtual server operations. IT administrators should like this feature, since complexity is currently one of the loudest complaints of virtualization.

Despite virtualization becoming main stream for some organizations, there are still obstacles to many for a smooth deployment, notes Paul Miller, vice president, systems and solutions, at the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking division of HP. With HP VirtualSystem for VMware, organizations will be able to scale up in their cloud computing efforts as they add more desktops to the system, or as they combine private and public clouds.

This should come as welcome news for IT managers struggling with ever-changing deployment needs. Also welcome news is that VirtualSystem can be customized with HP Virtualization Smart Bundles.

HP clearly sees the new release as part of an umbrella strategy toward seemless and scalable deployment, but also one that provides strategic advantage for the client.

At VMworld the synergy between private cloud infrastructure and desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) deployments is a major theme.



Indeed, here at VMworld the synergy between private cloud infrastructure and desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) deployments is a major theme. We're seeing a lot of VDI news and thin client news from the likes of Wyse. And VMware is expected to make some big View VDI product news as well.

On the business side, the new HP system is being heralded as helping organizations “align virtualization strategy and investments to business goals with consulting, planning, pre-integration, deployment and support services from HP Technology Services and HP ServiceONE partners,” the HP spokesperson notes.

VirtualSystem for VMware is available now from HP, with pricing starting at $167,300. This includes HP Converged Infrastructure, factory integration and three years of HP Support Plus 24 service.

(BriefingsDirect contributor David Weldon added research and reporting to this post. He can be reached via LinkedIn.)

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