Today we introduced our latest partner for PAN Manager – IBM! This is a great addition to our supported platforms, which now include all of the leading blade manufacturers in the world – HP, Dell, Fujitsu, NEC, and now IBM. Why IBM? From a simple market point of view, adding the #2 by volume vendor in the server market significantly increases our total addressable market. However, it’s not the market size that most intrigued us about IBM – it’s the relationships IBM has with customers. IBM is the foremost technology solutions company in the world, and is trusted to develop a ‘best for’ solution. By adding PAN Manager to the IBM BladeCenter ecosystem, Egenera can not only provide customers with greater diversity and choice but is enabled to deliver a best in class platform for managing and improving the service levels between IT and the business. Customer centricity is also… continue reading
Better Stronger Cheaper: Improving the Virtual Data Center with Egenera
At first blush, the steady march of virtualization continues. But first looks can be deceiving. Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President and General Manager of IDC’s Enterprise Platform Group, at market researcher IDC examined virtualization and converged infrastructure at the IDC Directions conference this year. According to the IDC research, many IT organizations are reaching the end of consolidation and few of these organizations will virtualize more than 80% of their applications. The research also shows that less than 10% of companies expect to ever have 100% of their applications virtualized. This means that the vast majority of data centers will have a mix of virtual and bare metal applications, which also brings a new level of complexity. To combat this growing complexity, leading organizations are aggressively moving to implement different automation, optimization and operational processes that unify the virtual and physical environments. Egenera understands the benefits of maintaining both physical… continue reading
Great Balls of Fire: Cisco Lights Up the Data Center
A few weeks ago, Cisco posted a field notice to customers of its UCS server blades, saying that failures on the blade can “cause the component to overheat and emit a short flash which could lead to complete board failure.” Cisco also warned that the defect could affect the other blades in the chassis by disrupting power flow. They informed their customers that they are replacing currently deployed UCS B440 Blade Servers, are making hardware modifications and are launching a hardware replacement program. It stands true that any recall, especially when dealing with expensive hardware, will impact the company’s bottom line. This is further proof that designing reliable hardware is difficult and underscores why high-profile companies such as HP spend billions on development. The Cisco recall also highlights the need for industry standards. Associations like the Open Data Center Alliance are working to bring interoperability and standards to the data… continue reading
Keep it Simple: Complexity is the “KISS” of Death
Recently, the Royal Pingdom blog released a huge variety of data from various sources. This data paints a picture of the state of the Internet this past year. As I read these data I was struck by how, from a systems view, there is an inverse relationship between size and simplicity. That is, the larger a system, the more important simplicity becomes to that system – both for the adoption of the service and to the ongoing operations and management. In short, complexity breeds uncertainty and drives up failure risks. This is true for business and as well as for the infrastructure upon which a business is built. Too much complexity in IT translates into a brittle foundation to the business. With a fragile foundation to IT, the infrastructure must be constantly monitored and nurtured to meet the minimum needs of the business. In short, complexity drives up costs and… continue reading
Disaster Recovery Planning in the Age of Physical Virtual and Cloud
Can your business afford to lose $110,000 an hour? According to research firm Aberdeen Group that is the estimated loss for every hour of downtime suffered by the average business when disaster strikes. There is little doubt that a hurricane or flood could bring your data center to a sudden halt, but according to a global study conducted by Forrester Research, over 40 percent of the IT executives surveyed indicated that it was a simple power failure and not a violent storm that caused their most recent data center outage. How likely is it that your enterprise will experience a significant disruption in data center operations? Forrester reports that during the five-year period beginning in 2003, as many as 27 percent of the businesses surveyed declared they suffered the effects of a disaster and invoked recovery procedures. Regardless of the reason for the disruption or the frequency, what matters most… continue reading
Perspectives on Data Center Modernization
According to a recent Tech Target poll, virtualization is marching forward along the fronts of desktop, disaster recovery and cloud. Two-thirds of those surveyed plan to expand virtualization efforts in 2012 with disaster recovery (DR) topping the identified use case for the technology; interest in VDI jumping 10 points; and plans for private cloud more then tripling. From these kinds of numbers its clear virtualization is the ‘go to’ tool for cost reduction, consolidation and data center modernization. All-in-all, great news for those of us in the business of virtualizing the data center. But is there more going on behind the scenes? Dig a little deeper on the TechTarget site and you’ll see another insight gleaned from the same survey: Physical servers live on longer than IT pros predict. In a nutshell, Tech Target also finds that apps installed on bare metal workloads are “sticking around, even as virtualization becomes… continue reading
DRaaS — Disaster Recovery as a Service
Everyone wants to provide a service. We are all too familiar with Software as a Service (SaaS). But in the beginning there was IaaS (infrastructure as a service), platform as a service (PaaS) and, more recently, Desktop as a Service and Storage as a Service. And now, in the ever-expanding world of “IT as a Service (ITaaS?),” Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is upon us. While attending Interop in NYC last week, I ran across BlackCloud Edge (BCE) – a new entrant into the DRaaS space that, at first blush, has cracked both platform heterogeneity needs as well as storage bandwidth challenges.BlackCloud Edge provides vaulting and recovery services for all different platforms. It leverages storage from Amazon S3 along with a shared pool of infrastructure the company maintains on behalf of its clients. Should any BCE client experience an event, IT-Lifeline will replicate the customer’s IT environment “in the cloud.” Recovery times are… continue reading
Clouds Keep Crashing
When reporting on some recent outages of cloud services from Google and Microsoft, Kevin McCaney at GCN recently asked the question: “is this the new normal”? It’s an interesting question to pose, but let’s take it a step further: ”Are outages of key IT services becoming the new norm?” With that frame of reference, I did a little digging around the web and indeed the frequency and impact of IT outages has increased. In addition to the Google and Microsoft outages reference in the link above, some more recent highly visible events of the past year include: Target website goes down Netflix video streaming outage #1 and outage #2 Amazon Cloud down in EMEA AWS in the US, outage #1 and outage #2 Sony PlayStation Network Twitter disruptions San Diego Power Outage There was no one thing that caused these outages as they ranged from natural events to human error, and they varied… continue reading
What Does Missoni Have to Do With Business Continuity?
Missoni Madness. Missoni Mayhem. Missoni Mania. All have been cited by the media as reference to the phenomenon that caused Target’s web site to crash yesterday when consumers flooded the retailer online with hopes of scoring an item from the limited-edition, low-cost designer collection from Italian fashion designer Missoni. Target.com was wiped out for most of the day as a result of the high demand, reminiscent of the most popular shopping days of the year such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday. As a leading retailer that should be prepared to maintain continuity of service on peak shopping days, this unexpected failure to sustain its online retail channel through an onslaught of web traffic and accommodate unusually high demand is being called amateurish by industry analysts and was a high-trending source of frustration among consumers on Facebook and Twitter. As is often the case, when one company falters, others gain.… continue reading
Unified Management- Protecting you infrastructure
The task of going virtual can appear daunting. Complexity and cost are both major concerns as implementation and maintenance projects creep in their scope. One of the major sources of complexity is the need to manage and protect both your physical and virtual infrastructure separately. Unified management platforms are the solution to this problem. By bringing together virtual and physical infrastructure management, unified management platforms enable organizations to consolidate IT process and streamline operations. This in turn allows IT organizations to use commodity “off the shelf” hardware components to create integrated continuity and disaster recovery services that bridge the gap between virtualization and physical infrastructure. The result is a business-critical infrastructure with massive hardware and operational efficiencies. On Wednesday, September 14th, Egenera and Virtual I/O will co-host a webinar addressing the key issues on this topic, and the solutions that are available: Automatically healing virtual resource pools Pre-emptively scaling capacity… continue reading
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