I believe that HP is offering network virtualization technology that has the potential of solving performance problems found in those environments. Let's consider what HP is saying about this product.

Here's what HP has to say about Velocity

• HP Velocity enhanced with latency and congestion control optimization. Networks are dynamic, with constantly changing conditions. This is especially true of the Wi-Fi and 3G/4G networks used for many mobile thin clients. HP Velocity, included with HP thin clients, intelligently adapts to network conditions, improving network utilization to help ensure telecommuters, branch office workers and mobile users experience less distortion when using real-time communication applications.
• The HP mt40 Mobile Thin Client is now Citrix Ready HDX Premium Verified with an Intel® Celeron® processor. Combined with HP Velocity, the HP mt40 provides the security of a mobile thin client with the performance required to offer excellent end-user experiences. For example, users are able to easily process multimedia, such as training videos, while on the road.
• HP now supports Citrix Excalibur and Citrix Receiver 13 on HP t410 HDX-SOC platforms. HP thin clients running Citrix HDX-System on Chip (SoC) technology offer the high performance necessary to run VoIP or other multimedia over a challenging network. ⁽²⁾ The system also offers low power consumption, which makes it ideal for use in older buildings or at any location where reduced energy use is essential.
• HP Thin Clients also are now qualified to work with the following unified communication (UC) solutions:
  • Avaya VDI Communicator UC
  • Cisco UC backend
  • Citrix Lync Optimization pack
  • Microsoft Lync 2013 native UC

Snapshot analysis

The key ingredient in HP Velocity is the ability to closely monitor and manage the use of network bandwidth. That is to place each type of network connection into a virtual environment so that each different type of communication protocol can see an optimal environment even though the physical link is limited.

Thin client and VDI workloads are often attempting to support traditional transactional applications; video and audio streaming; and, increasingly, Voice over IP (VoIP) workloads over just about any type of network connection available to the individual. This means dealing with bandwidth and latency issues as well as noisy connections so that the individual using these tools experiences good performance.

Communication data coming from VoIP and both video and audio streaming workloads is bursty in nature and doesn't deal very well with links that are noisy or exhibit very long latency.

Transactional workloads, on the other hand, have often been designed to deal with imperfect communications links and not lose data.

HP believes that with proper intelligence applied even marginal links can be utilized in thin client and VDI environments. It reminds me very much of the type of intelligence that my former colleagues at Digital Equipment developed for the company's networking product, DECnet.

HP isn't the only supplier working on this set of problems. Citrix, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Juniper are all developing their own network virtualization technology to address these same issues.

All-in-all, HP's Velocity appears to be a good example of how network virtualization technology can be used to improve performance, reliability and usability in commonly found networking environments. The only catch I see is that HP is largely deploying this technology in HP-centric environments.

If your organization is building thin client or VDI solutions based upon HP's thin clients or HP's line of servers, this technology could mean the difference between success or failure.

Surprise! Other airlines do this too!

Boy, the feedback I've been getting has been amazing. It appears that Delta isn't the only airline practicing "slippery pricing" on their website. Customers of AirTran, U.S. Airways, and United have also experienced the same thing.

Several readers described terrible customer customer service and "aggressive pricing strategies" when they were trying to get home for a funeral or to the hospital in a remote city when a loved one was on death's bed.

Delta called

A representative of Delta's CEO's office called after reading my previous post and discussed what the company is doing to learn how I experienced this type of pricing change mid-transaction. I was informed that Delta is tracking all user transactions and can examine what customers entered, the state of the flight databases at the time and see why their website displayed the results. They hope to better understand what actually happened during my attempts to purchase tickets to go home for the funeral.

I'll not try to describe the conversation word-for-word, but I will try to summarize my understanding of what was discussed.

Airline response to economic pressure

Delta, like all airlines, is facing high costs for fuel, equipment, fees and staff. It has turned to a number of strategies to earn a profit when selling their limited product — airline seats. Although not a topic of the discussion, some of the ways airlines, including delta, have used to increase revenues in this difficult environment include:

1. Adding charges for things previously included in the fare — things such as meals, fees to transport luggage, fees for things such as blankets and pillows
2. Encouraging customers to sign up for partner credit cards by offering to waive certain fees for cardholders. I suspect that the airlines are being paid a fee or commission by the credit card company for each individual they refer
3. Segmenting seats into different categories and charging a premium for "more desirable" seats, such as seats close to the front of the aircraft and exit-row seats. The airlines have also changed the seat pitch, or distance between seats, in certain parts of the cabin so a premium can be charged for increased legroom.

My take on what happened

I believe that my experience is related to reason number 3 listed above. Since each flight has only so many seats, the seats are segmented in different pricing categories, and a whole host of people and systems are purchasing seats, it is possible that a category of seating was available at the beginning of a transaction and was sold before a customer could finish the transaction.

Rather than honoring the initial price, airlines just display a screen prior to checkout offering a seat in another category, a category that costs more than what was displayed originally.

Analysis

While I can certainly understand what happened, I don't have to agree with it. If we use an analogy, it would be a like a grocery posting a price for an item, say a cabbage, and then surprising customers with a price increase at the checkout counter because all of the cabbages in one part of the bin had been sold and cabbages in another part of the bin were assigned a higher price.

Airlines really do a poor job of letting customers know about how seats have been categorized and the prices they've set for each category. A price is displayed for "a seat" and if all of the seats in that category have been sold before the customer can check out, the airlines demand a higher price.

It would seem to me that once an airline has posted a price for a seat, that price should be honored at the end of the transaction.

What's your take on this?

It's certainly no surprise to you that data grows at an exponential rate. Not just the amount of data but also the size of each data component grows. Remember 1.44MB floppy disks? Fifteen years ago I could copy an entire operating system onto a single diskette (DOS, XENIX, Minix, etc.). Ten years ago, I ran Linux from two such floppy disks (with X). At that time, Windows came on a single CD disk. A CD-ROM disk could hold ~700MB, which I thought was huge. Then came DVDs with their enormous capacities (4GB/8GB).

I suppose that storage has to expand ahead of data because we keep using more of it. Windows now requires one of those large DVDs for delivery. A single photograph from my DSLR camera weighs in at four to five megabytes. Even simple, single Microsoft Word documents are now too large for those old diskettes.

My first thumb drive was 64MB and I thought that was so cool. Now I need a 32GB one just for stuff.

I think you get the picture.

Data is bigger. There's more of it. And data grows exponentially with time.

So the thought of big data at home isn't so surprising.

Think about all of the data points that you now have on paper, in your head, or stored in various locations on the web, on disks, on thumbdrives, on floppies (kidding), or in the cloud. I personally store 50GB of data on Dropbox. It's mostly pictures but there's also a lot of documents stored there too. That's a lot of data for one guy.

Think of all of the music you own. Add up all of your bills, transactions, phone calls, TV shows, banking, medical records, maintenance records for all of your various electronics, home, appliances, cars, and so on.

That's a lot of data to sift through. When you start considering all of the data you've collected, it probably runs into the low terrabyte range, doesn't it? That's big. It's even bigger when you consider that the amount of data grows exponentially. It gets out of hand in a short amount of time.

If you digitized all of the data in your life, where would you store it?

Exactly. There aren't a lot of choices. 

How would you store it?

Exactly. That's the problem facing technology.

We need a big data solution for personal data. It has to be secure, flexible, inexpensive, expandable, accessible from anywhere, and easy to manage.

The cloud is the most likely candidate for data storage. But where will that cloud exist? At your home? In a data center? In multiple data centers?

The answer is all of the above.

It will have to exist everywhere to fulfill all of the requirements that I listed above. Since data centers probably won't have the capacity to store the data, we will have to have some of the responsibility placed on us. To that end, we'll have to "donate" capacity to the collective cloud in the forms of storage, CPU, and memory.

There is a company, the name escapes me (sorry), that has a setup like this for storage. When you join their cloud, you donate an amount of storage to the cloud where your data is stored and so is other people's data. Some of their data gets striped to your disk, some of yours is stored elsewhere too, and the whole thing is encrypted and very failsafe.

Think about the SETI@home project when you think personal big data clouds. SETI@home is the project to search for extraterrestrial life that uses a bit of your computing power to assist in that quest. There are other worthwhile projects that also use the BOINC client too. I'll leave that research up to you.

My point here is that big data is about to invade your home in a big way. If I were in Silicon Valley and could tap into the minds of smart, young entrepreneurs, I'd bring the solution to the world. But I'll have to leave it to those who are.

So for those of you interested in this quest, there are really two problems to solve:

One is the digitization of one's data and the other is the storage of it. I've described how the data can be stored and how one can enter the personal big data cloud. Digitization of your data is one I'll have to think on for a while but it will have to involve a combination of manual entry, scanning, scraping from other sources, and automated entry from transactions.

Have I just invented "Big Brother?" Or have I simply enabled people to free themselves from the burdens of bits of paper, multiple records, multiple formats for data, and prevented data loss in the case of disaster?

You tell me.

What do you think the impetus will be to bring big data home? Do you think there's a need? How long do you think it will take to implement my plan? Talk back and let me know.

Here's what Desktone has to say about its new offerings

Desktone, Inc., the pioneer of Desktops as a Service (DaaS), announced today it has extended its cloud-hosted desktop platform with a new on-premises, cloud-managed virtual desktop solution. The new offering resides at the customer site and is managed remotely by a Cloud Provider, giving enterprises and SMBs the flexibility to choose the cloud model that best suits their business: public, private, or hybrid. Now, Desktone provides the ultimate flexibility by offering different desktop options, including Microsoft RDS, VDI, and Remote Apps, across public, private and hybrid cloud environments — eliminating the barriers associated with traditional VDI deployments.

Desktone’s on-premises, cloud-managed virtual desktop solution enables Service Providers to deploy virtual desktops in the customer’s data center and remotely mange provisioning and ongoing management. By leveraging Desktone’s unique multi-tenancy and multi-data center capabilities, Service Providers can securely manage virtual desktops for multiple customers using a single platform, while IT can easily add, remove and edit their virtual desktops across locations.

The new on-premises offerings include both enterprise and SMB/Branch Office configurations:

• Enterprise customers can leverage existing private cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments or use the Desktone blueprint, which includes a choice of server hardware, NetApp or EMC storage, and desktop virtualization software.
• SMBs and branch office deployments can deploy a pre-configured, all-in-one virtual desktop appliance, which includes GreenByte’s vIO virtual storage, as well as compute and desktop virtualization software.
  
  Leading cloud providers, such as Dell, Fujitsu, Time Warner Cable and Dimension Data, have selected Desktone’s Platform to offer hosted desktops and apps as a cloud service due to unique cloud features that enable them to deliver the easiest-to-deploy and lowest-cost virtual desktops in the market.

Snapshot analysis

Desktop as a Service (DaaS), or putting virtualized desktop environments out into the clouds, would appear, on the face of it, to be a low-cost but flexible option for those not wishing to deal with a personal computer on every desktop. It also appears to solve software installation, software maintenance, data sharing and remote data access problems as well. Why hasn't its use skyrocketed?

Concerns about performance and reliability, as well as putting corporate data into the hands of a service provider, all come to mind as inhibitors to adoption.

Desktone, one of the originators of the concept of DaaS, believes it has a solution. Why not, Desktone asks, make the infrastructure software that supports DaaS available to enterprises and service providers alike? That way, the company believes, companies can deploy DaaS in-house, in the clouds or use both approaches depending upon the individual, the workloads, or other categories.

Will Desktone's move change DaaS adoption strategies? The answer isn't clear yet. What is clear is that Desktone is doing its best to remove obstacles to DaaS adoption.

Don't let the Entry moniker imply any limitations on the SmartCloud Entry solution, because there aren't any. Entry just means easy, not limited. SmartCloud Entry is a full-blown, full-featured, highly scalable cloud enabling solution for businesses. IBM has just taken the sting out of cloud adoption both in complexity and in affordability.

SmartCloud Entry is an affordable cloud solution. And it's doubly affordable because you don't have to purchase a bit of new hardware or rip out and rebuild your current virtualized infrastructure to start using your own private cloud.

It's a cross-platform, multi-platform cloud solution that makes creating, using, and managing cloud resources as easy as a few mouse clicks.

If you don't believe me about the "few mouse clicks," check out this video that shows you how easy it is to deploy a new virtual private server using SmartCloud Entry.

And, you can also watch how easy it is to go from no cloud to cloud in a day with SmartCloud Entry.

I spoke with Jeff Borek, Program Director for Cloud Computing Systems and Technology Group, Ian Robinson, Product Line Manager for Virtualization and Cloud Solutions, IBM Systems Software Team, and Alan Dickinson, IBM Program Director for Cloud Computing in Mid-sized Businesses. You can listen to the full 32 minute podcast on my Frugal Networker blog site and gather information on SmartCloud Entry firsthand.

Some of the new key features of the new version, 3.1, are:

• Expanded hypervisor options now includes Hyper-V.
• Multiple server architecture support from the single interface.
• Enhanced web portal for rapid self-service workload provisioning.
• Pre-configured VM appliance images.

And of course, its standard features of automated approvals, metering, billing, users, and projects through the SmartCloud Entry interface and the capability to create gold master images, to convert from physical systems, and to convert virtual machine images between hypervisors.

IBM's SmartCloud Entry 3.1 will be generally available June 14, 2013.

For more information about IBM's SmartCloud Entry product or any of its cloud computing offerings, check out the IBM Cloud Computing SmartCloud website. This site provides several videos, multiple pages of features, product offerings, use cases, and a cloud computing community portal that provides additional learning resources and information.

Additionally, if you'd like to see more of SmartCloud in action, search YouTube for SmartCloud Entry and enjoy learning about the next generation of cloud computing.

For more information on private cloud click here to download a free ebook on private cloud from the Aberdeen Group.

What do you think of an easy to adopt private cloud computing solution? Do you think businesses will jump at the chance to move that direction or do you think they're still too reluctant to go cloud? Talk back and let me know.

The situation

Customers are presented a complex set of screens showing a number of ways to select flights. The source, the destination, the travel dates and travel times are selected and a number of flight options are shown. A price is presented for each option.

When a specific routing is selected, a number of other steps are required to provide information on the passengers.

Once that information is selected, the website presents screens asking for credit card information.

I tried three different sets of flights, at different times and through different Delta hub airports. Each time the result was the same. before I could enter my credit card information, the website showed an increase of nearly $125 per ticket per person to complete the purchase.

It seems inappropriate to change the pricing mid transaction like this.

First contact with Delta

I contacted Delta and complained about the slippery pricing and received the following reply:

Online booking allows you to arrange your travel safely and securely by providing you with real-time schedule and fare information. Each Delta flight has numerous fare structures for every flight segment offered. Our lowest priced fares are limited per each segment and once sold out are no longer available. When reviewing fares, they are never guaranteed until you receive a confirmation number at the end of the booking process. In very rare cases, a fare observed while reviewing flight segment options may sell out prior to you actually finalizing your purchase with a credit card. I am very sorry that the fare you originally observed was no longer available for your travel itinerary once you were ready to purchase the ticket, and I can certainly understand your disappointment.

I responded to this message by telling the Delta representative that I thought changing the fee in mid transaction appeared to be a "bait and switch" operation and that is unacceptable to me.  I also pointed out that seeing the same price increase for three different itineraries in a matter of a few minutes didn't seem to be a "rare case."

Second contact with Delta

Here is how a Delta representative responded to my second message:

Please allow me to explain that our policies are based on extensive research done by our marketing team. We have a dedicated team of analysts who analyze the features of the policy before they are implemented. At the same time, we also respect the sentiments of our passengers and welcome your comments as an attempt to improve our overall performance. This said, I have forwarded your comments to our Customer Service Leadership team for further analysis and internal review.

Snapshot analysis

Delta, I realize that you wish to maximize the value of each customer transaction. I also know that slippery pricing doesn't lead to customer trust or customer satisfaction no matter how your "extensive research" was conducted.

I don't think that your customers support changing the price of tickets in the middle of a transaction. I did a rather unscientific study at the airport and couldn't find a single passenger that thought that was acceptable supplier behavior. If you offer a product at one price, that price should not change mid transaction.

Don't get me wrong here, I like VMware's virtualization products. I should, since I've been using them for many years, but not every concept is a home run. And I'd have to say that vCloudDirector is perhaps a single base hit at best.

Underneath vCloudDirector (vCD), it's VMware's standard server virtualization product. The vCD add-on is supposed to make it easy (I assume) to create and deploy cloud resources that they refer to as vApps, which are composed of virtual machines that you create in vCD.

You don't really need vCD for this. You can create virtual machines using the vSphere Client, and simply put them into their own virtual datacenter or resource pool without any extra software or hassle.

My point is that I don't really see a reason to have vCD. It seems like an added layer of complexity to a very simple system. Maybe creating a vApp is a good idea, but I'm still not sure what it means when you're really creating virtual machines in that vApp. A vApp is an organizational object, and has no other practical functionality. It seems like we're kind of renaming our resources into something else for no reason other than for it to sound more "cloudlike".

I need functionality, not fancy nomenclature or another interface.

If I sound confused, it's because I am.

I just don't get it.

A new interface doesn't really make something "cloud".

What makes something "cloud" is self-service, rapid deployment, elastic usage, and easy to use. I'd like to emphasize the easy part of that.

To be fair, vCD is not as difficult as trying to use Amazon's cloud deployment, but it's far less easy than it should be. Plus, there's no real advantage to using vCD that I can see.

I don't see any real difference in using vCD than simply creating datacenters, resource pools, and deploying virtual machines in the "old-fashioned" way via vSphere Client. Maybe it's just me, but do you see any real advantage to that interface, or does it just serve to confuse you too?

There might be some small advantage to running vCD, but I haven't really found it, and the trade-off of difficulty of its use just isn't worth it in my opinion. To me, VMware's efforts should be more focused on making the vSphere Client more "cloud friendly", rather than adding this new, pointless, and more complex layer to the mix.

I find that using vCD doesn't alleviate my need to continue using the vSphere Client. I have to keep them both open and switch back and forth between the two. One interface/product is all I really need to deal with.

My two cents is that VMware should continue to improve the vSphere Client and possibly have a "Cloud View" that you select from the different inventory options that are available. Select from Hosts and Clusters, VMs and Templates, Datastores, Networking, and Cloud. The Cloud View would show you your vApps (resource pools) and virtual machines within each.

VMware's flagship product, the ESXi family, is outstanding, but adding another interface that complicates and frustrates your users is a very bad idea.

What do you think of VMware's vCloudDirector product? Are you experiencing the same frustrations that I am with it? Talk back and let me know.

Here's a quick summary of what IBM announced

Here's how IBM summarized its announcement:

• First partner certified for SAP Business Suite on HANA applications (ERP, CRM, SCM)
  • 1TB, 2TB & 4TB configurations
• New! Virtualized HANA installation with VMware
  • Enables multiple HANA VMs on a single node system – Non-production environment
  • New! SAP HANA Synchronous Disaster Recovery – Enables HANA system failover to a remote site
• Largest scale-out solution certified for SAP HANA BW workloads
  • 56 x 1TB/Node = 56TB
• New! IBM Systems Solution for SAP Business SuiteTM and SAP HANATM
  • Reference Architecture of SAP Biz Suite on PureFlex and SAP HANA on System x3950 X5 Workload Optimized Solution for SAP HANA
• IBM PureFlex Solution for SAP Business SuiteTM
  • Reference Architecture for PureFlex POWER and x86
• IBM Flex System Solution for SAP NetWeaverTM Business Warehouse Accelerator
  • Reference Architecture and Integrated Offering for BWA on Flex System

I liked the fact that these solutions don't require a Storage Area Network (SAN) to support scaled-out configurations and are likely to reduce required floor space.

More information about these solutions can be found here.

Snapshot analysis

"Reduce costs," "increase agility," and "optimize IT infrastructure" have all become common phrases in discussions I have with IT executives. Their budgets are flat or falling and yet they need to increase what they're doing for the organization. Getting to a better computing environment isn't an easy task, however.

Today's applications are often constructed of highly distributed services that are spread over multiple system tiers. These tiers are likely to be replicated in several data centers. Some organizations have also replicated some of these tiers or, perhaps, the entire workloads in a third party's data center (can you say "Cloud Computing?") to reduce their operational costs. This requires systems that can be scaled from small to very large without requiring a customer to change system architectures somewhere along the way.

Achieving the proper balance of processor performance, memory size, and the best storage and network configuration is also a must. Getting this to work properly also requires many layers of software, each of which has to be configured properly. This requires quite a number of different types of expertise. Many organizations no longer have the staff necessary to pull this off. So, they over-provision systems, purchase too many software licenses, and blindly install configurations hoping that they'll perform "well enough to get by."

IBM appears to have stood back and listened to its customers and then put its engineers to work building and testing pre-configured hardware/software solutions for SAP's Business Suite and SAPs HANA. These pre-configured solutions are based upon IBM's PureFlex and System x3950.

Having taken part in something similar while I was working at DEC, I understand how challenging it can be to develop a reference architecture and then fit all the pieces together. IBM is fortunate to have a wealth of systems, storage, networking, and software expertise that can be assigned to this task.

In the end, being able to treat complex IT solutions as if they are "black boxes" that can easily be installed and used is very likely to help IBM's and SAP's joint customers get to a working, reliable, flexible environment quicker and at a much lower cost.

My first interaction with Time Warner Cable was, shall we say, much worse than I expected (see Time Warner Cable and canceled installation for the full story). In the end, we ended up with cable television and what TWC describes as "high-speed" internet. We just couldn't stomach paying so much more for a dedicated telephone line. So, we decided to become a disconnected family and just use our mobile telephone service.

A few problems appeared during our first month of this grand experiment. We couldn't send or receive faxes, and on rare occasions, our mobile telephone service become unavailable. So, I explored what options were available for voice over IP (VoIP) that would work with our existing telephone hardware. It didn't take long to uncover several options.

All of the options were based upon the purchase of a device that plugged into the router and offered a way for our telephone system to work as if it were connected to a landline. Our goal was to find a system offering monthly pricing that was at least two thirds less than TWC, with good call quality, voicemail, call forwarding, the support of at least two lines (one for our telephone system and one for the fax machine), and could be quickly and easily installed.

Here are some of the options that we considered:

• magicJack

• netTalk

• Obiha

• Ooma.

MagicJack

MagicJack offers a heavily advertised solution that is based upon a small device that plugs into the cable modem or router. The device includes a power adapter. A regular or cordless phone is then plugged into the device. The device appears to be available for approximately $60, and the annual telephone service is priced at approximately $30.

I spoke with several clients and friends who have been using this device for a while. Nearly everyone commented that they liked the pricing for both the device and the service. They also commented that they often heard complaints that their voices sounded distorted and there were irritating lags that led people to talk over one another.

NetTalk

NetTalk, like magicJack, provides several devices and an inexpensive telephone service. The devices are priced from $34.95 for the netTalk Duo II to $64.95 for the netTalk WiFi. The service offerings are segmented differently than magicJack. The base service is priced at about $30. Service to Canada and Mexico is an additional $5.85 per month. Service to an additional 60 countries costs $10 per month.

None of my clients, friends, or colleagues were using this service, so I had to rely on online reviews. As with magicJack, customers liked the pricing, but had concerns about call quality.

Obihai

Obihai technology offers a number of devices. A one-line device costs $59.99. A two-line device is priced at $99.99. The company also offers business systems. Obihai's claim to fame is that it offers a way to connect its devices to Google's Google Voice. It also offer an Android and iOS app that allows those devices to use the Obihai service.

As with netTalk, none of my clients, friends, or colleagues were using this service, so I had to rely on online reviews.

Ooma

Ooma offers the Ooma Telo, the device that connects to the network and offers a telephone jack; an HD2 handset; Linx, a four-port expander; and both a wireless and Bluetooth adapter. Ooma also offers a mobile app.

Ooma's Telo is priced at $179.99, and the monthly service is approximately $5. They offer a premium service for approximately $10 that offers a second line and several other services. In order to access that second line, it is either necessary to be using the HD2 handset or to purchase Ooma's Linx.

Several of my clients are using this device, and mentioned that the sound quality was as good or better than a traditional landline.

Snapshot analysis

There are many other offerings from suppliers, such as Cisco and Vonage. The hardware and service offerings vary widely, and it is necessary to really work out what each will cost for one, two, and three years. It appeared that the Ooma combined with the company's Linx fit our needs the best.

Is your company using one of these systems? What is your experience with them?

Reboot a physical system and wait. And wait, and wait, while the other callers on the maintenance call sound like young children on a long road trip, "Are we there yet?"

Here's a very typical dialog that many of you are familiar with from your own experience:

12.18am: Can you go ahead and reboot that system?

Sure, rebooting now.

12.20am: OK, where are we with that system?

It's still shutting down. Some services take a while to close.

12.23am: Can you give us a status on that system?

It's just now going through POST.

12.26am: What's our status?

You reply calmly: It's coming up. Right now, it's still checking hardware.

12.30am: Is it up yet?

No, Windows is starting.

12.33am: Is there a problem with the system?

No, it's almost at a logon prompt.

12.36am: Are we there yet?

Yes, I'm logging on now.

Sound vaguely familiar to you? It should if you're in the business of rebooting systems for maintenance or troubleshooting. Just for fun, here's that same conversation with a virtual machine as the topic:

12.18am: Can you go ahead and reboot that system?

Sure, rebooting now.

12.20am: OK, where are we with that system?

It's still shutting down. Some services take a while to close.

12.23am: Can you give us a status on that system?

12.26am: Are we there yet?

Yes, I'm logging on now.

Many virtual machines don't have any trouble shutting down or booting up, and boot times can take less than four minutes. Those of you who have experience with both types of systems know that I'm not exaggerating. If I've exaggerated in this demo, it's in shortening the time for a physical system reboot, and lengthening the amount for a virtual system reboot. The illustration is simply a demonstration of the difference between the two.

Reboot times are no longer a significant time problem during maintenance windows, which lowers the duration of maintenance windows considerably. It also makes troubleshooting through multiple reboots a lot less tedious. If you have to employ a team of system administrators to manage hundreds of server systems who reboot servers at least once a month for patching, you've saved a huge amount of time — time that translates as less down time.

Time is money.

You're not just saving your system administrator's time. Add up the time saved for everyone on that call, plus time saved for the hardware guy standing by in the datacenter in case of a hardware failure.

You can do the math yourself. The savings is huge.

Converting your physical systems can save money, you know that already. It can save labor too. But most of all, it can save time.

The purpose of this advisory article is to educate you on virtual machine density. No vendor can say with any accuracy that their solution will net you a certain conversion rate for physical to virtual systems without knowing some vital capacity information. Although I often hear eight to one, 10 to one, 20 to one, or more to one, there's no method to that madness.

Now keep in mind that I'm talking about server virtualization in this post. There are vendors who can tell you within a few virtual machines for desktop conversions. There's not as much diversity in desktops as there is in servers. Most desktop users use a web browser, a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email program, and very little else during the course of a normal workday. There are exceptions, of course, but for the average user, vendors can make pretty good guesses.

Servers are a different story.

Storage

External storage arrays, storage area networks, network-attached storage, local storage, and all the buzz terms referring to storage can make one's head spin faster than the platters on a 15K SAS drive. My best advice for virtual infrastructure storage is to buy the best you can afford, but split your storage into "tiers". Tiered storage means that you use your fastest disks for disk I/O intensive operations. We'll call this Tier 1.

Workloads that do not require high disk I/O, you place on Tier 2 storage, which is less expensive disk arrays that aren't leading edge SSDs. You can use standard architecture spinning disks for these.

For test, development, monitoring, and utility type workloads, you can use Tier 3 storage, which is very inexpensive spinning disks. And finally, Tier 4 storage is for those virtual tape libraries, ISO repositories, YUM/RPM repositories, and similar long-term storage that doesn't require high I/O speeds, or RAID 6 or RAID 10 fault tolerance.

For very intense disk I/O workloads, such as databases, you probably want to consider local storage for best performance.

Advisory: Tier your storage according to your workload needs. One size does not fit all in storage. Storage will be your largest expenditure. Buy at least twice as much as you think you will ever need, and then be prepared to expand that in less than two years.

Network

Network speed and capacity concern application developers and administrators when converting physical servers to virtual ones. The issue is that now all of your virtual machines will share network bandwidth with their host systems. This can be a problem for those network bandwidth-hungry applications and workloads if you don't plan ahead.

Host systems allow you to "team" physical NICs into a larger, single NIC. Blade enclosures also allow NIC teaming to pass more network traffic. NIC teaming also allows you to efficiently run multiple VLANs on your hosts. Virtual machine pools often require multiple VLANs, so the host must be able to support them. It's common practice for administrators to segregate network traffic by type for virtual machines using VLANs.

Advisory: Measure your network bandwidth requirements prior to converting physical systems to virtual ones. You don't want to "choke" applications that have high bandwidth needs. A bit of capacity measurement up front might mean that some applications have to remain on physical systems.

Server hardware

Your chosen server hardware can have a profound effect on virtual machine density. Again, a good capacity and performance chart will give you a good idea of the CPU and memory capacity that you'll need to accommodate those converted physical machines.

Remember that your dual core, 16GB RAM physical machine probably doesn't need that much capacity as a virtual system. The performance numbers will tell you what your actual utilization is, and then you can judge from that how much resources to dedicate to its virtual replacement.

The rule of thumb is to purchase more capacity than you need, or at least allow for easy expansion of your current capacity. Server hardware is very powerful these days, but virtual machine sprawl and over building are your worst enemies. The worst possible scenario is to take your underutilized physical server farm and turn it into an underutilized virtual server farm.

Advisory: Buy as much capacity as you can afford. Allow for intelligent growth and expansion. Watch sprawl. Keep a hot spare around for failures.

Workload type

The type of workload you have to convert affects density because some workloads burn capacity quicker than others. And they can burn different types of capacity. For example, some workloads use a lot of memory, while only nibbling at CPU cycles. Many vendors have affinity rules that you can tweak to separate certain virtual machines from one another to alleviate bottlenecks associated with combing too many of the same type of workload onto a single host.

You'd be surprised how little thought goes into placing virtual machines, separating them, and keeping them balanced. Administrators think that allowing the vendor's balancing algorithms to keep workloads segregated will work. It won't. You have to study the type of workload from each of your transitioning systems, and determine how its use of available capacity will affect other virtual machines in the cluster.

Advisory: Relieve compute bottlenecks by watching what type of workloads you're deploying. Apply affinity rules. Cap memory and CPU usages where appropriate for virtual machines.

Workload Diversity

Workload diversity will help increase your virtual machine density. You want to consider the workload type every time you deploy a new virtual machine to a cluster host. For example, you would not want to deploy several disk I/O intensive virtual machines to a single host in addition to other workloads. You'd want to spread those database virtual machines to other hosts, and maintain a high level of diversity on each host.

For example, hosting a database system with web server virtual machines, application server virtual machines, and network service virtual machines is workload diversity.

There is also a need to do this same type of diversification on your storage arrays. You want to diversify your storage workloads as well. Those disk I/O intensive database virtual machines should not exist on the same arrays with each other. You have to diversify all of your capacities: CPU, memory, network, and disk.

Advisory: Spread your workload types among your hosts and on your storage arrays. Remember that those disk I/O intensive workloads might be better served on local SSDs than on network-attached storage.

Server consolidation and physical to virtual conversion requires more than intuition or marketing conjecture, they require hard numbers from capacity and performance data. They also require some thought as environments grow. You can't just randomly place virtual machines anywhere you want in a cluster and expect that the software balancing will take care of your needs. I've given you some areas to focus on for your own server conversion and consolidation efforts. Please keep me posted on your progress and what kinds of virtual machine density numbers you successfully manage to score.

Please introduce yourself and your organization.

My name is Jennifer S Torlone. I am a senior director of Technology and Information Services at Amerijet Holdings, Inc, Amerijet's parent company.

What were you doing that needed this type of technology?

As a global cargo shipping company carrying more than 200 million pounds of freight annually to over 550 destinations worldwide, time is critical to us. Customers in the Americas, Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East depend on us to move their personal and commercial cargo quickly, securely, and reliably whether its via land, sea, or air.

Amerijet's worldwide cargo transportation services rely on a flexible and integrated IT infrastructure to get planes in the air faster, meet more customs cut-off times, provide better customer service, and support our organic business growth.

However, our existing systems were not able to support our continued global growth, and we had run out of space in our datacenter facility. We needed to change our approach to technology and information services management in order to support the new product launches and extreme business growth we were expecting.

What products did you consider?

We began a three-year plan for change that included moving to a new datacenter facility and replacing our mixed-vendor environment with an end-to-end Dell and VMware infrastructure. We needed a virtual environment that could provide maximum availability and performance for Windows Server-based workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server, as well as other applications and databases, including our cargo management systems.

Why did you select this technology?

We saw an opportunity to make a fundamental shift that would turn our IT into a business enabler. We have seen what Dell can do for our business, and thought its end-to-end solutions provided the necessary ingredients to build a reliable, scalable, and flexible IT infrastructure. The assistance we would receive from Dell ProSupport would help guide us through this monumental change, so Dell was a natural choice for a partner.

Executing our three-year plan, we built a new virtualized datacenter based on Dell blade servers, storage, switches, desktops, printers, firewalls, and backup software, as well as services. To keep the physical server footprint small, we chose Dell PowerEdge M620 half-height blade servers, housed in a Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosure, running VMware vSphere.

To support our new virtual server environment, we deployed a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN with Dell AppAssure backup software. We also upgraded our 1 gigabit network to 10 gigabit Ethernet with Dell PowerConnect switches to enable an infrastructure that can easily scale in the future. To secure our network and improve visibility into application-based threats, we replaced our existing VPN solution with Dell SonicWall next-generation firewalls at our headquarters and each of our 84 sites around the world.

What tangible benefit have you received through the use of this technology?

With Dell, we were able to make this major infrastructure shift a smooth one. With assistance from Dell Services, we were able to migrate our entire datacenter in 10 hours. We have also seen a 60 percent reduction of datacenter facility costs with an energy efficient, virtualized infrastructure, running more than 120 virtual servers on just 14 Dell blades.

All the Dell equipment installed quickly, and works seamlessly together. This gives us simplicity, reliability, and speed to keep up with rapidly expanding business requirements. We are faster. The new virtualized IT infrastructure enables us to run cargo inventory reports in seconds, instead of 30 to 40 minutes, so our IT department can focus on strategic thinking and avoid unplanned downtime. We have also reduced the time to close flights by 96 percent (from 2 minutes versus 45 minutes), expediting freight transportation and improving customer satisfaction.

Moreover, we've been able to connect Amerijet's global VPN network of 84 locations around the world using Dell SonicWall. It gives us a more flexible VPN infrastructure than our previous solution. We have visibility into our entire VPN network, which we didn't have before, in addition to centralized management. The beauty of Dell SonicWall and the Global Management System is that it allows us to react quickly to business needs.

What advice would you offer others?

Making the move to a new datacenter is no easy task, and much risk is involved. Be sure to choose your technology partner wisely, one that knows your business and genuinely cares about what you do. Consider the time it will take to migrate, what support will be provided, and always keep your customers in mind.

Snapshot analysis

Amerijet Holdings considered its needs and products offered by system and virtualization technology suppliers and selected Dell and VMware. Others facing similar needs have made different selections. Some have chosen HP, IBM, or some other supplier for the systems, and a different selection of virtualization suppliers.

International support is obviously very important to a shipping company that serves a worldwide client base.

Another factor is a set of virtualization tools to address processing, network, storage virtualization, and management tools for virtualized environments.

What's most significant to me is that Amerijet took the time to consider their needs and develop an architecture rather than merely picking a few products and building their environment on them. In the long run, this careful approach is more likely to produce the desired results than one that is product-focused.

I appreciate your time, Jennifer. Thanks.

As often happens in such discussions, the conversation galloped through quite a bit of territory. Topics such as the Apache Software Foundation's role in making open-source software available and enterprise ready, the difference between offering raw and enterprise-ready technology, and the evolution of big data in the enterprise were all considered.

The Apache Software Foundation's role in open source

Doscher and Ingersoll made a point of praising the efforts of the Apache Software Foundation during the initial moments of our rambling conversation. They pointed out that the technology, not vendor, focus of the organization makes it possible for open source project groups to gather and rapidly build technology focused on new tasks, and make it available broadly.

They went on to point out the work being done on Lucene, a text search engine written entirely in Java, and Solr, an enterprise search server based upon the Lucene library.

Raw versus enterprise-ready technology

The conversation turned to discuss how LucidWorks and its Apache Software Foundation colleagues are doing their best to offer packaged, enterprise-ready software, rather than just creating another open-source project. This means offering usable examples, good documentation, and both representational state transfer (REST) and web application programming interfaces.

Doscher and Ingersoll discussed how LucidWorks' customers have been able to take LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data, and put them immediately to work because of the company's efforts in making the raw technology into enterprise-ready tools. In their view, these customers have seen the value of the open-source technology, and are pressing it into service.

I'm hoping to speak with one or more of their customers to present a customer profile here.

The evolution of big data and search

Doscher and Ingersoll then went on to discuss how enterprise search and big data have evolved from looking carefully into the past to tease out what insights and learning are available to becoming another important information source for companies.

The key challenge today is moving from rigid systems that gathered, organized, and analyzed data based upon previously known questions to dynamic systems that can immediately look at streams of rapidly changing data coming from many sources. Their hope is that today's systems can help analysts discover the right questions to ask, rather than just providing the answers to previously known questions.

Snapshot analysis

LucidWorks is one of a growing number of technology companies that are building products based upon open-source software that was created in products hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. It is fascinating how they are cooperating to build the basic technology and then focusing on different competitive market niches. Each time I mentioned what I thought was a competitor, the folks from LucidWorks pointed out that those companies are partners that are trying to use their individual strengths together to serve the market.

This is an area that is worth watching.

Hotels versus apartments

Many companies view their datacenters like apartments. Systems were acquired to house a single set of workloads for a long period of time. Hillier asserted that today's modern, virtualized datacenters work differently. This, he pointed out, is the reason why performance and configuration management tools don't make the best use of available resources, and costs are higher than really needed.

Hillier suggested that hotels are a better model for how today's datacenters are being used. Virtual workloads come in, stay a while, and then leave. If resources aren't reclaimed and used to support a different virtual workload, datacenter efficiency and overall datacenter performance suffer. Costs for systems, storage, and software would all be higher than really necessary.

Making configuration management into a game like Tetris

IT administration would be well advised to use tools that make it possible to learn how these workloads run, what resources they use, and how they interact with one another, and then place them on systems. The process, he pointed out, is a bit like playing a game of Tetris with virtual workloads.

Deep analytics show where things should go

CiRBA uses what Hillier called "deep analytics" to learn how workloads work, what resources they use, and even the impact of plans for future expansion to transform how workloads are placed. CiRBA's technology can then automate the process of instructing systems, virtualization, and other management software to move workloads into an optimal configuration.

CiRBA can currently analyze workloads executing on Mainframes, midrange systems, and X86-based industry standard systems. It can then optimize workloads running on X86 and Power-based systems.

Snapshot analysis

Viewing systems as if they were a hotel chain is a very simple model, offering some profound insights. Rather than thinking about workloads being static, moving in, and then staying in an apartment, it is rather helpful to think about virtualized environments being like a hotel. Travelers come in, stay a while, and then move on. The goal of hotel management is hosting the largest number of travelers in the most efficient manner.

If I consider today's evolving software licensing policies that allow multiple virtual insistences of a given product to execute on a single physical system using one software license, making as many virtual workloads as possible share one physical system could certainly reduce software licensing costs.

Since more "eggs would be in a single basket", it is very important that performance, resource utilization, and other operational characteristics be monitored very carefully. If performance anomalies start to appear, it would be wise to quickly find out what is happening, and move workloads to other "hotel rooms" quickly to prevent outages.

CiRBA's ideas are interesting and could be very valuable to companies having highly dynamic datacenters or operators of multi-tenant datacenters. If your company has this type of operation, learning more about CiRBA's technology could be very helpful.

I can't tell you how many times I hear that "cloud computing is a fad" or "the cloud is inherently not secure", or best of all, "the Cloud is not a sustainable business model". To all of those, I simply say, "Nonsense". I'd like to say something related to bovine excrement, but I'll resist. Cloud computing is not a fad. It is not inherently a security risk. And it certainly is a sustainable business model. Cloud computing is the latest IT "fad" to become the target of the short-sighted commentary and naysaying that I've observed for the past three decades.

If you look at what's happened over those past three decades in IT, you see that I'm spot on with that statement.

Don't believe me?

How about the personal computer, as my first example. That's about 30 or so years old. How did that "fad" turn out? I can remember analysts and newscasters saying that the personal computer fad is a fleeting fancy, an expensive hobby, or a rich man's toy.

I'll name the fads that I can recall for you, but I'll spare you the details of each along the way (and they are not necessarily in chronological order):

• Personal computers

• Mobile phones

• Windows

• Apple stuff

• Linux

• Virtualization

• Laptops

• Tablets

• Blade servers

• Telecommuting

• Cloud Computing

Now look back, if you will, and cite examples of those fads that burned out like an old man's pipe. You can't name one, can you? Nope, you can't.

That's because they aren't fads at all. They're real. They fill a need. They're part of our technological evolution.

Cloud computing is no different from the rest of that list.

It fills a need — a need for low-cost, agile, OPEX-charged computing that's available 24x7 anywhere in the world. For some strange reason, analysts and observers see cloud computing as some sort of "tech devil", or some hellspawn that is very different from what has existed for many years under other names.

I find it both disturbing and humorous to imagine these people penning their negative reactions to cloud computing, when most of them haven't a clue what it even is that they're talking about. It's kind of like people who toss around the term "trans fat". They have no idea what trans fat is. They have heard the term and they know it's bad.

Well, in case you're wondering, I know what trans fat is. I know what cis fat is, as well. I can draw them for you. And I can tell you that cloud computing is here to stay, and that all services, even your operating systems, will exist only in the horrible, terrible, unsecure, devil-spawn fad that we now call the Cloud.

It makes me wonder how progress in this world was ever made with so many people standing about saying, "Nope, that'll never work", or "Don't waste your time with that nonsense". It makes me realize that without those hard-headed, negativity-deaf, determined innovators, there are many things that we wouldn't have today. Here's a partial list of those things:

• Radio

• Airplanes

• Cars

• Trains

• Telephones

• An accurate view of the solar system

• Television

• Personal computers

• Cloud computing

Now to some of Mr.Ranger's points from his article:

At the moment cloud still accounts for a relatively small slice of enterprise IT spending — perhaps no more than five or six percent of the total software market, although one prediction sees this climb to 20 percent by the end of the decade.

Yes, it might currently account for a small percentage, but by the end of the decade, it will comprise 90 percent plus. You have to understand that technology adoption isn't linear. When the first personal computers hit the market, uptake was slow, but quickly and exponentially grew to millions of converts. Same for cell phones, TVs, cars, and just about anything else technology-related that you can think of.

That's partly because companies remain cautious about the new technology, but also because they have significant investments in their existing on-premise IT infrastructure, both hardware and software.

True, but how long does it take for on-premise hardware to become obsolete? Three years? Five years? By the end of the decade, none of the hardware in datacenters right now will still be running in datacenters. That's plenty of time for conversion, and it will happen. By 2020, only a small percentage of hardware (<20) will be left on premise as privately-owned. The cloud will be the next utility, the next commodity, if you will, and we'll purchase it much the same as we do electricity, water, or gasoline — in bulk, and as needed.

Indeed, the rapid growth of cloud (and Software as a Service in particular) has made some question whether on-premise applications have a long-term future at all, or whether all applications will eventually be cloud-powered.

See? Steve realizes the folly of thinking that the cloud is a passing fancy or a fad. He is correct that all applications will be cloud-powered.

But it's also possible that on-premise applications still have some use — and some fight — left in them, at least as far as CIOs are concerned.

They do, but very little, and it's running out fast. CIOs will convert to cloud or be cloud-convinced when the winds of change blow their minds that direction. Everyone will soon have a "cloud initiative", or whatever buzz-term someone invents for it. The bottom line is that if you aren't already researching or planning your "cloud initiative", you're behind the curve.

John Gracyalny, VP IT at SafeAmerica Credit Union, said: "I don't consider the internet stable enough for truly critical functions. I'm also reluctant to trust a third-party datacenter's security."

I don't know John, but it sounds like he needs to get on his horse and mosey on over to the General Store and answer the clue telegraph. You trust third parties to prepare your food, to service your car, and to handle your mail, so what is it that makes third-party trust so difficult in IT operations? I can remember when every company wanted to run its own mail server and web server in house. Why? Why do you need to do that? Are you an email provider or a web hosting company? If not, why not allow someone else, who knows what they're doing, do it instead?

I don't build my own cars, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners. I don't even build my own computers anymore. If you need to feel ownership and control of something, plant a tree.

Some CIOs realize that moving to cloud-based services is part of the technology evolution inevitable. Those are the CIOs to keep. The other ones, unfortunately, not so much. If your CIO isn't looking to take your company to the future in technology, what good is he or she? Perhaps there are some openings for CAOs* somewhere.

Cloud computing is a fact. Cloud computing is a good thing. It is the future of IT for business and for personal computing. Choose a direction now, and head toward it for the future, because whether or not you like it, the cloud will (entirely) replace in-house applications. And it will happen sooner, rather than later.

*Chief Anachronism Officers: In charge of keeping things the way they were yesterday.

What is Lacuna Systems?

Lacuna Systems was started in 2009 by a group of web operations specialists. They searched for a product that would allow IT operations folks to quickly detect and resolve application problems before workloads would slow down or fail. They didn't find anything on the market that addressed the problems they saw, and so, they got together to "do a show". They created a product called Indico.

What does Indico do?

Here's how Lacuna describes Indico:

Indico VM, Indico 1000, and Indico 2000 are purpose-built appliances that provide the easiest platform yet for monitoring web application performance. No matter what platform you choose, Indico is the only product that installs in 15 minutes and provides critical performance information immediately for every web application. It's a snap.

Indico uses native APIs to gather data from the load balancers already on your network. No need to change anything. Indico analyzes data patterns for every web application to actually predict potential performance issues. It harnesses the power of algorithms to baseline performance for every application metric as well as across metrics to detect any abnormality. This increases your visibility, and drastically reduces your mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) problems that can lead to website incidents.

Best of all, Indico is automated, and requires no care; no feeding. It just delivers your critical performance data, day in and day out, to ensure your crucial web applications are performing at their peak.

Does this read like the marketing materials offered by all of the other competitors? You bet!

Lacuna Systems' answer to "what's different about your product?"

I asked the company representative to help me understand what's different about Lacuna's products, and how it differentiates its offering from everyone else's. For those who are unfamiliar with the acronym "ADC", it means "Application Delivery Controller".

An ADC is technology meant to increase the availability and reliability of applications in a physical, virtual, or cloud-based application delivery network. It is meant to offer functions such as load balancing to web-based applications.

Here's the response I was given by Lacuna Systems:

So here are some points that Lacuna feels differentiates them from the rest of the APM space:

• We have a unique set of data from the ADCs that nobody else has managed to tame

• We do not require any care and feeding that other ADC solutions may require

• We install in minutes and require no expensive professional services to install

• We use ADCs that are already in the network to gather application performance data, there is no need for network modifications, switch SPAN ports, network TAPs, or any other equipment

• We immediately and automatically detect new applications and start profiling performance on them with no user intervention required

• We detect potential performance issues 20-30 minutes before other tools, allowing faster MTTD and MTTR

• We provide actionable information about where the performance problem is happening providing granularity down to the server level.

Snapshot analysis

Application performance is an increasingly difficult issue for companies to address.

Applications have gone from executing on a single mainframe to being a collection of services offered by a number of distributed servers. Each of these services may be offered by a number of servers, each located in the same or a different datacenter. The services might be supporting multiple applications as well. Just to make things more challenging, each of these services might be executing on a physical, virtual, or cloud-based server. As the level of complexity increased and as more systems were involved in any given task soared, the industry started calling them "workloads", rather than just applications.

What are APM suppliers doing?

APM suppliers have tried to select a specific computing solution and tried to apply special techniques in gathering, storing, and analyzing operational performance data. Some suppliers have focused on important back-end data processing. Others have focused on front-end customer experience management. Still others have focused on web application performance.

Different approaches to APM

Some suppliers require that software agents be installed on all of the systems supporting a given workload. Others work with the management interfaces offered by the systems, application frameworks, applications, database engines, storage, and network. Still others sift through all of the network traffic to sniff out what is happening. Some use all of the techniques to gather operational data.

Different results

Some conduct electronic triage to explain what happened. Others use big data, machine intelligence, pattern matching, and "predictive analytics" to find anomalies to warn IT operations before problems can occur.

Different ways to display the results

Some present the analysis of the data through printed reports. Others present the analysis in colorful graphical dashboards.

Where does Lacuna System fit?

Lacuna systems, like other APM suppliers, appears to be describing what its products do using the same language and catch phrases as all of the others. It appears that it's focusing on web application performance, not back-end database performance or end-user experience management as seen by someone accessing a workload from a smartphone or tablet.

Others, such as BMC, CA, IBM, Netuitive, Prelert, Zenoss, and a long list of others, appear to be offering technology that does something very similar.

The challenge that customers face is that all of these suppliers are doing something ever so slightly differently and are, typically, using the same language to describe what they're doing. This means that customers must gather marketing materials, white papers, and videos offered by as many as 15 or 20 different suppliers. Only then can the customer figure out what supplier or combination of suppliers can address their needs.

OpTier SaaS

OpTier is now offering companies access to what it calls "an enterprise APM solution with deep-dive IT operational analytics (ITOA) capabilities in a cloud-based platform". This service offering makes it possible for customers to use OpTier's end-to-end transaction tracing capabilities to quickly identify problems and then resolve them.

Since OpTier SaaS is a cloud-based service, customers need not install or configure software in order to gain this insight.

A bit about OpTier

Wild pointed out that OpTier was founded about six years ago and offered transaction monitoring. This capability is still at the heart of all of the company's other offerings. OpTier's technology makes it possible to "tag" each and every transaction, and enough context information about that transaction to allow customers to see all of the systems, application frameworks, databases, networking, and storage facilities that are involved.

Over time, Wild added, the ability to gather, store, and analyze granular operational data from all of these components was added.

When asked what distinguishes OpTier from all of the other competitors, Wild responded that his company's goal was to help companies by providing insight into their business not just see what is slowing down systems or causing them to fail. This means, of course, that the technology scrapes the logs of components, sniffs what's happening on the network, and gathers data from management interfaces offered by all of the systems and components on the network. 

Rather than storing all of the operational data being generated by those systems, OpTier stores enough information to correlate how everything is performing so that IT or business analysts can learn about run rate characteristics of their systems and be able to see anomalies.

OpTier SaaS combines our end-to-end transaction tracing capabilities with advanced ITOA to provide an enterprise APM solution capable of 2-click problem identification to resolution.

Snapshot analysis

OpTier's demonstration is impressive, but I found myself thinking about how similar it was to presentations offered by 10 or 15 other competitors. All of them appear to offer the ability to see what is happening and predict, to some extent, what is likely to happen next. 

I think that all of the competitors, including OpTier, need to find better ways to articulate what they do, what benefit customers should expect, and pass "the reasonable person test".

What is "the reasonable person test", you ask? It is the simple question that a somewhat knowledgeable person would ask when hearing a company's message for the first time — "Why should I care about you and your products?"

I'm pretty sure that OpTier has a very good set of answers to that simple question. I'm also sure that its customers would express satisfaction with the company and what it is doing for them. My chief concern for OpTier is that the market is very noisy; many of the competitors are saying nearly the same things and their demonstrations look very similar.

The argument is in deployment.

As just about anyone in IT can tell you, operating systems and applications have grown exponentially over the years to the point where broadband is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. We used to think that downloading a 600MB ISO image was a major, day-long ordeal. But now, there are 4GB ISO images and multiple DVD images for some application suites. Patch payloads can reach the gigabyte level. Network bandwidth is at an all-time high usage level, so much so that some companies have segregated their networks into Production, Backup/Recovery, and Maintenance. Maintenance is the network where IT lives. Patch distribution, operating system deployments, security updates, downloads, and system administration.

Cloud-based SAM doesn't minimize application or operating system bloat, but what it does is leverage the internet's bandwidth for delivery, monitoring, and metering. Think of your own workplace. If yours is a geographically diverse workplace, as mine is, you'll understand why cloud-based SAM is almost a requirement. I say "almost" because it is still possible to perform these functions via VPN connectivity when users connect their devices to the corporate network. It isn't efficient, but it does work.

The more clever way to setup SAM for a diversely located worker population is to place the software asset management system in the public cloud space, and allow the processes to take place via user's personal bandwidth. It's kind of an extension of BYOD, but in this case, it's BYOB, where the "B" is bandwidth.

By using an employee's personal bandwidth for that "last mile" leg of the delivery process, the corporate network's bandwidth, even on a segregated network, remains available for monitoring, operating system delivery, server patching, administration, and other required maintenance activities. 

Cloud-based SAM will be most effective with user devices, which will always outnumber datacentered ones. User devices burn up the bandwidth due to the sheer numbers of them. 

So you see now that cloud-based SAM isn't some pariah waiting in the wings to strike back at you; it's the future of delivery, monitoring, patching, and maintenance of user devices, and probably a lot of servers as well. 

I'm not sure exactly what the fear or anxiety over cloud-based services is. It's astonishing to me that IT people are so fearful of cloud computing, especially public cloud offerings, that the cloud has been demonized — demonized to the point of being a FUD monster. 

Security is always the biggest fear when talking about public cloud, and it is an issue. I'm not minimizing the importance of it, but not using public cloud is like saying driving a car is too dangerous since there's a fatal car crash every 10 seconds in the US.

Time will show that my argument in the debate is the correct one, because SAM and cloud computing are a match made in IT heaven.

What do you think of cloud-based SAM? Good idea or bad omen? Talk back and let me know.

Typically, Steve is presenting one of his clients in the hopes that I'll be interested enough in their products or services to speak with an executive. Steve appears to understand what Kusnetzky Group does and doesn't do, and only mentions clients that would be of interest. In short, he never wastes my time or his clients' time.

I told you that little story to tell you this one.

Too close to see the forest

Steve and I were talking about the role Public and Market Relations plays in the go-to-market strategy of a technology company. The challenge most executives in technology companies face is that they are too close to their product, their technology and their own strategy to take the time to think about speaking with customers. They often produce messaging that isn't interesting, isn't relevant, or is flat-out unbelievable to anyone who hasn't smelled the fumes produced by the company's labs. All they see is the tree their company offers, not the forest that surrounds it.

Haven't done their homework

Quite often, these executives haven't done their homework and have no idea of the history of their particular market segment. They'll claim the be "the first", "the only", "uniquely qualified", or some other similar claptrap that is the marketing equivalent of wearing a sign that reads, "I'm ignorant and I want to convince you that my products are the best so you'll buy them".

Quite often, these executives appear not to know that the idea behind their product was implemented on mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s, midrange systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and appeared on industry standard, X86-based, systems in the 2000s. Often, their product isn't the first, the second, or even the tenth implementation of the concept. Oh, it is likely that their company has developed in a new way or based upon some new technology, but the concept has been around for quite some time. I've discovered that only a few executives appear to know about the history of technology in their markets.

In any case, executives are trying to frame the conversation just like a magician tries to focus the attention of the audience away from his/her special moves or procedures.

The art of misdirection

What these executives are trying to do is use the art of misdirection, very much like a skilled magician, to cause the audience to look where they'd like them to look. In the area of marketing communications, this magic is done with words rather than physical motions. So, a company might grab a word or phrase such as "grid computing" or "virtualization" that has a specific meaning and has been in use for decades and try to bend its meaning so that it supports their case that they're the first, the only or the best qualified.

In reality, if customers just took a moment to look around, they'd quickly find many examples of what this company is doing and learn that all products and strengths and weaknesses. Even the worst product can be useful in the right place.

Healthcare example

Steve went on to talk about one of his clients that offers no-nonsense IT for healthcare providers. His client's primary skill is taking years of experience as a CIO at a telecommunications company and cutting through all of the supplier marketing nonsense. His client promises to reduce his customer's costs by helping them find the best solution to the problem or problems they're having.

Here are some examples that were mentioned:

• There is no such thing as a healthcare network router, there are only network routers

• There is no such thing as a healthcare virtual machine software package

• There is no such thing as a healthcare industry standard system.

So if a supplier offers a healthcare company a healthcare-specific product that is 50 percent more costly than the competition, it is time to show that representative the egress rather than reaching for a checkbook.

Awareness is the key

It is wise for IT practitioners to understand that it is possible for specific applications of a technology to target a specific vertical market's needs, it is highly unlikely that the technology is really limited to that use. It is best if IT practitioners take the time to be aware of how technology is being used in other vertical markets.

Some background

Each and every time Oracle makes a move, it increases the price of its database, changes the terms and conditions under which its products can be used or announces that a platform, such as Intel's Itanium, will no longer be supported, EnterpriseDB steps up to explain that PostgreSQL combined with EnterpriseDB's enhancements is up to the task of supporting enterprise-level workloads at a much lower overall cost.

As would be expected, other database suppliers, such as IBM, have also taken up the anti-Oracle song. IBM would make the case that the combination of its DB2, its wealth of system platforms and its extensive consulting services would also make a better choice for enterprises.

Even though the court has forced Oracle to continue to support Oracle Database on HP's Itanium-based systems for a time, EnterpriseDB would point out that it is hard to believe that this support will be enthusiastic, timely or comprehensive.

Available options

Boyajian pointed out that organizations have only a few options when a database supplier, such as Oracle, tries to change the rules of the game. The available options are:

• Stay the course — continue using installed systems and software until they no longer can be made to function. The decision on where to go next can be delayed while market dynamics play out.
• Swap out the database and keep the same systems and software — suppliers such as EnterpriseDB and IBM both claim highly compatible products. Both companies also are offering both services and tools to help enterprises replace Oracle Database with their products.
• Swap out the hardware and keep the same database — Boyajian pointed out that Oracle's moves were designed to move HP Itanium users over to Oracle's Sun servers. He commented that if an enterprise was considering a platform change, considering servers from Dell, IBM or other servers from HP might be a better choice.

What's holding enterprises back?

Boyajian pointed out that a number of factors are holding organizations back and EnterpriseDB has been working hard to address all of these issues.

• Moving from one database to another or from one platform to another can be a time-consuming, complex and costly endeavor — highly compatible products can reduce both the time and the costs of a move. Boyajian pointed out that Postgres Plus is highly compatible and is available on Windows 32, Windows 64, Linux 32, Linux 64, Sun Solaris, and HP HP-UX on Itanium-based systems.
• Concerns about performance, security, or scalability can make a move seem unattractive — EnterpriseDB has done a quite a bit of work to address each of those issues and the company believes that its Postgres Plus is equipped to handle nearly every enterprise workload.

Snapshot analysis

Although my conversation with EnterpriseDB's Boyajian was very interesting, it is still clear that every company's environment is a bit different than all others. So, as I've commented before, there is no single cut and dried solution.

EnterpriseDB has chipped away at all of the potential objections to their product and now offer products that can handle nearly every enterprise workload. Boyajian would point to the increasing number of Global 1000 customers and a string of successes to prove the point.

Oracle customers who are feeling unsure of the company's intentions or strategy would be wise to speak with other suppliers, such as EnterpriseDB, to learn what option would be best for them.