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.

What Kaminario has to say about the fourth generation of K2

Today's legacy storage architectures are 20 years old. Outdated spinning disk architectures can't handle today's 100 percent storage growth per year without driving up costs significantly. Enterprises are especially challenged, as business-critical application workloads are expected to grow 70 percent over the next four years. Current scale-up and stack-up SSD architectures compromise latency, bandwidth, and consistency in performance for capacity. Only the K2 v4 can linearly grow capacity without degrading the performance of bandwidth, latency, or IOPS and, at the same time, provide the resiliency required by enterprises.

Kaminario K2 v4 specific enhancements include:

• Consistently high performance: 400 percent more read/write bandwidth than previous versions with consistently low latency (120 microsecond writes) and industry-leading IOPS for any mixed workloads.

• Lower TCO: K2 provides a 500 percent density increase over previous versions and is now offered at half the price.

• Safety and reliability: Non-disruptive upgrades, guaranteed performance under any failure with minimal impact (usually under 10 percent), hot swappable SAS drives and patent-pending high performance, space-efficient snapshot technology provide consistent enterprise-class SLAs.

• Expanded support for general purpose, server, and desktop virtualization (VDI) environments such as VMware VAAI, OpenStack cloud computing and RESTful APIs. Customer's choice of iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections.

Kaminario SPEAR

One of the most important elements of the Kaminario K2 family is its storage virtualization software technology. The Kaminario Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR) enfolds storage elements in a very clever and intelligent environment that does a number of things to improve storage utilization and performance. Here are a few of the many software capabilities of SPEAR:

• Parallel I/O processing — I/O requests coming from systems and workloads are efficiently distributed across the K2 storage cluster. All reads and writes are spread over multiple storage nodes to reduce latency and response, while at the same time increasing both the rate of I/O processing and throughput.

• DataProtect Self-Healing High Availability and Fast Data Protection — SPEAR is designed to support the intelligent fail/over capabilities of the K2 hardware. This technology detects failures, initiates the self-healing process and manages the dynamic cluster reconfiguration when needed.

• Flash Endurance — SPEAR minimizes writes to the Flash media and maximizes Flash endurance. It utilizes a system-wide write cache that eliminates hotspots and it distributes writes across all Flash media in the system, thus sustaining global wear leveling.

SPEAR is designed to facilitate upgrades. Updates can be made to the BIOS, firmware, and patches to any of the Kaminario K2 components while the system is online.

Kaminario also supports a single management service across all storage elements in a K2 storage system.

Snapshot analysis

Today's virtualized and distributed workloads can strain the storage system. Flash-based storage, such as Kaminario's K2, has been meeting the challenge of resiliency, I/O performance, latency and throughput these workloads impose. Kaminario's K2 family of storage systems has been addressing customer requirements for quite some time and has pushed the boundaries of scalability and performance with each new generation of products.

The Kaminario K2 v4 offers another step forward and increases Kaminario's capability to support high levels of scalability and performance in mixed workloads while keeping the budget in mind.

Kaminario, however, faces a very competitive environment. Many other storage suppliers are using flash storage and storage virtualization technology to address the very same requirements. Dell, EMC, HDS, IBM, NetApp, Sanboloic, and several others are trying to win over the same customer accounts.

Can Kaminiaro win against larger and better funded competitors? The technology the company is offering can win if potential customers take the time to evaluate what it can do for them.

Who is SQLstream?

SQLstream has been working to help its customers manage and use real-time streams of operational data using familiar ANSI SQL rather than forcing them to learn new techniques and tools. They've also worked to make their technology enhance the use of other Big Data tools, such as Apache Hadoop.

Industry trends

Our discussion examined the industry in the following way:

•  Business operations rely on real-time continuous business transactional applications. These help organizations with the day-to-day functions needed to keep the business going. Insight into unexpected market conditions, changing customer requirements and detecting anomalies typically aren't part of business transaction processing applications.
•  Business intelligence tools are used to do an after-the-fact analysis of what has happened and help organizations get answers to questions they already have about what's happening. While these applications are very important, they are designed to only answer questions that are already known. They may or may not be helpful in understanding rapidly changing market or business requirements.
•  The market is seeing the emergence of operational intelligence applications that gather, analyze and report on operational and business data as it is being created. Often these tools are categorized as "predictive analytics." They are designed to learn about how the organization's workloads are operating and to be able to detect changes or anomalies found in that stream of data. While the tools in this area are very powerful, they often are built using a different type of architecture than used for business transaction processing or business intelligence applications. This creates challenges for organizations that do not have expertise in highly distributed, multi-system data storage, retrieval tools, data reduction tools and pattern matching tools.

What does SQLstream s-Server do?

SQLstream describes s-Server in the following way:

SQLstream s-Server 3.0 is a massively scalable, real-time Big Data management platform. Data feeds can be anywhere and in any format, including log files, sensors, networks, social media and web feeds. Real-time alerts, aggregated information and in-memory operational intelligence can be visualized immediately while streaming the information directly to external systems, applications and databases. Ultimately, you gain immediate insight into your data, enabling you to respond while it matters.

Version 3 adds increased performance, offers plug-ins allowing access to a large number of applications and tools, and makes it possible to analyze data as it arrives as if it were stored in a traditional relational database.

Snapshot analysis

Organizations find it difficult to keep up with the rapidly generated data coming from their operational systems. This can include log files generated by operating systems, application frameworks, data management tools, storage systems and networks. It can also include data generated by industrial or security sensors, wireless devices, GPS data or data coming from the organization's business transactions. While tools such as Hadoop, NO-SQL and others can be useful, a fast implementation of a SQL-based database would make life easier for IT developers and analysts who are already familiar with ANSI standard SQL as a mechanism for data access and analysis.

I like the fact that this tool makes Big Data analytics available to organizations without forcing them to relearn everything and take up a different approach to data management and analysis.

Part of what helped bring Proxmox to mainstream use is its graphical interface management for container virtualization — traditionally handled only by the command line. The additional KVM setup and management capability has pulled in a greater audience as well.

Combining both KVM virtualization and container virtualization gives you the best of both virtual worlds. KVM is what you know as traditional virtualization, where you have a graphical console or the optional text console for nix systems. Container virtualization is a type of virtualization that goes by many names, including zones, containers, and jails. It is the most efficient type of virtualization in that you can set up hundreds of virtual machines per host.

Containers use a "jailed" or partitioned directory system for each virtual machine, and it leverages the system's kernel and other shared libraries. This type of virtualization can only host virtual machines that use the running kernel.

KVM virtual machines, on the other hand, can be of just about any operating system: Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.

And note that the graphical interface, shown in the original screenshot above, looks very much like that of Citrix XenCenter and VMware's vCenter. You'll have no trouble integrating Proxmox into your environment, or using it exclusively as your sole virtualization platform.

"When we first released Proxmox VE in 2008, there was no open-source GUI solution for container-virtualization with OpenVZ suitable to our needs," explained Martin Maurer, CEO of Proxmox. "That's why we developed Proxmox VE. Most virtualization projects focused on XEN, but after we tested KVM, we realised that this technology was more suitable to our needs. Now, five years later, KVM is the best established hypervisor in almost all Linux distributions. Proxmox VE is still one of the easiest to use, but also very flexible open-source virtualization products, combining KVM and containers on one platform."

Milestones for Proxmox Virtual Environment

• First public release on April 15, 2008: Proxmox VE V0.9

• GUI for managing container and KVM, available in more than 16 languages

• April 2012: Proxmox VE V2.0

• RESTful web API

• High availability (HA) based on Redhat Cluster and Corosync

• 2013: Over 40,000 hosts in more than 140 countries

• Active community: More than 20,000 forum members

• Roadmap Q2/2013: Proxmox VE 3.0.

One special feature not necessarily found in open-source, community-driven projects is commercial support. Proxmox Server Solutions offers several levels of support subscription plans for business use, ranging between €120 and €800 per year.

If you haven't tried Proxmox, I suggest that you do. It installs quickly on bare metal and is easy to use. You'll be shocked at how quickly you can create an entire virtual infrastructure.

If you don't know much about Proxmox or container virtualization, the links below will help you with more information. You can always ask me, too. I'll be glad to help.

Additional information

• Proxmox: The Ultimate Hypervisor

• Website: www.proxmox.com

• Wiki Proxmox VE: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page

• Roadmap: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap

• Downloads: http://www.proxmox.com/downloads/proxmox-ve

I was surprised to discover that the packages available all offered less and were more expensive than the services offered by Verizon FIOS. Since it was just about the only game in town, I held my nose and accepted the agreement.

I called a few days before the scheduled installation date just to reconfirm. I'm really glad I did. TWC had canceled my installation and new service without notice!

While the call center agent was friendly and was trying to be helpful, she was unable to recreate the package that I purchased back in February. I had been offered a package that included cable television for 3 digital TVs, their "ultimate" Internet service (much slower than offered by Verizon FIOS), and a digital telephone for one price, and was told the same package now cost $60 more a month.

I spoke with several agents via telephone, twitter and TWC's own chat line. In the end, I dropped the digital telephone line to get the price somewhere near what was offered for the whole package back in February. Through the efforts of the TWC agents, I was even able to get an installation appointment for today that was  originally scheduled back in February.

I'll let you know how the installation goes.

I'm left with a few questions, including the following:

• Why was my service and the installation canceled without notice?
• Why was the promised package no longer available?
• Why was the available package $60/month more expensive than the package I was offered in February?
• Will I be able to take part in long, tedious, but useful conference calls using just my cell phone?

1 PM ET Update - Tim, the pleasant, very professional, TWC representative appeared well within the window of time promised. We did a walk through the house and noted where cable drops should go in every room. I'm feeling hopeful that most of the problems will be resolved this afternoon.

2:30 PM ET Update - Todd, one of Tim's colleagues, came to help complete the installation.

4 PM ET Update - The installation was a success. I guess persistence eventually pays off.

Here's what MokaFive has to say about M5

M5 effectively transforms iPhones and iPads into true Enterprise-class, business computing devices with all the security and manageability IT requires with the ease of use and app selection that users now expect.

The M5 platform delivers a secure, device aware, digital workspace across any network — creating a highly elastic and mobile Enterprise perimeter with significantly less management overhead than legacy VDI or mobility solutions.

Updates to M5 for iOS include:

• Secure, Encrypted Workspace Container — Deploy a corporate AES-256 bit encrypted workspace on any iOS device, and remotely wipe it without affecting the rest of the device.
• Secure Web Browsing — Securely browse internal corporate websites, SharePoint, or intranet pages from public networks without the need for a VPN client from personal iPhones/iPads.
• Cloud Storage — Securely browse and access files in a public or private cloud from any location.
• SharePoint Access — Collaborate with co-workers anywhere, anytime with remote access to SharePoint files.
• Corporate Data Store — Add intranet directories and file sharing for users to browse while online.
• Document Annotation — Make changes to documents with annotation-style editing.
• Universal Search — Search for documents across all data sources.
• Application Whitelisting — Whitelist specific personal apps and websites for inclusion in the corporate workspace.

Snapshot analysis

From time to time, I have the opportunity to speak with MokaFive. Each time I do, I'm always impressed how they are using processing, application and access virtualization technology to create an easy-to-manage, safe computing environment for Windows, Mac and smart handheld devices. I can see how their technology would be of great help to organizations whose staff, consultants or customers need a secure, reliable way to access corporate applications and data.

For example, one of my Kusnetzky Group clients requires a very high level of security, and this has offered some challenges for me and my analysts. MokaFive would have been a great solution to those challenges.

The client sends encrypted data and requires interim reports, spreadsheets and presentation decks to be sent to them in the same form.  Unfortunately, this client has selected an out-of-date, Windows-only encryption product and we use a combination of devices that include Macs, iPads and other smart handheld devices. At the time this project started, we had no Windows-based devices in the company.

During the start-up phase of the project, we tried a number of virtualization technologies to run the required encryption product. The available application virtualization tools failed to support this out-of-date encryption product. (I think died in disgrace would be the best way to say it.) The use of virtual machine software to run Windows on our Mac systems required we acquire Windows licenses as well as acquire a virtual machine software product that would allow very low level access to storage resources. In the end, we decided that purchasing a low-cost Windows 7-based laptop just to run this software would be less costly and complex.

Now we have a laptop that sits on a shelf and is run for a few minutes every month or so.

Had the client been using MokaFive's product, it would have been easy for us to encapsulate the data and deliver it to us in a form that would have been easily usable on Windows, Mac and, now, on IOS devices.

What does it take to create a balanced data center environment?

Inder pointed out that, in IBM's view, that such a balanced data center environment can only be created with a carefully selected mix of virtualization technology including processing virtualization, storage virtualization and network virtualization (see Sorting out the different layers of virtualization for more information on the layers of virtualization technology.) I pointed out that access virtualization, application virtualization and both management and security technology are also required.

He made the point that creating an environment that best meets an organization's requirements usually means deploying a mix of technologies coming from many vendors and is likely to also include many different system architectures and operating systems.

Then he turned back to the discussion of IBM's Software Defined Network for Virtual Environments.

Software Defined Network for Virtual Environment

IBM believes that creating a flexible, agile virtual environment requires the following networking components:

• A network hypervisor
• Management and security tools that support simple, easy operation in a virtual environment
• An set of tools that allow the creation of an overlay network making it possible to view the virtual network environment as just a traditional Ethernet-based LAN
• Traditional network switches and OpenFlow enabled network switches that make it easily possible to do the following:
  • Create virtual networks that can link together systems supporting components of an distributed, multi-tier, multi-site workload
  • Support a multi-tenant environment that isolates one virtual network from others
• The environment must support multiple layers of communication and management including the following
  • The data plane - the layer that carries data packets from one place to another
  • The control plane - the layer containing the logic that controls where data packets go and who can see them
  • The management plane - the layer allowing a network administrator to log into a device and configure how devices work

The company is offering a collection of hardware and software products designed to help organizations design and implement virtual environment.

Getting from today's networks to software defined networking

Our conversation then turned to a discussion of the gold rules of IT (see Reprise of the Golden Rules of IT for more information on the rules). I pointed out that to be successful in today's world, it is necessary for suppliers to help organizations get from where they are today to a desired future state without having to abandon what they're doing and start over. I pointed out that organizations don't rip out technology and replace it just for the joy of using new technology.

Inder agreed and said that is the reason that IBM is so careful to design products and services that recognize that organizations need to continue to be productive even while they're carefully implementing their future. This has means, he pointed out, that the company's products are designed to work in a multi-vendor, multi-platform, multi-site environment.

When a networking product wasn't designed to operate in a virtual environment, IBM supplies tools, such as the Distributed Virtual Switch, The OpenFlow Controller, and sometime in mid 2013, the Software Defined Network for Virtual Environments.

Snapshot analysis

I've long been a proponent of implementing an architecture and only acquiring products and services that fit into that architecture. The architecure should be based, as much as is possible, on international and industry standards rather than just upon products and technologies from a single vendor. It was refreshing to speak with an industry executive that appeared to operate based upon the same principles.

I would urge IT architects to learn more about what IBM is doing with virtualization technology in general and network virtualization in specific.

Here's a quick review of the study findings:

• 95% of respondents believe that there are benefits to using more than one manufacturer in an area of their Agency's IT infrastructure
• 45% believe that adding a supplier can drive down costs — a reduction of as much as 20% of their annual budget.
• 5% of the respondents say that their data center is using a single supplier. Another 23% say that they use just two or three suppliers.
• 41% state that their agency has not even considered introducing additional manufacturers
• 76% of the respondents indicate that their Agency specifies a supplier at least some of the time. 41% state this is true all of the time.

Snapshot analysis

Although it is clear that the study was designed to support Brocade's attempts to become a major portion of the U.S. Government IT infrastructure and reduce the penetration of both Cisco and Juniper, the analysis appears relevant to areas of the IT infrastructure other than application software. It also appears likely that the results of the study would be useful to large, non-government IT installations.

Rather than focusing on an architecture, a structured plan on functions that need to be accomplished in any given area of the IT infrastructure, organizations often take what they believe is a simpler approach: to standardize on products. An example would be to standardize on Windows as an operating system rather than specifying that the operating system should run on a specific type of hardware, offering applications that support certain functions and can be managed by a specific set of management tools. Another example would be to select a single supplier of systems, such as Dell, IBM or HP, and then standardizing on a set of system capabilities.

This approach locks the organization into a single vendor's products and creates a rather inflexible and, if the study is to be believed, more costly environment.

The study supports the notion that adding more competitors to the list can drive down capital costs and, if done properly, can manage the increase in operational costs that come from the requirement to manage multiple suppliers, multiple management tools, and other operations.

If you'd like to review the study yourself, it can be found here.

They believe that tools should be able to follow and understand the entire flow of communication between and among application components, operating systems, data managers, storage systems and network components. In their words, products should be able to do the following:

• Be able to tell if there is communication going on at all. This is what a traditional network probe offers.
• Understand who is talking with whom. This is what a network flow management tool offers.
• Understand what words are part of the conversation. This is what a packet inspection tool offers.
• Understand what words are typically used together. This is what a multi-packet inspection tool offers.
• Understand both sides of the conversation. They're calling this full-stream assembly.
• Understand what is being said. They're calling this full-content analysis.
• Understand what the conversation means. They're calling this transaction analysis.

ExtraHop would pose that the best way to accomplish this is fully understanding the network dialog going on between systems and components rather than merely instrumenting individual pieces or inserting monitoring tools into application or virtualization managers.

While what ExtraHop has to say rings true to me, I've heard the same things said by many others. A few other competitors that are singing similar songs that come immediately to mind are eG Innovations, Netuitive and Prelert. I'm sure that if I did a bit of research on the subject, I'd come up with ten or fifteen other competitors.

Some of these competitors are trying to add "machine intelligence" or "predictive analytics" to the tools that are monitoring and managing complex distributed systems.

In the end, it appears that competitors in this market are all bringing very interesting approaches and technology to the market, but are having trouble articulating what they do without using the exact same language being used by others. ExtraHop faces this challenge.

So, an IT decision-maker is just going to have to do his/her own homework and speak with a number of competitors to decide which tool or combination of tools would best fit their own organization's requirements.

Note: after publication of this commentary, ExtraHop's representative contacted me. Her note included the following:

In particular, the deck we sent should demonstrate how we differentiate from competition by offering a comprehensive solution that meets all of the requirements that you listed. In this way, we are moving beyond the traditional APM landscape into the realm of true IT Operational Intelligence – a term, which really only one vendor has attached to itself, Splunk (also an ExtraHop partner). Slide 12 in particular lists the defining characteristics of IT Operational Intelligence, which are also the fundamental components of ExtraHop’s solution.

The company is going to schedule an additional discussion about the concept of "IT Operational Intelligence." I'll comment here after we have that discussion.

Although executives want to be able to quickly learn how a slow-down or outage impacts the company's revenues and intangibles such as customer satisfaction, quick actionable answers aren't always easily created. Items such as the cost of the outage in terms of revenues, shipments, retail sales, and the like, require delving into both business and operational data. Teasing out the actual costs and value of lost opportunities often requires a team of people from different parts of the organization.

Today's management software technology has only recently developed the ability to sift through operational data, make decisions about what is happening in real time, and then project the business impact. This type of technology is known generally as "predictive analytics for IT". It may also be discussed as using machine intelligence to address this complex problem.

It is clear that it is time for IT decision-makers to embrace IT analytics and be able to easily understand the full impact their systems and solutions have on the business.

If you're interested in a quick analysis of this issue and potential solutions, I've recently released a paper focused on the business impact of IT. It can be found here, if you'd like a free copy.

The above mentioned paper was sponsored by a Kusnetzky Group client.

There is a better way and it has nothing to do with x86 virtualization. But it's still virtualization, from the people who invented it.

It's called PowerVM virtualization on Power Systems (PDF). And it's brought to you by IBM, the creator of virtualization technology.

Now, you're probably assuming that such technology comes at a price. Well, you're right, it does, but it's much lower than you think. It's also not really about the cost of the hardware and software as much as it is about the cost per workload of the hardware and software. Let that sink in for a minute and continue reading when you've wrapped your head around the concept that what you're really buying for your virtual infrastructure is capacity — capacity to handle workloads. In practical terms, compare virtual machine densities for x86 architecture systems and Power Systems. I think you'll find that your cost per VM is significantly lower with the Power Systems. You'll also find a significant boost in performance as well.

Typically, we think of virtual machines (VMs) and VM densities per unit of hardware, with that unit of hardware being a virtual machine host system and that's fine. It's hard not to think of virtualization in those terms. However, you should also consider the following factors when attempting to compare apples (Power Systems) to oranges (x86 Technology):

• Risk

• Agility or time to market

• Total cost of ownership

• Service stability and reliability

• Staffing needs for management

• System efficiency

• Satisfaction

• Scalability.

In fact, there's a report that is the result of a study performed by Solitaire Interglobal Ltd. The study spans 61,320 customers and compares various virtualization technologies on the eight business metrics listed above.

My interest in IBM's new generation of Power Systems for big data and virtualization for SMBs came about as a result of a conversation I had with Colin Parris, GM, Power Systems at IBM. Parris' knowledge, excitement over the product line, and my many questions made us both miss a technical presentation that followed our interview. I blame myself.

The key points from this interview yielded the following information about Power Systems:

• Minimum partition size as small as 1/10 of a processor with granularity of 1/100 of a processor

• Automatic CPU adjustments based on load

• Dynamic reconfiguration without rebooting

• Dedicated and virtual devices in guest operating systems

• Virtualize network and storage for guest operating systems

• Active Memory Sharing

• Live Partition Mobility between systems provides exceptional capability for the user consolidating homogeneous and heterogeneous workloads

• Separation of physical processors from logical processors

• Flexible hardware resource allocation based on the needs of high-priority virtual machines

• Partitions can range from 10 percent of a CPU core up to 256 cores on the Power 795.

And since big data and analytics are on the minds of just about everyone in business these days, Power Systems are at the leading edge of those technologies as well. Check out these IBM Powercast videos to hear from actual clients and their experiences with IBM Power Systems. These view interviews discuss how IBM's Power Systems have propelled their small businesses into the "big time" by leveraging technology, specifically analytics, that, prior to IBM's new Power Systems for SMBs lineup release, was only available to large businesses.

There is sometimes a fear of what's called "vendor lock-in" with solutions such as IBM's Power Systems and Power VMs. Well, fear not, freedom fighters: IBM's Power Systems also run VMware (PDF), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (PDF), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (PDF), and, of course, IBM's own AIX.

IBM's Power Systems for SMBs make sense for the heavy lifting (big data analytics and virtualization) that you require but were previously unable to afford or that you thought somehow were bound to x86 architecture. And while you're transitioning, IBM's PureFlex systems allow you to mix x86 architecture systems with Power Systems and manage them from the same application.

If you're a current Power Systems customer, I'd like to hear from you and how the transition from x86 systems to Power Systems has boosted your computing power for future posts.

Related stories

• 'Big data as a service' is here, but is anybody ready?

• Business is booming for datacenters in Asia

• U.S. government outgunned on big data

• Leveraging big data analytics to improve healthcare delivery

What HyTrust has to say about this capability

VMware and other virtualization platforms do not provide adequate control, including viable methods of requiring additional level(s) of approval for actions that can result in negative consequences. So-called “privileged users” of an organization’s virtualization platform typically have much greater administrative power than counterparts who manage physical data center infrastructure. They can copy, power off or delete a business-critical VM – accidentally or intentionally – with a few clicks from any location in the world, or any device. If it results in financial hits, where operational downtime costs organizations tens of thousands per hour, compliance violations or an internal security breach, the cost is too high. Recent publicized incidents of privileged users taking down virtual data center operations attest to the large financial hits that enterprises can—and have—taken when adequate virtualization controls were not in place. For the most part, however, such events go unreported.

Snapshot analysis

It's often the case that IT administrators make snap judgements and implement changes in their virtual data center. Virtual machines can be started, stopped, duplicated or deleted based upon that individual's training and judgement. While most actions produce the desired results, a mistake or a malicious action can have terrible consequences.

It is interesting that HyTrust decided to add this capability in version 3 of its appliance server.  Asking managers or other administrators review and approve potentially dangerous actions could prevent the stopping of a critical process or deletion of an important virtual machine. It could also allow IT administration to better control the creation sibling virtual machines and prevent unlicensed and unauthorized copies of licensed software to execute in the data center.

If your organization requires secondary approval for physical actions and would like to extend that set of controls into the virtual world, HyTrust just might be the tool for you.

Catbird Security will debut a long-awaited new version of their flagship offering, vSecurity. It aims to dramatically increase the headaches associated with compliance monitoring and enforcement capabilities giving IT networking and security personnel in regulated software-defined datacenters the control and assurance they need to pass their audits confidently. The new vSecurity adds state-of-the-art vulnerability and configuration management, with Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) support, to Catbird’s existing arsenal of automated software-defined network security controls, significantly improving IT’s ability to monitor and enforce PCI, HIPAA and other standards in virtualized infrastructure.

With a promo like that, how could I turn it down?

The truth is that I really have enjoyed previous conversations with the company and have had a long and friendly relationship with Tamar Newberger, Catbird's Vice President of Marketing. We first met at a SCO Forum at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She was with the Santa Cruz Operation, and I was there representing Digital Equipment's PC server group.

Since those ancient times, Tamar went on to Catbird to lead their marketing efforts. From time to time, she's reached out to me to describe what the company is doing.

Catbird has addressed itself as a creator of clever security monitoring and enforcement products that monitor all network traffic, builds a picture of what is communicating with what, and applies a comprehensive array of tools to monitor and control that stream of communication. If the “bad guys” can’t communicate into or out of a company’s IT infrastructure, it becomes far easier to assure security and compliance with PCI (Payment Card Industry) security standards.

This time, the conversation focused on what Catbird is doing to help VMware-based environments secure the operations of their virtual systems. We enjoyed a discussion of all of the different types of security that are needed in the environment, and where Catbird's products fit. Here's a quick list of the areas we discussed:

• Identity Management
• Endpoint security
• Authorization
• Data security*
• Configuration management*
• White listing
• Network security*
• Configuration and log management*
• Platform security*

* Places in which Catbird sings.

What has always been interesting about Catbird is the ease of set-up and use of their products. All of the Catbird customers I've spoken with like the company and its products and see that they're benefitting from the relationship.

If security is your concern, you ought to know Catbird.

The VMware Essentials Plus Kit is one of its new weapons to win the SMB battle:

"VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit provides an all-in-one solution for small businesses to virtualize their physical servers and reduce hardware costs while ensuring superior high application availability and data protection. This kit includes six CPU licenses of vSphere Essentials Plus (for three servers with up to two processors each) and one license for vCenter Server Essentials."

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit includes all the benefits of Essentials and:

• VMware vSphere Storage Appliance for Essentials Plus

• VMware Data Protection

• VMware High Availability (HA)

• VMware vMotion

• VMware vStorage APIs

• VMware vShield Zones

• VMware vShield Endpoint

• VMware Replication.

You get all this plus three years of Production Support for under $7,500. VMware Production Support is 24x7 for Severity 1 outages.

Admittedly, I've had a few negative things to say about VMware in the past, but I don't care who you are, that's a damn good deal.

And what's more is that you can expand with another package of three at any time. Why three, you ask? Well, if you know anything at all about the vSphere product, you should build your clusters in three server increments for redundancy, maintenance, and balance. Sure, you can add in new hosts one at a time, but if you already own the hardware, why not add the extra capacity for test and development, production standby, or disaster recovery?

And, yes, you could simply purchase VMware's Essentials package, which gives you the following features:

• VMFS (Virtual Machine File System)

• 8-way Virtual SMP

• VMware Hypervisor

• VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning

• VMware Update Manager

• VMware vStorage APIs

• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials.

But note that vMotion isn't part of that three host package for $560. Spend the extra money for the Essentials Plus package to get the extra features and enhanced support options.

Now, you're probably wondering why I titled this post, "Why VMware needs to focus on SMBs". Good question. The answer is that VMware, the company that started x86 virtualization, lost sight of its most probable customer, the SMB, until recently.

VMware should offer a packaged product complete with hardware, software, support, training, and a support technician's block of time to get an SMB started with VMware's vSphere product line. I call this offering vSphere-in-a-box or VIAB, as in SMB VIABle Virtualization.

It's the turnkey solution that a lot of SMBs would purchase. Gladly. The part that a lot of ivory tower companies don't get is that small businesses often can't hire the expertise they would need to get something like this off the ground. There is a knowledge gap and a budget gap for smaller companies that could benefit from virtualization, but will never make the leap because of the barriers. The VIAB product could do make that difference and then VMware could hand off ongoing support to a local support company or partner.

Everyone wins.

And when that small company grows, whose products are they going to purchase again and again? A new one with a new learning curve and the mess of migration? No. They're going to choose VMware.

VMware needs to not only create a product offering and price point that's palatable to SMBs, but a full-service offering as well. SMB owners will look at the $7,500 price tag and pass it by because they see a product that is non-trivial to set up, manage, and maintain. They see the $7,500 as $7,500 plus the cost of hiring someone to take care of the hardware, VMware, operating systems and services as too cumbersome and too expensive.

Let me put this in plain English for you: You gotta make it easy for 'em. Is that clear enough? SMBs have to focus on doing their business, making a profit and building a future. If those SMBs aren't in the IT business, IT is a complex overhead and an ongoing headache for them.

The bottom line here is that you have to feel the pain of what it means to run a company that falls into the SMB range. And believe it or not, most of them do. It's a huge market and it's a very lucrative one, but you have to make it easy for them. And they're willing to pay a bit more for a painless experience.

Think about it.

No, really think about it.

VMware needs the SMB market. SMBs need VMware. Sure, there are the various free software options out there, but can you take them seriously for production? Maybe you could if you had the expertise to set up, maintain, and manage them for yourself.

What about Microsoft? Hyper-V is a great product. Microsoft offers it virtually (pun intended?) free of charge, but Microsoft is a software* company. It's doing exactly what VMware is doing — tossing out a product for you to purchase, but no turnkey solution for it. And no, strictly speaking, VMware isn't just a software company. They're owned by EMC. Think about the implications of VIAB that comes complete with storage, too. Now that's a VIABle product.

Puns aside, it's time for VMware to focus on the large and ever-expanding SMB market with a turnkey solution. Enough DIY already. Give me a solution that's running and ready for my business without the painful learning curve.

If you want to build a better mousetrap, you have to think like a mouse.

What do you think of VMware's SMB product offerings? Too little, too late, or just the right mix of DIY and SMB "Git 'er done" mentality to meet the need? Talk back and let me know.

*Xbox and Surface don't count for this discussion.

Here's how Sanbolic describes their software

Sanbolic ... announced the general availability of its Melio5™ software – delivering distributed scale-out, high-availability, and enterprise data services through software. Server-side flash has seen rapid adoption for applications such as hyperscale web serving, but limited adoption in general purpose enterprise applications. Sanbolic enables enterprise customers to dramatically improve their storage infrastructure economics by enabling server-side Flash, SSD, and HDD as primary persistent storage. Melio5 aggregates across nodes for scale-out and availability while providing RAID, remote replication, quality of Service (QoS), snapshots and systems functionality through a software layer on commodity hardware. This provides customers with the ability to deploy commodity and server-based storage architecture with similar economics and flexibility as public cloud data centers such as Google and Facebook.

With validation by hundreds of enterprise and government accounts running in production, Melio5 volume management and file system technology addresses the needs of high performing cost effective storage infrastructure on premise. Melio5’s architecture is designed to scale up to 2,048 nodes and up to 65,000 storage devices enabling linear performance scalability in a cluster.

Melio5 also eliminates the need to deploy a redundant flash caching layer in front of legacy storage area network (SAN) hardware by directly incorporating flash into hybrid volumes and intelligently placing data based on file system access profiles. A hybrid volume will place random access data such as file system metadata on flash sectors while placing sequential data on low cost hard disk drives to greatly reduce the cost of capacity. The result is a highly scalable, high performance storage system, with a much lower cost than legacy storage arrays.

Snapshot analysis

Having been involved with Digital Equipment's X86 server group long ago, I found Sanbolic's use of sophisticated, intelligent caching to be similar in concept to what was used to make DEC's high-performance (for the time) X86-based multiprocessing systems work so well. A relatively small amount of expensive high-speed DRAM was used to cache access processors were making to large amounts of much lower cost, slower speed DRAM. This allowed multiple processors to access and share the systems' main memory and also offered excellent performance at a much lower cost.

Walking down memory lane

At the time, this technology made it possible for systems having as many as 4 processors to run the same operating system and support the same server workloads. Although not supported by DEC, I am aware of at least one systems integrator that offered an 8-processor version by using higher-density memory and allowing more buss slots to be used for processor cards.

These systems were offered at prices similar to single or dual processor X86-based systems. The secret sauce was the caching algorithms combined with just the right amount of high-speed cache.

Sanbolic's approach

Sanbolic is using relatively fast flash storage devices combined with their software technology to allow organizations to make much better use of their storage. Sanbolic's goal is to match the economics offered by cloud storage providers and offer that to everyone.

The company points out that the use of their software combined with commodity storage devices provides systems level availability and as much as 650,000 I/O operations per second per server. 

Competition

Sanbolic faces competition on all sides, however. Suppliers such as EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp and many others are using similar messages to describe their technology. Most of these competitors, however, are offering much more expensive products and don't offer performance that matches what Sanbolic is offering. This, I believe, is one of Sanbolic's biggest competitive differentiators.

Each of these suppliers is using flash storage-based storage and caching algorithms in different ways. Some put the flash in the system buss, some use it in a storage-acceleration appliance, some put it in their storage server, and some offer it as a solid-state storage device designed to replace more traditional rotating media.

If your organization is seeking better storage performance at a lower overall cost, it might be worth speaking to the folks at Sanbolic.

Here is a summary of Correlsense' answer:

Key differentiators:

1. Complete end-to-end view: Other mobile APM tools can give you a partial view of what a mobile transaction looks like (either from the device itself or on the infrastructure side), only RUM for Native Mobile Applications can trace the entire mobile transaction from the device to the data center and back

2. Real monitoring as opposed to synthetic: RUM for Native Mobile Applications monitors 100 percent of users (not samples or averages), providing an accurate picture of mobile app availability, response times, and service level performance

3. No instrumentation: Companies don't need to change code or introduce high levels of production overhead to implement this mobile APM solution.

Snapshot analysis

When asked, Correlsense's representative presented the same or extremely similar reasons I've heard time and again from others. This, of course, means that they really can't differentiate their offering from offerings made by other suppliers.

While the company may be able to help its customers learn more about performance issues in a complex, distributed, multi-tier application environment, it is not at all clear why decision makers should chose them over others.

What is clear is that the performance management market, in general, and the end user experience market, in specific, has become overly complex. It is also clear that customers have built environments that are nearly too complex to manage, and the marketplace isn't helping them find simple solutions.

What does your company do to monitor and manage the customer- and staff-facing applications it relies on today?

A bit about Anturis

Anturis describes its mission in the following way:

From accessing documents to communicating with clients or even processing payments, IT plays a critical role in the health and growth of virtually every business today.

Anturis helps companies with limited IT personnel transition from a reactive to a proactive approach in managing their IT infrastructures to help you stop problems before they start.

Our solutions are designed to be a must-have for any website, server farm or cloud deployment, making diagnostics and troubleshooting quick and seamless.

Anturis' team includes staff coming from suppliers such as Parallels, Atempo, K7 Cloud, and jNetX.

Snapshot analysis

Management and monitoring tools have been getting ever more sophisticated. Why? Because modern applications have become very, very complex. A given workload is likely to be designed as a multi-tier, distributed colleciton of system services that have been pressed into service together to provide a solution to a problem. These services might be hosted on a physical machine, a virtual machine or a machine hosted in a third party's data center (cloud computing). Furthermore, the computing solution might be executing on a combination of Windows, Linux, UNIX and/or some other operating system. Mainframe, single vendor and industry standard X86 systems might all have been herded together to create the solution.

Often managing and monitoring this collection of technology is beyond the capabilities of any but the largest organization. Anturis believes that by applying the newest monitoring and management toolsl as cloud services, that this expertise can be packaged and delivered to smaller firms. The company's solution has just been launched as a beta test.

The key question that comes to mind is that monitoring and management is already a crowded, competitive market, why should we pay attention to Anturis? Tools and frameworks from major players such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM and others are battling for the attention of IT decision makers. I hear from new startups all of the time, each of them bringing something new to the discussion. All of them are focusing some of their attention on serving the needs of the smaller business. Many of them are offering cloud-based management tools.

At this point, all I can come up with is the fact that Sergeui and his team have brought new technology to market before. They understand that technology needs to be enfolded in well-thought-out marketing, sales and support strategies to be successful. Anturis believes that it can do a better job of offering this type of sophisticated tool set to small businesses than the current players are doing.

In the end, we'll have to watch and see if they are correct.

A bit about INETCO

INETCO is tightly focused on following business transactions from end to end and being able to accurately report on what is happening and where in real time. They also understand that today's workloads include components such as:

• Mainframes
• UNIX-based midrange systems
• Single-vendor operating systems running on special-purpose hardware
• Industry standard systems running Windows or Linux
• A herd of single-function appliance servers
• Workloads that are hosted on a combination of physical, virtual and cloud-based systems
• Increasingly complex distributed, multi-tier workloads that mix and match just about everything listed above
• A constellation of company-supplied, staff-supplied and customer-supplied end-points that include PCs, Macs, Tablets, "Phablets" and Smartphones  

The company believes there is value in being able to monitor the end-to-end performance of transactions rather than just offering tools that dive deeply into a huge pile of operational data.

Before I could comment

Before that commentary popped to the top of my research queue, the company's PR firm reached out to me to ask for my opinions on why a treatment of the announcement didn't appear in many analyst's publications. While I certainly can't speak for anyone other than Kusnetzky Group analysts, I do have some thoughts on the topic (surprise, surprise.) Here are a few of them.

• Regardless of how good INETCO's technology or architecture are, there is much confusion in the market for performance management tools.
• The announcement-per-second rate has gone up recently making it hard for any supplier to get a moment of decision maker's time and attention. Some really good technology is not getting the attention it desires.
• Customers are deploying an ever more complex mix of multi-tier, distributed workloads that are based upon different system architectures, hosting strategies (physical, virtual and cloud), and are allowing access to their workloads from an ever-growing array of end point systems (PCs, Macs, Laptops, Tablets and Smartphones.) It is not at all clear to them how to address the "Tower of Babel" they've built inside of their data centers at the encouragement of their chosen suppliers.
• There is a large and growing number of firms offering some sort of APM or similar products. I believe that I've spoken with representatives of over 20 suppliers in the past year.
  • All of them are speaking about their products and technology using the same or very similar language.
  • All of them appear to be promising the sun and the stars and some analysts (and customers) believe that in the end they are only going to deliver the moon.
  • Some are very large, traditional, suppliers of management tools and others are frisky startups, each of which says that it is uniquely qualified to make sense of this mess.
  • Few offer a comprehensive solution to what is increasingly becoming an intractable problem.
• Terms such as "Cloud," "Big Data," and "Predictive Analytics" are bandied about as if they are leading edge capabilities that should define one offering from another. Unfortunately, everyone is using these terms and so it is hard to separate one supplier from another.
• Often suppliers focus on only one part of the IT infrastructure and speak as if they are offering a comprehensive solution. One has to really dig into their messages to learn where the limits are. Customers don't have the time for this type of thing anymore and they can't make a mistake in selecting tools.
• Each supplier is offering a different mix of technologies and it is not clear where each fits and why.
  • Building management into everything — each supplier, of course, wants their own tools and frameworks built in and don't always play well with those offered by others.
  • Install agents everywhere that gather operational data and forward it elsewhere for processing and analysis
  • Follow network traffic and tease out operational data for systems, databases, application frameworks, applications, networks and storage
• Being able to audit and secure complex solutions is an ever-large factor in tool selection

What other factors do you think could be involved?

See Infographic

The same folks are making copies of my book, Virtualization: A manager's guide, available as a no-cost download.

The only catch is that it is necessary to visit their Facebook page and become a fan.

"The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation." — Piero Scaruffi

Without mentioning any company names, I'm going to analyze what I think is happening to innovation in a few key companies in this industry. I'll leave it to you to fill in the blanks where company names should be.

The brain drain

"Keep in mind that imagination is at the heart of all innovation. Crush or constrain it and the fun will vanish." — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

I think that there's a general exodus of the best and brightest talent from large companies. This has always been a problem but it seems that it's more prevalent now than ever. The true "rock stars" are leaving and they're taking band members with them on the way out. They're starting new companies, developing new products and getting bought out by the larger companies that don't innovate. It's a vicious cycle.

Death by acquisition

"Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation." — Edward Abbey

Some company executives might think that innovation is too expensive to do in-house, so they'll just buy their innovation. It's worked for other companies. Oracle, for example, has consumed dozens of companies including MySQL, Sun, Stellent, and PeopleSoft. There's no reason to spend years on R&D, when you can buy your innovations fresh. There's nothing necessarily wrong with buying innovation and innovative products as long as you acquire the talent, too. Often, though, the talent takes the money, the obligatory one year of "jail" time and then bails to create a new company bent on innovation all over again. It too is a vicious cycle.

No value in mental stock

"Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road." — Voltaire

A lot of large companies just don't value innovation. And that's really too bad. There are people who would develop new products and share ideas if there were some reward for it. Of course, the official word is that they do value innovation and want innovation but the sad reality is that innovation isn't nurtured, it's suppressed. I have friends in companies of all sizes, from the Fortune 50 all the way to mom and pop businesses. The smaller ones value innovation but often see it as "part of your job" if you come up with something spectacular. For this reason, many seek opportunities outside the company walls and in their own businesses.

It makes me question if those renegade innovators value innovation or are they basically "one hit wonders". For example, a gang of geniuses depart a large company, form their own company to create some technology service or product, and become successful. Does that company value innovation? Chances are very good that it doesn't. It has its product or service and it doesn't want to deviate from that singular goal. That sort of mentality creates more splintering, new companies, new innovations, and more fodder for uptake by large, non-innovating entities. Yep, you guessed correctly, if you said, "vicious cycle".

Upgrades are enough

"Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?" — Frank Herbert

Another reason I see for the lack of innovation is that company execs have grown lazy at their success. They feel that releasing a new version every couple of years is innovating. FYI, it isn't. Neither is releasing a new management tool. That's really not innovation. Upgrades are a natural progression of any product. Battle testing and feedback help drive that progression. The release-> upgrade-> release-> upgrade cycle isn't vicious and it isn't innovative.

Competition makes good business

"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth." — Peter F Drucker

My grandfather used to say that "Competition makes good business". He was in business for himself for more than 40 years. He knew what he was talking about. But he also came from a time when the customer was always right too. Those days are gone aren't they? They shouldn't be. Innovation drives competition. Unfortunately, many companies have lost sight of that basic premise. These days price seems to be the only negotiating point that anyone has to work with.

Competition and innovation set companies and their services and products apart from the pack. You get ahead of the competition by innovating. You stay there by keeping the innovation engine running.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

"If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old." — Peter F Drucker

I used to believe that building on past successes would work forever. It won't. For example, when x86 first began via VMware's initial product back in the late 1990s, I thought that it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. That entry into virtualization was pretty cool. But VMware didn't just sit around and release upgrades to that original product every two years, it innovated. It developed new products.

Had it simply settled for that original giant, it would be a part of faded memory by now. Its success is a testament to the value of standing on the shoulders of one giant and then building another giant. And another and another and so on.

Innovation is the keystone to breakthroughs in any business or industry.

It seems that real innovation has halted, or at least slowed to an imperceptible crawl, in virtualization. Now, that said, I'm not in the secret loop of product development at any company. I don't know what anyone has up their virtual sleeves.

A time for solutions

"Chance favors the connected mind." — Steven Johnson

I'm not one to present a problem without also offering a solution. The solution to the lack of innovation is simple. To innovate, you must participate. To participate, you must listen. Listen to your employees. Listen to your customers. And listen to your competition.

You also have to offer some reward for innovation, some incentive that makes it worthwhile for your employees to come forward with great ideas. There are hundreds of great ideas in the minds of your employees that are busting to see the light of day. The problem is that they'll never see the light of day because no one's listening.

When you don't listen, employees get frustrated. When employees get frustrated, they leave and they start their own companies and they innovate.

I've focused on virtualization for this post but the concepts apply to any industry or business.

Virtualization is nice.

Cloud computing is cute.

What's next?

The answer to that question is the next multibillion-dollar idea. It could be the seed for a startup composed of frustrated ex-employees or it could be employees with a stake in the success of the company that they work for now. Don't allow your company's best minds bleed off. Retain them. Allow them to spread their wings and innovate, create, and expand. If you don't, then you only have yourself to blame for your falling value.

What's next in virtualization?

That's the question to answer.

Find the cowboys and they'll have the answer.

I've offered my ideas of why innovation has slowed. What do you think the problem is? Or alternatively, if you can cite some good examples of recent virtualization innovation, please talk back and let me know.

My own personal quotation:

"I'm glad that God wasn't satisfied with an empty universe." — Ken Hess

What is ZVR?

Zerto Virtual Replication is, in Zerto's words:

Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. Zerto won Best of Show at VMworld 2011, as well as 2011 Product of the Year Gold Award because our software, Zerto Virtual Replication, is the industry's first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications. Zerto Disaster Recovery solutions replace traditional array-based BCDR that was not built to deal with virtual environments.

ZVR is a replication product that reaches into VMware's vSphere and vCenter environments so that it can replicate virtual machines to assure availability and reliability. This capability is not based upon creating snapshots of the virtual machines. The product can replicate complete VMware-based environments even if the virtual machines are encapsulating distributed, multi-tier workloads that span data centers or live in the cloud.

Snapshot analysis

Zerto's tight focus on VMware environments is both a strength and a weakness. While ZVR appears to be a "set it and forget it" tool for replication in a VMware environment, it does not offer, at this moment, abilities to deal with virtual machines running in a Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM, or Red Hat KVM-based environment. Furthermore, it is designed to address business continuity only in an X86-based environment.

So if an organization has a mixed environment that includes many different X86-based virtual environments or has workloads executing on Mainframes, Midrange UNIX systems, or other single-vendor environments, Zerto is, at best, only part of a solution.

VMware users comment that Zerto has helped them with continuity and replication of virtual machines to distributed datacenters or branch offices. If organizations have a more diverse IT infrastructure, Zerto can't offer a broad solution to business continuity or disaster recovery.

Apple's Mac OS offers many wonderful features, but tight integration into a Windows, Linux, or Unix environment isn't one of them. Acronis, among many others, have sought to fill the gaps left by Apple.

Here's what Acronis has to say about its Backup & Recovery for Mac:

Whether IT likes it or not, Macs in the enterprise are a reality. In fact, sales of Macs to businesses grew nearly 50 percent year over year in 2012 (meanwhile, PC sales were down 13 percent). Many see the advantages of enterprises moving to a more user-centric model where employees are free to use their workstation of choice, but using Macs in the enterprise also presents major compliance issues and threatens business continuity if Mac files are left unprotected.

IT departments clearly need a solution that can resolve the legal, financial, and bottom-line risks of Macs in the enterprise. And, to address this, on Wednesday, February 27, Acronis is releasing an architecture that seamlessly integrates Mac backups into its corporate data protection strategy, without affecting the user or administrator experience. The new solution, based on ExtremeZ-IP® and Acronis Backup & Recovery®, centrally protects Mac OS X® Time Machine® archives, with the flexibility to store Mac files to disk, SAN, tape, or the cloud. This means users can continue to operate on their workstation of choice, and administrators can be assured that IT is flexible, seamless, and fully compliant.

Ultimately, Mac integration is an important step in moving beyond traditional backup and disaster recovery to encompass a broader enterprise strategy for comprehensive, secure data protection. Regardless of where data resides, IT must ensure it is available, accessible, and protected in physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Snapshot analysis

Acronis is known by its users as a provider of easy to use, but powerful backup and recovery software. That being said, Acronis faces a bewildering array of competition including Apple's own backup capability, which is part of Mac OS. Here are a few of products tools that can be seen as competition for Acronis' products:

• Backup Exec 2012 agent by Symantec

• ChronoSync by Econ Technologies

• Data Backup by Prosoft Engineering

• Tri-BACKUP by Tri-Edre

• SuperDuper by Shirt Pocket

• Synk Standard by Decimus

• Knox by Agilebits

• SmartBackup by Freeridecoding

• Time machine by Apple

• Synchronize! X Plus by Qdea.

Which of these is the best product depends, of course, on your requirements. Some of these products are clearly designed for a single user or small company. Others are designed to bring Macs into a corporate backup and recovery environment.

Is Acronis Backup and Recovery for Mac the right choice for you? If you need to bring Mac OS-based machines into your backup strategy, regardless of whether that backup is to the cloud, your SAN, to tape, or to an external disk, Acronis might be a good solution for you.

While Kusnetzky Group has been happy with tools that replicate files to a backup volume on our storage server, that solution might be problematic for those who prefer a "set it and forget it" approach. Acronis users have always said nice things about the company and its products when interviewed or included in a Kusnetzky Group survey. Either way, it's worth a look.

I searched the really sketchy documentation provided with the device. I searched online documentation on both Verizon's and Samsung's websites. I couldn't find much useful information about Samsung's page buddies in general or the docking screen in specific. So I called Verizon's technical support line multiple times and later Samsung's and didn't get an answer. Finally, after trying one thing or another, I came up with a workable solution. Why did it have to be so hard?

The answer is clear: Today's smartphones are too complex for traditional call-centers to handle.

What is a Page Buddy?

Samsung has extended the Android operating system by adding a concept they call "Page Buddies." Page Buddies are optional, special purpose pages designed to pop up when owners use the S Pen, the earphones, the dock or when they're roaming. These pages can automatically show up and offer apps and settings tools to make the phone easier to use. They also are quite extensible, and yet very poorly documented.

The Note 2's default settings have page buddies turned on. So, they pop up when a user takes out the digitizer pen, inserts a headphone into the jack or connects a Bluetooth headset, inserts the phone in Samsung's smart dock or is roaming outside of the users normal area.

The Docking Page Buddy Screen

The Note 2's docking page buddy screen shows a wide calendar widget, a media player widget and adjusts the icons at the bottom of the screen to show the apps that are most commonly used.

The screen can be modified just like any other homepage on the device. Widgets and icons can be moved around, added or removed.

This is where I got into trouble. While trying to do something using the phone while it was in the dock, I accidentally selected the calendar widget and dragged it to the trashcan. I wasn't looking at the device. I was on yet another conference call on my land line and trying to look up something on the phone.

Once the widget was gone and the teleconference was over, I searched high and low to find a way to get the widget back. Did I mention that the documentation of page buddies in general and the docking page buddy are sketchy at best?

Calling Verizon Wireless technical support

After searching Verizon's website, Samsung's website and the web in general for about an hour, I couldn't find any useful information on page buddies or the calendar widget. Although I hate wading through Verizon's awful voice response system to get through to a technical support agent, I called their support number.

As an aside, I think that Verizon Wireless and other large companies are really doing themselves a big disservice by forcing people to deal with computerized answering systems that seem unable to understand spoken language and seem to be the only way to get through to a human being. 

After wading through the voice response system and being put on hold for ten minutes, I got through to one very nice rep and spent about 20 minutes with her trying to get her to understand what was happening. She just couldn't get the idea. She had no idea what a page buddy was. She did, however, know how to find the available widgets and pointed out the two calendar widgets available on the phone. She had no idea why neither of them looked like the widget that was previously displayed on the docking screen.

It is clear to me that her training on this phone added up to "here's what the Note 2 looks like, remember it and go to the phone to answer customer questions."

Her suggestion was to wipe the phone and rebuild all of my settings, reload my over 2700 contacts, and reconnect with three different email accounts and calendars.

Wrong answer!

Maybe the second call to Verizon Wireless will be the charm

So, I called back a second time. I had to joust with the voice response system a second time, got put on hold a second time and finally was able to get to the tech support person. I was forced to go through the same discussion about what I did, what happened and what I wanted to accomplish — just getting back to the factory setting without having to take my entire day rebuilding my phone.

After the long discussion, the agent realized that my question was beyond her level of skill. She asked permission to forward my call to the second level of support. She, by the way, appeared to have no idea what a page buddy is either.

Once again, I had to wade through the long technical support script to explain what happened, what I've done to try to fix it and ask for suggestions. Once again, the person couldn't understand what happened and what was needed.

This agent suggested that I call the Samsung USA support line and gave me their number and an incident number.

Speaking to Samsung's tech support line

Oh the joy. Now I get to talk to Samsung's voice response system.

After jousting with Samsung's voice response system, I was connected with a gentleman who appeared to know a great deal about the Note 2. He, at least, understood what a page buddy was. He pointed out the two available calendar widgets. He also suggested taking the battery out of the phone and doing a soft reset. Sure enough, the calendar widget was still gone.

When he suggested doing a hard reset and going through the long process, I suggested that wasn't an acceptable approach. He asked if he could put me on hold to speak with his backup support.

During the on-hold time, the call dropped.

Messing around on my own

I tried installing one of the two calendar widgets that were on the phone and noticed that something different happened when that widget showed up on the screen than when others were installed. The widget had diamonds on the four sides that made it look like it could be re-sized. Most widgets are not re-sizeable.

I was able to make the calendar widget look like the one that was accidentally deleted!

My primary questions are:

1. Why didn't the tech support folks of Verizon or Samsung appear to know this little detail?
2. Why don't these companies use tools such as those offered by LogMeIn to help support reps actually see what is happening on a customer's device?

How Nexenta describes Nexenta VSA for View

NexentaVSA for VDI is a purpose built storage appliance that provides advanced features and functionality suited to handle the demands of a virtual desktop environment. NV4VDI improves desktop / storage performance by providing better IOPS, latency, and boot storm response. NV4VDI can scale to thousands of machines without changing design or incurring cost overruns, thereby lowering the overall cost of deploying and managing a desktop.

NexentaVSA for View provides comprehensive functionality, including in-line data deduplication and in-line compression, flexible back-up and restore, unlimited snapshots, metadata acceleration, and uniform IOPS at any scale.

Snapshot analysis

Nexenta is one of several storage virtualization suppliers that are offering products designed to increase the overall performance and reliablity of virtual desktop environments. Other suppliers of products that address the same issues include companies such as NetApp, EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi Data and a few others.

Why is this necessary? Well, there are many differences in how server-centric and desktop workloads use storage. Just connecting the host server to a virtualized storage environment may or may not perform well. Some of the differences follow:

• Desktop systems typically are provisioned with low-cost storage devices. These devices perform well enough to address how they're going to be used. Server workloads typically are supported by higher-cost, higher performance storage devices.
• Server file systems are optimized to use big blocks of data to maximize caching and minimize I/O operations because server workloads traditional do more processing on each unit of storage. Desktop file systems are optimized to use small blocks of storage and assume that only a small amount of processing will be done on each unit of data.
• Server workloads typically transfer larger amounts of data into and out of storage in every operation.  Desktop workloads transfer many more small amounts of data in the same time period. The storage caching mechanisms must be adjusted so that desktop workloads perform well.  This means addressing the requirement of many more small I/O operations.
• Servers don't go off and online all at the same time so there aren't "storms" of storage requests at the beginning and ending of each staff shift. Desktop workloads tend to come online at the beginning of each shift and go off line at the end of the shift. Once again, if the storage caching mechanism is configured for server-centric workloads, desktop workloads will perform poorly during the "storage storms."
• Server-oriented management tools have different expectations of storage and different requirements. Storage is a shared resource on servers and this requires fine grain control of who can use files and applications. Desktop environments are typically support a single user's applications and data.
  
  • Server environments typically keep one copy of applications and shared data.
  • Each desktop environment expects to have its own copy of the operating system, applications, application frameworks, database engine, databases.

Nexenta says that it has addressed all of these requirements and has make it possible for VDI environments to perform well and be managed by VMware's Horizon View management environment.  While this is likey to make VMware View users happy, VMware is not the only VDI game in town. It is not clear at this moment if users of Citrix or Open Source desktop virtualization environments would see similar benefit from NexentaVSA.

Furthermore, encapsulating complete desktop environments and moving that image to servers is not the only form of desktop virtualization. Some approaches to virtual desktops are based on access or application virtualization rather than relying so heavily on virtual processing.

Nexenta is offering some interesting technology that might be of great help if your organization's virtual desktop program is based upon VMware. It would be worth examination if that is what your environment is using.  If not, then the products being offered by others would be worth considering.

What the company announced

Here's how the company describes the components of its recent announcement:

Vision Solutions’ new Cloud Protection & Recovery offering includes:

• Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) Platform: Double-Take Cloud Protection & Recovery (CP&R), Apache CloudStack™ Edition enables cloud providers running Citrix CloudPlatform™ or Apache CloudStack™ to offer cloud-integrated Recovery-as-a-Service to their end customers. This product is built on Double-Take's real-time replication technology.

• Metered Usage: Double-Take and MIMIX Metered Usage allow cloud providers to consume licenses of Vision Solutions' Disaster Recovery, Migration, and High Availability solutions in a pay-as-you-go fashion. This offering reduces business risks for cloud providers and helps create affordable cloud-based DR, HA, and Migration solutions for the end user.

• Software Development Kit (SDK): Double-Take SDK offers cloud providers the ability to use APIs for custom integration of Double-Take into their cloud ecosystem. This enables a higher degree of automation and helps reduce administrative costs for cloud providers.

With the launch of its cloud offering, Vision Solutions is also realigning its product portfolio into three solution categories: Cloud Protection & Recovery; High Availability and Disaster Recovery; and Migration and Cross-Platform Data Sharing.

Vision's High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions have set the industry standard for 22 years, ensuring resilience across cloud, virtual and physical environments. Products include:

• Private/Public Cloud Protection: vCloud Director Aware Data Protection

• Server Protection (Cloud, Virtual, Physical): Double-Take Availability for Windows & Linux, MIMIX Availability and iTERATM Availability for IBM i, and Double-Take® RecoverNow for AIX

• Agentless VM Protection: Double-Take Availability for Hyper-V and Double-Take Availability for vSphere.

Snapshot analysis

Vision Solutions is a company I've tracked for quite some time. When I first became aware of the company, it largely focused on providing clustering, availability and disaster recovery products for IBM's OS/400 (now known as IBM i) and IBM's AIX (now known as IBM AIX). It was just thinking about offering similar technology for Windows and Linux. At that time, Vision Solutions' technology was just about the only game in town for OS/400 users.

When asked, these customers typically raved about the quality and performance of Vision Solutions' products.

Today, Vision's product set has been extended to offer cross-platform data sharing (Double-Take Share is the product name), X86 Intel/AMD platform migrations (Double-Take Move is the product name), and migrations for IBM Power Systems (MIMIX® Move and Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX are the product names.)

The issue Vision faces is that quite a number of competitors are targeting backup; archival storage; data replication and migration; and disaster recovery. Although the products are excellent, does the company have the strength to out-muscle companies from A (Amazon) to Z (Zetta) that also offer competitive products. All of the big suppliers, including HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Symantec have offerings in this category, too.

The software has revolutionized the data center and enabled the cloud, not to mention what it has done to (and for) industry economics and software licensing.

I am departing at just the right moment: the debut of new class of cloud application hypervisors for multi-VM apps. Trying to conceptualize all of the pieces running in harmony -- the hypervisors, virtual machines, management and monitoring tools, development tools, the hybrid cloud and public cloud-- is making this lay person downright dizzy.

But I do have a few random thoughts to share, which I hope may amuse those bleary-eyed techies trying to get through the mid-winter morning blues:

Why didn't Microsoft purchase VMware? The NEED was obvious even to the hordes of reporters following the OS beats. Did Microsoft really try to lowball this beauty? It was perhaps the most catastrophic decision for the company ever. I pushed former VMware chief Diane Greene, but she never told me the story.

Why did VMware allow itself to be purchased by EMC?  $685 million (and change). Really?

Another acquisition puzzled me: XenSource was practical in trying to make its open source hypervisor hum with Microsoft's ubiquitous software.But why sell to Citrix -- which is, or was, just another arm of Microsoft? The payoff was nice, but Xen execs should have seen that the manuevering could lead to Xen's diminishment, at least by open source backers.

Okay, okay, enough of the Monday morning quarterbacking. Aside from these purported missteps, the level of innovation on this technology front -- from all players -- is staggering.  I hope I do retain what knowledge I have, but have a sense that it will be virtually obsolete within six months. 

At least I know what the cloud is -- should I be asked at a party or by my five-year-old daughter, who is running a multi-level farming enterprise as part of a game called HayDay on her iPad mini. She may have to move her virtual crops to AWS -- that is if she remembers to water them.   

From Wikipedia, there are several implementations but start with the basics : Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

"In the most basic cloud-service model, providers of IaaS offer computers - physical or (more often) virtual machines - and other resources. (A hypervisor, such as Xen or KVM, runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.) IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as images in a virtual-machine image-library ..."

Good luck on the next phase of the not-so-virtual journey. The only clouds I'll be concerned with in the imminent future are those floating over my daughter Abigail (shown above with her pink iPad) and me in the Southern Caribbean in a few weeks time....

Ciao

While this rather extreme, counter tech culture move might be a seen as a tool for forcing staff to work together, I think that law of unintended consequences will come into play and high-performing staff will move elsewhere rather than moving to San Francisco to work in a Yahoo corporate office.

I've been a telecommuter for nearly two decades. While at IDC and the 451 Group, many of my coworkers worked remotely and visited the office only when needed. We often won awards for productivity and, yet, were available to support sales, customers and other staff members when needed. Some of my colleagues chose to relocate to places that were close to family or to places they loved.

The physical distance between members of my staff seldom got in the way of collaboration because tools where put in place.  Staff meetings were conducted regularly using audio and video conferencing. Collaborative applications allowed staff to share documents, spreadsheets and presentation decks. Physical meetings where scheduled when we were all attending the same event or conference. If anything, staff appeared to work more hours and were more productive because they were able to focus on accomplishing their goals rather than spending hours fighting traffic and finding parking spaces.

Let's look at a few of the unintended consequences of Ms Mayer's move:

• It may become difficult for Yahoo to attract the very best employees because these people may not wish to work in San Francisco or other cities in which Yahoo has an office. If that is an issue for a potential staff member, they'll simply find positions elsewhere at companies that are more flexible.
• Staff who work from home to care for elderly or ill family members may find that impossible when forced to move away to be in a Yahoo office. They may be unwilling or unable to make that move.
• Remote employees may not wish to spend a measurable part of their day commuting. Traffic in the greater San Francisco area or other large cities can become quite a problem to those used to a 15-step commute.
• Remote employees may be facing the sale of a home in a low-cost area and then the pain of finding similar accommodations in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. When they see that their standard of living is going to decline dramatically, they may simply choose not to go. Furthermore, unless Yahoo is going to help with moving expenses and expenses related to the sale of a home, remote staff members are going to experience negative consequences of Yahoo's move.

While I understand the desire to make teams work together in a more cohesive fashion, just telling people who already work elsewhere that they're going to have to pick up and move to keep their job is not likely to build the harmony Ms. Mayer is seeking.

I guess we're all going to get to see the impact of this "grand social experiment" Yahoo has undertaken. 

Vision Solutions Double-Take disaster recovery

The most recent of these was Vision Solutions, which made a point of introducing a repackaging of its Double-Take disaster recovery product either as cloud service or as a product allowing cloud service providers to offer their own disaster recovery service.

Having watched Vision Solutions for quite some time, I've always been impressed with how solid their offerings are. The company has a number of availability products for a number of different operating systems, and each of them has quite a following. I expect that Double-Take Cloud Protection and Recovery (CP&R) is likely to gather a following as well. The product, by the way, is a CloudStack-based product designed to help service providers offer Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (Vision Solutions is styling this as DRaaS or RaaS) on their own private or public clouds.

The larger picture

The larger trend that I've been seeing is that suppliers of everything, from applications to storage to management tools to disaster recovery products, seem to be packaging their products up so that they can be delivered as service offerings.

Why are suppliers leaping into the clouds?

I believe that suppliers are doing this for a number of reasons. A few of them follow:

• With little added engineering, support, marketing and sales cost, these suppliers can enter an entirely new worldwide market

• The cloud services market can produce a more reliable stream of revenue, and can take suppliers a step away from the feast or famine cycle of packaged software products. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I believe Microsoft is forcing users to move towards online office products

• Cloud users all use the same version and configuration of products, reducing the cost of supporting them. This, by the way, is another of the reasons behind Microsoft's move to force customers to use online office products

• The supplier can appear to be forward thinking and innovative, even if all they're doing is repackaging something that has been in use for decades

• The supplier can garner industry attention with little additional work. After all, anytime anyone announces something that is cloud-related, they get media and analyst attention.

Is this a good trend?

Offering products as cloud services can help suppliers increase their stream of revenue, and can open new sales and market channels. If done gently, a new generation of happy customers can emerge.

If these new cloud services are forced upon customers, and older packaged software products are made unavailable or available with new restrictions (I'm thinking of you, Microsoft), customers are likely to be very unhappy, and may look for replacement products.

If one of your preferred suppliers offered a new cloud-oriented version of their product, would you use it? How would you respond if that became the only way they offered their product?

This announcement has been examined by my colleague Andrew Brust (see Red Hat's Big Data strategy: A full stack approach) and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (see Red Hat embraces Hadoop and big data). So, I will consider the industry context rather than the launch itself.

What did Red Hat announce?

As a quick overview, Red Hat announced a software stack designed to support Big Data solutions and includes the following products:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat Storage — the GlusterFS file system
• A Hadoop plug-in allowing Hadoop to process data stored using Red Hat Storage
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — Red Hat's version of the KVM virtual machine software engine
• Red Hat JBoss Middleware — an application development and deployment platform that works well with a whole host of development languages, application architectures (distributed, multi-tier, and cloud), database and both network and storage virtualization tools

My colleagues have done a great job of analyzing the components of this launch.

Competitive Review

Hadoop, an Apache Foundation project, has been sponsored by the who's who of technology, including suppliers such as AMD, Citrix, FaceBook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and VMware's SpringSource all of whom have Hadoop-based offerings.

The Hadoop competitive market has been growing since Hadoop emerged as a top-level project in May 2010. Although Red Hat has been effectively part of the Hadoop market, it hasn't put a stake in the ground until now. While some would point out that Red Hat is a bit tardy, maybe its entry should be considered fashionably late.

It is a very reasonable move for Red Hat to join the party. It is a growing area of interest for the market and Red Hat's Linux has been the foundation for numerous Hadoop-based projects (see The Linux Foundation Enterprise Linux User Report ). Red Hat, according to IDC (see the IDC Worldwide Linux Client and Server Operating Environments 2012 - 2016 Forcast and 2011 Vendor Shares) is the leading provider of commercial Linux.

Sad history

For a moment, I was caught up in reminiscing about this company. I thought about the ski jacket the company provided to attendees of an analyst gathering at the company headquarters in the late 1990s that I still wear when the weather is cold enough. It was a company that was once at the top of the server operating environment market.

Unfortunately, that company made some really bad marketing, sales and support decisions and was crushed under the wheels of another supplier of system software in the 1990s.

Later that same company thought that its name, a name that was formally at the top of the heap of life rather than at the bottom, would bring excellently engineered products back to glory. While the engineering was excellent, the marketing, sales and support strategies were not.

The company has changed hands and the new owners have been doing their best to revive the company and, they hope, bring it back to its lustrous reputation of the past.

Obscure announcement

A company representative reached out to me and told me that the company wanted to brief me on an announcement. In my assessment, the product they were hoping I'd feel enthusiastic about would be considered an important, but relatively obscure type of software, hardly worthy of enthusiasm.

Is anyone listening?

I responded by telling the company representative that I would be happy to speak with them, but feared that no one would be listening to their announcement message. Customers were no longer aware of the company and largely believed that the company had disappeared into the pages of information technology history long ago.

Company response

The company representative's response was sadly typical of a company whose management team believes that it is possible to engineer its way out of a marketing, sales and support problem.

Here is a snippet of that message:

<insert company name here>'s really reinventing itself, while focusing on engineering excellence, innovation and core competencies that put it on the map more than 30 years ago.

Wrong Answer

Unfortunately, that's the wrong answer. Engineering is extremely important to the success of a technology supplier. It, however, must be matched by marketing that brings people to the table; sales that transforms those sitting at the table from suspects to prospects to customers; and support that keeps them at the table to purchase future products and services. Excellent engineering clearly isn't enough. The "build it and they will come" school of business hasn't worked since the 1970s.

Here was my answer to that company representative:

That’s the wrong answer.

The marketing cycle goes something like this:

1. A potential customer gains awareness of the company and its products. Without this awareness, the process stops here.
2. A potential customer who is aware of the company and its products gains interest in the company and its products. Without interest, the process stops here.
3. A potential customer who is both aware and interested in the company and its products gains a desire to learn more. Without this desire, the process stops here.
4. A potential customer who is both aware and interested AND desires more information can be persuaded to take action. Without action, the potential customer remains only a potential customer and never becomes a customer.

<Insert company name here> is foundering in the awareness cycle and hasn’t moved forward. My clients and readers NEVER speak about the company. When pressed, most of them think the company went out of business ages ago.

More steps and strategies are required

Although I didn't say this in my response, that is only the first step.

Once someone is aware, interested, desire the product and service; and is ready to take action; an excellent sales strategy must take over and lead the potential customer into becoming a real customer.

Then an excellent support strategy must take over after a successful sales campaign to keep them happy.

No amount of engineering, no matter how excellent, will move a potential customer who is unaware to do anything with the company.

Please introduce yourself and your company.

I am Rick DeLaunay, and I am the proud Director of Technology and media for Scotland County Schools in North Carolina. Mostly rural, Scotland County is one of the smallest counties in the state and also one of the poorest in the nation. There are 14 public schools within the county serving 6,100 students.

What were you doing that needed this type of technology?

We are an extremely budget-strapped county. We needed to figure out a way to do more with less so we set out to find an alternative compute solution to the "typical" laptop one-to-one programs out there. Not too long ago, the state of North Carolina set an ambitious goal for us to achieve one-to-one computer access for all its K-12 students and also making all assessment testing available online.

For several of the school districts, the norm to achieve this was by purchasing laptops. If I had endless pockets, I would have loved to go with new laptops. But because of the huge upfront cost, and then upkeep — such as replacing batteries, replacing units that are lost or stolen and general upkeep — laptops just weren't a viable option for us.

What products did you consider before making a selection?

Prior to selecting NComputing's desktop virtualization solutions, we also evaluated Citrix and VMware.

Why did you select this product?

In searching for a viable alternative to a laptop approach that was less costly, but compute rich, I stumbled upon NComputing and learned more about its desktop virtualization technology. I quickly realized this was the answer to accomplishing the objectives of our one-to-one computing and online assessment testing initiative. NComputing employs thin client technology to enable virtualized desktops. However, unlike traditional thin client technology, NComputing delivers better user performance at a lower cost.

With NComputing, schools can have one-to-one computer access at a very reasonable cost, and when it's time for a tech refresh, the costs are minimal compared to any other solution. This should be the only way it's done. And not to mention, NComputing's ease of deployment is was extremely simple and seamless.

As a pilot project, we deployed NComputing X550 units at Covington Street Elementary in Laurinburg. The X-series taps the unused capacity of a PC or server so that users can simultaneously share a single computer. With the X550s, we can run five Windows workstations off a single server.

Students have his/her own ID and password, and their own specified applications, files and settings. It's like their own computer each time they use it. They love it! Teachers and students can choose from a number of applications for independent, group learning or tests.

This is one-to-one computing for literally pennies on the dollar.

What tangible benefits have you gotten through the use of this product?

With the success at Covington Street Elementary, we've rolled out NComputing to every school in the district for a total of 1,400 seats. Soon Covington Street Elementary will become the first virtualized one-to-one elementary school in North Carolina.

With the implementation of NComputing, we've seen increased student achievement and behavior. In district classrooms with a Windows terminal for every student, teachers have reported dramatic changes. During computer time, students are able to work at their own pace, solving that once never-ending problem of trying to teach children that are on different paths of a learning curve. With the help of NComputing, the result is more individualized learning and more focused, interested students.

According to the principal and teachers at Covington Street Elementary, the student's math scores, their problem solving skills and how they attack problems are so different from other classrooms, and they believe it's because of their technology partner, NComputing. Student engagement went straight up. Discipline problems went straight down. Achievement has been amazing.

In terms of a cost savings, the initial cost is 40 percent cheaper than rolling out laptops, and the biggest benefit will be when fresh time comes in three years. Then I will see a 90 percent savings, which is unbelievable. Right now, I'm providing one-to-one access for less than half the cost of a desktop computer. Additionally, I'm cutting down on heat and power, which is ultimately, saving more.

We save half a million dollars every four years and that's not counting replacing the batteries, power supplies, and lost and stolen devices we would have otherwise have had to do. And my staff doesn't have to repair 1,800 individual computers. It's a win-win.

What advice would you offer others facing similar circumstances?

Before you make a decision, you need to look at NComputing and its desktop virtualization solutions. (If you're interested a video about NComputing's products can be found here.)

When I'm doing my morning news scan, I click through links on a list that is automatically generated by my favorite search engine and sent to me as an alert. Quite a few of the news sources and company sites seem to have Apps for my Smartphone or Tablet and insist that I should download it even though this may have been the first (and very likely the last) time I have visited. To get my attention, they gray out the screen and force me to say no to an automatic app download time and again.

Why do companies think I want their single-purpose App if it the first time I visit their website from a smartphone or a tablet? Why do they continue to require me to refuse the automatic installation of their App each and every time I visit their Website?

Do you agree that the tactic of graying out the screen and forcing visitors to refuse the automatic installation of an unwanted App is irritating?