Brocade, a leading Evolving Solutions partner, recently announced enhancements to its Brocade® Ethernet fabric portfolio that utilizes Brocade VCS™ technology. These enhancements are designed to increase scalability, improve virtual machine awareness, further simplifying management and significantly reducing operational overhead, thus, delivering more choice, flexibility and automation to customers deploying virtualization and cloud IT infrastructures.
The new additions and enhancements include:

• New VCS technology extensions that automate VM discovery, configuration and mobility within Brocade Ethernet fabrics
• Increases in Ethernet fabric scalability by doubling the number of switches within a VCS fabric, allowing customers to easily and quickly scale out their data center networks
• The new Brocade VDX 6730 Data Center Switch, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch that protects existing SAN infrastructure investments by seamlessly bridging VCS Ethernet fabrics to Fibre Channel SAN fabrics
• The new Brocade VDX 6710 Data Center Switch, a high-density, 1/10 GbE switch that provides a low-cost entry point for VCS fabric technology by enabling 1 GbE servers to connect to Ethernet fabric environments as well as classic data center LAN deployments
• Unified management of Brocade Ethernet fabrics with other data center LAN, SAN and application delivery infrastructures in a single enterprise-class application

Evolving Solutions is an authorized Brocade Elite Partner allowing Evolving Solutions to bring clients market-leading high availability enterprise Storage Area Network technology.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Cloud storage technologies, of course, are appealing to data centers and IT management due to the technology’s ability to improve storage utilization, handle growing data capacity and deliver reliable data services. But, as Gartner points out in its research, the reality is that limited budgets and existing equipment and software investments can create an obstacle to achieving ideal private cloud storage. Plus, IT can not just abandon existing infrastructures to start from scratch and fully build in the cloud world.

Gartner suggests a ‘bridge to the cloud’ in its research titled “Use Heterogeneous Storage Virtualization as a Bridge to the Cloud”. How does heterogeneous storage virtualization help get an organization closer to the cloud? It provides a consolidation point for storage infrastructure, consolidating a collection of disk arrays that may be from different vendors or even different models. Once this is complete, the volumes presented by individual arrays are virtualized and thus appearing to users as coming from the heterogeneous storage virtualization device.

Although this ‘bridge’ sounds good it does have its limitations which need to be pointed out. First, individual disk arrays still require an initial configuration from their own element managers which can be complex. Also, this type of virtualization does not allow for a full implementation of private cloud storage. It is meant to be a bridge and third-party services will be needed to fill in any gaps.

Proper data storage is the key to success for any organization. eWeek recently featured an article titled “The Future of Storage: Blending New and Old” that speaks to coming trends in the storage industry.

Storage is developing at a rapid pace, but old standards such as hard-disk drives and long-term table storage will continue to be used for at least the next 10 to 20 years predict analysts. Their continued use is not only due to the fact that they are meeting current storage needs, but also because much IT capital is invested in these older technologies. Analysts also add that new storage technologies are not all ready to be deployed on a larger scale and affordability is a pressing factor as well.

So what are some of these future storage technologies?

• Although not necessarily new to storage, phase-change memory (PCM) has gotten a new look by researchers. The latest research shows that PCM may serve well in the digital data storage sector due to its new found ability to deliver faster data movement and its longer lifespan.
• Analysts see PCIe cards becoming more mainstream.
• Virtual machine image cloning or the ability to save the ‘child’ created each time a virtual machine is running may become a hot topic as well.

Analysts also see automated disaster recovery from either on-premised or from a cloud service and storage pooling as other future developments. Storage will continue to give IT manages much to think about in terms of improvements in data capacity, performance and, of course, affordability.

According to IDC, as IT departments work to meet the challenges of maximizing the performance of their IT landscape in the new era of data center virtualization, many will need help from external data center service providers. Here are some tips from IDC on how to evaluate high-quality services for optimizing the data center.

• Look for a provider that can support and has experience across the entire IT environment not just one technology asset.
• Look for a data center service provider that has experience across multiple geographies, multiple data center environments, and, also experience across various stages along the virtualization maturity curve can be invaluable.
• Look for a provider with systematic time- and customer-tested strategies specific to a given data center environment
• Look for a provider with data center analytics top-of-mind

A Network World article “How to become SaaS savvy” gives pointers to develop your “cloud smarts” as cloud computing, including Software as a Service, deployments and understanding continue to increase. Here are some tips to becoming SaaS savvy:

• Have an up-front and in-depth discussions with your cloud provider regarding integration and partnerships.
• As an enterprise develop a strong SaaS strategy.
• Along with understanding integration capabilities and partnerships, develop an understanding of what process modeling tools are available.
• Probe into the policies cloud computing providers have in place for software updates, change control and disaster recovery.

According to the IDC Group, as IT organizations look to the future, success will be built on streamlining processes, reducing complexity and improving time to market. Opportunities for IT in the coming years as the data center virtualization lifecycle continues to mature will include:

• Infrastructure resource efficiencies. In the early stages of an organization’s move to virtualization, efficiencies are first found on the server side, but organizations need to recognize that a highly virtualized world also requires changes on the networking, facilities and people sides of the data center operation.
• Improved storage efficiencies. IDC expects storage capacity in enterprises to soar through 2014 as the business continues to use and demand data to stay competitive and improve earnings.

Check back Friday, September 23rd for recommendations from IDC on how to evaluate data center services.

How does one get “fit” for smarter computing? The Bathwick Group in their research provides some recommendations to starting your journey, which was recently presented by Evolving Solutions and IBM.

Smarter computing is a “journey” that starts with first understanding your key dimensions of process, data and infrastructure. The next step in getting fit is to access:

• What skills and expertise do your people need in order to get fit for the journey?
• What are the best technologies to deploy in order to help you deliver smarter computing?
• Where can you utilize external help to ‘coach’ you on the journey to smarter computing?

Getting to smarter computing can seem daunting which may discourage many IT organizations. The key after gaining an understanding of your key dimensions and your ‘fitness’ is to start with a series of phases and small projects each of which can bring its own benefits and rewards while moving the organization further down the road to smarter computing.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesdays”.  Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Cloud computing enables users to get what they need, as they need it—from advanced analytics and business applications to IT infrastructure and platform services, including virtual servers and storage. But how do clients begin to wrap their heads around where to start or what functions could go to the cloud?

In a recent joint presentation with Evolving Solutions and IBM’s Chief Strategist, Don Cotey, they provided the following break out of the key foundational components of cloud computing deployment to help their clients gain a better understanding of how to think about cloud computing opportunities:

• Software as a Service includes business application services and industry solutions
• Platform as a Service includes application services, application lifestyle, workload services and integration
• Infrastructure as a Service includes operations support systems, optimization and security

Check back  Friday, September 16th for an article about how to get ‘fit’ for smarter computing.

We continue today with a look at what The Bathwick Group defines as key dimensions of smarter computing, which was recently presented by Evolving Solutions and IBM.

• Process – the core business processes that differentiate you as a business. Smart organizations will constantly monitor key business processes, looking for opportunities to simplify and improve.
• Data – the information upon which you base your business decisions. The ‘smarter’ organizations have defined a ‘single-view of the truth’ in their data definitions and constantly monitor and maintain this truth with new projects and deployments.
• Infrastructure – the computing resources that underpin your data and processes. IT needs to begin its journey of readying itself for virtualization and cloud computing to take advantage of their benefits and stay competitive.

On Friday, September 16th, we will discuss how to get “fit” for smarter computing.

In a recent joint presentation from Evolving Solutions and their partner IBM, Patrick O’Rourke speaks about a new era of IT as defined by The Bathwick Group – smarter computing. Over the next two weeks we will cover the what and why of smarter computing, key dimensions and how to get “fit” or ready for smarter computing.

First, what is smarter computing and why did it come about? Smarter computing is focused on delivering the best business outcomes in the most efficient and effective way. Smarter computing has come about as a consequence of our IT systems becoming too complex and difficult to manage. In today’s fast paced environment of innovation and change, it is common for business end-users to think of IT as a barrier to innovation rather than as an enabler. With new technologies now available that help to address the challenge of delivering flexible, dynamic business processes at a low cost, the time is right for smarter computing.

Check back Monday, September 12th to learn more about the key dimensions of smarter computing.