What are the common ‘pain points’ for data storage management teams in IT? InfoStor.com provides these common pain points and suggests how to mitigate them in their feature “6 Storage Resource Management Pain Points – Mitigated“

1. When applications slow most IT managers first look towards disk Input/Output as being the reason for latency, sluggish response times. A performance monitoring tool on mission-critical storage can prove invaluable.
2. A formal, written policy regarding storage management is necessary. Make sure to include treatment of versions, backup types, frequency, storage location, archive/retention and eventual file disposal. It may be helpful to group ‘types’ of storage into nodes or policy groups.
3. Tracking of physical storage assets from a financial perspective is key to determine charge back to business units.
4. A storage management team never wants to hear ‘we’re out of space!” Using tracking software to manage capacity has become the go-to method in today’s complex IT world to reliably keep storage issues to a minimum.
5. Storage managers need to recognize that security is also part of their job duties. Adequate controls are needed to prevent unauthorized tinkering with storage configurations.
6. Configuration management can be time-consuming and error-prone, but today, there are many tools that can help storage management teams automate and standardize.

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

In September, the Congressional House Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation assembled a panel of IT executives for advice on the types of projects the government should and shouldn’t do to facilitate cloud deployment reports Patrick Thibodeau for CIO. Some congressional committee members believe that the government’s IT budget could be drastically reduced by moving some workloads to cloud providers. IT leaders suggested that in terms of government use, procurement rules should be changed to enable multiple agencies to create one cloud rather than each agency doing individual clouds.

When asked about the role of government in helping to further develop cloud computing technology, the panel of IT leaders suggested continued basic research spending in areas such as improving current data rates and on high bandwidth data sharing over wireless spectrum. All industry groups have and continue to urge Congress not to get involved in cloud regulation.

Mr. Thibodeau reports that the White House has adopted a “cloud first” policy with the goal of moving 25% of government IT spending to the cloud.

Our first Fall seminar will be focused on virtualization and how VMware can
help you manage your virtual environment. With the introduction of VMware
vSphere 5, product licensing models are changing to give customers the
opportunity to move to a more cloud-like “pay for consumption” approach to
IT. And we will take a look at how Virtual Desktop computing is changing how
we do business today.

This is a unique opportunity to learn and understand more about Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure, applications and the transformation that is happening
today making organizations more automated, competitive and agile. The
cloud era is here.

We’ll also be hosting an IBM seminar about “New Opportunities in Storage to Optimize your Business”. You will learn how IBM storage and IBM Tivoli software solutions can help you take advantage of the breakthrough economics of smarter computing. Topics we will be covering:
- Store more with what is in your datacenter
- Reduce the cost of protecting your data
- Move data to the right place

Advancements in Virtualization
Hosted by Evolving Solutions
Thursday, November 10, 2011
11.30 am (Lunch Included)
Crave Restaurant
1603 West End Blvd
St. Louis Park, MN 55416
RSVP at www.evolvingsol.com/virtualization
Or call 1.800.294.4362
FREE

New Opportunities in Storage to Optimize Your Business
Hosted by Evolving Solutions
Thursday, November 17, 2011
8:30 – 12:45 pm (Followed by Lunch)
Doubletree
1500 Park Place Blvd.
Minneapolis, MN 55416
RSVP at www.evolvingsol.com/storagebriefing
Or call 1.800.294.4362
FREE

Evolving Solutions has been named one of the top 500 technology integrators in North America by Everything Channel as part of CRN’s 2011 VAR500 list.

The VAR500 list considers earnings from hardware and software sales and managed IT services and recognizes solution providers who bring technologies that transform the way their vendor partners do business. Evolving Solutions ranked 309 on the VAR500 list.

“It’s an honor to be named to the VAR500 list,” said Jaime Gmach, President of Evolving Solutions. “We believe that our business partnerships and commitment to delivering the highest quality of solutions and service to our customers gives us a true competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

Network World recently posted an article “Virtualization 101: Virtualization concepts” where Sandra Van Dijk walks us through several virtualization concepts, such as software appliances, workspace virtualization and capacity planning and management tools. Let’s review below each of these concepts:

• Software appliances and virtualization: software appliances can be used to package and deliver solutions on top of virtual machines to hide complexity beneath an application-specific management interface. Analysts say that over the next 12 months we’ll see more applications bundled on top of a hypervisor/OS combination.
• Workspace virtualization tools separate the user’s working environment from the OS or any applications on the PC – allowing users to run a corporate-managed workspace on a corporate OR user-owned PC. Workspace virtualization holds particular promise for mobile users.
• Capacity planning and management tools help plan for optimal performance of business processes by assisting IT to achieve performance goals and budgets without the over provisioning of infrastructure or excessive off-premise capacity. Analysts point to an increased interest in these tools due to their increased use for consolidation activities and planning for virtual and cloud computing deployments.

Other concepts mentioned in the article include server hardware assisted virtualization, PC virtual software appliances and virtual machine recovery.

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

There have been a host of recent studies regarding greening up enterprise IT that point to energy efficiencies and environmental impacts from cloud computing versus the traditional on-premise systems. Andrew Hickey of CRN focuses on one research project by Pike Research in this  article “Cloud Services Axe Data Center Energy Consumption, Power Costs”.

According to the Pike Research approach the move to cloud computing technology will have a great impact on data center energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Here are some of the stats Pike Research reports:

• By 2020, Pike Research predicts data centers to consume 31% less electricity than today
• Cloud computing will also drive a 38% reduction in worldwide data center energy expenditures by 2020
• Over the next decade Pike Research attributes cloud computing to reducing a data center’s greenhouse gas emissions by 28%

Pike Research sees that few clean technologies like cloud computing have the capability to reduce energy expenditures and green house gas emissions with so little business disruption. Cloud computing in the coming years could be one of the largest contributing factors to the greening of enterprise IT.

The Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal has ranked Evolving Solutions #47 in its annual Fast 50 – fastest growing private companies list. The annual Fast 50 list published by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal recognizes the top 50 fastest growing private companies in the Twin Cities metro area.

Jaime Gmach, President of Evolving Solutions, attributes much of the company’s success to its employees, who have demonstrated commitment to growing the company during a challenging economy and have consistently supported Evolving Solutions’ business vision. Gmach states that investing in the business did not stop during the recession. Instead, they took the opportunity to “double down” and invest in more people, processes and technology to enable growth.

Other factors contributing to ongoing business success include broadening solution offerings for increased value-add and listening to feedback from employees, clients and strategic partners to help guide investment decisions.

Even with all the data backup options available today, Evolving Solutions still recognizes tape backup as a stable solution for an organization’s IT systems. More and more organizations are using virtual tape versus physical tape as a back up storage device. Virtual tape has a number of benefits and a minimal cost.

So why virtual tape? First, virtual tape offers a huge privacy and security benefit. Today, physical tape has to be sent via courier to an organization’s data storage center for data backup. This extra moving part opens an organization up to the risk of data loss. Virtual tape is sent electronically and is encrypted, thus, guaranteeing a safer and quicker data transfer process. Virtual tape also allows for improved recovery times. Data is transmitted rather than an individual having to go to the recovery center and pick up physical tape ensuring better disaster recovery.

Finally, cost, as virtual tape storage technology has scaled in recent years the cost to switch is now minuscule if nothing for most organizations.

As reported by Patrick Thibodeau in his recent article “Server virtualization pushes storage demand to new highs” on Network World, just over half of all data center workloads are now virtualized. As more companies have continued to seek the benefits of virtualization the demands for storage and data center power are reaching new highs. In fact, the article states that analysts believe that 78% of all workloads will eventually be virtualized. The remaining workloads will continue to run on dedicated physical servers mostly because of security and compliance issues.

As the article explains, in pre-virtualization days, the process of adding server space often required review by IT administrators, but with virtualization IT can now provision a new application in minutes which is pushing up storage demand about 40% a year analysts say which in turn can put more demands on power.

Labeled sometimes as ‘virtualization sprawl’ companies are employing a number of tactics to respond to the new storage and power demands such as data deduplication, placing tighter controls on new virtualization deployments and looking toward outsourcing. Some companies have been able to offset their growing storage needs with the power savings seen with server virtualization as workloads have been moved to more power-efficient systems.

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

Sinclair Schuller of CIO introduces us to the concept of “Private PaaS” or Private Platform as a Service in his Network World article “Private PaaS: Private Cloud, Enterprise Architecture Converge”. Mr Schuller explains that in general PaaS is a software layer that typically stitches together networked resources including OS instances, database server instances, web server instances, and even load balancers into a single, shared logical hosting layer. The PaaS takes on the responsibility of matching the various application components to the infrastructure, deploying those components, dynamically configuring them, and even providing tools for scaling and updating the application over time allowing for faster and more efficient deployment and standards uniformity. Despite the value PaaS can bring to the enterprise and the application development team, developers have typically been barred from using it on major projects due to reasons related to security, performance and bandwidth.

Mr. Schuller points out that deploying a “Private” PaaS is the answer to gaining access to PaaS benefits while mitigating the risks. Private PaaS is the deployment of a PaaS software layer on an enterprise’s internal infrastructure with the goal of exposing the PaaS service to the developers allowing for a true establishment of an enforceable shared architecture and set of services for all applications.