“End customer applications are more fragmented than in the past; today they are often made up of multiple components which may include databases, application servers and Web servers. In order to get an application to work well, these components often need to be located physically near to each other within a traditional network topology. This locality optimizes the communications between application components. Customers have designed their data center to physically locate applications, databases and associated storage together. While, the architecture of an application has evolved to capture the key business requirements, the network has not kept pace to enable flexibility in location.”

Being able to move virtual machines from one place to another within the data center provides a great opportunity for boosting operational efficiency and utilizing scarce resources more effectively.  The problem in doing this though is that migration disrupts application performance and availability and may violate security policies.  Manual migration of virtual machines, therefore, presents a business risk that is also time consuming and expensive.

Borovick writes that currently, the network is one of the barriers companies face in moving to a more mature IT model that involves virtual machine mobility and the deployment of a private cloud.  IDC believes that in order to continue on the path to a fully virtualized datacenter, you need to make sure that all the application components in your datacenter are able to connect seamlessly. You want to facilitate the seamless migration of applications in the datacenter by making sure that all the components are connected.

The impediment to any-to-any connectivity is that each workload in a typical enterprise class datacenter has unique network demands and many have very stringent demands such as lossless packet delivery, deterministic latency and high bandwidth. It is critical to have a network that can pool resources together to minimize latency as required to support application availability. Additionally, 10 GbE will be required to meet higher bandwidth requirements. Further, virtual machine visibility and network virtualization is required to support security.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting a Q & A with IDC analyst, Lucinda Borovick, Program Vice President, Enterprise Communications and Data center Networks.

Questions answered include:

• How do I make sure the network doesn’t become an impediment in the path to the virtualized data center?
• What is network locality and why is it becoming an application and security problem?
• What should I consider when evolving to a data center network that will enable the virtualized data center?

Check back on Friday, March 4th for the first part in this series.

In addition to finding ways to cope with an expanding storage infrastructure, data center managers also have to:
- Providing continuous access to data stored on reliable and secure media
- Meet stringent compliance regulations that require longer data retention
- Create operational efficiency while simultaneously cutting costs

To maximize efficiency, companies must tier storage between high-cost, energy-inefficient disk drives and lower-cost, energy efficient,
long-term tape archive systems to manage the bottom line. In addition, many installed tape systems don’t provide mixed media support, partitioning, or library sharing, making it difficult for data centers to scale and share hardware and software to leverage existing resources and reduce operational costs. With the right tape storage technology, companies can consolidate multiple smaller systems onto larger solutions (or large systems onto fewer, higher-density solutions) and store more data at less cost.

An enterprise’s data represents one of its most important assets, so how that data is stored, accessed, and secured is of paramount importance. . Providing economies of scale, a sound storage consolidation strategy can lead to lower costs, less energy consumption, improved response times, better performance, increased capacity, and more.

Download the full whitepaper at Tech Republic.

The Symposium brings together many great IT leaders and thinkers from around the region to inspire, collaborate and maintain the competitive advantage in an industry that demands more for less. Nearly 240 IT leaders representing 100 of the regions’ top IT organizations attended last year.

The agenda includes presentations on Business Intelligence as a Service (BIaaS), achieving greater IT efficiency, database virtualization, successful data backup, storage asset optimization, storage efficiency in virtualized environments and more.

Learn more about the 10th Annual Minnesota IT Symposium.

When survey respondents were asked to identify what they considered to be the most significant challenges related to their virtualization use, performance, server capital costs and capacity sizing issues ranked one, two and three, respectively.  Furthermore, when respondents were asked what was needed to enable more widespread use of server virtualization, 35 percent said better integration between server, storage, networking and virtualization technology.

Like with any technological advancement, there are growing pains, and these organizations are seeing the impact of stressing a virtualized data center to the maximum.  In order to take their virtualization projects to the next level, server and storage integration is a necessity.

Tightly integrating servers and storage will allow better virtual server performance, greater virtual machine density, simplified management and better data protection.

Read the full article on Virtualization Review.

That said, many industry experts believe that cloud computing is over-hyped and that adoption will take longer than predicted.  According to Brocade’s John McHugh, “cloud computing will lack a serious uptake for another 10 years, except for private clouds within businesses. Until then, it will likely only form a relatively small part of businesses’ setup.”  He believes that security concerns surrounding cloud computing will continue to limit adoption and that interest in other areas such as networking technologies will emerge.

Ron Fuller, a Technical Solutions Architect for Cisco, says that networking is the critical foundation for data center success.   With increased virtualization on the platform side, stateless computing and workload mobility, Fuller says that networks “must scale in bandwidth, latency, quality of service and resiliency to provide the appropriate levels of service to the changing demands.”

As technologies such as consolidation and virtualization continue to change the ways in which data centers are designed and constructed, scalability will become increasingly important.  “The concept of scale as we know it is being turned on its head and growth projections for compute, storage and network resources are going through the roof,” says Fuller . “At the heart of this change is the glue that connects all of the key components of the data center together, the network.”

In today’s economic climate, cost efficiency is top of mind for the vast majority of C-level executives—and they are not just looking to drive down overall costs, but to put their available dollars to better use. Organizations are also focused on managing and mitigating risk—while still supporting business goals—and addressing various regulatory, organizational and industry-based compliance drivers.

In order to meet rising service-level expectations and cost saving objectives, IBM believes that it is time to start thinking differently about infrastructure. IBM’s strategy for dynamic infrastructure enables organizes to move beyond addressing simple daily operational challenges to becoming proactive about accelerating service delivery, reducing costs and managing risk.

Some ways in which Evolving Solutions is leverage the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure are:

• Integrated service management and data center automation to accelerate the delivery of IT services
• Energy efficiency initiatives
• IT infrastructure optimization via virtualization technology
• Information infrastructure initiatives for managing complex data growth
• Workload optimization to deliver better performance, scale and efficiency
• Flexible delivery choices (including cloud computing)
• Integrated risk management strategy

At the core of IBM’s strategy to transform IT and the data center is support for smarter business and IT service delivery. The Dynamic Infrastructure is all about achieving business goals.

Evolving Solutions overhauled the existing datacenter and conducted an enterprise-wide IT infrastructure redesign using JD Edwards ERP software.  We helped implement and configure the ERP solution, as well as migrating data from legacy systems.

Evolving Solutions designed a storage infrastructure using the IBM XIV storage system, X86 and IBM system p Bladecenter.  This solution sets the company up for uninterrupted growth up to 79 terabytes and can be easily updated if more storage is needed later.

The solution also included virtualization and disaster recovery components. We implemented an IBM System p Blade center appliance, which allows the customer to run five diverse workloads inside a single architecture.  Their virtualized environment allows them to move running workloads between servers to maximize availability and avoid downtime, as well as dynamically adjusting server capability to meet changing workload demands.

With the company’s location prone to flooding, backing up files and moving the tapes off-site is extremely important.  They cannot risk their data being lost.  We therefore implemented a Tivoli Storage Manager disaster recovery solution to act as their insurance policy.

Summary of Benefits

• Consolidation – Streamlining and integration of disparate systems
• Scalability – Room to grow without having to implement a “forklift upgrade”
• Enhanced Performance – Virtualization has increased server utilization
• Network Connectivity – Fast and remote access to company data
• Cost Savings – Savings in systems maintenance costs  following AS400 decommissioning
• Managed Services – Scheduled healthchecks to monitor system performance

Read the full solution success story.

CAMP is designed to to provide IT staff and asset management personnel with a single source database for managing multi-vendor technology assets.  Now our customers can access the IT information they need – when they need it.

Our mission is to make it easier for our customers to access and track IT assets under contract.  CAMP was created to significantly improve IT efficiencies.

Read the full press release