EqualLogic is Storage Virtualization

In this Equalogic Bits Segment I will discuss how EqualLogic truly is Virtualized Storage and how this relates to Server Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization.

Source: MarcMalotke.net   By: Marc Malotke

Top 10 Storage Virtualization Trends of 2010

The storage area network (SAN) is now an essential technology for many large and midsize enterprises. Over the years SANs have become more sophisticated as vendors have rolled out systems that deliver better storage utilization and functionality. Based on these positive developments, 2010 should bring new and interesting products in several key areas. Here are our top 10 trends to keep an eye on in the coming year — along with the insights of key IT managers who are looking to optimize their existing storage and virtualization strategies.

1. Integration of solid state with rotating media for higher performance and lower energy costs.
Product picks: EMC FAST, Fusion-io, Compellent Storage Center

In an effort to provide the best possible storage solutions, many storage vendors are looking for ways to marry the high performance of solid-data memory to the lower cost of rotating media. As prices continue to drop for all storage technologies — and as hard drives get faster and cheaper — vendors are specifically working to incorporate the latest solid-state drive technologies into traditional SAN arrays. EMC Corp. and Compellent both offer fully automated storage tiering, which is the ability to store data depending on the needs of the application. More-frequently accessed files are stored on faster-performing disks, while less-frequently needed files are moved to tape.

“We’re using the Compellent product as part of our new Savvis Symphony cloud infrastructure service offering,” says Bryan Doerr, CTO of St. Louis-based services provider Savvis Inc. “We like how it has a policy that sits between the application and the array to control how each block of data is written to the physical media, based on frequency of usage.”

Doerr is pleased that these decisions are made automatically. “We don’t have to map tables or keep track of what files are stored where, and that’s a very powerful benefit to us,” he says. “Compellent can move individual blocks from a low-cost and low-performing SATA drive to a solid-state drive for the most-frequently updated data.”

One of the more interesting products is a hardware accelerator plug-in adapter card from Fusion-io that can pre-cache data using solid data memory for SAN arrays and other large-scale storage applications.

2. De-duplication technology — on storage and backups — can help open unused space.
Product picks: EMC Avamar, Symantec/Veritas Netbackup PureDisk, IBM/Tivoli Storage Manager, NetApp FlexClone

De-duplication technologies can provide a powerful way to quickly reclaim storage and minimize backup jobs. When users first start applying these technologies, they’re frequently surprised at how much duplication actually exists. As depicted in Figure 1, with PureDisk software from Symantec Corp., users can drill into a backup job and see that they could save more than 95 percent of their storage by getting rid of duplicate data. This capability offers huge potential savings, particularly when backing up virtual machine (VM) collections and remote offices.

Part of the challenge when using VMs is dealing with the fact that they share many common files inside each virtual image — the boot files for the operating system, the applications and so forth. A de-duplication product can leverage this by making only a single copy of common files.

PureDisk is typical of de-duplication products in that it operates in two different ways. For starters, you can use a PureDisk client or agent that runs on each VM and reports the unique files back to the central PureDisk backup server. And PureDisk can also back up the entire VMware VMDK image file without any agents on the separate VMs. This offloads backup from the ESX server and enables single-pass backups to protect all the files — whether they’re in use or not — that comprise the VM.

“De-duplication gives us big storage savings,” says Chuck Ballard, network and technical services manager at food manufacturer J&B Group, based in St. Michael, Minn. “We have 30 machines, each with a 20GB virtual hard drive, on our SAN. Rather than occupy 600GB, we have about a third of that, and we can grow and shrink our volumes as our needs dictate. We use the [NetApp] LUN copy utility to replicate our workstation copies off of a master image.”

Ballard stores his images on NetApp’s SAN arrays that have their own utility — called FlexClone — to make virtual copies of the data. “We had EMC and also looked at IBM, but both of them had limited dynamic-provisioning features,” he says, adding that a VMware upgrade that required 4.5TB on J&B Group’s old SAN now uses just 1.5TB on the company’s new storage infrastructure.

3. More granularity in backup and restoration of virtual servers.
Product picks: Vizioncore vRanger Pro, Symantec Netbackup, Asigra Cloud Backup

When combined with de-duplication technologies, more granular backups make for efficient data protection — particularly in virtualized environments where storage requirements quickly balloon and it can take longer than overnight to make backups. Backup vendors are getting better at enabling recoveries that understand the data structure of VM images and can extract just the necessary files without having to restore an entire VM disk image. Symantec Netbackup and Vizioncore vRanger both have this feature, which makes them handy products to have in the case of accidentally deleted configuration or user files. For its part, Asigra Cloud Backup can protect server resources both inside the data center and the cloud.

4. Live migrations and better integration of VM snapshots make it easier to back up, copy and patch VMs.
Product picks: FalconStor FDS, VMware vMotion and vStorage APIs, Citrix XenServer

VMware vStorage API for Data Protection facilitates LAN-free backup of VMs from a central proxy server rather than directly from an ESX Server. Users can do centralized backups without the overhead and hassle of having to run separate backup tasks from inside each VM. These APIs were formerly known as the VMware Consolidated Backup, and the idea behind them is to offload the ESX server from the backup process. This involves taking VM snapshots at any point in time to facilitate the backup and recovery process, so an entire .VMDK image doesn’t have to be backed up from scratch. It also shortens recovery time.

Enhanced VM storage management also includes the ability to perform live VM migrations without having to shut down the underlying OS. Citrix Systems XenServer offers this feature in version 5.5, and VMware has several tools including vMotion and vSphere that can make it easier to add additional RAM and disk storage to a running VM.

Finally, vendors are getting wise to the fact that many IT engineers are carrying smartphones and developing specific software to help them manage their virtualization products. VMware has responded to this trend with vCenter Mobile Access, which allows users to start, stop, copy and manage their VMs from their BlackBerry devices. Citrix also has its Receiver for iPhone client, which makes it possible to remotely control a desktop from an iPhone and run any Windows apps on XenApp 5- or Presentation Server 4.5-hosted servers. While looking at a Windows desktop from the tiny iPhone and BlackBerry screens can be frustrating — and a real scrolling workout — it can also be helpful in emergency situations when you can’t get to a full desktop and need to fix something quickly on the fly.

5. Thin and dynamic provisioning of storage to help moderate storage growth.
Product picks: Symantec/Veritas Storage Foundation Manager, Compellent Dynamic Capacity, Citrix XenServer Essentials, 3Par Inserv

There are probably more than a dozen different products in this segment that are getting better at detecting and managing storage needs. A lot of space can be wasted setting up new VMs on SAN arrays, and these products can reduce that waste substantially. This happens because, when provisioning SANs, users generally don’t know exactly how much storage they’ll need, so they tend to err on the high side by creating volumes that are large enough to meet their needs for the life of the server. The same thing happens when they create individual VMs on each virtual disk partition.

With dynamic-provisioning applications, as application needs grow, SANs automatically extend the volume until it reaches the configured maximum size. This allows users to over-provision disk space, which is fine if their storage needs grow slowly. However, because VMs can create a lot of space in a short period of time, this can also lead to problems. Savvy users will deal with this situation by monitoring their storage requirements with Storage Resource Management tools and staying on top of what has been provisioned and used.

Savvis is using the 3Par InServ Storage Servers for thin provisioning. “We don’t have to worry about mapping individual logical units to specific physical drives — we just put the physical drives in the array and 3Par will carve them up into usable chunks of storage. This gives us much higher storage densities and less wasted space,” says Doerr.

Citrix XenServer Essentials includes both thin- and dynamic-provisioning capabilities, encoding differentials between the virtual disk images so that multiple VMs consume a fraction of the space required because the same files aren’t duplicated. Dynamic workload streaming can be used to rapidly deploy server workloads to the most appropriate server resources — physical or virtual — at any time during the week, month, quarter or year. This is particularly useful for applications that may be regularly migrated between testing and production environments or for systems that require physical deployments for peak user activity during the business cycle.

Compellent has another unique feature, which is the ability to reclaim unused space. Their software searches for unused storage memory blocks that are part of deleted files and marks them as unused so that Windows OSes can overwrite them.

6. Greater VM densities per host will improve storage performance and management.
Product pick: Cisco Unified Communications Server

As corporations make use of virtualization, they find that it can have many applications in a variety of areas. And nothing — other than video — stretches storage faster than duplicating a VM image or setting up a bunch of virtual desktops. With these greater VM densities comes a challenge to keep up with the RAM requirements needed to support them.

In this environment, we’re beginning to see new classes of servers that can handle hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. For example, the Cisco Systems Unified Communications Server (UCS) supports large amounts of memory and VM density (see Figure 2): In one demonstration from VirtualStorm last fall at VMworld, there were more than 400 VMs running Windows XP on each of six blades on one Cisco UCS. Each XP instance had more than 90GB of applications contained in its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure image, which was very impressive.

“It required a perfect balance between the desktops, the infrastructure, the virtualization and the management of the desktops and their applications in order to scale to thousands of desktops in a single environment,” says Erik Westhovens, one of the engineers from VirtualStorm writing on a blog entry about the demonstration.

Savvis is an early UCS customer. “I like where Cisco is taking this platform; combining more functionality within the data center inside the box itself,” Doerr says. “Having the switching and management under the hood, along with native virtualization support, helps us to save money and offer different classes of service to our Symphony cloud customers and ultimately a better cloud-computing experience.”

“If you don’t buy enough RAM for your servers, it doesn’t pay to have the higher-priced VMware licenses,” says an IT manager for a major New York City-based law firm that uses EMC SANs. “We now have five VMware boxes running 40 VMs a piece, and bought new servers specifically to handle this.”

As users run more guest VMs on a single physical server, they’ll find they need to have more RAM installed on the server to maintain performance. This may mean they need to move to a more expensive, multiple-CPU server to handle the larger RAM requirements. Cisco has recognized that many IT shops are over-buying multiple-CPU servers just so they can get enough dual in-line memory module slots to install more RAM. The Cisco UCS hardware will handle 384GB of RAM and not require the purchase of multiple processor licenses for VMware hypervisors, which saves money in the long run.

James Sokol, the CTO for a benefits consultancy in New York City, points out that good hypervisor planning means balancing the number of guest VMs with the expanded RAM required to best provision each guest VM. “You want to run as many guests per host [as possible] to control the number of host licenses you need to purchase and maintain,” Sokol says. “We utilize servers with dual quad-core CPUs and 32GB of RAM to meet our hosted-server requirements.”

A good rule of thumb for Windows guest VMs is to use a gigabyte of RAM for every guest VM that you run.

7. Better high-availability integration and more fault-tolerant operations.
Product picks: VMware vSphere 4 and Citrix XenServer 5.5

The latest hypervisors from VMware and Citrix include features that expedite failover to a backup server and enable fault-tolerant operations. This makes it easier for VMs to be kept in sync when they’re running on different physical hosts, and enhances the ability to move the data stored on one host to another without impacting production applications or user computing. The goal is to provide mainframe-class reliability and operations to virtual resources.

One area where virtualized resources are still playing catch-up to the mainframe computing world is security policies and access controls. Citrix still lacks role-based access controls, and VMware has only recently added this to its vSphere line. This means that in many shops, just about any user can start and stop a VM instance without facing difficult authentication hurdles. There are third-party security tools — such as the HyTrust Appliance for VMware — that allow more granularity over which users have what kind of access to particular VMs. Expect other third-party virtualization management vendors to enter this market in the coming year. (To get an idea of how HyTrust’s software operates, check out the screencast I prepared for them here.)

8. Private cloud creation and virtualized networks — including vendor solutions that offer ways to virtualize your data center entirely in the cloud.
Product picks: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, VMware vSphere vShield Zones, ReliaCloud, Hexagrid VxDataCenter

Vendors are virtualizing more and more pieces of the data center and using virtual network switches — what VMware calles vShield Zones — to ensure that your network traffic never leaves the virtualized world but still retains nearly the same level of security found in your physical network. For example, you can set up firewalls that stay with the VMs as they migrate between hypervisors, create security policies and set up virtual LANs. Think of it as setting up a security perimeter around your virtual data center.

Amazon has been hard at work with Elastic Computing — its cloud-based, virtualization-hosted storage — and last summer added Virtual Private Cloud to its offerings (see Figure 3). This enables users to extend their VPNs to include the Amazon cloud, further mixing the physical and virtual network infrastructures. It’s also possible to extend any security device on your physical network to cover the Amazon cloud-based servers. The same is true with Amazon Web Services, where customers pay on a usage-only basis with no long-term contracts or commitments.

Microsoft has a series of new projects to extend its Windows Azure cloud-based computing to private clouds. They can be found at here and include ventures such as “Project Sydney,” which enables customers to securely link their on premises-based and cloud servers; AppFabric, which is a collection of existing Windows Azure developer components; and updates to Visual Studio 2010.

Some of these are, or soon will be, available in beta. But like other efforts, more federated security between the cloud and in-house servers will require improvements before these new offerings can be dependably used by most enterprises.

Two new entrants to the cloud computing services arena are Hexagrid Inc. and ReliaCloud, both of which offer a wide range of infrastructure services, including high availability, hardware firewalls and load balancing. With these companies, all cloud servers are assigned private IP addresses and have persistence, meaning that users treat them as real servers even though they’re residing in the cloud. Expect more vendors to offer these and other features that allow IT managers to combine physical and cloud resources.

9. Better application awareness of cloud-based services.
Product picks: Exchange 2010, Sparxent MailShadow
It isn’t just about networks in the cloud, but actual applications too, such as Microsoft Exchange services. The days are coming when you’ll be able to run an Exchange server on a remote data center and failover without anyone noticing. Part of this has to do with improvements Microsoft is making to the upcoming 2010 release of its popular e-mail server software. This also has to do with how the virtualization and third-party vendors are incorporating and integrating disaster recovery into their software offerings. An example of the latter is MailShadow from Sparxent Inc. This cloud-based service makes a “shadow” copy of each user’s Exchange mailbox that’s kept in constant synchronization. There are numerous cloud-based Exchange hosting providers that have offered their services over the past few years, and Microsoft is working on its own cloud-based solutions as well.

10. Start learning the high-end, metric system measurements of storage.
If you thought you knew the difference between gigabytes and terabytes, start boning up on the higher end of the metric scale. SAN management vendor DataCore Software Corp. now supports arrays that can contain up to a petabyte — a thousand terabytes — of data. Savvis sells 50GB increments of its SAN utility storage to its co-location customers, which Doerr says has been very well received. “It’s for customers that don’t want to run their own SANs or just want to run the compute-selected functions,” he states. “There’s a lot of variation across our customers. You have to be flexible if you want to win their business.” Given that it wasn’t too long ago when no one could purchase a 50GB hard drive, he says this shows that, “we’re going to be talking exabytes when it comes to describing our storage needs before too long.” Next up: zettabytes and yottabytes.

Source: Redmondmag.com

Virtual Servers, Real Growth

 

If you follow tech industry trends, you’ve probably heard of cloud computing, an increasingly popular approach of delivering technology resources over the Internet rather than from on-site computer systems.

Chances are, you’re less familiar with virtualization — the obscure software that makes it all possible.

The concept is simple: rather than having computers run a single business application — and sit idle most of the time — virtualization software divides a system into several “virtual” machines, all running software in parallel.

The technology not only squeezes more work out of each computer, but makes large systems much more flexible, letting data-center techies easily deploy computing horsepower where it’s needed at a moment’s notice.

The approach cuts costs, reducing the amount of hardware, space and energy needed to power up large data centers. Maintaining these flexible systems is easier, too, because managing software and hardware centrally requires less tech support.

The benefits of virtualization have made cloud computing an economical alternative to traditional data centers.

“Without virtualization, there is no cloud,” said Charles King, principal analyst of Pund-IT.

That’s transforming the technology industry and boosting the fortunes of virtualization pioneers such as VMware (NYSE:VMW – News), Citrix Systems (NMS:CTXS), two of the best-performing stocks in IBD’s specialty enterprise software group. As of Friday, the group ranked No. 24 among IBD’s 197 Industry Groups, up from No. 121 three months ago.

1. Business

Specialty enterprise software represents a small but fast-growing segment of the overall software enterprise market, which according to market research firm Gartner is set to hit $229 billion this year.

As with most software, the segment is a high-margin business. With high upfront development costs but negligible manufacturing and distribution expenses, specialty software companies strive for mass-market appeal. Once developers recoup their initial development costs, additional sales represent pure profit.

Software developers also make money helping customers install and run their software, another high-margin business.

But competition is fierce. Unlike capital-intensive businesses, software companies require no factory, heavy equipment, storefront or inventory to launch. Low barriers to entry mean a constant stream of new competitors looking to out-innovate incumbents.

In addition to the virtualization firms, notable names in the group include CA Technologies (NMS:CA) and Compuware (NMS:CPWR).

All offer infrastructure software to manage data centers.

“Big-iron” mainframe computers began using virtualization in the 1970s, around the time when CA and Compuware were founded.

In the late 1990s, VMware brought the technology to low-cost systems running ordinary Intel (NMS:INTC) chips. VMware has since emerged as the dominant player in virtualization.

Citrix has added a twist to the concept, virtualizing desktop computers. Rather than installing workers’ operating system and applications on hundreds of PCs spread across the globe, companies can use the technology to run PCs from a bank of central servers. Workers, who access their virtual PCs over the Internet, don’t know the difference.

Microsoft (NMS:MSFT) has jumped in with its own virtualization product, HyperV, which it bundles free into Windows Server software packages. Oracle (NMS:ORCL) and Red Hat (NYSE:RHT – News) have launched virtualization products as well.

Meanwhile, CA and Compuware are racing to move beyond their mainframe roots to support virtualization and cloud-computing-enabled data centers. In February, CA said it would buy 3Tera to build services and deploy applications aimed at the cloud-computing market.

And Compuware bought privately held Gomez, Inc. last fall to manage cloud application performance.

Name Of The Game: Innovate. With a fast-moving market and steady influx of new competitors, keeping customers happy with good service and money-saving breakthroughs is vital.

2. Market

Nearly everyone who runs a corporate computer system is a potential buyer of virtualization software. Companies ramping up their information-technology purchases use the software to manage their sprawling infrastructure; others with limited budgets use it to squeeze more out of their existing systems.

Sales of server-virtualization software are set to grow 14% this year to $1.28 billion, according to a report by Lazard Capital Markets. Sales of software to manage virtual environments will grow 44% in 2010 to $1.88 billion.

Desktop virtualization revenue will rise 184% this year to $847.8 million. Citrix has the edge in this budding market with its XenDesktop product.

VMware is dominant among large enterprises, controlling about 85% of the server virtualization market. Microsoft is favored by small and midsize companies.

Virtualization is seen as “a strategic asset” for enabling cloud computing, and continues to gain momentum, says Lazard analyst Joel Fishbein.

VMware has the early-mover advantage in this market with its vSphere platform and has stayed ahead by adding new features such as data security and disaster recovery, analysts say.

But Citrix is partnering closely with Microsoft to take on VMware in virtualization.

3. Climate

Competition is heating up as companies scramble to adopt virtualization. Before 2009, just 30% of companies used virtualization, says analyst Fishbein. This year, that will double to 60%. Most of the gain is coming from small and midsize customers.

In addition, virtual servers are soon expected to more than double as a percentage of the overall server workload, from 18% today to 48% by 2012.

VMware says it can stay a step ahead of the pack by building new features into its products, says Dan Chu, VMware’s vice president of cloud infrastructure and services.

“We have a large technology lead with what we enable for our customers,” Chu said. “We are several years ahead of what the others are doing.”

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton says his firm’s broadening strategy — offering a variety of products with multiple licensing options and distribution channels — will grow sales.

“What’s going on is a massive shift in how computing gets delivered,” Templeton said. “In an environment that’s changing so dramatically, the highest-risk thing you can do is not act.”

4. Technology

The first virtualization boom stemmed from a shift over the last decade away from big expensive mainframes and minicomputers to massive banks of cheap Intel-powered machines. Virtualization gave these low-cost systems some of the high-end features of their pricier counterparts.

Virtualization software makers are betting on a second wave of growth fueled by the industrywide shift to cloud computing.

Technology managers use virtualization to run cloud computing in their own data centers. And large tech vendors such as Microsoft use the technology for cloud-computing services they sell to customers.

Dividing computers into isolated virtual machines gives cloud service providers the benefits of shared computing resources without the security downsides.

VMware has the early lead in virtualization. But the technology is quickly becoming a commodity as Microsoft and others bundle it into their broader platforms.

“VMware is known as a virtualization company, and Microsoft is a platform company,” said David Greschler, who heads up Microsoft’s virtualization efforts. “Their strategy is to sell virtualization, but our strategy is to make virtualization available as part of a larger platform at no extra cost.”

At the same time, a shift toward a world of cloud-computing services hosted by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon.com (NMS:AMZN) and Google (NMS:GOOG) could lead to fewer companies purchasing virtualization software themselves.

Source: Investor’s Business Daily

Citrix Extends Client Virtualization

Virtualization software maker Citrix Systems last week unveiled the word’s first bare-metal client hypervisor, announced a new version of its server virtualization platform and welcomed news from several partners.

Citrix used its annual Synergy show, held this year in San Francisco, to let partners and customers know that it is aiming to extend its ecosystem.

The new XenClient product is a “super fast, 64-bit, bad-to-the bone hypervisor — a true Type 1 hypervisor that bonds to the laptop and delivers a bare metal experience to the apps, OS and things that run on top of it,” said Citrix CEO Mark Templeton, speaking in his keynote address. The company made an “express kit” trial version available for download and promised general availability later this year.

“Desktop virtualization is going mainstream,” Templeton said. “It’s becoming more and more of the fabric of enterprise computing.” Computer makers Dell and Hewlett-Packard disclosed plans at the show to roll out new laptops designed to support the new XenClient hypervisor. The bare-metal client hypervisor is essentially the same technology used on servers, but designed for a client machine.

Although it’s possible to use a server hypervisor on a client machine, it’s not made for that hardware, hence it lacks support for USB devices, graphics accelerators and other features essential to the client. Templeton declared that XenClient would “change the game” by adding a local hypervisor to the laptop, allowing a single-client box to run multiple VMs.

The advantages of running multiple VMs on a single corporate laptop are myriad: A user can, for example, keep personal computing files and apps on a corporate laptop securely isolated in a separate VM. IT can provide a temporary employee or contractor with VM loaded with corporate apps.

And client-side hypervisors make provisioning to mobile client machines much simpler. “People forget that last [point],” said Ovum senior analyst Tim Stammers. “But if you talk to IT departments, they’ll tell you making images for machines is a real pain. The local hypervisor solves that problem.”

Both Citrix and rival virtualization company VMware promised in 2008 to deliver a client-side hypervisor in 2009. “The fact that they were both late shows that this is very hard stuff,” Stammers said.

Native Bare Metal Hypervisor

XenClient is a Type 1 hypervisor, a native hypervisor that runs on bare metal. Existing Type 2 hypervisors, which have been around for a long time and allow users to do things like run Windows on a Mac (such as Player and Parallels), aren’t as secure as the native versions, Stammers said. Type 2s run on an operating system that can be hacked.

The XenClient was developed in collaboration with chip maker Intel, and optimized for Intel Core 2 desktops and laptops with its vPro technology. The hypervisor serves as “a foundation for centrally managed OS/user environments to be streamed, cached and executed locally on desktop/laptop devices, including off-network mobility,” the two companies said in a statement.

According to sources close to the company, VMware is concentrating on refining its Type 2 virtualization technology, rather than pursing a bare-metal client strategy. VMware had not returned calls for comment at press time. But Stammers believes that VMware will probably come out with a native client hypervisor later this year.

Conference attendee Larry Cohen, a systems administrator for a Silicon Valley manufacturer he preferred not to name, was impressed by the XenClient technology, but said he wished the company would focus more on XenCenter, the company’s XenServer management console. In particular, he’d like to see a better event viewer and logging capabilities. “It would make troubleshooting issues on the physical hardware a lot easier,” Cohen said.

Server Upgrade

Citrix also launched XenServer 5.6 at the show. The latest version of its server virtualization platform mainly fills in some gaps in the previous version, Stammer said. Memory management was one of the key enhancements, he said, but also pointed to new features in the Enterprise and Platinum editions, including automatic work-load balancing, power management and storage integration with StorageLink, Citrix’s platform for providing linking server virtualization to storage resources.

“This market has become a constant race to add tools,” Stammer said. “I often say that server virtualization gives you great flexibility, but flexibility can tie you in knots. So we do need these tools, and different shops need different tools.”

XenServer 5.6 comes in four editions: Free, Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum. Each edition provides additional features.

The free version of XenServer has become an “entryway for new virtualization customers” for Citrix, said IDC analayst Al Gillen. IDC is seeing a growing number of infrastructure vendors using the “free-plus-premium”offering strategy (sometimes called “freemium”) to build market share, Gillen said. 

Stammer applauded both Citrix releases, but said that the future of XenServer is uncertain. Increasingly, this market looks like it’s going to come down to Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware ESX, he said. He points to statements by Citrix executives, who as recently as 18 months ago, said that in the future most of Citrix’s business will come from the sale of tools used to manage Hyper-V.

HP Readies XenClient Notebooks

HP made a splash at the show with demos of the industry’s first Citrix-ready XenClient platforms. “Using a local hypervisor, the ability to bring the virtual machine down and run it locally, allows you to be productive whether you’re connected or not,” said Jeff Groudan, director of thin client solutions for HP’s person systems group. “So you have the mobility, but also a lot of the management capabilities inherent of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), such as being able to manage the image centrally.”

HP also gave a nod to Adobe’s recently beleaguered Flash technology with an enhancement of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 6. RDP 6 is one of the most common VDI protocols used by VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services environments, but it doesn’t Flash natively. The RDP Enhancements for Flash is a component that runs on the thin client machine and allows the server to redirect the Flash content down to the client, which also decompresses the file.

“One of the challenges of client virtualization, whether it’s Citrix or someone else’s VDI environment, is they don’t handle Flash very elegantly,” Groudan said. “The experience may not be very good, or it may overly load down the server when they do the decompression for the thin client. The RDP Enhancements fix that problem.

“It was clear to us that complexity of client virtualization has been an inhibitor of growth in this area, Groudan added. “So we have a laser focus on simplifying the process, but also on optimizing the end-user experience.”

HP also unveiled VDI reference architectures for XenDesktop and XenServer at the Synergy event. Joseph George, client virtualization business lead for HP’s infrastructure software and blades division, said the reference architectures are the fruit of his company’s ongoing strategy of “converged infrastructure.” HP believes that that strategy can accelerate the delivery of client virtualization.

“We’ve got the best portfolio out there when it comes to converged infrastructure and client virtualization,” he said. “And the expertise we have in our ranks has allowed us to put together these new reference architectures.”

The new HP and Citrix VDI reference architectures provide the functionality of a stand-alone desktop, George said, while enabling unified management of both physical and virtual infrastructures from the same centralized console.

The HP/Citrix VDI solution supports more than 1,000 users of XenDesktop 4.0, XenServer 5.5 or Provisioning Server 5.1, George said. It leverages HP BladeSystem’s c-Class or HP ProLiant servers with HP Flex-10 technology, HP storage and networking and a choice of HP t5740 or HP t5325 thin client machines.

The big gadget news at the event came from Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell, who surprised conference attendees by officially unveiling his company’s new mini-tablet PC during his keynote. It was actually more of a teaser than an unveiling of the device a MID (mobile Internet device) dubbed The Streak, which Dell casually pulled from his pocket while onstage.

“The device we use to access our information shouldn’t matter anymore,” Dell said. “Whether it’s a phone, or a notebook, a netbook or a desktop PC, your client image can follow you everywhere.” Dell then took the wraps off The Streak, which was loaded with the Android OS and Citrix’s virtual desktop software. Dell said The Streak would be available first in Europe in June, with a U.S. launched planned for later this summer. The carrier will be AT&T.

• By John K. Waters
  • 05/17/2010

 

Source: Redmondmag.com

CIO100 – Genesys Health System – 2009 Winner

Project Description: Genesys Regional Medical Center deployed virtual clinical workstations so clinicians can access information within seconds. Rather than logging in and out of several applications during a session, a clinician simply needs his security badge and a single password to log in and commence or continue a session. Logging off takes one keystroke, which suspends work into a virtual session that can be resumed remotely at any time. The virtual workstation has freed up to two hours a day for patient care, as well as saved the group an estimated $50,000 a year in IT costs and $30,000 a year in electrical consumption. (Source: CIO.com)

VDI Performance Acceleration – Atlantis Computing’s ILIO

VDI platforms use shared storage located centrally for VDI desktop images. However, Windows operating systems were designed to operate with a low latency dedicated local disk for every desktop. The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems is dependent on performing input/output (IO) intensive tasks such as file layout optimization, background defragmentation, antivirus scanning and virtual memory paging. However, in a VDI environment, these tasks result in placing a heavy tax on shared storage infrastructure as each user, application and desktop compete for limited IO capacity (measured in input/output per second-IOPS). Without adequate storage IOPS, applications and virtual machines take longer to boot and applications respond sluggishly, leaving users frustrated.

Atlantis ILIO is a revolutionary approach to deploying VDI that makes the Windows operating system perform well without massive investments in storage infrastructure. Atlantis ILIO boosts VDI desktop performance by transparently offloading IO intensive Windows operations from VDI shared storage. ILIO terminates operating system and application traffic on the same rack as the VDI servers before traffic hits the storage fabric. The result is a 10x performance increase for VDI desktops, which translates into faster VM boot times, logon, and overall application performance. Atlantis ILIO also eliminates VDI IO bottlenecks caused by boot storms, logon storms and antivirus scanning.

Source: Atlantis Computing

VMware Workstation 7 – What’s New

Introducing VMware Workstation 7

Winner of more than 50 industry awards, VMware Workstation transforms the way technical professionals develop, test, demo, and deploy software. Innovative features help software developers, QA engineers, sales professionals, and IT administrators to reduce hardware cost, save time, minimize risk, and streamline tasks that save time and improve productivity.

Deliver Desktops as a Managed Service with VMware

Streamline Desktop Management and Deployment

Instantly provision desktops to local and remote users from the datacenter with VMware View. Standardize desktop deployments by creating images of approved desktops, then automatically provision as many as you need. Easily manage groups of users from a single desktop image. Delivering desktops as a managed service with VMware View typically lets you reduce your overall desktops costs by 50% by centralizing management and resources and removing IT infrastructure from remote offices.

Improve User Satisfaction

Provide a superior end-user desktop experience over any network, with VMware View with PCoIP, a high performance display protocol. Virtual desktop users can instantly access their personalized desktops, including data, applications and settings, from anywhere, without suffering the lag times of earlier technologies. Play rich media content, use multiple monitor configurations and seamlessly access attached peripherals.

Standardize Your Virtualization Platform

Enjoy a unified management experience through VMware View’s integration with VMware vSphere, the only virtualization platform tuned and optimized for desktops. Dynamically load balance virtual desktop machines to optimize computing resources. Power on thousands of desktops at once, without any performance degradation. Bring the power of the datacenter to the desktop and use a common platform to manage both servers and desktops from the datacenter to the cloud.

Easily Deliver Desktops to Remote Users

Deliver cost-effective virtual desktops and applications securely to call centers, government agencies, healthcare providers, branch campuses or offshore facilities. Give partner organizations and independent service providers temporary access to corporate desktops through a secure network connection. Perform maintenance and troubleshoot user issues without engaging in expensive on-site visits or maintaining remote IT staff and infrastructure. Deliver a high performance desktop experience to users—wherever they are.

Deliver Built-in Business Continuity for the Desktop

Meet work-from-home mandates in the event of quarantine or natural disaster with an emergency preparedness policy and VMware View 4, the only desktop virtualization solution that provides built-in business continuity and disaster recovery for the desktop at no additional cost.

Provide high availability for your desktops within your virtualized environment without the cost or complexity of traditional clustering solutions and back them up nightly in the datacenter as a business process. VMware View with VMware vSphere for Desktops lets you extend enterprise features such as VMotion, High Availability and Distributed Resources Scheduler to the desktop, ensuring an “always on” desktop. With VMware View you can:

• Let your desktops take advantage of key features in the vSphere platform such as VMotion, High Availability, Dynamic Resource Scheduler and Consolidated Backup.
• Access virtual desktop from a wide variety of devices over any network connection to ensure business continuity.
• Quickly provision virtual desktops to remote users or groups of users in the event of a pandemic or catastrophic event when it is difficult for workers to access the office.
• Keep desktops running even when server hardware goes down with automated failover and recovery.
• Shift desktop computing resources automatically as user needs and application loads change with dynamic load balancing.
• Give remote users a high performance desktop experience with VMware View with PCoIP while protecting access to sensitive data.

Ensure Security with Centralized Control and Management

Protect your organization’s information assets and ensure compliance with industry and government regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, government mandates on settings for PCs and more with desktop virtualization. VMware desktop virtualization solutions enable enterprises to secure data, centralize control of desktops and software access and maintain compliance without sacrificing end user needs.

Ensure Corporate Security Compliance with End User Restricted Entitlements

Ensure appropriate access for end users with specified credentials by restricting access to desktops based on the authentication method. For some business environments, this may mean, for example, you can allow access only to users who have authenticated with a smart card. VMware desktop virtualization solutions are modular by design, enabling integration with 3rd party software to allow for further extension of security requirements.

Maintain Locked-down Desktops without Restricting Application Access

VMware virtualized applications run entirely in user mode and can be deployed to fully locked down desktops. No administrative rights are needed to execute these virtualized applications. Additionally, applications can be encapsulated in a fully encrypted file for deployment. IT staff can be assured security compliance needs are met while enabling end users to easily and safely access business critical applications.

Manage and Track Software Application Usage & Deployment

Monitor software license usage and ensure compliance with vendors without imposing new process or enforcement tools. VMware desktop virtualization solutions provide out-of-the-box integrations with existing policy-based usage mechanisms such as Active Directory and LDAP. VMware View seamlessly plugs into existing management frameworks for discovery of software assets and systems, so you can use your existing monitoring and distribution tools to maintain single-pane-of-glass control of software license compliance.

Decouple hardware, applications and operating systems to eliminate compatibility issues during OS migrations and upgrades. Get the benefits of newer platforms without paying heavy support costs to test and troubleshoot integration issues. Run a single image of a new operating system across a variety of hardware types. Encapsulate older applications and even run multiple versions of the same application side by side.

Source: VMware

Cloud Computing with Wyse

Cloud Computing involves using information technology as a service over the network.

• Services with an API accessible over the Internet
• Using compute and storage resources as a service
• Built on the notion of efficiency above all
• Using your own datacenter servers, or renting someone else’s in granular increments, or a combination

We at Wyse believe cloud computing has the potential to change how we invent, develop, deploy, scale, update, maintain, and pay for applications and the infrastructure on which they run.

Cloud Computing Benefits

Efficiency

Drives cost out of the delivery of services, eliminating capital expense in favor of more easily managed operating expense

Agility

Increases speed and agility in deploying services, adapting to seasonal or cyclical computing needs

Speed

Shortens implementation cycle time

Flexibility

With application deployment decoupled from server deployment, applications can be deployed and scaled rapidly, without having to procure physical servers

Ubiquity

Applications can be made available anywhere, any time

Cost avoidance

Minimizes the risk of deploying physical infrastructure, lowering the cost of entry, thin devices enable Green IT

Accelerated innovation

Reduces run time and response time, increasing the pace of innovation

Users

Task Workers

Call Centers addressing the trend to move employees off campus and into home
Challenge: PCs are virus prone, difficult to manage, and at risk of data being exposed or devices being stolen. Tried terminal services and dissatisfied with user experience
Require flexible seating, reduction in energy, and simplified management and deployment

Financial Services

Branch systems with varying classes of users across broad geographies attracted to client vitalization for security and compliance.
Challenges: VDI pilots proving difficult to scale, user experience across branch system is inconsistent, require higher levels of user functionality for banking peripherals.

Healthcare

Hospitals addressing the need for EMR and access to common databases and information
Challenge: Healthcare environment, ease of secure access to up to date EMR, access for field professionals. Risk of theft of traditional PC devices, and the liability of data loss and exposure, universal access throughout the primary and satellite facilities

Education

Schools need to provide common IT functionality to faculty, staff and students
Challenge: shrinking budgets, limited IT administrative support, ageing computing devices, providing lesson and status access to parents, teachers and students from home

Engineering

Technology companies needing to provide secure, access devices to on shore, off shore, and outsourced engineers and developers.
Challenge: Requirements to deliver productivity applications while addressing performance demands of engineers and developers

Simple EndPoint Benefits

Security/Privacy

No HDD prevents data from being stored on the client, improving data security. All data stays on the server / cloud, enhancing privacy enforcement. Devices can be virus proof, removing a security concern for the endpoint component of the environment.

Compliance

HIPPA in Healthcare, Basil-II in banking, and Sarbanes Oxley regulations all require data to be protected and centralized. Thin endpoints enforce this requirement, easing compliance.

Manageability

Lowest TCO is accomplished when all endpoints appear similarly to the server. TCs, TPCs, and Thin mobile devices (handheld and notebook size) are all centrally managed, and look the same to servers. Like the Southwest Airlines strategy – all 737-300s – easier to manage.

Reliability

Thin clients are far simpler in design than traditional PCs, and deliver far greater reliability. Measured in terms of MTBF (Mean time between failure), PCs offer 30 – 40K hours, but TCs deliver far better ratings at 80 – 375K hours.

Rapid Deployment

No imaging requirements on most thin devices make TCs deployable in minutes, not hours as with most PCs. TCs go from carton to desktop to productivity in minutes. No software to load, little configuration needed.

Power, Noise, Cooling

TCs use a fraction (less than 10 percent) of the energy needed by traditional PCs. No fans or moving parts in TCs eliminate noise, and reduce AC requirements in the work areas.

Pano Express Combines VMware vSphere™ Essentials, Windows 7 Operating System, Server and Storage Pre-Configured with Pano Logic’s Zero Client Platform

Pano Logic, the leader in zero client desktop virtualization, today announced Pano Express, the only all-in-one zero client, hypervisor, operating system, server and storage solution available. Pano Express drastically reduces the capital costs (CAPEX) and complexity of implementing a complete desktop virtualization solution by providing a pre-loaded, pre-configured 50-user suite combining VMware vSphere™ Essentials, Microsoft Windows 7 licenses, and server and storage hardware with Pano Logic’s award-winning zero client platform for just $489 per seat. That is the lowest cost available for a complete, all-in desktop virtualization solution.  

The pre-configured, pre-loaded all-in suite is designed for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) and eliminates the complexity and resources required to cobble together the right infrastructure, storage and software for these organizations. With an all-in price of $489 per seat, CAPEX spending for Pano Express is approximately half of what virtual desktop deployments from other vendors cost. The reduced complexity of Pano Express strips the decision-making process to one simple question: “How much does it cost to get started?” More importantly, because Pano Logic is a true zero client solution, with no processors, software or storage on the client device, lifecycle savings from reduced management, energy, repair and replacement costs are dramatic. Pano Express provides annual total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of as much as 80 percent over a typical PC infrastructure.

“Pano Express is the lowest cost desktop computing solution on the planet when you factor in the huge long-term savings in reduced support, maintenance and energy costs from zero client computing,” said John Kish, CEO of Pano Logic. “We’ve dramatically lowered the cost and made the entire transition process – the decision, the purchase, and roll out – simple for any organization to undertake regardless of training or expertise. Having already deepened our technical integration with VMware View™, we are continuing to expand our affiliation with VMware. Our low-cost, zero-complexity desktop virtualization solution will transform the implementation path for organizations embracing 100% centralization.”

Pano Express includes 50 zero client Pano Systems, VMware vSphere Essentials, 50 Windows XP or Windows 7 virtual desktop licenses, and a custom configured dual-quad core server with high-performance RAID5 internal storage. Pano Systems are comprised of the zero client Pano Device, Pano Direct service and Pano Manager. Pano Express ships pre-loaded and pre-configured, and will be available for purchase through an approved Pano Logic reseller in North America. 

“We’re pleased with the release of Pano Express, a pre-packaged solution that will enable SMBs to tap the extreme value and simplicity of desktop virtualization,” said Patrick Harr, vice president, desktop virtualization at VMware. “This suite is a powerful tool for expanding and speeding the adoption of desktop virtualization so that customers of all sizes can realize the dramatic savings and simplicity of centralized computing.”

Available in early June, Pano Express has already achieved success in the marketplace.

“I was sold on Pano Logic based on the ongoing support, maintenance and energy savings I would realize over time but when I learned of the additional price benefits and the convenience of having all of the software fully loaded and ready to go, I jumped at Pano Express,” said Mike Stewart, Assistant to the Director of Information Systems of the Blue Ridge High School District. “My department is stretched thin trying to maintain a computing infrastructure with limited resources. Having the computing equipment arrive, the software fully loaded and the components ready brought tremendous peace of mind and immediate savings in deployment costs.” 

About Pano Logic
Pano Logic is the leader in Zero Client Desktop Computing. Pano Logic’s all-in-one hardware and software solution redefines the delivery and management of end user computing by radically centralizing desktop management. Pano Logic is a complete end-to-end solution purpose-built for desktop virtualization that deploys in under an hour and dramatically simplifies the complexity and management of virtual desktops and slashes computing TCO by as much as 80 percent. The Pano Device, a zero client, contains NO processor, NO operating system, NO storage, NOR any moving parts, completely eliminating endpoint management and security breaches. The Pano Device uses less than 5 watts of energy or 97% less than a PC, drastically reducing energy costs. To learn more, visit http://www.panologic.com

Source” Pano Logic

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