Tag: virtualisation

Data centre evolves from snooze to news warns Gartner

darwinBeancounters at Gartner said that thedData centre industry is about to see some rapid change after 15 years of more or less being a snooze.

In its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking report Big G said that emerging innovations like software-defined networking (SDN) and disaggregation switching, and  data centre networking was shaking up the industry.

Unlike in the past, vendor differentiation is shifting toward software — including management, automation and orchestration — compared with hardware.

Gartner Research Director Andrew Lerner, who co-wrote the report said most of the suppliers were the same names as they everywere.  But positions have have changed within the industry.  Arista Networks becoming a Leader and Dell is being more progressive.

The report found that the adoption of and interest in white-box switches over the past year have increased significantly within hyperscale data centres.

Dell twigged to the fact that a white-box or branded white-box was the key and  then Juniper followed, then HP.

There is now a demand for a denser, more highly virtualised data centre to improve agility within networks. Organizations want less proprietary, closed systems than have typically filled the space.

The market leader is still Cisco and has the largest  installed base of any vendor in the quadrant, Cisco is by far the global leader in port shipments and revenue.

Gartner’s report slams Cisco for overlapping, conflicting architectures as well as one of the priciest solutions on the market.

Cisco’s flagship Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is “less open” than some SDN products, said Lerner, but “if you’re looking for an open solution, they do have a broad portfolio.”

Arista is the fastest-growing vendor in the space and is one of only two companies – including Cisco – that Gartner refers to as Leaders.

Arista has taken a open and agnostic approach that’s cost-effective, so it’s a very compelling story for company’s the report said.”

HP is not doing that badly either. The No. 2 player in the market has a strong global reach, a broad portfolio and open SDN. HP was rated the most open vendor, according to Gartner research surveys.

What is keeping the computer giant from being a leader in the market is its failure to execute sales from a channel perspective.

“From a portfolio perspective, they can go toe-to-toe with anybody. … They have the HP brand and the global distribution channel, so on paper, they should be a fierce competitor,” said Lerner. “The reality is, we don’t see the HP distribution channel putting the HP data center networking portfolio in front of customers with the same degree of fervor as, say, a Cisco or even an Arista.”

Dell was the most innovative vendor in the marketplace over the past year, with more than 24,000 networking customers, jumping from a niche player in 2014 to a visionary this year.

Dell was the first mainstream vendor to support a disaggregation switching solution that allowed organizations to run third-party networking software on Dell hardware.

VMware was the only vendor that made the quadrant that doesn’t provide hardware in the data centre. The company’s flagship NSX SDN overlay product garners a high degree of interest and has a proven track record of reliability with customers.

VMware’s suffers from an immature channel and sales coverage  which is triggering its growth.

 

Virtual clients break the $1 billion barrier

dollarBy 2016 the virtual client computing (VCC) market will be worth $1 billion in 2016, up from $805 million in 2013, in Europe.

So says IDC, which says that growth is fuelled by the centralised virtual desktop (CVD), also known as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The growth is due to advances in datacentre infrastructure virtualisation.  Cloud service providers are going to take a far larger part oof the VDI market and that brings the benefits of client and desktop virtualisation to small enterprises.

But while Western Europe is likely to see bigger growth in VDI projects, central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa are lagging behind.

Mohamed Hefy, senior research analyst at IDC said: “There are more urgent infrastructure challenges [there] – for example hospital funds would be directed to critically needed medical equipment and analytics capabilities rather than virtualised infrastructure.”

The trend toward bring your own device (BYOD) technology and increasing workforce mobility will be factors considered by IT staff evaluating VDI.

Cloud wreathed in mist, myths

clouds3While cloud computing is touted by every vendor and his dog as the panacea for all IT ills, the whole subject is still befogged by myths and mystery.

That’s what market research company Gartner thinks, anyway.  In a recent report it said cloud computing is “uniquely susceptible to the perils of myths due to the nature, confusion and hype surrounding it”.

No one really knows what it is, said David M. Smith, a VP at Gartner.  “In the cloud means where the magic happens, where the implementation details are supposed to be hidden. So it should be no surprise that such an environment is rife with myths and misunderstanding.”

The first myth in the mystery is that not all cloud service pricing is coming down.  Companies can’t assume that the cloud always saves money.  The second assumption made is that the cloud is the be-all and end-all of IT, and using cloud services isn’t necessarily the answer to cutting costs.

Many companies don’t even have a cloud strategy and are just obeying the diktats of their CEO – who probably doesn’t have a clue about what cloud is anyone.  And cloud computing is not one thing – instead cloud services are broad and need to be analysed for their relevance.

People tend to think of cloud computing as less secure than having your data on servers in your premises.  But there’s evidence that security breaches are more likely to happen here than in trusted cloud services.

Data centre outsourcing, data centre modernisation and data centre strategies are not synonymous with the cloud.

Still confused? It’s hardly surprising, is it?

Avnet teams with Veeam

avnettsAvnet Services said that it had become an accredited Veeam authorised education centre.

That will allow it to introduce a training programme in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy and Spain.

The idea is to let its reseller partners become trained in Veeam software products. Veeam specialises in providing backup virtualisation management.

Rene Albert, director of education at Avnet Services EMEA said that the partnership will extend his company’s education portfolio just as the virtualisation market is showing increased growth.

And Daniel Fried, MD at Veeam said that the new training and certification programmes with let channel and end users take advantage of demand for data protection built for virtualisation.

Organisation waves goodbye to the desktop PC

Scottish standardThe Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has moved to a mobile model and in the process reduced its PC energy costs by as much as 90 percent.

That’s according to Citrix, which said it is using its  technology to reduce its energy footprint.

SEPA is using desktop virtualisation technology to centralise data and applications, which people  can now use as a service. It moved into a new building earlier this year designed with mobile usage in mind – and includes seven hot desks for 10 staff. SEPA employees over 1,000 people.

Staff get to the SEPA desktop wherever they are and using whatever device is being used – whether it’s a tablet, a home PC or a desktop PC.

The scheme will also reduce business travel costs. Citrix gives as one example that lets scientists who work at the agency start a model in the morning from home and access the results later in the day.

Jav Yaqub, IT Services Manager, SEPA said: “We wanted this project to embody the core ethos of the agency, creating an efficient and environmentally-conscious IT infrastructure. We also wanted to offer people their desktop, wherever they went, but we were obviously concerned about potential data loss. The idea of having a centralised virtual desktop and using low power thin-client devices was very attractive. Our employees love the new environment.  They are able to do more things from more places.”

Bull flies red rag with fast data analytics

scotbullBull Information Systems has put together a new big data analytics tool called “bullion fast data analytics”, designed to look at data from the digital economy in real time.

It has been built using Pivotal based technologies in combination with Bull’s bullion servers.

Bull points out that this year there are roughly 3 Zettabytes of data floating around, or 400 Gigabytes for everyone on the planet, with this figure only set to increase to up to 40 Zettabytes by 2020. So for it’s very useful for organisations to be able to sift through this data and extract relevant information, whether that is managing crises, or building customer loyalty. Of course, we have all heard about “big data” this year.

Fast data analytics is, Bull asserts, the “first platform to integrate new data fabrics, modern programming frameworks, cloud portability and support for legacy systems”. The architecture has been designed on top of Pivotal Greenplum Database and Gemfire, and the company promises the end product makes analytics less complex, shifting the focus from software tinkering to applying the actual information.

The company says its technology is highly flexible and can “significantly” reduce Total Cost of Ownership, as well as having been validated with Pivotal and VMware at Bull’s R&D labs. It runs in a virtualised environement, promises lower latency, and cost savings.

VP of Bull’s enterprise service business, Jacqueline Moussa, said the company offers a “unified and robust platform”.

“Organisations can take advantage of lower implementation and operations costs and quick real-time analysis of the huge amounts of data being produced each hour,” Moussa said.

Avnet to school partners on VMware

avnettsAvnet and VMWare are collaborating to open an End User Computing practice in Britain, to push channel partners towards the desktop transformation market, utilising VMware’s Horizon suite along with Avnet SolutionsPath.

Avnet insists that as the office environment rushes towards Bring Your Own Device, IT departments are faced with emerging threats to make sure their networks are fit for security as well as cost effective. By investing in the workspace, businesses can reduce headaches in the long run.

The company believes twinning SolutionsPath with VMware technology can manage all parts of a firm’s physical and virtual infrastructure centrally, meaning down the road businesses can implement a system that is not shaken by the consumerisation of IT.

The EUC practice promises to quicken entry into desktop transformation, and Avnet says it will do this by opening up access to its technology and multi vendor network, as well as providing specialist knowledge.

Businesses that sign up to the practice will have the opportunity to learn about delivering VMware gear in a way to fit a customer’s IT environment, as well as gauging the level ofvirtualisation that is required. Users can pick from Avnet’s wide range of VMware partners such as HP, IBM, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Riverbed, and Nvidia.

Partners will also be encouraged to learn how they should sell VMware Horizon in markets such as healthcare, government and finance.

VMware’s UK&I head of channel, Ed Dolman, said the initiative will be a “powerful value proposition” as the company looks for new partners who are interested in desktop transformation but don’t have the right skills.

“By enrolling in Avnet’s SolutionsPath University, business partners have the ability to receive the training they need to develop knowledge and expertise supported by the generation of sales leads,” Dolman said.

EMEA CIOs expect higher IT spending in 2013

server-racksWe might be a bit closer to bottoming out. According to a study commissioned by Riverbed Technology, 71 per cent of CIOs in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region expect IT spending will go up this year, reports IT Web.

A total of 400 CIOs across the region took part in the study and answered a few questions about their spending priorities over the next 12 months. They were asked to pick their top five priorities and virtualisation and consolidation programs ranked first. About 50 per cent believe server virtualisation will be their primary spending priority. Data consolidation ranks second at 40 per cent, followed by storage consolidation, desktop virtualisation, server upgrades security and compliance, and WAN optimisation, all in the 32 to 34 per cent range.

Oddly enough, the study found that 10 per cent of CIOs plan to make rather aggressive investments in an effort to boost competitiveness. However, 28 per cent claim their focus will be on efficiency and overall cuts in spending over the next 12 months.

It is hardly surprising that 33 per cent of CIOs plan to approach investment cautiously in 2013, but most plan to keep spending at current levels. Only 9 per cent said their IT budgets were shrinking and that they would spend less than last year.

Although most outfits see potential to cut costs through data centre and server consolidation, there’s apparently a lot of room for improvement in WAN performance. As many as 38 per cent of the CIOs said application performance over WAN is a barrier to consolidation.

Pivot3 signs EMEA distie deal with Avnet

avnettsPivot3 has signed on the dotted line to make Avnet its distribution partner.

The company, which deals in converged storage and compute appliances, has said under the agreement Avnet will distribute the Pivot3 vSTAC VDIproducts to its partner network across EMEA countries.

The Pivot3 vSTAC VDI appliance family is said to make VMware View deployments easy, affordable and channel friendly for the 100 to 2,500 desktop target market.

They are also claimed to eliminate the need for specialised IT expertise to configure and integrate separate SAN storage, servers and software into a VDI solution.

Ed Bateman, director of software, Wireless and Mobility Business Group EMEA at Avnet said the partnership would give resellers a product that was “simple, scalable and cost-effective” for their clients.

In support of the partnership, Pivot3 has a VDI Channel Ready program which it claims is  designed to maximise lead opportunity and qualification for Avnet resellers and product providers in EMEA.

It provides online tools for VDI self-configuration and ROI analysis. Additionally, prospects can “Test Drive” a live, hosted 300 to 400 desktop scenario complete with workload simulation, login storms, scale-out of desktops and performance reporting. The Channel Ready program is also designed to enhance sell-through with all VMware and Microsoft license revenues flowing to the resellers. In addition, deal registration is available to partners.

The Pivot3 vSTAC VDI is available now and is already said to have caught the eye of several leading enterprises across various industries, including healthcare, education, government and financial services. List pricing starts at $29,999.