Inside Enterprise IT

Last week we experienced one of the most significant and exciting launches from Microsoft… the release of Windows 7! As part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Dell consultants worked with a number of customers during their testing and implementation of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

At Betfair – home of the world’s biggest betting community – robust IT is crucial. Staff at the firm process six million transactions every day; that’s more than the combined total of the European stock markets. Security and high availability are paramount, as are energy efficiency and ease of maintenance.

When the IT team replicated a standard workflow across various operating systems, they saw a 20 percent performance increase with Windows 7. This improved performance will boost staff productivity, as well as increase the time the IT team has for value-added work. New features of Windows 7, including BitLocker and AppLocker will improve security. With staff queuing for upgrades, the end-user benefits are clear. Eighty percent of Betfair’s staff in Europe will be using Windows 7 within the next month.

Ian Burgess, Head of Microsoft and Datacentre Platforms, Betfair says: “We have a list of tickets in our support system from people requesting Windows 7. It’s faster, easier to use and has lots of features that produce a more polished, seamless user experience.”

Betfair has also significantly reduced energy consumption. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2 takes advantage of the energy saving features of Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel technology. Hyper-V will also help to achieve efficiency and simplify management. Burgess says: “One of our Hyper-V clusters has four nodes with capacity to spare, whereas before there were seven nodes at full capacity. That equates to a massive energy saving across our datacentres. We’ve achieved this through the combined features of the PowerEdge R610 servers, and Windows Server 2008 R2.”

So whether your main motivation is the safety of your mission critical data, energy efficiency or the time your IT team spends managing your client estate, read on for an idea of how Dell can support you. If you're interested in more information your company's migration to the Windows 7 environment, take a look at IT Expert Voice, where best practices and news related to Windows 7 in the enterprise is discussed.

I remember riding in the car which a bunch of teenagers a few months ago when the Seether song “Careless Whisper” came on the radio. They loved it - so edgy, such a great sound. Ugh, really?  Had they never heard of Wham?  George Michael? I’d like to forget the 80s sometimes, too, but please. How could those kids think that song was an original? Don’t even get me started about Limp Bizkit covering “Faith” … blasphemy.

It happens in music, and it happens in IT -- and it appears to have happened this week.

The recent VCE announcement from Cisco, EMC and VMware sounds very familiar, a lot like the Business-Ready Configurations for Virtualization (also known as vPOD) Dell’s been doing all year. 

Their “IT flexibility and lowering the cost of computing” message – yeah, doing that since March. If the popular saying “imitation is the best form of flattery” held true, these three companies would have also leveraged Dell’s passion for customer choice. But they didn’t. Instead, they seem to be focused on locking customers into a proprietary stack of technology. Customers don’t like that. That kind of situation could easily turn into a couple of million dollars.

Fortunately, Cadence Design Systems will never have to worry about that. Check out how they used Business-Ready Configurations to save about $2.7 million in physical-hardware cost.  Using Dell’s run books Cadence expects to double the speed at which they deploy VMs to roughly 200 per month. 

As we continue to integrate existing and new partners into the configs (EMC, Brocade, Juniper, Scalent), customers will find it even easier to deploy a customized, virtual environment start to finish.

Where is Milli Vanilli these days, anyway?

On Friday I grabbed lunch with Geoff Tudor, SVP of business development and co-founder of Nirvanix .  After they cleared the plates I talked to Geoff about what Nirvanix does and where he saw cloud storage heading.

Some of the topics Geoff tackles:

• Providing cloud storage for the enterprise from five data centers around the world that are pooled and presented as one large global file server.
• The Nirvanix “secret sauce”: the file virtualization layer that sits on top of pooled/virtualized commodity storage.
• How Nirvanix’s offering is different than Amazon’s S3 (hint: one’s targeted at enterprises and one’s targeted at developers)
• Customers such as the NASA/ASU library which is the largest cloud storage use ever and stores images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera.
• Security and how Nirvanix addresses customer’s concerns.
• What Geoff sees in the future for cloud storage.

Pau for now…

The day that many of us have been waiting for has come: the official launch of Microsoft Windows 7 and general availability (GA) for consumer customers. What this means is that PC manufacturers like Dell can begin shipping systems with Windows 7 on them. Of course, large corporations and other enterprises have had beta programs in place for some time now so last week's announcement was very much focused on consumers' use of Windows 7. Microsoft hosted events in New York and elsewhere, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself spent more than five minutes with Matt Lauer on The Today Show touting the benefits of Windows 7, but again heavily focused on consumers. In my view, Windows 7 is a given for consumers as almost all PCs will ship with it.

What I want to talk about today is why large companies should look at Windows 7. The enterprise is where the real decision is to be made and I think there are good reasons for corporations to begin the switch.

Dell recently did a survey of Federal IT decision-makers with the 1105 Government Information Group about their Windows 7 adoption. It’s not surprising that 72 percent reported their organizations did not adopt Windows Vista. Many of those organizations are likely running Windows XP and some may even be running Windows 2000.

Forrester Research published a report of their own recently, “Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook,” that provides quite a few tips for migrating to the new OS. The report points out that about 79 percent of PCs used by small-to-medium businesses are still running Windows XP; that is in-line with our research in the federal space.

There have been a great number of comparisons of the new OS to Windows Vista as well as Windows XP. Many are suggesting that Windows 7 is very similar to XP so I'm sure many CIOs in large enterprises are wondering why make the switch at all. After all, no one in IT gets promoted for forcing an OS switch on their company’s workforce.

I think we all know how the current economic situation has led to a very frugal approach to IT spending. However, keeping laptops and desktops in circulation for more than four years can lead to higher maintenance and energy costs, and can reduce employee productivity. According to IDC, IT organizations may be incurring operating costs as much as 20.5 percent higher than necessary to acquire, manage and decommission their desktop and notebook PC equipment when comparing tightly managed three-year life cycles with less systematic, longer-span life cycle management strategies.

Also, J. Gold Associates says that keeping a laptop in circulation for years four and five can cost organizations $9,600 in lost end-user productivity and the cost to fix a laptop not under warranty can reach $1,425.

To provide evidence of lost employee productivity, Dell commissioned a performance study that compares current Latitude laptops products to similar models that are three and four years old. Examples of the results include:

• The battery life of a Latitude E4300 laptop running Windows 7 is up to 85 percent longer than a Latitude D620, a 3-year-old system, running Windows XP;
• The Latitude E6400 running Windows 7 offers up to 63 percent better performance than a Latitude D620 running Windows XP;
•  With a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop you can reduce boot time by up to 29 percent compared to a previous generation Latitude laptop.

(Details on all of these claims are available in the footnotes here.)

So, aside from all the cost, performance and enhanced features of Windows 7 as a motivator to migrate, there's also the news that Microsoft has finally announced an end-date to the support they'll offer for Windows XP. According to the Microsoft Support site, Windows XP will enter its “extended support’ phase on July 7, 2010 with extended support ultimately ending in April 2014. While that seems a long way off, many analyst firms are urging large enterprises to begin their migration planning now as it takes time to assess your applications and determine what your roll-out plan is. So, it seems that migration isn’t so much of a “will we” question, but more of a “when will we” question.

Dell recently announced Dell’s a Windows 7 Readiness Assessment to identify application compatibility, hardware compatibility and migration readiness and to provide the recommendations needed to help make your transition to Windows 7 as smooth as possible. But applications are but one part of the migration process. We're making available to you a webcast entitled "Preparing for Windows 7 Migration" that discusses just how a corporation conduct such a significant migration. Here are a few other issues that need IT staffs need to consider:

• Determining application compatibility including your Web applications;
• What new system imaging and deployment technologies are there to consider;
• Deciding how new virtualization technologies should be leveraged;
• Determining whether to deploy 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the OS;
• Dealing with extensive amounts of user data that will need to be migrated;
• Handling a more distributed workforce with a larger number of devices;
• Training both IT and end-users

We'd be eager to hear your thoughts on your organization. What are your migration plans? Do you plan to do a wholesale of all your clients at one time or stagger it out? What's the primary operating system you'll be migrating from? Do our numbers above match with your environment?

Yesterday Gartner distinguished analyst Tom Bittman, who covers cloud computing and virtualization,  posted some thoughts and observations from the Gartner Symposium in Orlando.

Private Cloud-o-maina

Based on Tom’s observations, private cloud (however defined) seems to have captured the hearts and minds of IT.  Before he began his talk on virtualiztion he did a quick poll asking how many in the audience considered private cloud computing to be a core strategy of theirs.  75% raised their hands.  While not overly scientific, that’s a pretty big number.

Little Miss Appropriation

The logical next question one may ask is what do people mean when they say “private cloud.”  According to Tom the three most common ways private clouds are being (mis) described are:

• IT defending its turf: Shared services that were being re-labelled as private clouds (but without a self-service interface, or much automation at all)
• Vendors defending their products: Old products being re-labelled as private clouds in a box (I described most of these as “lipstick on a pig”)
• Advanced server virtualization deployments: Although few have a true self-service interface, the intention is certainly there

So it looks like there is quite a bit of misappropriation of the term.  However,  as we previously learned,  just because there is hype and misuse of terms, doesn’t mean there isn’t value in the concept of “private cloud.”  The question is what is that value?

Tom sees private cloud’s value as a means to end and concludes his post by saying:

The challenge with private cloud computing, of course, is to dispel the vendor hype and the IT protectionism that is hiding there, and to ensure the concept is being used in the right way – as a stepping-stone to public cloud… [italics mine]

(I’m not your) Stepping Stone

This is where I disagree.  I believe that while private cloud can be a path to the public cloud, it can also be an end unto itself.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) we will always have heterogeneous environments and in the future that will mean a mixture of  traditional IT, virtualized resources, private clouds and public clouds.  In some case workloads will migrate from virtualizaiton out to the public cloud but in other cases they will stop along the way and decide to stay.

IT will become more efficient and more agile as the cloud evolves but there will be no Big Switch (see above illustration), it (IT) will need to manage a portfolio of computing models.

Pau for now…