Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 @ 02:43 PM
The hum you will soon hear will not be the one that comes from your PCs cooling fan. Rather, it will very likely be buzz surrounding IBM's Smarter Computing initiative. Actually, if Big Blue's new online modeling tool dubbed, "IBM Smarter Computing Workload Simulator," works as intended you’ll find the din inescapable.
The new online tool appeared on IBM's Power System web site in November and allows IT managers to simulate an IT infrastructure that closely resembles their own Windows-based environment and see with their own non-IBM eyes the substantial advantages that a Power Systems-based computing topology can deliver.
IBM's "Smarter Computing" campaign asserts that one’s existing x86-based beige-box infrastructure is inefficient. Resource reallocation and accelerated business innovation, it says, can be yours by moving to a Power Systems environment.
The heart of IBM's new visual simulator is the time-tested Business Partner spreadsheet modeler that was used to sell IBM systems. Now, it has a modern UI that would even impress a sleep-deprived gamer. In exchange for giving them information on your current computing environment, and basic contact information, you get to work though their templates and ultimately arrive at an ROI statement that contrasts the cost of running your existing environment with plugging into some new IBM iron.
One thing's for sure: You can be certain that all of the dyed-in-the-wool IBM i users out there are saying, "It's about time!"
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Thu, Dec 15, 2011 @ 11:34 AM
It seems everyone is facing discouraging budget cuts at the same time they're facing unprecedented data growth. It's a conundrum that’s here to stay – but, you know what they say: when the going gets tough, the tough figure out how to use what they've got while still dreaming of a shiny new rack of servers. Wait, is that the saying?
Smart IT administrators will refuse to compromise data integrity just because a few hundred thousand dollars got snatched from their budget. If you are revamping your backup and recovery plan to account for growing data, here are three ways you can maximize the use of your existing infrastructure and save money without sacrificing safety:
- Love the WAN You're With: Choose backup and recovery software that works with your existing WAN. Replication software should allow you to either "throttle" the data queue, or let you control when backups are transmitted so it won't disrupt daily traffic. If you can't throttle, then it should allow you to compress the data. Good software will allow you to do both.
- Send only changes: It's not necessary to send the same data over and over again – it’s inefficient and takes up processing power and bandwidth. That terabyte of data that you have to protect across a T1 is not going to fit in within your 8 eight hour backup window, so how about just moving the changes instead of everything? Replicating only the changed data also saves you space on your repository, as you are only storing one copy of the information, versus multiple copies that a full backup would require.
- Consider the Cloud: The undeniably awesome thing about cloud storage is you only pay for what you need and you don't need to add one single piece of hardware or infrastructure to use it. There’s no reason to add to or build a data center when someone has already built one for you. And it probably runs on wind energy or the happy dreams of little fluffy bunnies. Cloud backup and recovery can be fully automated and storage can scale automatically too, saving you administrative time. And hey, if it’s good enough for the feds, it's good enough for you.
We're partial to our software, of course, but when you're shopping around for backup and recovery software be sure to consider software that lets you use your existing infrastructure.
Want to hear more about what we can offer? Click here to learn how we can help you protect physical or virtual servers on any platform – using your existing infrastructure – or download our popular One Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Tue, Dec 06, 2011 @ 02:08 PM
Recently the U.S. Government released a document called Federal Cloud Computing Strategy as part of the administrations Cloud First initiative, which requires agencies to evaluate safe, secure cloud computing options prior to making any new investments in IT. The government intends to spend one quarter of its entire IT budget, that's $20 billion, on cloud computing.
The paper is geared for government, but it offers interesting insights into what you might take into account if you’re considering migrating critical data to the cloud. You can download the document here (www.cio.gov/documents/Federal-Cloud-Computing-Strategy.pdf). Scroll to page 11 to see a helpful decision framework.
What's interesting about this initiative is that it likely means the end of the discussion about "is the cloud safe enough for critical data"? If the cloud is safe enough for the feds, it's safe enough for us – even those of us with stringent compliance requirements. If your wondering if it really is safe enough for you, consider that cloud providers are in development overdrive to snag a piece of the $20 billion up for grabs. The cloud is about to get a whole lot better. Here are some changes you can expect:
- Increased infrastructure
- Lower pricing
- Efficiency improvements
- Enhanced security
- Compliance compatible
- Agility improvements
- Innovation improvements
Last year most industry experts would tell you that the cloud was great for non-critical data. Some may have ventured that the cloud was a trend that would never be safe enough for data that had to be kept secure and private. This year, with the American government leading the charge, 2012 could very well be the year the world shifts - to the cloud.
Interested in backing up to the cloud? Double-Take Cloud for Windows lets you backup and recover to and from the cloud with four layers of security so your information stays safe. The best part is you only use and pay for what you need. Download the free whitepaper: Cloud Backup and Recovery.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 @ 01:42 PM
Author: Robert Gast
In the second part of our two part series on improving the environmental friendliness of your IT center, we continue our discussion of major elements in a typical green IT strategy.
- Consider moving to the cloud, which is the ultimate in virtualization and consolidation. Cloud computing can reduce the number of servers in your data center, which may reduce your costs. If you would typically host your transactional web server farms or commerce applications, you can use the cloud to provide those services instead. The cloud frees smaller companies from the burden of a data center; while larger corporations use the cloud to host less critical or lower-tiered applications to further reduce their data center footprint.
A cloud-computing vendor can virtualize the systems serving several customers. Economies of scale make it practical and profitable for the vendor to invest more heavily in green technologies. As an added benefit, using the cloud can enhance backup and recovery capabilities and reduce the costs typically associated with tape-based backups.
- Optimize power and cooling requirements. Consolidated environments require less energy to power and cool than an entire room, or possibly multiple rooms, of unconsolidated physical servers. Use a high-density power and cooling solution designed specifically for a smaller more efficient virtualized environment. These solutions keep the dense architecture at an optimal temperature without cooling the entire data center.
- Look for free energy savings. There may be ways to reduce energy consumption by simply reorganizing your data center. For example, rearranging the servers in your data center into what's known as a "hot aisle/cold aisle" configuration can reduce cooling costs by improving airflow. This involves aligning server racks in rows with the fronts of servers in one row facing the fronts in the adjacent rows and, when there are several rows, backs facing backs. This way, the hot air exhausted out the backs of servers isn’t blown into the cool air intake in the fronts of other servers.
- Employ technology to extend energy savings beyond the data center. It may be trite to say, but the Internet is ubiquitous. Depending on the types of jobs they do, many employees can work from home over the Internet and come into the office only when a face-to-face meeting becomes beneficial or necessary. Reducing office space requirements will, obviously, reduce real estate costs, but there are also green benefits to be derived.
- Office space has to be heated, air conditioned and lit. Thus, if some employees work at home and the company takes advantage of this by reducing its office space, the company’s energy use will decline. At the same time, there won't be a significant increase in the employee’s household energy use because most people don’t adjust their home thermostats when they leave for and return from work. In addition, if other household members already work from home or are otherwise at home during working hours, household lighting costs will increase only marginally.
- Employees will consume more energy at home to run their PCs, but that merely shifts the energy use from the PCs that they would have otherwise used at the office. Companies may consider compensating employees for this shift in energy consumption.
- Eliminating employees' commutes probably delivers the largest green benefit of a work-at-home strategy. Thousands of employees logging hours of commuting time each week pump considerable CO2 into the atmosphere. In addition, those commutes add significantly to tire wear-and-tear. Thus, eliminating commutes prevents the spewing of greenhouse gasses and results in fewer worn-out tires being sent to landfills. There is also a big benefit for employees. Eliminating commuting costs puts more money in their pockets at the end of the month.
Becoming more environmentally friendly isn't just the mantra of the greenie movement anymore, and its core tenets are not difficult to embrace. Apart from financial incentives there are other rewards, like knowing you did your best to make the world a better place for your kids.
Relative to green technology, there are a number of software products available to make migration, virtualization, backup and recovery streamlined and inexpensive. Just a few changes can save your organization enough time and money to deliver a significant return on your green investment.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Tue, Nov 22, 2011 @ 01:00 PM
Author: Robert Gast
To make your IT infrastructure more environmentally friendly you must first need to sow the seeds of change. Here are several ideas for greening your silicon patch, presented in a two part series.
Part One
It took some convincing but now it’s clear that there are an abundant number of reasons to pursue a higher level of earth consciousness. In less than a decade the public discussion on seeking more energy efficient technologies for the data center has shifted from one driven by seemingly transient and superficial hype-cycle messaging to a series of responsible core corporate values with empirical social and business benefits.
For businesses, the kernel of the conservation discussion is where green ideas convert into greenbacks. To wit, conserving resources saves money, period. Consider the following:
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Greening your infrastructure reduces power and cooling costs because green technology, which is more efficient than older hardware platforms, requires less energy.
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Greening through the consolidation of servers and sites leads to more efficient management of data centers, which translates into cost savings for you.
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Green IT is composed of several technologies that all have the goal of reducing power consumption and overall data center footprint, consolidating locations and resources, and improving the efficiency of operations.
Indeed, discussions of green technology now extends beyond the public relations department. Once fervent perennial antagonists, corporations and environmentalists are now—occasionally—converging on the points of clean, healthy, sustainable, and more contentious. The common ground between environmental responsibility and corporate profitably can be observed in the following overarching elements of a green IT strategy:
- Server or site consolidation provides a more flexible and efficient platform that helps reduce power consumption. Consolidation usually means migrating several physical systems to virtual machines that run on one or a few physical servers. This need not be a complicated or expensive undertaking. Real-time and live migration products take the pain out of migrating to new infrastructure, including eliminating most, or all of the downtime necessary to do so.
- The energy savings available from server consolidation can be considerable. A typical x86-based server consumes between 30 and 40 percent of its maximum power even when is idle. Consolidating underused servers onto a single physical server eliminates much of that energy wastage by reducing the number of idling systems.
There is one caveat to consider: When consolidating infrastructure, evaluate your disaster recovery plan and the ability to protect your architecture from failure. A virtualized blade server rack can host dozens of servers, each of which may contain eight to ten virtual hosts. Because there are more servers in a single rack space, redundancy becomes more important. Should a physical system hosting several virtual servers fail, the interruption to business operations will be more significant than for a single, pre-consolidation physical server failure. This increased risk means that it is even more important to provide comprehensive disaster recovery and fault tolerance for consolidated infrastructure than for unconsolidated servers.
- Implementing virtualization technologies helps with consolidating environments and also provides the flexibility to use only the power required to run those virtual machines. Instead of multiple single servers dedicated to a single function, multiple workloads can run on one machine even when the workloads employ different operating systems. Once physical servers have been converted to virtual servers, the data center will see the benefits of more efficient processing.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Thu, Nov 17, 2011 @ 01:43 PM
Are hurricanes increasing in quantity and fury or do we just hear more about hurricanes since Smartphones started following us everywhere? Technically, there's no trend. Hurricanes are not increasing, or decreasing, in any discernable pattern of intensity since we started officially tracking them in 1851.
However, earthquakes are getting more frequent and there has been about a 7% increase in flood and storm activity every year for several decades. While hurricane patterns remain unpredictable, natural disasters are increasing every year.
What's may be contributing to the feeling that hurricanes are more frequent is that the cost increases every year by millions. Researchers theorize (and it's somewhat obvious) that the increasing cost of disasters is because of where we live. The population density of major costal cities is growing faster than safe housing and appropriate building codes for houses and office buildings can keep up. (The population of Miami Dade county has grown 1,600% since 1930.)
If it seems that disasters are getting worse – they are – sort of. The sum total of natural disasters is getting worse. The real questions we need to ask ourselves is not how to control what we can't control (earthquakes and hurricanes) but how we can protect our families and livelihoods in the face of more precarious working and living conditions.
If your family doesn’t have a disaster plan, make one tonight. Click here for some tips. If your business doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan, start on one today. If you need tips you can download our Disaster Avoidance and Recovery whitepaper or visit our Disaster Recovery Resource Center.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Wed, Nov 09, 2011 @ 01:51 PM
VMware has announced the inclusion of basic replication technology for vSphere 5 systems, and many organizations are looking at how they can utilize this platform. Currently, tools like Site Recovery Manager (SRM) require the use of approved, third-party array-based replication systems to move VM data and configuration from one physical location to another. In vSphere 5, VMware can still utilize array-based replication, but can also leverage specialized appliances and the vSphere Replication Management Server (VRMS) platform to provide limited replication capabilities.
Most Vision Solutions, Inc. customers are already very familiar with this form of technology, as it is possible to set up this type of configuration using the Double-Take for Virtual Infrastructure (DTVI) product that's been available for years. The limitations of host-to-host replication have always made DTVI a solid, but secondary choice for our clients; and the same technology is utilized in VRMS, with the same limitations.
DTVI and VRMS both provide solid snap-and-send-based replication from on VMware host device to another; leveraging the VM Backup API to create differencing snapshots. These snapshots are then transmitted via secure shell to the target VM host, where they are applied to the target copy of the VM itself. Command and control systems manage the replication operations and bring the target copy online in the event of a loss of the primary.
This methodology, while absolutely functional, does have some restrictions present in both our own product and the vSphere technology:
- If snapshots are routinely used for other purposes or by other backup systems, conflicts can occur.
- At higher VM densities per host, the overhead of the snapshot systems begins to have a measurable impact on the performance of the guests running on that host.
- Much more bandwidth than necessary is consumed by the requirements to keep latency low and move larger amounts of data for things like Windows paging files and Linux swap-space.
- None of these systems is an useable choice for non-virtualized servers that require DR protection.
In addition, the scalability of ESX's inbuilt replication, as VMware's messaging suggests, is aimed at a small environments. For Small- to Mid-Sized Businesses, this is a reasonable limitation, but for larger shops that need more flexibility in architecture, this limit may mean re-engineering your vCluster designs.
The solution is to combine host-based replication like DTVI – where appropriate – with guest-based replication platforms like the Double-Take Availability for Windows and Double-Take Availability for Linux product lines. While they are licensed either by guest or at the VM host level, these products perform true byte-level replication that can easily exclude non-critical files and binaries.
Double-Take Availability also covers non-virtualized production resources, and even has the ability to leverage virtualization for DR where production is physical. One to one configurations from P2P or P2V can be mixed with many-to-one configurations leveraging P2V and V2V tools like the Virtual Recovery Assistant platform included in the software suite.
Since Double-Take Availability is designed from the ground up to scale effectively on any platform, there is neither limit to the number of vCluster nodes, nor the requirement to vCluster at all if individual hosts are a preferred configuration. This universal view also applies to platforms that leverage virtualization tools from other vendors, such as Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V technologies.
We're all for using the best tool for the job, and in this case, we can provide you with all of those tools.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Fri, Nov 04, 2011 @ 03:50 PM
Remember when you were a little kid? When did you want it to be your turn to play with your favorite toy? Right now! When seemed like the best time for your favorite snack? Right now! When did you want your mom's attention? Right now! In an August 2011 survey of 633 IT professionals conducted by Vision Solutions, 70% of respondents reported that their company desires to integrate their data closer to real time. In other words, when do they want their data? Right now! They want distributed applications to stay synchronized so that users can see the data entered by other employees, departments or locations - right now. They want reports from their production systems - right now. They want to feed data from databases spread across the enterprise into their mission critical eCommerce application, Analytics system or web portal - right now. The highest priority of survey respondents was to better use their data for competitive advantage, and they need it now. Register for Vision Solution’s Double-Take Share 5.0 webcast and learn how Share can automate the sharing of data from similar and dissimilar database, operating system, and hardware platforms in real time and with no programming. Do it – right now!
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 @ 11:24 AM
Author: Mike Talon
What happens if you have lots of bandwidth, flexible Recovery Point Objectives and you're virtualized both in production and DR? Well, you can take advantage of Double-Take Virtual Host Edition for a start.
Double-Take Availability can easily run on virtual guest devices, both Windows and Linux. You can protect those guests either to other guests or (for Windows only) to a Virtual Recovery Assistant helper VM. That's the solution with the most flexibility in the product line, but some customers don't need that level of flexibility, and would rather replicate at the ESX or Hyper-V host level instead.
Double-Take Virtual Host Edition is the perfect solution for that host-to-host replication. Formerly known as Double-Take for Virtual Infrastructure, the product got a rename when the 5.0 version was released to make it sound more like what it does – replicate VMs via virtual hosts.
It supports ESX 4.x and Hyper-V RTM and R2, including the Hyper-V Role on Server 2008 and 2008 R2, and is designed quite differently on each platform:
On ESX, Double-Take Virtual Host Edition leverages native VMware snapshot technology to take periodic snapshots that hold up to 15 minutes or 32 MB of data – whichever comes first. By closing one snapshot and immediately opening another, we can provide continual protection for any VMs on that ESX host, and transmit the now closed snapshot to a target ESX device. Once on the target, the snapshot is committed to a duplicate copy of the VMDK files for those protected VMs, and the original is then removed from the source ESX host. When the next snapshot window closes, the process repeats. Since we also re-create the VM definition files onto the target host, if the host or a VM fails, we can bring up those VMs on the target device.
This is great for those shops that have bandwidth to spare, and would prefer a more host-centric approach to High Availability. The ESX architecture does enforce some restrictions, however. This is not strictly real-time replication, though it can be quite close with the rightinfrastructure. You will also need to be sure the hosts are sized properly to allow the system the overhead required to do the periodic snapshots. Finally, you'll want to make sure you're using a stretched-LAN or virtual LAN in order to allow for VMs to re-connect on the DR site. If, for any reason, these restrictions don’t work for you, no problem! Just use Double-Take Availability for Windows or Linux within the guests; and all of these restrictions disappear.
On Hyper-V, the Double-Take Virtual Host Edition system works much more like the Double-Take Availability product line. Since the Hyper-V host (both Hyper-V Serverand Role) is a Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 device, we can provide true byte-level real-time replication over much lower bandwidth than we can provide at the host level on ESX. This means you are essentially performing Application-Level Failover (similar to DTAAM forExchange or SQL), where the Hyper-V VM is the "application" being failed over. We replicate all VHD's and the virtual machine definitions for those VMs you want to protect, and can failthem over just like any other application.
Double-Take Virtual Host Edition gives you even more options for protection of a virtual infrastructure on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V. Knowing that you have the ability to do guest level (Double-Take Availability) or host level (Double-Take Virtual Host Edition), means that you can use one suite of products from Vision Solutions, Inc. to protect anything in your physical and virtual environments.
Posted by Mary Ann Garwood on Fri, Oct 14, 2011 @ 12:38 PM
Author: Becky Hjellming
Remember when John Henry went up against the steam engine? It's the ultimate story of man versus machine. The equivalent in the IT industry is the battle of manual processes versus automated tools. Vision Solutions recently surveyed 633 IT professionals in North America to determine how they are sharing data today, and found that a whopping 60% of respondents are still using manual processes to share data. They might use FTP, log shipping, or some other ETL (Extract Transform Load) tool in conjunction with scripts or other in-house tools to get the job done. In fact, 57% are incorporating in-house tools. The problem is that manual processes and in-house tools, even in the hands of the best and strongest, are labor-intensive, prone to errors, and expensive to develop, maintain and manage. Just like John Henry and his hammer, the days when manual solutions meet your need have passed. Don't die with your hammer in your hand. Check out Double-Take Share for easy, automated cross-platform data sharing. Click here to read our white paper, "Real-Time Database Sharing: What Can it Do for Your Business" to learn more.