Why server virtualisation can store up trouble

Originally published on Silicon.

Server virtualisation technology is taking hold in mainstream IT environments and is on its way to becoming a core technology. But the views I hear time and again from IT professionals are as much about virtualisation's impact on the wider infrastructure as about their experiences of the technology itself.

One of the side effects of virtualisation is its impact on the storage infrastructure. To understand this issue, we need a grasp of how IT environments have traditionally evolved. Generally, each time a new application was deployed, a new set of servers and storage devices came with it, creating a so-called silo.

This approach causes some problems: it requires physical space for a start, and managing multiple, disparate hardware and software platforms has proved onerous for many organisations. Nonetheless, it has one major benefit in that each application's storage requirements are handled more or less individually.

The paths between application processing and storage, and the bandwidth required, can be calculated in a relatively straightforward manner for individual applications. While bottlenecks have always existed, the nature of silos makes them relatively easy to spot.
But there is an additional downside. Because storage systems have been fully specified upfront to cope with expected loads, much spare capacity exists today that has never been used but which is unavailable for anything else.

Enter server virtualisation, which offers a way to consolidate multiple workloads onto a single physical server. The benefits are generally well appreciated and in principle can also result in more efficient use of storage by breaking the silos that were bought to serve the needs of particular applications.

However, the downside of server virtualisation is that it doesn't pay sufficient attention to the physical environment beyond the server. It's great in principle to shift multiple workloads onto a single server. But rather than having individual routes to the physical storage layer, information flows now take place using the same physical interface.

From talking to early adopters of server virtualisation, we know this approach can easily cause a bottleneck if the workloads are data-intensive or require access to concurrent physical resources. Where silos make bottlenecks easier to spot, virtualisation does not.
Numerous IT managers describe their difficulties understanding what physical resources a virtual machine is actually using. Management tools - or at least those used by many IT departments - are not sophisticated enough to provide such a view, and many IT staff lack experience of the new environments.

However, we should also remember it is still relatively early days for virtualisation in the distributed systems environment. IT management vendors are working with virtualisation vendors to ensure the physical and virtual worlds are both taken into account.
Meanwhile, although the traditional storage infrastructure of NAS, SAN and the like evolved without considering virtualisation, a number of vendors are starting to incorporate recognition of server virtualisation in their products.

In fact, the principles of virtualisation are also highly applicable to the storage realm and happen to have been around for a long time. Indeed, storage virtualisation makes the overall pool of storage easier to manage and enables the allocation of storage as it is needed through so-called thin provisioning, reciprocating the operational flexibility of running a virtualised server environment.

Storage virtualisation also offers a number of other benefits such as reduced power consumption and makes supporting disaster recovery easier, as data can be replicated and moved within the overall storage pool with minimum disruption to users and applications.
Ultimately, one of the key things we've learned from early adopters is that it doesn't make sense to think about server virtualisation and storage virtualisation in isolation from one another. Looking at virtualisation across both areas should improve performance and efficiency, and cut costs.

Storage is often an area that hasn't been revisited for some time in many organisations, so it makes sense to study how the latest capabilities can support server virtualisation, before operational bottlenecks threaten to spoil the fun.

Videoconferencing: coming to a company near you?

Originally published on cio.co.uk.

It is probably fair to say that the likelihood of videoconferencing becoming mainstream in the next year or so is slim. Of course, many vendors will no doubt vehemently disagree with this, and claim that the videoconference revolution is only just around the corner. For some, maybe, but not for all. In spite of the often touted benefits, such as the ability to involve remote teams in 'face-to-face' meetings, reduced travel budgets and time lost due to travelling, there are a number of negatives that videoconferencing struggles to overcome. To begin with, professional business-grade video conferencing is generally acknowledged as being expensive, and difficult to set up and maintain, with specialised equipment required at both ends of a connection, often in a pre-designated, and often purpose-built room. In addition, latencies on video calls can make them, at times, painful to participate in. And perhaps most importantly, a lot of people just aren't comfortable with their picture on the screen, and are happier sticking with the tried and tested audio conference, perhaps calling on web-conferencing when some visual interface, such as a set of slides, is required.

But while video conferencing is unlikely to replace the humble phone call any time soon, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It is certainly already well past the starting post, no doubt egged on somewhat by the continual stream of travel woes affecting businesses such as rail and air strikes, the recent disruption caused by the ash cloud, and swine flu , along with shrinking travel budgets and changing work practices. Recent research carried about by Freeform Dynamics with companies into their use of advanced business communications revealed that while video conferencing is less widely used than most communications tools, it is at least on the agenda in some shape or form for many, although broad adoption is fairly limited.

But just implementing video conferencing doesn't automatically guarantee that it will deliver benefits to the business. And in fact, if the expectation is that it will be used just because it is there, then it most probably won't. In fact, in this scenario, it is more likely to end up with the cameras pushed towards the wall while people just use the system for voice. The 'trick' in getting it to really work in the organisation is to ensure it has a good home in the overall communications strategy. This demands a real 'top-down approach' to make it happen, with senior and middle management as genuine flag-wavers of the solution. This means getting them to actually use it, not just talk about it, e.g. by starting to organise meetings themselves on a regular basis, and getting inventive with strategies around this. Some companies, for example, have had 'competitions' to see who can cut the most travel budget by using video conferencing, with prizes for the winners. Of course, ensuring that everyone uses meeting best-practices, such as clear agenda etc., applies here just as it would in any other type of meeting. Like most technologies, once videoconferencing starts being used successfully, and talked about, everyone else will demand to use it.

It is probably also worth remembering the old maxim of horses for courses, and identifying precisely which courses work best for video conferencing. For example, in some companies, larger group meetings aimed at disseminating information, where information flows from one site to many others but not much interaction is expected from the satellite sites, are probably well suited to videoconference sessions, whereas smaller, interactive discussions might be better handled by a web or audio conference. In other companies, the reverse may be true. The point is that video conferencing is not a solution that solves all meeting needs, and is very much about delivering specific values in well-defined scenarios. It works much better when it coexists with others tools, such as web and audio conferencing. Over time, individual company experience will determine the best tool for any given communications objective.

On a final note, when video conferencing is considered as a component or 'option' within a broader communications solution such as Unified Communications (UC), interest increases significantly. With this in mind, UC just might be the conduit that pushes video conferencing into the spotlight, even if it is one shared with a whole raft of other communications tools.

Selling the Cloud

Vendors are pushing cloud for all they are worth. And customers talk about it too, whether they understand what the word means or not. Some claim cloud computing is the key to lower costs and increased flexibility. We also hear that cloud is about surrendering control, and exposing private information. Some of what you hear is misleading, and even misinformed. Cloud is really quite a nebulous concept – if you will excuse the pun.

It seems that almost every 'cloud' vendor has a different strategy. Some are offering applications accessed over the internet or host custom applications in shared datacentres. Others specialise in highly automated and virtualised infrastructure to transform the datacentre. Some offer flexible, use-based pricing, while others prefer longer commitments or set resources.

The cloud computing vision is really the fulfilment of a long-talked-about but not quite realised concept: IT as a service. A combination of ‘cloudy’ ingredients, such as on-demand capacity, self-service setup, shared resource pools and service monitoring may construct what are widely called cloud services.

Many poster-child cloud-focused services, such as SalesForce.com, are close to past visions of service-based IT, such as application service provision. Vendors such as VMware want to make manual, internal IT provisioning into a dynamic process. VMware proposes that customers use virtualisation and automation extensively to create a ‘cloud computing environment’. By default, this cloud environment is both internal and private. Even with no external services being consumed, this model is widely described as cloud computing.

The ultimate expression of cloud computing is for near-complete freedom to choose where a service may run. It may run locally in the datacentre, but as requirements change the workload could be moved or extended to another location. This other location may be external to the company, and provided in a secure but shared facility, or even in a publicly accessible facility by a third party.

How cloud it is perceived by customers is by far the most important thing. Some customers may not even require your approach to involve the word ‘cloud’, if all they care about are the attributes of a particular service.

Generally, we can split customer views into three main classes:

The first is that on-premise solutions are not generally considered cloud. So when vendors bang the ‘internal private cloud’ drum, it needs to be presented to the customer more in terms of application and infrastructure flexibility, without complicating the issue by talking cloud.

Second, customers do not view email, communication and collaboration tools as ‘cloud’ but more as ‘hosted services’. However, vanilla infrastructure capable of hosting a variety of applications, business tools, data or development environments are seen as cloud.

But the third and most important consideration in the customers’ eyes is that cloud services should offer freedom. They must be flexible, on-demand and with no ongoing commitment.
Ultimately, if you feel that you absolutely must talk about cloud to your target audience, it is worth avoiding defining it through services that are aggregated into ungainly artificial containers – such as fixed or pre-allocated resources, defined capacity, and especially longer-term fixed contracts.