Category Archives: IT Management

DataCore, Hosting, IT Management, IT service management, Partnerships, service provider, Storage hypervisor, Storage virtualization, VMware

DataCore Software Announces Pay-as-You-Serve Cloud Service Provider Program for Hosted IT Services

DataCore Software today announced that providers of hosted IT services may now rent DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor through the company’s Cloud Service Provider Program. Under the program, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) pay for the use of the software monthly based on the amount of storage they serve versus having to purchase it outright. This allows participating providers to reduce capital expenditure and better align costs to revenue.

DataCore’s storage hypervisor software manages and protects hosted IT environments, providing a high performance, highly scalable, automatically tiered storage infrastructure upon which providers can confidently build and offer their hosted IT services.

The DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program goes a step further in the direction of “on demand” infrastructure with its “Pay-as-You-Serve” proposition to hosted IT service providers—they pay for the software as they use it, based upon the storage they serve to their subscribers.

“In order to offer the most competitive pricing for their services, CSPs and other hosting companies seek to lower capital expenditures and keep expenses and their timing aligned to revenue-producing activities,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “The DataCore storage hypervisor ‘software advantage’ gives us the unique ability to offer the kind of service provider program that other leading software companies, like VMware, have developed, but apply it to the storage-side of the infrastructure. Ideally tailored for the flexibility, efficiency and predictable expenses they seek.”

New cutting edge technologies will also be of interest to CSPs. These innovations designed to satisfy large scale, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) requirements crucial to building robust cloud storage infrastructures are packaged in the company’s newest product, SANsymphony-V R9.0, aptly described as “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud.”

The storage hypervisor’s powerful storage management capabilities and interchangeable hardware design empowers hosters with great cost-savings flexibility, new levels of automation for increased resource productivity and a storage infrastructure that easily incorporates the industry’s latest innovations.

“The new DataCore CSP pricing model reduces our upfront costs – thereby enhancing our margins,” comments Philippe Merckel, CEO, MERCKEL SAS. “DataCore understands that as data centers move to the cloud in the form of virtual, private data centers, cloud platforms need the storage virtualization functionality that DataCore brings to the table with its storage hypervisor. The key, however, for CSPs lies in making the adoption of this technology cost-effective. That is what this Cloud Service Provider Program does. It makes it far easier for us to standardize on DataCore for storage virtualization because we pay as we go rather than paying for everything upfront. It fundamentally suits our own business model whereby our own clients lease our cloud platform.

The DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program is currently open only to providers of hosted IT services located in Europe; the program will be expanded to include North America and additional geographies over the next 90 days. For more up-to-date information about program eligibility and the program itself, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Partners/cloud-service-providers/CSP-Program.aspx.


Application performance management, AppNeta, IT Management, M&A Activity, Network performance, Performance management, Tracelytics

AppNeta Acquires Tracelytics

AppNeta, provider of end-user-centric performance management solutions for business critical applications, today announced the acquisition of Tracelytics, an  provider of full-stack, SaaS-delivered Application Performance Management (APM) solutions. With the addition of Tracelytics, AppNeta will deliver a SaaS portfolio that includes a broad suite of End-User Experience monitoring capabilities, innovative APM services built on full-stack application tracing technology, and unprecedented application-aware network performance insight.

“Tracelytics’ APM technology brings the next critical piece of the puzzle to our cloud SaaS environment and is setting a new standard for application performance management,” said Jim Melvin, CEO of AppNeta. “Their technology is a perfect companion to our network performance management solutions. Together we are providing unmatched insight to application and network operations teams that they do not have today. By coupling Tracelytics’ technology with our existing cloud services platform, we are accelerating time to value for our ever-increasing customer base.”

The acquisition of Tracelytics strengthens AppNeta’s breakthrough approach to application and network performance management as it is the only solution to offer a 360o view into the network and the key applications running on it. AppNeta’s award-winning, cloud-delivered PathView Cloud service offers integrated insight from every element of the network performance stack: path, packet, flow and device. This complete, integrated suite delivered from the cloud offers thousands of global customers the fastest time to resolution in the industry and superior End- User Experience monitoring.

“With the steadily increasing use of highly distributed Web-based applications, network performance insight is critical to assuring successful application delivery and a quality end-user experience,” said Jim Frey, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Few APM solutions today offer the depth of visibility from the network perspective that is required for this level of end-user experience monitoring.”

Founded in 2010, Tracelytics has developed the next generation of APM technology. The innovative SaaS solution provides deep, detailed visibility into Web applications, identifying where issues and bottlenecks are occurring and providing actionable data for quick problem resolution. Tracelytics delivers a unique combination of immediate time-to-value with full-stack application tracing, providing real time visibility and management into Web applications with any level of complexity.

“We are excited to bring our customers full-stack performance insight to both the core application performance and the end-user’s experience for today’s distributed application architectures.” said John Vigeant, CEO of Tracelytics. “But without the corresponding deep network performance visibility, they can’t fully understand and solve problems in the complete application delivery chain. Together with AppNeta, we can now answer these questions.”


Deloitte, Embotics, IT Management, Magirus, Private Cloud, Venture Funding, VentureLink LP

Embotics Gets $8.4 Million for Private Cloud Management

Image representing Embotics as depicted in Cru...

Private cloud management vendor Embotics Corporation today announced that it has closed $8.4 million in equity financing. Bringing Embotics’ total financing-to-date to $18 million, this latest round includes $2.5 million from VentureLink LP and $2.5 million from Covington Fund II Inc. (Covington), with the remainder of the funds coming from other private investors. Embotics will use the funding to accelerate global sales and marketing efforts, as well as to hire more software engineers.

This mix of pragmatic growth, strategic marketing and sales investments will build upon the momentum of the past year’s 300 percent growth in sales to further strengthen Embotics V-Commander’s leadership position in the private cloud management market.

“We continue to support Embotics because of its proven track record of successfully developing products that address the problems in virtual data center environments,” said Phil Reddon, managing partner of Covington. “Our experience investing in the virtualization sector, along with Embotics’ success in assisting companies with private cloud management, automation and self-service provisioning, make for a smart business and investment partnership between our two organizations.”

“We have a strong belief in Embotics and its virtualization and cloud management technology. Due to the market need for its solutions, we are confident that Embotics’ business will continue to grow,” said Jim Whitaker, managing partner of VentureLink LP. “Embotics’ clear differentiation in cloud management made its business and this opportunity very attractive to us.”

This round of financing comes on the heels of Embotics’ most successful year to date. The company has experienced 300 percent growth in sales over the past year and 220 percent year-on-year growth in new customers, which now include Bell, Deloitte, Cisco, CSC, Dutch Ministry of Defence, MITRE and numerous universities and public sector departments. In addition, Embotics has signed new channel partnerships, including one with Magirus in Europe.

“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Covington and to begin our new relationship with VentureLink because of their proven success when it comes to supporting technology innovation,” said Jay Litkey, CEO of Embotics. “The significant increase in our sales demonstrates the opportunity that exists in the market. This financing will enable us to match that opportunity with clearly defined differentiation, corresponding sales and an increased engineering team to support new and existing customer opportunities.”


Amazon Web Service, Appcara, Application programming interface, Enterprise software, IT Management, Rackspace, VCloud, VMware

Appcara Debuts Its AppStack Release 2 Platform, A Dynamic Application Layer Above the Cloud

Appcara, maker of cloud application lifecycle solutions, announced a major new version of its AppStack application and portability platform that helps enterprises and service providers accelerate complex applications into the cloud and deliver new application-based revenue sources. Incorporating a real time Dynamic Application Environment layer that eliminates the need for server templates or scripting, AppStack Release 2 changes the rules of cloud computing. With AppStack 2, enterprises and service providers gain exceptionally fast time-to-market for key business applications – maximizing time, knowledge and profitability.

While cloud deployments are common for simple web apps, the $385 billion enterprise application market remains the province of on-premises data centers, in large part because IT staffs lack the tools required to truly govern VMware, Citrix, or other private and hybrid applications running on Amazon Web Services, Citrix CloudStack or VMware vCloud. While cloud app management solutions exist, they require deep technical knowledge of application stacks, and a lot of manual, error-prone effort to use.

AppStack provides an advanced application layer above public and private clouds – to capture application components, configurations and dependencies in real-time in the industry’s only dynamic Configuration Repository – thereby automating all aspects of the application lifecycle. By decoupling apps from low-level dependencies such as operating systems and machine images into its uniquely visual, intuitive, real time environment, AppStack 2 enables total application portability, even across different public clouds – for instance, from Amazon to Rackspace – as well as from public to private clouds. AppStack allows cloud computing to expand beyond simple, predefined workloads, and into the realm of serious enterprise applications – with a single pane of glass management interface, and eliminating vendor lock-in.

“For a long time enterprises have been seeking to leverage cloud environments for more complex business applications and take advantage of the flexibility, faster time to market and markedly lower cost structures delivered by the cloud. AppStack’s ability to capture and assemble these application graphically, in real-time, is something that’s businesses can truly leverage for improved efficiency and faster time to market,” said William Fellows, analyst at 451 Research.

A major new capability in AppStack 2 is the App Marketplace functionality that connects application publishers and consumers and provides a platform to enable usage-based applications, so that:

  • Corporations have immediate access to business applications, enabling
    them to integrate applications without the need to purchase, install &
    configure apps as with packaged software.
  • ISV’s can readily publish business applications for usage-based
    consumption
  • Distributors can resell applications in a usage-based model in the
    cloud, and to move away from traditional box-based software sales.

“Many of our clients come from the Life Sciences industry where they have very sophisticated, mission critical applications running on their servers. Making a move to the cloud wasn’t an option worth considering until the AppStack solution came along,” said Tim Caulfield, chief executive officer at American Internet Services (AIS). “The idea that AppStack can do the heavy lifting on the back-end and provide the user with a very clean, single-pane-of-glass interface, is quite appealing and fits nicely with our BusinessCloud1 offering.”

AppStack 2 builds upon existing AppStack patent-pending components that have been in use by service providers and enterprise customers, including:

  • Dynamic Application Engine – which
    captures user-defined app environments, settings and relationships in
    real-time, construct data models and insert into Configuration
    Repository. It automates provisioning, lifecycle management, and
    portability.
  • Configuration Repository – which stores
    application settings, dependencies and change records for all
    application workloads. This enables speedy provisioning of application
    workloads as well as the ability to de-couple lower level components
    such as operating systems for portability across cloud vendors.
  • Cloud Target Optimizer – which maps
    provisioning elements and instructions to vendor specific API’s and
    available capabilities.

“Enterprises need to get critical apps to market with the least effort and cost possible, and the solutions on the market today help with only simple, static environments,” said John Yung, founder and CEO of Appcara. “AppStack keeps it simple, fast, and visual to deploy and manage even complex applications in the cloud, so customers and service providers can lower their IT costs – even with enterprise applications – and focus on scaling their business.”

AppStack Release 2 will ship in July 2012. Appcara is showcasing its latest version of AppStack at Cloud Computing Expo New York, in its booth #257.


IT Management

The Likelihood Theorem

When deciding where and how to spend your IT dollars, one question that comes up consistently is how far down the path of redundancy and resiliency should you build your solution for, and where does it cross the threshold from a necessity, to a nice-to-have because-its-cool.  Defining your relative position on this path has impacts in all areas of IT, including technology selection, implementation design, policies and procedures definition, and management requirements.  Therefore, I’ve developed the Likelihood (LH) Theorem to assist with identifying where that position is relative to your specific situation.  The LH is not a financial criteria, nor is it directly an ROI metric.  However it can be used to assist with determining the impact of making certain decisions in the design process.

Prior to establishing the components that make up your LH ratio, consider that at the start, with a completely blank slate, we all have the same LH.  True, you could argue that someone establishing a system in Kansas doesn’t have to worry about a tsunami, but they do have to consider tornados.  Besides, the preparation for such a level of regional, long term impact would be very similar regardless of the root cause.

The Likelihood Theorem starts with the concept of an Event (E ).  Each ( E ) has its own unique LH.  So initially:

LH=E

Next, apply any minimum standards that you define for included systems in your environment.  Call this the Foundation Factor (FF). If you define a FF, then you can reduce LH by some factor, eliminating certain events from consideration.  For example, your FF for server hardware may be redundant power supplies, NICs, and RAID.  When it comes to network connectivity, it may be redundant paths. If using SaaS for business critical functions, it may be ISP redundancy via multi-homing and link load balancing.  Therefore

LH=E-FF

Any of us who have been in this industry (or been a consumer of IT) for more than 5 minutes knows that even with a baseline established, things happen.  This is known as the Wild Card Effect (WCE).  One key note here is that all WCEs are in some form potentially controllable by the business.  For hardware, this may be the difference between purchasing from Tier 1 and Tier 2 vendors (i.e. lower quality of components or lower mean time to failure rates).  Another WCE may be the available budget for the solution.  There may be multiple WCEs in any scenario, and all WCEs add back to the LH ratio:

WCE1 +WCE2 + WCE3 …=WCEn

And so:

LH=E-FF+WCEn

At this point, we have accounted for the event in question, reduced our risk profile by our minimum standards, and adjusted for wild cards that are beyond our minimum standards but that we could address should we have the authority to make certain decisions.  Now, we need to begin considering the impacts associated with the event in question.  Is the event we are considering singular in nature, or is it potentially repetitive?  LH related to a regional disaster would be singular, however if we are considering telecommunication outages, then repetitive is more reasonable.  So, we need to take the equation and multiply it by the potential frequency (FQ):

LH=(E-FF+WCEn)*FQ

The last factor in LH is determining the length of time that the event in question could impact the environment.  This may come into play if the system in question is transitory, an interim step to a new solution, or has an expected limited lifecycle.  The length of time that the event is possible can impact our thoughts around how much we invest in preventing it:

LH=((E-FF+WCEn)*FQ)/Time

So, in thinking about how to approach your design, consider these factors:  What event are you trying to avoid?  Do your minimum specifications eliminate the possibility of the event occurring ( E = FF )?  What if you had to reduce your specifications to meet a lower budget (WCE1) or use a solution with an inherently higher ratio of failures or lackluster support (WCE 2 and WCE3)?  Can you reduce those wildcards if the Event is not fully covered by your minimum standards (lower total WCEn)?  Will the event be a one-time thing or could it happen repeatedly over the lifecycle of the solution?

I’m not suggesting that you can associate specific numerical values for these factors, but in terms of elevating or reducing the likelihood of an event happening, these criteria are key indicators.  Using this formula is a way to ensure that working within the known constraints placed on us by the business, we have maximized our ability to avoid specific events and reduced the likelihood of those we can realistically address.

Citrix Receiver, Citrix Systems, Citrix VDI, IT Management, Thin client

Stratodesk Unveils New Version of NoTouch Desktop

Stratodesk today announced the latest version of NoTouch Desktop, offering customers and resellers a versatile and easy to use endpoint VDI and cloud OS and client management solutions.

Stratodesk’s NoTouch Desktop allows businesses to simplify and unify their desktops. The PC and thin-client re-purposing and management solution consists of two-parts: the NoTouch Receiver OS, a thin OS that runs on PCs or Thin Clients and provides instant connectivity to all popular server-side technology and connection brokers, and the NoTouch Center, an innovative, browser-based client-management tool that gives system administrators the ability to manage and secure any and all PCs and OEM thin clients from one virtual management console. NoTouch Desktop is completely hardware, vendor and platform agnostic and has minimal hardware requirements.

The latest version of NoTouch Desktop inter alia includes:

  • Integration with the native Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Client to connect to a
    Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Server in three different ways (Citrix Receiver,
    Java Client, Web browser). NoTouch Desktop now enables users to
    repurpose existing endpoints and to establish a connection to a
    VDI-in-a-Box infrastructure in under five minutes.
  • Citrix Receiver 12.1 with flash redirection and USB support
  • Firefox 12 with Flash Plug-in 11.2
  • The remote tool Team Viewer to give fast and hassle free support

“Stratodesk’s latest version of NoTouch Desktop provides businesses with a best-of-breed endpoint OS and management solution that is even more versatile, easy to connect and cost effective,” explains Emanuel Pirker, Founder and CEO of Stratodesk. “We’re excited to provide a smart and effective, hassle-free, hardware independent solution for businesses moving to VDI. We are also very proud to present a rapid way for VDI-in-a-Box users to repurpose all their endpoints and connect to VDI-in-a-Box environment. “

Pricing for NoTouch Desktop begins at $31.49 for 1-10 clients, $29.92 for 11-100 clients, $28.34 for 101-500 clients and $27.00 for 501-1000 clients. For more information, please visit www.stratodesk.com or call (415) 946-4029. To evaluate NoTouch Desktop for free please register at: http://www.stratodesk.com/download.

Stratodesk will host a free webinar on how to repurpose and manage your existing hardware with NoTouch Desktop on Wednesday, May 30 at 09:30 a.m. PST. For registration please click here: http://www.stratodesk.com/calendarevents/20/webinar-30-may-2012


iPad, IT Management, Mobile, Mobile device, Mobile device management, Mobile Enterprise, Soonr

Soonr Lets Enterprise IT Control Tablets, Mobile Devices

Image representing Soonr as depicted in CrunchBase

Responding to the growing trend of data being created, consumed and stored on mobile devices that are not controlled by IT, Soonr, a leader in secure business cloud services that transforms tablets like the iPad into business productivity tools, today announced Soonr Enterprise to help solve the mobile enterprise challenges large organizations are facing.

“Soonr is helping our global sales organization fully exploit the power of its smart devices – transforming its tablets and smartphones into reliable alternatives to carrying a laptop,” said Al Lounsbury, director of Digital Tools, Corporate Marketing at Ciena. “They can access core content to do business – whether they are documents, presentations or videos – and work on them seamlessly and securely within the cloud infrastructure.”

Soonr Enterprise builds upon its existing enterprise grade infrastructure and services that have been in continuous operation since 2005, now serving over 120,000 businesses globally.

Business units and Teams want easy access to content across mobile devices, while their IT counterparts want to ensure that access to sensitive information is secured and controlled according to corporate policies. IT professionals have genuine concerns about the extreme security risks of unmanaged cloud services and are issuing legitimate warnings about a lack of controls, capabilities, reporting and integration. Even so, business units are being rapidly drawn to what tablets and mobile devices can give them – agility, ubiquity and simplicity.

“IT needs to provide corporately endorsed solutions that are easy for individuals to use, but provide IT with security, control and accountability,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “With the Consumerization and mobilization trends, IT has some real interesting challenges with data and compliance issues on end-user mobile devices. IT needs vendors like Soonr to help address these data access and collaboration challenges in the enterprise because they are not going away.”

Soonr understands the complexity of security and compliance issues facing today’s IT departments and their requirements for managing cloud services. Soonr’s services run over a purpose-built, enterprise-grade infrastructure that relies on geo-redundant data centers in major regions that delivers better than 99.9 percent uptime with industry-leading response and service restoral time guarantees. Security of customer information is assured with 256-bit AES encryption of data in transit and storage with dynamic key rotation, virus scanning, and firewalls against hacking attacks. Role-based access controls, password protection and expiration timers for share links, and inactivity session timers deliver best-in-class user security. Finally, encryption of all local session information and non-persistent use of login credentials provide critical protection against lost or stolen devices.

“It’s an issue that every large organization has to come to grips with – and it is not an easy one,” said Martin Frid-Nielsen, co-founder and CEO of Soonr. “But we’ve come up with a solution that helps CIOs and their IT departments to navigate the divide between security and ingenuity. The last thing you want to do is hold your company back from effective sale approaches – and the modern ways of doing business – because of fear.”

The new capabilities being announced today are designed to expand the level of control enterprise IT is able to exert over users, devices and the documents that are part of the cloud collaboration environment under IT management. These include the ability to create and manage Groups from global team lists with custom share permissions, which reflects how Projects are actually managed in large companies. Both users and Groups may now be imported from enterprise Active Directory databases so that adding individuals to Projects with the right permissions is fully automated, saving time and reducing mistakes when multiple systems have to be configured.

New Policy Management capabilities allow the enterprise IT Admin to access all Projects users may have created with the ability to view, search, edit and delete Projects, as well as to control how Projects are shared with other employees or external parties. These new controls enable businesses to be in compliance with industry regulations or lawful access requirements.

Advanced reports and audit trails about user, group, device, and Project-related activities provide a rich set of tools that can be used for business analytics, such as determining how Projects and documents are being used, or for diagnostic, compliance, or security purposes.


6fusion, IT Management, Virtualization, VMware, VMware vSphere

6fusion Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere Now in Public Beta

Image representing 6fusion as depicted in Crun...

6fusion, a provider of utility metered public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure management solutions, today announced that Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere has achieved public beta and is now available for sign up. Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing unparalleled insight into resource consumption – all for free and all right from the VMware Console. Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere product joins the existing family of Cloud Resource Meter for Windows, and Cloud Resource Meter for Linux already available from 6fusion.

“Utility metering with the Cloud Resource Meter gives us the ability to profile our environment in a way we never have before,” said Graham Brown, Director, Business Technology Consulting, Gyrocom, “which gives us accurate data to make informed decisions on workload allocation and deployment.”

Using 6fusion’s unique Workload Allocation Cube technology with a connection to the UC6 Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Resource Meter provides an industry standard unit of measurement allowing you to meter resource consumption across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. This standardized approach to metering allows IT departments to improve ROI analysis, optimize resource consumption, build the business case to migrate to cloud, or simply improve IT distribution processes.

“Universal metering is foundational to any utility,” said John Cowan, 6fusion Co-founder and CEO. “Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows any VMware user in the world to quantify their cloud requirements and determine the best location to run those workloads going forward – maximizing efficiency of IT spend and ROI.“

Cloud Resource Meter is available in two models – Free and Pro. Cloud Resource Meter Free provides the ability to meter and view the last 28 days of data directly in the vSphere interface or in the 6fusion UC6 Console. The Pro version provides the full capabilities of the tool, including unlimited metering, expanded reporting capabilities, technical support as well as the ability to access 6fusion’s enhanced analytics tools.

To learn more about Cloud Resource Meter or to sign up for access to the beta product, visit www.6fusion.com/products/cloudresourcemeter, or stop by booth 618 at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco or booth 311 at Interop Las Vegas.


IT Management, Networking, PacketPortal, Partnerships

JDSU, NetSocket Partner on PacketPortal

NetSocket, the creator of the world’s first real-time cloud service assurance solutions, announces its relationship with JDSU as a PacketPortal™ application partner. PacketPortal is JDSU’s recently launched Smart Network Application Platform (SNAP) that allows communications service providers to more intelligently capture and analyze network data remotely to provide the highest-quality subscriber experience.

NetSocket delivers immediate insight into cloud networks, providing complete service visibility. It enables network managers to anticipate, isolate and remediate IP service issues before they become end-user problems. NetSocket’s solution automatically provides a comprehensive view of content, session and IP topology on a hop-by-hop basis. It captures and correlates network behavior in real time on any size network and across multiple vendors. NetSocket provides a trouble-free cloud experience, ensuring higher session quality and lower support costs.

PacketPortal enhances the capabilities and improves the efficiency of today’s network monitoring and troubleshooting software applications by extending visibility to the network edge while reducing complexity by focusing on only critical data. The partnering relationship announced today allows customers to use PacketPortal along with the NetSocket application to truly visualize the customer experience for IP cloud-based communications and collaboration services.

“Through our partnership with NetSocket, JDSU creates new opportunities for enterprises and service providers to derive value from the PacketPortal platform,” said Doug Fantuzzi, vice president in JDSU’s Communications Test and Measurement business segment.

“By integrating with PacketPortal, NetSocket can provide carriers and enterprises with immediate visibility into the location and causes of customer experience issues, especially in remote sites where previously it was difficult to obtain data,” said John White, CEO, NetSocket. “Now we can extend our correlation/isolation abilities to a broader market and reduce troubleshooting time and costs, minimize downtime, and improve productivity.”

JDSU will demonstrate the PacketPortal-enabled NetSocket solution this month at Interop 2012, May 8-10 in Las Vegas, Nev., at JDSU’s booth No. 2443. JDSU is also exhibiting at the DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) Customer Partnership Conference in Tampa, May 7-9, booth No. 942.

To learn more about JDSU, please visit http://www.jdsu.com/.


IT Architecture, IT Management

The Taxonomy of IT Part 5 – Genus and Species

As the last (do I hear applause?) installment in this five part series on the Taxonomy of IT, we have a bit of cleanup to do.  There are two remaining “levels” of classification (Genus and Species), but there is also a need to summarize this whole extravaganza into some meaningful summary.

Genus classifications allow us to subdivide the Family of IT into subcultures based on their commonality to each other, while the Species definition enables us to highlight sometimes subtle differences, such as color, range or specific habits.   Therefore, in order to round out our Taxonomy, Genus will refer to how IT is physically architected, while Species will expose what that architecture may hide.

The physical architecture of an IT environment used to fall into only a couple of categories.  Most organizations built their platforms to address immediate needs, distributing systems based on the location of their primary users.  An inventory database would be housed at the warehouse facility, while financials would sit on systems at corporate.  This required the building and maintenance of complex links, both at the physical transport layer and also at the data level.  Because of the limits of access technology, people traveled to where the “data” was kept.

Twenty years ago, we began the transition of moving the data to where the users can consume it.  A new Genus evolved that enabled data to be moved to where it could be consumed.  It’s vastly more efficient to ship a 5MB spreadsheet halfway across the country than it is to ship a 170lb accountant.  In this architecture, the enablers were increases in available bandwidth, more efficient protocols, and better end-node processing power.

As we move forward in time, we are continuing to push the efficiency envelope.  Now, we don’t even have to move that spreadsheet, we just have to move an image of that spreadsheet.  And we don’t care where it needs to go, or even what route it takes to get there.  We are all about lowest cost routing of information from storage to consumption and back.

So, Genus is a way for us to gauge how far down that arc of advancement our customers have traveled.  Think in terms of a timeline of alignment with industry trends and capabilities.

Species, on the other hand, can be used to uncover the “gaps” between where in the timeline the customer is and what they have missed (intentionally or not) in terms of best practices.  Did they advance their security in line with their technology?  Have they established usage policies?  Can their storage sustain the transition?  What have they sacrificed to get where they are today, and what lies beneath the surface?

Using Genus and Species classifications, we can round out the taxonomy of any particular IT environment.  The combination of factors from each of the seven layers completes a picture that will allow us to guide our customers through the turbulent waters of today’s IT world.

To recap the seven layers:

Kingdom: How IT is viewed by the business

Phylum: IT’s general operating philosophy

Class: How IT is managed on a daily basis

Order: How IT is consumed, and why

Family: The structure of data flow within IT systems

Genus: How IT is physically architected

Species: What that architecture may hide

It would be quite the undertaking to build out individual groupings in each of these categories.  That is not what is important (although I did enjoy creating the pseudo-Latin neologisms in earlier parts of the series).  What is key is that we consider all of these categories when creating an overall approach for our customers.  It’s not all about the physical architecture, nor all about management.  It’s about how the collection of characteristics that flow from the top level all the way down to the bottom converge into a single picture.

In my opinion, it is a fatal mistake to apply technology and solutions across any of these levels with impunity.  Assuming that because a customer fits into a specific category they “have” to leverage a specific technology or solution is to blind yourself (and ultimately your customer) to what may be more appropriate to their specific situation.

Each environment is as unique as our own strands of DNA, and as such even those that make it to the Species with commonality will branch onto different future paths.  Perhaps there should be an eighth level, one that trumps all above it.  It could be called “Individuality.”