http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSZSxzREhxk
What are the benefits of VDI? What are the risks? How do organizations address those risks? Where is VDI headed? DJ Ferarra of LogicsOne hits these points in this new video.
To learn more, we have free webinars available for download on VDI and BYOD!
I am just returning from the VMware Partner Exchange conference (PEX) that was held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. While this was a partner vs. customer focused event, there were a few tidbits I felt made sense to share you so here we go….
Awards:
GreenPages was given the Virtualization of Business Critical Applications (VBCA) award for the Americas this year, which was a great achievement. For those of you not aware, the VBCA program inside of VMware is focused on virtualizing the ‘big boy’ mission critical applications such as Oracle, SQL, SAP, Exchange, etc. that have historically been both technically and politically difficult to virtualize. In addition, GreenPages was given the same award on a Global scale which was very exciting as it marks the first time that GreenPages has won a global award from any vendor partner! This also marks the 4th consecutive year that GreenPages has won an award from VMware (2010 – Desktop Virtualization, 2011 – Rainmaker, 2012 – Partner of the Year, and 2013 – Global VBCA). The primary reason we won the VBCA this year was due to several projects which included the virtualization of large applications including a 5500 seat Exchange environment and production databases at a major professional sporting league.
End User Computing Updates:
Horizon Suite v1 will be GA by end of Q1 and will include Workspace, Mirage, and VIEW.
The Workspace product is a combination of what was formally Horizon App Manager and Horizon Data (code name Octopus). For those that do not know, the App Manager side is meant to be an Enterprise App Store which includes SAML integration to various SaaS applications in addition to being able to launch ThinApp apps and VIEW desktops. Support for launching XenApp published apps will come shortly after the GA date, figure April/May timeframe. If you are familiar with Citrix Storefront, this is a very similar concept. The Data (Octopus) side is one of the ‘dropbox for the enterprise’ apps.
Mirage will be updated to version 4.0 at GA time. The key feature in this release is individual application layering. For this, think Unidesk as the concept is very similar but this solution is really meant for physical devices vs. virtual or VDI, at least for now. There is no real VIEW integration with Mirage yet, but that is coming. The hold-up is mainly due to performance issues with running Mirage based workloads in a shared VDI environment. One more interesting tidbit on Mirage is that the license now also includes Fusion Pro. The purpose behind this is to lay down a Mirage based image to a Mac for corporate use and being able to maintain control/management of that image in a BYOD environment.
VIEW will be upgraded to v5.2 and key features here are 3D graphics enhancements including compatibility with some of the new Nvidia server based cards to offload hefty graphics and improve performance. Additionally, HTML5 rendering of the desktops will come with this release. This is the AppBlast piece that was shown at VMWorld back in 2011. Keep in mind that HTML5 has some pretty major limitations so in most cases you’ll still want to deploy the full VIEW client, but in a pinch if you are on some kiosk type machine where installing a client is not possible, then you’ll still be able to get to your desktop and perform basic tasks. Lastly, scalability is enhanced and will continue to expand with future releases.
VMware also announced official Radware and Riverbed Stingray support and reference architectures for load balancing within a Horizon/VIEW environment. F5 support has been around for some time already.
vCloud Suite Updates:
This one, I was very disappointed in as I had expected to hear some pretty significant changes to the way the suite is packaged, however this didn’t happen and seems to have been tabled for some reason so nothing to announce here 
.
Cloud Credits:
Some of you may have heard of these already, but they are basically ‘chips’ that a customer purchases through GreenPages which can then be redeemed at any one of VMware’s vCloud VSPP service provider partners for public cloud IaaS services.
Virsto Acquisition:
Not much was said about this at the event other than the initial focus and use case will be on VDI acceleration. Stay tuned for more detail here as I find it.
BC/DR:
Big topic here was vSphere Data Protection Advanced Edition (VDP-A). Like regular VDP, this is based on the EMC Avamar engine but is more scalable to support larger environments. It is missing some key features currently such as replication, but VMware is diligently working to add these features throughout this calendar year.
Integration Engineering Meeting:
I had the pleasure of meeting with some folks from this internal VMware team. I will simply say this single meeting made the entire trip worthwhile. I learned quite a bit about the team and how it works so I’ll give you an overview. First off, in order to be a member of this team you must have a minimum of 10yrs employment by VMware. Given that VMware has only been around since the late 90s, that requirement greatly shrinks the potential team members, but trust me when I say the guys on this team know their s**t. Their primary charter is take the point of view of an external customer along with going out and meeting with actual customers and providing very candid feedback to the various product management teams inside VMW. I love this team because they are a no bull$hit group of people. If something sucks, they will say it, likewise if something is stellar they will say that as well. Unfortunately I cannot share details of what we discussed as the majority of it was future/NDA type material but I think it is awesome that this team exists inside of VMware because they really do help make the products better. As an example, some of you may be aware of the tool recently made available to make the process of applying SSL Certificates to the various VMware architecture components much easier and it was this team that pushed for the tool and helped get it green lighted.
Ok, that’s it for now… Back to work!
To learn more about how GreenPages can help you with your VMware environment, fill out this form!
By Francis Czekalski, Enterprise Consultant
There’s no doubt that BYOD is a top buzzword and priority for IT decision maker in 2013. This is certainly a complex issue that requires a lot of planning and commitment if your organization expects positive results. Below are a couple quick points on BYOD that your organization should keep in mind when implementing and monitoring a policy.
A couple interesting findings from a recent study from Dell (http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-stats-research/2013/01/22/study-it-managers-must-embrace-byod-or-risk-being-left-behind)…
If you’d like some more information on BYOD and mobile device management, download this free webinar.
What’s your opinion on BYOD? Has your organization implemented a policy? If not, do you plan on implementing one? Why or why not?
By Geoff Smith, Senior Solutions Architect
As this is the last entry in the Mind the Gap blog series, I wanted to tie up all of the loose ends from the previous posts. In those, I’ve asked all of us in IT to break out of our comfy IT management “snuggies” and look at how our world is changing. In the past, IT has been the gatekeeper to technology for the business, mainly because we were the only people who lived it every day. That is no longer true.
In nature, each generation of a species evolves in some way, adapting to changes in their environment, habitat, or position in the food chain. The same can be said for IT users. As each new workforce generation rolls into the business world, they bring with them a greater understanding of what technology is and what it can do for them. I’ve been supporting users since the early 80s, when we got the cross-eyed, “I don’t need that thing” look when you dropped their new computer on their desk and took away their Rolodex. Today, if they don’t have a new laptop every 2 years you are “inhibiting my ability to function.”
This shift, in a relatively short timeframe, is what I call the Greatest Generation Users, or GGU. The workforce today is filled with GGUs. They come out of high schools and colleges with more IT awareness than many of us did when we finished our degrees in computer science. It may not be true IT knowledge, but that makes it even more difficult to support them adequately. GGUs function in a completely different way than businesses typically do today, and in order to enable a business to take full advantage of those they hire, IT is often the one saying “no you can’t.”
Many in IT still firmly believe that if technology ideas or capabilities are not borne from IT, they must be inherently suspect. But all you have to do is look at where your innovation “cheese” has been moved to (see Mind the Gap – Consumerization of Innovation) and you will quickly realize that to keep up with the GGUs you have to shrug off the corporate technology chains and find solutions that enable the GGUs to work in the ways they want. Remember—your bosses are often GGUs as well.
Beyond these users and their knowledge and expectations lies the grey world of “usability.” Up time is a thing of the past. GGUs expect little to no latency in their technology solutions and watch out if they have to refresh a page just to get updated data. Usability equals efficiency in the mind of the business, and efficiency equals profit.
And it’s not just about mobile devices, remote access, work from home or other entitlements, it’s also about how you support these use cases, ensuring the same high standards you provide to traditional corporate users. Technology and work freedoms are rapidly becoming “perks” to hiring desirable candidates. People are now more than ever the intellectual property of most organizations, and if IT is the blocking force for enablement, you may soon be waving to the GGU who takes your spot on the roster.
A 3 Part Series from Trevor Williamson
Part 1: Understanding the Dilemma
IT teams are increasingly being challenged as bring-your-own-technology (BYOD) policies and “as-a-service” software and infrastructure multiply in mainstream organizations. In this new reality, developers still need compute, network and storage to keep up with growth…and workers still need some sort of PC or mobile device to get their jobs done…but they don’t necessarily need corporate IT to give it to them. They can turn to a shadow IT organization using Amazon, Rackspace and Savvis or using SAS applications or an unmanaged desktop because when all is said and done, if you can’t deliver on what your users and developers care about, they will use whatever and whoever to get their jobs done better, faster and cheaper.
Much of this shift toward outside services comes down to customer experience, or how your customers—your users—perceive their every interaction with IT, from your staff in the helpdesk to corporate applications they access every day. If what you are delivering (or not delivering as the case may be) is more burdensome, more complicated or doesn’t react as fast as other service providers (like Amazon, Office 365, or Salesforce, etc.), then they will turn (in droves) toward those providers.
Now the question hanging heavy in the air is what do those providers have, except of course scale, that your IT organization doesn’t have? What is the special sauce for them to be able to deliver those high-value services, quicker and at a lower cost than you can?
In a few words; IT Service Management (ITSM)…but wait!…I know the first reaction you might have is that ITSM has become a sour subject and that if you hear ITIL chanted one more time you’re going to flip out. The type of ITSM I’m talking about is really the next generation and has only passing similarities to the service management initiatives of the past. While it is agreed that ITSM has the potential to deliver the experiences and outcomes your developers and users need and want, today’s ITSM falls far short of that idea. Process for process sake you’ve probably heard…but whatever, we are still measuring success based on internal IT efficiencies, not customer or financial value or even customer satisfaction. We still associate ITSM exclusively with ITIL best practices and we continue to label ourselves as providers of technology components.
As it turns out, the adage “You cannot fix today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions” is as right as it ever was. We need to turn ITSM on its head and create a new way forward based on customer centricity, services focus, and automated operations. We have to rethink the role we play and how we engage with the business. Among the most significant transformations of IT we need to complete is from a provider of technology components to a broker of technology services. We have relied on ITSM to drive this transformation, but ITSM needs to change in order to be truly effective in the future. Here’s why:
The roots of service management focus was on the customer: “Service management” originated within the product marketing and management departments and from the beginning, service management placed the customer at the center of all decision making within the service provider organization. It’s the foundation to transform product-oriented organizations into service providers where the customer experience and interaction are designed and managed to cost-effectively deliver customer results and satisfaction.
But when we applied service management to IT, we lost customer focus: Applying service management to information technology produced the well-known discipline of ITSM but, unfortunately, IT professionals associated it exclusively with the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) best practices, which focus on processes for managing IT infrastructure to enable and support services. What’s missing is the customer perspective.
In the age of the customer, we need to proactively manage services via automation: In the age of the customer, technology-led disruption (virtualization, automation, orchestration, operating at scale, etc.) erodes traditional competitive barriers making it easier than ever for empowered employees and app developers to take advantage of new devices and cloud-based software. To truly function as a service provider, IT needs to first and foremost consider the customer and the customer’s desired outcome in order to serve them faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality. In today’s world, this can only be accomplished via automation.
When customers don’t trust a provider to deliver quality products or services, they seek alternatives. That’s a pretty simple concept that everyone can understand but, what if the customer is a user of IT services that you provide? Where do they go if they don’t like the quality of your products or services? Yep, Amazon, Rackspace, Terremark, etc., and any other service provider who offers a solution that you can’t…or that you can’t in the required time or for the required price.
The reason why these service providers can do these seemingly amazing things and offer such diverse and, at times, sophisticated services, is because they have eliminated (mostly) the issues associated with humans doing “stuff” by automating commodity IT activities and then orchestrating those automated activities toward delivering aggregate IT services. They have evolved from being providers of technology components to brokers of technology services.
If you’re looking for more information on BYOD, register for our upcoming webinar “BYOD Webinar- Don’t Fight It, Mitigate the Risk with Mobile Management”
Next…Part 2: Planning the Solution
Are all rogue IT projects bad things? Could this type of activity be beneficial? If rogue IT projects could be beneficial, should they be supported or even encouraged?
Recently, I took part in a live Twitter chat hosted by the Cloud Commons blog (thanks again for the invite!) that was focused on Rogue IT. After hearing from, and engaging with, some major thought leaders in the space, I decided to write a blog summarizing my thoughts on the topic.
What does “Rogue IT” mean anyway?
I think that there are rogue IT users and there are rogue IT projects. There’s the individual user scheduling meetings with an “unauthorized” iPad. There’s also a sales department, without the knowledge of corporate IT, developing an iPhone app to process orders for your yet-to-be-developed product. Let us focus on the latter – rogue IT projects. Without a doubt, rogue IT projects have been, and will continue to be, an issue for corporate IT departments. A quick web search will return articles on “rogue IT” dating back around 10 years. However, as technology decreases in cost and increases in functionality, the issue of rouge IT projects seems to be moving up on the list of concerns.
What does rogue IT have to do with cloud computing?
Cloud Computing opens up a market for IT Services. With Cloud Computing, organizations have the ability to source IT services to the provider that can deliver the service most efficiently. Sounds a lot like specialization and division of labor, doesn’t it? (We’ll stay away from The Wealth of Nations, for now.) Suffice to say that Rogue IT may be an indication that corporate IT departments need to compete with outside providers of IT services. Stated plainly, the rise of Cloud Computing is encouraging firms to enter the market for IT services. Customers, even inside a large organization, have choices (other than corporate IT) on how to acquire the IT services that they need. Maybe corporate IT is not able to deliver a new IT service in time for that new sales campaign. Or, corporate IT simply refuses to develop a new system requested by a customer. That customer, in control of their own budget, may turn to an alternative service offering “from the cloud.”
What are the advantages of rogue IT? Do they outweigh the risks?
Rogue IT is a trend that will continue as the very nature of work changes (e.g. long history of trends to a service-based economy means more and more knowledge workers). Rogue IT can lead to some benefits… BYOD or “bring your own device” for example. BYOD can drive down end-user support costs and improve efficiency. BYOD will someday also mean “bring your own DESK” and allow you to choose to work when and where it is most convienent for you to do so (as long as you’re impacting the bottom line, of course). Another major benefit is increased pace of innovation. As usual, major benefits are difficult to measure. Take the example of the Lockheed Martin “Skunkworks” that produced some breakthroughs in stealth military technology –would the organization have produced such things if they had been encumbered by corporate policies and standards?
Should CIOs embrace rogue IT or should it be resisted?
CIOs should embrace this as the new reality of IT becoming a partner with the business, not simply aligning to it. Further, CIOs can gain some visibility into what is going on with regard to “rogue IT” devices and systems. With some visibility, the corporate IT departments can develop meaningful offerings and meet the demands of their customers.
Corporate IT departments should also bring some education as to what is acceptable and what is not acceptable: iPad at work- ok, but protect it with a password. Using Google Docs to store your company’s financial records…there might be a better place for that.
Two approaches for corporate IT:
– “Embrace and extend:” Allow rogue IT, learn from the experiences of users, adopt the best systems/devices/technologies, and put them under development
– “Judge and Jury:” Have IT develop and enforce technology standards
CIOs should also consider when rogue IT is being used. Outside services, quick development, and sidestepping of corporate IT policies may be beneficial for projects in conceptual or development phases. You can find the transcript from the Cloud Commons twitter chat here: http://bit.ly/JNovHT