VMware Extravaganza: Steak & Coors Field Tour!

When: May 26th, 2011

Time: 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.

Where: Denver ChopHouse & Coors Field

Agenda:

11:00-11:45: VMware Presentation- The Cloud, Disaster Recovery & Remote Survivability

11:45-12:45: Lunch at the Denver ChopHouse & Brewery

1:00-2:30: Private Tour of Coors Field

Space is Limited!  To reserve your spot at this event please call 303-786-7474 or e-mail Andrea.Leonhardt@pei.com

So You Want To Go Green? – Upgrading Equipment and Operational Practices

Last month we discuss the role that Virtualization equipment replacement played in a Green IT business plan.  Those two areas are where the “heavy lifting” is done and where the majority of your cost savings will be realized in a Green IT strategy.

There are still other areas that can provide positive impact and should not be overlooked.  They include equipment upgrades (rather than equipment replacement), and changes to your operational practices.  These are steps 7 and 8 in our 10 step Green IT Business Plan:

7. Upgrade Equipment

You may also find that it’s more effective to upgrade rather than replacement equipment.  Consult with your vendors and resellers to identify those technologies that can be upgraded.  Extending the useful life of existing equipment is also part of an ROI calculation and will reduce the amount of equipment that will be decommissioned and recycled.

8. Operational Practices

Additional operational efficiencies are possible when you can combine the support and administration of formerly disparate systems into a single team.  Unified Communications and Telephony are a good example.  Up until recently, telephony/PBX systems were run by a communications team, and servers and network services were handled by the IT team.  Modern unified communications solutions now permit both functions to be run by a single team.  Operational efficiencies will reduce team sizes and save on manpower costs.

Next month I’ll touch on the final two elements of the business plan. 

-Tim Krueger, PEI

The Dividends from VMware and HP Storage Upgrades

Many of our customers run a PEI designed combination of VMware virtualized servers and HP Storage.  The architecture has proven to be both powerful and agile.  If you rely on either, or both, there are times when version upgrades pay real dividends. 

The latest VMware vSphere 4.1 upgrade is one of those times!  vSphere 4.1 offers a number of compelling solutions that addresses key pain points and enhances the value of your VMware investment.   For small and midsize businesses, the new vSphere 4.1 delivers higher efficiency, greater agility, and more freedom of choice than ever before, making it easier than ever to optimize existing assets and get always-on IT with comprehensive, cost-effective backup and recovery, resulting in a solution that can help customers achieve rapid, sustainable growth.

 Efficiency through Utilization and Automation – vSphere 4.1 enables higher consolidation ratios with unequaled performance by providing groundbreaking new memory management technology, and by expanding its storage, networking, and automation capabilities.

 Agility with Control – vSphere 4.1 extends its award-winning availability and security capabilities with the world’s fastest live migrations and the ability to respond in parallel to any business need or change. Application services enhancements deliver new status details for high availability, tighter integration with an existing directory services, and advanced patching.  New features are provided with vMotion™, High Availability, Data Recovery, Active Directory Integration, and vCenter Update Manager

If you’re also relying on the Hewlett Packard P4000 SAN (formerly known as the Lefthand SAN), the latest 9.0 software release is a tremendous complement to the VMware upgrade.  The new 9.0 release is a comprehensive release that includes significant enhancements with:

• New global configurations done at the management group
• Automated online upgrade management to apply updates more easily
• Alarms and Event enhancements
• Network RAID 5 and 6 enhancements
• VMware VAAI vStorage offloads – faster VM deployments and less server load
• Central Management Console enhancements
• Improved Host server cluster management
• Many other benefits

What does this all mean?  In a nutshell, these upgrades deliver real performance gains and extend the useful life of your server/storage investments.  If you’d like to learn more, we encourage you to speak to your PEI Sales or Technical representative.  Given the reasonable time necessary to perform these upgrades, this may be the wisest investment you’ll make all year.

-Tim Krueger, PEI

So You Want To Go Green? – Virtualization and Equipment Replacement

As part of my continuing series on building a Green IT Business Plan, I want to discuss the next two steps.  In my previous two articles, we covered a discussion on IT Assessment, Operations and Facility Assessment, Performing a Needs Analysis, and System Consolidation.

After completing those steps, the next part of the plan is:

5.            Virtualization

One of the single most important new technologies available is virtualization.  Virtualization is the tool that permits your to optimize equipment usage, eliminate redundancies, increase utilization and streamline operations.  Server and storage virtualization also permits equipment to perform multiple roles.  Another major benefit of a virtualized IT environment is the agility and velocity it affords to adjust to changes in demand, usage and function.    A well designed virtual environment will also positively impact availability and disaster recovery.

The virtualization process can be large and time consuming depending on the sophistication of your IT infrastructure.  It’s absolutely critical to develop a strong and detailed plan for your virtualization deployment, and to solicit assistance from a qualified Reseller that specializing in this area.

After you’ve completed your virtualization, the next step is to look at the rest of your IT infrastructure.  Step 6 is:

6.            Equipment Replacement

Your Green IT business plan will almost always include some level of equipment replace.  Whether it’s replacing old PCs, or replacing servers, network and communications equipment with virtualized or multi-function devices, it’s important to make sure that your clearly understand the useful life of the new equipment, how it’ll integrate with your remaining environment, the operational and technical requirements, and the power consumption that’ll be saved by the replacement.

The good news is that newer, state-of-the-art equipment is often easier to implement, operate and maintain.  Ask your vendors to address these points prior to selecting the equipment.  There can also be added benefits by standardizing on products from a single vendor.

Next Month we’ll discuss upgrades and operational practices. 

-Tim Krueger, PEI

Have we been ‘Green-Washed’?

First I will not take credit for the term ‘green-washed’.  I’ve seen it in several articles and I’ve been contemplating its meaning along with sustainable or sustainability at it applies to IT.  Terms that seem intangible however when applied in the right context could result in millions over the life of a company.  Let’s chat more.  I recently read several articles speaking to their readers about the inability for people to distinguish the actual meaning of sustainability based on what their role, company or job entailed.  This may be the culprit but I suspect something different.  The marketing and public access of information has taken on new power in our culture to perpetuate the ‘hot’ word of the moment.  It seems we continue to put new labels on old ideas and present them as fresh or ground-breaking.  In this example sustainability related to IT has been linked to everything from power save software that turns off lights and computers to highly complex virtualized storage and server infrastructure.  Invoking another commonly used term Green IT with green again being a word that is so beat down people may now be ignoring it when in use.   This overuse or exploitation of such terminology may be attributing to our Green-washing.  Our ability to ignore or glaze over the real meaning of making your IT infrastructure Green or sustainable and just assuming it is because someone has suggested or even performed work to green your IT. 

In the PEI world Green IT or sustainable IT means a holistic (there’s another one of those words) approach to the entire infrastructure and networking architecture of an organization and finding each and every point of entry to reduce power consumption, required rack or floor space and reduce the management cycles of staff.  This approach allows us to truly offer a sustainability argument for IT and create a greener environment.  So if you’re sick of the word Green or not …if the goal of achieving sustainability makes you tear your hair out …just remember these are not new concepts or crazy fictional ideas.  These are concrete, real, business impacting and cost saving measures that no matter what title is given to them is integral to running your business wisely.  And that is a concept that will never go out of style. 

- Jennifer Smith, PEI

View 4.5 Release

Recently a very exciting software release from VMware took place.  VMware introduced View version 4.5.  While the name may allude that it is a “partial” upgrade instead of a full “.0” release don’t let this fool you. In addition to support for Windows 7 there are many substantial enhancements in the latest release.  First a quick overview of the View product in general.  VMware View is a software application that allows you to virtualize the desktop.

A virtualized desktop is accessed from a remote server, instead of on the local storage of a remote device.  This allows remote users to access all of the applications, programs, processes and data from a central location.  This also allows users to access their specific desktop on any capable device such as a personal computer, thin client, smartphone or notebook computer.  View helps provide secure access to an increasingly mobile workforce allowing users to securely access to applications and data from any device where and when a user needs it.

Great!  Why would I want to virtualize the desktop?  A virtual desktop can provide several advantages over traditional full workstations including easier management, simpler provisioning, lower cost of deploying new applications, desktop image and management capabilities, secure remote access and a longer refresh cycle for client desktop infrastructure.

View 4.5 provides these features as well as some new enhancements.  Some of these enhancements include better management capabilities, tired storage enhancements that provide cost savings and application independence.

Here are some scenarios of how VMware’s View 4.5 could help your organization.  If you have multiple locations View can be a great tool for managing desktops and allowing centralized support for remote users.  If you are looking to standardize or upgrade to Windows 7 VMwares Thin App which comes with part of the View bundle can help ease the transition by virtualizing applications so that your legacy applications that may rely on an older OS can function on Windows 7.  If you are trying to prolong your hardware refresh cycle virtualizing your desktop will allow you to take advantage of your existing investment because of the fact that you will be relying on the central server to provider your published applications rather than relying on the local resources of a desktop.

Technology is constantly changing an improving.  Think about your business challenges and determine if View may be able to help your organization with some of your initiatives.

-Jon Eyberg, PEI

Is your 2011 IT Budget in Place?

Wow its December, how did the year fly by so quickly?  It seems like only yesterday that shorts and t-shirts were the norm and year-end seemed so far away.  Now everyone is looking forward to their holiday season to spend time with loved ones, but one thing needs to be taken care of before everyone jets off for the holiday’s… your 2011 IT budget.  We at PEI would like to take this time to remind you of the importance of creating a well-planned 2011 budget.

Read the rest of this entry

So You Want To Go Green?  Where Do You Start?

So you’ve decided that Going Green makes sense for your business.  Whether it’s the Return on Investment proposition, doing your part to consume fewer resources, a sense of social consciousness, or a mandate from your vendors or customers, you’ve concluded that it’s time to start.  What are you going to do?

There will be countless organizations telling you to buy this or that product, join our club, or subscribe to our service.  That approach may work, but wandering through the pasture picking up a little green here or there is a little short sighted.  What I advocate is taking a little time to build a plan.   Mapping out a strategy is going to allow you to align your goals with the actions you take.  It allows you to budget your time and treasure and monitor the benefits of your green strategy.  Keep in mind that any sized organization can participate and any can reap benefits, but as the saying goes, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

Over my next few blogs, I’ll share a series of steps that you can follow to build your Green Business Plan.  Because our expertise is Green Information Technology, the plan I’m offering if focused on technology.  That said, the first two (2) steps involve Assessment.

1. Information Technology Assessment

Any project where the ultimate goal is to reduce costs, generate a Return on Investment, reduce waste and increase operational efficiency must begin with a detailed assessment of what you have.  An inventory will highlight redundant and poorly utilized equipment.  It will also establish a baseline that you can measure against.  In addition, yours must include a financial baseline that includes your operational costs.  These costs include power consumption, maintenance and support costs on a per-device basis, and spare part/replacement expenses.

2. Operations and Facility Assessment

Most organizations spend the majority of the IT budget on facility and operational expense.  It has been estimated that the average business spends only about 30% of their IT budget on software and equipment.   This assessment should include a thorough review of each data center, heating and cooling, and manpower costs.  Has your IT team collaborated with your physical plant team?  Do they know what facility resources you require and have they had the opportunity to help optimize your use?  Rightsizing your datacenter, or using a collocation facility, can have a profound impact on your annual IT expenses.

My next blog will outline your next two steps.  If you’re unsure on how to proceed with the Assessments, please feel to contact me.

-Tim Krueger, PEI

What tops your priority list for 2011?

As 2010 comes to an end many organizations are beginning to re-evaluate what objectives were accomplished in 2010 and have begun to look forward to see what tops their list of initiatives for 2011. At PEI, the majority of our clients fall into the mid market category, from the discussions we have been having; here is a top 10 list of the most pressing initiatives for the mid-market in 2011.

1. Infrastructure Virtualization
2. Unified Communications
3. Microsoft Exchange 2010 Migration
4. Microsoft Windows 7 Migration
5. Managed Services
6. Server Upgrades (to support virtualization)
7. Security
8. SANs
9. Strategies for supporting remote users
10. Disaster Recovery

Continued challenging economic times have forced IT professionals to be creative to accomplish their goals with limited spending increases. Many organizations have turned to leasing to help accomplish their objectives. Leasing can prove an essential tool for small and mid-size organizations by allowing them to conserve capital and make set payments over time. This can also allow for equipment upgrades at regular intervals without breaking the bank.

With challenging economic times larger organizations have tended to avoid CapEx risks such as buying new hardware. Fortunately for organizations in the mid market they have tended to see the benefits of operational investments fairly quickly, even during an economic downturn. We have seen many organizations achieve these results with their infrastructure virtualization projects.
Now is a great time to take some time to pause and reflect on your accomplishments in 2010 and start to prioritize your objectives for ensure a successful 2011.

-Jon Eyberg, PEI

Green IT… The best kept dirty little secret

Earlier this year, I served on a panel on Green Business.  Given that we’ve been providing core infrastructure for over 20 years, I tried to articulate how information technology can be a major contributor to “going green”. There were a lot of highbrow concepts bantered around with words like “virtualization”, and “consolidation”, and notions of ecology, natural resource preservation and government incentives.  What it all boiled down to was anything that reduces energy consumption or generates less heat will save you money and start you down the lush Green IT path.

So who’s buying Green?  It turns out that most businesses we deal with are more concerned with cost containment and improving the bottom line.  Given this economy, how can anyone argue with that?  It’s a big order to keep everyone gainfully employed and practice the Doing-More-With-Less exercises.  The dirty little secret is that the technologies that fulfill on positive bottom line impacts are also the same ones that are being touted for Green IT.   Insightful business decision makers are, in many cases, converting over to the Green side of the street, AND exercising masterful decision making skills that save them money and improve their ability to compete.

So what’s the lesson?  Simply put – going Green makes sense for business, and businesses are wise to focus on being Green.  The hard part now will be breaking the news to the business decision makers.

-Tim Krueger, PEI