A bit more detail on Microsoft CS 14

In a follow-up to some of the features I briefly mentioned in a previous article here is a more in-depth look at some additional new features currently in the CS ‘14’ beta software which have been covered in various presentations throughout TechEd 2010 this month. 

Enterprise Voice Features

Site Resiliency

With the addition of a ‘Site’ component in Communications Server user services can now be balanced and protected against device and site failures by associating users with more than one location.  Data Center and main office locations with full CS server deployments are defined as a Central Site while small and medium remote offices where a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) is installed is deemed a Branch Site.  Each Enterprise Voice enabled user is then associated with a primary site and secondary, backup site automatically by virtue or simply registering with the primary site under normal conditions.

One of the new server components found in the Front-End server role is the Registrar.  The Registrar service handles Communicator end-point login and connections to CS.  This component lives on both a Front-End server role (both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition) and on an SBA. 

For clients located in a branch office with the SBA configured as their primary registrar those users can be serviced by another pool in a central site in the event that the SBA fails.  In the case of a WAN outage or loss of connection to the primary pool in the central site the branch office users are still signed-in to their Communicator client, but only Enterprise Voice features are available along with peer-to-peer communications between users in that ‘orphaned’ office location.

 

Call Admission Control

Call Admission Control (CAC) is basically a fancy name for bandwidth management of voice call routing, which determines whether or not an audio or video session can (and should) be established based on taking real-time measurements of the network conditions.  It is applied to media flow traversing LAN/WAN network segments but does not extend out to communications across the Internet or PSTN. 

 

Mediation Server Bypass

This feature (also referred to simply as media bypass) offers bandwidth savings and can help improve call quality by reducing latency, removing transcoding, and minimizing the potential for additional packet routing problems to impact the communications.

Multiple Gateway Support

Unlike previous in versions of OCS where a mediation server could only be configured to communicate with a single gateway the Mediation Server role can now configured to handle multiple routes so many media gateways can be configured to route calls to the same Mediation Server.  This can greatly reduce the amount of on-site hardware required in some distributed deployment scenarios.

 

Private Telephone Lines

A user can now be configured with a second private telephone number which would not be listed anywhere in the directory for other users to browse and identify it.  A special ring is associated with incoming calls directed to the private line number, and none of the advanced features (call forwarding, team ring, RGS, etc) are available.

Common Area Phones

Because the Polycom CX700 (Tanjay) device has always required a user to sign-in it has never been a good solution for open areas and shared workspaces to provide telephony services.  With CS 14 come a host of new telephony end-points from various partners including Polycom and Aastra. 

These devices can register directly to Communications Server using a dedicated AD object and provide for, at minimum, voice services at all times.  Additionally CS Enterprise Voice enabled users can log into some devices using a PIN, brining their number and presence over to the device until they either sign-out or a time-out period is reached in which the phone reverts back to the standard number.

New HP Converged Infrastructure Blade Servers

The HP design & engineering teams know customers are really struggling with IT sprawl.  There’s more stuff in your datacenters which is difficult to keep up with. As a result, customers typically today are spending up to 70 percent of the time just simply maintaining and managing their infrastructure and only 30 percent of the time on innovation.  

HP announced the new blade servers below:

BL680c blade server 

• The first blade to support up to 1 terabyte of RAM
• As many virtual machines as you might ever want - can handle over 4,000 virtual machines on a rack. 
• Four socket blade
• FlexFabric capabilities. 
• 60 gigabits of bandwidth

BL620c blade server 

• Ultimate in two socket capabilities. 
• Can have an incredible amount of scalability
• Up to half a terabyte of RAM and 40 gigabits of bandwidth on it
• FlexFabric capabilities

BL 2x220c blade server 

• Designed and optimized for those high density computing environments / performance computing
• Two servers in a single blade = 32 servers in an enclosure or 120 servers in a rack
• FlexTen on the motherboard for Ethernet and also a 40 gigabit InfiniBand connection on the motherboard

BL460c blade server 

• World’s best selling blade
• Flex fabric capabilities

BL490c blade server 

• Updated to G7 - first generation of this server was designed primarily for virtualization

BL465c blade server 

• Delivering  great new performance levels

BL685c blade server 

• Delivering  four socket performance at two socket economics.

You can watch the rest of the HP whiteboard session here:

OCS 2007 R2 – Moving to Communications Server 14

As you will no doubt be aware Microsoft held it’s north American TechEd conference earlier this month and one of the key announcements was around Communications Server 2010.

Microsoft announced the new features of Communications Server 14.

What I'm blogging about today is a few of the features announced. More specifically, how those features translate into new benefits for small business OCS users.

Many of 14's updates focus on simplification: Easier administration, more unified front-end interface.  The main small-business advantage comes from a more comprehensive client application.  So here is the low down for you:

Summary:

• The live meeting conferencing functionality will be rolled into Communicator “14″.  There will be one client, Communicator, for all media modalities and the associated features.
• There will be a new Silverlight-based web client available for those users wanting to join a web conference, but don’t have the rich Communicator client installed.  This is a new client and not a replacement for Communicator Web Access. 
• When a user clicks to join a meeting from a link, it detects whether the Communicator client is installed. If it is not, you can join via the Silverlight client.
• Participation via the Silverlight client is anonymous (i.e there is no sign-in required).  This is a powerful feature that will make it a whole lot easier for external (to your organisation) attendees join a meeting.
• MCS 14 will federate with Windows Live “Wave 4″ and will support Audio and Video with Windows Live Messenger contacts.
• All MCS 14 features were designed ground-up to work on-premise, cloud, or hybrid:
  • both in terms of supporting a percentage of MCS users on-premise, in the cloud, and,
  • in terms of having some or all Exchange & SharePoint services in the cloud
• Supported virtualisation for all server roles in MCS 14 (with the normal audio and video caveats;  i.e. you must closely follow the virtualization guidelines to support audio and video, and even then it could be more susceptible to jitter and latency)
• The MCS 14 will support a media bypass feature which will allow a consolidated MCS “14″ front-end server to go direct SIP to a supported IP-PBX’s without having to through a mediation server when the call is going to a locally dialled PSTN number.
  • the Media by-pass, coupled with the branch office survivability will remove the need for Mediation servers in most local or branch sites (in most cases)
• Multiple SIP Gateways can be connected to one Mediation server.
• Communicator “14″ will support the G.711 codec and will be able to talk to certified MCS “14″ media Gateways to go out local PSTN access points.
• The visual Presence circle is changing to a square in Communicator “14″

Management

• A new Silverlight web-based management console (Communication Server Control Panel) that is built on a new set of Communications Server PowerShell cmdlets.
  • Support for Role Based Access Control administration (similar to Exchange 2010)
  • Support for cut-and-paste in the UI (i.e. easily copy Normalization Rules)
  • Can easily see all the Policies (i.e. Voice, Conferencing, Client) for a particular user in one place
• A new Central Management Store (CMS)
  • a central database the holds XML documents that describe your deployment
  • all topology changes get written to the CMS, and a read-only copy is pushed to all servers in the topology
  • the topology is pushed out via a file transfer agent and via HTTPS for the the Edge role
• New tools to help with certificates
• New support for ’server maintenance’ – a server can be put into maintenance mode for O/S and hardware maintenance
• New PowerShell cmdlet’s
  • Everything in the new UI can be done through PowerShell
  • Cmdlets to manage users, configuration, devices, policies
  • Support for synthetic transactions (test phone calls, sip registrations, simple conferencing)

Topology Changes

• More support for role collocation.  More roles, including the Mediation role and CWA, can be installed with the Front-End
• A new “Site” topology entity which can be used to represent a geographic boundary such as a centre or branch location.  A site contains one or more pools
• Similar roles as OCS 2007 R2 (i.e. a backend role that defines a pool, Edge Mediation, AV Conferencing, Archiving, Monitoring, Director, Group Chat)
• The Director role now streamlined and includes a local SQL Express database – removing the need for a separate back-end SQL database.
• The concept of Standard and Enterprise edition still exists
• Support for DNS load balancing within a pool
• New Topology Builder UI which helps you build your topology document

Virtualisation

• Support for the virtualisation of almost all roles
• Client virtualisation support is similar to Communicator 2007 R2 (i.e. IM and application sharing but audio/video is not supported)
• Cannot virtualise the new branch office workload

Monitoring

• New SCOM 2007 R2 management pack:
  • Support for synthetic transactions (monitor the user experience)
  • Media quality alerts
  • Call failure alerts
  • Actionable alerts
• Monitoring role can be collocated with the front-end role
• The ability to ‘heal’ the audio of a particular end-point if the Monitoring role detects degradation in quality.

Office Communications Online

• Second-half of 2010:
  • Peer-to-Peer Audio/Video and File Transfer across the firewall
  • Communicator Mobile
• First-half of 2011:
  • Federation and PIC
  • IM Archiving
  • Recording and Playback
  • Application Sharing
  • Unified Voicemail
  • ACP Integration

Pretty impressive I think you will agree!

What IT should learn from public clouds

Corporate computing is going through a fundamental shift — moving to a world that’s largely cloud-based, self-service, and highly virtual with shared resources. Rather than go through their IT departments like they have for decades, users will simply specify how many cloud servers they need and for how long, and provision their own resources with a few mouse clicks. I recently read an interesting post by Rodrigo Flores, observing that the growing acceptance of public clouds is also changing the role of corporate IT departments, and they’ll have to either adapt or die. I’d like to make a few suggestions about how they can adapt.

First of all, they need to face reality. IT is driven by the need for agility, elasticity and cost-efficiency, and that can be provided most effectively in the public cloud. A year or two ago, most pundits were saying that large-scale adoption was inevitable — now the transition is well underway. Individual users and departments are already making inroads into the cloud to take advantage of agility not available internally. In many cases they’re not waiting for permission or help from corporate IT— they’re moving ahead on their own.

The growing emergence of public clouds creates an alternative to the traditional data centre, while lowering the costs of infrastructure services. As cloud computing takes hold, the impact can prove unsettling for corporate IT departments that find themselves increasingly evaluated against the fast service and flexibility provided by public clouds. How will corporate IT departments fit in? How can they maintain their relevance when users can simply go to the cloud and get the servers they need immediately, often with better service than is available internally?

Rather than viewing public clouds as a competitive threat, corporate IT should embrace cloud computing and recognise their new role — serving as a trusted broker for the resources that users need, whether in a public cloud or internally depending on where the application belongs. Corporate IT becomes a much more agile organisation, leveraging public clouds and internal clouds within an integrated framework, and IT professionals providing the front-facing infrastructure and support services that make it work.

But corporate IT still has much to learn about how to design and support this new environment, with virtualisation being only the first step. To gain this expertise, they need to look to the public cloud — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.

The infrastructure and processes that cloud providers have created at tremendous effort and cost can provide a guide for how corporate IT departments are going to operate in the very near future. It’s an idea that hasn’t yet received much attention from industry observers, but we’ve been hearing it a lot lately from our customers, particularly those thinking strategically about the cloud.
Thus, corporate IT has another incentive (in case they needed one) to take the lead in moving their companies to public clouds. As they plan their own agile environments for internal users, public clouds are where they’ll learn the best practices needed to make it work:

• Building the self-service portal: Corporate IT will need to make self-service for computing resources as simple and robust as it is in the public clouds.
• Managing a multi-tenant environment: Cloud providers deliver rapid provisioning at low cost by supporting large numbers of users on a shared infrastructure. Corporate IT will need to replicate this environment, while providing mechanisms that allow applications to be moved out to a public cloud or back again.
• Scaling efficiently: Cloud providers use several different scaling techniques and policies to keep up with growing demands, and corporate IT can learn a great deal from them about how to make trade-offs and automate wherever possible.

To sum up, corporate IT should look to public clouds as their most valuable resource — often far more agile, elastic, and cost-effective than internal resources. They’re where many enterprise applications (perhaps the majority) will soon run.

In addition to their inherent advantages, public clouds also have much to teach. The lessons will come in handy as IT departments discover their new strategic role as champions of a more agile corporate computing environment.

Microsoft CS 2010 (Wave 14)

You may or may not know that OCS 2007 R2 is about to be superseded by CS 2010 – sometime in this half of the year.  At TechEd the covers were unveiled and a number of the features and capabilities started to emerge along with the changes in licensing such as Voice and Conferencing.

In a nutshell, with CS 2010 Microsoft are offering separate licenses for the enterprise voice functionality and unified conferencing functionality. This allows customers to choose whether to license for voice, conferencing, or both. With Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, a single license covers both conferencing and voice, and customers can only license voice and conferencing together. The difference is shown in the tables below. (The name of the new license is shown in quotes as it is not final.)

The brief also explains that the price of the CS 2010 Enterprise CAL will be lower than the price of the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, and that customers who purchase the OCS R2 Enterprise CAL before the release of CS 2010 and maintain their Software Assurance (SA) will have access rights equivalent to the rights under the “Voice” CAL for the CS 2010 release at minimum.

The effect is that existing customers who meet the requirements will get the complete set of enterprise voice functionality Microsoft deliver in CS 2010 for no additional charge.

What about new customers?

A new customer who wants to add Communications Server-based instant messaging, presence, and conferencing to their existing IP PBX system, but who is not yet ready to use our voice capability, will pay less using the CS 2010 licensing than they would using the OCS 2007 R2 licensing. The reason is that, as noted above, the CS 2010 Enterprise CAL, which is specific to conferencing, costs less than the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, which includes both conferencing and voice. The new customer will not pay for voice functionality until they’re ready to use it.

A new customer will pay more with CS 2010 than OCS 2007 R2 if they want to use the full set of voice and conferencing capabilities to replace or enhance their existing IP PBX systems, but they’ll also get more, including call admission control for voice and video, support for Enhanced 9-1-1, survivable branch telephony, and multiple options for data centre resiliency. 

VMware vSphere 4.0 U2

It may have gone un-noticed but VMware recently released Update 2 for vSphere 4.0 and vCenter Server.

The update primarily introduces additional hardware support:

• Fault Tolerance (FT) support for Intel Xeon 3400, Xeon 5600 and i3/i5 CPUs
• IOMMU support for AMD Opteron 6100 and 4100 CPUs

ESX/ESXi 4.0 U2 also introduces support for Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating system.

The Update 2 for vCenter only introduces environment customisation for additional guest operating systems:

• Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
• SLES 10 SP3 and 11 (x32/x64 bit)
• RHEL 4.8, 5.4 and 5.5 Server Platform (x32/x64 bit)
• Debian 5.0, 5.0 R1 and 5.0 R2 (x32/x64 bit)

Application Whitelisting Gains Momentum

Having attended Infosec and presented their this year on VDI Security and Whitelisting and hearing the noises made pre and post Microsoft TechEd, it has become clear that application whitelisting is a key technology.   Not just because traditional signature-based anti-malware has been losing effectiveness, but also due to a not yet widely recognised problem with standard user deployment.

User Account Control (UAC) is forcing developers to change their applications. Because of UAC, users can be prompted before installing applications and more organisations are making the choice to deploy the desktops they manage in standard user mode. And unsurprisingly, independent software vendors (ISVs) are now releasing applications that don’t require administrative privileges.

At his session “Applocker: Your Solution for True Application Smackdown,” Microsoft’s Jeremy Moskowitz put it this way: “If you want to make the CIO sit up and take notice, demonstrate installing Google Chrome on a PC without admin privileges.”

Application whitelisting has been around for awhile from vendors such as Syamntec and McAfee. Microsoft’s release of AppLocker with Windows 7 further validates the need for this market category.

Gmail gets improved chat window

We have been using Google Apps for some time now and talk to many clients about the simplicity of the product the ability to collaborate as teams with ease and the ability to hold video chats – yes video chats!  I say that because many people I talk to don’t actually know there is video chat capability in the Gmail client let along multi participant chat too!

We at long last Google have made this feature somewhat easier to find.  Chatting in Gmail is simple enough: Click on a contact and a chat window will open in the lower right corner of the screen. Finding video, group and voice chat was previously a bit harder to find, but now Google has solved that, adding one-click buttons for these three functions right into the Gmail chat window.

Even if you don’t have the plugins required for video chat, you’ll see an icon that will install the required plugin, after which you can carry on with the chat.

Google says it expects the number of people using the video, group and voice chat features to rise dramatically after this improvement.

Windows 7 and 2008 R2 SP1 Beta at end of July

Just a quick one for those of you waiting to see what SP1 for Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will bring to the table. The following announcement was made in TechEd early this month.

“Public beta of service pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 coming by end of July. The new virtualization tools in SP1 will help Windows Server 2008 R2 users prepare for cloud computing, Remote FX provides rich 3-D graphical experience for remote users, and Dynamic Memory enables more control to adjust memory usage without sacrificing performance. The service pack also will include a series of incremental updates, previously delivered through Windows Update, for both Windows Server and Windows 7 users.”

SQL Server 2008 Virtualisation? Read on

I thought I’d share with you, some useful resources around the virtualising of SQL 2008 R2, on Hyper-V R2, and the kind of performance you can expect from this combination of technologies.

High Performance SQL Server Workloads on Hyper-V White Paper

This whitepaper focuses on the advantages of deploying Microsoft SQL Server database application workloads to a virtualisation environment using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. It demonstrates that Hyper-V provides the performance and scalability needed to run complex SQL Server workloads in certain scenarios. It also shows how Hyper-V can improve performance when used in conjunction with advanced processor technologies. This paper assumes that the reader has a working knowledge of virtualisation, Windows Server Hyper-V, SQL Server, Microsoft System Center concepts and features.

The whitepaper discusses a number of different tests that were performed, in some detail, yet also, from page 30, you can also start to read about the best practices for running workloads like SQL on Hyper-V.  The best practices section provides guidance around configuration for the parent OS, networking, VHD considerations, and more.

Thanks to Matt @ MSFT for this.

Google Chrome OS – Due Q3 2010?

Google’s operating system Chrome OS, originally announced in July 2009, will debut this year in Q3. There are still many unknowns about the OS, but we know that it will be a free operating system based on the Chrome browser, targeted at netbooks and designed to work with web applications.

“We are working on bringing the device later this fall,” Google’s Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai said at CompuTex. “It’s something which we are very excited by … We expect it to reach millions of users on day one,” he said.

Given Google’s vast influence and Chrome’s rising share of the market, it will reach a vast number of users, but how many of them will opt to actually use it as their primary OS? Support from hardware manufacturers would definitely help, and judging by some early reports, Chrome OS won’t go unnoticed.

Storage Consolidation for SMB with HP

Storage consolidation isn't anything new and impacts every organisation; SMB, Mid Market and Enterprise.  AMI-Partners in a recent survey asked SMB customers in nine different countries around the world what were the top factors driving their investment in storage.   The top three answers were (note that the percentages indicate who answered "Agree Strongly" or  "Agree"):

 

• Growth in storage capacity: 63%
• Replace aging / broken equipment: 48%
• Server / Storage consolidation: 42%

This shows that regardless of how long storage consolidation has been around, it's still a solution customers need. HP has recently refreshed their entry-level storage products.  They are announcing enhancements to the following product families:

 

• HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 MSA
• HP StorageWorks X1000 Network Storage System
• HP StorageWorks X310 Data Vault – US & Canada only.

P2000

Back in February, HP announced significant enhancements to the P2000 G3 MSA functionality and several versions that included Fibre Channel, and combo iSCSI/FC controllers.  Briefly, here's what HP announced on June 2 for the P2000:

 

• New P2000 G3 SAS MSA featuring the latest 6Gb SAS.  This includes all of the features HP announced in February like 64 snapshots and volume copy licenses included, drive spin down, and more.
• New P2000 G3 SAN Starter kits.  There are two new SAN Starter kits.  These starter kits simplify the ordering and deployment of a SAN and also offer a lower price than if the components were bought separately.

X1000

HP announced the re-branded X1000 series in 2009.  It took the file sharing capabilities of the ProLiant Storage Server family and the file sharing and iSCSI capabilities of the StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System and merged them together into the X1000.  So the X1000 is a unified storage solution, with both iSCSI software target to host applications and file sharing.  What I think sets the X1000 apart is the HP Automated Storage Manager software or ASM.   ASM dramatically simplifies managing the X1000 so you don't need to have storage expertise.  Here's a summary of what's new:

• HP ASM has been updated and now even easier to use.  You can be up and running in 6 mouse clicks
• New X1500 - a new tower enclosure for customers that don't have rack-server infrastructure.
• X1800 has been enhanced to hold 16 small form factor (SFF) drives - it's 2X the capacity of the previous model in 2U rack space.

Naturally there are other arrays within HP Storageworks such as EVA (P6000) and the P4000 (Lefthand).  We will cover these in detail in another post.

Small businesses think big with the cloud.

Cloud computing reduces the cost of big data analytics.
Big data analytics is no longer just the purview of big companies with big budgets. Increasingly, cloud computing gives small companies an affordable and easy-to-use way to find out how big data can help grow their existing business or uncover new opportunities. Because cloud computing removes the need to invest in expensive infrastructure to try out their new ideas, small companies no longer face barriers to big data innovation.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google along with the on-demand analytics solution vendors that support them, make big data analytics very affordable. A lot of parameters go into computing the exact price of running big data analytics in the cloud such as usage and configuration and, of course, each IaaS and analytics vendor has its own pricing model.

So, perhaps you are now convinced that big data analytics is becoming cheap but are wondering what demand from small companies will really be. After all, don’t small companies have small data? Do they really have the skill sets required for big data analytics? Are the solutions available to these small companies really as good as what the big players have access to? The answers to these questions may surprise you.
All companies have big data whether they realize it or not.

Big data analytics functionality is likely to accelerate in the world of cloud analytics instead of being just a subset of what is available in non-cloud products. Just as users in small companies turn to IaaS to gain affordable access to big data analytics, developers of analytics software and associated plug-ins will turn to the infrastructure as an affordable way to develop and test their applications.

Ease-of-use is a major focus of on-demand solutions in general, particularly big data analytics intended for business users. On top of ease-of-use as a major design focus of on-demand solutions, technical support is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Now really is a good time for you to be looking to the cloud, call us to help you.

Location:Camelford,United Kingdom

Do you treat smartphones and laptops differently?

Many people believe that managing smartphones and managing laptops are completely different exercises.

I think that is very short sighted.

The biggest difference between a laptop, tablet, netbook and smartphone will soon be the screen size.

They can do word processing, email, web browsing, spreadsheets and PowerPoint they’re stuffed with data, they’re as critical to many employees as their laptop, and are a lot more ubiquitous.

So why is it that many organisations apply complex heavyweight management regimes to their laptops involving patching, control, security, automatic software updates and so on, when the same organisation will happily let employees wander around with relatively uncontrolled iPhones?

If it’s OK to allow relatively uncontrolled smartphones why isn’t it OK to allow equally uncontrolled PCs – after all they’re pretty much the same in computational terms.

Now I’m not advocating uncontrolled and insecure IT, far from it. What I am advocating is consistency. If PCs are a risk that needs to be managed, then so are smartphones. Conversely, if lightly managed smartphones are an acceptable risk why do you need heavily managed laptops?

There are two points here. Firstly, there can be no difference in the management principles applied to laptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones. In a few years the distinctions between them will be so blurred it may not even make sense to give them different names. Secondly, the simple control-oriented view of laptop management that emerged when dinosaurs roamed the earth is no longer tenable. Organisations will need to permit employee choice, and find new styles of management for all types of personal computing device, not just smartphones.

Location:Camelford,United Kingdom

Considering FCoE? Where do you start?

With all the hype surrounding Converged Networks, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) plus the endless debate about standards, you may be wondering where does this new technology provide real value now? And where to best start deployment?

Here are a few things to consider:

The biggest concentration of connections, traffic, switches, cables, NICs and HBAs are at the server edge.

The standards for FCoE and CEE are solid for the first hop (Server connection to Switch).

Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) are available and replace the NICs and HBAs in your servers today.

FCoE Switches and Director blades are available today and replace your Ethernet FC infrastructure.

The biggest advantage to a converged network infrastructure is the reduction in the amount of network components, such as switches, switch ports, SFPs, cables, NICs and HBAs. So it makes sense to start deployment at the server edge where you will be able to reduce the most infrastructure. There is no need to replace your entire Ethernet or FC network to benefit from a converged network.

At a practical level, focusing on a single hop for the first step to a converged network keeps the project manageable and maintainable. Start with tier 2 and 3 applications environments to gain experience with this new technology before converging the networks for tier 1 applications. Two deployment scenarios are possible today:

Top of Rack (ToR) FCoE Switch will reduce cables, SFPs and connections to the servers when combined with a CNA.
An End of Row (EoR) FCoE Director Blade will reduce cables, SFPs and connections to the servers when combined with a CNA.

Need support and advice on a converged network? Call us on 0845 260 5757.

Location:Camelford,United Kingdom

Testing the cloud

We’ve talked about the power of cloud computing and how millions of businesses have already gone Google by switching to Apps. But sometimes it’s hard to imagine what working in the cloud would really mean, and frequently, people ask us how they can better understand the benefits of Google Apps specifically for their business.

How would online collaboration really affect your workplace? And how could increased email storage or integrated IM and video chat actually impact your company’s productivity?

To answer some of these questions,Google have created the Go Google cloud calculator to let you take a test drive into the cloud.

Whether your company is big or small, brand new or been around for a while, this tool will give you a sense of the benefits of going Google in an easy-to-understand way.

Once you take a spin and learn about the potential cost and time savings, the tool will create a custom URL, presentation PDF, spreadsheet or even a poster that you can share with other decision makers within your business as you discuss going Google.

So if you’ve been thinking about moving your business to the cloud, take a couple minutes and see what it would be like to go Google.

The Go Google cloud calculator can be found at www.gonegoogle.com.

Like what you see?  Need help going Google – Contact us.

Brocade has increased its backbone switch Fibre Channel ports

Brocade Communications Systems has announced that it has increased the port count on the blades used in its Fibre Channel backbone switch by 33 percent and doubled the throughput on those ports from 4Gbps to 8Gbps.

The storage networking vendor said it has increased the number of ports per blade for its flagship DCX backbone switch and its midsize DCX-4S backbone switch.

The DCX is a 14U (24.5-in) high switch with eight vertical blade slots. Brocade said it has increased the number of Fibre Channel ports on each blade from 48 to 64, meaning the DCX can now have up to 512 ports. Built for midsize networks, the 8U-high Brocade DCX-4S has four horizontal blade slots. The total port count in that switch grows from 192 to 256.

Brocade customers will be able to upgrade their existing DCX switches by simply pulling an existing 4Gbps Fibre Channel blade and inserting a new 8Gbps blade.

Just a bit of Friday Humour

How are you going to put your datacentre in the cloud:

Almost 60 per cent of European CIOs using cloud computing

Nearly 60 per cent of European CIOs are already using cloud services – even if they don’t realise it. That’s according to a new survey from IDC which found that the use of cloud services was more prevalent than had been expected.

The revelation was particularly revealing given that 50 per cent of the same CIOs said they were not using cloud services when asked a more general question – and about a third say they won’t be using cloud computing within the next five years.  However, the results change when they’re asked about specific products. This suggests some CIOs weren’t aware that some of the technologies they were using were actually cloud technologies.

High priorities on CIOs’ shopping list of technologies include virtualisation, although security is not far behind, with storage management third on the list.

Need help formulating your cloud strategy?  Contact Us.

8 Ways to Measure Cloud ROI

Cloud computing has been described as a technological change brought about by the convergence of a number of new and existing technologies. The promise of cloud computing is identified primarily by the following key technical characteristics:

• The ability to create the illusion of infinite capacity performance is the same if scaled for one or one hundred or one thousand users with consistent service-level characteristics.
• Abstraction of the infrastructure so applications are not locked into devices or locations.
• Pay-as-you-go usage of the IT service; you only pay for what you use, with no or minimal up-front investment costs. You typically just use the service through a connection and device.
• Service is on-demand and able to scale up and down with near instant availability. Typically, no forward planning forecast is required.
• Access to applications and information can be obtained from any access point.

What sets the promise of cloud computing apart is that the rate of change, magnitude of cost reduction and specific technical performance impact that cloud computing can provide is not just incremental, but can give a five-to-ten times order of magnitude of improvement.

The Capacity-Utilisation Curve

The model illustrates the central idea around cloud-based services enabled through an on-demand business provisioning model to meet actual usage.

This model is important to businesses because one of the core perceptions of cloud computing is to avoid the cost impact of over-provisioning and under-provisioning of computing resources. This benefit is in addition to the opportunity for cost, revenue, and margin advantages of business services enabled by rapid deployment of cloud services with low entry cost, as well as the potential to enter and exploit new markets.

8 Ways to Cloud Computing ROI

The problem with using the view of capacity and utilisation alone is that it is a technology provider/seller viewpoint essentially based on key performance indicators (KPIs) rather than business benefit metrics.

1. The speed and rate of change - Cost reduction and cost of adoption /de-adoption is faster in the cloud. Cloud computing creates additional cost transformation benefits by reducing delays in decision costs by adopting pre-built services and a faster rate of transition to new capabilities. This is a common goal for business improvement programs that are lacking resources and skills and that are time sensitive.

2. Total cost of ownership optimisation - Users can select, design configure and run infrastructure and applications that are best suited for business needs. Traditionally this has often been decoupled when IT projects are handed off to production services. In cloud computing environments these are joined up.

3. Rapid provisioning - Resources are scaled up and down to follow business activity as it expands and grows or is redirected. Provisioning time compression can go from weeks to hours.

4. Increased margin and cost control - Revenue growth and cost control opportunities allow companies to pursue new customers and markets for business growth and service improvement.

5. Dynamic usage - Elastic provisioning and service management targets real end users and real business needs for functionality as the scope of users and services evolve seeking new solutions.

6. Risk and compliance improvement - Cloud computing green capabilities can be leveraged through shared services.

7. Enhanced capacity utilisation - IT avoids over-and under-provisioning of IT services to improve smarter business services.

8. Access to business skills and capability improvement - Cloud computing enables access to new skills and solutions through cloud sourcing on demand solutions.

These measures define a new set of business indicators that can be used to create a "score card" of your current and future operational business and IT service needs relating to cloud computing potential. The work of The Open Group is developing tools and frameworks to enable businesses to evaluate these cloud computing opportunities to focus on how flexibility, competitive advantage, compliance risk and security in all aspects of the cost of cloud adoption can be better defined in a business language.

Thanks to CIO.com for the information.

The Magic Quadrant for Virtualisation has been updated by Gartner

Gartner has published a new version of its Magic Quadrant for virtualisation.

One of the interesting things to note is that VMware still dominates the top right quadrant (where we all want to be and the grass is green).

Gartner has placed Citrix and Oracle as the same ability to execute despite the vision that Citrix has in this field.

Microsoft is the only challenger.

HP Wynyard Data Centre

Ever wanted to see the HP Datacentre in Wynyard?

Pretty impressive:

SaaS training represents less training than on premise hosted models

Gartner have recently released their survey results around SaaS and Software training within the enterprise, and we thought we would share it with you.

Training end users on how to use a SaaS system trails off more than with a software system (which is more episodic). For example, if an enterprise has just adopted Salesforce.com, end users need to be trained on its general layout and how to use it. After that, because new features trickle in from time to time (like Google Apps), there’s rarely another big “training event”–there may be an e-mail or short video on how to use the couple of new features, but that’s about it.

This contrasts with large software systems, which store up many features for a release that occurs once a year or every couple of years.  This collection of new features makes some kind of formal training pretty much a requirement–whether it’s a half day of training in a classroom, a collection of videos, an e-Learning tutorial. If you added up the corresponding elements of SaaS training that occurred over the same time, the total training content for both SaaS and software would be the same (assuming the same features were released). The difference is that SaaS training happens in small amounts over time, while the software training happens all at once to coincide with the “big bang” release.

And some companies will go to great lengths to avoid “big bang” training.  Organisations were worried about the move to Office 2007 with the Ribbon UI and the cost associated with the training which is significant within the enterprise.  One organisation figured that a half day of training (around $600 per employee) would be required for the company’s 40,000 employees. He’d done the math and wasn’t too keen on spending $24 million for training.  They decided to stay with Office 2003, and use the consumerisation of technology to drive the demand for Office 2010, by stating “By the time the next version of Office comes out in 2010, a whole bunch of the employees will have had to buy new home PCs and they’ll have spent their own (non-company) time learning the new UI. Yep, that’s how I’m going to dodge that bullet.”

Training has evolved anyway, gone are the days of a war and peace manual.  Users are more technically savvy now and will look to the internet and their colleagues for initial support, representing a move to more communal support.

Symantec targets the Smartphone (iPhone and Android)

Symantec's Norton division has launched its "Norton Everywhere" initiative aimed at bringing security protections and cloud-storage access to the Google Android and Apple iPhone smartphones.

First announcement is a free app for Android and iPhone, called Norton Connect, that will enable access to data stored in Symantec's cloud-based storage service for those subscribing to a service such as Norton 360.

The Norton Connect apps are expected to be available in June from the iPhone and Android apps stores. The Android version will also be available directly from Symantec.

Also due in June is data-protection and management software for Android called Norton Smartphone Security for Android 1.0. This software, Norton's first subscription-based security software for Android, will let users remotely disable a phone if it's stolen or lost.

The Smartphone Security for Android software also will watch for known malware, though there's not much of it for Android today.

The software also has a call-blocking mechanism and a way to tell who's calling you. Another feature Norton is calling "roaming protection" will notify you if you're in a different roaming area, where additional charges are likely to apply.