NetBackup 5200 Appliance Spec

There has been a flurry of comments and discussion on the NBU 5000, so we thought it would be good to put something up about the newly launched 5200 and how it compares with the 5000.  Straight to the hardware spec comparison:

So you can see the 5200 is a little beefed up over the 5000 with more storage, more memory, faster CPU's and more I/O options (FC being the big one).  But the biggest difference, and what makes the appliances tick, is the software.  The NetBackup 5200 is a full NetBackup 7.0 Media Server.  Meaning you can add it to an existing NBU environment, create dedupe pools on it for storage, replicate it to another 5200, hang tape drives off of it etc.  Just like you'd install media server software for 7.0 on your own server.  The NetBackup 5000 I previously posted about runs PureDisk software so it is more of a dedupe storage appliance than a full backup server.

The 5200 has a bunch of network ports and they can actually be bonded to form a single group for performance and fault tolerance.  This is important since NBU media servers typically accept a large number of clients from an IP network.  When bonding the 10Gig or 1Gig Ethernet ports together it does adaptive load balancing and doesn't need reconfiguration at the network switch level so backup or storage admins can drop this appliance in without pulling in the network team to muck with their switches (or you don't have to muck with the switch yourself if that's your job).

VM Stall has it hit you yet?

Many organisations are hitting a brick wall when it comes to fully deploying virtualisation in their environments. According to a recent survey, businesses are still unsure about the ability to back up and recover their virtual machines, causing many organisations to avoid virtualising their entire infrastructure and hitting the phenomenon which has become known as "VM stall."

An organisation reaches VM stall when it hits a point in its virtualisation journey where it just can't seem to get beyond a certain percentage virtualised. The average stall point seems to be somewhere around 40 percent, and this can be caused by a number of factors. However, one factor seems to be common across most organisations falling into this trap: VM stall will typically occur when a company no longer feels comfortable virtualising. This wariness usually stifles a virtualisation deployment before reaching mission- or enterprise-critical applications, leaving a virtual environment made up of more or less "low-hanging fruit" applications.

Backup and recovery software provider Veeam recently finished up a survey of around 500 CIOs from organisations across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. The survey looked to identify the impact of virtualisation on data protection strategies. What it found was that enterprise adoption of virtualisation is actually being hampered due to fears around the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines.

According to the survey, on average, approximately half of all servers are viewed by CIOs today as mission-critical, and with 42 percent penetration, virtualisation is fast approaching the mission-critical application stage.

Veeam's "VMware Data Protection Report 2010" survey included other interest findings as well, such as:

• Nearly half (44 percent) of respondents indicated that concerns around backup and recovery prevented them from virtualising certain mission-critical workloads.
• Yet at the same time, only 68 percent of production-level virtual servers are currently being backed up; and more specifically, only 29 percent of organisations back up their entire virtual estates.
• And of those servers and virtual machines that are being backed up, only 2 percent are being tested for recoverability each year.
• Nearly two-thirds of organisations experience problems every month when attempting to recover a server. These failed recoveries cost the average enterprise more than $400,000 a year.

On a positive note for Veeam and other virtualisation backup and recovery solution providers, the survey did find that attitudes among organisations are indeed changing. According to the survey results, 59 percent of businesses are now planning to deploy a virtualisation-specific solution to back up virtual servers.

Microsoft Lync Launch Recap

If you missed today’s official Microsoft Lync Launch event, here is a recap of the highlights:

• Lync will be Generally Available on Dec 1, 2010 in  38 languages in 150 countries around the world.
• Bill Gates made an special appearance over high definition video.  He referred to Lync as being the most important productivity tool for the Office worker since the introduction of the PC.
• “The era of the PBX is over” – Gurdeep Singh Pall.
• “The mother of all redials” – Gurdeep Singh Pall on the 1-click to redial past IM, phone and video calls.
• The Lync client supports multiple monitors – you can undock and place different Lync components on different monitors.
• Lync is “Designed to fit like a glove with Office, Exchange, and SharePoint” – Chris Capossela and Gurdeep Singh Pall.
• Demonstrated high definition video call with a Windows Live Messenger client.
• Demonstrated Lync for XBox and Kinect - ”videoKinect” allows you to use Microsoft Kinect with the XBox to communicate with a Lync client.
• Lync will be available on the iPhone in the coming year
• HP releasing 9 different PC’s with ‘Certified for Microsoft Lync’ audio and video devices (passed Microsoft’s standards for optimised audio and video).
• Good demonstrations of new Polycom devices with Lync support built-in, including the ability to join a conference call with one touch using a new polycom phone.
• Lync OnLine – committed to give customers the choice of running on-premise or have it managed by Microsoft.

Management for 2011

Its that time of year when everyone starts to predict strategic IT technologies for 2011, so we thought we would have a punt too!  Many organisations we have spoken to over the last calendar year are still planning on fattening out their virtualisation estate over the course of the next year to include, high availability, desktop and greater consolidation ratios, whilst being mindful of the ability to adopt cloud.  And because of the close nature between virtualisation and cloud technologies it is clear that management is one of the top priorities.  I think it is therefore prudent that you should consider some of the management scenarios in your planning for next year:

Capacity planning and optimisation. Most people that I talk to when I ask them how they scaled their virtualisation infrastructure look blankly at me and have over provisioned like they did in the physical world. Capacity planning and optimisation tools will calculate just how much public or private infrastructure you need to run your apps and how best to arrange the VMs for maximum efficiency.

Virtualised I/O. Virtualised I/O -- usually in the form of 10 Gb converged Ethernet. Aside from benefits like reducing cabling and switch ports, I think the most interesting aspect of virtualised I/O is the ability of a physical server's personality to be moved to any other server in the data centre. In addition to the underlying network technology, the thing that makes this possible is integrated management of the server and data centre fabric.

Public and private cloud management. Management tools for managing virtualisation platforms will integrate with cloud services. Initially it will be about monitoring or provisioning. Later on, your system management infrastructure will facilitate the movement between internal and external resource pools.

Streamlining ongoing management of servers. If you manage a server the same way you always have, then the ongoing costs of maintaining a virtualised server will be the same as they always have been. In addition to standardising images and other process-related things, you should be automating configuration management.

Real-time automation of workload management. As server hardware becomes more powerful we'll naturally want to increase our VM density to achieve a lower cost per VM. The result is that individual servers will be increasingly critical to application availability.

Gartner storage best practice for hosted desktops

At the end of September this year, Robert Passmore working for Gartner published an article with the title: Storage Best Practices for Hosted Virtual Desktops. The article discusses how features provided by some storage arrays can enhance Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) implementations.

The paper tries to answer the following questions:

• How can I simplify the creation and maintenance of thousands of disk images?

• How can I drive per-seat storage costs near to the same level as the original desktops?

• How can I provide performance to withstand boot, login and virus scan storms?

• How can I provide availability, data integrity and recovery appropriate for all those desktops?

"…Key Findings

• Users deploying HVD projects are often shocked by the apparent cost of storage.

• Users who have deployed the technologies described in this research have been able to achieve usable storage area network (SAN)/network-attached storage (NAS) storage costs approaching the costs of consumer disks used in actual desktops.

• Cache in the storage array is key to adequate performance during boot and login storms.

Recommendations

• Seek at least one storage vendor that can deliver the capabilities described in this research.

• Create a scenario/design around that vendor to provide a benchmark to evaluate other vendors and designs…"

Source: Gartner/virtualisation.info

XenServer backup

In September this year, PHD Virtual released the first version of its Backup for Citrix XenServer product. Apparently they decided later to release this first version as version 5.0. Yesterday PHD Virtual announced the start of the beta for PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 for Citrix XenServer. PHD Virtual expects to make the product generally available this month as well.

The product is delivered as a virtual appliance, and integrates directly into XenCenter offering a "single pane of glass". It can backup running and powered down VMs and VM Templates, without compromising hypervisor performance or impact Dom0.




This release will provide the following new features:

•Advanced File Level Recovery – quickly recover files without the need to restore a full VM

•Flexible Backup Storage – extended support for network based backup storage

•Application Object Recovery – Use your existing tools to quickly restore application objects (database object, mailbox, mail message, etc.) directly from backup storage

•Support for Tape Backup Solutions – Quick and easy export to existing tape solutions

•Enhanced Retention and Archiving – Policy based backup trim options; long term archiving.

Source: virtualisation.info

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Cloud adoption 2011

We are all starting to be lured by the benefits that we as consumers have enjoyed for many years, now entering the enterprise.

However, cost-savings alone are not encouraging IT directors and business leaders to stampede, en masse, to the cloud.

With over half of cloud services spending already on business applications (including collaboration platforms such as SharePoint), applications - and not reductions in CapEx and/or OpEx - will be the great drivers of cloud adoption.

More and more enterprises are realising business value as they think through what their IT operations will look like in a world of increasing cloud service leverage. Flexibility, scalability, utility-based pricing, expertise, and service orientation are just a few considerations that make the cloud highly attractive.

Where will enterprises start? The obvious is new apps that scream to be transitioned to the cloud: those that are hugely resource-intensive for short and unpredictable intervals, and require massive scalability (video processing, financial computations and large content sites). These have been, among the first, apps that have been migrated and tuned, out of necessity, to cloud services. Equally compelling is when enterprises hit the end-of-lifecycle points that require a refresh of complex legacy production applications. These applications also will likely be retooled and implemented in the cloud. Finally, the cloud is ideal for applications that start at the departmental level - driven from a business need - without IT involvement.

Take SharePoint as another example. Many SharePoint installs start without central IT knowledge or approval, by a local admin who "just" needs a document management solution. Provisioning the same server in the cloud lowers the barrier to entry even further. Because of the leap in terms of capabilities in SharePoint 2010, in the second quarter of 2011, a majority of organisations will either start migrating to SharePoint 2010 or install it for the first time.

As most of the SharePoint implementations are outsourced, the cloud is a great way to collaborate, without complex VPNs and travel. Complex environments need to be instantiated quickly (as in the case of customer demos or training), archived, and pulled up again at moment's notice for the next project.

Integrations involving, management, and workflow apps, connection to Active Directory and federation issues, and the need to move data back and forth quickly is not low-risk, and requires resources and time that even the largest enterprises may not have. Migrations also require storage, archiving, and related hardware and expertise needed to maintain environments may tax even the largest IT departments and data centers.

This is what 2011 will be about. For pre-production, the cloud will become the platform of choice for system integrators working on complex deployments for larger enterprises - where copies of environments can be instantiated in seconds, just by sending an email.

On the production side, hosting vendors such as Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, and dozens of smaller companies will continue to penetrate the SMB market that is loathe to invest in IT infrastructure and resources.

Business top line is always stronger than bottom line. Users are more important than IT managers. The cloud is not different. This is why applications and application development would drive cloud adoption in 2011.

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Public Cloud for Government

Public sector organisations are coming under unprecedented pressure to cut costs. IT teams and being tasked with delivering more efficient services, infrastructure and self service solutions to both internal users and citizens all while cutting the cost of delivering the IT infrastructure.

A recently completed global research project on IT outsourcing attitudes and practice also highlighted some key challenges facing the public sector:

• 69% of public sector business decision-makers say doing more with less is their key challenge this year;
• 83% regard cost savings as their top strategic priority for 2011.

Public sector IT managers are also acutely aware of the pressure. In line with private sector peers, 48% highlight finding more cost-effective IT infrastructure as their top priority, followed by effectively managing and prioritising IT demand, then delivering faster data access across the organisation.

Despite this, IT managers in the public sector say that only 7% of their IT infrastructure is outsourced compared to 19% in the private sector.

Historically, owning and operating your own IT infrastructure was a differentiator. However, with the growth of the IT services sector, the operation of the underlying infrastructure for these services is most often best left to companies that execute these tasks on a massive and, hence, more efficient scale.

The shift in IT procurement is predicted to happen, with public sector respondents expecting to outsource 64% of their infrastructure within 10 years, approaching the predicted private sector level of 67%.

Much of this change will result in applications for government moving to cloud environments. In fact, 59% of government or public sector IT teams are already using or expect to use cloud for enterprise applications within five years.

Public discussions on the G-cloud and the actions of governments in Europe show that the shift has begun.

A key barrier to ensuring more efficient and effective IT operations could be that decision-makers in public office appear to lag behind their private sector counterparts in their understanding of new ways to purchase IT to drive efficiencies. Only 8% of service managers claim they know exactly what cloud computing is and the benefits it can offer in the current economic climate.

Service managers, however, do see the potential for development, with 64% agreeing they could change the way they plan if they could reduce or eliminate the capital cost of IT infrastructure.


Due diligence and a strong vision will help you move towards the cloud, allowing better tax payer spend and a better level of citizen reach.

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Google apps beefs up to challenge office365

Ten times more applications for Google Apps customers


As customers begin to recognise large productivity gains with Gmail, Google Docs and the rest of Google Apps, they frequently ask when they’ll be able to use services like Google Voice, Reader, Blogger and AdWords with their Google Apps accounts. Google have steadily added new functionality to Google Apps and recently added support for third-party apps, but this week they opened the floodgates of new functionality wide open. Starting today, users worldwide can access a full spectrum of services from Google—including more than 60 productivity-boosting applications that extend far beyond any traditional software suite.

Coupled with the ability for administrators to provide different sets of applications to different groups of users, the possibilities for empowering workers in new ways are remarkable. For example, you could equip your marketing team with Picasa Web Albums so they can collect and share photos from customer appreciation events, and let that team publish your company’s blog with Blogger. Services like iGoogle and Alerts, on the other hand, may be broadly useful, and could be enabled for your whole organisation.

Existing customers can transition at their own pace over the next couple months to the new infrastructure supporting these applications from the administrative control panel. New customers will automatically have the new infrastructure.

In tandem with this big improvement, google are also simplifying the names of the versions of Google Apps. Here’s how they now refer to their line-up:

Google Apps is the free service geared towards families, entrepreneurs and other groups up to 50 users.

Google Apps for Business offers 25GB of email storage per user, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, data migration capabilities, advanced management tools, telephone support, added security features and more, all for $50 per user per year.

Google Apps for Government is FISMA certified and designed with local, state and federal agencies in mind.

Google Apps for Education offers many benefits of Google Apps for Business, but at no cost to schools, universities and qualifying non-profits.

And so the battle continues!





Sent from my iPhone

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Faster Collaboration – Whats it worth?

Over the last few years, saving money on an email solution has been the most common driver for companies switching from legacy on-premises systems to Google Apps. But customers aren’t just using Google Apps for email. They’re also adopting innovative teamwork tools like web-based documents, spreadsheets, presentations and project sites, and we now know the value of improved productivity by “going Google” is actually even larger than the substantial cost savings.

To quantify the complete value of Google Apps including collaboration and productivity benefits, Google enlisted the help of Forrester Consulting to measure the “Total Economic Impact” that a typical company can expect over three years, moving from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Google’s web-based solution. After dozens of in-depth customer and stakeholder interviews and hundreds of survey responses from IT administrators and end-users, Google are now sharing the research results, and you can download and share Forrester's report.

The key findings of Forrester’s analysis bring the benefits of Google Apps into sharp focus. The following results are what a typical large customer with 18,000 employees and several offices around the world can experience by making the switch.

• Over 300% ROI
  The return on investment of switching to Google Apps is 391%. (307% after adjusting for risk.) In plain English, for every dollar spent on Google Apps, the system pays back the initial investment and more than three more dollars in additional business value.
• Dramatically improved productivity
  The value of improved productivity from Google Apps is even greater than costs saved by making the switch. Features like fast email search, integrated IM, message threading, great spam filtering, collaborative sites and real-time, multi-person collaboration in documents, spreadsheets and presentations all contribute to the productivity improvements quantified by Forrester.
• Break-even under 7 months
  The break-even payback period of switching to Google Apps is very short – faster than seven months. After the investment quickly pays for itself, the productivity gains from Google Apps continue to grow year after year.
• NPV over $10,000,000
  The risk-adjusted Net Present Value (NPV) of switching to Google Apps is over $10,000,000 for the typical large business. Productivity gains contribute over $7,000,000 to this amount.

Of course, both Google and Forrester strongly advise readers to conduct their own impact analysis when evaluating Google Apps, but this research solidifies what the Google Apps team has been hearing loud and clear from customers about the business benefits they’ve experienced.

Cloud Computing and Business Integration

Over the last year, companies have been increasingly collaborating and exchanging information with external partners and customers, making B2B integration all the more critical for everyday business success. The days of manual processes are long gone with the future focused on automation and scalability. As companies continue to look for ways to extend the value of their existing infrastructures and leverage the on-demand, scalable power of cloud computing, the industry will see new opportunities to help customers solve their business problems, and allow them to better serve their own customers. 

The following five predictions are what we expect to create the biggest waves in cloud computing and business integration in 2011. Enterprises that can prepare for and understand these areas will be well equipped to continue taking a proactive approach to the ever-changing challenges of their business.

1.    Companies will stop buying cloud and start buying the solution.

Buying the cloud, for cloud sake, was all the rage in 2010. But in 2011, the hype will die down and decision-makers will be more cloud savvy, realising the cloud is just a consumption model - albeit a compelling one. They will go back to basics and focus first on solving a business problem, and then find a good solution. Evaluating a cloud solution is no different than traditional on-premise solutions, where considerations about security, interoperability, proven technology, customer service, etc. all still apply. If it turns out that a cloud solution fits the bill, companies can begin to factor in benefits such as a faster time to implementation, reduced capital expenses and easier management. Next year, fewer IT leaders will push the cloud as the sole priority, and instead lead with the business problem to see whether the cloud is the right delivery model for the solution.  dataplex can help you get to the cloud, click here to see how

2.    BI²: Convergence of business integration and business intelligence.

There is a clear and steady march to real-time, with more companies exchanging information outside their four walls at an ever increasing rate. Not surprisingly, companies of all sizes want visibility into this goldmine of information given the impact it can have on their top and bottom line. This is particularly true with B2B integration processes, where insights into the status of critical messages, the successful transmission of real-time information, or details on the most active customers or partners can help companies be more agile and adjust to business fluctuations. Whereas BI tools were once deployed as standalone products, in 2011 more customers will want bundled solutions that include business intelligence as a value add necessity included with integration solutions.  This will be the year that we'll see more vendors looking to bundle BI into their solutions so customers can benefit from event-driven intelligence.

3.    Cloud vendors will unite to address security.

Survey after survey continues to show that fears about cloud security are the primary reason why companies continue to proceed cautiously with moving mission critical data and applications to the cloud. While the benefits of scalability and agility are well-known, the anxiety over security isn't likely to diminish in the near future. However, the cloud industry is hearing customers concerns and taking a proactive stance to address and mitigate potential risk. From the creation of the Cloud Security Alliance and its partnership with MashSSL Alliance to promote the use of a next generation SSL standard for cloud computing to new user certification programs, the industry is working to allay fears about security. In the next year, we'll see a heightened focus from cloud vendors on SLAs, best practices and compliance that will help customers overcome their concerns about security, and keep cloud adoption and innovation on an upwards trajectory.

As we look ahead into 2011, companies will be all the more focused on finding resources and best practices that will best position their businesses for the coming economic recovery.  In the end, what matters most is that businesses find the right solutions that allow them "interact" with applications, users and information in a more systematic, aligned way that delivers value to their customers and drives revenue.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is part of the Windows Storage Server family, which is built upon the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system to provide a platform for network attached storage appliances. Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials includes storage technologies enabling you to grow with your storage requirements while providing an easy to use backup and recovery solution. Windows Storage Server Essentials is specifically developed to address the storage needs for small businesses up to 25 users without the need for specialised IT skills. Configuring Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is easy: remove from box, connect to network, power up and access the device from a browser to configure it. The management dashboard makes it simple to manage, maintain and monitor the health of the Windows Storage Server Essentials device, and client computers.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials as well as the rest of the Storage Server product family are available through hardware partners.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials can be used as a new server for storage or to add additional storage capacity. For

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials addresses the requirements of small businesses with the following features:

Easy to use Backup and Recovery

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials helps protect business data by providing daily automatic and consolidated backup for your PCs, as well as Mac clients. Specialised IT skills are not required to manage the small business storage backup and recovery requirements. Users can easily perform recovery on individual files, folders, entire client PC or even the entire Windows Storage Server Essentials device.

Active Directory Domain Join

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials can easily integrate into the Microsoft identity infrastructure and that ensures that there is secure access for all the important small business data. This is done easily and through the management dashboard.

Management Dashboard

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials provides a dashboard that helps manage, maintain and monitor the health of the server, and client computers. Organisations can provision users, file shares and administer 3^rdparty add-ins without the need for specialised IT skills.

Centralised Storage

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials provides storage to keep all your important documents in one place. Every member of the organisation can access what they need in one centralised place from their PCs securely.

Plug and Play Storage and File Services

As a preconfigured appliance Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is ready-to-go right out of the box. File services are pre-configured and deployment is quick and painless, just plug in power and Ethernet, then complete the simple setup from a client computer and you are done.

Remote Web Access

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials lets small business users access their data securely from any common browser from almost any device. This will ensure that even when users are away from their business network that they have access to their important data.

2011 Cloud Predictions

In 2010, we have seen a transformation of sceptics from their belief that cloud computing is suited mainly for small to mid-sized business, to a general acceptance that “the cloud” is everywhere. However, we have also seen a lot of inconsistency in how to differentiate cloud-based computing from on-premise computing. As a result, there has been confusion created in the market as software vendors like Microsoft promote their cloud offerings, and CIOs of large companies claim that their private cloud has been in place for years.

It is clear that 2011 will continue a trend toward the convergence of the consumer and the enterprise web. Historically, the enterprise web has lagged the functionality and scalability of the consumer web because of several factors — the most significant of which are application complexity and the need for robust data security.  Today, the capabilities of the public cloud make the support of enterprise applications routine, and we see evidence of it being implemented every day.  With that said, there are changes in the ecosystem that will impact the speed to adoption among large enterprises.

What’s to Come for the Cloud

Large consultancies will continue to push private cloud and have minimal success with the public cloud

There is an almost religious debate brewing among cloud purists that recognise the difference between service-oriented architecture (SOA) and a true software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.

Large organisations have been much more accepting of SOA-based solutions that reside entirely within their own firewall. This type of service has been branded as the private cloud and has gained a lot of traction among the Fortune 500.

Why are many in the Fortune 500 slow to adopt the public cloud? The answer has to do with risk tolerance. CIOs have taken notice of the cloud computing (e.g. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) benefits, however, they have accountability for their actions and as much as they want to demonstrate that they have a cloud strategy, they are still concerned about allowing their data to reside outside of their firewall and relying on a service that is “out of their control.”

User demand for access to cloud-based content and applications whether on a PC, laptop, tablet or smart phone will grow

The ability to access applications through a browser is powerful in terms of maintenance and deployment. However, a side effect is that there is parity among these hardware devices as long as they support a browser that can run the applications. And in the end, the employee benefits by being able to choose the device that optimises their experience.

The interesting note about this prediction is that hardware manufacturers will drive much of the change. The iPad, iPhone and Android devices have exploded in the market and are quickly capturing the attention of the business community. In my own experience, I have seen several companies buy pallets of these devices, and only then start asking questions about how they can re-architect their enterprise solutions in the cloud to optimise their use. It is truly a case where the intuition of IT groups and business decision makers tells them that these new devices are game-changing, and they are willing to figure out how they will benefit after they have made the purchase!

Adobe AIR will gain recognition as a leading cross platform mobile technology

We've seen the acceptance of AIR across many standard devices, and that continues today as Adobe has tipped their hand about additional OS support for Android and BlackBerry. The momentum around cloud services is not all about shared infrastructure, but also the ability for these systems to support a rich, flexible user experience that surpasses that of Windows-based solutions. 

More recently, Adobe has stressed the importance of adoption on non-traditional devices such as televisions, smart phones and set top boxes. Adobe AIR (version 2.5) brings this cross-platform vision into your home. Now the only remaining battleground is the border war between Apple and Adobe. In 2011, the momentum of Adobe will require that we finally see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel when it comes to the long-running conflicts between these two organisations...somehow.

Amazon Web Services will continue to innovate to become more enterprise friendly and gain traction within large corporations

When we think about cloud services, it is usually in reference to SaaS, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) has done a phenomenal job in building robust IaaS offerings by listening to their customers and responding to their needs. 

Amazon first introduced their web service offerings in 2006 beginning with Simple Storage Service or S3. Since that time, they have added a host of other offerings including Elastic Computing (EC2), Authentication, DevPay, Queuing Services and many more. S3 and EC2 provide the backbone for analyst projections that Amazon's AWS business will grow from $500M to $750M next year.

AWS has realised rapid adoption for small to mid-sized businesses looking to limit their investment in infrastructure and literally create their data centres in the cloud, allowing for unlimited ability to scale while only charging for the capacity used. Larger organisations have been slower to adopt due to some of the factors mentioned above, as well as existing contractual commitments and a lack of transparency to behind the scenes processes. AWS has shown a deep commitment to improving and adding to their service portfolio to better service the enterprise and 2011 success will demonstrate the fruits of their labour.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud computing has been a popular topic lately. The idea is that you can hedge your bets and bring the best of both private and public clouds into a productive architecture.

So what are the emerging architectural patterns around hybrid cloud computing? More important, how is the technology evolving?

It is common to put the emerging patterns of hybrid cloud computing into a few core categories:

• Static placement
• Assisted replication
• Automigration
• Dynamic migration

Static placement refers to architectures where the location of applications, services, and data is tightly bound to the private or public clouds. This means it's difficult or impossible to port from private to public, or the other way around. There is little use of standards, and typically this is aimed at older platforms where the requirements allow deep platform-binding. If hybrid clouds exist today, they can be expected to use this architecture.

Assisted replication refers to architectures where some applications, services, and data may be replicated from private to public clouds, or the other way around. These types of architectures typically provide code and/or interface compatibility to support simple replication of architectural components, but not much else. There is some use of standards, often at the API level (usually as Web services) and with new platforms that are code- and service-compatible with emerging cloud platforms.

Auto migration refers to the code or entire virtual machines moving between private and public clouds instances, usually through human intervention, but sometimes through an automated process. This includes the automatic movement of code and/or virtual machines through very well-defined interfaces and some use of standards.

Dynamic migration refers to the moving virtual machine instances between private and public cloud instances, as if both the public and private clouds existed in the same virtual operating system. Standards are used where possible. This is the functional objective of hybrid cloud computing and the core promise made by the hybrid operating systems providers. But so far, they're just promises.

Confusing isn’t it!

Source Infoworld

Public Sector look to the Cloud

Cloud and virtualisation technologies are being widely considered by the public sector and future IT decisions are to be based on increasing efficiency, a survey has revealed.

The Insight EMEA survey said that 57 per cent of respondents in the public sector were now evaluating cloud-hosted applications, but that only 22 per cent had deployed cloud technologies.

67 per cent had deployed server virtualisation solutions to drive down IT costs and consolidate IT hardware, and others were found to be deploying or evaluating other virtualisation technologies like application or desktop virtualisation.

The survey said that 66 per cent believed the biggest influence on IT decision making over the next year would be increasing efficiency and reducing costs.

Responding to the survey, Guy Beaudin, public sector business development director at Insight said: "Based on this survey, the downturn is having a maintained effect on many organisations and their approach to IT spending. Organisations are considering their approach to how they source their IT requirements more carefully, and approaches based on cloud-hosted applications or shared services models are being implemented to meet the challenges of reduced budgets."

The survey also revealed that 40 per cent of respondents will be undertaking bite-sized projects that deliver value quickly.

Gartner suggest that Data Growth remains IT’s biggest hurdle.

Data growth is the biggest data centre hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises, according to a new survey by research firm Gartner.

According to Gartner, 47 percent of the respondents to a survey conducted over the summer ranked data growth in their top three challenges. With spending returning to more normal levels after a couple of down years because of the economy, 62 percent said they plan to expand hardware capacity at existing data centres by the end of 2011; 30 percent plan to build entirely new data centers.

"As the global economy begins to revive in 2010 and organisations start to shift focus to a return to growth, IT organisations will be challenged to support the various growth initiatives," said Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The survey took place between June and August and involved IT staffers from 1,004 large enterprises in eight countries. The data from it is available online.

In addition to concerns about data growth, 37 percent of those surveyed named system performance and scalability as the second biggest challenge for them in the coming year, with 36 percent citing network congestion and connectivity issues.

"While all the top data center hardware infrastructure challenges impact cost to some degree, data growth is particularly associated with increased costs relative to hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services," April Adams, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

Survey respondents also chose archiving and data "retirement projects" as their most popular approach to dealing with their data explosion. Sixty-two percent indicated they will invest in data retirement efforts or continue to push ongoing efforts through the end of 2011.

Adams said that while survey respondents pointed to data growth as their top challenge, they did not blame a lack of data centre capacity as driving their strategic plans. Instead, they indicated business continuity and data availability as their chief reasons.

The second and third most commonly mentioned drivers for strategic change were data containment initiatives, named by 37 percent of respondents, and maintaining or improving user service levels and satisfaction, which was named by 36 percent of those surveyed.

Other projects at the top of IT staffers' lists for 2011 include: data security from internal or external hackers; storage consolidation; storage management tools rollouts; and data reduction techniques.

When it comes to technology investments, server virtualisation topped the list with 67 percent of respondents saying they plan to spend money on that in 2011. About 56 percent of respondents said they also plan to invest in application consolidation. And 51 percent plan to spend money on blade servers.

Citrix XenServer Intellicache – Quick Explanation

Citrix are working on a new capability of XenServer called Intellicache, which is supposed to be a greate enabler for Desktop Virtualisation and potentially do away with products to enhance the IOPs available to XenDesktop.

Storage is a big bottleneck in regards to desktop virtualisation. High speed centralised storage (SAN) is expensive, but eases complexity. Local storage is cheap and fast, but increases complexity. The ideal solution would be a marriage of cheaper centralised storage (NAS) with local storage for eased complexity and fast desktop performance. This is the goal of Citrix’s IntelliCache feature. IntelliCache basically uses centralised storage to store desktop image and caches the image on the local storage of the XenServer. Subsequent requests for the image will be retrieved from local storage instead of traversing the LAN. IntelliCache will be part of XenServer 5.6 SP1.

Microsoft Hyper-V Dynamic Memory, quickly explained.

Dynamic memory is a new feature of Hyper-V R2 Service Pack 1. With Hyper-V Dynamic Memory, the host automatically rebalances memory among virtual machines (VMs) on a moment-by-moment basis. Memory is pooled on one physical host, then it is dynamically distributed to VMs as necessary. But there’s a problem with this memory allocation: Hyper-V assigns the memory in one-second intervals. Hyper-V includes a couple of settings to help tune the 1 second interval (Memory Buffer and Memory Priority).

The Memory Buffer reserves extra RAM for each VM. The VM uses this space if RAM requirements change between one-second intervals. Without a buffer, an increase in memory requirements during this mere second automatically forces a VM into an out-of-memory condition and memory pages are swapped to disk. The Memory Buffer can be configured on a VM bases.

Since Memory Buffer over-allocates RAM per VM, a host server could run out of available physical RAM causing a contention for memory. The Memory Priority setting allows you to prioritise VMs. You essentially give Hyper-V an ordered list of VMs from which it should pull memory first. Lower-priority VMs lose memory before higher-priority VMs during memory allocation.

Lync Server Roles and What They Do

There is quite a few new Lync server roles built into Microsoft Lync, and not lots of information about what they are for, so here is an overview of each Lync 2010 Server Role, focused on their intended function in the Lync family (or “site” as the new terminology goes).

Archiving and Monitoring - Just like the name says. This server role monitors your Lync Server usage. Archiving archives IM conversations, Group Chat and conference logs.

Audio/Video Conferencing - Conferencing is integrated into Lync Server; a separate client (like Live Meeting was) isn't necessary. This server controls that integration.

Central Management - Main configuration server. The Central Management Store provides a master configuration database that sends configuration information out to all the servers deployed.

Director - The Lync Director server regulates user pools. It's usually on the front-end server.

Edge Server - Like they did before, Edge Servers make communications with external users possible. Lync Edge servers have also added DNS Load Balancing (helps reduce the need for Hardware Load Balancers).

Group Chat - The Group Chat feature allows users to discuss topics over time, with those discussions saved and searchable. Think of it like a bulletin board or discussion forum, built right into Lync.

Lync Web Application - Maintains the new Silverlight-based Lync Web App client. In case you conference with non-Lync users who'd like to join in without installing extra software.

Mediation - Handles mediation between servers and gateways. If there's a break in Lync's communication, the Mediation Server Role allows the call to bypass itself and flow from the Lync Server directly to a gateway or IP-PBX.

Reach Application Sharing - As the name implies, this role handles sharing of applications between users while chatting or conferencing.

Survivable Branch Appliance - This role helps keep remote offices connected. If there's a break in communication (say the network goes down), the Appliance Role will route calls through a local gateway out to the public phone network. So calls can continue even while the network's being fixed.

Unified Communications Application Server - As you might expect, it helps with recording voicemails & passing them to Exchange.

Web Conferencing - Provides a foundation for hosting Web conferences (with integrated audio/video from the Audio/Video Conferencing Server).

Education in the Cloud

Norfolk County Council has decided to meet the computing needs of its 400 schools in a completely new way. Called cloud, it cuts costs, improves flexibility and delivers a higher-quality service.

The 'cloud' has been a buzzword in the technology business for a couple of years now. But now it's moved from being an idea to something that delivers real benefits.

Put simply, it's a new way for organisations to buy the IT services they need. Instead of having to run the applications they need in their own data centres or on servers in designated offices, they use online equivalents delivered over the network.

The advantages include lower costs, better, round-the-clock support and greater flexibility. For example, the 'volume' of a particular service can quickly be scaled up or down as an organisation's needs change.

For schools, sixth-form colleges and the organisations that support them, the main benefit is the reduction in the amount of back-office IT work that needs to be done in-house. Schools, in particular, often struggle to find the levels of expertise required to do this properly. You need a great deal of specialist expertise to keep computer networks secure these days, for example.

In addition, a key plank of the new government's education reforms – "free" or not-for-profit schools set up by parents, teachers and other groups – stands to create an IT market for schools that can best be met by suppliers from data centres located in the cloud rather than through local provision of computing hardware and software. As local government considers how ICT is provided for these schools, they need to plan IT that can be scaled flexibly, both up and down, as the demands of schools they support vary.

The facts speak for themselves. A study undertaken by Redshift Research in December 2009 found a key problem facing schools in the UK was lack of a flexible ICT delivery model. The vast majority of schools and colleges deliver ICT services internally: 93 per cent provide their own network management; 91 per cent manage their own PCs and 90 per cent their own applications, while server management is handled in-house by 87 per cent of schools. More than half of the respondents said they relied solely on whatever internal skills they had to hand to keep networks and systems running.
Work in Norfolk has demonstrated the possible effects of this. Before work started on the school cloud project, one of the council's main concerns was access and security. Each school and college sent basic information taken from their management information system (MIS) to the council regularly to aggregate and check for anomalies: the number of inaccurate Unique Pupil Numbers (UPNs) was staggering.

Students taking part in the 14-19 Diploma, for example, typically have access to services across multiple sites – and different logins and passwords for each one. It was proving difficult to track learner attendance across sites never mind more introducing more complex projects such as a secondary school learning platform, reliable college information MIS and college virtual learning environments (VLE).

In response, Norfolk adopted a Virtual Data Centre (VDC) - an on-demand computing service - delivering server, storage, network and security resources over an integrated and automated infrastructure. This will allow the council to implement a single sign-on system, meaning that each child, student or member of staff will have one unique online identity, regardless of the number of institutions they are registered at across the education estate.

VDC allows organisations to align computing resources to their needs quickly, reliably and securely – and without incurring capital costs. Studies suggest the solution costs 40 per cent or more less than in-house alternatives.

In Norfolk, it will remove the need for schools to have physical hardware and will free up resources, enabling learning services to be provided to more than 100,000 pupils.

It's automated and scalable, so Norfolk County Council Children's Services can now add and remove applications easily, and in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously.

It takes somewhere in the region of four to six weeks for organisations to buy new equipment, install it in their premises and bring it into service. Using VDC, new applications are up and running in no more than five days and additional capacity can be provided within the hour. As a result, it will be much easier for Norfolk County Council to introduce new educational aids and working practices across the schools and colleges it supports. Once installed in the virtual data centre, they are available to all.

Together, these benefits are vitally important. The array and complexity of IT products and services available to head teachers and their staff is growing. And for many, attention paid to this area is time taken away from their core role – teaching or running a school.
Cloud services leave IT headaches with the experts, save schools money and allow teachers to focus on what they do best – educating our children.

This is certainly a trend that we at dataplex are seeing, are you looking to move to the cloud and in Education?  Talk to us to see what’s in the cloud and what’s not.

SharePoint 2010 in Office365 – What’s in and What’s not

The SharePoint Online version in Offce 365 is based on the SharePoint 2010 platform. With the introduction of SharePoint Online 2010 in Office 365 the SharePoint On Premise platform and SharePoint Online platform will basically be on par. However, not all functionality will be supported in Office 365 / SharePoint Online 2010.

An overview:

Sites and Communities:

• SharePoint for Internet Sites (targeted for release in FY12). Supports customisations, site authoring, and WCM workflow and approval.

Content Management:

• Access to customer asset management systems. This limitation disables support for end-to-end eDiscovery scenarios. Targeted for W15.

Search:

• 'Unified' Search results combining online and customer site sources. (Targeted for W15)
• FAST Search which includes features such as thumbnails, previews, contextual search, visual best bets, and deep search refinement. Targeted for W15.

Insights:

• Business Connectivity Services (BCS) which eliminates the ability to access external services. Targeted for release in FY12.
• PerformancePoint Services. Targeted for W15.
• PowerPivot is unable to connect to external services. Targeted for release in FY12.

Composites:

• Sandbox Solutions are targeted at the site collection level.
• Alternatives to higher-end custom solutions (full-trust code) are targeted for FY12 and W15.

Although this might seems as quite a list, SharePoint Online 2010 will enable most organisations to host their entire SharePoint environment in the cloud.

XenDesktop on Hyper-V SP1 - 40% More User Density

As you have likely heard by now, SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will soon be released (in the first quarter of 2011). Yesterday at TechEd Europe, Microsoft announced the results of recent joint scalability testing by Microsoft and Citrix on the scalability of Hyper-V SP1 and Dynamic memory with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Brad Anderson (Corporate Vice President, Management and Security) announced the results in his keynote from Berlin"...with Service Pack 1 you will see a 40% improvement in the density that we enable on Hyper-V in a VDI environment".
Michale Kleef, Senior Technical Product Manager went through a demo with Hyper-V SP1, Dynamic Memory, Remote FX and Citrix XenDesktop. You can watch the 10 minute video on at the TechEd Europe site here.

This section of the keynote starts around 1 hour and 10 minutes into the video and goes on for 10-11 minutes.

Michael also blogged about the results. Here is a sampling of Michael's post -

As Brad Anderson and I discussed at the TechEd Europe keynote today, Dynamic Memory, a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, can increase Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) densities by 40% compared to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 and also well above a leading industry solution. It's also not just a benefit to VDI.
...
Our primary goal was simply to understand how Dynamic Memory influences the memory ceiling to density, and realistically, by how much. Secondary goals were to understand how XenDesktop 4 functioned with Hyper-V R2SP1 and its different approach to storage using Citrix Provisioning Services.

This testing demonstrated that, with SP1 enabled, Hyper-V density with XenDesktop increased from 85 Windows 7 VMs to 120 Windows 7 VMs.

By allowing Dynamic Memory to take control of memory allocation, this total load on the single server test up to 120VMs with a 40% increase in density. Each VM averaged around 700MB RAM running the LoginVSI workload and these results were consistently confirmed on the Dell blade testing also. When we scaled this out on the complete Dell RA, we took a reference architecture that previously ran on 12 blades, down to 8, with an easily calculable corresponding drop in cost per user/VM.

Office365 Overview

We all now know that Microsoft BPOS is called Office365, but apart from a rebrand what is included? Basically Office 365 will contain the new versions of Exchange (2010), SharePoint (2010) and Office Communications (Lync 2010). Next to this the Office Web Apps and an Office Subscription will be added.

BPOS is currently used by 40 million paying users. In my opinion Office 365 will be such an attractive proposition to businesses of all sizes that it is to be expected the number of users will expand fast. Let me explain.

Using cloud solutions, which Office 365 is, has become a trend over the last months. Office 365 will appeal to businesses of all sizes which need best of breed productivity software but want to outsource the technical installation, maintenance and housing.

Office 365 consists of the new versions of the Microsoft productivity tools. Most employees use these tools on a daily basis. Their work lives in many cases evolve around these tools. Microsoft offering Exchange, SharePoint and Lync out of the cloud means customers can use their environments with the assurance it will be up and running 99.9% of the year and will constantly be updated with the latest features.

SharePoint Online 2010, which is based on SharePoint Server 2010, is one of the components available in Office 365. The current version of SharePoint Online is primarily aimed at teamsite and collaboration functionality. The new 2010 version however will basically be on par with the On Premise version of SharePoint. Almost all capabilities, including integration of custom developed components, will be available in the cloud. SharePoint 2010 will open up a whole new set of capabilities regarding all sorts of workloads for customers.

Exchange 2010 will change the way customers use e-mail. Currently Exchange Online already offers a 25GB mailbox. This 25GB mailbox will still be available in Office 365. Next to this however Microsoft will offer an unlimited storage capability for older e-mails which basically allows customers to archive all their mails automatically. Other enhancements like using Exchange Online 2010 as a voicemail platform and the upgrade of the Outlook Web App will complete the user experience.

Lync will replace Live Meeting and OCS Online. Lync is the new version of Office Communications Server and offers many new possibilities for Office 365 customers. Customers will now be able have audio, video meetings and will be able to host online conferences. Next to this customers will be able to connect their landlines to Lync which will enable them to call via Lync.

New to Office 365 is the inclusion of the Office Web Apps and Office Professional. Basically customers will be able to view and edit office documents online through the Web Apps. The subscription model for Office Professional will enable customers to implement Office Professional without having to actually buy the Office Professional version upfront.

Office 365 enables customers to choose whether they want to work from their own On Premise solution or Online, managed and hosted by Microsoft.

Google Apps and Education

Since our support of UCISA 2010 we have had a considerable number of discussion around Google Apps in particularly GMail for student mail.

Last month, Google celebrated a big milestone for Google Apps for Education: 10 million active users. While a lot of the credit belongs to the school IT leaders and teachers who recognised the collaboration and learning potential of services like Google Docs, Google Sites, and school-wide Gmail, there are a number of partners that integrate the solution stack with critical and popular education applications.

Here’s a look at how schools can integrate Apps with the technology platforms commonly used by colleges and universities today:

Blackboard + Apps: Northwestern University’s Bboogle project is a free, open-source integration that lets schools integrate Google Apps with Blackboard’s learning management system. This video and case study shows how a history professor at Northwestern used Google Sites to create a collaborative encyclopedia with his students; Bboogle managed authoring permissions for the class and provided links between the Blackboard course site and Google Sites.

Moodle + Apps: Moodle solutions provider Moodlerooms have provided the single sign-on, automatic user provisioning, and Google Apps widget integration available in joule™. More information is available in this case study, or the related Moodle-Google open-source code.

So not only is Google an excellent option for education collaboration, but there is strong integration with your virtual learning environments too.

Looking at moving to a hosted SaaS email solution, talk to us to help you transition and integrate.

Microsoft Cloud

We have been so busy of late that have had little time to discuss Microsoft’s latest cloud move – Office365

Office 365 features Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online as a bundled, hosted package. While it's not Microsoft's first office automation solution delivered as a service, the hope is that a cloud-based solution equipped with features and functions that are equivalent to the now aging client-based Office software will provide an easy path to the cloud for Microsoft customers. If it can pull off that transition, Microsoft may find itself leading the cloud-based office automation space quickly, perhaps passing Google as early as next year.

Why will Microsoft win that war? Answer: The millions of existing Office users, such as myself, who don't want to learn a new interface to use Google Apps or other cloud-based productivity programs.

While those in the IT community can argue over the technical differences between the competing cloud-based productivity applications, most rank-and-file users don't care. Thus, as IT departments ponder the movement to the cloud, Office 365 will prevail, as it offers the path of least resistance.

McAfee Move

In mid May McAfee, announced a two-phases partnership with Citrix to deliver security solutions specifically tailored for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).

The first phase involved releasing a VDI-optimised antivirus, while the second is about introducing a single out-of-band security agent that control the whole virtual infrastructure through hypervisor’s APIs (something the industry usually calls introspection).

A few weeks ago McAfee completed the first step, announcing the availability of its new Management of Optimised Virtual Environments (MOVE) antivirus.

MOVE is based on a lightweight agent, that pseudo-randomizes some of its activities on the virtual desktops’ virtual hard drive, and that doesn’t carry on the scanning and removal engine.

The core activities are in fact executed out of band, in a remote, dedicated virtual appliance. What the optimised agents, which are centrally managed by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), really do is copying the suspicious files from the potentially infected virtual desktop to the security virtual appliance, over a secure channel..

Google Enterprise Search (GSA) Indexes Google Apps

The Google Search Appliance, an enterprise search device loaded with Google search software, is now able to crawl, index, and retrieve data stored in the company's Apps hosted collaboration and communication suite.

The capability is made possible by a component called Cloud Connect, which also links the Search Appliance to public websites, like the popular micro-blogging service Twitter.

Being able to tap into a company's Google Apps data broadens the Search Appliance's scope, which already includes on-premise applications, document management tools, databases, Web servers, intranets and files.

The Search Appliance is intended for use by employees, clients, and partners that a company grants access to. Search Appliance customers will receive this new capability in the form of a free software upgrade for their devices.

Other enhancements include the ability to find people related to a query so that users can locate peers who are experts on a specific field.

In addition, the Search Appliance now lets administrators set up parameters for filtering search results according to certain metadata modifiers, something Google calls "dynamic navigation." Also, this upgrade adds native capability to crawl and index data in Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Important Hyper-V Update

Microsoft released a few important Hyper-V updates in a single package via Windows Update. These updates have been publicly available for some time now, but they are now including these as a single roll-up for convenience. There are three issues resolved with this update:

• Compatibility with Intel Nehalem Processors
• Compatibility with Intel Westmere Processors
• A network issue when, under extreme network load, the VM network connection is lost.

For specifics on the issues resolved with this update, please see the following KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264080

PCI DSS 2.0 Addresses Virtualisation

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) has released version 2.0 of the Data Security Standard (DSS), an update to its 1.2.1 version.

PCI DSS 2.0 focuses on clarity of language for a number of key areas, including virtualisation.

The addition of the virtualisation concept into the standard reflects the importance of this technology and its operational impact within the PCI community, but there are still related security challenges that need to be addressed. Adding virtualisation into the standard is movement in the right direction, but without any real guidance on how to ensure virtualisation compliance, how effective can it be?

The PCI DSS 1.2.1 specification has a requirement that only one primary function per server be implemented, which has led to confusion for those using virtual machines in their environments. It wasn't clear in looking at the 1.2 specification if it permitted two or more virtual machines to run on the same physical server (one of the main reasons behind using virtualisation). The 2.0 specification at least seems to clarify that issue by allowing multiple VMs on the same physical hardware -- that is, as long as each VM is only performing one primary task.

Specifically, requirement 2.2.1 states the following:

Implement only one primary function per server to prevent functions that require different security levels from co-existing on the same server. (For example, web servers, database servers, and DNS should be implemented on separate servers.)

Note: Where virtualisation technologies are in use, implement only one primary function per virtual system component.

Other areas of note are:

If virtualisation is implemented, all components within the virtual environment will need to be identified and considered in scope for the review, including the individual virtual hosts or devices, guest machines, applications, management interfaces, central management consoles, hypervisors, etc. All intra-host communications and data flows must be identified and documented, as well as those between the virtual component and other system components.

The implementation of a virtualised environment must meet the intent of all requirements, such that the virtualised systems can effectively be regarded as separate hardware. For example, there must be a clear segmentation of functions and segregation of networks with different security levels; segmentation should prevent the sharing of production and test/development environments; the virtual configuration must be secured such that vulnerabilities in one function cannot impact the security of other functions; and attached devices, such as USB/serial devices, should not be accessible by all virtual instances.

PCI DSS 2.0 takes effect on Jan. 1, 2011, and represents the first significant update to the standard in over a year. Annual audits that occur after that date will be subject to the new standards. With the wording in the requirements being somewhat vague, and the fact that interpretations can vary from one auditor to the next, you might want to start your planning now to make sure your environment fits within these new guidelines.

Going to Windows 7 – Microsoft Suggest you look at VDI

Microsoft is continuing its Windows 7 marketing push with a recommendation that all customers examine desktop virtualisation before moving users to the new operating system.

Desktop virtualisation is still probably more often talked about than actually deployed, but analysts and vendors believe the expected mass migration to Windows 7 may be coupled with many new virtualisation deployments.

Virtualisation of desktops, applications, and user settings may potentially speed up the process of moving users from an old desktop to a new Windows 7 machine, and solve application compatibility problems.

Microsoft, though, gives nothing but high marks to desktop virtualisation in a post on the Windows for your Business blog.

"As they move to Windows 7, we are seeing customers widely adopt the virtualisation technologies," writes Microsoft. "This helps IT simplify deployment, migration and management of their desktop environments enabling faster service delivery, as well as centralise and secure data, and makes applications and user state available regardless of locale."

Microsoft goes on to say that "Leveraging these benefits can get customers to Windows 7 more quickly and easily, so we recommend all our Windows 7 customers look into how desktop virtualisation can help their migration."

Microsoft, of course, is pushing its own virtualisation products to help with Windows 7 upgrades,recently updating the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation to improve compatibility with legacy applications and create more options for running Web apps that require the outdated Internet Explorer 6.

Windows 7 includes an XP Mode and a Virtual PC technology to run older operating systems. However, Microsoft has many strong competitors in desktop virtualisation and is unlikely to dominate this market in the same way that it dominates the operating system market.

Citrix and VMware are the biggest contenders, with each vendor offering both desktop and application virtualisation software. VMware, for example, upgraded its ThinApp application virtualisation software this year to migrate applications from older versions of Windows to Windows 7, noting that many customers face complications in moving legacy apps to a new operating system.

Citrix online plug-in 12.1

Citrix has released the Online Plug-in 12.1 for Windows

What's New

ICA File Signing. Helps protect users from unauthorized application or desktop launches by digitally signing .ICA files. You can configure the online plug-in security policy and digital-signing requirements using Group Policy Objects or the Citrix Merchandising Server with the online plug-in. The online plug-in verifies that a trusted source generated the application launch and based on administrative policy, protects against application launches from untrusted servers.

Enhanced printing performance. Improves user printing performance and speed when printing to redirected client printers. Install the XenApp Printing Optimization Pack on the server running XenApp 6 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and configure the server-side policy settings for:

Dynamic Client Printer Mapping. Redirected printers are discovered dynamically and created automatically.

Optimized EMF Universal Print Driver. Reduction in bandwidth consumption for the most demanding printing applications.
Enhanced XPS Universal Print Driver.

Improved printing performance on Window 7 clients.

New decoder for HDX 3D Pro Graphics. A new deep compression codec is included in the online plug-in to receive 3D professional graphics over low bandwidths.

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Xenapp printing optimisation pack

XenApp Printing Optimisation Pack improves printing speed, reduces bandwidth required for printing, and improves the user experience when printing to redirected client printers.

XenApp Printing Optimisation Pack:

Adds settings to the Universal Printing Citrix policy setting that control enhanced Metafile Format (EMF) processing mode and image and font caching, limits and defaults for print quality and image compression, and users’ ability to modify these settings

Adds options to the Session printers Citrix policy setting that control default printer settings for session printer

Adds options to the Printing driver mapping and compatibility Citrix policy setting that control default printer settings for mapped client printer drivers

Adds dynamic printer discovery to automatically reenumerate and update XenApp session printers after roaming to a different location so that relaunching of XenApp sessions is no longer necessary.

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Citrix Releases Access Gateway VPX 5.0

Access Gateway VPX 5.0 is a virtual appliance for Citrix XenServer or VMWare ESX/ESXi that provides secure access to virtual desktops, applications and data while allowing users to work from anywhere. It offers the same capabilities as an Access Gateway physical appliance (Model 2010) while giving greater flexibility and more deployment options to IT administrators. Access Gateway VPX is the best choice for organisations who need to rapidly provision secure access, reduce infrastructure requirements, and minimise power consumption.

New Features
Some of the key new features available in Access Gateway version 5.0 include:

• Access Gateway VPX for VMWare ESX/ESXi — Access Gateway VPX running on VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors allows organisations to leverage their existing server virtualisation investments and provides additional deployment flexibility
• Simple and Intuitive Administration — Access Gateway 5.0 uses a new Flash-based administration tool for the appliance that makes it easy to install certificates, configure access control and monitor activity from any Flash-enabled web browser.
• Basic High Availability support for Model 2010 and VPX appliances — Two Access Gateway appliances can be configured as a failover pair. The appliances operate in active/passive mode, with the primary appliance servicing all user connections and the secondary appliance monitoring the primary and synchronising session information. If the primary appliance fails, the secondary appliance takes over.
• Variable Logon Points — Each Access Gateway appliance can host multiple logon points for support of different features or different user communities. Basic logon points enable unlimited logins for secure access to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop only and are enabled by the free Access Gateway platform license; SmartAccess logon points enable rich access control features such as network-layer VPN, endpoint analysis, clientless access to web sites and file shares, and adaptive access control.
• Endpoint Remediation — When users fail to access the system because of a failed endpoint analysis scan, you can provide a customised HTML message informing them of why they failed and what steps to take for remediation.
• Improved architecture — Significant updates have been made to the appliance firmware and Access Controller web services in this release to improve the overall performance, stability and feature set of Access Gateway.