Remote Working–It’s a changing landscape.

Remote working has always been on the agenda of many since the advent of laptops, getting access to corporate data was always a challenge and bind that with HR, Security and results based management you always had issues in aiding this move despite the obvious well documented evidence that it works!

The remote workforce has grown quickly over the past decade, but the economic issues have had an impact.  The U.S. teleworking population in 2010 was estimated at 26.2 million — nearly 20% of the U.S. adult working population.

Remote working is one aspect of workplace flexibility. Employers are finding that telework and other flexible work arrangements are effective tools in attracting younger employees who appreciate greater flexibility and to recruit remote workers from a wider talent pool.

Ten years ago, people might have been surprised if you told them you worked from home. Today they’re more likely to be surprised if you don’t have some kind of flexible working arrangement that means you can. 

As remote working becomes more the norm, the number of people who enjoy the ability to work from home occasionally has also increased. This may be on a formal basis in which the employee can work from home a set number of days a week basis, on an ad hoc basis when there’s a childcare issue or a practical need to be at home, or on a crisis basis.

Equanet over the last 6-8 weeks have seen a large number of client engagements for remote working due to Business Continuity to protect their productivity and employees from harsh winters and recent medical pandemic.  Getting employees used to working from home can benefit a company should disaster strike. 

Most modern companies have relaxed into accepting remote workers and trusting them to be productive.  The image of the remote workers having daytime TV on in the background is no longer upheld by many, perhaps because as more people experience remote working themselves they see the benefits (no commute, a distraction-free environment, less office politics to name but a few).

With the emergence of tablet technology, faster mobile networks and better security the ability to keep in touch and work when away from the office has become a policy issue.  If you need help in developing your remote working strategy or implement the right technology you should really contact us to find out how we can get a faster time to value for you.

Your Best Cloud…

Having completed Equanet’s VDI, Cloud and Consumerisation event this week with support from Citrix and Microsoft I thought I would ask you what your best cloud is?  Private, Public or Hybrid?  The answer has to be none of the above.  Too many people get hung up on the idea of positioning a cloud solution without doing their homework and we firmly believe the best cloud is Your Cloud; based upon your needs, legislation and technical readiness.  All too often we are told that Hybrid cloud is the best cloud – why?

You can't blame those for recommending this strategy. Hybrid clouds can leverage both private and public clouds and dynamically choose where processes and data should reside.

The problem comes when enterprises rely too much on vendor marketing and not enough on their own architectural requirements.  Businesses typically realise the limitations too late in the process normally due to a lack of transparency.

Staff involved with these projects get caught up in the hype, feel pressured to get a cloud solution up and running, and hit issues they don't see until it's too late.

Equanet believe that there is an easy resolution to this, it is doing the same that you have for your data centre projects over the past few years without the cloud tag.  Firstly you need to undertake a root and branch assessment of the core requirements to define the right cloud approach for you.  In many cases the complexity of a hybrid cloud can overshadow the cost benefit of cloud in the first place and a straight forward public or private cloud solution is best for business.

Remember there is no silver bullet: Cloud computing requires that you make some compromises.   Just understand them before committing.  Have a cloud strategy in place and understand what is in and what isn’t.  Alternatively talk to us at Equanet to see how we can help you.

Citrix Acquires App-DNA

It is Citrix Synergy in Barcelona at present and as ever Citrix have come to the table with a number of product updates, product advancements and news of acquisitions.  One of them made yesterday was the acquisition of App-DNA.

App-DNA provide application analysis, assessment and remediation software under the name of AppTitude.  The product assists in migrating users from Windows XP through to Windows 7 and caters for understanding the issues of upgrading Internet Explorer on Wed Based Applications.

Citrix is planning to integrate the AppTitude technology in the Citrix Desktop Transformation Model, offering assessment functionality, remediation of incompatible applications and automated application packaging to MSI, App-V or Citrix XenApp formats.

If you are considering desktop migration either to a physical Windows 7 desktop or to a virtual desktop environment you really should leverage App-DNA to understand where your application issues are and how they may impact the scale of the project.

Talk to us and see how we can support your desktop transformation project.

Gartner’s Strategic Technology Trends 2012

Gartner has recently updated it’s strategic technology trends for 2012 and comes at a critical junction for IT departments as they get to terms with their IT Budgets, Architecture Upgrades and the ever growing demands placed on business by consumerisation.

What's a "strategic technology"?  Strategic technology is one that has the potential for "significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years."

So what made the cut and what didn’t?

1. Media tablets
2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces
3. Social and contextual user experience
4. Application stores and marketplace
5. The Internet of everything
6. Next-generation analytics
7. Big data
8. In-memory computing
9. Extreme low-energy servers
10. Cloud computing.

Many of these go together. Such as contextual and social user experience and Internet of Things depend on one another. App stores and marketplaces and tablet computing go hand-in-hand.

So do you agree?  Is there anything on here that you planning on doing and is there something missing from this list?  It would be interesting to see.

VMware and NVIDIA collaborate to improve VDI performance

VMware and Nvidia are collaborating to implement the Quadro's Virtual Graphics platform on VMware View.  Since the advent of server-based computing, handling graphics-intensive tasks has always been a challenge, but performance has gradually improved.

Graphically intensive applications (CAD and Media Rendering) will be accessible from almost any device without being tied to a fixed location.

The solution uses a dedicated Nvidia Quadro card on the host and a graphics driver in the virtual desktop. There isn’t a firm date for when the View and Quadro Virtual Graphics will start shipping, but VMware is hoping that some users will be able to start testing before the end of the year.

HP's new VirtualSystem for Microsoft simplifies the cloud journey.

HP has announced new servers that come pre-configured with Microsoft software to help companies deploy virtualised servers more quickly.

HP's VirtualSystem for Microsoft includes HP servers and Microsoft's Hyper-V , and simplifies the deployment of applications including SharePoint, Exchange Server, and SQL Server.  The environment naturally can be managed using HP's Insight Control and Microsoft System Center.

The servers provide a path to help customers build private and public clouds and link them together as a hybrid cloud.  VirtualSystem for Microsoft uses the same architecture as the HP CloudSystem, which combines storage, networking, and servers to reduce latency when scaling configurations in cloud deployments.

HP and Microsoft are trying to make it easier for customers to move applications to the cloud,

VirtualSystem for Microsoft will be available in November priced from about.  It will be offered in two models -- the VS1, for companies that want to host about 750 virtual machines, and the VS2, for companies hosting about 2,500 virtual machines.

VS1 can be configured with up to eight HP ProLiant DL380 G7 servers, 1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet connections, and a P4500 LeftHand SAN (storage area network) that scales from 14TB to 57TB.

VS2 can have up to 12 HP ProLiant BL460c G7 servers, multiple network and storage connectivity modules, and P4800 LeftHand SAN that can expand to 84TB.

VMware Upgrade their View Client

 

VMware have just released several new mobile clients for View.  Hot on the heals of the new iPAD client from Citrix last week VMware have released a new View client that has some well overdue and innovative features.

The main new feature is that the client now supports iOS multitasking, in layman terms it means that you can flip between View desktops and local applications and still have a connected View desktop.

Naturally through the close links with RSA, there is now support for soft tokens in the View client itself.  A mobile device really should have a mobile soft token support for 2 factor authentication and at last we now have it.

Hot on the new capability of iOS 5, View can now leverage Apple’s AirPlay to allow your iPAD to connect wirelessly to a large form factor display.  Naturally you will need an Apple TV to connect this to wirelessly but we think this is a neat solution.

The Android client has now come out of beta mode and is now fully supported so that’s good news for honeycomb based tablets such as the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet.

It is great news for those businesses that are looking to adopt tablets in the enterprise and are looking to get a faster return on their investment through integrating with VDI implementations.

Things just got better

Sometimes it difficult to see how something so easy could get even easier, and today Citrix have done just that by bringing their Kaviza acquisition into the fold and adding more functionality and a new name ‘Citrix VDI in a Box’.

This is a version 5 release of the VDI solution aimed at the SMB marketplace following the shrewd acquisition Citrix made earlier this year of Kaviza.  Some people questioned the logic of the acquisition including us.  But from getting to know the product, the issues that our SMB customer base face and how this solves many of the VDI hurdles it is crystal clear why Citrix made this move.

VDI-in-a-Box offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. Customers just have to deploy the virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go.The solution can scale simply through adding more servers to the grid.  Once you know your users to server ratio you have a simple internal SKU that you can align a cost to.  Adding more users becomes easier to forecast and budget for.

Version 5 provides the following new features:

• Support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, besides the already existing support for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESXi
• Expanded set of wizards to cover every frequent operation
• Support for Citrix HDX providing:
• Real-time audio stream, which reduces network latency for voice traffic
• Webcam compression
• Graphics command redirection, decreasing bandwidth with 33 percent
• Intelligent local rendering.

New Citrix Receiver for iPAD

Citrix has a new update of Citrix Receiver for iPad, v5.0.

The latest client packs a lot of great new features, these are:

iOS 5 Support
Universal iOS Application Support
Several HDX Graphics enhancements
40% Less bandwidth consumption
50% Faster Application Launch times
XenApp Fundamentals 6 Support
Session Sharing and Connection Center Support
Simplified and Universal Receiver User Interface
High resolution Support (up to 1600 x 1200)
Fine-tuned and improved session controls
Improved External Keyboard Support
Fine-tuned and improved gestures
Improved setup auto-discovery
Enhanced Access Gateway Support
Stability and security enhancements

This represents a great new set of features for a great enterprise ready tablet, want help on configuring and integrating your iPad into business? Then contact us at tablet@equanet.co.uk

Citrix acquires another cloud company

Citrix has acquired ShareFile in an attempt to break into the cloud-based data sharing market.

Many users now have a multitude of different devices which is putting new demands on how data is stored and shared, giving rise to the personal cloud, according to Citrix.  And is a very crowded market now with the likes of Dropbox, iCloud and Box.Net to name but a few.

The service allows enterprises to upload files to its centralised cloud storage, which can then be accessed by anyone who has the right credentials using a PC, smartphone or tablet.

ShareFile offers its service at four standard price plans: Basic, Professional, Enterprise and Enterprise Gold. They differ in the number of allowed employee accounts, monthly data transfer volume, storage volume and functionality that is included. For example, the Professional plan costs $59.95 per month and includes 10 employee accounts, 10GB of transferred data and 10GB of storage. They all include unlimited accounts for clients and partners.

This acquisition will allow Citrix to realise it’s "follow-me-data" strategy, which aims to allow business users to access their content from anywhere over any device and any network.

Steve Jobs and Apple –The Pioneers of Consumerisation?

As I sit here eagerly for the last 2 hours or so downloading the latest iteration of Apples operating system; iOS 5  (which by the way is telling me has over 1 hour to wait) I got to thinking surely the movement of consumerisation is largely an offshoot of the innovation that Steve Jobs and Apple crave on.  Whether or not it was intentional is another discussion, but nonetheless the iPAD represents a desirable device that has found its way into many enterprises and will continue to do so.

First was the iPod (That’s next on my upgrade).  Which proved massively popular and then went off the scale with a clever port of iTunes onto Windows desktops and the millions of users who could access the service. The natural extension of this was the iPhone (That is after the iPOD upgrade), which only had an app store developed for it in 2008!  Once it became apparent the reach that the App Store would have every mainstream vendor clamored to get their applications to the masses.  More interestingly the more nimble organisations found ways to get their innovative cloud applications to the consumer and hence into businesses such as Dropbox, Box.net and Evernote.

After the iPhone came the iPAD, a natural branch of a fantastically successful phone but in a slightly larger form factor.  Suddenly the execs of the business were entering the business with tablet devices asking how they get them on the network, why won’t our productivity applications work with it and why is the wireless not in the right areas.  This brought about a whole project in systems integration.

I come back to my original question – was this a planned shift in workforce devices?  I doubt it, but it has happened.  And the fact that my download of iOS 5 is still saying one hour remaining tells me that the world of business is going to have a whole new set of capabilities tomorrow morning in the office.

Equanet are experts in tablet deployment, integration and strategy.  We can help you develop your vision, deploy that vision and manage that vision.  Interested in seeing how tablets can impact your business, then contact us.

Oh, and I now have 45 mins left…..

Consumerisation - are you adopting it?

We have all heard of the trend consumerisation it has been around for many years and will continue to be around for a good few more. Here at Equanet we are having many conversations per day around this topic, MDM and BYOC.

Sadly, there are many companies out there who are closing the door on this opportunity rather than embracing it. Consumerisation does require a strategic approach with flexible policies and adequate security to ensure good experience. And let's face it consumers always win!

In our experience the majority of reasons for not adopting consumerisation is a lack of understanding and largely a lack of trust that your employees will be on Facebook rather than working. We think that you should put some effort into researching this trend and understand the value it can bring to your business. If you can't find an opportunity at least you can say that you have tried, but we are pretty confident that you will find pockets of opportunity within your business today to adopt it.

It is fundamental to have a plan, that plan should be strategic rather than tactical and should span the entire length and breadth of the business. A formal working party should be created that includes all stakeholders in the business and make sure you include HR; it has a big impact on their policies typically.

In our experience it is a great opportunity to cast the net out to the entire business and get some feedback on the perception of the IT service. This, when coupled with what your users would like to receive should highlight a big disconnect but also expect some fantastic internal PR. When was the last time you asked your users what they wanted from IT instead of dictate it?

One you understand the areas of the business to benefit from consumerisation you will need to assess your policies and get them up to date to match the new world of working.

In parallel to this IT need to ensure that the infrastructure is fit for purpose and can provide the best level of service to your users; but ensure that the service doesn't compromise data integrity.

You need to ensure that you have the appropriate tools in place to manage the devices that are attaching to your network through MDM technologies. You will need to ensure your applications can be accessed, there is no point in supporting tablets in the enterprise if you cannot connect to business systems. You will need to consider the cost of application redevelopment into an enterprise application store which would be native to the device, or look to integrate application virtualisation technologies (eg Citrix, Microsoft or VMware) to bring windows based applications to the device ensuring a faster time to value.

The benefits of consumerisation are clear from a high level you now need to understand how they benefit you as a business. Equanet are uniquely placed to help you address consumerisation through leveraging our consultants knowledge in developing your strategy. Once we understand your strategy we can help you realise it through our design, funding, implementation and support services.

Remember consumers normally win!

Location:In the air

Hyper-V 3.0 Some more details

Microsoft continues to drip feed information into the blogosphere about the new capabilities to expect in Hyper-V 3.0 and to be honest the product is shaping up to look like a great compete to vSphere.

Some of these features are:

160 logical processors on Hyper-V hosts
2TB RAM of RAM per host
32 vCPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM
NUMA in the guest, so that the VM has processor and memory affinity with the host
Storage Live Migration,without a shared storage backend.
New virtual disk format, called VHDX with a 2TB limit for the currently used VHD format, with a maximum of 16 TB.
Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX), enables offload storage features to the backend storage (comparable with vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) by VMware)
Multiple concurrent Live MigrationsActive Directory will be virtualisation aware, providing snapshot support for VMs running Domain Controllers
Virtual Fibre Channel Support and direct access to SAN LUNs using MPIO
VM boot support from fiber channel and iSCSI SANs
Updated virtual switch, providing multi-tenancy capabilities
CPU metering
Resource pools
Hyper-V replica providing asynchronous/consistent replication functionality
Remote Desktop Session Host now fully supports RemoteFX
Support for NIC Teaming, load balancing and failover in the OS
Support for Bitlocker on Clustered disks.
Cluster Shared Volume 2.0 with built-in replication and hardware snapshotting
Support for Data de-duplication
Windows Server 8 provides the ability to turn on and off the GUI

That's a lot of known features, we wonder what will be the surprise features that are not announced yet!


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Microsoft nails live migration across subnets with Hyper-V 3.0

In the next release of Windows Server Microsoft has nailed one of the most difficult problems in virtualisation: moving a running VM across a WAN.

Microsoft announced this at the Microsoft Build conference. It will be available in Microsoft's Hyper-V 3.0 included in Windows Server. This capability has certainly proved Microsofts maturity in virtualisation.

With live migration, a running VM is moved across computers without any disruption to the guest VM. Most hypervisors have the capability to do live migration across the same LAN segment and it is a given feature now.

A more taxing problem is the ability to move a live VM across different subnets, or separate WAN sub-networks. Network latencies and addressing complexities have made this task of many complexities.

At a basic level each virtual machine gets two IP addresses. One address is the home address for the VM itself, which it uses to communicate with the rest of the network. The second IP address will be available for the local data centre.

VMware also offers similar functionality but requires CIsco and its OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) technology.

This capability really starts to help with Hybrid clouds and how we can enter into the public cloud and importantly exit the cloud. This provides far more control over your operating environment.

Other new features in Hyper-V announced so far are:

Live migration of the VM's virtual hard disk
Scalability to support up to 32 virtual processors for each VM
Each VM can now have 512GB RAM
VHDX file system to create virtual storage disks up to 16TB in size.

And we are sure that there are plenty of other features that haven't even been announced yet. Good work Microsoft.

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Windows 8 to Sync user settings and apps

Since the Microsoft Build event the other week features have been coming out of the woodwork about some of the new capabilities of Windows 8.  One of the key capabilities is the ability to allow Windows 8 users the option to log onto their devices with their Windows Live ID.  The benefits of which are below.

Microsoft revealed at the Build conference that users will be allowed to sign into their Windows 8 PCs using a Windows Live ID, this is only an option and not compulsory.  Some of the key features stated by Microsoft in doing this are as follows:

• Associate the most commonly used Windows settings with your user account. Saved settings are available when you sign in to your account on any Windows 8 PC.
• Reacquire your Metro style apps on multiple Windows 8 PCs. (”The app’s settings and last-used state persist across all your Windows 8 PCs.”)
• Save sign-in credentials for the different apps and websites you use and easily get back into them without having to enter credentials every time.
• Automatically sign in to apps and services that use Windows Live ID for authentication

The Windows 8 control panel has a section called Sync PC Settings to enable of disable this capability.  This can be dictated by users or administrators through GPO.  The configuration allows for variable settings to be synced such as Personalisation, Themes, Ease of access, Language preferences, Apps, Web browser and Some passwords.

The syncrhonised settings data is stored in the Microsoft cloud separately from users’ other Windows Live data.

Microsoft said on their blog “Using the new Restore/Refresh tools, it is possible to easily create an image that has your preferred desktop apps installed, and then use that as a refresh point.  If you do want to roam your settings for desktop apps then you can continue to use the mechanisms available for roaming profiles and client side caching of files available with Active Directory and Windows Server.”

Should make the transition between tablets and desktop a lot smoother allowing for personalisation of the user profile is a key concept that businesses consider when transforming to Windows 7 or virtualising the desktop.  We think that this is a shrewd move by Microsoft to close the gap between desktop and tablet.

New GUI for OpenStack

The cloud management platform OpenStack has had a makeover through a new graphical interface and unified authentication management system.

The goals behind this update have been to make OpenStack easier to use and administer and to scale for large multi thousand server clouds.

Overall, this release, named Diablo, will include over 70 new features and enhancements.

The software has a new distributed scheduler for deploying virtual machines anywhere in the system, even if nodes are scattered about in different data centers around the globe. A new multicluster container sync feature can be used to replicate data across different remote clusters.

The new graphical user interface allows administrators to provision resources through a portal interface.

The unified identity management system, called OpenStack Keystone, ties together the different authentication systems previously deployed for individual components. It can integrate with external directory systems, such as Microsoft Active Directory or other authentication systems based on LDAP.

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Why it is important to distinguish virtualisation from cloud

So many businesses are looking to cloud for many reasons and we in IT have become responsible for devaluing the opportunity that can come from it by over using the terminology without a clear definition about what it means.

One thing we always make people aware about is that cloud and virtualisation are based upon principles that have been around for decades; those principles being both business and technical principles. The key thing to remember is that we are now better armed than when we tried this similar concept in the past; we have better computers and importantly faster, ubiquitous networks.

Virtualisation is an infrastructure management tool to provide consolidation and higher availability of systems; most of which have nothing to do with the cloud. The technology allows enterprises to use a single piece of physical hardware, to perform the work of many.

Cloud computing, is access through the Internet to business services running in a non-local environment. Cloud computing can certainly take advantage of virtualisation but cloud computing can be (and has been) accomplished without the use of virtualisation.

Unlike most IT projects, cloud computing and virtualisation impact almost everyone in the enterprise which means that non-technical people are involved in the implementation and deployment processes.

The risk of not knowing the difference between virtualisation and cloud computing can be a costly one as hype around these two technologies reaches a crescendo. Too many vendors are over simplifying the entrance into the cloud through a simple swipe of a credit card and hey presto you are now in the cloud.

Equanet firmly believe that a full feasibility study needs to be performed to define your virtualisation and cloud strategies before moving forward, failing to do so typically means confusion about strategies and over spend of budget whilst under delivering on capability.


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Cisco and Microsoft Collaborate on Hyper-V 3.0

Cisco has collaborated with Microsoft to provide virtual switch support which should make the offering more attractive to those who are debating VMware following their recent licensing changes.

Cisco is set to offer virtual switch support for Hyper-V which is currently found within VMware through it's Nexus 1000v virtual switch.

This joint collaboration will provide customers with greater control and monitoring across their Hyper-V estates.

How important this will be is yet to be determined as it is unclear how important enterprises place granular control and monitoring across the virtual switch. You would expect this granularity to be important for those customers who have a large investment in Cisco equipment and will also become a more determining factor when looking at hybrid cloud solutions.

The support for Hyper-V will only come once Microsoft release Windows Server 8 which has Hyper-V 3.0 integrated.

Cisco will provide customers two ways to analyse data across the switches these are:

Cisco Nexus 1000V switch is designed to be a distributed virtual switch, this kits each Hyper-V guest with a virtual Ethernet card that can be managed through a Cisco Virtual Supervisor Module.

The other alternative Cisco will offer is a new version of Cisco Unified Computing System Virtual Machine Fabric Extender, which extends Cisco management to virtual environments.


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VMworld Desktop Announcements

So we have been meaning to provide this update since the event but have only just got round to it – apologies.

So what announcements were made?

• VMware Horizon App Manager will support Windows apps through ThinApp
• The mobile phone hypervisor, MVP, will be Horizon Mobile
• View 5.

VMware Horizon App Manager

The vision of VMware Horizon is pretty neat, and VMware is extending this vision further to include the deployment ThinApp packages.

The process behind the publishing of the application through Horizon involves the addition of a DLL to the ThinApp package which allows Horizon to manage it.  Once the change is made you direct your Horizon environment at the Thinapp store whereby a Horizon scan is performed.  Once the scan is complete you then compile your application catalog and align them to the users for self subscription.

Horizon will be the ideal platform for Thinapp application delivery and is long overdue.  Once end user take up of Horizon is seen it is clear that the delivery of SaaS applications and other web based applications will become the next phase of deployment again fueling adoption.

At the moment Horizon is aimed at View desktops for integration and is understandable but as the product evolves the future focus will be on all Windows desktop environments, and you can also imagine Google Chrome OS and other mobile devices.

VMware MVP (Horizon Mobile)

It is hard to believe that it has been nearly three years since VMware acquired Trango to provide the MVP capability.  The concept is a type II hypervisor model, in that you own a phone a native (personal) OS, then you have a second Android OS (corporate) instance that runs in a VM on top of the native OS. The corporate VM can run a different version of the Android OS from the personal one, and it can be totally controlled by the IT department through native management or integrated as part of your MDM strategy.

The corporate VM can be connected to a VPN while the personal environment is not. All of the apps and encryption can be controlled by IT.

VMware is branding this as Horizon Mobile.

VMware View 5

VMware also announced the next version of VMware View – version 5.  The key features of View 5 are:

• View Media Services for 3D Graphics
• View Media Services for Integrated Unified Communications
• View Persona Management
• PCoIP Extension Services
• PCoIP Optimisation Controls
• PCoIP Continuity Services
• View Client for Android
• Enhanced Security Settings
• vSphere 5 support.

Microsoft to reduce the gap between PC and tablet

Microsoft is looking to slow down the progress of Apple and iPAD on Tuesday of this week with the introduction of software to turn touchscreen computing into something more familiar with PC users.

The software will be shown off at a Microsoft conference for software developers in California.

The beta version of the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system represents a bet that iPad does not represent the final shape of tablet computing.

A trial version of Windows 8, is expected to be released to developers this week.

Windows 8 will have two interfaces: the traditional “desktop” familiar to PC users, and a touch-based interface using the same large “tiles” used on Windows software for smartphones.

The software will also be designed to bridge the gap between the “apps” found on tablets and smartphones and the full-featured applications of PCs.

Microsoft will have to make its operating system function for the first time on different chips, while also creating a way for developers to write software that works with different interfaces.

We are pretty confident that Microsoft will enter this marketplace with a very compelling proposition that will demonstrate their desire to succeed against the dominant apple.

Microsoft releases Release Candidate of VMM 2012

Microsoft have announced the availability of the Release Candidate of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 as publicly available.

SCVMM will no longer be virtual machine manager tool and will transition to a Service Management and Fabric Management tool, by providing lifecycle management of VMs and the applications inside them.

SCVMM includes Server App-V.  Server App-V provides application virtualisation technology for backend services, the technology will also become available as a complementary technology to Windows Azure (PaaS).

Communication with the storage will be supported through the Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S) providers, so that SCVMM will be able to provision LUNs at the cluster level, currently three providers are available NetApp FAS, EMC CX,VMAX and HP EVA (Built-in to HP StorageWorks CommandView EVA 10.0).

The RC introduces the following new features:

• Support for upgrade to RTM when released
• Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management
• Network Management
• Storage Management
• Update Management
• Power Optimization
• Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO)
• Service Lifecycle Management.

Some pretty nice features I am sure that you will agree.

HP Unveils OpenStack Cloud Offerings

Yesterday HP released its first two public cloud computing services for private beta, and they’re based in part on the open-source OpenStack code. The services, are HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage.

HP VP of Cloud Solutions suggests that the new services aim to compete directly with other developer-focused cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which leads the OpenStack project.

HP is the first major provider other than Rackspace to publicly use OpenStack code in an available offering.  Both offerings are based on HP’s  hardware and software with key elements of HP Converged Infrastructure and HP Software combined with a developer friendly integration of OpenStack.

HP is not providing further comment at this time. Just launching the services is enough to generate buzz and integrating with OpenStack is sure to generate a lot of interest.

Where are you going with your apps?

We are constantly craving the ability to access information from a plethora of devices be that information in the public, personal or private cloud.  The accessibility of data from within the public or personal cloud is a simpler process than that of accessing within the private cloud; largely due to the complexities of accessing systems behind the corporate firewall (not just technical complexities but ones of security and HR process). The consumerisation of IT has driven this desire to get access to data wherever it is needed thus providing the business intelligence to make timely and accurate decisions.  This fueled by the adoption of tablets and smartphones is only going to be further exacerbated.

After tablets and smartphones, mobile applications are the next technology wave sweeping the mobile industry, we saw this in niche verticals around 2002 through to 2004 but it is once again proving a popular activity for businesses to assess and adopt. According to a study by Ericsson, 35% of smartphone owners use their apps even before getting out of the bed.  However, as of today, the mobile applications lack the ability to communicate with the enterprise software systems.

As most employees own multiple smart devices today businesses must provide access to their enterprise applications from such devices, supporting initiatives such as BYOC or BYO-3. Mobilising your enterprise applications is a fantastic way of boosting productivity of employees. It allows mobile employees to access the enterprise applications over wireless connections from home or when they are on the road.

The best way to make the applications available to the employees is through an enterprise application store.  Accessing applications from an Enterprise App Store allows IT to track software licensing costs by maintaining an inventory of all the assets and deploying applications to the relevant users. It also enables IT to recommend and deploy “best of” public app store applications to the employees.

However, IT admin cannot manage applications well if they cannot manage mobile devices. So it goes without saying that it is a best practice to have a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution in place to manage corporate assets and corporate applications.

In the SaaS era, putting your enterprise applications in the cloud is a favorable model. It not only minimizes IT support but also reduces storage and distribution bottlenecks.

Has this got you thinking?  The opportunity to exploit tablet devices has never been better, but careful planning and deployment is critical to ensure that they do not become an expensive notepad.  So if you need help in your MDM and application development strategy come and talk to us to see how we can help.

Citrix acquires Ringcube

Citrix has acquired RingCube, a software solution for personalising operating systems hosted within their VDI architecture. Citrix plans to couple RingCube's technology with its own VDI offering, XenDesktop.

RingCube allows users to choose wallpapers, define their printers, install department applications and create their own areas for storing data.

To gain economies of scale organisations look to deploy a single desktop image in their vdi deployments to multiple users which can deprive the user of personalisation of their desktop.

RingCube's technology saves all the customisation data in a separate file, which can be paired with the operating system when it is requested. This approach can greatly reduce the amount of storage needed, since duplicates of the OS are not required.

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

VMware vSphere 5.0

Last month VMware announced the latest edition of VMware vSphere which is due to start shipping very soon, so for those of you who aren’t aware of the announcement we thought we would highlight some of the key features here.

• vSphere Storage DRS: storage resources can be grouped and balanced more effectively.
• Profile-Driven Storage: vSphere helps choosing and allocating storage resources based on the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the target VM.
• Support for larger VMs: virtual machines can now have 32 virtual CPUs  and 1TB of memory.
• vSphere vMotion: virtual machines can now be moved across high latency networks.
• vSphere Autodeploy: vSphere provides a network boot based system for new installations, allowing to automate the deploy of new virtual machines ESXi hosts.
• New version of the virtual machine format (version 8): added support for USB 3.0 devices, Windows Aero 3D graphics and OS X Server 10.6.
  vCenter Appliance for Linux: a linux based management appliance is now available.
• vSphere Web Client: a browser based interface for vSphere.
• VMware announced an update in licensing models for vSphere, introducing vRAM boundaries, which is the amount of memory allocated for a virtual machine when it is powered on.  Which you can read more about here as there has been quite some noise about it.
• Improved SSD handling optimization
• vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA): The VSA creates shared storage out of local storage for use by a specific set of hosts.  This means that vSphere HA & vMotion can now be made available on low-end (SMB) configurations, without external SAN or NAS servers.  The vSphere Storage Appliance can be deployed in two configurations:
  2 x ESXi 5.0 servers configuration
  Deploys 2 vSphere Storage Appliances, one per ESXi server & a VSA  Cluster Service on the vCenter server.
  3 x ESXi 5.0 servers configuration

Desktop Virtualisation? We’re talking Converged Desktop…

For over a year now we have been talking about the merits of converged desktop (desktop virtualisation, application self subscription, SaaS and Unified Communications), the reason being is simple.  Desktop virtualisaiton is just a set of efficient tools to drive cost and complexity out of the business and deliver the user a desktop over any device.  But any device and a Windows desktop doesn’t equate to improved user productivity, to achieve that we need to be delivering business applications, data and increasingly voice and video to the desktop too.

Putting desktop virtualisation to the side, businesses have been seeking the converged desktop for many years some with success and some not so successful.

Equanet are seeing a new convergence taking place at the desktop.  One that transforms the enterprise worker’s traditional desktop into a completely virtualised collaborative workspace by combining virtual desktops with the communications applications workers depend on. 

We’re seeing the convergence of virtual desktop and media-rich communications as also being inevitable, given that a worker’s productivity is not solely defined by having ubiquitous access to apps, but also the media-rich collaborative tools they need to be productive, on the device they happen to be using at any given time.  From a Cisco perspective this is called VXI (Virtualisation Experience Infrastructure).  And from many conversations I have had with customers and partners it is also a well kept secret, yet massively simple to get your head around.  In simplistic terms; a set of SKUS that have ben endorsed by Cisco and either Citrix or VMware to guarantee performance and scalability for a known number of users and is built upon Cisco UCS.  If you need more horsepower you add an additional unit of power by selecting the right SKU.

VXI provides business with a roadmap to allow them to activate certain elements of the infrastructure as and when they need to, providing a simple roadmap and nearly commoditization of technology.

It is pretty clever technology and we think you should take a look at it. Interested to know more contact us.

Dell takes OpenStack to it's core

It seems that OpenStack is getting some serious attention and momentum with HP adopting OpenStack and also Dell. Dell has created a solution of hardware, software and services that businesses can purchase to deploy their own internal IaaS.

The company has also released into open source a software program, called Crowbar, that should help organizations deploy their own OpenStack configurations on Dell hardware.

The solution includes a full distribution of OpenStack running on Ubuntu 10.10 running across Dell PowerEdge C servers. Dell provide a reference architecture for businesses do design their own clouds.

Crowbar software, can automate the installation and configuration of OpenStack across multiple nodes. Crowbar can also be an OpenStack management tool

Dell has built Crowbar as a modular architecture allowing the software to manage non Dell servers.

OpenStack was launched by Rackspace and NASA and is an open source product deigned for setting up cloud environments.

Where are you on the road to cloud? I will be interested to hear contact me here

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

VMware Listens to its Customers

VMware recently announced the release of VMware vSphere 5.0 along with a new licensing model that was based upon configured vRAM per virtual machine.  Your allocation of vRAM increased on each licensing model; the grander the license model (Enterprise+) the bigger the allowance of vRAM.

This has sparked quite a lot of criticism in the channel for those customers looking to migrate to vSphere 5.0.  So following all the noise VMware has increased the allowance on virtual RAM so that most customers will not be adversely affected.

VMware's new licensing model introduced on July 12 was an attempt to shift from pricing based on physical resources to pricing based on virtual resources. 

Many customers and partners have complained to VMware that the model would restrict their virtualisation (further exacerbating VM stall) efforts by requiring the purchase of more licenses to achieve the same level of consolidation they were accustomed to.

The new vRAM entitlements are as follows:

• vSphere Enterprise+ will get 96GB of vRAM
• vSphere Enterprise will get 64GB of vRAM
• vSphere Standard and Essentials will both get 32GB of vRAM.

The product will still continue to be licensed per CPU as in pervious editions, however VMware are removing the restrictive model of CPU cores and physical RAM per server and allowing the vRAM to be pooled across all VMware hosts in the farm.

VMware also increased the amount of vRAM that counted to each virtual machine to 96GB, meaning that no single application will require more than one vSphere Enterprise+ license.  VMware also implemented an average consumption model on vRAM across a 12 month window so that customers can burst for short periods of time without have to pay for the spikes in usage.

The new licensing model should make customers aware of VM sprawl (the increase of virtual machines due to the simplicity of creating them).  Equanet recommends that customers increase the density of their virtual machines on physical hosts and leverage DRS to migrate lower priority workloads when high priority applications need more server resources.  By implementing a strict policy on virtual machine lifecycle management Equanet also believe that this will ensure organisations leverage their investments in virtualisation; it is a good time to undertake some housekeeping.

Looking to implement vSphere 5.0 or migrate – talk to our solutions team to see how we can help - 08444 12 11 10.

Is your network ready for the cloud?

I have 20 minutes to spare before a session on open cloud begins so i thought i would post a thought around cloud and the network. One area that many businesses seem to overlook once they have looked at if the applications are suitable for cloud migration is, is my network suitable.

For many months now, we’ve talked about the Journey to Cloud Computing and how an evolution within your Data Center is needed to make that a reality.

As a partner to Cisco we are constantly asked what their stance is on cloud with reference to the network, and more recently the whole UCS and vblocks piece (but that is another blog).

Typical questions are:



What is Cisco’s perspective and strategy around the usage of multiple types of Cloud Computing (Private, Public, Hybrid, Community) and what is needed from the network to interconnect all these offerings?

How does my business manage the network transitions needed between today’s applications (often client-server), the virtualisation of those application, and next-generation web and big data applications?

What considerations do we need to make within my Data Centre as we try and maximise efficiency and scalability?

What considerations do we need to make at the edges of our networks when the proliferation of devices is almost out of control?

Are there ways to protect my network investments while still having the flexibility to deal with the business uncertainties that are around the next corner?

To help in those discussions, Cisco have put together a way to look at building Business-Ready Cloud Networks. By “Business-Ready”, we mean that your organisation can feel confident that it can run any mix of business applications within this framework and know that it can evolve as your business/application needs change over time.

The key points to take away from this are:

Cisco believes that IT services will be delivered (over time) through a variety of Cloud Computing services, both on-site and off-premise. The network requirements to deliver this in a secure, highly-available manner require a network that is robust, automated and capable of embedding network services to deal with any type of device or application.

The challenges in the Data Center and at the edges of the Borderless Network are unique, but they should be thought of in the context of architectures that deliver end-to-end service-levels to any user, any device or any application, regardless of where the IT service resides.

Data Center architectures must be able to evolve from today’s applications, through virtualisation and onto next-generation applications without the need to create entirely new architectures or silos with each step in the Journey.

Borderless architectures must allow maximum flexibility of devices and location, while delivering secure, robust user-experiences across all applications.

Want to see the slide deck from cisco, it's over here

Location:S Park Crescent,Gerrards Cross,United Kingdom

HP Endorses Openstack

Not to be outdone by Dell, HP have openly come out this week and showed support for the rapidly growing open source cloud platform – Openstack.   Announced yesterday on HP corporate blog they will be joining and supporting OpenStack.

HP is in a unique position to bring together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the point where cloud and connectivity converge.
 
HP recognizes that open and interoperable cloud infrastructure and services are critical in delivering the next generation of cloud-based services to developers, businesses and consumers.  Over the past year, the OpenStack community has been focused on developing open source software for building private and public clouds.  Today, OpenStack has participation from more than 90 organisations with 1200 participants.
 
HP is taking an active role in the OpenStack community and see this as an opportunity to enable customers, partners and developers with unique infrastructure and development solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

HP is joining a wide range of tech companies—including such rivals and partners as Citrix Systems, Dell, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems, Brocade and Mellanox Technologies—that have signed on to the year-old organisation, whose goal is to create an open and standard cloud environment for both public and private clouds. All the code for OpenStack is available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Happy Birthday Openstack

A couple of weeks back Equanet were lucky enough to attend the first EMEA forum for OpenStack we have been tracking this solution closely since its inception a year ago and all I can say is watch this space for some exciting developments.

While companies such as VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat hope to use their data center presence to grab significant wallet share of the IaaS, a growing number of technology providers are aligning around open source cloud contender OpenStack as a platform for both public cloud providers and for customers' private clouds.

Well-established vendors and providers such as Dell, NASA, Rackspace and Citrix are throwing real weight behind OpenStack in the form of actual products and implementations.  And to bring real credibility to that Citrix just acquire cloud.com.  That's good news. It means the year-old project isn't likely to fade away anytime soon.

Dell is among the most notable companies to throw its weight behind OpenStack. The company this week unveiled its anticipated package of hardware, software, and services built around OpenStack, aimed at giving organisations the tools to deploy their own IaaS operations.

This is one area to watch and with the backing of major vendors and consultancies we believe that this is going to be a great journey.

Interested in understanding more about Equanet and our cloud capability, contact us.

Windows Server 8 Sneak Preview

Equanet have recently come back from the Microsoft World Partner Conference, which really cemented the reach that Microsoft has with over 15,000 partners attending the conference.  One of the key take aways was the next release of Windows 8 and some of the elements that are going to be included in it.

Windows Server 8, the server complement of Windows 8 client, is on the same development track and path as Windows 8 client.

Microsoft is suggesting Windows Server 8 is a key private-cloud building block, which means virtualisation will be critical to the next release. Microsoft demonstrated only one of what officials said would be several of more than 100 new features coming in the next version of Windows Server: The next version of its Hyper-V hypervisor.

The coming Hyper-V Replica feature provides asynchronous virtual machine replication. All users will need is Hyper-V and a network connection. Users will be able to schedule replication to happen immediately or later. The new feature will allow users to do things such as replicate their mission-critical database to an offsite data vendor such as Equanet Cloud.  Microsoft also is going to allow Windows Server 8 users to replicate unlimitedly without charging additional fees per virtual machine.

Microsoft is also believed to be providing the next version of its Hyper-V hypervisor in the Windows 8 client, as well, though Microsoft has yet to announce this officially.

You can see this demonstration here, and fast forward to 38:00mins.

I’m over here!

OK for those of you who used to follow me, you may be wondering where I have been of late. Well its been an interesting few months, culminating in me taking a position at Equanet to help drive the solutions capability into the market place.

One of the key elements to drive is the positioning of Equanet’s cloud and vdi offering (amongst many others).  And for those of you wondering what we can offer you – all I can say is keep watching this blog, these tweets and this website.  All will become clear and it will be big and innovative and delivered by a fantastic pool of consultants covering the length and breadth of the IT space from advisory engagement through to delivery and support.

As ever, anything that you read on this blog can be delivered from our consulting team and we aim to be thought provoking and informative.  If you have any questions or indeed want to contact me please email me on charles.barratt@equanet.co.uk

Charles.