Archive for June, 2011

County Government in UK Builds Open Systems Cloud

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Are open systems solutions appropriate for everybody? Or are certain types of IT shops better advised to use pre-packaged solutions?

InformationWeek noted in this article that an open-systems approach such as Xsigo’s has long-term cost savings compared with single-vendor solutions, but may require extra effort up front for integration. This could potentially lead to a perception that only people in the IT business, such as service providers, should take this on.

But this does not square with the facts. Xsigo customers comprise every size and type of business; most are not IT providers. Today we announced a perfect example: a deployment with Carmarthenshire County Council, a government agency in the UK that provides services in a 180,000 population county.

In a consolidation initiative, the Council looked at their infrastructure options. Their objective was to consolidate servers and combine services to multiple groups within a single infrastructure. In other words, they were building a cloud.

Upon assessing their situation, they first concluded that a Fibre Channel infrastructure update was required due to end-of-life components. In addition, they had been virtualizing their servers and found that more bandwidth would allow them to run more VMs on each server. As a result they were considering a 10G Ethernet infrastructure buildout.

The Council then considered Xsigo. A look at the numbers showed that Xsigo gear would provide more bandwidth, better isolation for their cloud, and cost less than the Fibre Channel update alone — to say nothing of the cost of the 10G Ethernet expansion.

When considering the Xsigo integration implications, they looked at the data. Xsigo had been proven interoperable with all the gear they use: HP blades, HDS storage, VMware software, and Cisco networking and storage switches.

As a result, the integration went smoothly and delivered immediate performance and flexibility benefits. Nial Grimes, IT Consultant at the Council reported, “Virtual I/O has also substantially increased our server consolidation ratio and given us performance levels we had never achieved in the past.”

The Council researched their options and verified real cost savings and proven interoperability with Xsigo. They also found that Xsigo would provide isolated operating environments within a single infrastructure to enable their cloud services.

They put it together and delivered immediate benefits for their management and for their users. Not rocket science, just good solid IT.

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Unified Computing: Who Will Win the Stack Wars? Free Analyst Report

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Unified computing solutions are now available from multiple vendors. Who will prevail? Download this thoroughly researched 23-page report from InformationWeek Analytics that exhaustively compares solutions from HP, IBM, Cisco, and Dell/Xsigo.

unified computing reportIt’s an interesting read.

InformationWeek offers it only on their pay-site ($99 to join), but we’re making this report titled, “Unified Computing: Who Will Win the Stack Wars,” available to you for a limited time free of charge.

Register for the report here.

The central question is this: “The battle lines are drawn, but do the benefits of a prebuilt system outweigh the drawbacks of subscribing to a single vendor’s technology vision and product roadmap?”

The report looks at this question — and the question of why unified computing at all — in detail.

Here are a few highlights:

1) “The next big thing in unified computing is the Virtualization of Everything: data and storage networks, block and file storage, even network appliances.”

Needless to say, we would agree completely. In deployment after deployment, we’ve seen that an end-to-end approach — virtualizing the servers and the infrastructure — makes the server virtualization project significantly more effective.

2) “The ultimate goal for the next-generation data center is a cloud-like environment where each application can be dynamically provisioned, configured, orchestrated and decommissioned using set resource profiles.”

Once you have achieved step 1 (the “omni-virtualized data center”) you’re significantly closer to a cloud-like environment. With that end-to-end approach I can:

  • Dynamically connect any network or storage to any server
  • Link resources without regard for physical limitations such as cards cables and switch ports
  • Deliver whatever number of connections and bandwidth each server needs

Those attributes put me a closer to that fully flexible cloud of interchangeable assets.

3) “Bundled unified computing stacks occupy that uncomfortable position common to most all-in-one offerings: When striving to be all things to all people, you end up dissatisfying almost everyone.”

You can look at this point from two angles. One is that any bundled solution is likely to quickly diverge from its prix fixe origins, so some level of integration becomes a fact of life.

The second is the open solutions such as Dell/Xsigo’s have an immediate appeal. They’re designed with simplicity and interoperability in mind, with use of widely-tested, well-known components. Instead of trying to be all-in-one, they strive for easy integration.

Other interesting discussions in the article raise questions such as:

  • Of the technologies in the stacks, which are IT managers most likely to deploy in the next 12 to 24 months?
  • Why the fixation on blades?
  • For storage in these stacks,  what are the pros/cons of FC and iSCSI?

Register for the report here.

Enjoy!

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Posted in cloud | 4 Comments »

VDI Cloud Provider Saves Cost, Adds Performance with Xsigo

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

VDI and the cloud would seem like a match made in heaven. By outsourcing your desktops to a 3rd party, you can save a lot of time and capital expenditure. VDI is complex, so why not capitalize on the in-depth planning and execution that someone else has done already?

This is the idea behind dinCloud, a California-based supplier of enterprise cloud services. As their CTO, Mike Chase puts it, “we had to solve 64 major problems” in order to deliver a great user experience that is highly reliable and lightning quick.

In the process, they learned a lot and integrated a number of innovative technologies, including Xsigo virtual I/O. Three objectives drove their thinking in selecting virtual I/O:

  1. Compute density: To minimize costs, dinCloud sought to maximize server utilization without compromising performance. The company’s high-end servers had sufficient compute capacity to accommodate 170 users each, but would have required eight 10G Ethernet connections per server to avoid I/O bottlenecks. With Xsigo, just two connections provided higher performance at ¼ the cost.
  2. Server uptime: To maximize equipment utilization, it was essential to minimize the downtime imposed by server maintenance and configuration change requirements. “Planned maintenance can take equipment offline for hours, often involves many manual steps, and introduces operational risk, all of which drive up costs,” Chase continued. “With Xsigo we can make changes in software, with fewer steps, and with zero downtime, all of which helps us offer a better quality service at less cost.”
  3. Transparency: Enterprise cloud customers demand predictable service levels that match what users experience with their own data center. In a shared cloud environment, traditional infrastructure lacks the granularity to guarantee application performance, forcing providers to over-provision resources to meet service level agreements. Xsigo’s quality of service features let dinCloud ensure bandwidth to specific applications under all conditions without over-provisioning.

Chase explained, “With Xsigo, our environment becomes compartmentalized. If an application misbehaves, we can limit its impact on other applications. When a problem does occur, we can pinpoint the issue to a specific application, something that is nearly impossible with a traditional infrastructure.”

VDI and the cloud looks like an idea that’s bound to take off, and dinCloud is off to a great start. Learn more about them here.

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How eBay/StubHub Saved 50% with Xsigo vs. Cisco

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

StubHub, a division of eBay, reported savings of 50% using Xsigo. And got what they believe is a better solution than what Cisco was offering. This is straight from an article today on Bloomberg.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

“When StubHub Inc. executive Robert Capps oversaw the building of a new data center, he shunned Cisco Systems Inc.”

“‘Cisco wasn’t serving our needs,’ Capps said. ‘They were not innovating in the areas of data-center operations that we needed innovation.”

“For years, Cisco has benefited from the impression that its products are a safe bet, said StubHub’s Capps, who switched to gear from Arista Networks Inc., Xsigo Systems Inc. and Mellanox Technologies Ltd. to outfit his data center.”

StubHub did the research in building out their cloud and found what they considered to be the most flexible, cost effective solution. And it was not from Cisco.

The entire article can be found here.

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Posted in competition | No Comments »