IT professionals have not yet moved beyond the traditional view of their technology infrastructure and risk overlooking the impact of new technologies and trends affecting businesses.

Professionals continue their focus on the IT concerns of the past, despite calls for aligning IT to changing business strategies and a need to reinvent IT amid the economic crisis, a TechTarget study on professionals’ IT priorities for 2012 has found.

IT administrators listed server virtualisation, data centre consolidation, cloud computing (particularly private cloud) and compliance as their main initiatives for 2012. But their views and concerns around these technologies including cloud haven’t changed much.

For most respondents, security continues to be a primary concern about cloud followed by reliability and data protection. While these are important concerns, IT professionals are overlooking other aspects of the cloud which are important in developing a holistic cloud strategy. Only a minority are concerned about other issues such as vendor lock-in,  lack of management tools, and lack of demonstrated savings.

Vendor lock-in becomes a problem when the cloud service provider prevents the customer from taking their data back, according to Nigel Fortlage, from a customs brokerage firm in the US.

When it comes to security initiatives for 2012, the study showed that IT professionals are still pre-occupied with traditional security-oriented projects such as data protection (43%) and network-based security (40%). Virtualisation security and identity and access management (IAM) were listed low in the priorities list despite experts insisting that IAM in the cloud is a “multi-faceted challenge.”

According to experts, poorly controlled IAM processes could result in regulatory non-compliance because when undergoing audits, businesses will not be able to prove that their data is not at risk of misuse.

Separately, more than half of respondents (58.5%) said that the external cloud service they plan to use in 2012 is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) followed by business continuity and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) both at 30% and Storage-as-a-Service at 28%.

SaaS has been an increasingly prevalent delivery model since 2006 and it is time IT pros look beyond it. However, only a minority of respondents are looking at cloud for services such as Datacentre-as-a-Service (DCaaS), or Security-as-a-Service or for collaboration.

Another telling factor was that, among the desktop initiatives, IT professionals prioritised migrating to Windows 7 (61%) over other strategic desktop initiatives such as implementing application virtualisation (17%) or adopting online productivity apps such as Microsoft Office 365 (10%).

And lastly, among the mobility initiatives outlined by businesses for 2012, adoption of smartphones and tablet PCs ranked highest at 29% and 30% respectively whereas other initiatives such as mobile virtualisation took low priority at 5%.

All these factors demonstrate that businesses and their IT teams are still reactive to technologies that are now mainstream and are still playing catch up.

Do you agree? Please let us know by writing to avenkatraman@techtarget.com.

 UK and European businesses are looking to use outsourced data centres and cloud services in the short term, while planning longer term to build their own in-house data centre facilities to deal with growing data volumes, findings from Oracle’s Next Generation Data Centre Index study showed.

This “buy” capacity for now and “build” capacity for later policy may be a quick-fix response to address Big Data challenges but this strategy could fall short in the light of other findings of the study.

For one, the study showed that virtualisation of IT hardware in the data centre is patchy where only 12% of respondents said they have virtualised more than 70% of their IT estate. 38% admitted to have virtualised less than 30%. This lack of virtualisation and server consolidation could lead to data centre inefficiencies as well as under-utilisation of IT systems and will not help businesses reap all the benefits of virtualisation.

Another finding was that more than a third (36%) of data centre managers do not have visibility of energy usage, with 10% of respondents doubting that anyone else sees a copy of the bill for data centre energy usage. Amid stricter carbon emissions regulations in the EU, an organisation that does not have a good grip of its data centre’s power usage will risk facing hefty penalties or will find its cooling costs spiralling out of control.

Another worrying finding from the study was that 39% professionals said they second-guess future workload requirements. If data centre managers are not aware of their potential workload, scaling a data centre and making it future-proof will not be possible.

In addition to these issues, experts added that many organisations do not have a clear exit strategy in terms of using cloud services.

All these above factors combined will limit UK and European enterprises’ ambitious data centre plans and may restrict them from evolving their data centre into a private cloud.

If you would like to share your thoughts, please email us at avenkatraman@techtarget.com.

Energy costs are already a big challenge for data centre managers, and more bad news is on the way.

In the next couple of years, energy costs in data centres will rise massively, said Rakesh Kumar, vice president, Gartner Research, today at the Gartner Data Centre and IT Operations Summit 2011.

In 2010, energy alone accounted for 12% of the cost of running a data centre, third after people (29%) and software (22%). But, this is going to change in the next few years. While hardware (servers and storage devices) costs will go down, energy costs will go up to 20% from the current 12%.

This means energy costs will account for a fifth of the cost of running a data centre.

The reasons for this increase are higher power costs plus more equipment within a data centre.

While energy costs will become a big headache for data centre managers, there are many things users can do to address this issue, Kumar said:

•     Use free-air cooling. Here’s how you can use free-air or natural cooling in the data centre.

•     Reuse heating

•     Scale vertically first, then scale horizontally [Scaling vertically means adding more resources such as memory or CPUs to a single server while scaling horizontally means running an app across multiple servers so that even when a single server fails, the app isn’t affected).

•     Build density zones

•     Consider multi-tiered designs

•     Build/rebuild pods

Specifically, Kumar urged European IT pros to look more strategically at free-air cooling. “Free-air cooling is very important and help enterprises save on energy bills considerably, especially in the UK and other northern countries where temperatures are 16 degrees or below for a majority of the year,” he said.

He also advised users to “play the refresh game more often” because newer servers are more energy efficient.

 At VMworld Europe 2011 we heard a lot about vSphere, the Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS), Horizon Mobile, and virtualisation management tools, but next to nothing about desktop virtualisation.

Does this sparse talk about desktop virtualisation signify that VMware is shifting away from VDI and looking to a future of mobile and social enterprise?

In his keynote, VMware chief executive Paul Maritz outlined the company’s key investment areas including efforts in cloud and mobile virtualisation.

VMware’s initiative in the cloud space includes its partnerships in community cloud in the healthcare and financial services space as well as its work with cloud service providers such as Colt, CSC, SingTel and Verizon among others.

Maritz also spoke about Cloud Foundry - which he described as the “Linux for the cloud era”, insisting that cloud should not be based on highly proprietary systems or limited to a single vendor. “Cloud should facilitate applications portability in a cross-cloud, multi-cloud world,” he said.

Separately, VMware announced its strategic partnership with telecommunications company Telefónica to deliver VMware Horizon Mobile and allow users to access a virtual (Android-based) enterprise phone on their personal Android smartphone.

The virtual work phone will be controlled by the enterprise. “A user installing a hacked version of a game on their personal phone will not affect the security of the work phone,” Maritz said.

“We need to go beyond desktop virtualisation in a post-pc multi device world,” he said. “We are going to make investment in a new set of tools as users are no longer tethered behind their desks or using heavy-weight desk based machines.” He also explained the role of its Horizon App Manager.

The Hands-on Labs space at the event, which Maritz described as the “heart of the conference”, also focused on VMware’s cloud initiatives, server virtualisation, email collaboration tools, management suites, and mobile virtualisation.

In short, at VMworld Europe 2011, VMware highlighted every aspect of its portfolio except VDI. Was this just coincidence - or does it signal a deeper trend? Please share your thoughts.

Checkout our VMworld Europe 2011 conference coverage here.

Archana Venkatraman is the Site Editor for SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK

If your company gave you a (reluctant) nod to attend the upcoming VMworld Europe 2011 in Copenhagen, you feel the pressure to justify your time. Here are some tips on how to make the most of the show.

Prepare: Doing your homework will help you sail through more strategically. Come with an understanding of the main problems your IT environment is facing. Is it compatibility? Is it ageing hardware? Is it full to capacity? Is backup a nightmare? Identifying this up front will help you make the best use of your time.

Make an agenda and stick to it: Go through the programme beforehand and plan out your agenda. There are general sessions where VMware chiefs outline their roadmaps and super sessions on niche topics such as “securing the cloud”, “transitioning to ESXi” and “mobile virtualisation”. Build your own schedule here.   

Don’t miss the one-on-one opportunities: Several VMWare “knowledge experts” will be available for one-on-one meetings to answer your technical questions.  You can schedule a 15-minute session with any three of these VMware knowledge experts for specific advice on compliance, security, and performance and capacity management as well as on specific VMware topics such as Zimbra, VMware View, vSphere, Cloud Foundry and others. Remember this is available only to end-user attendees, so make use of it.

Learn new technologies: Develop your skills and knowledge about emerging technologies and keep up with newer trends around cloud security, mobile virtualisation et al. Do not hesitate to ask questions - no matter how basic they are. Make sure you know how exactly a certain product will help solve your enterprise’s IT problem, and its cost, compatibility, security etc.

Get hands on experience: You won’t know unless you try it. Give the products a go at the Hands-on Labs. Lab sessions are categorised by VMware solutions and are aimed at providing users some best practice tips. 

There are also track-specific sessions to help you develop in-depth technical skills. Topics include: “SRM 5.0 - what’s new and recommendations for success”; “VMware Data Recovery - Everything you need to know”; or “Getting started with vSphere Design” among others.

Collaborate: Impromptu interactions with IT pros from other companies can be very insightful. Collaborate with a wide range of IT pros experiencing similar issues as you - tighter budgets, stricter UK data regulations and tougher EU carbon emission rules. Learn how they deal with these pain-points for inspiration.

Take notes: Never trust your memory. Write down names and versions of products that interest you, tips and advice, upcoming products and vendor promises.

Use social networking: Yes Twitter is prone to banter but don’t scoff it off yet. Follow the right people and follow the right conversation to get insights and sometimes, inside scoops.

Evaluate: Once you get back, evaluate what you learnt and check if you have any unanswered questions. Don’t forget to stay in touch and follow up on points you feel the need for.

See you then!

Find our VMworld Europe 2011 conference coverage here.

Archana Venkatraman is the Site Editor for SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK

Bogged by the dark, grim and uncertain realities of the outside world? Maybe you can seek some solace in the world of technology.

Here are a few pieces of good IT news to help take your mind off the London riots and faltering economy:

•      Oracle is starting a huge recruitment drive in EMEA, looking for 1,700 new employees with varied skills and experience across all divisions of its business. 

•       Intel plans to invest $30 million (£18.5 million) over five years on cloud computing research — the starting point for product development that could spur future growth.

•       Insurance industry CIOs are optimistic about increasing IT investment in private cloud services, recent research has shown.

•      And VMware took customer feedback to heart and changed its vSphere 5 licensing in an effort to reduce customers’ costs. 

If that is not enough to cheer you up, just turn to Twitter and take in some of the peer-to-peer learning and networking. When data centre professionals share tips and trends, they demonstrate perfect solidarity and reflect the maturity in their industry.

Wish we could say the same about the outside world.

Archana Venkatraman is the Site Editor for SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK

This week I was at BriForum London at Chelsea Football Club. Packed with virtual desktop devotees, the show proved engaging. I even helped hand out free “God Save the Geeks” T-shirts and BriForum rucksacks.

Desktop models. The first session, “Desktop Virtualisation Models and PC Capabilities: What’s the Best Fit for Your Users?” was presented by Ian Pratt and Brian O’Reagan and it was packed. We ran out of seats, so some attendees needed to stand for the 75 minutes. They didn’t seem to mind and were quite an interactive crowd, asking questions about managing virtual machines (VMs), watching demos, and listening to why a Type 1 hypervisor can help improve performance and management. I even had trouble handing the mic over to attendees quickly enough.

VDI and cost. The “Outgunning VDI for a Fraction of the Cost” session was presented by Tom Reed and Jesus Garcia from Intel. Attendees wanted to know how to take a golden image on the road. Reed explained that he “lives on a plane” and needs to access his desktop anytime so he can still build PowerPoint presentations. Attendees in the room generally agreed that this is a growing problem, with businesses implementing more devices and some employees owning the technology.

Remoting Protocols. The popular session” RDP, RemoteFX, ICA/HDX, EOP, and PCoIP VDI: Remoting Protocols Turned Inside Out” was presented by Benny Tritsch and Shawn Bass. The room was brimming with attendees wanting to learn about high latency and how to encode and decode videos. Benny discussed decoding information to send down the wire so it is decoded when it reaches the other end.

The presenters also demoed Flash and SilverLight. They argued that even though the technologies seem very different, they’re actually quite similar. With SilverLight RDP and remote FX, on the local area network (LAN), the protocols did a fairly good job with good compression. They introduced less bandwidth with a higher latency, and the technology started to struggle. With Flash they did a demo on the LAN, again, with RDP and remote FX - they altered the latency and bandwidth again until the technology started to struggle. Remote FX appeared to be doing much better than RDP in terms of video quality. The conclusion from the speakers: Does RDP suck over the LAN? Apparently not, it just depends on the settings you’re using apparently. If you adjust your latency you’ll get a much better user experience, so have a play around with the settings. Congratulations if you managed to get a seat in that session - it was 75 minutes long and some people resorted to sitting on the floor.

Future of Desktops. “The Future Desktop: What Should It Do and What Should It Look Like?” session with Brian Madden and Harry Labana attracted a big crowd and was probably the busiest of the first day. Madden explained that the session came out of a drunken conversation between the two of them. The session covered the management side of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and how to look after several devices at once. Madden posed the question: “How do I look after 1,000 users that have five devices each? Do you think your boss is going to give you five extra staff to manage them all?  No.” Brian and Harry were suggesting how VDI can help with this management, but highlighted that it is not cost-effective to predict how many devices staff plan to use. They advised that you plan to give your user what he want, and learn how to manage that, or consider outsourcing management.

All of this took place on just day one. Overall, the majority of attendees I spoke to said they enjoyed the sessions and the speakers. Shame about the severe lack of rubbish bins around the venue though….

Kayleigh Bateman is the site editor and UK managing editor for SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK and TechTarget International.

If your company shuts down during the Christmas period, it’s a boon for employees. Although downtime for IT services is not an option, particularly, when it comes to protecting existing data and business-critical processes. Ensuring that IT systems continue to function and having a resilient, efficient disaster recovery plan (DR) allows IT managers worldwide to tuck into their turkey dinner with peace of mind this Christmas.

 Solid DR plans during business lulls

To reduce the impact of a potential disaster, IT managers should do some pre-planning before heading out for the holiday. Review internal service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure that they align with current business needs. During this time of year, for example, most organisations may have less demand on IT systems. So recovery-time and recovery-point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) may be longer. Although following a disaster that may affect the urgency with which IT returns service.

But for some markets, such as the retail sector, Christmas is a busy time of year, so RTOs and RPOs should be reduced as little as possible. SLAs should reflect business needs and dictate staffing requirements.

If you don’t need a large IT workforce on-site, staffing should be sufficiently skilled to run restores, fix bugs and troubleshoot other problems. IT managers should remember that in the event of a disaster, on-call employees may not be where they expect to be. So don’t assume they are within an easy commute of the premises.

Adequate staffing is a good place to start, but there are other considerations. If any IT manager depends on a DR provider, check that it has made suitable plans for the holiday.

A backup administrator should also confirm that there are sufficient supplies of empty tapes in the library to tide the business over (it sounds simple but it’s often overlooked). Precisely calculate the number of tapes (or free disk capacity) required, remembering that end-of-year backups can consume additional resources than do normal backup cycles.

Also, it is important to check that tape management providers work over the Christmas break. If they don’t, you may need to institute a different process from the standard operating procedure of removing tapes and shipping off-site regularly to keep disaster recovery plan protocols intact.

In short, a little planning now means you can relax and enjoy the festive period and enter 2011 without worrying about the what-ifs.

David Boyd is a principal consultant at GlassHouse Technologies (UK) and a contributor to SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK. Boyd has more than nine years of experience in the design and deployment of complex storage networks, backup, virtualisation, high availability and disaster recovery solutions.

Organisations that want to overcome financial challenges, particularly during recessions, often opt to outsource IT functions.The driving forces to shift to outsourcing services are infrastructure consolidation and the elimination of excess hardware. A highly consolidated environment can improve return on investment (ROI) on hardware and eliminate waste, where expensive hardware remains unused and gathers dust.

Complex IT infrastructure drives outsourcing services

Historically, IT departments have created highly complex IT environments by adding new hardware and then consolidating to improve efficiencies in cycles: In short, infrastructure is a bit of a mess and can be difficult to manage in-house.

Employees, for example, now need new skill sets, including virtualisation and consolidation skills. In the historic underutilised environment, it was enough to handle individual incidents reactively because a single failure rarely had widespread impact.

But in today’s highly consolidated environment, a single failure can be catastrophic. So the “fire fighters” of the past need to manage performance more closely to pre-empt problems and downtime.

Enterprises can potentially overcome this challenge by adopting outsourcing services that are internally run or outsourced to an external provider. This approach allows IT staff to leave day-to-day tasks to experts while it concentrates on strategic projects. What’s more, IT managers also benefit from the utility-style resourcing model of outsourcing services. Management can adjust staffing up or down according to peaks and troughs in business activity.

Still, providers may overpromise and underdeliver. So understanding how to judge a supplier’s merits is key. Companies should investigate a potential managed services supplier thoroughly to ensure that it not only meets technological demands but also adheres to a business’s existing service-level agreements. Businesses should also request references from existing customers and seek evidence of a supplier’s ability to handle complex IT environments and place business objectives at the forefront.

Outsourcing services can help ease IT management and decision making. And while it may not be the answer for every business, it’s an important consideration for IT departments that are struggling to bring efficiency and cost-effectiveness to the business.

Mark Swanston, Infrastructure Operations Services Manager at UK VAR GlassHouse Technologies UK (LTD) and a contributor to SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK.

Swanston brings over 12 years experience within the support services arena. During his time at GlassHouse, he has worked with numerous organisations delivering a wide variety of support services. Although initially brought onboard to provide technical support, Swanston quickly climbed ranks within the organisation and now has the responsibility for overseeing the operations team, supporting pre and post sale engagements.

Swanston joined GlassHouse from IBM where he was part of team delivering strategic support to IBM’s internal EMEA based data centres. During this time he gained valuable insight into managed service best practice and also developed automation policies which helped form the building blocks of the processes used today within IOS.

With today’s advancements in technology it should be easy to implement and benefit from automated processes. Allaster Finke, practice lead at Glasshouse Technologies (UK), outlines why true automation still seems like a step away and how businesses can overcome barriers to entry.

We’ve all seen it. The script that runs, regular as clockwork, to do that thing that is critical to make sure system X keeps running or keeps the manager informed that his investment in technology is sound. The script that was written long before any of the current operations team was on the payroll and will likely still be doing its job when most have moved on. 

Automated monitoring, reporting and administration can be vital to the efficiency of the IT department. As vendors have cottoned on to the needs of the administrators, product functionality in automation has become richer and reliance on bespoke scripts has lessened, although it has never truly gone away. This functionality in systems management has long been the panacea for reducing the time spent on repetitive administrative tasks and can often remove the mundane from the daily work schedule. 

The advent of cloud computing beckons a new era of automation: the idea of service/system delivery at the touch of a button brings fresh challenges to those setting themselves up as providers. Rapid deployment of IT resources is a wonderful idea, and recent technological advancements (such as a maturity in the virtualisation arena, improved network capabilities and more flexible application architectures) have provided the technical possibilities. However, actually providing an IT service robust enough to take advantage of those advancements requires tighter integration of automation in administration, process and reporting.

Of course, full automation may never be possible, but understanding where automation will help is the first step. A focussed introduction of automated services may reduce the risk of things happening within your environment without your knowledge or control. Identifying those processes that can easily be automated without a loss in control is a start. Then, as the support team’s knowledge on the technology grows (and their experience in those nuances that are never fully conveyed in the marketing spiel!), moving more technical elements of the service over to an automated model could be part of gradually improving the service — enabling more efficient day-to-day administration and freeing up the time of the support team to deal with other tasks.  

Great examples of these are: automatic tiering for data storage (the re-allocation of data from high-cost-high-performance drives to lower-cost-lower-performance drives based on actual I/O activity for that data); or automated reallocation of virtual machines from a resource-constrained host to a less busy host within a cluster. Both of these examples may be something support teams wish to maintain some level of control over before letting the system just go ahead and action.

It is also salient to recognise that automation technologies should be complemented by a suitable process for managing the automated output (whether it be a system change or a status report) to produce the best service. It isn’t very useful, for example, for a capacity management report to be sent to a shared mailbox if nobody knows how to effectively deal with the contents. Automation to a void is often less useful than no automation at all!

In conclusion, the increase in technology functionality needs to be met with increases in service management — automation at a functional level is all well and good, but without tight integration with IT service management and analysis only half the benefits will be realised.   

Allaster Finke is a senior consultant for GlassHouse Technologies (UK), a global provider of data centre consulting services, and a Contributor to SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK. Allaster has over 8 years experience in the design and delivery of IT solutions, with a particular focus on SAN, Storage and Backup technologies.