VMware targets the SME sector with VMware GO

Some believe that one of the reasons behind Diane Green’s departure as CEO of VMware in July 2008 was the company’s lack of penetration in the SME and cloud computing markets. With VMware Go it has announced a cost-effective solution that provides an on-ramp for the SME sector to cloud computing and virtualisation. This demonstrates the importance of the SME sector to the growth potential of the cloud computing market, and also to VMware’s future.

The SMB sector is being used as the vehicle to drive public cloud computing

The cloud computing market has many challenges, not least of which is the need for some consensus on exactly what cloud computing is. I believe that cloud computing can be simply described as a new delivery mechanism for IT as a service, which operates at three different layers in the technology delivery stack. The foundation layer is the infrastructure level, focusing on how an organisation’s or service provider’s physical IT assets can be transformed so that they offer a shared platform for flexible IT delivery; this is better known as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The second layer is that of the application and is more commonly known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which involves application development and looking at how these applications will operate on the underlying shared infrastructure. Finally, software-as-a-service (SaaS) represents the third layer and is focused on the delivery of specific business services using the previous layers as enabling technologies.

This picture is further complicated by the terms public, private and hybrid cloud, where private refers to an on-premise only approach (behind the firewall), public to a generally available Internet-based service (outside the firewall), and hybrid to some form of mixed approach that is still too loosely defined to be of any use.

Given this level of ambiguity, complexity and a lack of standards, combined with the ‘conservative’ nature of many large enterprise customers (particularly those with security concerns at the top of their agenda), the move towards this new service-driven approach to IT delivery requires either a compelling business reason why any organisation should move to the cloud, or a sense of momentum that makes its widespread adoption a seemingly inevitable consequence of market forces.

I we believe that currently neither of these conditions is prevalent, but the SME sector appears to the most interested in a public cloud approach and can clearly see some definite business benefits. Therefore, vendors are keen to use the SMB sector to drive the further development of public cloud computing, and by implication the use of private and hybrid cloud solutions in enterprise customers: it is too early to say for certain if this approach will work, but enterprise-class customers are beginning to show more interest, and we expect 2010 to be a year that will define the future market penetration potential of cloud computing.

Vmware sees the cloud as a long term solution

The market for virtualisation technology solutions is rapidly becoming commoditised, as the entrance of Microsoft and its Hyper-V product has reduced the entry price for many organisations. The only impediment to the complete communisation of the virtualisation stack, relating to server virtualisation, is a lack of interoperability between the main solutions. However, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) released version 1.0 of the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) in September 2008, which provides a Virtual Machine (VM) transport format; although basic (it does not support all hypervisor technologies currently) at least begins to address the movement issues of VMs between different vendor solutions.
Therefore, it is not surprising that VMware has recognised that any revenues from the core base technology are only a short- to medium-term prospect. Its movement into the cloud computing market represents at least a ten-year plan to continue to deliver significant revenues from its core capabilities of virtualisation solutions. Interestingly, VMware is also looking at wider markets, with two recent acquisitions (Springsource and Zimbra) that demonstrate its belief that the future will not be dominated by Microsoft, but will be more diverse. This is a bet worth playing, and only time will tell if VMware is correct in its assessment.

Who is a Cloud Vendor

What is in a Name

The term Cloud Computing (CC) is one of those universal terms that can be described as “meaning all things to all men”, which for end user organisation’s looking to understand how/if CC fits into their strategies and is as much use the proverbial chocolate teapot. I define CC in a number of different classifications, and this approach can be used to sort out the vendors so that an organisation is more targeted in its definition of CC, or more importantly it can deliver what the organisation expects and wants.

I classify CC in four different ways: Firstly the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which refers to the vendors that offer the servers and storage needed to execute an organisation’s IT needs, IBM and Amazon are the big names in this class; Secondly, the Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors such as Google and Microsoft, where the vendors provide the development environment for organisations to design and build solutions and get them to market quickly; Thirdly, Software as a Service (SaaS), which is probably the best known of the CC offerings where the software is hosted and made available to the customer over the Web, Salesforce.com are the best know vendors; Finally, Build Your Own Cloud (BYOC), which provides the capabilities to do all the above internally based on a vendors underlying technology stack, VMware and Citrix are the biggest players in this market. Another option that is distorting the market even more is the move by vendors such as HP and Dell where they are modifying their tradition hosting services to provide CC.

VMWare moves into the Application Layer

SpringSource aquired by VMWare

I see this as a significant, if risky, move by VMWare. This I believe is a move aimed at its pretentions in the Cloud, and if you want to play in that field beyond the nuts and bolts of the Hypervisor then applications and their portability are significant elements. To that end this is as much a response to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun as it is to Microsoft, but it does move them from being just a pure virtualisation player. I do not believe that SpringSource will be re-branded, or that we will see significant changes immediately, but I anticipate that next year the developer platform will be pushed as the platform for the cloud, success will depend on how MS, IBM, and Oracle respond and how many developers switch to using it, or leave it and focus on .NET, BEA, or Websphere (with BMC acquiring MQ series) that can not be ruled out just yet.

Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008 is a surprisingly diverse product, with some very small new enhancements that could be easily overlooked, and some large high profile additions that Microsoft is certainly not allowing anybody, including the media, to overlook. However, what is the balanced view on Windows Server 2008.
Firstly, it has an inbuilt Hypervisor – a Hypervisor enables the virtualisation of the commodity server hardware so that it can support the execution of multiple Virtual Machines. Hyper-V, as it is known, is not the most technically advanced Hypervisor on the market, that award goes to Vmware, but it is a very good basic Hypervisor with a couple of interesting features: The ability to execute a Xen based Virtual Machine, and the concept of synthetic device drivers – the synthetic device drivers are the new high performance device drivers that are available with Hyper-V, rather than emulating an existing hardware device Microsoft exposes a new hardware device that has been designed for optimal performance in a virtualised environment.
One of the smaller and easier to overlook features of Windows Server 2008 is the ability to have a finer grained password policy, which may sound dull, but consider the IT department that is supporting ‘C’-level executives who do not necessarily have the time, or inclination, to maintain a complex alphanumeric 10 character password that is forced to be changed every 30 days. This finer control allows for these users to have different rules to say a database administrator, which enables IT to ensure that password policies are designed appropriately for the role/purpose of the account.
The other big feature of Windows Server 2008 is the introduction of server core, a stripped down operating system. This according to Microsoft requires up to 40% less patches to be applied, and occupies significantly less disk space than for the full Windows Server 2008. I consider this to be a major advancement, which will enable organisations to install server core on systems such file and print servers, reducing the maintenance required, and hence the operational cost.
Other features that are worthy of a mention at this stage include; role-based installation of features, simplified clustering using the wizard concept, read-only domain controllers, modified boot process that brings the firewall up earlier and so reduces the window of vulnerability, and the use of Network Access Protection (NAP) so a health policy can be set for anything connected to the network.

Moving from Old to New

Many analysts predict the future of IT and we are all talking about what technologies will shape this future, but back in the real world CIOs are trying to deliver a service to their users while using for the most part a mixed bag of technologies.

I believe that many organisations in the next few years will reach a tipping point where they must make the leap and implement new technology, which could create problems for other older technologies; therefore, I think a time will come when organisations think about complete replacement using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach, which will be the beginning of the cloud revolution.

However, do not worry that time is a few years away yet, and in fact may not happen for 10 years, but like the Internet, it is coming so do not bury your head in the sand, be prepared and start planning now for a brave new IT world.

Clouds

Dell raised a petition to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’, but in August the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a ruling that denied the company's claim to the term, but it did leave Dell with the option of appealing.

Over recent weeks a number of high profile announcements about cloud initiatives have circulated, and at first sight this may suggest that cloud computing has broken through from concept to reality in the enterprise, but is this just more hype or are we at the dawn of a new era in computing?
Firstly, the concept of cloud is not universally categorized so all the rhetoric needs to be carefully evaluated; I describe ‘cloud computing’ as the ability to deliver IT as a collection of services to a wide range of customers over the Web. We further refine this definition as either internal – IT within an organization’s firewall making its resources available as a cloud to its customers – or external – where a service provider supplies IT capability to customers via the Internet as either a top-up to existing IT resources, or as a complete solution thereby making the server-less organization a reality.
One of these announcements was that IBM is investing US$300M in 13 new data centres world-wide aimed at providing Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities. This new initiative was described as a cloud computing solution for DR; it provides backups of data on servers that can then be quickly accessed to rapidly restore lost files. This solution can be seen as IBM leveraging its acquisition in 2007 of Arsenal Digital Solutions – a manufacturer of rack-mounted appliances dedicated to business continuity.
However, the IBM announcement uses the term cloud, but does not really deliver a cloud solution; it merely offers a single cloud-based service which I believe represents the current state of the market: that is to say single cloud solutions aimed at particular niche deployments. In July HP, Intel, and Yahoo announced that they are working together to deploy a global test-bed of six data centres for the open development and testing of solutions to the challenges cloud computing will present. This announcement is a larger scale than the Google and IBM announcement of October 2007, where two data centres dedicated to cloud research were being set-up.
I consider the concept of cloud computing to represent the future of how IT will be delivered to its customers, but we believe that many issues remain with cloud computing and applaud the efforts of HP, Intel, Yahoo, IBM, Google, and Microsoft for providing the platforms for developers and researchers to work on the challenges. One of the most fundamental challenges to be how the services and delivery will be managed, and more importantly charged for. This is just one example of the sort of practical questions that come to mind when you start to consider how the cloud concept can be used.

I expect many more announcements of cloud solutions like the IBM DR one will be made over the coming years. This we believe will create confusion in the market similar to that when virtualization first appeared, but as the research turns to solutions the scope of these announcements will increase from single solutions to more enterprise-ready solutions; however, the marketing hype may have already created a high-level of scepticism among end-user organizations that will need to be convinced that the cloud has arrived and is fit for purpose in commercial deployments.

V IS THE WORD

Last week at VMworld Paul Maritz CEO of vmware set out its vision for the future of virtualisation. In his keynote speech he positioned vmware’s approach around three key elements; firstly the concept of a Virtual Data Centre (VDC)-OS, secondly a move towards the concept of vCloud, and finally re-positioning vmware – changing the message from having a server virtualisation heritage to emphasising that it began as a founder of client virtualisation – and launching its vClient initiative. Supporting this vision was a rebranding, with all products/services now being prefixed with a ‘v’.

For many years now the analysts have been calling vmware an OS vendor, but it refused to accept the label arguing that it considered its self a virtualisation vendor, and was not a direct competitor of Microsoft’s, rather a complementary technology. However, the announcement of the VDC-OS demonstrates a move towards a vmainframe computer principal. Effectively, what VDC-OS will enable is for large resource pools to be created from a collection of commodity based hardware, which can consist of storage, servers, or network devices. These large computing resource pools it is argued will provide the scalability needed by organisations to execute a collection of applications that provide a business service as a single Virtual Machine (VM).
The VDC-OS is a framework that has three main components, the interface to the hardware is called vInfrastructure Services, and includes vCompute, vStorage, and vNetwork, which are all capabilities designed to abstract the resources so they can be pooled. The second component is Application vServices, which addresses the changing nature of an applications relationship to an OS. The final component is the management layer, and vmware have renamed Virtual Centre (VC) to vCentre. The VDC-OS represents the evolution of vmware’s Virtual Infrastructure (VI) solution, and it is anticipated that by early 2009 many of the capabilities required to make VDC-OS a reality will be available.
The vCloud initiative consists of three different approaches, the first is a program for service providers that will enable them to construct cloud solutions that can be offered to its customers, secondly it will eventually be a product that enterprises can purchase to construct its own internal cloud, and finally a set of APIs that will allow the on-demand allocation of resources between internal and external clouds to operate. However, I consider that before vCloud becomes widely adopted a number of key issues need to be addressed, not least of which is details on how the services will be licensed and managed.
The last major thread of vmware’s future plans is a shift in emphasis away from server virtualisation towards desktop or client virtualisation with its vClient initiative. The objective is to enable the end-user to connect from any device and receive their personal desktop environment. The main component of this plan is the development of a client side Hypervisor that will be a bare metal Hypervisor and control the protocols used so that the end-user experience is delivered according to what device and what connectivity the user is using.

I believe that vmware has been very bold in making clear how it see’s its future, but has to wonder how much of Paul Maritz key note was aimed at Wall Street and allaying the fears of its investors about future revenue streams; this road map of how it plans to grow the business and deal with the threat of Microsoft’s entry into the market provides that audience with what it needs, but is the technology mature enough to support this radical shift in the data centre.

How Green is your PC

The battle to win the hearts and minds of customers entered another round of ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ style of marketing, as both HP and Dell announced their most recent figures on recycling in the battle to be seen as the most environmentally responsible IT organisation.
This war of marketing, or as I prefer it recycled packaging, began in 2006 when Dell announced a plant a tree for me campaign, and promptly proclaimed itself the environmental warrior of the IT community. The Dell announcement of plant a tree for me said that US$6 per desktop would fund tree planting to cover the carbon emissions the PC would generate over a typical three year life span. I calculated that using an eight hour day and 200 days operational use a year, and providing the PC is switched off when not used in the evening and weekends, then this would equate to approximately 4800 hours of use over the three years. I then used the results from the UK governments Defra report (Defra’s greenhouse gas (GHG) conversion factors for company reporting), which suggests that one should assume an average of 0.43 kg of CO2 emissions per kWh of electrical power consumption, to calculate that a standard 220 Watt PC would emit 454kg of CO2 emissions over the three years, which appears a lot for just US$6 to off set.
This announcement (plant a tree for me) irked HP who have been following a Corporate Social and Environmental Responsible (CSER) agenda, which for many years has embedded Global Citizenship as one of the seven core elements in its corporate objectives. It is also worth noting that HP has been re-cycling products since 1987; it developed the Designed for Environment (DfE) policy in 1992; and entered in to a joint initiative with the World Wildlife Fund US (WWF-US) to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide in 2006.
However, the recent announcement from Dell stated it had extended its leadership in global recycling, announcing it is ahead of schedule to achieve a multi-year goal of recovering 125 million kilograms (about 275 million pounds) of computer equipment by 2009.
Not to be out done HP this week announced it recycled nearly 250 million pounds of hardware and print cartridges globally in its fiscal year 2007 – an increase of approximately 50 percent over the previous year and the equivalent of more than double the weight of the Titanic.
Therefore, as we can see this war of words, and deeds, looks set to continue, and as people become more familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint then expect this to become even more personal in how it is improving your life.
I consider that although this posturing appears targeted at convincing the consumer that the vendor has valid ‘green credentials’, and they are not contributing to the problem of green house gases, but are in fact part of the solution, it is at least driving the environmental debate and forcing other vendors to follow, which can not be a bad thing. Particularly as we are likely to witness an increased demand for even small organisations to report on its carbon emissions, and if you consider that in the example above the PC over the three years if it was not switched off at weekends and the evening would generate a total of 2500kg in CO2. Therefore, any approach to raise the awareness must be applauded if it is helping us to reduce our own carbon footprint.

Virtualisation do not chose for today consider tommorow

Good morning, last week of my 3 month research in to IT strategy, so I have been compiling the report, and cannot share any of my findings until the report is published in September. However, today is final read through on 3 sections, then to complete the glossary, then that is it finished. The report captain will have the task of Quality Checking (QC) the whole document, and must spot any inconsistencies.

The rest of week will be working on my presentation for VMworld in September, so if you are going I will see you there.

Virtualisation Market Hots Up

The whole market in virtualisation is dynamic and as such represents a daunting prospect for many CIOs, who must decide which vendor I go with, and what are the gotchas that the technology has hidden.
My advice is to not look beyond a 3-5 year time frame, as the market is changing rapidly, and a leading vendor today may not be then, or the technology will have changed. You do not want to make a 100% life time choice of Betamax, it was the best technology, but VHS won the battle, so beware consider the value you can get, and build in the cost model a complete replacement of the solution in 5 years. Then review the figures and see if they make sense

Vmware changes at the top

Not much to blog about in terms of my day, it has been heads down writing the report, and will be for the next two weeks.

Vmware ditch the Green agenda

Vmware announced this week that they have voted Dianne Green out as CEO and president, to be replaced by an ex Microsoft and EMC SVP. The key question is why and what does this mean for virtualisation and Vmware in particular.
My view is that Dianne, as nice as she was, was destined to be moved out because Vmware have become increasingly isolated in the virtualisation market, or to be exact they are loosing the marketing war on interoperability of virtualisation. I like most others assumed Dianne would be given time to show how Vmware was going to react to the Microsoft Hyper-V entry to the market.
I guess the vote indicates that the board did not believe her approach would address the issue of increased competition in the market. Her replacement, being from EMC, and an ex Microsoft executive, is an interesting choice, and indicates that EMC is taking a more hands-on approach to Vmware than is visible.
I would expect Vmware to start to be more vocal about its partnerships, and begin to build more open links with the likes of Citrix, Microsoft and others. The virtualisation market is still in a state of flux, and just because Vmware is dominant today, does not mean it will be in three years time. To maintain its lead Vmware must re-invent it’s self, and be the champion of interoperability between hypervisors. By doing this, it will increase the potential market size, and therefore increase its share of the revenues.
An area that remains potentially very fertile is that of desktop virtualisation, in this space Vmware has made some strides, but with Citrix having a massive install base of terminal services customers, Vmware must work hard to build on its brand name.
These are I believe interesting times for Vmware, they have every thing to gain, and every thing to lose, so must walk a certain line if they are to remain the face of virtualisation. What now for Dianne, well I would expect her and some colleagues to begin a new start-up in an adjacent market, and try to once again become a dominant figure on wall street.

A Damp day in Hull

It was a 5 am start to the week, but the rain made it feel more like winter, which takes the pleasure away from the 3 hour drive. A day in the office today, so chance to discuss topics with colleagues and generally update each other on what we are doing. It sparks many different conversations on different topics. The one thing you miss working from home.

CTO or CIO who holds the power

The role of IT is changing and it is moving towards a period of transition to a position where IT is embedded in the organisation, and is managed more locally by the people it is designed to help, but still needs the holistic cross departmental perspective. This transition I believe will be the catalyst for the clarification of the roles of CIO and CTO, which is currently not clearly defined (in fact the organisational structure is very haphazard and examples of the CTO reporting to CIO and visa versa are common). We believe that the office of the CTO should include the architecture, strategy, research and development, and planning operations, while the CIO should be responsible for the delivery of IT as a service to their customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, and be focused on the extraction of business value from the IT resources. The CIO will need to have a voice in the office of the CTO so that operational considerations are taken in to account when designing the architecture in the future.

However, given that the two roles are addressing different needs, and therefore have different agendas, we believe that the current arrangement (as haphazard as it is) is not sustainable in the long term; we consider the two roles need to be separated and not be part of the same department: this would enable the forward looking strategic decisions to be made taking all aspects of organisational needs in to account (IT, people, culture, money and market forces), and operational effectiveness be the prime consideration of the CIO, while the CTO is more focused on the technology and the architecture in particular.

Home sweet home

Working on a report, which means that I do not have much new stuff to add to this site: because the work can not be published until the report has been, and that is not until September.

Working on a report is fun; you get to research a topic in depth, build up a detailed knowledge of a topic, and discover what has been happening in the market. The down side is most of this is done from home, and as such you do not get out and meet people, hence not much to say.

The world in a URL

The opening up of the dot name space, so you can have dot anything (up to 64 characters long) will be a nightmare for brand managers: do they protect all the brands, all the tag lines, and all the possible derivations, which could be thousands, or do they just register the brand name.

This is a risky business, as the brand reputation could be high jacked and destroyed on-line, the alternative is managing and funding all the domain names that could be used to link to the brand. Glad I am not a brand manager.

Chaos rules

Last few days have been mad, I am heads down on the report and to be honest getting stuck on some of the more complex models, but drawing pictures helps.

Yesterday was a write off, I had the dentist, doctors for the kids jabs, British Gas doing an inspection, school. And the day was trashed because the nurse got up late, was behind with her work. That small thing made my whole day one of catch-up, and re-assign appointments. The Journalist were OK, and I made the vendor briefing, but I do not want another day like that.

Hyper-v worth the Hype?


I thought the 2nd August was 180 days for when Hyper-v will be released, but I am picking up noises that suggest it is next month, but I may be wrong on that. Hyper-v is a basic hypervisor, and as such lacks some of the more advanced features that Vmware, Citrix (XENserver), VirtualIron, etc have. I believe that the link up with Citrix demonstrates that Microsoft is going after the SMB sector with Hyper-v and leaving XenServer to complete in the enterprise market with VMware, while it works on making Hyper-v as technically capable as its rivals that is.

Vmware with it price bundles is attempting to move into the SMB space, however, what Vmware provides in terms of capability it lacks is a clear understanding of the market, and how to deliver to the SMB sector. Smaller vendors such as VirtualIron and Parallels have created a good reputation in certain SMB markets, but they lack the funding to raise virtualisation profile. Therefore, I believe that as Microsoft winds up its PR message, this can be used by the smaller vendors to ride on the coat-tails and enjoy more success.

Windows server 2008, is a very good product and I think this will become more widely used as the business case evidence is released to support Microsoft's claims of reduced management time and hence cost savings. As for Vista, well 2008 and Vista desktop is an argument from a support perspective, but with talk of Microsoft seven (vista replacement) due in 2009 time frame I think many may hold fire (if they can), which will mean organisations if their refresh is due in 2009, 2010 will have a dilemma use Vista or stay on XP. Evidence is mixed on this, but I believe Vista will more widely adopted in conjunction with 2008, but not in every case.

Only 6 weeks until the football season starts

After last week when it was one day event after another, this week starts in London, but it is home for nearly two months while I complete a report. I will get the odd day out, but at least I will some work done.

Virtualisation aims at the desktop next

The take-away from the Citrix and Vmware analyst events was they have both woken up to the fact that what the analysts have been saying for the past 12 months plus is coming true. Server virtualisation was full of gotcha’s, and end-users found them out and management vendors were not ready. The result was it stalled and damaged confidence.

However, the rise of desktop and application virtualisation is characterised by other vendors being ahead of the game, and the virtualisation vendors being slow to recognise its value. We will have to wait and see how this battle shapes up, as Citrix have a leading position and it is theirs to lose, but their market is based on the old paradigm, not the new. Therefore, I see this as a more level playing field where the best proposition wins out, and so far Citrix has a good story and Vmware some cool technology. What is needed is the mix of both.

A Damp day in Munich

Munich is overcast; however, Citrix was a very good event. The day was long, especially after a late night. Now it is the dead time, pick-up for the airport is in an hour.

I will get home at 11pm, and then off to Vmware tomorrow for another overnight stop.

Think about image management in a desktop virtualisation world

The big topic that Vmware and other VDI vendors neglect to say is that managing the images and then the patches is an operation that must not be under-estimated, Citrix have a different approach, and it certainly resonates with hard pressed server managers.

Consider the how do I manage and how do I provision and patch the centrally hosted desktop images and applications. This is an area that should be considered, as the value you can obtain from both centrally hosted and managed images, as well as a method of image management provides a double cost saving.

BHX and a coffee, with the internet on the go

Off to visit Citrix today in Germany, so early start to the airport, this is the bit I like the best, short travel to meet vendors with an interesting story to tell.

Windows Server 2008 points the way to Microsoft’s future approach

Windows Server 2008 is a surprisingly diverse product, with some very small new enhancements that could be easily overlooked, and some large high profile additions that Microsoft is certainly not allowing anybody, including the media, to overlook. However, what is the balanced view on Windows Server 2008.
Firstly, it will have by 2 August an inbuilt Hypervisor – a Hypervisor enables the virtualisation of the commodity server hardware so that it can support the execution of multiple Virtual Machines. Hyper-V, as it is known, is not the most technically advanced Hypervisor on the market, that award goes to Vmware, but it is a very good basic Hypervisor with a couple of interesting features: The ability to execute a Xen based Virtual Machine, and the concept of synthetic device drivers – the synthetic device drivers are the new high performance device drivers that are available with Hyper-V, rather than emulating an existing hardware device Microsoft exposes a new hardware device that has been designed for optimal performance in a virtualised environment.
One of the smaller and easier to overlook features of Windows Server 2008 is the ability to have a finer grained password policy, which may sound dull, but consider the IT department that is supporting ‘C’-level executives who do not necessarily have the time, or inclination, to maintain a complex alphanumeric 10 character password that is forced to be changed every 30 days. This finer control allows for these users to have different rules to say a database administrator, which enables IT to ensure that password policies are designed appropriately for the role/purpose of the account.
The other big feature of Windows Server 2008 is the introduction of server core, a stripped down operating system. This according to Microsoft requires up to 40% less patches to be applied, and occupies significantly less disk space than for the full Windows Server 2008. I consider this to be a major advancement, which will enable organisations to install server core on systems such file and print servers, reducing the maintenance required, and hence the operational cost.
Other features that are worthy of a mention at this stage include; role-based installation of features, simplified clustering using the wizard concept, read-only domain controllers, modified boot process that brings the firewall up earlier and so reduces the window of vulnerability, and the use of Network Access Protection (NAP) so a health policy can be set for anything connected to the network.
I consider that unlike its code base cousin, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 actually provides the system administrators with the capabilities needed to make their operational lives easier. I are not predicting a massive up-take for Windows Server 2008 this year, but I believe that as organisations plan to refresh its technology Windows Server 2008 will be selected because it has been designed to make management simpler, and hence reduce operational costs.

Monday morning i feel fine, i have work on my mind?

First day of the week and only day I will be at home this week, a lot of travelling, Munich tomorrow for teo days, then Hampshire for two days, in between I will be home Wednesday night, before leaving for Hampshire in the morning.

Today has four telephone sessions, one with the team, two vendor briefings, and one journalist, then I will finish my last out-line for the report in between.

Virtual Management on the network

An aspect of virtual management that is often overlooked is that of network management, and how this becomes more complex in a virtual network world. Why, because the in a virtual world you are not restricted by the physical connections, so potentially you could create recursive loops, and instead of having network separation, have complete openness.

Friday, Friday the day we all adore, except fish that is

Continuing work on the report, and still doing the out-lines, my aim is to finish them today, but a colleague is ill so I have volunteered to do his duty analyst slot, which fits my plans fine.

I have a call with an end-user today on the report to discuss how they have approached IT strategy, all good background for the report. Do not forget to complete the survey please.

It’s the Network no it’s the Application

Sounds like a playground squabble, well that life in most silo’ed IT departments. This situation has given rise to a new generation of monitoring tools, such as Netscout, they are passive none intrusive, using either port mirroring or passive tapping techniques.

The benefit is that these tools can monitor the packet level transmissions, this level of information is important to understand normal behaviour. The problem with tools has been that they generate vast amounts of data, and it took time to analyse it and make it relevant.

Today, these tools can provide sub-second real-time data, and present this in different ways to match the audience. Therefore, it is not surprising that many telco’s are using these tools to ensure quality of service.

Beware, the benefits are great, but ask what effort is required to set-up and administer the tool once operational, that is where you will find the good tool from the bad.

Typical British climate, hot one day, wet and cold the next

Continuing work on the report, and still doing the out-lines, my aim is to finish them this week, as next week I am out so my boss can have time to send me comments.

On a wet dull day working from home when nobody is here does take the shine off it, but the work output will increase so it is swings and round-abouts.

EA or IT Strategy which came first

One question that appears to be the cause of much debate on the discussion forums and twitter is what role EA plays in an IT strategy. The proponents argue that it either defines the strategy, or is defined by the strategy.

However, if you examine the process of strategy as it relates to IT, then it becomes clear that EA is a component part in this process. That is to say, it works in conjunction with the strategy development process, and does not define the strategy, or is defined by the strategy. The role of EA is to translate the business strategic imperative into an IT architecture, an IT strategy considers more than just the architecture, as organisations, and strategies, are constructed from a combination of people, process and technology.

Therefore, neither came first, they are twins hatched from the same egg.

Webinars save the planet, but do not meet the speakers needs

The day has started bad, I was getting ready for a speaking engagement in front of a couple of thousand people in Orlando, but the vendor has decided to cancel the conference, and replace it with a Webinar. I hate doing presentations when I can not see the audience, you just do not know how it is being received.

Anyway today is day two of the report, more out-lines to produce and get approved.

The Virtual Desktop will it happen

The death of the desktop PC has been predicted by many in our industry for years, but we still have millions of them in use all over the world, and with the cost of the hardware falling the economics look like keeping the status quo.

However, as the world goes more mobile, and the devices used require less local processing power the need for smaller intelligent devices that can connect to the data sources and applications will increase. This will be the point that organisations look at the value of the desktop in terms of how does it fit my business model.