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Monday, March 03, 2008 6:02 PM/EST
Aside from VKernel, I'm not seeing a lot of choice for IT managers who want to enable chargeback for virtual infrastructure costs. However, I met today with virtual test lab management toolmaker Surgient and got a little more insight into some ways IT managers might think about chargeback. Erik Josowitz, a VP at Surgient, suggested that quantifying RAM and time might be a good way to measure the amount of resources a VM is using, and therefore could be a good way to charge departments for virtual computing resources. Other resources to measure could be VLAN, IP address and MAC address consumed. I suggested network bandwidth, but agreed with Erik that the incremental use cost for bandwidth was so small as to be negligible when compared to the other metrics he suggested. What is clear is that VM infrastructure is paying for itself through hardware consolidation and power reductions. It's...
Monday, February 25, 2008 6:51 PM/EST
Novell announced today (Feb. 25) that it was acquiring PlateSpin, a data center virtualization management tool maker. As I've been covering how to prevent virtual machine sprawl, I'm interested in getting a look at what PlateSpin brings to the table, in particular the PowerRecon and PowerConvert products that enable virtual machine chargeback and usage accounting and workload portability between networked physical resources. In my tech analysis of how to prevent virtual machine sprawl, I reported that Ziff Davis Enterprise Editorial Research had found that 80 percent of respondents said lowering hardware costs was their top virtualization driver. I suggested in the story that controlling virtual machine management costs would rise in importance after the physical-to-virtual ("p2v") transition was complete. I suspect that products like those made by PlateSpin and strategies such as Novell's drive to monitor and manage multiplatform virtualized environments will quickly become the important factors in determining the...
Thursday, February 21, 2008 7:56 PM/EST
I've just returned from the Emerald City (Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ) where I was given a demo of the latest version of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, Release 4. After reviewing Oracle Database 11g I felt it was time to take a look at Grid Control R4, released in November 2007. I was just able to scratch the surface of the Oracle ecosystem manager in the over 3 hours of demonstration time. My basic takeaway is that database and system administrators should definitely get the basic Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control R4 product, which is available at no extra license cost with most Oracle products. I'll take a closer look at the add-on management packs that Oracle charges for when I take a full look at the product. In most respects, the basic shape of Grid Control R4 is comprehensive systems and application management. The three-tier architecture uses agents...
Thursday, December 27, 2007 2:06 PM/EST
Today I learned a bit more about the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance from Pinkesh Shah, senior director of product management for policy compliance and risk management. From the conversation I picked up on two important concepts that will likely be a recurring theme for security in 2008. The first is deeper integration of the products that make up McAfee's security suite and more integration through partnerships, which is where the McAfee SIA (Security Innovation Alliance) comes in. The second is security infrastructure consolidation. In 2008 I'm planning on a closer look at McAfee's SIA, which is similar to Check Point's Opsec program. One of the compelling things about an integration program is the obvious benefit of being able to integrate competitive products into the McAfee infrastructure. SIA was launched in Oct. 2007, so the first half of 2008 will be a critical time to watch what happens with the offering....
Friday, December 14, 2007 6:55 PM/EST
In my upcoming review of nCircle's Device Profiler 3000 (DP3000), I was reminded of how much overlap there is between compliance regulations. In a nutshell, the DP3000 is a scanning engine (it uses Nmap, for example) that collects configuration data from servers, network devices and applications and then forwards that information back to the central console called the Compliance Configuration Manager. (This product is the result of nCircle's acquisition of Cambia in May 2007.) The data collected by the DP3000 is concentrated at the CCM and then spit out in the form of reports, dashboards and monitors that show what's changing in the IT environment and what impact that's having on compliance posture. Reports issued by the product enable an IT staff to make sure out-of-compliance objects are prioritized and brought back into compliance while the senior IT staff gets big-picture reports that provide an overall idea of how the...
Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:00 PM/EST
Hosted applications, including Salesforce.com, make sense if they get enough customers to buy in. The ability to "socialize" -- or spread out the costs of a top notch data center including security, availability and scalability among a large group -- makes business sense. But now I'm wondering if it would be a better idea to aggregate these hosted services so that enterprises could consolidate access to the growing variety of hosted apps and services. I started thinking about this after attending a Dreamforce session on integrating Google Adwords with Salesforce.com to process leads. Salesforce.com users can get a lot of specific information about leads that come from Google Adwords. Leads that come from Yahoo or Ask are logged as coming from those search engines and also what words resulted in the search, but that's about it. In other words, it makes a difference which hosted services you use if you...
Monday, July 23, 2007 6:22 PM/EST
HP announced today announced it's acquisition of Opsware, gaining a number of products that appear to have considerable overlap with existing HP offerings. Enterprise Management Institute analyst Andi Mann suggested to me that Opsware offers a server and network management component that compliments HP's network management prowess. We'll get a better picture of product and service offerings coming out of the acquisition over the next several months. I'll be watching to see what products are axed, which are integrated and which ones remain as distinct offerings in the HP product and service realm. I think the interesting areas will be in the integration of change management systems that the two companies offer. Another area that I'll be interested in see product development work is in seeing how well the data center server management tools are integrated. If you're working at a company that uses Opsware and you have insights or...
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