I have read several articles recently that spell out the pros and cons associated with Software as a Service Cloud based offerings. In most cases, they will call out the challenge of integrating applications as a major con. Last week, I was witness to an example that spells out the ADVANTAGES of integration within a cloud model. For those not familiar with salesforce.com, it is a multi-tenet SAAS based CRM application. It includes contact management, opportunity management, and other marketing features. Recently they acquired Jigsaw. Jigsaw is a marketing firm focused on acquiring, cleansing and distributing contact information for use in marketing campaigns.

Here is where the integration gets interesting. In a traditional on premise environment, companies would install a CRM system, buy lists, import them and then develop a staff of people to manage this database. All of this, while the sales team is making a mess of the database. In the new salesforce.com/jigsaw world, this is managed within the cloud. Here’s how….

Last week, our Jigsaw sales rep offered to do an analysis of our contact database and compare this to their master records database. The result showed significant gaps on our end. Their resulting offer, is to simply provide a service which will allow our database to grow/cleanse as theirs does on a regular basis. Of course there is a fee for this service, however, compare that to the costs of acquiring data, and managing this with full time resources and infrastructure.

salesforce.com has clearly recognized the power and value of integration. Integration to Google Apps is standard with their offering. I am sure that we will see more examples of this as this market matures. So I challenge you to debunk the integration myth with cloud, and look for opportunity to leverage this.

Here in Dallas, every single day in August, so far, has hit 100 degrees.  The extended forecast for the next 10 days shows no change.  My lawn, despite regular watering, is starting to brown.   The heat is a total beat down.  No escape.   It’s hard to want to do much more than stay inside (avoid), go to Colorado (run away), or hit the pool (relief, albeit relative with water temps over 90degrees 24X7).

I’m not sure if any of those are really solutions to the problem of it being hot.  There may not be a solution to this problem; I live here, I choose to live here, I deal with it.

When I wrote last, about the successful approach to a desktop virtualization project, I made the case that you would need a good solid target user group for this project.  That remains important.  But as we do more of these client analysis (looking into ROI of VDI), there’s another critical success factor that needs to be addressed.   Nothing crazy, but a consistent observation.

If you have good, consistent, desktop management skills, practices, people, and process that you really do follow, you will be successful with the virtualization of your desktops or their applications.

If you think that a VDI project will solve your problems of desktop management, touches, or allow you to better manage your infrastructure – and you don’t have a good process or management in place – you will be wrong.  You will spend a lot of money.  You will be unhappy.  People will also mock you.  Maybe not to your face, but at dinner with their family you will be discussed.

Summer’s a good time to lay down your tracks.  Critically review your operations to see if you are a best practice poster child for application management and deployment to and of desktops.  Do you adhere to solid and consistent promotion processes (test, QA, production)?  Do you practice rolling back what you just pushed?  Do you follow the same process for all of your user communities?  Have you reduced the number of images you manage to three or less?  Do you make exceptions?  Every month?  And justify working around your process ‘for security reasons’?  You may be off the tracks.

It’s hot.  You can avoid, run away, or find relief from the heat.  But it takes effort and planning.  The heat makes it hard to make the effort.  Fight through it and make the effort now to lay down tracks that you can follow, regardless of the heat.  Everyone will enjoy dinner, too.

Recently we have seen a lot of evidence from our clients and prospects that they purchase storage based on outdated paradigms. More specifically, we found that many purchased simply because they believed they needed a certain level of performance or functionality that could only be delivered from their existing technology, or the system that offers the longest list of features and “yes” responses on the RFP response.

This pattern of behavior has initiated a series of discussions within our company that have lead to additional exploration on how and why companies do what they do…

I have been in the IT business for more than 25 years, and have been responsible for selling storage solutions for just shy of 13 years. I have sold enterprise storage to household name companies, and while I wouldn’t say I oversold them, I would believe that looking back, many of those companies could have satisfied their needs with much less than the stereotypical “refrigerator” storage device.

Think about this for a minute: We all have home and personal email accounts, and smartphones capable of sending and receiving texts and photos. These are some of the technologies and luxuries that have lead to the explosion of data growth. Where do you think all of that data is stored? On rows and rows and rows of refrigerator sized enterprise storage units? …Unlikely. No business could sustain that cost of ownership model, nor could they “sell” that level of service to end users.

Chances are (if you had access), in the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and the like, you’d find “rack and stack” storage as far as you can see. But why is that?

Because it’s – dare I say it – good enough, fast enough, and reliable enough.  Thank you, Stuart Smalley.

I am not advocating dumping enterprise storage altogether, I’m simply saying that when the time comes to buy, try Rightstoring your enterprise.

RightStor is what we call the process of identifying the most efficient and cost effective location for storage and protection of your corporate data.

It’s not a revolutionary concept by any means, and it has its basis in Information Lifecycle Management, but so many still ignore it at the time to buy. RightStor is a commitment to slow down, and take in what is available and match that to what is truly needed – and what is affordable. When capacity becomes an issue, we take our clients through the needs analysis, and we also have a candid discussion about history – in order to determine the best solution going forward.

As I stated in a prior posting about interoperability, options abound in the storage marketplace, and I would bet that many of those companies who invested in million dollar systems to deliver mid – six digit IOP performance to their enterprise would love to have some of that money back when they realized that after three years, they never came close to needing that afterall. That’s a lot of wasted expense, but shame on… who? The seller… or the buyer?

This past month I’ve had the opportunity to create various Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models for our prospective clients.  In creating them, I realized that the gap between learning about the potential in savings versus the gap in executing is a function of where the project lies in the priorities of the organization.  In other words, yeah the savings look great but there are more compelling projects ahead of it.  Nothing new here, it has always been that way.

So that got me thinking, if the TCO savings are clearly evident – enough to justify execution in any economic environment – but the ability for the organization to act on the savings is limited and the current environment “works”, what can we do to overcome that gap?  Being a new Google Apps reseller, this kind of situation will most likely be the single largest inhibitor in our clients executing on going Google.

When we researched what information was out there for clients switching to new messaging environments, we found a couple of sites as well as  some compelling information from the CIO for the City of Orlando, Conrad Cross.  Arming ourselves with that information, we created our own TCO site – http://www.googtco.com – that not only allows our prospective clients the ability to create their TCO for their current messaging environment, it educates them on why they would want to make the move.

Our next TCO project will be around storage.  This area will be equally compelling given the advent of new optimization technologies in enterprise data storage.

I had the opportunity to attend the Government focused Texas Technology Forum in Fort Worth last week. While the big hit was definitely the brilliance of Dan Thurmon juggling swords on a 10 foot unicycle, the true buzz of the event was around Cloud Computing in Government. The majority of the breakout and keynote sessions revolved around this topic in some form or fashion. The technology leaders in our public sector for the majority, are open to leveraging cloud to more effectively utilize their budget and reduce IT expenses. Conrad Cross (CIO of the City of Orlando) discussed his deployment of Google Apps which resulted in significant expense savings for Orlando. Conrad is not alone, many of our local municipalities are interested in this approach to email. Some have even deployed with similar satisfaction. Don’t take it from me or Conrad, take a look at the Forrester research on the topic…http://www.googtco.com/benefits/cost-savings

Sure, there was some debate on the topic around security and compliance etc. If you have not taken the time to fully understand how Google and other SAAS providers have accounted for this, you owe it to yourself to do so. I suggest this whitepaper as a great example. http://www.googtco.com/benefits/security-reliability.

In the end, all systems (in house or public cloud), are tied to the global network in some form or fashion, so the real question we should ask ourselves is, “How solid is our security and DR plan compared to a company that does this for a living like Google”?

Ok, so maybe desktop virtualization is for you, maybe it isn’t. Here at Cima we continue to have a lot of interest in our engagements that evaluate desktop projects. I tend to think that a good desktop project has five (5) phases:

1. Problem Statement – what is the problem that a desktop project would address?
2. Business Case – is there a generic (non-solution specific) business case for your organization? This is a value statement associated   with solving the problem (why solve the problem in the Problem Statement)?
3. Requirements – what are your general solution requirements? An associated part of this (call it 3 a., typically, is what Solutions meet my requirements),
4. POC – proving the technical viability of the solution(s) that meet requirements, and
5. Deployment and management of the solution.

The problem statement is easy for every organization to come up with (it takes a lot of IT resources and time to manage desktops). The generic business case is usually there, but as I wrote in May, usually less compelling than other, more boring projects like improving enterprise storage back up. The Requirements phase is where we start to see differentiation across our client’s needs – the need to develop and look at specific use cases is where we start to see value in desktop virtualization projects. Proving the solution works is critical, hence the POC should be conducted to validate assumptions. The POC also provides an opportunity to hone the business case to the specific use cases and the selected solution. Deployment and management, natural parts of any successful project plan, and come after evaluation phases (1-4) are completed.

If there’s a breakdown in the value of desktop virtualization, it’s in the requirements phase. We see many customers interested in “VDI” so they can eliminate the “IT management” headache associated with those remote touches, conflicts within the application stack, and general deployment management.

With a VDI project can you expect to eliminate all of your desktops? Can you shove all those apps that run on the PC into the data center? I didn’t think so.

Your requirements are going to be specific to a set of users, a set of applications – in short, a use case or two or six. And when your use case(s) start(s) to get limited, so does your ROI.  Remember, you’re going to bring in another tool (the VDI tool set), train support staff (sys admins), and – oh my gosh !!! – complicate – yes, I said it, complicate – your IT environment because you now have ‘something else’ to manage.

It still can make sense to do it. You just have to understand that desktop virtualization is a complicated (I said it again) ROI to nail down.

Making a storage selection decision is never easy, but the good news is that while the feature / function matrix can appear to complicate things, assuming the requirements are addressed, the actual decision on what supplier to select should actually be a bit simpler than it was only a few years ago.

In the past, one established a relationship with a particular supplier, and you agreed to walk hand in hand with one another until one of you did something taboo to the relationship. Today, however, I am finding far fewer clients with those kinds of relationships. The result is that more companies are finding themselves out in the market looking for a storage solution they hope will integrate with what they have.

Fear not, for I bring you tidings of great joy: Interoperability is a reality. It’s called Storage Virtualization.

Interoperability technologies have matured to the point where one should feel comfortable having disparate storage devices comprise an enterprise data repository.  Having one supplier in the production data center and another at the DR site keeps everyone on their toes, and can help keep your costs down by introducing competition and the opportunity to remove platform-specific licensing from the financial picture.

For those of you that would argue storage management costs would increase due to supporting multiple storage platforms, I am suggesting a level of “common management” – either hardware or software, making the physical disk storage platforms themselves somewhat of a non-issue. If you take away a supplier’s “works only with my storage” capability, then you’re doing the equivalent of what the Philistines did to Samson by cutting his hair.

Storage Virtualization allows for not only interoperability, but also centralized control. Performance and feature/function advantages can also be introduced to aging – or even JBOD storage by extracting those capabilities from the arrays and allowing an external model perform the heavy lifting.

There are many options available today to support this proposition.

IBM has had the SAN Volume Controller for more than seven years now, and it has been extremely successful at making apples, oranges and bananas all talk together like one happy fruit salad – whether sitting in a single bowl or in two different kitchens altogether. There are nearly 5,000 clients using it today.

FalconStor has a similar capability with their NSS product, and they add a twist by including storage as an integrated option in the NSS appliance model (as opposed to the gateway model, which is more like IBM’s SVC). One advantage to the NSS is the IP-based replication capability which keeps DR expenses down.

There are countless software solutions, including companies like DataCore that can promise – and deliver – similar results with capabilities that most companies could use to keep their storage hardware suppliers on full alert. DataCore’s initial offering was one that attracted the attention of some bigger names in the storage business, and helped them see the value – and future – for storage virtualization.

So why don’t companies jump on this stuff? Is it due to crafty sales people preaching gloom and doom if their clients veer from the plan to simply order some more of what they were sold last time?

Probably.

I know not every supplier has a solution like this. I know of one in particular who has had a few “less than successful” attempts (you know who you are) at virtualizing storage from other manufacturers, and maybe that’s what’s keeping some folks from looking at it. Until the biggest of the big gets it, there’s no sense in looking at it… right?

Wrong.

The market has changed and smaller companies – often considered niche players – have surfaced with game changing features and functions, and nimble support organizations ready to impress even the most stubborn prospect. Those companies are more than willing to be a participant in a storage virtualization plan because they are betting on the odds that you’ll find their capabilities and support rival those of your incumbent supplier . It is a no-lose proposition for them.

Please don’t misunderstand the message here. I am not against having supplier consistency. I’m simply stating that many companies remain unaware that they do have options, and there is no need to simply call up Lou the Storage Salesman and order more of what they already have.

Try it. Let me know how you like it.

On Tuesday of last week, I had the great opportunity to spend time with some of Austin’s up and coming technology developers at the Door64 annual techfair. Cima Solutions Group hosted a booth there jointly with our good friends and business partner – Virtual Bridges. If you have not heard of Virtual Bridges, check them out at http://vbridges.com/wp/.

Their Verde product is truly a leading edge approach to desktop virtualization. Most of you will think VMware, Citrix, Microsoft. However, I challenge you to look at a company that actually developed in order to deliver virtual desktops, not virtual servers. There are two key differentiators behind the Verde solution: 1) Built for up to 100 desktops per server compared to the sub 10 figure offered by well known providers, and 2) Mobility.

Number two is the one that got me thinking beyond traditional use cases for VDI (call centers). When I say mobility, I mean that a user of this product can house/access their desktop from a myriad of devices. PC, Laptop, Thin Client, USB Flash drive, and yes…an iPAD. It has taken me months to truly grasp the value of an iPAD. Don’t get me wrong, I love gadgets, but i like gadgets based on the fact that they allow me to consolidate and simplify. If I have a laptop and an Android phone. Why do I need something in the middle? After attending this conference with Virtual Bridges, the light came on. I can replace not only my laptop, but also my trusty leather binder with my notebook in it. The iPad will suffice brilliantly as a replacement for the spiral notebook (with a few extra features). And with access to my common desktop, I no longer see the need for bringing my laptop on trips.

Reflecting back on my many trips to Armonk, NY while at IBM, and trying to get through security with with my laptop , I would have loved a more mobile option such as a pen with a USB flashdrive in it housing my desktop which I could access from anywhere. I know this is far fetched, but isn’t that what Austin is all about? Twitter was born out of Austin. I’m sure it seemed far fetched that it would amount to anything, but tell that to Justin Halpern. All he did was start tweeting S–t his dad says. 2 million followers later, he has a sitcom and the number one selling book on the New York Times. If you have not heard of him, go take a look – hilarious.

The leaders in innovation are in Austin. If you continue to think about the app developers and cloud computing as a flash in the pan, you are missing the true business value that is buried in these technologies. I encourage each of you to think about how the fun little apps you are downloading on a Saturday night might just morph into cost savings for your company.

Oh, and yes, I do own a pen with a USB flashdrive in it. Love my gadgets.

Regardless how “low” disk hardware pricing may be trending, there appears to be a renewed emphasis in driving it even lower through added attention on effective tiering of data within the storage infrastructure.

I am old enough to remember the days when there were relatively few choices.  The disks were physically large and by today’s terms, the capacities were relatively small.  If you really needed it, a full string of disks meant “…That wall has to go…”

Once storage moved from the Henry Ford model, as it were, companies started trying to squeeze every penny out of the disk storage expenditure – moving to two, then three, and now we find there are companies creating as many as five different tiers through the use of Solid State, Fibre Channel, SATA, FATA and SAS disks.  Some are even including tape as an active tier in their infrastructures.

I believe the concept of tiering is in some part simply the result of Data Center Managers looking at their once pristine – and empty – raised floors and asking “Where did all these fibre channel disks come from?”  All those years of not thoroughly understanding the demands of the business caused them to play it safe by buying too many – too small – too expensive disks, simply because no one wanted to be the on the other end of the accusations that the system may be underperforming.

The solution became to buy a mix of disks, and assign names like Gold, Silver, and Bronze, and then take a guess at what data should go where.  If you were lucky, you got it right – but the odds were probably against you from the start.

There is a point to which the savings that are generated through tiering are spent through the management of excessive levels of tiering.   When it comes to tiering, keep it simple:  Two tiers of disks should be plenty.

If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself if you’re truly stressing the performance of your subsystem.   Chances are, you could be buying larger capacity, lower cost disks – and perform just fine for the majority of application needs.  If you’re not pushing the upper limits of the subsystem performance, then trying to squeeze out a few dozen more IOPS per disk doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Take IBM’s XIV Storage:  the design of XIV effectively says “if I can give you Tier 1 performance using Tier 3 disks, then why do you need to worry about tiering at all?”

Good point.

The parallelization of SATA disks in the XIV storage seems to be working, as XIV is a hot seller, and a rock solid platform – in spite of the efforts of the naysayers who claim SATA disks can’t be trusted for Tier 1, critical enterprise applications.  Users simply store the data on the XIV, and the system spreads it out across all of the spindles that are available, much like water poured into a vessel will occupy the entire width of the vessel itself, before it fills up.

Another strategy that seems to be working is the one used by Compellent.  Rather than assigning individual volumes to tiers, Compellent’s Fluid Data ™ architecture monitors the activity of the individual data blocks, and moves the inactive data to lower cost, larger capacity drives.

In a given database, there are bound to be data blocks that are accessed more frequently than other data blocks.  If that is the case, then why put the entire database itself onto a more expensive disk tier if the majority of it is simply going to just “sit there”?

Compellent’s offers a hands-off design to storage management, allowing the subsystem to manage itself using predefined policies.  What’s more – it works even if the system has only one disk size, since data blocks can be stored using different parity levels on the same set of disks.

So while many technologies seem to be holding fast to the idea of segregating data to a specific disk capacity and speed in a dedicated enclosure, XIV and Compellent are taking on the tiering challenge by allowing the technology to do the work – removing the human element – and by doing so, they’re showing their customers the real way to save money through tiering.  …Without tears.

Cima has been seeing a lot of interest in Desktop Virtualization (we’ll try to clarify terms in a minute) and, as an organization, we’ve taken a strong interest in helping evaluate this toolset for our clients.

As with everything that we do, we look to ground our recommendations and analysis in sound business value.  Desktop Virtualization is interesting because:

1. Like a fast food value menu, “Everyone” seems to be looking at it, and everyone has an offering
2. It means different things to different people, (so, it’s confusing) and
3. From our analysis, the business value is not often as compelling as ‘everyone’ wants it to be.

So, let’s start with who’s looking at it.  We conducted a survey of mid-market clients several months ago, asking them about initiatives that mattered to them now.  Almost one-third (31%) of the respondents indicated that Desktop Virtualization was important to them…the most important thing, in fact.   Interestingly, however, twice that amount (70%) indicated that the more mundane task of improving ‘back ups’ was most important to them now.  That seems to fit with the typical IT management priority associated with having to take care of existing stuff while wanting to be able to get to new stuff.

We’ve also seen that desktop virtualization means different things to different people (and, different things within a single organization).  I think it means separating (abstracting) the (physical) computing resource from the user.  I don’t know about whether or not you need a desktop, re-use your old desktop, have a thin client, move to an i-pad or connect through a toaster.  We can argue about what it means, but where ever you land on what it means, there are solutions that fit your model as well as mine.

What I’m beginning to think is the promise of “desktop virtualization” lies in making the applications themselves virtual  – the application virtualization part of desktop virtualization and not the VDI part (PC, thin client, i-pad, toaster)  seems, at least to me, to be more liberating, more valuable, and more enabling.

Cima makes it a point to find and deliver business value in the reliable solutions we recommend and deploy.  So far, and maybe tied to that research I mentioned above, we’re finding that in most cases clients get more value (business, financial value) in the mundane task of improving their operations  -stuff like making ‘back ups’ more efficient,  driving density into their virtualized server environment, or even looking at how to virtualize storage.

I’m not saying that desktop virtualization doesn’t make sense.  I’m saying it needs to make business sense for you to go do it – and that’s the question our clients are asking; “Does VDI make sense for me”?