Mark Vaughn's Weblog

Around 5 years of age, desktop computers may begin to lack the processing power required to meet the ever-growing demands of operating systems and applications. By this point, many people are looking to swap out desktops. With Windows XP finally reaching it’s final end-of-support date, a lot of organizations are finding themselves with a large number of desktops that are unable to upgrade to Windows 7, due to the age of the hardware.

This was the situation for one of my first VDI projects. Almost 4 years ago, a school district was facing a required hardware refresh to move to Windows 7. This was a requirement for some of their curriculum, and they had thousands of desktops that were over 7 years old and could not be upgraded. However, using VMware View as a VDI solution, they were able to repurpose those old PCs as VDI end points. Their preferred endpoint is a Teradici-based zero client, as they are easier to manage and offer improved management. However, the plan was to use zero clients for all new purchases and to replace the existing desktops through attrition.

They were early adopters in education, and had a very savvy IT group that was up for the challenge. Today, I received a report from this customer that wanted to show off how VDI was allowing them to reach outrageous lifespans on their old PCs. When I saw these numbers, I just had to share them. These are the numbers that make VDI work, and why I love working with VDI technologies.

With over 5,000 desktops in the district, 57% are between 6 and 9 years old. Many of these do not meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7, yet they run it on a daily basis. But what’s more impressive is the fact that 32% of their desktops are over 10 years old and still in use to serve up Windows 7 desktops on a daily basis.

Wow, talk about return on investment! Our initial ROI analysis assumed that almost all of these desktops would have already been upgraded to zero clients by now. Ever year they are able to delay that, they are leaving money in the budget for other projects.

A strategy that was meant to delay desktop replacements for a year, to offset the costs of the initial VDI environment, has paid off better than we could have imagined. We have a happy customer, and their technology department has been able to improve the educational tools within their district while lowering costs. #winning

I have always liked blade servers, since I first began deploying blades on HP platforms. Then, when I was introduced to Cisco UCS blades, I saw that the data center world was being reinvented. In fact, when I left the corporate world for consulting, being able to work with UCS was one of my requirements. Not to knock other blade platforms, I just saw something truly innovative in UCS and wanted to be associated with that kind of technology.

Now, some years later, I have come across a new innovation that is causing me to look back at rack mount servers…while I wait for blade manufacturers to adjust to this new trend. The trend is one of grouping local storage together into a centralized and highly available storage pool. There are many options to achieve this, and I discuss this further in my recent TechTarget article “Cutting the other direction: Why blade servers are losing their appeal“.

To be clear, I am not turning my back to blade servers. Blades are still my preferred platform. However, I see this new storage trend as one that can take off, and blades will need to hold more than two hard drives to play in that world.

As always, please come back here and leave any comments on the article. I look forward to the conversation.

With a graduate degree in business, and 20 years of experience in IT, I am often frustrated to see these two organizations at odds with one another. While it is nearly impossible to conduct business, today, without IT…IT does not exist just to make pretty lights blink in the data center. IT exists to serve the business and to ultimately aid the business in achieving their goals. These should be complimentary goals, not contrary ones.

For the IT strategists and engineers that “get” this concept, there are two core technologies that you need to be exploring. The first is automation, and the second is orchestration. Automation will make routing processes more reliable and their outcomes more predictable. Automation is not easy. It can often be much more difficult to automate a task then to simply execute the steps individually, but the outcome is more valuable.

The second concept, orchestration, is where IT and the business meet. With orchestration, you add intelligence to automation, allowing tasks to be triggered by predefined conditions. These can be technological conditions or even business conditions.

To end 2013, I wrote a two part series on these topics for TechTarget. The first article is “Car assembly plants can teach a valuable lesson in IT automation“, dealing with automation and a great experience I had at a GM plant. The second article is “IT orchestration can help bridge gaps to unite divided business units“, building on the previous work on automation.

I hop that you will take a minute to read these articles, and then come back here and leave a comment to let me know what you think.

In my 20+ years in technology, I spend roughly 16 as a customer and the last 4 as a consultant. Those can be two very different roles, while dealing with very similar challenges and solutions. However, they do not have to bee that different. If you know what to look for, you can find consultants that are focused on your business, and not just their technology.

Have you ever heard the term “seagull consultant”? It is a humorous term, but one that can be outright terrifying for your business. To learn more about this term, and how to select the right consultant for your business, read my latest TechTarget article “Meeting long-term business goals, avoiding seagull consultants“. If you would like, feel free to come back here and leave a comment. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

VMware first announced its concept of the virtual data center operating system (VDC-OS) at VMworld 2008. Paul Maritz, VMware Inc.’s CEO at the time, took the stage and began to share his vision of a software-defined data center. Maritz is no longer in the driver’s seat, but this destination of a virtual data center operating system and the software-defined data center is finally coming into view.

At VMworld 2013, the concept of a VDC OS took two big steps forward. Learn more about this in my latest TechTarget article “Not lost, just recalculating: VMware’s route to a VDC-OS has been long“, then come back here and leave a comment.

Not all hypervisors have reached a level of parity in features, functionality and performance (regardless of what some marketing campaigns might say). However, the virtualization heavyweights are beginning to see real competition, and they realize that the gaps between the leading hypervisors are closing quickly. Given these narrowing feature gaps, how will we compare hypervisors in the future?

As the hypervisor battle evens out, I foresee a kind of stalemate. Vendors will struggle to differentiate their products from the competition, and the short attention span of IT pros will move to areas that provide greater value.

What can this mean for your organization and your long-term IT strategies? For more on this topic, read my TechTarget article “As feature gaps narrow, how will we compare hypervisors in the future?“.

There is a lot of talk about the software-defined data center lately, though the shift from hardware to software has been going on since the first logical partitions appeared in mainframe computing. Surprisingly, this shift continues to sneak up on people. When that happens, there can be power struggles and confusion as to who’s responsible for what. Many technology disciplines — networking teams, for example — still see themselves as focused on managing hardware rather than software and fail to see that virtualization has moved us beyond these distinctions.

What a networking device does, it’s core functionality, has been abstracted and is taking a new form…but will network administrators embrace this change? I go into more detail on this topic in my latest TechTarget article “Virtualization widens schism between server and networking teams“. Please take a minute to read that, then come back here and tell me what you think.

In these times of lean staffing budgets, some IT professionals are hesitant of diving too deep into a new automation tool, worried they could actually automate themselves out of a job.

I came into technology as a Perl programmer and UNIX administrator. I spent years writingcommon gateway interfaces for websites and automating routine tasks. As I moved along in my career, the ability to script and automate tasks was one of my top priorities when interviewing prospective employees. In my opinion, the ability to leverage an automation tool is a sign of a mature engineer. So why are so many people hesitant to embrace automation tools?

An automation tool can be anything from a scripting language to an application that allows you to build a workflow of tasks to be executed as a single action. Some tools are easy to learn, and others are a little more daunting to master. However, it may not be the learning curve that keeps many people from leveraging these tools. While some may simply not appreciate thevalue of automation, others are truly apprehensive about the end result. Some fear that if they can do their job in half the time, they or one of their co-workers may no longer be necessary. That could not be further from the truth.

I cannot remember anyone automating themselves out of a job. Gaining valuable skills only makes you more valuable, not less. I love this topic, and I take a deeper look at it in my article “Don’t fear an automation tool — it may be your best bet at job security“.

Virtualization transformed data centers and restructured the IT hardware market. In this time of change, startups seized the opportunity to carve out a niche for products like virtualization-specific storage. But are these newcomers like Nutanix and Fusion-io here to stay or will they struggle to compete as established companies catch up with storage innovations of their own?

For a long time, it appeared storage vendors were growing complacent. A few interesting features would pop up from time to time, and performance was steadily improving, but there were few exciting breakthroughs. Users weren’t demanding new features, and vendors weren’t making it a priority to deliver storage innovations. Virtualization changed that tired routine.

In many ways, now, it is storage vendors that are knocking down technology walls and enabling new technologies to flourish. I discuss this topic more in my TechTarget article “Virtualization storage innovations challenge market leaders“. Please give it a read and come back here to leave any comments.

Several years ago, server virtualization rolled into the data center with all of the outrageous promises and unbelievable claims of a sideshow barker. Experts and vendors claimed it was going to improve server efficiency, shrink your infrastructure, slash bloated power bills, make cumbersome administrative tasks disappear and cure the common cold. The sales pitch was smooth and we all bought in, but has virtualization fulfilled the promises?

Did your infrastructure shrink when you implemented virtualization?

I want to hear more from you about this. Take a minute to read my TechTarget article “Virtualization improved server efficiency, but did it meet the hype?“, then come back here and contribute to the conversation.