How Is The Economy Driving IT Consolidation?

There's been plenty of news on the state of the economy and how it's affecting everything from the length of the work week to the ability to travel, even Steven Colbert has been forced to make some changes.

It's been said, though, that it's always a recession in IT Operations. Companies look to the advantages technologies like mobile and remote access, unified communications, virtualization and IT consolidation as ways to reduce cost while keeping - and in many cases, expanding - functionality.

So what are your peers doing to keep IT budgets in check and save their organizations money during this financial tumult?  I'm looking to our research panel to find out. We're currently in the process of fielding a panel survey to assess the measures organizations are taking to reduce costs and make and I'd like you to participate. While this research is in the field, joining our research panel gives you the opportunity to share your best practices, a link to join is here:

Join Our Research Panel!

All of the responses will be anonymous and will be aggregated. You give a little and get a lot, lending some time and your insights into how your IT organization is run while gleaning cross-industry insights on how IT plans to weather the rough road ahead.

I'm looking forward to your responses!

By Chris Silva

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What's He Building In There?

Tom Waits fans know the title of this post as one of his pieces and one that was used in the Enron documentary "The Smartest Guys In the Room." There's a YouTube video of the Waits piece here, if you're interested. Doing some research recently, the first couple lines of the song - if one can call it that - started playing in my head as I began contemplating what Cisco is planning for its upcoming, and much publicized 11/11/08 release. I've been piecing together some things I'm seeing in emails and Cisco blog posts and they're definitely building something "in there" in San Jose. The question is, "what is it?"

Teaser emails talking about a four year evolution toward a product that will be "summed up in a fraction of a second" started making their way into inboxes this week, paired with some mock "media attention" on one of Cisco's blogs, The Platform. 

I have to hand it to Cisco, while they may not generate the type of buzz or pre-release interest of a Steve Jobs speech at WWDC or even the more recent anticipation of the newest device coming from a carrier - this month the Blackberry Storm - but they've managed to create some intriguing speculation on what it is that they're planning to announce?

At Forrester, we decided we'd bite. We have no advanced knowledge of the announcement, but we're making the call that, given the relative scarceness of product announcements in Cisco's 10000 series router line, and the description of the to-be-announced product as:

"a revolutionary telecommunications product that will enable service providers to capitalize on a major market opportunity being created by the accelerating growth of both video and mobile data traffic."

...that it's going to be a revamp of service-provider, edge routers.

So, that's our guess, what's yours? I guess we'll all see in a couple of weeks, for sure.

By Chris Silva

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Where's The Wi-Fi Marketing?

I'm concerned about the state of WLAN vendor marketing. In the last year, a relatively precipitous drop-off of marketing driven "news" has occurred in my RSS reader, and a noticeable lack of "pitch decks" are finding their way into my inbox. That's not to say that I'm not still drowning in press releases (no, the fact that the Poughkeepsie School District is using your solution is not worthy of coverage) but I'm seeing less and less sizzle in a time where more would be better. A good thing for me, perhaps, but not a good thing for continuing to make the case for Wi-Fi.

Recently, Network World completed testing on 802.11n infrastructure posting the results in an online article dated this week. Results aside, look at the vendors participating in the survey: Aerohive, Bluesocket, Siemens and Motorola. Aside from Motorola, the vendors included are not market-share leaders in WLAN gear. Aerohive, which offers a controller-less architecture and, until recently, was considered a startup by many has not - to date - come close to many of the other WLAN players such as Aruba, Cisco, HP's ProCurve, and Meru in terms of building a marquee client roster. Similar can be reported of Bluesocket and, while Siemens made a splash with its energy sipping 802.11n products earlier in the year, not much has been widely reported on them since.

David Newman of Network World appropriately called out the non-participating vendors. An interesting lot of non-participants, here. I can give vendors like Trapeze and Colubris a pass given recent acquisition moves and the associated and inevitable management changes that make participating in a public, head-to-head evaluation a political hot potato. That leaves the larger vendors, though: Cisco, HP*, Meru? Where are you guys?

At this time of economic instability, I'd like to see more of the vendors trotting out the story of why Wi-Fi is a cost saving measure over wired Ethernet, but nobody's made a big splash on network-spend-marketing since Nortel at the last Interop, where it debuted the "Cisco Tax" strategy. Aruba is doing some interesting work on green via its Green Island project - launched yesterday- which can also double as cost-saving info. Is there anyone else I'm missing?

This is the time to be marketing, and getting dollars earmarked for cost-saving technology investments, but I'm not sure WLAN vendors are listening.

* As the acquirer of Colubris, perhaps the same bureaucratic delays apply here as well.

By Chris Silva

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Enterprise Readiness Of Cloud Ratcheting Up

It may just be time for enterprise customers to take a serious look at cloud computing. Major announcements in the past few days from Microsoft and Amazon have certainly signaled that the on-demand Internet computing model has staying power. And with a long recession looming there may be no better time to start getting familiar with something that could dramatically lower infrastructure costs.

Amazon, which has been the dominant market leader and pioneer of cloud computing, finally lifted the "beta" tag from the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and delivered an SLA for the service and support for Windows applications. It also announced plans to provide service monitoring, load balancing and automatic scaling services in the future. And Amazon's even starting taking phone calls and providing premium support for enterprise customers. Nearly all of these capabilities have been available for months from smaller cloud players (especially those coming from an ISP background where such capabilities are commonplace).

Microsoft countered by signalling that cloud computing has such significant staying power that they are willing to bet the "Windows" brand on it. Ray Ozzie's Windows Azure goes beyond the basic infrastructure and services of EC2 providing Visual Studio.Net developers with the promise of a complete platform for their works. This will put Microsoft in competition with EC2 as well as Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. But Azure is just a technical preview today (aka "beta").

What these market makers have in common is massive data center footprints that allow them to support significant numbers of very large clients at huge scale and across geographies.

As Ray Ozzie put it during his keynote on Monday at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference, it is becoming exceedingly difficult for enterprise infrastructure and developer teams to manage applications at web scale. The world where latency differences between New York City and Columbus, Ohio can cost you customer loyalty and millions in revenue, getting web scale right is increasingly important and the infrastructure and operations professionals who have these skills and experience using them are becoming harder and harder to find. Cloud computing platforms from the Web Giants don't eliminate this problem but they certainly can ease the burden considerably, and when doing it yourself means large capital investments, the appeal of a platform that delivers some degree of this on its own becomes very appealing. 

Its quickly becoming quite clear that cloud computing isn't a passing fancy but is indeed a new computing paradigm worthy of your attention. The questions about cloud computing now shift to what percent of your application portfolio is it suited to and how easy is it consume. Most infrastucture clouds are built on a hypervisor foundation (although not VMware ESX) so any application that behaves well in a hypervisor should be suited to these clouds, but which of these need the scalability of a cloud platform or works best in a hosted environment? Most clouds are also designed to appeal to developers - not infrastructure managers - and ask I&O pros to use different tools and metaphors to get their job done.

The enterprises that are tapping into clouds today are doing so with web microsites, internal-facing projects, and  other fairly safe experiments. Most of this activity falls into the "toe in the water" variety. Further experimentation is needed for enterprises to gain comfort with this new model and these new services. If your company isn't playing around with cloud computing platforms today, you run the risk of falling behind. Windows Azure is a significant statement of staying power for cloud computing. It's time to shift your thinking from if you will use cloud computing to when.

By James Staten

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NAC Results Make Waves

In early September, Forrester published its “The Forrester Wave™: Network Access Control, Q3 2008.” Forrester’s findings revealed that Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Bradford Networks, and Juniper Networks lead the pack because of their strong enforcement and policy, but that Microsoft’s NAP technology, despite being a newcomer, has become the de facto standard.

Any time you try and put some order to vendor solutions, you are bound to find people in agreement – and to raise ire in others. However, reaction in the blogosphere to a recent Network World article on the research has raised some questions about Forrester’s Wave methodology which I’ll aim to address:

• Security Incite writes, “The Forresters checked out a bunch of data sheets and decided Microsoft was “top of the NAC heap.”” If only it were that easy! More than 150 hours of analysis went into the Network Access Control (NAC) Wave, in which we analyzed more than 70 criteria (encompassing more than 200 attributes) for the 10 vendors that were included in the study. The criteria was based on more than 200 client inquiries I’ve fielded in my five-plus years covering the space.
  

• Our study was not based on the number of units sold or performance tests – it was based on real-world challenges faced by very large enterprises and not an academic exercise (for the record, the sky is blue in our real-world). Those common metrics are, for lack of a better word, useless. I know for a fact that several of the vendors in the study are giving their product away to gain market share, so how can unit volume equate to the quality of the product? Where does that fall on the BS-O-meter?

Performance tests are even less dependable because there are too many variables to consider and all too frequently are vendor-sponsored. Security Incite writes:

“…People that really buy products understand that a good RFP response gets you in the bake-off. That’s when things like “performance tests” start to matter.”

Since when is performance a critical factor in security? When’s the last time you heard a security pro say, “It doesn’t protect us, but boy does it scream with speed when it lets harmful users get by!”

Bottom line, I believe the NAC Wave was a fair, balanced and comprehensive study that looked at the products of 10 leading vendors in the space and concluded that Microsoft was the leader based on vendor strategy moving forward – even Security Insight and Security For All acknowledged it would be a standard in the future – and their presence in the market. While we may have to agree to disagree on the results, the methodology that helped us reach those conclusions should not be called into question.

By Robert Whiteley

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HP Acquires LeftHand Networks, Virtualized iSCSI Storage Vendor

Today, HP announced the intention to acquire iSCSI storage vendor LeftHand Networks for $360 Million in cash. LeftHand makes virtualized storage array software that can turn just about any server, PC or subset of disks on a device into a full featured IP based SAN array with features like space efficient snapshots, distance replication support and thin provisioning. LeftHand has a tight partnership with VMware, and does both standard virtual server attach to SAN, as well as some innovative virtual appliance models that turn the physical disks on board a VMware server into an array. The LeftHand software can span across multiple physical devices, allowing for combinations of virtual appliances and dedicated servers.

It’s no surprise to see LeftHand get snapped up by a major storage vendor as they are one of the few remaining independent storage vendors in a market where it’s hard to be small and go it alone. It’s a particularly good fit for HP though for a number of reasons. For one, about half of LeftHand's 3000+ installs use HP servers as a back end. HP states that they are committed to supporting existing customers regardless of what platform they are on, but they are eager to take advantage of their strength in delivering industry standard servers as the go forward back end for LeftHand. This is also a good thing for customers who will benefit from the simplicity of a well integrated packaged solution including hardware and software. The acquisition also gives an immediate boost to HP's story around advantages for VMware attach, which is currently one of the hottest battlegrounds for all storage vendors.

What's more, like PolyServ, the clustered NAS firm bough by HP, LeftHand is at its core a software company. This means that HP can continue selling the current LeftHand product family, and eventually take advantage of the capabilities throughout the rest of the HP StorageWorks family. Existing HP storage products can use the help as the iSCSI offerings are weak, they have no true thin provisioning, snapshot count and manageability can use a boost and the overall EVA architecture would benefit from more virtualization and flexibility. The LeftHand technology stack should help to accelerate HPs roadmap in these key areas, helping them improve current offerings and at the same time build towards the virtualized, scale-out storage that is likely to be the architecture of choice in most datacenters in the near future.

By Andrew Reichman

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