Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

3. Data Regulations: Each jurisdiction around the world has slightly different approaches to the regulation of data privacy and the Australian Law Reform Commission has recently released a report suggesting significant strengthening of Australia's data privacy regime. Therefore it is important that customers understand where their data will ultimately be stored and by whom so that they can ensure compliance with Australian privacy and also record retention regulations. Many SaaS providers work on the basis of centralised infrastructure that is not based in Australia. The customer must ensure that contractually the provider is bound to comply with Australian privacy laws before allowing the data to be exported. The issue is further compounded if the SaaS provider then uses a third party to do the storage of the data. Such is the complexity that EMC announced recently that it is having difficulty choosing a location to build the data centres to run its storage-as-a-service offering...

MENLO PARK , Calif. – November 10, 2008 – Replicate Technologies today announced the general availability of its first product, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer™ (RDA) 1.0. Leveraging server virtualization to provide a breakthrough approach to fault management, RDA 1.0 ends the conventional break-fix cycle by using both preventive and remediation analysis to avoid and solve configuration errors in virtualized datacenters. It is the only product available today that provides a unified view of the dynamic datacenter, and can predict and prevent faults before they cause downtime. A well-run datacenter has always required well-managed configuration. Virtualization not only introduces a new layer to configure, but also places new and unique demands on the cross-functional configuration of servers, networks and storage. Recent industry surveys on datacenter operation and management practices indicate that more than 60 percent of unplanned downtime incidents are due to configuration errors...

CUPERTINO, Calif., Aug. 26, 2008 — Solidcore® Systems, Inc., the leader in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control™ software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process. The Solidcore capabilities help customers define more comprehensive change policies and streamline the validation of changes throughout the IT environment to avoid costly downtime. Enterprise IT organizations are under increasing pressure to maintain the integrity of virtual systems in production environments. They want to apply the same processes to virtual infrastructures that are in place for the physical infrastructures, which can also include best practices such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL...

Vienna, Va. – June 02, 2008 – StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT Operations teams, announced today the external infrastructure connectivity upgrade to its staging and testing solution, StackSafe TM Test Center. The solution creates a virtual copy of the software infrastructure stack and enables IT Operations teams to better test the impact of changes before releasing them to the production environment, reducing the uncertainty and downtime related to IT changes. With this upgrade, the virtualized Test Center environment can be extended to interact with non-virtualized system components that reside outside of the Test Center environment – enabling test scenarios across the entire end-to-end IT service. “ Virtualization technology offers the potential to deliver time-stressed, resource-thin IT operations staff a low risk way to test and assess the impact of making changes to the IT production environment,” commented Richard Ptak, Fo...

Well I've always said that you were cool, guys. You don't need a Gartner to say that :-) This news further validates the strong interest that StackSafe Test Center has generated in the market in 2008. In the past two and a half months, we have accomplished numerous significant achievements: A successful launch at DEMO '08 Ranked #7 of the 72 DEMO companies by TheDeal.com Ranked #3 of 20 DEMO "Products That Matter to VARs" by ChannelWeb Listed as one of DEMO "Ten Favorite Products" by PC Magazine Positive analyst coverage of StackSafe Test Center Gartner First Take Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Product Brief Ptak, Noel and Associates Commentary Winning the ITIL Innovation of the Year Award at the February ITIL Pink Elephant Conference

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., March 11, 2008 – VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today a partnership with Lifeboat Distribution, an international specialty software distributor. Under the agreement, Lifeboat will distribute VKernel’s suite of virtual appliances for analyzing capacity bottlenecks, implementing chargeback, and gaining cost visibility in VMware ESX environments to its global network of virtualization resellers and solution providers. “We’re excited about working with Lifeboat to immediately increase the market opportunities for VKernel’s products,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “By rapidly solving specific server virtualization issues, our virtual appliances provide instantaneous value and benefits to any organization involved in a virtualization project.” The VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite for Systems Management is a set of “plug-and-play” virtual appliances des...

"VMware is making it easier by setting up and testing application environments in virtual server spaces before you deploy them on production systems," Clabby explained. Stage Manager also automates some of the functions of the system administrators. "It is acting like a systems administrator saying 'this has to be set up like that.' It is enabling you to deploy immediately by doing all of that work for you," he added. The new product also minimizes the amount of hardware that is typically used in the pre-deployment process, stated Melinda Wilken, director of marketing at VMware. "IT teams use a lot of physical hardware, a lot of dedicated physical hardware that is not used all the time and only used when you are working on a specific stage." More here

Like I said, we did a Vendor Briefing with the StackSafe guys last week and here's the official statement. StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, announced today the immediate availability of StackSafe™ Test Center. Test Center is the first virtualized staging and testing solution for IT Operations teams that improves availability and resiliency through enhanced software infrastructure testing. StackSafe's solution directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT Operations testing and analysis of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks. "If IT Operations teams can test and certify changes to software infrastructures before they go live, then IT services become more available and resilient as well as more repeatable and better documented," said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Comprehensive and efficient staging, testing and analysis are essential to ach...

I forgot to mention. Last week I had a vendor briefing with StakSafe folks. The news will be released in a couple of hours. Keep watching here and at StackSafe !

This looks like a re-entry of the Lab Manager. I'm curious to test it anyways. Features: Key Features Rapidly create new multi-server software configurations (services) Monitor resource usage on a per-service, per-stage and per-instance basis Easily perform operations on a complete service (e.g. cloning, deploying, archiving, etc.) Marshall changes across the service lifecycle, interacting with external process management/workflow system to ensure compliance with service transition policies Maintain an archive of past service configurations supporting compliance and recovery operations Maintain an auditable history of software configuration changes Manage storage behavior on a per-stage basis to maximize storage efficiency Control access to services on a per-service, per-stage and per-instance basis Inherit then deploy services to resource pools created within VMware VirtualCenter If you have some time at hand, then do try it . With so many products coming out, I m getting less ...

Found this site today: What does this Freeware/Commercial product do? Change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of your virtual environment, to limit unauthorized changes and errors in VI3 inventory. Erroneous and unauthorized changes usually occur every day in organizations in which many IT professionals manage different aspects of virtual infrastructure. Such changes can cause failures and outages in your virtual infrastructure. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your virtual environment. This freeware tool sends a daily report pointing to every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware, including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration values. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 can be used to: Overview configuration changes on a daily basis to ...

I chatted up with the folks at StackSafe and we spoke at large about the impact that virtualization is having on business processes. 95% of the server market still needs to be virtualized. So what is keeping the organizations, big or small, from adopting virtualization in their environments? It is the complete overhaul of your total business bulk, that is keeping people on their toes. Change Management is a very crucial part of your business, and with virtualization, a lot changes. And it changes all over the place, vertically and horizontally. A lot is at stake and a lot gets horizontal as VMs start "floating" across hardware seamlessly. Silos are bound to shift and tumble and we have a complete sprawl. StackSafe is still its "Stealth Mode"but they will be getting out of it soon by end Jan 2008 next month. I spoke to Joe Pendry, Dir Marketing, Andrew Gross, Chief Scientist (check out their profiles on StackSafe) Here is a summary, in the form of a Q&A, of what...

"There has been an evolutionary acceptance of NCCM strategic importance and functional capabilities," said Jeffrey Nudler, senior analyst and project lead at EMA. "More than 51 percent of respondents reported having made NCCM purchases in conjunction with CMDB initiatives -- highlighting the importance of NCCM and its integration with other IT management components." The NCCM market segment is a relatively new addition to the broader IT management market, yet EMA has been involved practically from its inception and witnessed the market go through this remarkable transformation. Until recently, configuration remained focused exclusively on the network device itself. Today, configuration management must take into account the relationships between devices and the impact of change on adjacent devices. This shift from a static, device-oriented approach to a dynamic approach elevates the relevance of NCCM to both structural and operational IT management. Forbes carrying ...

You can sell virtualization when: People really need to consolidate. Really! People don't know anything about it. (Not the ethical way to promote it, I know, but I'm just telling you how it is) People don't fear virtualization People don't spend too much time discussing over discussions, they lose focus amidst all the FUD People don't let competitors confuse THEM while spreading FUD. note: Remember FUD spreaders don't necessarily have to come from within, they can be external elements People really aren't afraid of change One large financial services firm configured its own server, locked it down and delivered it to iQor to run. “And don’t touch it," the client ordered, according to Sabatelli. “What I did in that instance was convert the physical box over to a virtual box without their knowledge," Sabatelli recounted during a VMware customer panel at the VMworld 2007 this week. “They came back later and asked, ’Is everything OK with the box?’"...

So dear CxO, are you beginnig to get my (our) drift as to why your "traditional IT manager" is resisting the change? Its because they have the backing of the traditional admins! Its time to make your move now, as virtualization is coming, like it or not! Robert Whiteley and Natalie Lambert have seen the future—and in it, traditional network security is dead. At least that is the message the two Forrester Research analysts delivered to a crowd at the Forrester Security Forum in Atlanta Sept. 6. According to them, in the next five years the Internet will be the primary connectivity method for businesses, replacing their private network infrastructure as the number of mobile workers, contractors and other third-party users continues to grow. In this new world, which Whiteley and Lambert called "Internet Everywhere," corporations will have to redefine network security and focus on data encryption, managing risk at the endpoint and having strict data access controls, the...

This too is: Production Ready! (supports ESX 3.x version) OS : Centos 5 Server(equivalent to Redhat 5) Test and Evaluation ready (as always) Compatibility across wide range of VMware products: ACE 2.x, Fusion 1.x, Server 1.x, Workstation 5.x, Workstation 6.x Full support and client engagement available (for Virtual Infrastructure consulting and project work), our OTRS friends will handle on your functional needs Supporting Avastu and OTRS docs for test and deployment Will soon be uploaded.

ITIL, change management, CMDB are all interconnected. A lot of IT shops start experimenting with VMware and are not really keeping the Change Managers informed about how things are being done it tackle incidents and RFCs. Of course it is for the better. It helps streamline and manage the changes in a controlled lab and then eventually pushing it into the production. But nevertheless the management ought to understand how the new evolving (physical and virtual) infrastructure affects the change management. Learn how to: * Optimize the planning, control, execution and validation of initial provisioning and subsequent changes in your operating systems and applications, both on physical and virtual machines * Enable all of your machines, both physical and virtual, to stay in their desired state according to your policies * Achieve real business benefits from virtualization today It is sponsored by HP .

Hamilton talks about the dangers of manual methods. It indeed is crucial or managers to have all their ITIL, Change Management processes fully appraised of the new technology which will impose some new challenges. The deal is pretty simple: No matter if you start small or big, just have a plan that encompasses issues like: - Provisioning - Internal Licensing policies (to prevent a VM sprawl!) - Auditing - Security As virtualization adds flexibility and mobility to server resources it also increases the complexity of the environment in which the technology lives. Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie talks with George Hamilton, director of Yankee Group's enabling technologies enterprise group, about what network managers need to do to get ahead of the management nightmare virtualization could introduce to their networks. Check out the podcast . (I found it interesting to listen)

I will be collecting my thoughts on Change Management pretty soon. I'll focus on... Change Activists within an organization Devil's advocate vs Relentless inquisitor Inside the box (Inside Out) vs Out of the box (Outside In) Logic (yawn) vs Learning (yay) Problem Solving Ability vs Solution Identification Change is just not welcome. Not by the ones who promote is as a boon and talk at great lengths about it. Not by the ones who have to get their jobs done. Face it. What makes it only worse is to put the same people who had been using the adhoc ideologies to run the business (whatever value that it had OR was perceived by the client) and are now the guardians of the newly implemented way of working. So what did not change? Yes you got it! PERCEPTION! More later...