Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Redefining Entry-Level Storage


I recently attended a briefing for the EMC Elect on the new VNXe system. EMC is bringing enterprise-class storage capabilities to the small and medium-size businesses. The new VNXe3200 system provides affordable pricing, simple integration, and efficient data storage in a flash optimized hybrid VNX storage system. 

The VNXe3200 has efficiency features, which are important to all size business. These features help lower the overall cost of your data center infrastructure, which is important when using show-back to provide cost transparency to your business partners. The VNXe3200 hybrid system will lower the overall cost per IOPS and GB by leveraging just a small amount of flash and using the FAST Suite. The system was not only re-architected to support flash drives, it was optimized for flash by automating and auto-tiering data into and out of flash drives based on hot spot recognition. It also boasts up to a 50% reduction in capacity requirements by exploiting advanced capabilities like thin provisioning and file dedupe.



Additionally, EMC has added MCx, Fibre Channel support, and enhanced software functionality like security and compliance, monitoring and reporting, and snapshots for no additional cost.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

CIO Survey Gives 4 Tips to Tech Execs

The below infographic distills InformationWeek’s 2014 Strategic CIO Survey results into top focus areas. Perhaps not surprisingly, for IT execs, cutting costs ranks at the top of the list. What else are top priorities? Speed to market, insufficient budgets, and the skills gap.

Of course, most of these priorities are not new to corporate organizations, but what is fluctuating is the recognition that the way IT does business needs to change. I couldn't agree more with looking at IT organizational structure to determine if it is setup to meet today's technology challenges and service oriented mindset. The way IT delivers services to the business is significantly different than it was 5 to 10 years ago, and the legacy silo structure doesn't work effectively in today's environment.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Horizon 6 Cloud POD Architecture

In a past article, I reviewed the Horizon 5.2 POD architecture. Horizon View components fit together within a physical architecture, based on the concept of building blocks and pods. It is a scalable approach which allows IT operations to build out their VDI enviroment as end users move to virtual desktops.

A Horizon View pod integrates five 2,000-user building blocks into a View Manager installation that you can manage as one entity.

By taking this approach, you can be fairly user-agnostic and deploy additional blocks or pods with varying performance characteristics, geographical locations, or access mechanisms as required.

A typical Horizon View deployment can consist of 500 to 10,000 virtual desktops hosted across a single or multiple ESXi clusters managed by a management building block.


The Cloud pod architecture extends the entitlement capabilities for Horizon desktops across datacenters and physical sites with Global Entitlements.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

VMware Horizon 6



VMware had some very exciting news yesterday with the announcement of VMware Horizon 6! VMware Horizon is a family of virtual desktop and application solutions designed to deliver business applications to end users. With Horizon, VMware extends the power of virtualization from data centers to devices. It delivers desktops and applications with great user experience, manageability, and flexibility. The endpoint conversation is no longer about VDI, it is about delivering application and mobility services to your business users that fit their specific needs.

I know I preach about this on a regular basis, but operations needs to be seen as delivering services to the business and get away from the perception of executing tasks. This helps them become much more strategic partners to their organizations. Horizon 6 will help transform end user computing to offer a portfolio of delivery options for application services.


Horizon 6 allows IT professionals to deliver virtual desktops or applications through a unified platform, the Horizon Workspace, to their corporate users. While accessing virtual desktops isn't something new with Horizon Workspace, the application services have been greatly expanded to include RDS-hosted applications, SaaS and web applications, Office 365, Google Apps, ThinApp packaged applications, and even XenApp applications from Citrix; all delivered from a single platform. This provides corporate business users with all the resources necessary to enable them to work effectively from any device, at any time, from anywhere. VMware Horizon 6 is going to raise the bar for delivering mobile services to business professionals and aligns nicely with the new era of the software-defined enterprise.

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