Andrew McCreath goes McVirtual

Tactical Management versus Transformational Management

2009-11-06T22:48:00.000Z

....coming soon....

http://consultingblogs.emc.com/andrewmccreath

Simplicity and ‘The Cloud’

2009-10-22T10:27:00.002+01:00

Many years back I read a great book by Jack Trout & Steve Rivkin on the Power of Simplicity. It has become part of my daily ethic when talking to peers, clients and when I get home I even use it with my kids!

Nobody really wants to be bamboozled with complicated explanations, and those that try to do the bamboozling are often lost is a hazy vision in the first place. Vision is for dreamers, the ability to bring vision in to a strategy is where the smart people come in. Let’s face it we can all watch an episode of Star Trek and think “how cool are warp drives and photon cannons”, but unless somebody turns that in to reality then is remains in the fiction drawer and never sees the light of day.

So what’s happening with this term ‘The Cloud’ then? Well, simply put many folks are calling themselves cloud when they’re not a cloud, others are calling themselves cloud application providers, or cloud networks, etc, etc ,etc, the list goes on. It appears that if you put the work cloud in front of your primary marketed product then you are in-the-cloud-game!... WRONG!
Any single organisation that calls themselves a cloud must be scrutinised closely. By implication a cloud is a heterogeneous common platform for on demand compute resource that is available everywhere to anyone at anytime.

So simply put, how does one create a cloud. Well, one doesn’t, many do. It is going to take all service and compute providers to come together and agree a common architecture for platform integration. We have seen the starts of this with the VCE Alliance for example, where VMware, Cisco and EMC created a journey for their customers to take in the Private Cloud Formation, this involved the three main components in the infrastructure (Storage, Compute and Network), working together to form a service. Now you have a building block (or common hosted platform) for your Private Cloud, what do you do next? Well you need to make it available which means you need scalable architecture across sites. No point having a Cloud Compute capability in one country when the world runs 7x24! Major in-country disruptions through internet, power, strike-action, or any other number of potential business hazards, could lead to a complete outage; much like the recent O2 network, and Google mail.

So now you have a common hosted platform, a Private Cloud, serving your organisation you are ready, and indeed waiting, for the industry to provide a common-link. How do you connect with somebody else in the Cloud arena? And what controls, security and data protection is on offer? No point sharing somebody else’s cloud if they’re going to be taken over by a competitor, or worse go bankrupt! How do you control the data in this cloud and stop it wandering off anywhere else.

This is going to be the stumbling block of full cloud formation for many years to come, and indeed prevents many Private Clouds from being much more than Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). EMC has Atmos Online which delivers cloud computing for the enterprise, real world storage and compute capability- http://www.emccis.com . Admittedly it is only out of the Americas right now, but it is a huge step forward in actually offering tangible cloud services. Need a virtual server or set of virtual servers, grab Atmos Online Compute services, install your application, control your own systems, and hey presto you’re up and running. Now that is simple! The first real option for anyone to take a cloud service. Interesting, I think so, especially if you consider what must be going on “in the private cloud”....

EMC Blog site

Where am I blogging now?

2009-10-12T20:18:00.001+01:00

OK, so I've been on the Virtual tour with clients for the last few months, but I will endeavour to keep up to dat over on my corporate public blog from now on too ....

http://consultingblogs.emc.com/andrewmccreath

Andrew McCreath's off topic Twitterings...

2009-02-25T17:37:00.003Z

Yes, I do things outside of work....

http://twitter.com/GoingForBroke

I am also on VMware Communities

2009-02-25T17:36:00.001Z

See the link below

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/AndrewMcCreath

How Virtualisation affects Backups

2009-01-19T21:26:00.001Z

Most of the mistakes made when running a virtualisation project usually occur when a process, work stream or department has not been consulted in the initial planning & design phase of the project. This may be due to virtualisation being seen as a quick win for the server infrastructure team, or cost avoidance for desktop through virtualisation.

The fact of the matter is, when it comes to backing up the virtual infrastructure, this can be the main area of pain, especially when there are constrains in that area to begin with, then virtualisation can negatively compound the issue.

Server virtualisation enables us to squeeze the most out of our server/ storage/ network infrastructure, but it gives us a new problem in the backup arena. How do we go about capturing this information, and what strategy do we adopt?

There are typically three main options here for most SMBs:-

1.) Backup at the host level.

2.) Backup within the virtual machine

3.) Backup via SnapShot (VCB)

The first will put a backup agent on the ESX host and allow the host to backup its visible LUNs. The benefits are the simplicity of the roll-out, and the low level of additional hardware required to deploy this scenario.

The challenges are that this places a high resource requirement on the host itself which can negatively impact the performance of the virtual machines. There is no support for database backups at this level, nor file restores and the overall performance of the backup is low.

The second option is to place an agent in the virtual machine itself.

This is ideal for organisations that wish to continue with the simple but familiar route to backup, and gives the granularity that has become expectant of the process to date. However, this does required to continued maintenance and management of each client, the virtual machine resources are swamped during the backup and can affect resource pools in the virtual infrastructure, and the bottle neck becomes the network bandwidth to the media server.

The third option is to deploy a smart set of tools/ services which support VCB or SNAPShots. These minimise the resource impact on the hosts and virtual machines, while increasing the restore options down to the file level as well as the entire VM instance. The management becomes simplified and processes optimised.

The disadvantages are the increased requirements on shared storage (iSCSI/SAN) and an additional Proxy Server. For databases pre and post scripts may be required for live (hot) backups

Looking up the service maturity model however, some enterprise organisations will have separated the data sets from the service (server/ application) layer, and applied an ILM or Content Management & Archiving system; therefore the “Information” or data layer is already protected, and the challenges move to service availability and compliance.

Virtualisation boost in the year of doing ‘more with less’

2009-01-09T21:15:00.002Z

So last years economic and financial events have established ’09 as the year of doing ‘more with less’ as I mentioned pre-Christmas.

Cost is now the central factor for consideration, whether that involves production BAU services, or the cost avoidance for DR hardware and new application server deployments.

The ability to deploy a new application in days rather than weeks or even months has had many an industry jumping for joy, and doing-more-with-less.

But looking back over the last twelve months, what can we say were the other primary drivers for deploying a virtualisation solution?

We have seen business agility at the forefront of virtualisation uptake, but the enhanced availability and management tools of the virtual environment from vendors has also come along in leaps and bounds. This has supported the strategic move forward for organisations to adopt the technology with confidence.

The messaging behind virtualisation has also been transformed of late and more visibility of the product roadmaps have been revealed, to building strategic confidence. So how do these factors help affect uptake this year, and more importantly, what will be this years’s key virtualisation drivers?

With the ‘more is less’ objective remaining imperative, the word on everyone’s lips will be cost cutting and optimisation in 2009. The age old adage off ‘sweating assets’ will be reinforced, and virtualisation is predominantly positioned to deliver against both of these.

Organisations will look to improve their ROI in shorter time frames, and be looking for more quick wins to support the business operation this year. Simplified management, smart-sourcing and a focus on the internal operations will be at the front of the CIO’s mind, and they will be looking for simple answers to these problems.

Getting the right people for the job will no longer mean recruiting the skilled labour or contractor, it will be more about ensuring you have the right services aligned to your operation. IT will be accountable to a new range of questions – “Who will support my virtual environment and at what cost?”. “Who will continue migrating my physical servers when my limited resources are stretched even further this year?” “When and how will I start being able to measure the effect of virtualisation, and continue to lobby support for this strategic move?”

The good news is that there are services out there to address these questions and they’re not just available from the virtualisation software providers. There are now a range of smart-services on the market available at lower costs. There are answers to the challenges but we need to fully understand the question and work out how these will benefit the short term problems, while not negatively impacting long term strategy and existing ROI commitments.

Another key driver in 2009 will be desktop virtualisation, thereby leveraging existing products, skills and processes to deliver flexible, cost effective, simpler to manage desktop environments. With organisations having many more desktops than servers to manage, support and refresh, and various product developments through 2008 to 2009, this will certainly be in the Top 5 on the business To-Do list.

Flying the flag for ‘more with less’, this rapidly growing technology will also provide the strongest ROI within an IT organisation and eliminate environmental control issues in the general office, as well as the enhanced security, management and reduced support requirements.

Recent Publications

2009-01-09T21:01:00.004Z

Firstly, my apologies, I haven't updated my personal blog in the longest time, but I have been out there writing articles for other sites.

Here are the links:-

Virtualisation boost in the year of doing ‘more with less’
So last year’s economic and financial events have established ’09 as the year of doing ‘more with less’ as I mentioned pre-Christmas.
By Andrew McCreath, GlassHouse- Virtualisation Practice Lead
http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2009/01/09/virtualisation-boost-year-doing-more-less/1/

Managed Services: Providing A Way Through Tricky Economic Times
By Andrew McCreath, GlassHouse- Virtualisation Practice Lead
http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/11/27/managed-services-providing-way-through-tricky-economic-times

Managed Services for Virtual Environments
By Andrew McCreath, GlassHouse- Virtualisation Practice Lead
http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/11/02/managed-services-virtual-environments

How long until backups are just a nearline copy

Server virtualisation has opened up a world of "best-of-breed" backup offerings for strategic backup software vendors. These new backup products do everything from leveraging snapshots, mirror clones and storage replication to performing new file- and block-level backups of the virtual file system.
By Andrew McCreath, GlassHouse- Virtualisation Practice Lead
http://searchstorage.techtarget.co.uk/news/column/0,294698,sid181_gci1336104,00.html

Storage Virtualisation: A Virtual Necessity Or Yet Another Passing Fad?

By Andrew McCreath, GlassHouse- Virtualisation Practice Lead

http://storage.itproportal.com/articles/2008/09/15/storage-virtualisation-virtual-necessity-or-yet-another-passing-fad

Word from the TOP

2008-05-12T14:58:00.005+01:00

Where did the last year go..... well sit right there and I shall tell you.

In a nutshell it was evolved and virtualised. My work life balance went through the floor and suddenly I was interfacing with people in binary as opposed to the gold old Queens English.

I must have been in every type of organisation on the planet in the last twelve months, and one thing is for sure, NO TWO WAYS ARE THE SAME!

Everyone has a process, most people know they need to change (virtualise), few people truly know how it is going to affect their business in a years time, and therein lies a whopper of a problem.
If an organisation cannot identify it's service level improvements then what good is throwing yet another technology at the problem.
Sure you'll save some year on year pennies versus deploying physical servers, and even some management systems will be simplified. But have you truly saved your "Business" anything?
Did things get faster? Do the users of the IT systems benefit from this transformation? Are you "selling/ buying/ doing" more now that your servers are virtualised.
If the answer is 'I'm not sure' or a flat 'No', then we need to talk some more.

IT has been trying to "Run Like a Business" for a while now. Originally IT used to be owned by either the Finance Manager or the HR Manager, who's roles were to run the business, not run like a business!

IT believed it could evolve by becoming cost neutral, i.e. recharging for services. Nice idea, but you don't see budgetary items such as "Indirect marketing costs" or "New recruitment Advert" appearing in the annual IT budget. Other divisions do not re-charge, or try to be cost neutral, they are run to deliver value and service to the business. Driving sales, adding bottom line value, etc, etc.
Why would IT try to run like a business? And then go slap an invoice on the Workman's desk for "services rendered".

OK rant aside, what needs to happen? What needs to change? Who should this change affect?
Well I'll tell you, and I'll use our favourite "ergy" word too, Synergy. I'm not a big fan of the word myself, buy it does wrap up other words such as Collaboration, Efficiency, and Effectiveness amongst others.
The end user in your organisation can only achieve more given the tools and processes to support his work load. Have a listen around the work place and see what people are complaining about. I bet you'll hear some of the following:-

My desktop is too slow
My application crashed
Is your network working, I seem to be offline
What's this new icon on my desktop, click... C.R.A.S.H.

There are many negatives out there, but they have something in common. The user is a danger to themselves and your organisation. 99% of the time it is unintentional, they've tried to copy paste a 20MB BMP in to a 10k work document on the web, the daft things.

The fact of the matter is you cannot make things idiot proof, somebody will simply throw a bigger idiot at it....

What you can do is simplify everything. Give people precisely what they need to do their work, and not an drop more. Make it fast, make it reliable, make it work.

So why am I blogging on this business topic under McVirtual? Well virtual desktops are the big thing on the game card for the next few years. It worked a treat with servers, and is now ready to take on the desktop arena. Furthermore there are plenty of support services and methodologies coming about to support this initiative. this is VERY different from the early days of server virtualisation, which was literally thrown out there to see what could be reeled in.

to be continued.....

(Andrew McCreath)

VI3 Nirvana Deployment

2007-04-15T12:24:00.000+01:00

OK, so recently I've been putting together a nirvana configuration for a huge bank. While VERY exciting it has posed a fair few challenges.

We've built up a MAN, slapped in some high-powered directors, spanned, and stuck on a couple of monster EMC DMX3's running SRDF between them across sites.
Each host can now see storage on both locations (R1,R2 copies) and the VI3 cluster resources are spanned across both sites.

Gripping edge stuff, and highly intricate underneath, but simple to manage at the top.
No single point of failure, and by adding application availability in SQL2007 (and other types) there is as near to ZERO RPO/ RTO as possible.

As soon as I find out how to add a file to the blog I'll post up some pretty power point slides of how this has been achieved.

Welcome one and all

2007-02-24T20:25:00.000Z

OK, so I've been in the virtual market place for a good number of years now.
I belong to the VMTN Forum, which is a great source of knowledge.

So, what's here, why am I here?
Well, everyone has their take, and indeed their preferences. I however am technology agnostic when it comes to connectivity, storage, servers, etc. The one thing I do stick on in the virtual market is VMware technology.

ESX and GSX products have grown considerably in the market place, and matured at the fast pace the market has required.
Virtual Infrastructure is an enterprise ready technology for 90% of the worlds organisations to pick up and go.