ITEC

Save Money, Energy & The Planet

Key Points

• The key to green cabling in the data center is planning enough space for proper airflow for both data and power cables, eliminating excess airflow, and laying cable properly.

• In purchasing the cable plant, think long term and get the longest-lived cable possible. Not only will this save the cost of frequent complete cable plant change-outs, but it also reduces energy use and thereby minimizes heat in the air.

• Recycling cable goes beyond copper and includes finding proper homes for old cable jackets.
A data center is crucial to the enterprise, so running it as efficiently as possible can only benefit the enterprise. Although going “green” sometimes seems to involve spending a great deal of money with few business benefits, greening the cable plant is different.

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VMware is the kingpin of virtualization, but the game is changing fast and Microsoft is baking the technology into the very core of many products. Which company has the best approach?
Moderator

John Dix, Network World Editor in Chief, sets up the debates and recruits the experts. Contact him with thoughts and ideas, jdix@nww.com.

The experts
Bogomil Balkansky, Vice president of product marketing, Virtualization and Cloud Platform at VMware,
says vSphere wins because of the company's big head start, large installed base and track record of innovation.

David Greschler, Director of virtualization strategy, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft,
says Microsoft wins because virtualized environments will ultimately span data center and cloud platforms and the company's management framework, identity service and development environment can best span this heterogeneous environment.

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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is poised to release its largest ever number of security bulletins next Tuesday. At the moment, the software giant says that 34 holes will be patched, of which eight are considered critical, affecting popular software in its line-up such as Windows, Office, Internet Explorer and Silverlight. Another six were marked as important, and are covered over 14 security bulletins in total.

In addition to security patches, Microsoft is also planning to release an updated version of the free Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, reports Ars Technica. At least one or more non-security related, high-priority updates will also be delivered via Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services.

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Even Small Changes Can Produce Big Returns

Key Points

• Traditional backup plans are inadequate in today’s accelerated, interconnected business landscape. Work with the business to understand and plan for the organization’s recovery time and recovery point objectives.

• Maximize power and cooling redundancy and invest in ironclad service plans for cooling equipment to prevent meltdowns that can take down servers and availability.

• Decoupling software from hardware—a key feature of virtualization—can keep mission-critical business apps running on pooled hardware even if one of the underlying machines fails.

Although uptime has always been a crucial metric for IT managers and the businesses they support, ongoing trends in data center design and methodology—including greater penetration of cloud-based services and the evolution of consolidation and virtualization beyond servers and into storage and networking—are raising the uptime stakes ever higher.

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Large companies are slowly turning to thin provisioning technology and other tools in an effort to boost data utilization rates beyond 40%.

At the turn of the century, large data centers still relied mostly on direct-attached storage systems, which offer abysmal data utilization rates -- 25% to 30% of hard drive capacity.

Since then, many enterprise IT managers have at least begun to study technologies that could vastly improve data utilization, like Fibre Channel, IP storage-area networks, thin provisioning and virtualization. A recent survey by TheInfoPro found that almost half of Fortune 1,000 companies now use thin provisioning or plan to do so.

Nonetheless, data utilization rates at most large companies remain at 40% or lower, resulting in a significant waste of electricity and floor space, analysts say.

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Disaster recovery has become table stakes in the world of server virtualization. Any good virtualization platform these days will find a way to restart a virtual machine in the event of a hardware failure. But which vendor excels more than any other at getting critical applications back online after failures, and making sure the most important virtual machines are given priority in the restart process?
VMware vs. Microsoft vs. Citrix

Debate has broken out over this topic since the Burton Group research and analysis firm declared that Microsoft's Hyper-V is not enterprise-ready because it lacks a specific feature found in both the VMware and Citrix hypervisors. But Microsoft contends that Hyper-V does meet the core features customers are looking for, and even the Burton Group concedes that Microsoft has surpassed its rivals in certain types of disaster-recovery scenarios. (Tech debate: Who has the better virtualization platform - VMware or Microsoft?)

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Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) heralded its real-time collaboration platform, Wave, as a game changer upon unveiling it last year, but now it is letting it die a quiet death about three months after making it publicly available. The company said, on its official blog, that Wave didn't attract users as hoped.

By its own admission, Google was pushing the envelope and didn't know how users would react to "this radically different kind of communication." It appears to be a good example of technology getting too far ahead of users. 

"Wave's principal problem," InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn writes, "was that it needed a critical mass of users to be useful; early adopters tended to visit once or twice and then seldom returned because the people they wanted to communicate with were still using email, IM, Facebook or some other system."

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica noted that developers found Wave to be "a technological marvel," but it's no surprise that it didn't attract many fans among users: "Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface."

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If a modern era baseball player finished a season with a .470 batting average, the player would be in the Hall of Fame for shattering the single season record. He’d also likely be calling the team owner “partner” after renegotiating his contract.

If an oil company spills 47% of its crude from a pump in the Gulf of Mexico – well sadly we know the result of that.

Now if an IT professional is responsible for CRM or eCRM platforms, there’s a 47% chance they’re on the wrong side of the CRM success rate. In 2009, CRM failed at a 47% clip according to the July 2010 issue of DestinationCRM Magazine.)

Not a surprise really. The 47% failure rate is generally in line with past years. But it’s not acceptable and certainly can’t be good for the career path of anyone on the CRM team.

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Get Microsoft’s Newest OS To Play Nice With Your Existing Applications & Systems

Key Points:

• Although Windows 7 is a very reliable OS, enterprises may still face considerable application compatibility issues
• Without planning or testing, a Win7 migration will quickly run aground. Planning is essential to success
• Win7 may require significant upgrades to system hardware such as RAM
• After the poor reception Windows Vista received, Microsoft badly needed a hit to get back in the game. Fortunately for Microsoft, Windows 7 has turned out to be a reliable OS that is garnering minimal bad press and much praise.

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The pros and cons of different approaches to network access control

One important piece of a multilevel security defense for companies of almost any size is network access control (NAC), which lets you enforce policies for end-user machines.

The basic idea behind NAC -- which can include hardware, software or a combination -- is deceptively simple. Before any end user's computer -- an endpoint -- is allowed on the corporate network, a NAC makes the computer prove that it complies with the company's security policies. For example, you could set up a NAC to refuse to let a user's PC on the company LAN until the PC reports that it has all the latest patches for its operating system and office software and that it has the latest updates for the corporate antivirus program. If it doesn't have the goods, the device is not getting on the network.

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