Virtualization technology

Despite these benefits, the thought of switching to a virtualized technology infrastructure gives pause to even some the most educated CIOs. Technology confusion and vendor choices aside, the dread of physical-to-virtual transitions stems from concerns over security, performance, and scalability. These three issues have emerged as the main challenges organizations face when making the transition from a totally physical IT infrastructure to one that is increasingly virtualized.

Fortunately, one vendor in particular has made gains in addressing these fears. With its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has made significant progress in all three of these key areas, making it a capable contender in the enterprise virtualization marketplace.

This blog will focus on the security concerns, and our next blog will tackle the performance and scalability fears with the physical-to-virtual transition.

Security

Anyone who runs a computing environment, whether physical or virtual, is concerned about network and data security. So let’s set the record straight regarding virtual servers and security; virtual machines (VMs) are neither more nor less secure than physical machines. Virtual servers require all the same network and data security precautions, patches, and due diligence you’d apply to physical servers.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s discuss how Red Hat has enhanced the network and data security on its virtualization technology solution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6) introduces a number of new identity and authentication features, such as the new System Security Services Daemon, which provides centralized access to identity and authentication resources. Additionally, all RHEL 6 packages now include a 4096-bit RSA hardware signing key.

Other new network and data security technologies in RHEL 6 include the sVirt API to secure virtualization. In RHEL 6, Red Hat integrated sVirt with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) as a way to provide additional security to virtual guests. In effect, this minimizes the number of interfaces between the virtual guest and the KVM host, exposing only a small potential area of attack that you can closely monitor and audit.

Should a virtualized guest manage to break the KVM containment, it would likely attempt to manipulate the image of another guest or access files or network ports. Since all those resources also are labeled within SELinux, RHEL 6 prohibits unauthorized access, as each guest has its own label identification.

Furthermore—with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) system management layer— the virtualized guest SELinux identifier can even be passed along with the virtual guest as part of a live migration, moving this protection with it.

Therefore, sVirt perfectly demonstrates the power of KVM integrated with Linux. Without KVM, Red Hat would have had to implement these network and data security features twice to achieve a similar level of protection, as other vendors have had to do with their virtualization technology solutions.

Come back in a few days and we’ll show you how Red Hat and KVM are addressing the performance and scalability concerns.

So what does this mean for the IT employee today? Simply put it means that those that will command the best salaries and opportunities don’t necessarily need tons and tons of experience in one area of IT. Rather, they need to be able to understand how IT functions throughout an organization; how overall system design is impacted by the latest breakthroughs in virtualization technology and what this might mean to data storage management and computer network security. The new IT worker needs to have a diverse skill-set.

At ASG, we’re more and more passing up the 15 years of experience to find that person that holistically understands the role of technology in organizations today. There are tons of job opportunities out there today for this type of person.

From our own experience with Flash-based file systems, we’ve seen some great benefits, including:

• System performance improvements of 50%
• 70% more mailboxes on an Exchange Server

Take the temperature of data and move it to the right tier to leverage performance and cost. Check out the video to see more ways to leverage Flash.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mark Teter is CTO of Advanced Systems Group, and frequent speaker at technology conferences. Stay tuned for additional video blogs from Mark on the top 5 barriers to cloud computing solutions growth, and the cloud computing decision framework.

Some highlights…

• NAND flash can replace up to 1,000 disk drives with its performance
• Uses 1/5 the power of hard drives making it one of the greenest technologies available
• Little or no power consumption when it’s not being used
• The price of NAND flash should likely be reduced 50% in the next 12 months

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mark Teter is CTO of Advanced Systems Group, and frequent speaker at technology conferences. Stay tuned for additional video blogs from Mark on how to leverage flash, the top 5 barriers to cloud computing solutions growth, and the cloud computing decision framework.

ASG successfully transformed their sprawling server farm into an efficient, scalable, virtualized data center. With VMware virtualization, we’ve achieved a 6:1 server consolidation ratio, improving overall efficiency and cost significantly.

In addition, we designed and implemented a storage area network (SAN) that provides tiering, redundancy, replication & archiving capabilities.

Now, we’re implementing desktop virtualization, with HP thin clients, WMware View, and Citrix XenApp/Desktop. This single sign-on computing infrastructure is expected to reduce GRH’s desktop PC helpdesk tickets by 80%.

Read the article on GRH’s transformation in the digital edition of Inside Healthcare here.

Myth 2—There is no recognized value proposition

Much work still remains to be done on refining the value proposition of cloud computing. Key elements of the value proposition, however, already have become apparent. These include:

• Access to IT resources without upfront capital investment—allows organizations to easily and quickly gain the use of IT resources of all sorts without the upfront capital investment usually required or involvement in long term leasing. The cloud enables IT resources on demand.
• Pay-per-use access—the organization pays only for the IT resources it actually uses and only when it uses them. This eliminates the common practice of buying extra IT resources that may never get utilized
• Easier innovation by removing IT barriers—organizations can pursue business strategies without concerns having the necessary IT resources in place when they need them.
• Scale up or down easily—the cloud enables organizations to respond to fluctuations in the economy, markets, customer behavior, unexpected events quickly and easily by scaling their IT resources up or down as needed.

Cloud computing effectively shifts IT investment from a capital expenditure (CAPEX) to an operational expense (OPEX). In practice, the cloud allows organizations to find the optimal balance of IT resource CAPEX and OPEX and shift that balance as conditions warrant.

Myth 3—Your data lies exposed to the public

Yes, with cloud computing the organization’s data will reside in the cloud, but that needn’t leave it any more exposed than when it resides behind the corporate firewall. To date, the most egregious losses of data—think TJX Companies—occurred when the data was supposedly sitting safe behind the fire wall and under the direct control of the organization’s in-house IT people.

In addition, cloud computing takes three forms, each with different amounts of public exposure:

1. Private—data sits behind the corporate firewall, where the organization directly controls the amount of exposure.
2. Public—the data sits in the public cloud exposed to the public; security is dependent on the cloud service provider’s security precautions and defenses.
3. Hybrid clouds—some data resides on the private cloud, other data may reside on the public cloud. Security depends on both the organization’s internal security controls and those of the cloud provider.

In all cases, you must assess the security capabilities of the cloud service provider and balance any participation in private, public, and hybrid clouds accordingly.

Our next blog will explore 2 more myths of cloud computing, so swing by in a few days.  As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject, so leave a comment.

Cloud computing is the latest rage
When it comes to technology these days, the cloud is the place to be. Cloud computing has emerged as a hot trend, right alongside virtualization and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Vendors are racing to cash in.

As a result the market misinformation abounds, creating confusion among organizations that might otherwise benefit from the new technology. And as with any emerging technology, much remains in flux. Standards are still evolving, prices and pricing models vary widely, and best practices are just being identified.

In the meantime, a number of myths already are circulating about cloud computing. This paper provides an effective definition of cloud computing and corrects six of the most pervasive myths.

Cloud computing defined
Cloud computing is a convergence of high performance computing architectures, Web 2.0 data models, and enterprise-scale computing. Think about it as the next phase of service-oriented IT. With cloud computing you are accessing and running IT services, but the services could be somewhere beyond the corporate firewall.

Cloud computing enables you to deploy applications, systems, and IT resources as services that reside somewhere in the cloud—the global connected network. It allows you to use the applications, systems, and IT resources of other organizations when you need them.

Cloud services allow you to scale your IT resources quickly and endlessly. If you suddenly need to process more data you can just add more CPUs. If you need to store more data beyond your own disk capacity, no problem; just grab additional storage capacity from the cloud. When peak periods have passed and you need less IT resources, you can just as quickly and easily scale down.

Finally, cloud computing isn’t free. There is a cost to cloud resources, which we will take up later. The resources, however, are there for the asking.

Six cloud computing myths today:
Myth 1—There is only one way to do cloud computing

Some vendors might like you to believe this. It is not true. At this point there are at least four general types of cloud computing and more are likely to follow:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)—includes servers, networks, storage, management, and reporting. The big name here is Amazon with its EC2 offering, but it is not the only player.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)—addresses the needs of application development and testing by providing building blocks, enforcing consistent standards, and facilitating testing. The big player here is Google’s App Engine with more coming.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)—delivers packaged applications configured by each customer that run as a hosted service. The big names here are Google Apps and Salesforce.com although there are hundreds of others and more arriving seemingly every week.
4. Storage as a Service (StaaS)—similar to IaaS but focused on storage delivered as a hosted service. It includes primary, secondary, and archival storage as well as backup and disaster recovery. The big players include Amazon S3, Nirvanix, and Rackspace. Again, new players arrive monthly.

Together these types of cloud offerings form what can be called “IT as a service.” There is a type of cloud computing for almost every need.

Come back and visit in a couple of days and we’ll explore 2 more cloud computing myths. If you have some cloud computing myths of your own, please share them with us and our readers.

“Although solid state is emerging as a viable enterprise storage alternative, there’s still plenty of life left in hard disk drive technology, with higher capacity, greener and more capable drives on the way.”

Nobody is seriously suggesting the era of hard disk drive (HDD) technology is about to end. To the contrary, HDD vendors continue advancing the technology.

Still, a few doubts arise as solid-state drives (SSDs) and other solid-state technologies take on selective enterprise storage chores. “The amount of SSD replacing hard disk drives at present is miniscule,” said Mark Geenen, chairman, International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA). Yet, IDEMA began accepting SSD vendors into its ranks in 2009.

More telling, maybe, are the enterprise storage managers willing to experiment with solid-state storage alongside HDD. “We’re testing a couple of Fusion-io cards in some servers for a couple of high-performance trading applications,” said Kevin Fiore, CIO at San Francisco-based investment firm Thomas Weisel Partners LLC. The company wants to determine if the 160 GB and 320 GB solid-state cards make enough of a difference to justify the extra thousands of dollars they cost.

Solid-state storage, however, will remain a…read the full article.

Our last blog posting discussed the first two best practices. Centralizing and consolidating manufacturer’s contracts and identifying the total cost of ownership or TCO. This latest blog will discuss the next two tips: getting timely expiration notifications and determining the support level and support service needs.

Proper handling of application environments includes proactive management of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. When support contracts expire, companies face business disruptions to their critical application services. Therefore, companies should receive timely notification of any pending vendor support and maintenance contract expirations. Make sure you can view each support contract associated with each business application environment, including support contract and line item (individual equipment) expiration dates.

Like any financial asset, you must manage the complete lifecycle—acquisition, configuration, deployment, maintenance, and support. Determine the importance of each application environment to your business, and then determine the support level and its associated support service for your equipment. The reason is simple: When you have your support services in place—at an appropriate level of service—you’re significantly more prepared for potential business disruptions.

For example, this practice is essential in disaster recovery planning. When establishing the recovery time objective, ask, “Are the support contracts in place? What equipment do we have covered by support contracts, and what does that support entail? Have the necessary vendors reviewed the disaster recovery plan, and have we included all the vendors in the escalation processes?” Determine the support level and entitled support service with each application environment, and you can easily answer these questions.

Next up: make informed decisions and deploy similar support levels. If you have some best practices you’d like to share, leave a comment.

For more information about our maintenance and support contract service, Smartrack, visit http://www.virtual.com/x.php?p=Support.

Storage virtualization can extend the working life of your current storage investment. However, much of the investment still needs proper maintenance and support contracts, and companies are often uncertain what assets they should replace due to their high support costs.

By providing a unified picture of actual support spending across all business applications, organizations can accurately calculate the capital and operational expenses with each application as well as the underlying application environment. This information aids budget-planning purposes and establishes proper budget and expense controls.

Additionally, you should be able to view this information from a single dashboard so corporate decision makers can see relevant maintenance and support documentation.With support contract information online, you can easily export it into other data formats such as MS Excel, PDF and XML—simplifying collaboration with peers and management teams.

You will also want to view individual support contracts with detailed information comparing inventory support coverage across all manufacturers using generalized levels.

Companies will also want to view individual equipment expiration dates. Without advanced notice of pending contract expirations, along with details on connected software products, organizations will find it difficult to conduct financial analysis. When you have access to current and clear support and maintenance information, you can effectively produce a cost analysis for the support of renew versus asset/replacement decision.

And of course, properly managing any application environment requires proactively management of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. Be sure to link hardware and software resources to reveal connections between software licensed to specific application environments.

Virtualization technology is transforming the data center. As server and storage virtualization move into production mode, these best practices ensure successful deployments that optimize performance and utilization. Storage virtualization has quickly become a mainstream IT strategy for just this reason.

By virtualizing your storage assets, you can centrally pool all disk resources across your physically separate storage arrays. But the real benefits lie in the ability to provision data capacity, migrate data between different storage devices, and dynamically expand and upgrade your storage infrastructure.

Ideally, your storage virtualization should maximize your existing storage resources and provide an infrastructure that is scalable, available, and reliable for all applications.