Hobsons EMT, which provides customizable, Web-based software solutions for higher education, is using server virtualization to enhance its data center efficiency and increase service levels while reducing power and cooling and cutting costs in the process. Patrick McFadin, director of engineering, spoke recently to InfoWorld about how Hobsons is using server virtualization, why they selected Virtual Iron over VMware and lessons learned about best practices for implementation. Links to the podcast are available here.

SearchServerVirtualization posted a Podcast on their site highlighting how seven of Virtual Iron's rapidly growing family of customers are deploying Virtual Iron to reduce their capital and operating expenses and improve their ability to better align their IT operations with their business goals. The customers featured in this podcast are a diverse group, representing a broad set of industries and business models, including professional services, health care delivery, retail, software as a service (SaaS), ecommerce, media and publishing and IT services. They can be found across the US, Canada and Europe. Some are well known, some are not. They range from one person, Windows–only IT shops running iSCSI SAN arrays and a limited number of workloads in test and staging environments to large, sophisticated IT departments running a variety of Windows Server and Linux OS guests and a broad range of demanding workloads in production environments with mixed Fiber Channel and iSCSI SAN arrays. Despite the wide variances outlined above, these organizations all have something very fundamental in common – a strong desire to take full advantage of the well-documented operational and economic benefits of server virtualization in a way that is both affordable and easy to manage. The Podcast is available here. Please note that it sits on a third-party site and does require registration. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Virtual Iron has become the server virtualization solution of choice for K-12 school systems. This blog describes how the Emanuel County School System, a rural school district in Georgia, is using Virtual Iron. The next entry profiles the Pawtucket School Department, an urban school district across the US. Emanuel County is located 90 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. It covers almost 700 square miles in east-central Georgia and is home to just over 22,000 residents. While the area is largely rural, the county school district puts a high priority on developing strong educational programs and it views information technology as an important enabler for achieving this goal. The school system educates 4,500 students in eight schools covering pre-K through 12th grade. As the school system has grown, it has put increasing pressure on its IT systems. The district moved into a new centralized data center, bought new, more powerful servers and, for a short time, resolved its problems. But, as the county, its school system, and its IT needs continued to grow, the school system quickly outgrew the capacity of its new data center. Where it started with 20 servers, Emanuel County quickly added more to meet increasing demand. This created significant power and space issues. There was pressure to add additional servers as well, but retrofitting the data center to accommodate that growth was a very expensive proposition. This led to a decentralized architecture with seven different locations each housing three to four servers supporting the school district. The root cause of this server sprawl was the low utilization of the school system’s existing server infrastructure. Each server was dedicated to a single application running, in most cases, at less than 15% utilization. This was a clear indication that implementing server virtualization would pay significant dividends in terms of both OpEx and CapEx savings. ECSS looked at several vendors, including VMware, but deemed it too expensive and too complex. They also tested both Citrix XenSource and Novell Xen, but did not feel the capabilities in these solutions were comprehensive enough to meet its needs. These solutions also required Linux command line programming which introduced unnecessary complexity for the ECSS IT staff. They then learned about Virtual Iron, and after extensive internal testing, found it much easier to use and afford. Today, with the help of server and storage virtualization from Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks, ECSS has streamlined its data center, reducing its number of servers from 38 to 18, with half of those servers part of a hot backup site for disaster recovery. With this consolidation, the school system has not only reduced its power and cooling costs, but also avoided the physical labor, capital expenses and server outages that would have resulted from retrofitting its existing data center with additional cooling and power outlets. The school district is running Windows and Linux workloads side by side on the same servers. Typical Windows workloads being virtualized include the district’s e-mail archive system, Zenworks Configuration Management, and eDirectory services. Typical Linux workloads include Novell OES2, SASI Student Information System and Novell GroupWise. Emanuel County and SSI report no performance degradation on those workloads.

The Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island is leveraging server virtualization as a core foundation to streamline its IT infrastructure and reduce its capital and operating expenses. The school department serves over 9000 students and 1300 faculty and staff, throughout 17 schools and an administration building. With reduced city and state aid to education, there is never enough money to support the technology and the related services required by its constituents. Mike St. Jean, the school department's Director of Technology, has used creativity and resourcefulness to deliver a high level of IT services across the entire school district. Over the past few years, under Mike’s leadership, the school department shifted its district-wide technology model and resources from a traditional client-server model to thin client and server based computing model. As a result, the Pawtucket School Department has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while greatly increasing access, services, security, and manageability compared to traditional desktop computers. However, this new architecture introduced its own new set of challenges. One negative byproduct has been the sheer amount of server sprawl that has resulted. For example, each high school has one Novell Netware workgroup server and six Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 (Win2K3) terminal servers. Each junior high school has one Netware and four Win2K3 Terminal Servers. Each elementary school has one Netware and one to two Win2k3R2 terminal servers. The Administration Building houses an additional twenty or so terminal, workgroup, web, communications, data, and application servers. District-wide the IT staff maintains eighty servers, supporting 2000 workstations, 1600 of which are dedicated thin clients, with a need for further expansion. Clearly, the environment was ripe for server virtualization and consolidation. In early 2007, St. Jean set out to research server virtualization technologies. He looked at every available option in detail, testing them himself to form his own opinions. Eventually, Mike got around to testing Virtual Iron. He downloaded the Virtual Iron free trial. Within ten minutes he had the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager installed and was off and running. This trial was so encouraging and the management capabilities so intuitive and robust that, after reviewing all the available alternatives, St. Jean and his IT staff decided Virtual Iron was the best product, period. Even though it cost more than the free products, it had additional performance and management capabilities that the School District simply could not live without. But this cost was still significantly less than comparable offerings by VMware or Citrix. According to St. Jean, “ based on the success of these trials, the IT staff plans to cut the district’s 36 physical school-based terminal servers in half due to Virtual Iron’s ability to provide additional management, provisioning, backup, and archiving capabilities. Another benefit is that the IT staff will be able to reduce the electrical and cooling requirements of each school’s central wiring and server closets. This is a significant factor in very old, cramped school buildings, with older infrastructure.” With a small initial investment, the dedicated IT staff at Pawtucket School District has been able to build gradually, absorbing technologies and expanding capacity as budgets allow. One of the things that the team liked best about Virtual Iron is that it provided it with the ability to start small and to scale fast. Going forward, there are also another dozen or so services targeted for virtualization over the next year as the administration center adds additional managed nodes. Just as the Pawtucket School Department’s IT staff shifted from a traditional client-server model to thin client infrastructure to realize substantial cost savings and management efficiencies, it is looking to leverage Virtual Iron as a core foundation solution to take CapEx and OpEx savings and management efficiencies to the next level. In St. Jean's words, "Virtual Iron is budget friendly to cash-starved school districts, easy to setup, use and maintain for time-limited IT staff, and is stable, high performing, and secure to meet the exponentially growing technology needs of students, faculty, and administration."

Mike Grandinetti March 3, 2008 At VMworld Europe 2008 this past week in Cannes, France, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tarry Singh, an executive with European services provider Atos Origin, and one of the virtualization industry’s most insightful and prolific bloggers. We discussed a wide–ranging set of industry issues including customer requirements, obstacles to broader market adoption, the emerging competitive landscape, and Virtual Iron’s differentiation relative to VMware and Microsoft. Tarry asked many provocative questions, and he captured our discussion on video, and posted it on his blog site here.

Mike Grandinetti April 11, 2008 Cloud Computing. Pie in the “Sky” or does it really represent “The Future” of IT? Long term, certainly. In the short term - yes and no. It depends on whose viewpoint you take. In this specific instance, many small and mid-size enterprises, including Virtual Iron, have been the early adopters. It fits precisely the manner – and velocity - that many SMEs want to purchase products and services going forward. At the same time, cloud computing does not yet meet the rigorous criteria of enterprise IT and has yet to be supported by most major corporate IT vendors. Of course, there is always room for innovators to address market gaps. Cloud computing is a textbook example of a disruptive technology. The service offerings from Amazon – known as EC2 and S3 - are widely consumed, despite the fact that the uptime challenges and poor customer support have been very well- documented. Regardless, SMEs have simply found the operational and economic benefits of “Cloud” – or “Utility” computing far too compelling to wait to take advantage of. It turns out that Virtual Iron has an early window into this exciting market, as several of our customers are pioneering the delivery of this new approach, including XCalibre in the UK and several in North America and APAC. They focus on the goal of delivering a higher, more attentive level of service at a local and regional level. First-some basics. What is cloud computing? In essence, analogous to an electrical or water “utility”, cloud computing platforms offer compute and storage resources simply by “plugging” into the network through an extremely simple interface. The IT industry has dreamed of “on demand” computing for what seems like an eternity – and have experienced many false starts and unwarranted hyperbole. In fact, a very prescient Eric Schmidt, former CTO of Sun, and now the highly visible CEO of Google, said as far back as 1993, “ when the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network. “ The relentless onslaught of Moore’s law and Cal Tech legend Carver Mead’s famous corollary from 40 years ago that the price of transistors would be reduced by 50% every 18 months was dead on. It has led to powerful dual socket, quad processor servers at commodity prices. Combined with the widespread adoption of server virtualization and open source operating systems, it has led us to the point where Cloud Computing is in fact quite real today. The positive implications of on - demand application delivery models are widespread – think of well known market juggernauts like Salesforce.com, Yahoo Mail, Facebook and Google Apps, as well as Virtual Iron customers like Hobsons EMT, the leader in the university SaaS space, with renowned customers like MIT, Harvard, U Cal Berkeley and Queens College . Over the next few posts, I will specifically address how our hosted service provider customers are delivering “adaptive” IT server computing infrastructure to their own end user clients at “Internet Speed”, delivering a viable alternative to Amazon EC2 in their local markets. In each case, the ability to leverage Virtual Iron’s capabilities is a core foundational component to enabling new business models and revenue streams for our customers and in turn, innovative and superior service levels for their own customers. Make no mistake - these are very demanding and technically sophisticated customers, who fully evaluated all of their options, including the free open source version of Xen, as well as commercial offerings from VMware ESX and others, before selecting Virtual Iron as the provider of choice for their cloud computing infrastructure. In turn, they are delivering services to their own extremely demanding clients. Next up – a detailed overview of Virtual Iron Software customer XCalibre and their innovative FlexiScale service, a direct competitor to Amazon EC2 in Europe, before we turn our attention back to North America. Mike Grandinetti April 11, 2008

Mike Grandinetti April 30, 2008 Talk about tapping into a hot trend. While I was aware of the currency of cloud computing, I was caught off-guard by both the sheer volume and the global nature (largely out of band) of the response to my previous post. Over the past several weeks, while I have been traveling overseas, several major announcements have occurred which served to further validate and accelerate this rapidly evolving phenomena. A few highlights include: -Google announced Google App Engine (April 7, 2008) which allows developers to build and host web applications on Google’s scalable infrastructure, taking a “Fast Follower” approach in the category of horizontal platform services behind Amazon Web Services -Google announced integration between Salesforce.com and Google Apps (April 13, 2008). This offering will compete directly with Microsoft’s CRM software, which is integrated with its own Office suite in an attempt to more aggressively challenge Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar Office franchise. -Not to be outdone, Amazon announced its plans to transform EC2 into real online virtual infrastructure (April 16, 2008) – specifically by supporting persistent raw block storage devices stored within Amazon’s own S3 storage cloud. This capability, which is currently in Beta, is planned to be made available by year’s end. This represents an important step forward Other related announcements were made by Microsoft as well as IBM which I will outline in the next post. As I discussed in the last post, SMEs are quite clearly the early adopters around Cloud Computing infrsatructure. As if on cue, Colin Bannister, the Director of Strategy in the UK for CA, a supplier to large and very large enterprises, wrote in a contributed article to the Financial Times, “ The problem for me is that, in my experience, the successful businesses are the ones that see IT as fully integrated into their success and core to their strategy.” Exactly! Colin’s point of view, based on his company’s large scale customer base, is consistent with my own observations of the bifurcated adoption behavior. Markets are comprised of segments. Innovators, like Virtual Iron Software customer XCalibre, target classic early adopters in the SME space. This is exactly where salesforce.com found its early traction and where Google Apps is now finding market validation and acceptance. In the case of UK – based XCalibre, their customers, including web site design and training firm Cosmic, online portal 3Sacrowd and European football club Celtic FC Limited are all deriving significant operational and economic benefits from use of XCalibre’s FlexiScale platform. According to Tony Hamilton, Head of Multi Media for Celtic FC, “We switched to XCalibre in 2007 for a few reasons; the are a progressive, local company; understand exactly our needs both nationally and internationally; are very capable of coping with the huge Celtic traffic; are on call round the clock in the rare instances we need support or advice. Moving to XCalibre was a brilliant business decision.” This is entirely the point- compared to Amazon’s impersonal approach, locally and regionally - focused innovators like XCalibre provide a more attentive level of service. Domino Duhan, Technical Director of 3sacrowd, has had a similarly positive experience. His perspective – “As existing customers of XCalibre Communications, we approached the company for a web hosting solution for our new online glossy www.3sacrowd.com. We quickly saw that the flexibility and scalability of Flexiscale as an ideal solution for our high traffic volume, social networking site. XCalibre have worked in partnership with us to launch the Three's A Crowd Online portal and provided valuable technical assistance. Overall we have an excellent working relationship with XCalibre and wouldn’t hesitate to use Flexiscale for future projects.” What is behind these very positive customer sentiments? XCaliber, founded in 1997 and ranked as a Top 20 UK hosting provider, had a clear vision when it conceived of FlexiScale. The mnemonic, SASHA describes it briefly: -Simple -Affordable -Scalable -Highly Available More specifically, XCalibre’s focus was on delivering SASHA to developers and ISVs to enable them to focus on their own core value propositions without the need to worry about data center elements including networks, server hardware, storage, operating systems or the myriad details required in managing data center infrastructure. Some key design principles include: -Extensive use of (Virtual Iron) virtualization -Fully Integrated Provisioning and Billing -Full Redundancy and Automatic Self Healing -Linear Scalability -Intelligent Load Balancing and Self - Optimizing In comparison to Amazon EC2, XCalibre provides: -Existence of an SLA -Windows OS Support and integrated licensing -Truly static IP addresses and multiple IP’s per server -Each customer gets their own VLAN -Standards – based ISO boot images vs. a proprietary AMI -Persistent, scalable and highly available storage architecture that copes with heavy sustained IOPS ( per above, Amazon announced a piece of this, although it will not be GA for many more months) -Automatic fail-over in case of a HW fault -Automatic load equalization across a cluster -Integrated fire walling (now in Beta) -Integrated Load Balancing ( coming soon) Talk about a differentiated offering to the 800 pound gorilla. So much so that I was recently approached by a Boston area entrepreneur looking to launch a new venture that is planning to standardize, at least in part, on XCalibre’s advanced FlexiScale Cloud Computing platform. Pretty impressive. Mike Grandinetti April 30, 2008