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09-02-2012 - Numbers don’t lie
I have been going through my annual ritual of checking all of the published statistics from industry ...
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Jon Toigo  |
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Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners
en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC. |
01 februari 2011 - Secret sauce
With something like 400 million desktop PCs in the business world, averaging 400 US dollar in acquisition price and nearly ten times that amount in ownership costs, there exists a pretty clear business case for desktop virtualization. Today, that means encapsulating a desktop OS and its application software into a software container that is delivered to an end-user’s preferred client device on demand. The idea is that the management hassle and cost of desktop maintenance will drop significantly through centralization and standardization, while the mobility of users and flexibility of computing environments will be better supported. It’s your proverbial win-win.
This value case has both storage industry players as well as peddlers of server hypervisor software pretty excited as we move into 2011. Why storage vendors? Customers, of course, will need space to store those 400 million desktop images or VDIs, hence they will need to buy more storage capacity. The giddy anticipation of the hypervisor salesmen also seems justified. Consumers will need to stage their VDIs somewhere so they can be pushed out to client devices. The current approach utilizes a hypervisor on a server, for now at least.
Wow factor
Late 2010 saw a succession of proof-of-concept papers coming from the brand-name storage vendors touting cost models for VDI that were a fraction of the acquisition price of physical PCs. One three-letter vendor boasted that a five-thousand-PC environment could be effectively hosted on its storage array for roughly 50 dollar per box.
Once you get past the wow factor, however, you quickly realize that the storage vendor’s benchmark is rather self-serving. The number ignores the cost of licensing the desktop OS and application software and the cost of hypervisor licensing, server hardware, network enhancements, and storage cabling requirements. It does so in order to narrowly focus on the cost per VDI using the vendor’s storage gear. Moreover, a business will need to stack up a full five thousand virtual PCs in order to amortize the cost of the storage rig and achieve the cost per virtual desktop that the vendor advances.
Truth be told, virtually no one is going to virtualize five thousand desktops all at once, not even the large insurance companies or government research labs that actually have desktops in those numbers. It is more likely that companies will tread cautiously when pursuing a desktop virtualization strategy, virtualizing only a handful of machines at a time, so that the real cost and efficacy of the strategy can be clarified. Until that happens, buying a huge storage rig from EMC, IBM, HDS et cetera to support five thousand virtual PCs at below 100 dollar each will not return its investment. In fact, companies pursuing this course will likely find out the hard way that the easiest path to doubling or tripling desktop computing costs is to virtualize their desktops on expensive infrastructure.
DataCore
It was refreshing to read the benchmark on VDI and storage that was written by Ziya Aral, CTO of DataCore Software, to be found at www.datacore.com/downloads/vdi-benchmark-paper.pdf. His goals were not to amortize a specific storage rig, because DataCore sells storage virtualization that works just as well with Joe’s JBODs as it does with VMAX or USP. He wanted simply to understand the capacity and performance requirements for desktop virtualization, especially in the one- to five-hundred-VM range that will be much more common in the real world.
DataCore Software demonstrated pretty persuasively and without trying terribly hard that you could set up that range of VDIs on a virtualized storage platform for about 35 dollar per desktop. They also discovered that the low cost could be maintained as you grew the infrastructure, using storage and servers configured as part of a star topology—the stars later serving as building blocks for scaling. The price included all of the redundancy and failover capabilities heralded as ‘enterprise-class’ hosting by the brand-name storage rig vendors—using only the secret sauce of DataCore’s read–writable snapshots created from virtualizing underlying storage.
There were many not intuitively obvious findings in DataCore’s research that I will only summarize here. For one, a Microsoft Windows 7 machine will boot in less than 198 K of memory, so there is no real advantage to throwing a ton of RAM at the system. For another, most desktops require very little physical storage. So when you begin doing VDI, you need to stop thinking as though you are deploying a physical PC. Those have their parameters dictated by boundary conditions, which means that they are configured according to what the most data-intensive application or user might require in terms of storage capacity.
22-02-2012 - Europees MKB benut opslagcapaciteit onvoldoendeVan alle kleine Europese bedrijven met 100 of minder werknemers heeft slechts 2 procent alle bedrijfstoepassingen naar de cloud gemigreerd. 85 procent heeft bedenkingen over een dergelijke stap. Dit blijkt uit gezamenlijk onderzoek van Dell en Intel.
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