From my conversations with customers it is evident that CIO’s are continuing to strive to be at the heart of value creation. Generally speaking the top three goals for CIO’s in 2013 are: -

1. Protecting corporate data
2. Improving business productivity  – and giving business stakeholders transparency as to the cost of the IT services they are consuming
3. Lowering the cost to serve of IT services – and moving spend from CAPEX to OPEX

With Cloud Computing firmly ticking numbers two and three on the CIO “to do” list, is it just fear of failure around the first point that is preventing much wider cloud adoption than is currently occurring? Inevitably, as with all things “IT”, it isn’t quite that straight forward. Clearly, having confidence as to the protection afforded a corporations most precious asset (its data) is a potential barrier Continue Reading

It seems now as a consumer you are presented with a vast array of solutions in which to store your data. Pat Gelsinger spoke this week of a desire for VMware to become the “Apple of the data centre”, running all your applications and databases in a virtualised environment. This could be either in your own data centre or one of the many hosted now available for use by any size of organisation. And what about all this data, according to IDC data volumes will continue to double every two years, giving you possibly, a  Continue Reading

This year, we’re bringing back EMC Forum to the UK and Ireland. This essential one-day event shows you how cloud and Big Data are transforming our industry — and how you can transform your business to stay competitive.

At EMC Forum you can learn, connect and network. You will hear local and international insights from high calibre keynote speakers and presenters, and case studies featuring the latest integrated solutions from EMC and our partners. A hand-picked selection of partners, such as Cisco, Computacenter and MTI, will be exhibiting their products, and our VLab will offer technical training from EMC engineers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the latest solutions, products and services direct from EMC specialists and partners, network with the EMC Community and
discover our vision for the future. Continue Reading

We assembled our key ingredients for Trusted Cloud in Part 1 so let’s look at how to cook them and taste our creation….

How to mix
The formula for building a trusted cloud is to gain control over and visibility into the cloud’s infrastructure, identities and information.

Information can move instantly, often for perfectly legitimate reasons like load balancing, backup, DR. Information mobility is a great resource though it can be a nightmare Continue Reading

This week I was invited to attend a multi-supplier strategy workshop with one of our clients.  The purpose of the workshop was to look at their future storage strategy and all the major industry vendors  were there to present. This style of workshop provides clients the ability to see consistencies and opinions from each supplier. When it was my turn to present , I decided to push things a bit and discuss how sourcing storage and technology would change in the next 5 years.  I started by suggesting that come 2017 the major vendors will not be selling hardware. This may seem a bit of a ridical theory, but by how much? If you follow my reasoning to come perhaps this statement Continue Reading

In my day to day job I have conversations with all levels staff within an IT oganisation, from Systems Administrators to CxO, and the one common theme that appears in all levels definition of Cloud Computing is x86 Virtualisation and, you guessed it VMware.

VMware have cleverly targeted their marketing and developement efforts around Cloud Computing and have succeeded in being, in the majority of cases, the first vendor to be mentioned during any discussions around this capability.

Due to this efficient marketing it has also helped to position the virtualisation Continue Reading

The hype is nearing its peak, promises of reduced IT costs, flexible computing, infrastructure and application architectures that can keep pace with your businesses ever changing landscapes. But what is happening in reality? How many enterprise organisations are adopting public clouds? Do they really believe that a public cloud is the right strategy to adopt?

I’m not convinced.

This is not only because of the nervousness of large enterprise customers but also the lack of ability to execute from large IT vendors. The cloud offering as it stands today is predicated on x86 virtualisation and the battle is being played out at the hypervisor and cloud-management layers. Is VMware, XEN, Openstack or Hyper-V the best Continue Reading

What is a Private ‘Heterogeneous’ Cloud environment?

Well I’m talking about a Private Cloud that spans both x86-64 and RISC based processors using Type 1 hypervisors supporting multiple Operating Systems. In this particular instance I will be talking about VMware for x86-64 virtualisation and the IBM Power Hypervisor for virtualisation of the IBM POWER (RISC) processor. Further supporting infrastructure includes Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches for IP Protocols and MDS9000 Fabric Switches for the FC Protocol, EMC multi-tiered storage (VMAX) Continue Reading

As part of my day job I regularly come across a wide range of multi-disciplined individuals who all have skills and experiences that I can only hope to one day match. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and have a plethora of views and visions of not only the end game but also the approach needed to ensure a successful implementation of the holistic IT department of the future.

Through their enthusiasm and desire to ‘fix’ legacy IT they sometimes fail to recognise that they are all working towards the same end goal, that in fact by working together and learning from each other and taking the best aspects of each others frameworks, definitions, libraries and experiences we can deliver true Cloud Computing solutions. The IT industry is maturing and we have a number of proven techniques to ensure that we meet business requirements, address operational processes and deliver robust solutions.

It is only now as part of Cloud Computing are we seeing many of these come together. Cloud Computing is not only a set technologies, or just some service management, process re-engineering, high level architecture definitions or Infrastructure delivered on-demand to meet your businesses IT processing requirements.

Cloud Computing is all of these any more.

With Chris Chant announcing his imminent departure, is this where the G-Cloud programme turns into what many have claimed it always was…vapour?

In being so forthright with his views on what is acceptable and, far more clearly, what is unacceptable, Chris has doubtlessly alienated large parts of the traditional Systems Integrator community who have been waiting for the moment to get their revenge.  Some will be thinking that the time is right. 

I will bet that they’re wrong.  Chris has established a strong and vocal community of support for G-Cloud and that support will continue under the watchful eyes of Liam Maxwell, Continue Reading