OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 5-14-09

1993-2009
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
May 14, 2009 meeting

Present: Jeff Reid, Steve Kronebusch, Andy King, Jim Sutter, Jennifer Curlee, Jeff Hecht, Sharon Solomon, Dave Phillips

We welcomed Steve Kronebusch, Sidepath – Simplifying Networks, to the meeting as a subject matter expert to provide technical backup where needed.

The minutes of this and prior breakfasts are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to the presentation material, when available.

Topic: Virtualization – server, storage, desktop, application, network.

Jeff Reid said that preparing this introduction proved to be very enlightening. He had some experience with virtualization at Conexant using VMWare, and more at Thornton Holdings where they ran into problems with compatibility between the virtualization software and their Great Plains, Citrix and Microsoft software. The official response from the vendors was “we can’t support you”, but unofficially they would put them in touch with many of their users who were running VM. Before virtualization, a given application ran on a specific hardware and OS software platform. Virtualization decouples the components, allowing sharing of resources, increased utilization (decreases future costs), lessens management overhead (still necessary, and capacity planning is important), reduces power consumption, and reduces response time for creating new virtual servers (to 30 min. or so). The areas of virtualization include servers, storage, desktop, applications and networks. The VM software turns hardware into software instances, which the Hypervisor maps to the physical server, router, switch or storage. The Connection Broker software allows a user to connect to his/her own virtual desktop of data and services, like the thin client concept. There are several virtualization packages – VMWare (market leader), Microsoft Hyper V (relatively new), Citrix Xen (building on their thin client experience), Virtual Iron (Oracle just bought them). This presentation is focused on VMWare and Compellent. VMWare breaks the dependency between OS and the hardware, allowing a large number of virtual machines to share a single pool of server resources, increasing utilization thus decreasing costs. Compellent breaks the dependency between servers and storage, by virtualizing all disks into one pool of storage, accessible by any server, reducing cost and wasted of storage capacity. This combination dynamically balances computing and storage resources based on business needs and predefined rules. It allows you to setup, test and implement DR with no downtime and less cost and complexity. It enables cost effective high availability for applications (and data protection and recovery) on virtual machines by combining snapshots of files and automatic restart of virtual machines in case of server failure. You can run multiple desk top OS (Mac, XP or Vista OS) on the same machine. Cisco has allowed workers to choose from a handful of laptops – about 25% choose Macs. Jeff’s handout covers this in more detail along with general thoughts and advice. A virtual management tool is required (VMWare’s is VCenter). Get your staff certified. Do an assessment. Review your current data backup and recovery processes. Power consumption will reduce but will increase in spots because of footprint density and you might need hot air removal. It is worth looking at and there are compelling reasons for implementing virtualization. His slides can ce found at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio.

Andy King, Exemplis Corporation, said that they use VMWare in a test environment. It gives application developers a playpen (pig pen!). They are relatively small in number (10 people), and so there is not a compelling reason to go virtualization. He complimented Jeff on his presentation, and now has more energy to plan for more.

Jim Sutter, Peer Consulting Group, also thanked Jeff for the thoroughness of his presentation, for which Jeff thanked Steve for his assistance. Jim does see a problem with taking this to the BoD – great IT story, but why didn’t we do this before. At one of his clients, they went to Vista with all new hardware, more laptops than desktops, never went to XP, and didn’t find a cost reason to go thin client. Looking back to his many years in the business, he remembers vividly the very large mainframe, and all its complexity. Now we are back to more of the same!

Jennifer Curlee, Surefire, said that they are relatively small (25 servers) and welcome virtualization to cut expenses. They went to a Xen server, deferred management tools, and will go gradually to virtualization. Her concerns revolve around performance and the network.

Jeff Hecht, Word & Brown, said that they have gone virtual for all their developers (50 in both locations). It provides high availability and many alternative environments. He is able to make the case for cost avoidance. They provide a virtual desktop environment for their offshore developers, as they don’t want proprietary software to go offshore. They use best of breed solutions, and they can start with a low risk, low cost entry point. It provides for more productivity, and for staged test environments. It is great for websites, especially low volume sites.

Sharon Solomon complimented Jeff for a great presentation. At Watson Pharmaceuticals, they had a 3-year plan to go virtual, and presented it to the CFO. Remember that this is a very regulated environment, and so backup, DR and rollout were very important.

Steve Kronebusch, Sidepath, thanked the group for inviting him to participate and he enjoyed the meeting. It is not often that he gets to hear the discussion from the CIO’s point of view.

Thanks again to Jeff and Steve for the very good introduction and informative handout.