IT Roadmap

Virtualization Offers More than Scale

Explosive growth of data and processing requirements is driving the need for a new architectural approach to IT infrastructures. The approach of mapping single servers to specific applications simply cannot meet the increasing demands for resources and dynamic response to business needs. Data center virtualization is the solution.

Virtualized architectures offer scalable and cost effective processing platforms. However, that just scratches the surface. Beyond the obvious benefits of scale, virtualization offers:

• Agile response:  Dynamic businesses require quick response. Thanks to virtualization, IT teams can respond to new user and business demands for applications, services and more. Changes in applications, workflows, software revisions, desktop configurations and more are straightforward to deploy and immediately available across the entire infrastructure.


• Reduced capital and operating costs:  Virtual platforms deliver new levels of utilization and performance. Servers that were once 30% utilized reach 80% plus within a virtual infrastructure. With this increase in ROI, costs for power, space and capital are reduced. Management costs are also dramatically reduced, allowing IT staff to focus on innovation and next generation services instead of day-to-day system and resource management.


• Business Continuity:  Virtualized architectures offer affordable alternatives to traditional redundant data centers. Virtual resources act as backup resources across the infrastructure, enabling planned and unplanned downtime with minimal, if any, impact on service delivery.

Virtualization isn’t a new concept. Service providers offered virtualized access to outsourced applications and services nearly a decade ago. Today, a wide number of vendors offer virtualization software, off-the-shelf hardware components and networking solutions that enable an IT staff to integrate and create a virtualized data center.

But the benefits of virtualization are not all in place, yet. The movement to blade servers and storage appliances improves overall ROI while simplifying management. Reduction to costs is important – but there is more to come.

The ultimate benefits of virtualization will come from an automated, ‘lights out’ approach to delivering IT services. Early tools for automation are being deployed by a number of independent vendors. The rewards from virtualization will continue to increase as these tools come to market, are improved and refined, and as they reach ‘standard’ levels for interoperability.

Still, for the near-term, the best approach to data center virtualization is to work with partners who are experts in the design and deployment of virtualized infrastructures.

It’s clear that the time for virtualization is now. The opportunity to improve results from reductions to capital expense, ensuring business continuity and improved agility that enables IT to quickly meet business needs are definitely within reach.

IP Telephony is More Reliable Than You Think

Just how dependable are Cisco voice over IP solutions?  This uncertainty is why many people get concerned when they find out they will be using a phone that is attached to the data network. 

These concerns are rooted in several sources.

• Historic network performance – computer networks in general have the persona of being somewhat reliable.  Many consider the performance of an Internet connection as what they could expect of a new IP phone system. It’s the “somewhat reliable” that causes concern.


• Perceived network performance/PC performance – websites, applications or the PC appear to be sluggish at times.  While this could be due to any number of factors, to the typical end user, this is the network.


• Reliable phone systems – there is no doubt the telecommunications industry has created traditional phone systems that are extremely reliable. This minimizes the need to switch because they don’t understand the benefits beyond dial tone.

There is an industry joke that if a network engineer maintains a data network with 95% uptime, he is a hero.  If a telecommunications engineer maintains a telephone network with 95% uptime, he is fired! 

However, given the advancements that Cisco has made in this technology space, systems can now be designed and configured to provide better reliability than traditional phone systems.  The very basic concept of IP telephony allows for tremendous flexibility, scalability, and more importantly, reliability. 

Traditional phone systems have all the functionality built into the PBXs – configuration, call processing, call routing, voicemail, PSTN connectivity, and handset connectivity – to name a few.  IP telephony breaks these functions out into separate devices that can be dispersed throughout the network, as well as duplicated to provide redundancy.  Now you can have a voice gateway with PSTN connection in 2 offices and provide backup PSTN connectivity to each site or have call processors in the 2 locations to provide backup call processing and call routing to ensure that you always have the ability to send and receive phone calls.

Aside from utilizing redundant equipment, most recent voice server applications use the concept of active and in-active partitions.  This now allows for more efficient upgrading of the application but also a fall-back plan if the new upgrade doesn't perform as expected – all with minimal downtime (recall that we are using redundant equipment as well!)

Cisco’s latest development has been to move the voice application servers to a virtual environment.  This not only reduces operating cost, but also provides a robust platform for streamlining the deployment of voice application servers making the switch from a traditional telephone system easier than ever..

So what are you waiting for?  Find out how your company can benefit from Cisco Unified Communications today!

Today's post written by: Nathan Richie, boice.net Network Consultant

Virtualization Works for SMBs Too

Many small to mid sized businesses feel that enterprise class technology solutions such as virtualization and continuity are too expensive and or complex for them to leverage.  While that may have been the case in the early days of virtualization, today’s solutions are designed to address the needs of small, medium and enterprise businesses.

So what are the benefits of virtualization and business continuity for real world users, and not just the big enterprises with millions of dollars in IT infrastructure?  They’re the same.   And you can have them right now. Let’s look at an example:

A small university’s growth was outstripping its data center’s ability to process data. The IT staff decided that a move to a service-oriented design, leveraging virtualization, was the best approach to solve their problem.

Virtualization allowed the university to:

• Scale as needed by distributing their processing power across a variety of applications, enabling them to keep up with growth at a significantly lower capital equipment cost.


• Improve individual application performance by adding processing power as needed in an ad hoc fashion.


• Provide continuous availability because failure of a server, or even multiple servers, didn’t result in an outage.


• Lower IT management costs. Since each virtual server was identical to the other, best practices could be applied to update, tune and manage the entire infrastructure as a single homogeneous entity.

The university was in the process of creating an offsite backup center to ensure continuity. Once they saw the values of virtualizaton, the university chose to leverage those resources to create a larger-scale central processing center—even though the location was off campus. Instead of having idle resources standing by in case of a failure, these resources were utilized as part of the active processing infrastructure to deliver ongoing results.

So how do you know if virtualization is right for you?  Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Will my company’s future business objectives require expanded application processing?


2. Will a reduction to IT management costs allow me to offer increased end user services?


3. Do our employees, customers and partners need 365X24X7 availability of computing systems?


4. Are my computing systems performing as well as they could be?


5. Do I need to deploy new applications with minimal time and trouble?

If you answered “Yes” to any of the above, then virtualization is a tool that can help your business.

Business Continuity Comes Front and Center

Business continuity is a key objective for any organization. Traditional best practices for continuity focus on geographic redundancy - meaning multiple sites with replicated systems, applications and data (based on critical business processing).

The advent of data center virtualization changes the face of continuity and the need for redundancy.  Rather than having replicated sites standing idle waiting for a failure, virtualization empowers backup resources to be utilized as part of the processing infrastructure.

By virtualizing data center resources across all sites, traditionally non-performing investments (e.g., disaster recovery systems, storage and networks) can be transformed into a productive IT asset. IT services can scale across these redundant sites, the sites themselves can be optimized for better efficiency and ROI, and business continuity is achieved in a much more active manner. The concept of failover is replaced by an active, virtualized infrastructure.

Virtualization brings additional benefits:

• Data replication, system upgrades and standard maintenance can be performed seamlessly.


• Single points of failure are eliminated.


• Overall costs of redundant systems can be reduced thanks to shared resources and services placed on lower-cost, higher performance racked servers vs. traditional standalone systems.

When leveraging virtualization to provide high availability and business continuity, there are a few areas to consider:

• Applications: Can your applications be virtualized? The easiest way to determine this is to ask about clustering of your application. If it can be clustered, then each instance can retain state and that empowers virtualization.


• Data:  Can data be replicated in real time to assure consistency and currency? If the data doesn’t require immediate updates, this may not be an issue since replication tools can run on a frequency basis to meet your data relevance needs. In many cases, real-time replication isn’t the best solution thanks to the bandwidth required to keep massive data volumes in sync.


• Connectivity: Virtualizing resources only works if users can access information regardless of their location. That’s where access devices come into play. Such devices route users to the best available resource, based on performance, availability, etc. Such routing is completely transparent and non-disruptive to users.

Virtualization may be a better model for your business continuity efforts. The best approach is to work with an expert, creating a complete virtualization architecture, then a phased deployment to fully realize the power of a virtualized infrastructure.