Posted on Sun, Aug 29, 2010
Author: Neil Longmuir
Practice Lead for Cloud
As the number of companies utilizing virtualization grows, the driving force behind this growth is without a doubt the resulting increase in hardware utilization and in turn the lower IT cost via the sheer consolidation of physical assets. With fewer assets to purchase and maintain year on year, companies can easily see the benefits and their affect on the balance sheet.
Other forces have now arisen which are driving the increase in the use of virtualization. Of all the services being offered within the new 'pay-for-use' IT service model known as the Cloud, “the notion of recovering your critical IT components and services from disaster by using Cloud Computing”, is one of the most compelling reasons for organizations to finally stop treating DR (Disaster Recovery) and BC (Business Continuity) as a nice to have.
When organizations start to seriously consider the cost of securing their critical data & services against the feared 'disaster event', the fact that multiple technologies and paradigms offer differing levels of recovery is not comforting to IT executives.
Traditionally when the analysis of DR technologies begins, the cost of a solution is typically a function of two critical facets; the organization's tolerance to;
- data loss during an outage.
- downtime of normal business operations during an outage.
With the process of virtualizing their IT infrastructures already begun, Cloud customers today take advantage of the Scalar ‘virtualized DR’ (vDR) product that enables multi-tenant customer infrastructures to be replicated continuously to a secondary data centre for the purpose of recovering from disaster events. In addition, non-resident Scalar customers who have their own private cloud are able to use Scalar vDR as a target for data replication and hence a site for recovery. Coupled with proven recovery processes, the vDR product empowers Scalar customers with the ability to recover from disaster no matter where their infrastructure resides.
Fundamental to vDR, replication of data at the block level requires technology that’s commonly provided by Enterprise Storage vendors. The replication (or snapshotting) process coupled with quiescent agents (via application APIs) maintain datastore and application context.
What this all means is that the SLAs (service level agreement) which, typically drove the solution and therefore the costs can be met more easily and hence at considerably lower costs than traditional DR methodology.
Comments welcome and for a detailed technical walk-through of vDR and its benefits, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Posted on Sat, Aug 28, 2010
Author: Rob Adams
Consultant for
Telecollaboration
This past week the City of Ottawa announced a telework initiative to reduce the number of trips that it's field staff makes to and from their offices. Ottawa councilor Maria McRae highlighted examples where staff made between 15-20 cross town trips to return to their desks for common activities like updating records, and checking email. One City of Ottawa employee explained that he travels 60 minutes to work each day by car, while there is a City of Ottawa building 8 minutes walk from his home. Telecollaboration could solve both of the city's dilemmas.
The City of Ottawa is demonstrating leadership in considering the benefits of teleworking on it's staff, budgets, and the environment. As a large organization with offices spread out across the geography of the Nation's Capital there are many opportunities for collaboration between staff at multiple locations. A solution like Scalar's Telecollaboration could allow staff to work from multiple office locations and still collaborate with team mates in their primart office.
If you'd like to learn more about Scalar's Telecollaboration solutions we'd love to discuss them with you.
Posted on Thu, Aug 26, 2010
Author: Roger Singh
Practice Lead for Network and Scalar's CTO
Stories we hear from prospects and clients alike about web application performance seem to share a common plot line.
You have worked hard to improve the UI of your website to make your visitor's experience as wonderful as possible. You have invested in all of the tools and infrastructure recommended to you to secure the site from hackers. You have honed your database to ensure that the customer with the book and the CD gets the recommendation to also purchase the appropriate themed gift bag. What do you do then when you're bounce and abandoned shopping cart rates continue to climb?
Thousands upon thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours later you have an internal site for your finance and operations team that integrates data from your ERP, your CRM and Websphere so that they have up to the minute access to critical decision making data. Despite this awesome integration you see that usage rates of the custom application are still low, and users continue to work within the 3 silos of data without leveraging the business tool you implemented.
Web Application Performance has become an extremely complex discipline today as it can be critically impacted by so many elements of your network. To understand the elements that impact web application performance you need to consider all variables including new virtualized environments, cloud accessed resources, hardware that gateway nodes reside on, and many other key facets of the integrated environment that your application resides in.
Scalar's Web Application Performance assessment can help you to get a clear understanding of how to decrease your web customer's bounce and cart abandonment habits, and to improve the ROI of your internal Web Applications. I look forward to learning more about your applications and how we can improve them together.
Posted on Wed, Aug 25, 2010
Author: Michael Traves
Practice Lead for Data Management
Over the past couple of several years, acquisitions and mergers have been the focus of great speculation, anguish, disappointment, and frustration. But are they good for the industry, consumers, and most importantly your business? What does it mean for innovation? And how important is that?
It wasn't so long ago that I can remember companies with project teams whose sole purpose it was to rid themselves of a particular vendors technology in their infrastructure. Depending on how invested they were on the technology, the costs involved in replacing it, and how ingrained it might be with their systems and processes these projects would take months and sometimes years. The interesting fact here is that in many cases these project teams never dissolved - whatever vendor they were targeting for replacement very likely had acquired someone else that had an impact on their infrastructure so by the time they finished replacing one they'd be at it again. And again.
As we all know, it's not always about the best technology, vendor, or solution. Whether the result of poor support, a project gone sideways, or an employees bias, it is quite common for companies to shy away from products manufactured or distributed by specific vendors. More specifically though, it isn't the company itself with the bad taste, but the people involved with whatever happened. Thus, as people move between companies, so do the biases - for and against - specific vendors. Thus we have the notion of churn in the data centre, with technology purchases and expulsions patterns following employees movement throughout their career, company to company. A successful sales person sells to people, not companies, and thus their success is tied to making individuals successful. The challenge than is in convincing a person to choose against his ingrain bias - something a more successful sales team will accomplish.
Mergers and acquisitions shake up these buying patterns, and as they increase in frequency and size make it difficult if not impossible to target specific vendors or technology for purchase or avoidance. The fact is, innovate technology companies get acquired by larger, not so innovate companies all the time. The success of such an acquisition has more to do with politics and culture than the underlying technology itself - competitors will catch up when given the opportunity to do so, and innovation can be impacted greatly when a company is in the throws of acquisition, particular a hostile one, or one with clear culture differences. Losing all your key people, whether it be people cashing out or being left out isn't going to make your acquisition pay off.
On the surface, then, all looks gloomy. Or does it?
Successful innovation requires flexible execution, which is generally a trait of smaller, more nimble companies. The challenge smaller companies have is getting their product to market, something which requires successful funding and industry accolades to turn prospects into customers. Turning a profit, one that is consistent and measurable is often a great challenge but should be a marker in companies purchasing decisions. Acquisition is often an objective of these companies, as it greatly accelerates their entry into the market. Being part of a larger organization with the funds and reputation to take smaller, innovative companies farther and faster than they could on their own is a recipe for great success for both organizations. When done correctly, customers will also benefit greatly. When done poorly, the result can be disastrous - for both vendor and customer.
Successful acquisitions allow for continued innovation, and retain the staff the made the company successful in the first place - from the engineers, developers, and support staff with product knowledge, to the sales and technical field engineers who have customer relationships and can instil confidence that "all is well". You may never be able to convince everyone with a bias against the acquiring company to stay the course, but with the right approach the majority of customers will stick around and benefit long term, while the market opportunity dramatically increases for the vendor.
Mergers, while similar to acquisitions attempt to appeal to clients of both organizations, but generally do neither. A merger is an acquisition of equals, and eventually the corporate culture and management of one company will infiltrate or corrupt the other. Whether the customer will benefit while they take the time to sort that out is hard to determine.
Partnerships, while useful to those who look for integration and interoperability of best of breed products are at constant risk, particularly these days, to acquisition by competitors and the changing tides of business. Partnering allows companies to offer technology, directly through resale/OEM, or indirectly through partners, as a solution. But when a strategic partner gets acquired or folds, it leaves the customer and the vendor exposed to support issues and ultimately triggers technology migration. Partners become competitors and customers are left to deal with the issues. Successive attempts (and failures) by vendors to do this over the long term hurts their credibility and are highly disruptive to customers infrastructure.
Learning to ride the tide of acquisitions in the industry is an important success factor in your business being able to take advantage of new industry trends and technologies to drive bottom line profitability, while minimizing risk.
So the question must be asked - how has your infrastructure been impacted by acquisition and merger activity? Has it been positive? Did it bring any tangible or technical benefits to your business or day-to-day activities? And when you look to acquire new technology and solutions from a vendor, does their perceived risk to acquisition factor in to your buying decision?
Posted on Wed, Aug 18, 2010
Author: Rob Adams
Consultant for
Telecollaboration
When you consider your budgets for next year you know intuitively that you should take a closer look at inter office travel expenses. Whenever you consider it though, a quick chat with your peers about the big players in the "telepressence" business quickly closes the door on that thought. With the need for dedicated high cost network bandwidth, and the inability to work collaboratively it doesn't seem that telepressence can compete with showing up.
There is a solution now that not only provides for HD video between your offices, and allows for shared document collaboration - but it does all this using your existing network capacity.
Scalar's Telecollaboration solution should be a part of your budget planning cycle this year. When you rack up the totals for travel costs, the productivity lost due to travel, and the costs for meals and accommodation there is no reason to not investigate this cost effective collaboration solution.
Your organization's employees will both benefit through more frequent face to face interations, and your budgets will be healthier for the decreased drag due to inter office travel expense.
I look forward to the opporutnity to show you how simple it is to give your team what they need to work more closely together.
Posted on Thu, Aug 05, 2010
Author: Scott Wilson Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP)
Practice Lead for Business Continuity
Business Continuity has grown in to a large and complex essential business practice.Everyone is doing it in some form; unfortunately most are not doing it well. Typically Business Continuity is confused with Disaster Recovery. This is not correct. Disaster Recovery is a smaller part of Business Continuity. Here are some standard definitions of the two:
BUSINESS CONTINUITY is an ongoing program supported and funded by executive staff to ensure business continuity requirements are assessed, resources are allocated and, recovery and continuity strategies and procedures are completed and tested.
DISASTER RECOVERY: Activities and programs designed to return the entity to an acceptable condition. The ability to respond to an interruption in services by implementing a disaster recovery plan to restore an organization's critical business functions.
As you can see Disaster Recovery fits in to the overall Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program as a planned response to an unplanned event. These can include Natural Disasters, IT failures or organizational challenges.
Understanding how all the pieces of the BCM program fit together can be a challenge if only addressed from an IT perspective. History has shown business interruption and disasters can occur at any time and be in many different forms. So for a business to survive and possibly thrive in an uncertain future, better Business Continuity is KEY.
There is a lot of information out there for practitioners of BCM programs, however finding and understanding this information and deciphering how it is relevant to your organization is always a challenge.
So as an introduction to this blog I invite you to review the information posted here regularly and comment on the content. With comments I can respond with specific answers to your comments or questions and help provide a better understanding of the BCM landscape and possibly address your concerns.
If you have a specific question regarding anything Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery please feel free to contact me and I would be happy to investigate it and post it to this blog.
Posted on Mon, Aug 02, 2010
Scalar Decisions invites you to join an exclusive community of IT administrators as we discuss the deployment and operation of leading edge technologies over lunch.
TGIF@ScalarLabs is an interactive monthly session for a technical audience.
By attending you will learn about how the combination of technologies can make your life easier:
- snapshot and replication tools can increase your productivity and empower end users
- virtualization will enable you to better serve your user and business stakeholders
- squeeze the most performance out of the WAN bandwidth you already have
- getting more storage bang for your buckusing 10GB and converged networks to reduce your cabling headache
- getting the most out of the network you are stuck with
- why using multiple tools for backup recovery archiving and dedupe isn't the only option
- figuring out where your security issues are.
As a systems, networking or storage professional, you are obligated to meet rapidly increasing capacity and reliability requirements, while minimizing complexity, and simplifying management. And you must do so in a business environment where shrinking IT budgets are forcing you to do more with less.
By attending these sessions you will see how your peers are solving their toughest issues while saving time and money.
Register now, seats are limited.
Posted on Thu, Jul 15, 2010
Author: Dave Briand
Practice Lead for Virtualization
You’re allocating money, time, and resources in the wrong places, and will continue to do so if you aren’t building your IT infrastructure and policies towards a vision which includes data center automation.
If you’re reading this, I can speak about virtualization and other ITish topics because you have some inkling with what’s been going on with IT. Either you’re an admin, manager, director of IT, or CxO who somehow relies on technology. On the off chance that we effectively hired the Stephen Hawking of Search Engine Optimization and you got here via Google I hope you are one of those people…if not, good luck.
With that being said, here we go…
There have been some leaps and bounds in the last 2 years with respect to data center automation (DCA) – we can now provision server, network, and storage in a manner of minutes, an idea foreign to us 5 years ago. Think of what’s been accomplished over the last two years with disaster recovery solutions, data deduplication and replication, each one of these technologies has the ability to drastically affect how you can leverage IT to differentiate your business.
The odds are though that you’ve done what we in the services industry call “low-hanging virtualization” – basically you virtualized the easiest apps and haven’t gone further. There are various reasons for this:
- Scared of virtualization – you think it’s going to make your apps run like shit and the business will complain – pink slips to follow
- Don’t understand virtualization - you had a presentation years ago and don’t know what’s out there today
- Don’t have time – fighting fires is a bitch, but if you solve problems today the same way you did yesterday, I hope you’re prepared for the same fires tomorrow
- Don’t have money – it’s because you’re wasting it in the wrong places
- You don’t care – either you’re reading this because you actually do care, or because you’re bored at work, hopefully the former
Pretty much anything can be virtualized today. Applications that people would have never virtualized two years ago are now considered low hanging fruit - whether it’s on proprietary virtualization (Solaris-SPARC, AIX-Power, HP-UX-Itanium) or commodity virtualization (VMware, Microsoft, Xen – all on x86 hw). The main reason for this is the increase in compute power and memory speed.
The time and money required to do this isn’t as much of an obstacle and you think. By using sound financial modeling it can be shown pretty easily that by not going down this path you’re CAP/OPEX two and three years from now will be massive compared to a virtualized and consolidated model. This is where having a vision comes into play, and selling that vision into your organization.
You’ll be more successful introducing DCA by aligning IT to the business. Too often IT departments are viewed as cost centers and as obstacles whenever the business wants to introduce a new product, service, or customer to their existing infrastructure. I’ve seen cases where DCA has totally transformed a business’ go-to market strategy because of the reduction in provisioning times. Getting a product/service out the door faster than your competition is crucial to any company’s survival in today’s cut-throat market.
The majority of you will either be at Maturity Level 0 or 1, and a very simplified version of your process for adding server capacity is as follows (the same can be applied for adding network and storage as well):
What we see here is that there are pretty good benefits of introducing virtualization, as long as your employ a “virtualize first” server provisioning policy. Expect to get pushback from the business on this, since they are likely not in tune with what technology can do for them.
This flowchart assumes that you have enough capacity in your virtual infrastructure that you only need to provision virtual server, network, and storage. Which is more often than not the case.
Maturity Level 0 will take from two to three months to complete, Maturity Level 1 could take from a week to two months, depending on the capacity you have.
Regardless of where you are today, we can get you to Maturity Level X – true Data Center Automation to the point where you’ve adopted and employed the proper policies and procedures to offer IT as a Service – or the Internal/Enterprise Cloud.
The business provisions environments for itself, and adding capacity is a no brainer. This leaves your IT staff to focus on things they should be doing – investigating new technologies and methods to further differentiate your business.
This model is something that you should be laying the foundation for today. By acquiring storage, network, server, and software that have the ability to be integrated to an automated model will allow you to meet your vision of the automate data center.
If you’d like some help, send me an email and we start putting the plan together today.
Posted on Thu, Jul 01, 2010
Scalar Decisions Inc. today announces the team from Southwest Technology Group, the former Sun Microsystems IMO for southwestern Ontario has joined the Scalar team.
Saul Morrison, President of STG commented, “For twenty years, STG has provided enterprise solutions to a very loyal customer base. I am very excited to now provide our customers with a broader solutions portfolio that encompasses more than just Oracle-Sun. The decision to join Scalar was an easy one; I know that our customers will be looked after.”
“Our SWO division will be strengthened with the STG team and Saul will continue to be a key contributor to Scalar’s success,” said Paul Kerr, CEO of Scalar. “We currently share a number of great customers and we know that the transition will be seamless. Today Scalar is leading our customers through technology shifts like private and public cloud services through virtual infrastructures and our goal is to prepare customers for these shifts in order to realize the benefits.”
Scalar will be hosting two Customer Appreciation Events in London and Waterloo on July 27th and July 28th respectively to thank and welcome STG customers.
Posted on Tue, Jun 15, 2010
Magor Communications today announced that Scalar Decisions has become a new Canadian channel partner for the Magor TeleCollaboration™ HDWorkPlace family, which seamlessly integrates advanced collaboration capabilities into a 1080p high definition (HD) video conferencing experience. An innovative provider of powerful and practical technology and consulting services throughout Canada, Scalar is focused on 'Optimizing IT for Business' by delivering infrastructure solutions that simplify the challenges, lower the costs and improve the performance of key systems in enterprise environments.
“We are pleased to be adding Magor TeleCollaboration to our roster of best of breed infrastructure solutions.”The Magor HDWorkPlace family’s fully integrated advanced collaboration capabilities allow permitted participants to see, control and edit shared files and documents in real time. So, instead of “talk now, do later”, users conduct working visual collaboration sessions that allow them to make decisions, get work done and produce results more quickly – all while leveraging their existing IT assets and infrastructure. In addition, the system’s flexible video compression processes, which can adapt in real time to challenging network conditions and end-user behavior, protect critical network traffic and applications while delivering 1080p video and collaboration – including over best effort IP packet network connections such as the Internet.
“In addition to the cost savings our customers will receive by reducing travel and the increased productivity they’ll enjoy, the Magor TeleCollaboration systems will allow our customers to leverage available bandwidth to close the ‘distance gap’ between colleagues, customers and partners,” said Paul Kerr, CEO of Scalar Decisions. “We are pleased to be adding Magor TeleCollaboration to our roster of best of breed infrastructure solutions.”
“Scalar has a long history in the Canadian market designing, deploying and managing mission-critical IT infrastructure solutions that increase utilization of human capital resources as well as equipment,” said Rick Miskiman, VP Sales and Business Development. “Adding Magor TeleCollaboration solutions to the Scalar product line continues that impressive tradition. We are proud to add Scalar to our growing roster of channel partners and look forward to working with them to bring the power of Magor TeleCollaboration solutions to their enterprises customers.”