Posted on Mon, Aug 29, 2011
With VMworld kicking off today, it's appropriate that we have two big VMware announcements this week.
The first is that Scalar has achieved the VMware Academic Specialization. VMware established specializations as designations of academic expertise that enable customers to identify partners with the highest level of VMware technical solution knowledge and experience. Scalar is now able to drive deeper into customer engagements, based on our knowledge and ability with the academic market.
Second announcement is that Scalar Managed Zimbra has been certified as a vCloud powered service, based on the fact that the infrastructure underlying it is based on VMware's leading virtualization and cloud computing technology.
We're excited to have both these announcements in the same week. For more on our Academic Specialization, see here; and for more on the vCloud Powered status, see here.
Posted on Mon, Aug 08, 2011
Author: Dave Briand, Solution Architect, Virtualization and Cloud Enablement.
Remember simpler times: all a system had to do was run and not crash on a consistent basis. If a user complained about performance a typical response sounded something like “Sorry, it’s an application/hardware/connection limit.”
Sure, user-sat has been a focus for a few years now, but only recently have end-users had the ability to drastically alter the strategic direction for an entire IT group. Some are saying we’re returning to the age of the mainframe, when user time was managed just as tightly as the expensive hardware. I say we’re entering the age of the manframe (or personframe), where things like applications and hardware are the true commodities in the end-user equation, and things like mobile devices and accessibility from these devices are the big to-dos on every VP’s list. The ability to efficiently integrate these end-user devices is quickly becoming the new differentiator for companies like VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, and even Oracle.
So what does it all mean?
To focus on the users, you can’t be focusing on your infrastructure.
If you’re lucky enough to have a massive budget and aren’t concerned about the environment, the following does not apply to you. If you or someone you’re trying to impress has to pay for power, it might be of interest…
The good thing is that users are creatures of habit. Every morning at around 9AM you can expect users to log in, at noon there will be a rush for Facebook or some other social site, and at about 5PM they log off. If you design your infrastructure to meet the needs of the 9AM rush you’ll have next to no system utilization from 5PM to 9AM, with systems left on, waiting for the next 9AM rush. You have three options at this point, and if you want to avoid this waste of power, CPU, and space, you have two options.
- Option 1 (don’t care): Leave it on, waste power, waste money on systems that at best will only be used every 2 days out of 7 or about 16% of the time.
- Option 2 (go green): Power down the systems when they aren’t being used. This is pretty simple and can be accomplished within VMware or any system manufacturer’s power management tools.
- Option 3 (maximize efficiency): Turn your end user computing infrastructure into backup machines, or into databases for crunching numbers, or into whatever else you need done during the off hours.
You can also combine options 2 and 3 if you only need the servers during end of month billing cycles or during peaks that occur throughout your computing cycles. The goal here is to not do option 1 all the time.
So how do you get it done so you can focus on end users?
Don’t buy standalone infrastructures and don’t try to put together from scratch by yourself. All server manufacturers have something to help with this, some are better than others, depending on your specific requirements and budget. We have the ability to come in and assess your needs and architect a solution that meets whichever combination of options you want to look at. Give us a call and let’s move past this hurdle so we can focus on the fun of desktop and application virtualization!
Posted on Thu, Jul 28, 2011
HDS announced their 2010 Top Partner Awards today and Scalar is the proud recipient of two awards - Canadian Hitachi TrueNorthTM Top Growth Partner of the Year for FY10 and Canadian Hitachi TrueNorthTM Top New Named Accounts Partner of the Year for FY10.
The Top Growth Partner award acknowledges the partner that had the highest year-over-over growth for HDS products and solutions sales in FY2010, and the Top New Named Accounts award recognizes the partner that generated the most HDS-related revenue from new named accounts in FY2010.
As always, we're delighted to be recognized by our partners, and hope to be included again in next year's honours!
Posted on Fri, Jun 24, 2011
We've been out and about the last month at a number of shows in Ontario and BC - Cisco Networkers, CANHEIT, MISA, BCnet, IT4BC and VMware Forum. It's great to get out and flex our tech muscles with the IT community! Here's a couple of little videos from some of the shows - Ian Forbes at VMware forum showing how easy it is to provision storage with EMC and VMware, and Dhiva Navaratnam at Networkers chatting to Cisco's Warren Ross about Scalar, VDI and cloud. Enjoy!
Posted on Wed, Jun 01, 2011
The PROFIT 200 was announced this morning, and Scalar has made the list for a second year running - we're at number 64! It's great to be recognized once again as one of Canada's fastest-growing companies. For those of you who don't know, the PROFIT 200 is an annual ranking of Canada's companies by five-year percentage revenue growth. This is the 23rd year of the PROFIT 200. We're also pleased to report that we're in the top 20 of the list for 2010 revenues. Hopefully we'll be making the list for many years to come.
If you want to check out the full list, visit the PROFIT 200 website
Posted on Thu, Apr 28, 2011
We were delighted to find out today that we've been ranked at # 20 on the CDN Top 100 Solution Providers for 2010, having moved up two places from our 2009 ranking at # 22. The Top 100 is an annual ranking of the highest-revenue generating solution providers with major operations in Canada.
To see the full list for 2010, visit the CDN Top 100 website.
Posted on Wed, Mar 23, 2011
Author: Michael Traves, Practice Lead for Data Management
Data has become the fuel that drives business acceleration, making organizations today extremely reliant on data storage. With storage requirements growing by between 40% and 120% per year, you need a way to manage data differently. For data to be put in the right place at the right time for the right cost. Fluid Data will redefine the data centre, providing enterprise storage solutions that drive efficiency, flexibility, availability and scalability. Storage that grows with your business and adapts to constant change.
Scalar, together with our partner Dell | Compellent, will be hosting a Lunch & Learn session on Fluid Data at Morton's The Steakhouse on 19 April 2011. If you'd like to come, sign up here.
Hope to see you there!
Posted on Mon, Mar 14, 2011
Author: Michael Traves, Practice Lead for
Data Management
With consolidation and virtualization of infrastructure, many benefits can be achieved; however they should not require increased management or complex processes to maintain through the life of the asset and solution. One key to this is automation – and notably, the ability for tasks normally requiring administrative intervention or complex policy/script writing to be automated and initiated on-demand or scheduled without user analysis and execution.
Today’s storage arrays come with a wide assortment of software management capabilities that allow for intelligent, automated provisioning which, in the past, needed to be manually performed, such as RAID Parity, Striping, LUN creation, device discovery, etc. However, the most notable capabilities are wide striping, thin provisioning, and dynamic data placement/caching. I’ll give you a quick overview to illustrate their greatest benefits:
Wide Striping places data within a LUN (Volume, Filesystem) across as many disks as possible. Sometimes this is limited to a pool of disks, other times it is across the entire set of disks. The objective is to create as much parallel IO as possible, across as many devices as makes sense, to drive IO rates up across all co-located data.
Generally, wide striping is enabled hand-in-hand with Thin Provisioning, another feature commonly available at the array, pool, or aggregate level. Thin Provisioning allows storage to be allocated across a set of disks as needed, not pre-allocated ahead of time, greatly improving storage efficiency and enabling administrators to provision for the life of the asset, not initial requirements.
Thin Provisioning implies a certain amount of block level virtualization, which is why Wide Striping is discussed at the same time – however other functions that work at the block level can also be implemented since the logic to virtualize a block’s location has already been implemented. These can include encryption, compression, and data deduplication, features that generally improve security and storage efficiency. Notably, block level deduplication of shared blocks can be of great benefit in environments when those blocks end up being served from cache frequently – it means less cache is required to improve application performance for a large number of workloads, without creating IO spikes. This is very noticeable in such applications as Virtual Desktops, particularly boot and anti-virus storms which tend to occur with regularity.
Dynamic Data Placement is a capability that enables you to put data on the right tier at the right time – at the block (or sub-LUN, in some cases) level. Dynamic Data Placement lets the intelligence in the storage array figure out what tier the data should be on, based on real-time statistics gathering, and on a scheduled or dynamic basis will move data to the appropriate tier.
Associated with this type of data movement is Dynamic Data Caching. Rather than actually move a block’s location between tiers, it is instead cached in FLASH or SSD. The benefit to this approach is that an array’s read cache becomes much larger, and works well for larger working sets (such as virtualization), without actually having to relocate all data onto expensive SSD. As data ages in the cache, it will fall out and be replaced by more active data automatically.
Having gotten this far, you must be asking yourself - does my storage array have any of these features? Well, maybe, but more likely no, unless you recently purchased it. Whether the features are licensed, or in use, is another matter altogether. All too often features get marketed but never sold or properly implemented; sometimes due to budgeting, but more often they just don't work as advertised and get turned off prior to deployment into production.
If you find yourself in this situation, or are looking at options to replace, upgrade, augment, or properly deploy what you already have, get in touch through the form on this page. Sometimes it's just a matter of better using what you already own - or replacing it when its lifecycle ends, with something capable of delivering the value you're looking for in a consolidated, virtualized storage infrastructure to support your application and business services.
Posted on Wed, Mar 02, 2011
Author: Fiona Griffiths, National Business Lead for Scalar Managed Zimbra
Last week I attended a symposium, Exploring the Future of E-mail, Privacy, and Cloud Computing, at Ryerson University. There was a great lineup of speakers. Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, spoke about the importance of not sacrificing privacy and security for business results. According to Dr Cavoukian, the goal should be to create a positive sum result (for those of you who remember game theory). She also spoke about the importance of embracing new paradigms, and that outsourcing services does not mean outsourcing accountability.
There was a lot of discussion around the US Patriot Act and whether this should be a concern for Canadian businesses outsourcing to the US. This was a heated topic that had opinions ranging from “it's a red herring” to ”there is absolute concern that organizations need to fully understand the implications of this to their business and data stored outside of our country”. There seemed to be general consensus that it's easier to evaluate the risks of going to the cloud when you can reduce the number of variables involved. When going to the cloud you should fully understand the laws that govern your data both within and outside of Canada. If you are outsourcing to a provider outside of Canada, then as a business you will be governed by both Canadian and foreign law.
Here at Scalar we offer a 100% Canadian Hosted and Managed email and collaboration solution, Scalar Managed Zimbra. We believe that Scalar Managed Zimbra makes it easier for Canadian businesses to adopt cloud computing, without having the complexity of understanding the risks associated with hosting their data outside of the country.
We’ve recently signed an agreement with University of Guelph to move their 60,000 mailboxes onto Scalar Managed Zimbra – you can read more about that deal here.
If you’re interested in learning more about Scalar Managed Zimbra, fill out the form on this page and we’ll be in touch!
Posted on Thu, Jan 20, 2011
Author: Jeremy Hanlon
Principal Consultant for Virtualization
I’ve had the pleasure this week to spend some time with some large Canadian Universities looking at Desktop Virtualization. I’ll be honest – for the past few years there has been a lot of talk about Desktop Virtualization/VDI but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot happening, just a bunch of POCs that didn’t seem to turn into anything.
Then last year it started to change (at least from my perspective). The ROI was much improved. The actual VDI solutions were getting better and better. Implementation was becoming easier.
At Scalar we began to spend a lot of time with VMware View… especially after VMware View 4.5 came out. VMware claimed that View 4.5 could reduce IT maintenance, cost and complexity in the education space. After a lot of in-house testing, it all seemed true.
We started doing implementations of View with vendors like F5, Cisco, EMC and NetApp, building complete virtual desktop infrastructures. Implementations were put together quickly and easily. As I watch the @VMwareView twitter feed I keep seeing the same thing – RTs (RT = retweet) of “View implementation complete – way easier than I thought”. The View implementation isn’t bad at all; we spend more time with all the other pieces, like F5, Wyse, Networking, Storage, etc - making a high performance and dependable infrastructure. That’s the true value of a good VAR/SI, like us (a little self promotion never hurt!).
So back to Higher Education. We’ve completed some large implementations of VMware View for some very prestigious Canadian Universities and Colleges. From great ROI to huge power savings to “any device compatibility” there were a lot of good things that came out of the implementations. Students were able to use their own laptops, iPad’s, iPhones, Android devices, Wyse thin clients, etc; migrations to Windows 7 were accelerated; there were both CapEx and OpEx savings; clients realized easier management and better reliability. Overall – some very happy customers and end users.
When we saw how happy our Edu clients were with the implementations and how quickly they were completed we decided to work with VMware and Wyse to come up with a great VDI Starter Kit for the Education Market. The kit contains everything you need to see why a Scalar, VMware View and Wyse solution will save you time and money on the desktop side of the house – included are professional services, production licenses, server hardware and actual Wyse thin clients. It’s all there – VDI in a box.
Want to see a product demonstration of VMware View 4.5 in our customer demo lab at Scalar? Drop me an email and we’ll set up a meeting.