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Monthly Archives: March 2012

When Two are Better than One

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Bill MacDonald
Posted by Bill MacDonald
Services Alliance Manager
EMC Global Services
Alliance

Our virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions are designed to enable your organization to meet its unique business needs. But what exactly are your requirements and how can our solutions help? That’s where strategic alliance partners such as EMC provide tremendous value. 

EMC Global Services is now delivering two solutions—focused on end-user computing and virtualizing Microsoft applications—to accelerate IT transformation. These two new offerings will help you realize the benefits of increased IT efficiency and business agility through the transformation of people, process and technology.

End-User Computing Solution
If your company is looking at our end-user computing solutions—VMware virtual desktop infrastructure, for example—to help you transition into the post-PC era, EMC Global Services is an ideal partner. EMC experts provide strategic consulting and implementation services that will help to ensure that the solution is increasing employee and IT productivity, while also reducing costs, improving security by centralizing device management, and enabling employees to access data and applications from anywhere and from any device.

Virtualize Microsoft Applications Solution
If your organization is considering VMware infrastructure to virtualize Microsoft applications, EMC Global Services has the deep Microsoft applications experience you need. Its experts will help you develop, deploy and operate virtualized Microsoft applications that are highly optimized for cloud environments, speed application deployment and increase scalability. With EMC Global Services, you can optimize your existing infrastructure and reduce the need to invest in additional hardware.

Why EMC?
Every engagement with EMC Global Services encompasses strategy, planning, design and implementation. Today more than 2,500 EMC Global Services’ experts are VMware trained professionals and they all have extensive knowledge about VMware technologies and solutions. As a result, your organization gets:

  • Strategic guidance to realize the power of your information and your business objectives
  • End-to-end capabilities to address all stages of your IT journey—from strategy and design through implementation, training, support and ongoing operations
  • Breadth of expertise including infrastructure, application and business specialists to accelerate the adoption and integration of best practices and processes for the virtual infrastructure—encompassing backup, disaster avoidance and integrated management of physical and virtual assets
  • Training and education to help enhance the skills needed to implement and manage new and more complex IT infrastructures
  • Expert customer support to ensure business continuity and a highly available data environment

Two can be better than one. Together, VMware and EMC Global Services provide the right technology and two new services to ensure we meet your organization’s unique business requirements. You can learn more at www.emc.com/services.

Virtualizing Voice and Other Real-Time Applications (Not Only Possible, It’s a Really Good Idea)

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Johanna
Posted by Johanna Holopainen
Sr. Manager, ISV Alliances
Marketing

Two years have passed since VMware and Mitel debuted their joint solution for virtualizing voice applications, and yet I run into customers who still insist that voice applications need their own physical servers.  As businesses of all sizes continue to adopt unified communications (UC), it’s important that IT professionals understand the full range of options for hosting—and virtualizing—UC components, including voice.

Let’s start with a super-quick overview. UC isn’t a technology, but an umbrella term for a collection of technologies such as email, texting, instant messaging, conferencing, call control, and of course, voice.  Integrating these technologies delivers a host of benefits. Employees can stay better connected with their customers—and each other—through integrated messaging, mobility support, and presence, that very cool feature that makes sure your messages find you, no matter where you are. Managers use conferencing and collaboration to keep projects on track and do more with less.  On the IT side, centralized administration and reporting makes network provisioning and control a lot easier.  In short, UC has something for everyone in the organization.

Mitel

So what’s the issue in virtualizing UC? Primarily, it’s about performance, that is, the effect of latency on the user experience. Some UC components have real-time requirements, for example, IP voice quality degrades dramatically if just a handful of packets arrive too late. Email, text messages and other UC features aren’t as latency-sensitive as voice—they’re often called “near-real-time.”  (My colleague Robert Campbell will be blogging about performance requirements for UC in an upcoming blog.)

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A big advantage for us in moving down the voice virtualization route was the ease of business continuity and disaster recovery…before, we had about a 72-hour lead time to recover our voice solutions, now we can do it within hours.

Rob Neil, Head of ICT and customer services
Ashford Borough Council

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Until a few years ago, there were good reasons to virtualize only the near-real-time components and keep the real-time apps running on physical servers, but thanks to advances such as the VMware-Mitel solutions, that has changed.  Today, just about any real-time application can be virtualized. When it comes to voice, VMware and Mitel have joint customers—enterprises and SMBs—who have successfully deployed virtualized voice applications. They report benefits such as reduced data center footprint, energy savings,  centralized management, and especially business continuity/disaster recovery—a capability that is relatively new for voice applications (click on the image below to hear them).

Mitel Video

In short, virtualizing voice and other real-time applications is not only practical, it makes good technical and business sense. VMware and Mitel have proved it—now it’s time for you to seriously consider it in your environment.

Learn more about voice virtualization by downloading the VMware-Mitel white paper “Uniting the Worlds of Data and Voice: Adding Unified Communications to the Virtual Data Center.” And please let us know where you stand on this issue. Are you sold on the benefits of virtualizing voice and other real-time applications, or do you still have reservations?

News Around the Network

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Gina Bollenback
Posted by Gina Bollenback
Global Alliance Marketing
Communications Manager

This week’s News Around the Network highlights new areas of integration between VMware and its partners as well as a new list of top VMware blogs and how to become a vExpert for 2012:

Symantec Introduces Cloud Security Solution with VMware (Voice & Data)
Symantec’s latest security solutions are fully integrated within VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite.

Dell Adds Data Encryption Service to Their Cloud (ZDNet)
Dell announced this week that Trend Micro, another VMware partner, will now integrate its security features into Dell’s IaaS cloud with VMware vCloud services.

Thoughts on Best Practices with VMware vSphere 5 (Virtual Storage Guy)
Vaughn Stewart goes beyond the tech-centric in his blog post and focuses on the major benefits and capabilities of vSphere 5.

Top 2012 Blog Results (vSphere-Land)
Eric Seibert’s annual list of the top VMware blogs is out – peruse his list for great resources to follow and keep up with tools, tips, ideas, events, and more.

VMware customers, if you want to see anything specifically highlighted in this blog please respond in the comments section or on Twitter or Facebook. VMware partners and community, please let us know if you have any stories you suggest we highlight in future weeks.

RSA Conference 2012 and VMware – Partnership and Progress on the Journey

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Jeremiah
Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius
Information Securiy Architect
VMware Technical Alliances

This year’s RSA conference set a new benchmark for VMware presence and the reach of our partnerships for securing the virtual datacenter and cloud computing models.  It’s been exciting to see the evidence of a growing partner ecosystem that is focused on solving the real security needs of customers with VMware as their enabling platform.

Two years ago, it was difficult to find anything on the exhibition floor with much of a security approach for virtualization. By last year’s conference, the ubiquity of virtual platform adoption could be seen, but often with little done to enable data center transformation. Today, there are many more technologies for realizing virtual and cloud solutions among the exhibitors.  I predict that we’ll next year we’ll see near disappearance of many of cloud messages, as mainstreaming continues.

What’s different for VMware? At the 2011 show, we had one partner, with solutions integrated on our vShield technology.  Now, we are featuring co-exhibition by fifteen global alliance partners, many with multiple solutions on display and actively promoting vShield in their centerpiece offerings.

Another indicator of the mainstreaming of clouds and virtualization was the “Cloud Computing” conference track that featured 29 breakout sessions. The keywords “cloud” and “virtual” yielded over 75 sessions presented at RSA 2012, and the subject came up in every session I attended – even those seemingly unrelated.

In addition to standard track offerings for RSA conference attendees, the Cloud Security Alliance was hosted at RSA 2012 for their annual summit.  The closing keynote was given by VMware’s own CTO, Steve Herrod. It was great to have Steve deliver the vision and solution of a VMware architected cloud.

As VMware continues to develop our excellent capability as the leading platform for building private cloud infrastructure, the opportunity will grow for our partnerships that yield robust and dynamic security solutions – delivering on the promise of security that is “better-than-physical”.  The RSA 2012 successes are our sign of what’s to come, and I’m already looking forward to next-year’s conference.