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Kevin McIsaac |
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Dr Kevin McIsaac is the IBRS advisor for virtualisation, desktop deployment, mobile devices & networks, servers & storage and data centre infrastructure. He has 25 years of IT experience and is a recognised expert in infrastructure, operations and vendor management. Dr McIsaac has 10 years experience as an IT Analyst researching, distilling and disseminating best practices in IT and regularly work with the CIOs and the IT management teams of leading Asia-Pacific organisations. Prior to IBRS, Dr McIsaac was Research Director Asia-Pacific Group for META Group and has held leadership positions at Computer Associates and Functional Software. Dr McIsaac is a highly sought after speaker who is regularly quoted in the global press.
Oracle’s acquisition of Sun
Oracle’s vision is to become the leading IT Systems Vendor by
creating a complete IT stack of hardware, middleware and
applications. The objective is to reduce complexity, and to lower the
total cost of ownership, though integration and optimisation across
the entire stack.
Oracle
will retain Sun products that are both
complete this Systems Vendor vision and are aligned with its long
term business and technology strategies. The remaining Sun products
will either be parked, and the customer base transitioned to a
related Oracle product, or sold to a third party.
Storage deduplication: Tactical band-aid or strategic p...
Storage vendors promoted storage deduplication a technology that can
increase storage efficiency and reduce storage capital costs.
However, since some storage deduplication products have a high
capital cost, to ensure that an investment is recouped IT ...
Return of the systems vendor
HP’s acquisition of 3COM, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun
Microsystems and Cisco’s move into blade servers are all clear
signs that IT infrastructure is at the beginning of another major
structural change. These events herald a transition from today’s
Layered Components model, where best-of-breed components are
purchased from a number of specialist vendors and then integrated by
the IT organisation, to an Integrated Systems model where complete
systems are purchased from a single vendor, avoiding the need for the
IT organisation to act as a Systems Integrator.
IT
organisations should look at adopting the Integrated Systems model
when the costs and risks of acting as a System Integrator outweigh
the benefits of competition at the component level (commoditisation
and innovation).
Last Word: Desktop virtualisation? It's the application...
Desktop virtualisation is no longer the hottest topic in the media, however it still gets considerable interest from IT executives. As part of a series of roundtables that I am running on “The Evolution of the Desktop” I have just finished speaking to 28 IT executives on this topic. From these conversations it is clear there is still a strong interest in finding a better way to deliver the desktop that both reduces the TCO and increases agility. That is, simplifies remote access, enables business continuity and speeds up deploying new desktop applications.
Data centre power and cooling efficiency
Increasing your data centre efficiency is a journey that has clearly
defined steps. Organisations should focus on defining clear,
measurable objectives, planning and monitoring efficiently rather
than on the technology that vendors promote to deliver d ...
VMware seeds the cloud
vCloud Express is a new entry level Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS) offering based on self-service portals, credit card payments
and VMware’s enterprise class virtualisation products.
CIOs
should look at vCloud Express as a low
cost, low risk way to learn how to use public cloud infrastructure.
Since vCloud Express may be seen by some groups (dev/test, business
units) as a way to side-step the perceived bureaucracy of the IT
Organisation, CIOs should develop a strategy to embrace this use as a
way to retain control and ensure relevancy with dissatisfied
customers.
Is your data centre running out of capacity?
The data centre is an essential IT resource with a finite capacity. Due to the very long lead times and very high capital costs for expanding that capacity, IT organisations must be sure they have sufficient head room to accommodate near term growth and a plan enabling long term growth.
Organisations that run into their data centre’s capacity limits will have significant constraints placed on IT and on
business growth. Based on recent incidents at ANZ organisations this risk maybe much greater than you think.
Migrating physical servers to virtual machine...
Migrating physical servers to virtual machines is a one-off project
that requires deep specialised knowledge, and IT organisations should
engage a specialist third party to develop the migration plans and to
perform the physical to virtual migration. T ...
What is an "Infrastructure Cloud"
With infrastructure vendors
jumping on the cloud bandwagon, their sales and marketing teams are increasingly using the terms “Cloud”, “Cloud
Computing” and “Infrastructure Cloud”. From
discussions with clients we have observed these terms are not well understood and mean a wide range of different things to different people.
This confusion is driven by a war between vendors to establish a definition of these terms that best suits their specific products, technologies and architectures. Until “Cloud Computing” and “Infrastructure Cloud” become commonly defined, which we expect to take at least until the end of 2010; be careful to define what you mean, and seek to understand what others mean by these terms to avoid significant misunderstandings between staff, vendors and
partners.
What's driving archiving?
In our November 2008 survey we found many organisations are using archiving to manage their rapidly growing unstructured data. On further in-depth research we found that these archiving projects are mostly IT driven, focused on silos of data, and are larg ...
Trends in data centre infrastructure
Despite the challenging economic climate, the data centre is a hive of activity with many organisations taking a strong interest in consolidating the data centre and running it as a shared service. Savvy manager will take the current economic slowdown as ...
Archiving: How to avoid project failures
As discussed in “Backup is not Archive!” all IT organisations should evaluate deployment of an archival
platform. However, based on numerous client conversations and a recent survey, it is clear there are significant project risks in implementing archiving. One-quarter of archiving projects take more than two years to implement and nearly half of IT managers state that they would not recommend the archiving product they had selected!
Backup is not archive!
Many organisations do not distinguish between backup and archive and
assume their backup data is also their archival data. This makes the
backup environment overly complex and difficult to operate and
creates a very poor archival platform.
Organisatio ...
Virtual desktop reality falls well short of Vendors cla...
Virtual Desktops was one of the hottest infrastructure topics of 2008. However, tight IT budgets due to the economic downturn, and mounting evidence that Virtual Desktops are more expensive that well managed full desktops, will dampen enthusiasm for this ...
x86 Server Virtualisation Update: Is KVM the end of XEN...
While much has been written about the release of Microsoft’s
hypervisor into a virtualisation market already dominated by VMware,
there is a quite battle being fought for third place between XEN and
KVM.
With
KVM stealing the open source thought
leadership from XEN, and XEN being acquired by Citrix, which is
better known for desktop products, the position of third place is now
up for grabs. The net result is that XEN will remain a niche product
in the virtualisation market.
Has Microsoft’s desktop licensing got you on edge...
Deployment of a virtualised Microsoft desktop environment requires careful consideration of how virtualisation impacts an organisation’s Microsoft’s licensing costs. Even though Microsoft has introduced new licensing packages to address desktop virtualisation, it is not uncommon for organisations to significantly underestimate the licensing costs involved.
To avoid confusion, and potentially embarrassing licensing cost surprises, when evaluating a virtual desktop strategy IT organisations must keep firmly in mind Microsoft’s edge-centric (device) licensing model. Think in terms of licences and grants and not in terms of software.
Greening Your Desktop Part II: Pick the Low Hanging Fru...
Reducing the environmental footprint of the Desktop has become an important topic for many organisations. Organisations that have undertaken a Green Desktop initiative report excellent returns from low risk operational and behavioural changes that avoid t ...
Greening Your Desktop Part I: Gather the Facts!
Reducing the environmental footprint of the Desktop has become an important topic for many organisations. Astute CIOs will implement simple measurement processes to test vendors’ claims and separate the ‘green washing hype’ from the truly effective changes.
Will Portable Electronic Devices Replace The Desktop?
Historically, the main barriers to mobility were the high cost and the limited capabilities of the mobile devices and the mobile data network. With network and device costs plummeting, 3G network bandwidth good enough, and the computing capacity of recent ...
