Griffin IT was one of a small group of companies worldwide to be selected for VMware’s Virtualisation Management Lighthouse programme. Lighthouse participants receive early access to technical training and implementation support for the VMware Virtualization Management products. During the program VMware launched vCenter Operations and provided the partners indepth product management and technical knowledge transfer.

VMware Virtualization and Cloud Management solutions fundamentally simplify how IT is managed, accelerating IT service delivery, transforming operational efficiency, automatically assuring compliance and reducing business risks. Griffin IT has built a VMware Virtualization Management practice focused on providing solutions in Australia for IT Operations Management.

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced a strategy and a new solution to simplify and automate how IT organizations manage services in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.

VMware vSphere® has helped thousands of companies transform their datacenters, simplifying many core systems management functions, such as resource allocation and load balancing, by building them into the virtualization platform. VMware’s management strategy is to further simplify IT by integrating performance, capacity and configuration management and applying analytics to help customers achieve the degree of automation required to operate a cloud environment.

“IT management is being turned on its head as enterprises expand their virtual infrastructures to achieve improved efficiencies and responsiveness,” said Ramin Sayar, vice president product strategy, enterprise management, VMware. “Increasingly, our customers are realizing that a management model designed for yesterday’s IT systems is making it difficult to keep up with the demands of today’s business environment. We believe VMware vCenter™ Operations will help our customers modernize their operations and take the next step in the journey toward a more simplified, agile approach to IT.”

vCenter Operations will be tightly integrated with VMware vSphere, understand its advanced infrastructure management functionality and be able to collect data from its underlying physical components (servers, storage, network) as well as other management tools within the enterprise. It will then analyze the millions of data points these systems produce in real-time to get to the information that matters and visually present it in a simple, actionable way through dashboards. This means infrastructure and operations teams will have the intelligence they need to make fast, informed operational decisions.

VMworld 2010 - “Two years ago VMware set out a vision to modernize the data center and transform IT — this week we are taking significant steps forward to bring this new world of IT as a Service and hybrid cloud computing to reality,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware.

IT as a Service is the transformation of IT to a more business-centric approach, focusing on outcomes such as operational efficiency, competitiveness and rapid response. This means IT shifts from producing IT services to optimizing production and consumption of those services in ways consistent with business requirements. This changes the role of IT from a cost center to a center of strategic value.

VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz and CTO and Senior Vice President of Research and Development Steve Herrod outlined VMware’s vision for IT as a Service on Tuesday, August 31 during the VMworld General Session keynote presentation, available at:

VMworld 2010 Europe General Session

Griffin IT exhibited at the Australian itSMF National Conference in Melbourne. The stand was shared with other members of Transform ICT, an international alliance of IT Service Management specialists focused on improving IT operational performance.

On the Transform ICT stand from the left are Peter Kendall (Griffin IT), Mike Reardon (eInfo Solutions) and Bruce Monk (Delta Software).

Cloud computing is a theme for the conference. Of particular interest was the panel discussion, “Governing the Cloud” where Tim Hartman from VMWare and the other panelists gave their views on the advantages and challenges cloud computing will provide.

Transform ICT prepared the brief below for the itSMF conference. It outlines how Transform ICT see cloud computing expanding the role of IT Service Management professionals.

Transform ICT Conference Brief (PDF - 696KB)

On April 1, 2010, VMware acquired products from the EMC Ionix family of IT management solutions. This was part of a realignment of the strategy for the EMC Ionix division following the establishment of the VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) Coalition. The EMC Ionix division will continue to focus on management capabilities for the information infrastructure – including network, storage, and Vblock solutions. VMware is expanding the capabilities of vCenter for server and application management.

The VCE coalition provides solutions across server, network and storage for customers which are currently virtualising infrastructure and transitioning toward building private cloud data centers. A white paper from the VCE Coalition below gives in depth look at some of the capabilities being provided.

Griffin IT, a VMware partner will be transitioning to VMware systems to support our customers for the following products from July 1, 2010

• EMC Ionix Service Manager (also formerly known as Infra) will become VMware Service Manager.
• EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager (also formerly known as nLayers Application Discovery Manager) will become VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager.

VCE Coalition White Paper (PDF - 1.3MB)

EMC World is the annual educational forum for EMC customers and partners. EMC IT, the internal EMC support organization will talk on their experiences with Ionix Service Manager (formerly Infra). EMC IT supports over 40,000 internal users in 61 countries (and 20 languages), and many hundreds of business applications on over 6,000 server instances spanning five data centers worldwide.

EMC IT Case Study Presentation (PDF - 1.6MB)

EMC World 2010 Web Site

EMC IT, the internal support organisation for EMC is providing a blog on their journey to the private cloud. EMC have been talking about private clouds from the perspective of an IT vendor for quite some time. EMC is also an IT consumer. EMC IT supports over 40,000 internal users in 61 countries (and 20 languages), and many hundreds of business applications on over 6,000 server instances spanning five data centers worldwide. This means thousands of terabytes of storage, tens of thousands of devices, and hundreds of thousands of network ports used to conduct business every day.

Learn how EMC IT is overcoming the fundamental differences involved with the Private Cloud:

• IT is built differently (pooled architectures, service catalogs)
• IT is run differently (low-touch, zero-touch mode)
• IT is consumed differently (variable consumption, multiple providers)

Join Jon Peirce, EMC Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Services in the video presentation below:

EMC IT Virtualisation Journey Blog

Bob Quillin, Senior Director Product Marketing, EMC Ionix, discusses Enterprise Management Associates research on CMDB system deployments.

Industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) just wrapped up a fascinating study titled: “CMDB System Deployments in 2009: From Philosophy to Federation” in which they focused on the trends and requirements as CMDB systems evolve towards a more federated model. The study surveyed 162 industry executives, managers and professionals and came up with some great news for EMC’s Ionix Service Manager CMDB (formerly Infra) and Ionix Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers) products - plus deep insights into what the true “state of the art” is in federation and discovery.

In their survey, EMA, uncovered a few key insights:

• A majority of respondents recognise the cost savings associated with CMDB deployments and point to these technologies as key to helping companies pull out of the current economic downturn.
• While overall IT spending is declining, investments in CMDB initiatives remained flat in 2009.
• The ability to automate CMDB’s was a primary concern for most respondents, as they ranked automation as the number one feature required when choosing to adopt new solutions.
• For application dependency mapping, the survey reports primary challenges are: “administrative overhead, lack of currency, cost and lack of visibility into how the application dependency mapping tools identifies specific CIs.”

CMDB 2.0: It’s all about Accuracy, Currency and Dependencies

While EMA did not externally publish the actual competitive, head-to-head comparison amongst vendors, they did announce that both EMC’s application dependency mapping and CMDB solutions ranked amongst the highest competitively in terms of customer satisfaction.

It appears we’ve turned the corner in CMDB and CMS deployments - CMDB 2.0 anyone? Where we are now focusing more on the value of the CI’s in the CMDB and their inter-relationships. The majority of CMDB projects I’ve seen have stalled out because: (1) the data in the CMDB was stale the minute it went in and (2) there were little or no dependencies established in the system at all. CMDB projects fail when these two problems are not addressed in the design.

More CM, Less DB

The pairing of the EMC Ionix Service Manager CMDB and EMC Ionix Discovery Manager are a perfect match - yin and yang, hand in glove, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, peanut butter and jelly - well, you get the point. They are already solving problems together for customers - and the survey results indicate how hard this problem is and how EMC is leading the way in solving it.

So, up to now, CMDB deployments have focused exclusively on the DB part - how do I build up the biggest, baddest database? All DB.

In the end, the framing characteristics of CMDB 2.0 comes down to now focusing more on the CM - the “configuration management” part and how dynamic application discovery, dependency mapping, and CMDB federation is becoming the focus as IT organizations move from early experimentation to day-to-day operations.

Migration to the cloud offers a range of financial and operational benefits to those involved in IT service management, not least the opportunity to start from scratch with totally integrated, virtualised systems. As EMC launched EMC Ionix to help ease this migration, VitAL editor Matt Bailey spoke to EMC Ionix ITSM specialist John Murnane and the company’s regional vice president EMEA, Colin Murray.

VitAL Magazine November 2009 Article (PDF - 359KB)

In this issue:

• EMC Ionix Family Ushers in Next Generation of IT Management
• Five Ways to Keep ITIL Relevant and Save Money in a Tough Economy
• Galileo Case Study
• Analyst Research: CMDB and Application Discovery
• Archer Daniels Midland Case Study

EMC Ionix Connect Newsletter (PDF - 851KB)