Reality check: Southern scales back desktop virtualization

Computerworld - Southern Co. had big ambitions for virtualizing its desktops. The company's IT leaders say they saw virtualization as an easier, cheaper setup than conventional PC environments.

In fact, as they started a virtualization pilot in early 2010, they figured they could do a widespread deployment without much difficulty and move most of the company's employees into a virtual desktop environment over two to three years.

Then reality hit.

"When we originally went into the pilot, we thought it would be a revolution -- that we'd put these machines out across the organization and we'd save a lot of money," says Steve Weber, Southern's director of client services. "What I learned going through this is that it wasn't ready for the revolution, but it had evolution aspects."

The company's experience illustrates the complexities of desktop virtualization. On the one hand, IT leaders recognize that the architecture promises to deliver some powerful benefits and financial returns. On the other, they're learning that those returns don't come easily.

"I think it's a much better architecture. It's more stable. It's more secure. It's easier to manage. And I think it will become the preferred architecture," Weber says. "But the question is, how do you get there?"

Southern is working on the answer.

The Atlanta-based energy company first considered desktop virtualization in 2004, when it started to virtualize its data center. Client services manager Mark Canup says the company pushed for data center virtualization for the typical reasons: reduced costs, increased flexibility, and lower energy use.

Back then, Southern's IT executives believed that desktop virtualization could deliver similar benefits, Canup says. But while server virtualization in the data center moved ahead, initial attempts at desktop virtualization yielded few returns. That's because desktop virtualization five or so years ago essentially meant moving applications off a desktop and putting them on a server.

"You had a PC behind the data center for every thin client you had in the field when it first started out, and you couldn't get enough virtual desktops on one server to make sense," Weber says.

That had changed by late 2009, when Southern decided to launch a pilot desktop virtualization project.

This independent paper from senior analyst Jon Collins at FreeForm Dynamics considers how Web-based security threats are evolving, within the context of IT trends including mobile, home computing and other forms of remote access that could potentially increase the attack surface of the companies. It defines the scale and types of threat, what to look for in a corporate web security solution and compares the different types of technological approach available to companies and the processes that need to be considered for effective protection.

Read now.

Security is not an option. This KnowledgeVault Series offers professional advice how to be proactive in the fight against cybercrimes and multi-layered security threats; how to adopt a holistic approach to protecting and managing data; and how to hire a qualified security assessor. Make security your Number 1 priority.

Read now.

Social-networking sites have revolutionized how businesses use the Internet. Instead of relying on faltering newspapers to find job candidates, companies can access thousands of potential employees through Facebook and Twitter. But social-networking sites have also left businesses vulnerable to new security threats. So are they tools to be used or security traps to be avoided?

Read now.

Virtualization leaps to applications, mobile devices and databases

Computerworld - Here, there and -- yes -- everywhere, virtualization is headed toward ubiquity.

"We're almost to the point where we don't even have to say virtualization or describe architectures as using virtualization, because it's becoming an implied part of technology," says Chris Wolf, a Gartner Inc. analyst.

Indeed, virtualization already is well on its way to dominating the server realm and is edging onto the desktop. In no time at all, virtualization's reach will expand across the application landscape, hit the mobile arena and land in the data tier. Here's a closer look at its journey across the IT infrastructure.

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Computerworld - Here, there and -- yes -- everywhere, virtualization is headed toward ubiquity.

"We're almost to the point where we don't even have to say virtualization or describe architectures as using virtualization, because it's becoming an implied part of technology," says Chris Wolf, a Gartner Inc. analyst.

Indeed, virtualization already is well on its way to dominating the server realm and is edging onto the desktop. In no time at all, virtualization's reach will expand across the application landscape, hit the mobile arena and land in the data tier. Here's a closer look at its journey across the IT infrastructure.

If virtualization is headed one place in 2011, it's upstream, toward mission-critical applications, says James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

"We're starting to get to this point where organizations stop saying, 'Well, we'll never virtualize those applications, but all these we will,' and start saying, 'Why were we never going to virtualize those?' " he says.

Arun Taneja, founder of IT analyst firm Taneja Group, agrees.

"We're close to breaking all the relevant barriers so that mission-critical applications can be brought under the virtualization umbrella," he says.

Over the past 18 months, the industry has come a long way in addressing the major pain points: I/O and storage, Taneja says.

For example, start-ups like NextIO, Virtensys and Xsigo Systems offer products capable of virtualizing, or aggregating, interconnections across high-capacity InfiniBand or Ethernet links. They help give IT managers control over I/O by enabling them to set policies designating how much I/O a particular virtual machine requires and then divvy up the remaining portion among VMs on a percentage basis.

"Essentially, these products bring [quality of service] into I/O, and they provide a huge industry-forward movement," Taneja says.

Likewise, storage virtualization products from companies such as 3Par (acquired by Hewlett-Packard in September 2010 after a bidding war with Dell), Compellent (which in December agreed to be acquired by Dell) and even NetApp work far better within a virtualized environment than do traditional storage wares, he adds. He points to "wide striping" as one technique that makes bringing mission-critical applications into the virtual environment feasible. Wide striping helps eliminate storage bottlenecks because the technology distributes the I/O loads across all disks rather than forcing IT managers to group disks and specify which applications are served by each group -- even if disks are idle elsewhere in the array.

"That's the power of virtualization, and the lesson we've learned as an industry over the last three years. When you go into a virtual server world, you can't have old-style storage," Taneja says.

Moving virtualization up the stack toward mission-critical status is also about application portability, Staten adds.

"With server virtualization, organizations can build a server image really quickly, give it its own machine, move it from machine to machine, clone it, duplicate it and so on. Now they want the same thing with applications -- they want to bare-metal build an image, bare-metal deploy, bare-metal pick it up and move it somewhere else, and bare-metal clone and life-cycle-manage it," he says.