“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten” – Benjamin Franklin

Virtualization: Smart IT Investment in a Tough Economy

January 27, 2009

By Dave Trowbridge

Given today’s weakened economy, CIOs are naturally reconsidering their IT budgets, wondering if the spending priorities they set earlier in the year are still appropriate. But if the CIOs interviewed for the Goldman Sachs IT Spending Survey of July 2008 are representative, those priorities make even more sense now than they did before the recent downturn.

They identified their top three spending initiatives over the next 12 months (in order of priority) as server virtualization, server consolidation and cost cutting.

Storage relatively strong among weak IT spending

By Dave Raffo, Senior News Director

January 6, 2009 | SearchStorageChannel.com

 

Storage sales were relatively high while overall IT spending was far lower than usual last quarter, according to VARs surveyed by financial adviser firm Robert W. Baird & Co.

 

Fourth-quarter IT sales were “well-below normal” seasonality, according to a report by Baird analyst Jayson Noland. The results came from 40 VARs representing about $6 billion in annual IT spending mostly in North America and Western Europe. The VARs were asked to characterize their quarter as above plan, below plan or at plan for the quarter.

 

Thirty VARs characterized storage as above plan and five said it was below plan – by far the most positive results of any product category. Noland wrote that Network Appliance, Brocade, Data Domain and CommVault received positive scores “relative to overall trends” for the fourth quarter, which is historically the biggest for IT spending.

INX Announces Virtual Disaster Recovery Hosting Service Agreement for Bay Area Air Quality Management District

Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is the regional, government agency that regulates sources of air pollution within the nine San Francisco Bay Area Counties. BAAQMD is an innovative organization that awards millions of dollars to fund local projects designed to reduce the Bay Area’s carbon footprint. Due to the nature of their operation, BAAQMD has a low tolerance for downtime.

BAAQMD engaged INX to virtualize their production data center with VMware ESX Servers to eliminate unplanned server outages, dramatically reduce the time involved in tasks such as server provisioning and to reduce the agency’s carbon footprint and IT expenses. Sixty physical servers were virtualized onto seven VMware ESX host servers, eliminating nearly 300 tons of annual CO2 emissions and saving over $50,000 in annual energy costs alone.

SRM Demonstration

Here is a good Site Recovery Manager demo on YOUTUBE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hap4VsC9a1k

Bank scores with server virtualization

By Gunjan Trivedi , CIO , 12/16/2008
They say old habits die hard. It’s a adage that’s certainly true for ICICI Bank’s senior GM and the Group CTO, Pravir Vohra. As a man who was part of the team that popularized online banking and helped create a new revenue stream for ICICI Bank, Vohra is already known as an IT leader who can make a difference. He’s also celebrated as a CIO who not only leverages new concepts and technologies to create -mover advantages for his organization, but also adopts solutions at such an unprecedented rate and scale that it advances his bank beyond the reach of its peers. Even solution and service providers have found it hard to keep up.