The acquisition of Virtual Iron was announced by Oracle on the 13th May this year. Oracle already had its own OracleVM product and can now add Sun's xVM software to the pot. Both of those products are (like Virtual Iron) based on open source Xen.
While this consolidation is good for customers in the long term, providing 3 strong competitors to the incumbent VMware, in the short term it was hard to see Oracle maintaining so many similar components to their stack. Sure enough something had to give and last week Oracle wrote to partners confirming that there would be no new sales of Virtual Iron, and that its features would eventually be subsumed into OracleVM. Virtual Iron customers should update themselves on the situation here.
Although we have already been contacted by an unhappy Virtual Iron customer looking to mitigate the risks in operating a platform whose development has been ceased, at least Oracle made their decision to melt-down Virtual Iron quickly, limiting any uncertainty.
If you are a Virtual Iron customer, and need to migrate to a supported, Xen-based platform with a future. We can make the transition as painless as possible. Given that most Virtual Iron customers have tight cost constraints, we are currently recommending Citrix XenServer as a replacement. There is even a completely free version that offers enterprise features like live migration, shared storage integration, and OS templates.
During this difficult period, we offer a free consultation with one of our engineers, to scope the size and shape of any possible migration from Virtual Iron to XenServer, or to consider other options. Simply get in touch.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Monday, June 01, 2009
Security Assessment & Penetration Testing Case Study
360is has been operating since 2002, our consultants have been advising UK companies since the early 90's. Over the years we've been asked many times for case studies on Security Assessments, Penetration Tests, and Post Incident Investigations. Up to now we have always resisted, for reasons of customer confidentiality and because most of our clients are still referred to us by word of mouth.
We are pleased to announce the first of several Security Services case studies. While based upon a real engagement, some details have been changed to ensure confidentiality and each case may draw upon information from more than one project.
Can you see anything of your current situation reflected in these stories?
Are the benefits gained by our clients interesting to you?
Have you thought about the ways we can help you this year?
We are pleased to announce the first of several Security Services case studies. While based upon a real engagement, some details have been changed to ensure confidentiality and each case may draw upon information from more than one project.
- Financial Services, External Security Assessment.
Can you see anything of your current situation reflected in these stories?
Are the benefits gained by our clients interesting to you?
Have you thought about the ways we can help you this year?
Monday, May 11, 2009
TomTom GO 530 To Give Away
If you register your Virtualization or Security Service, support or training requirement with us before the end of June 2009, and attend a meeting with one of our consultants, you will be entered into a prize draw for a TomTom GO 530 Sat Nav system.
To register your project and to arrange a meeting, email your contact details and an outline of your requirement to Rob Gilson. Details of the lucky winner of the TomTom will be announced on our site on the 30th of June.
To register your project and to arrange a meeting, email your contact details and an outline of your requirement to Rob Gilson. Details of the lucky winner of the TomTom will be announced on our site on the 30th of June.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Citrix XenServer Case Studies
Over the last 3 years, our consultants have delivered about 50 virtualization projects for clients as far away as India. We have worked with all the major hardware and software vendors to solve real business problems. A few of these experiences were captured as case studies and can now be made available to you.
What makes these documents a little more interesting than an average case study is that they have been written up-to a year after completion of the project, and include an update on how the new infrastructure is performing, and how accurately the technology delivered on promises. First out of the trap are several Citrix XenServer success stories, watch out for VMware and Hyper-V later.
Multimedia Distribution & Switching, virtualizing difficult workloads.
Financial Data Warehouse, how to virtualize a billion dollar database.
Multilingual Call Center, navigating the vendor jungle.
Can you see your current situation reflected in these stories?
Are the benefits gained by these clients interesting to you?
Have you thought about the ways we can help you this year?
What makes these documents a little more interesting than an average case study is that they have been written up-to a year after completion of the project, and include an update on how the new infrastructure is performing, and how accurately the technology delivered on promises. First out of the trap are several Citrix XenServer success stories, watch out for VMware and Hyper-V later.
Multimedia Distribution & Switching, virtualizing difficult workloads.
Financial Data Warehouse, how to virtualize a billion dollar database.
Multilingual Call Center, navigating the vendor jungle.
Can you see your current situation reflected in these stories?
Are the benefits gained by these clients interesting to you?
Have you thought about the ways we can help you this year?
Monday, March 30, 2009
XenServer Administration Poster
Since XenServer was made freely available for download a few weeks ago, there has been a surge in companies new to virtualization, taking their first steps into this area. As you would expect, this has resulted in lots of questions on the user forum and calls to our help desk.
360is have produced a XenServer administrators poster, in A4 format, for both new and experienced admins to download for free. Do let us know what you think, and make any suggestions for improvement via the normal channels.
UPDATE: 28-04-09
The response has been overwhelming, with more than eight hundred downloads. For those of you that asked for more glitz, and as part of 360is "printer toner industry stimulus package", please check out the new "midnight edition".
Thursday, February 26, 2009
360is XenServer Support, for free!
Many of you will already be aware that Citrix has just announced that XenServer Enterprise (the version of Xen many of our clients run) is to be made available free of charge. A new enhanced version of XenServer called "Essentials" is being launched. Essentials has sophisticated Lab-Manager, Orchestration, and Workflow functionality along with integration to Hyper-V and the Microsoft stack. It is only this enhanced edition that will carry a price tag.
This is great news!
Click here to download almost £2K of software for free.
It is particularly good for Small to Medium sized companies who might otherwise have been unable to deploy enterprise grade virtualization in this years "zero CAPEX" environment. You can now virtualize an estate for zero pounds spent on software (unless you need the "Essentials" version). What should you do with this unexpected windfall? The money saved from as few as 4 free XenServer licenses could buy one of our Hardware Appliances, allowing you to replace tens of aging physical servers with a single, low power, high performance, 2U dedicated appliance with one-stop-shop support.
One good turn deserves another...
360is are offering 60-days free standard support to new clients sourcing their XenServer software (free or Essentials) though us. In order to secure this support we will need to register a number of details about you in Citrix systems and our own, please get in touch before we change our minds!
This is great news!
Click here to download almost £2K of software for free.
It is particularly good for Small to Medium sized companies who might otherwise have been unable to deploy enterprise grade virtualization in this years "zero CAPEX" environment. You can now virtualize an estate for zero pounds spent on software (unless you need the "Essentials" version). What should you do with this unexpected windfall? The money saved from as few as 4 free XenServer licenses could buy one of our Hardware Appliances, allowing you to replace tens of aging physical servers with a single, low power, high performance, 2U dedicated appliance with one-stop-shop support.
One good turn deserves another...
360is are offering 60-days free standard support to new clients sourcing their XenServer software (free or Essentials) though us. In order to secure this support we will need to register a number of details about you in Citrix systems and our own, please get in touch before we change our minds!
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Find us at...
You can now find us more easily in the following online business directories:
Yahoo UK, under IT Consultants.
Google Local, under IT Consultants in London.
London Directory.
ITNerd, under IT Consultants.
The UK Business Directory, under Independent Consultancies.
Yahoo UK, under IT Consultants.
Google Local, under IT Consultants in London.
London Directory.
ITNerd, under IT Consultants.
The UK Business Directory, under Independent Consultancies.
Friday, February 06, 2009
V for Virtualization, XenServer vs Hyper-V vs VMware
The recent availability of Microsoft Hyper-V has generated an enormous amount of interest and inevitable questions for our sales engineers. If you have a project on plan this year and want to discuss it in person with one of our consultants then contact us. Meanwhile I'd like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths and inform a few truths about this triumvirate facing IT managers in 2009.
Firstly, although there are many more than 3 companies offering similar "whole system" x86 server virtualization, there are only 3 that are significant at this point, expect the rest to be acquired or fold as they fail to achieve critical mass. This leaves us with:
Xen took a fresh look at x86 virtualization in 2002/3, starting out as a research project at Cambridge University, spawning a commercial entity (XenSource) acquired by Citrix in 2007. The approach taken by Xen, and used in the XenServer product is to have an extremely thin virtualization layer between physical hardware and guest OS, and to do the minimum required to allow those guests to run safely together on a system. This approach was made possible by advances in CPU design by Intel and AMD around the time of Xen's formation. Indeed, CPU vendors are still among Xen's largest backers. XenServer has a number of enterprise features like High Availability, Live Migration, and integration with enterprise storage vendors, while still lacking some depth compared to VMware. Our experience is that most XenServer installations are bought on a combination of price and performance. XenServer costs between one half and one third the price of a VMware setup, and this is before staffing is considered. Performance remains a differentiator particularly where extreme consolidation is desired, or where the applications are particularly demanding. 360is staff have been working with XenServer commercially since 2007 and are the UK's most experienced partner.
Hyper-V is free. It is Microsoft's 2nd crack at virtualization after MS Virtual Server which was a disappointment. Hyper-V is a ground-up rewrite and like VMware ESX and Xenserver is a Type-1 or "native bare metal" hypervisor. As such it is loaded onto the physical hardware of the server and all guests run in a layer above it. Early on in the products development, Microsoft tapped XenSource for expertise on running Linux guests and managing scheduling. Hyper-V currently lacks most of the enterprise features of either of the other 2 products, including lacking live migration/vmotion. That said, Hyper-V will become ubiquitous though its low price and wide distribution channel. Our initial testing has Microsoft's product in 3rd place behind XenServer and VMware for performance, particularly with memory-access-intensive workloads, but no-doubt this will be improved upon in future releases. We have yet to see a client using Hyper-V in production but we have many running it in test and development.
So what's an infrastructure manager or CIO to do? Is there such a thing as the right hypervisor? Or a wrong one? After all, you wouldn't want to have been the person who cabled up his building for token ring only to switch to ethernet 2 years later.
Of course we are talking about a false dichotomy, no matter what the vendors say.
Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it. What am I talking about when I say this?
Ultimately, virtualization is about making more efficient use of hardware and of the man-hours spent managing it, mostly through resource sharing and the enablement of faster provisioning and tear-down (or migration) of new services or workloads. Like most advances in technology, the real barrier to benefits are more likely to be your ability to accept virtualization into the core of your operation and to adapt your behavior and ways of working around accordingly.
360is helps our clients adapt IT operations to a fully virtualized infrastructure no matter which of the 3 dominant hypervisors best suits their purpose. Remember, a good IT infrastructure impresses, a great one is invisible.
Firstly, although there are many more than 3 companies offering similar "whole system" x86 server virtualization, there are only 3 that are significant at this point, expect the rest to be acquired or fold as they fail to achieve critical mass. This leaves us with:
- VMware, the market leader, indeed the market creator.
- Citrix XenServer, commercial progeny of the open source Xen project.
- Hyper-V, Microsoft's 2nd take, now they decided it is a good thing after all.
Xen took a fresh look at x86 virtualization in 2002/3, starting out as a research project at Cambridge University, spawning a commercial entity (XenSource) acquired by Citrix in 2007. The approach taken by Xen, and used in the XenServer product is to have an extremely thin virtualization layer between physical hardware and guest OS, and to do the minimum required to allow those guests to run safely together on a system. This approach was made possible by advances in CPU design by Intel and AMD around the time of Xen's formation. Indeed, CPU vendors are still among Xen's largest backers. XenServer has a number of enterprise features like High Availability, Live Migration, and integration with enterprise storage vendors, while still lacking some depth compared to VMware. Our experience is that most XenServer installations are bought on a combination of price and performance. XenServer costs between one half and one third the price of a VMware setup, and this is before staffing is considered. Performance remains a differentiator particularly where extreme consolidation is desired, or where the applications are particularly demanding. 360is staff have been working with XenServer commercially since 2007 and are the UK's most experienced partner.
Hyper-V is free. It is Microsoft's 2nd crack at virtualization after MS Virtual Server which was a disappointment. Hyper-V is a ground-up rewrite and like VMware ESX and Xenserver is a Type-1 or "native bare metal" hypervisor. As such it is loaded onto the physical hardware of the server and all guests run in a layer above it. Early on in the products development, Microsoft tapped XenSource for expertise on running Linux guests and managing scheduling. Hyper-V currently lacks most of the enterprise features of either of the other 2 products, including lacking live migration/vmotion. That said, Hyper-V will become ubiquitous though its low price and wide distribution channel. Our initial testing has Microsoft's product in 3rd place behind XenServer and VMware for performance, particularly with memory-access-intensive workloads, but no-doubt this will be improved upon in future releases. We have yet to see a client using Hyper-V in production but we have many running it in test and development.
So what's an infrastructure manager or CIO to do? Is there such a thing as the right hypervisor? Or a wrong one? After all, you wouldn't want to have been the person who cabled up his building for token ring only to switch to ethernet 2 years later.
Of course we are talking about a false dichotomy, no matter what the vendors say.
Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it. What am I talking about when I say this?
- Tiered, shared storage
- Network that scales at an acceptable cost
- A capacity planning model correct for your particular setup
- Accurate and appropriate information on performance
Ultimately, virtualization is about making more efficient use of hardware and of the man-hours spent managing it, mostly through resource sharing and the enablement of faster provisioning and tear-down (or migration) of new services or workloads. Like most advances in technology, the real barrier to benefits are more likely to be your ability to accept virtualization into the core of your operation and to adapt your behavior and ways of working around accordingly.
360is helps our clients adapt IT operations to a fully virtualized infrastructure no matter which of the 3 dominant hypervisors best suits their purpose. Remember, a good IT infrastructure impresses, a great one is invisible.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Information Assurance, 360is feature in National Computing Centre Magazine
What is Information Assurance (IA)? Why is it so hard for organisations, large and small, public and private to achieve? When there is a failure of IA why don't the causes get put right? For the answers to these and other questions take a look at the latest issue of the UK National Computing Centre magazine. 360is Principal Consultant discusses Information Assurance and addresses the root cause of most IA failures, AKA "the people problem". The article goes on to detail some practical steps that every organisation can take to improve its IA scorecard and avoid becoming another story on the national news. The 2-page article can be accessed directly as a PDF here.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
New "Resources" Page
The amount of 360is articles, whitepapers, software, and interviews has grown to such a degree this year that we have decided to collect them all in one place for easy reference. The 360is Resources section is the place to go for all this information, freely provided by our experienced consultants. Over the coming months look out for new material.
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