April Seminar, Virtualisation In High-Tech Environments

101 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Rd

We are holding a free, invitation only seminar on the 23rd April 2012 for high-tech or research and development centric organisations in the Cambridge area.

Aimed at technical and business users with an interest in virtualisation, this is not a vendor-centric product briefing, but a sharing of real customer experiences in two demanding application areas and a detailed look at a world class software research and development facility. There will also be an opportunity to network with fellow members of the Cambridge technology cluster over lunch.

360is are hosting the event at Citrix’s R&D centre on the Cambridge Science Park. Two local case studies will feature, each from a different high-tech business that has adopted desktop or server virtualisation to increase productivity for specialist office workers, scientists, or engineers. If you are charged with supporting demanding, sophisticated users in the Cambridge area then this seminar will be of interest to you.

Contact the organiser for an invite if you would like to attend.

When: Monday April 23^rd 09:30 until 12:30

Where: Citrix Systems Inc, Building 101, Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 0FY

Organiser: rob.gilson@360is.com

Summary Agenda:

09:30 Registration and Coffee

09:50 Start

10:00 Mark Heath VP of Products, Citrix XenServer

Detailed look at the engineering facilities and resources behind the Citrix R&D organisation

10:30 Case Study 1

Shortening the testing and development cycle for an large international software company

11:00 Break

11:15 Case Study 2

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for demanding, scientific, and engineering users

11:45 Closing remarks and prize draw

12:00 Buffet lunch and open networking 

About 360is

360is have over 10 years’ experience in providing consultancy and professional services in the application of  technology to business problems and challenges. Our staff have worked in and around Cambridge since the early 90s, solving problems for numerous Software, Life Sciences,  Electronics and R&D driven companies.

Virtual Machine Company Webinar Recording

The Virtual Machine Company seminar is now available for download. For details of the agenda and material covered please see the original invite here.

We are making it available as a 40MB Powerpoint (pps) file.
Download it here (registration required).

Autumn Virtualization Seminar, London & Cambridge (NOW FULL)

We are holding an invitation-only seminar on mission critical & production systems virtualization in November. Some of you will have already received the invite directing you to register.

Choose the date/location below to book your place and receive the calendar appointment and PDF agenda via Email.

19th November: Royal Mint, Royal Mint Court, London, EC3N 4HJ.
26th November: Trinity Centre, Milton Rd Cambridge, CB4 0FN.

Registered attendees will receive further information on the event and a full agenda.

Agenda
09:30 Arrival & Tea/Coffee

10:00 Welcome & Introductions - 360is Ltd

10:05 Running Citrix Virtualized In Production - Citrix Systems Inc

• Netscaler VPX, XenDesktop, XenApp.
  
• Best practice advice for reliable virtualization of Citrix software.
  
• Citrix end-to-end virtualization strategy for agile infrastructure.

11:00 Break

11:10 Virtualization Hardware - The Virtual Machine Company Ltd

• How customer requirements shaped virtualization hardware.
  
• How to achieve ultimate VM density and lowest TCO.
  
• A post-server approach to virtualization.

11:40 Case Study, “Virtualising A Billion Dollar Database” - 360is Ltd

• Maximising VM density without compromising performance & availability
  
• The virtualization experience, one year on.

12:00 Finish and Q&A.

12:15 Tour (Royal Mint only) followed by light lunch.

Cancellations & Additional Invitations
Places are limited, if you are subsequently unable to attend then please let us know so that we can move someone else up from the waiting list. If you did not get an invite and would like to attend, or wish to recommend a colleague, please contact rob.gilson@360is.com.

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Update 16-11-09: The seminar is now full and there is a waiting list for those unable to get in this time around. Please notify Rob Gilson (above) if you have registered but are now unable to attend.

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Update 20-11-09: Thanks to all who attended the Seminar. For those who were unable to make it, or who want copies of the presentations, please see the following links:

• 360is Intro & VMCO Hardware (7MB), Rob Gilson - 360is
  
• Citrix Update (11MB), Damian Saunders - Citrix Inc
  
• Virtualizaing Difficult Workloads (2MB), 360is
  
• VMCO Case Study (6MB), 360is
  

360is Security Seminar, The Insider Threat

360is Principal Consultant, Nick Hutton, is a guest speaker at a breakfast briefing at the Royal Society for the Appreciation of Arts, London on Wednesday October 22nd 2008. The subject for the briefing is "The Insider Threat" and the event will be attended by CSOs and IT managers. Also speaking at the event:

Geoff Harris, President of the Information Systems Security Association in the UK
Damir Rajnovic, PSIRT Incident Manager, Cisco Systems

Presentation start at 9am sharp, find us on the map. If you would like to attend this free seminar, please contact us.

Out of Chaos, Opportunity

The cost of provisioning a server or desktop has collapsed thanks to virtualization, thin client, multicore CPUs and ubiquitous gigabit networking in the data centre. Indeed, in the last 3 years virtualization software itself has tumbled in price from thousands of dollars per unit and is now given away for free with many Operating Systems.

So what happens when server hardware reaches true commodity pricing levels? What happens when the necessity for new capital equipment expenditure goes away, and the power to spawn whole IT estates ends up in the hands of business units or end users? Virtual system instances surge to meet demand (no bad thing) but the CIO and his team are left responsible for reliability, security, and compliance of an uncontrollable virtual estate. Not all organisations have a powerful CIO or IT function, not everyone is able to effectively enforce central policy on such a fluid infrastructure.

Early adopters of virtualization have already found this out the hard way, and are now trying to cope with this uncontrolled growth in the number of virtual systems.

We have been here before. During the 90's the cost per megabyte of hard drive storage (remember when we used to think about storage in terms of megabytes?) plummeted. Storage proliferated in the data centre, on the desktop, and in a hundred types of portable devices. The struggle to manage this storage still rages today. Do you know where your confidential data is? Perhaps it's on the SAN, and on John's desktop PC, or his laptop, you know, the one he lost on the train. We waited more than 10 years for tools to help us manage this uncontrolled growth in storage. Even now with data de-duplication, filesystem snapshots, disk encryption, and (somewhat) affordable SAN and NAS, managing storage is a daily struggle with huge associated costs.

Common sense tells us that it is better to fix problems now, before they become chronic. How much easier would it have been to manage today's terabytes of storage if all those powerful tools were available to us in 1990?

How can we take the lessons learned from storage and apply them to today's problem of virtualization sprawl?

What if you could devolve the power to create, destroy, and hibernate virtual machines to your authorized users in a carefully controlled way? What if virtual machines were automatically decommission after a projects pre-determined end-date? What if you could report on and produce billing records for virtual machines according to their consumption of physical resources?

If you could do all these things today, how would that help you manage virtual server sprawl now and in the future? How much time would it save, and what would all that be worth to you?

For more than a year 360is have been working with a group of experienced virtualization practitioners at one of our clients, who have recently spun-out a software company, and are taking just such a Virtual Resource Management platform to market. DynamicOps announced the launch of VRM in June and based upon its maturity in production environments are already welcoming new users. We recommend it for medium and large organizations looking to rein in existing virtualization sprawl or stop the problem before it starts. Vendor neutral, multi-platform, and security conscious, DynamicOps and 360is are planning an autumn seminar in the heart of London's financial centre to introduce VRM and and explore how it allows you to re-gain control of your (virtual) IT estate.

If you would like to be invited, please get in touch.

Seminar: Mission Critical Virtualization

360is is running an invitation only seminar on the 21st July at Chalfont Park, Chalfont St. Peter, Bucks. The theme is mission critical and production systems virtualization. If you are an existing customer then you should have already been contacted, however there will be a few extra places available. The agenda includes a preview of Citrix Xen v4.2, disaster recovery and business continuity using virtualization, a guest speaker from SteelEye Technology, and one of our own case studies. The whole event lasts less than 3 hours and attendees will also have the chance to win a presentation case of champagne.

Please contact Rob Gilson by Email if you would like to come along, or call us on the main number leaving your full contact details.

--- Update 6pm 21st July
Thanks to everyone for making the seminar a success, we will be in-touch shortly with each of you. Congratulations to Alex of Netui who won the prize draw, and thanks to Citrix for the use of the venue, catering, and staff.

--- Update 6pm 23rd July
It looks like our virtualization hardware appliance made a good impression, Rupert over at Virtualisation Tribulations had some kind things to say about our latest product and the seminar. UK virtualization blogs (or technology blogs of any sort!) are rare, so be sure to check it out for an insiders view on Citrix, Xen, VMWare, and the industry.