It’s all over the Internet – Brocade is ready to get sold to the highest bidder.  The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Brocade has approached a banker to find the highest bidder for it.

Looking at its competitors the following just appear as contenders right away -

1. IBM
2. Cisco
3. EMC
4. HP
5. Dell
6. Oracle

All of them definitely would wish to buy Brocade from a business value perspective but only a few desperately need it. Let’s analyze the factors as to why Brocade would want to get sold first. It’s not anyone wants to be sold after having performed a major acquisition – Foundry Networks.

Brocade offers a strong product line so it’s not that it is losing its share of the market or is underperforming. It’s just that the market is down so there is not a major rush for Brocade products. And that’s perfectly fine.. So no reason to panic here.  Why would Brocade not stick around for another year and receive an increased share price for itself.

Analyzing Brocade’s share price – it has hovered around $8 on average for past 5 years. That means being part of an acquisition at this time will take its value higher and eventually get to play a major role as a capability enhancer.  The market has bottomed out and there is no real scope for Brocade price to go any lower.  Keeping this in mind, the winning share price offered for Brocade will have to be higher than $12 price range if there is a competitive bid.

Brocade may no longer find it financially sound to invest into research for its new products by itself. So it may want to leverage that role through its new rich owner. Talking about owners, it’s about time that we discuss who could be the prospective buyer.

IBM – Huge interests, OEM partnerships that align with Brocade, server business that rivals competitors, and can just take Brocade to another level.  But IBM has internal red tape issues that do not offer immense growth for Brocade. If it’s just money that they end up talking about, however, IBM will be on the top.

HP – Another major player that has a lot of hardware depending on Brocade. HP sells Brocade solutions to almost everyone that would have a use for Brocade products and these products have worked in a stable manner for years in customer environments. HP would also look to enhance the use of this product for its blade infrastructure and probably just embed SAN switches into the hardware.  It may also want to take some of the foundry switches and sell them directly to medium and large businesses.  Most importantly, it will give HP an edge against its competitors.

Dell – Does not make a huge difference to them but they would sure want to expand their business area. Dell currently works a lot with EMC in sourcing switches etc., but wouldn’t it be good to have your own solution. Besides, they recently acquired Perot Systems so i doubt they would be willing to make another major acquisition so soon.

CISCO – Would not win regulatory approvals since it would be intent on just quietly killing its competitor and sell own products instead.  That would mean use the technology of brocade but don’t just use their products anymore.  Another way they can get it is buy through EMC.  There is one hidden intent though that’s explored in the next step.

EMC – Would definitely be interested to buy Brocade since it makes huge sense. Now for the surprising but not very well known news and could be the reason Brocade is willing to sell itself off to the highest bidder.  Infoworld reported on September 1, 2009 that CISCO & EMC might be starting a new joint venture company (http://www.infoworld.com/d/hardware/cisco-emc-starting-new-joint-venture-company-093?source=rss_infoworld_news).

I have a strong feeling that the selloff of Brocade has something to do with it.  EMC and CISCO might have been sending feelers to the top executives at Brocade or Brocade must have thought of this as a good opportunity. Regardless, if Brocade goes to EMC/CISCO it would be a HUGE winner only if CISCO does not plan to retire it down the road.

For end users it will be a major benefit since EMC’s storage technology, which is immensely popular can easily integrate with Brocade (they have been working together for so long).   My best bet is that CISCO/EMC will win this one if they go all out.  EMC also recently bought out Data Domain which is very popular for de-duplication products. There may be some business ideas going back and forth to come out with some innovative ideas in the next year or so.

Oracle – It will only buy Brocade to build on its security platform and compete with CISCO in some areas. But there’s no major business benefit to Oracle though some may debate this.  My opinion is Brocade/Oracle relationship is a no brainer compared with EMC/CISCO-Brocade.

But hey.. the race has just begun. Let’s see who wins it.

The appropriate identification of a stable environment can usually be gauged by the efforts that go into maintenance and necessary upgrades.

Performance Management and Capacity Planning efforts when tuned correctly make a significant improvement in the stability of any IT environment.  Maintenance efforts are greatly reduced and staff resources can become more involved in performing useful tasks like improvements, design, and planning.

In any IT infrastructure environment there are atleast 3 things that always exist – desktops, servers, and networks. But what many IT environments lack is the proper analysis and planning of an upgrade lifecycle, update strategy and break/fix methodology.

Upgrade Lifecycle – Environments implementing tens to thousands of web servers fail to consolidate. Mentality fixated on performance impacts related to consolidation also cause major overheads.  Improper scalability and inflexible architecture causes major re-design or re-work to scale up or down. Changing needs do not necessarily reflect a change in processes to match the pace. Technical resources and consultants face the hassles of identifying and removing outdated information, asset management and inventory issues, increased dependency on environments causing major impacts during upgrade, and the list goes on.

Update Strategy – Many IT environments work under the presumption that performingpreventative maintenance is going to cause them outages. Hence they follow the well known principle of “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.   No harm with following this principle except that IT managers and executives should understand that this concept is not for every organization. Smaller organizations are more optimal for such strategies but medium to large organizations should understand the negative aspects of following this principle. Servers, Desktops, and Applications may remain unpatched causing issues with stability, security, and performance problems. Besides, application code may not function very effectively and cause business disruptions.

Break/Fix Methodology – Internal IT processes should align and not prevent quality efforts. So instead of being an aspect of red tape it would be really worthwhile to complement existing efforts to fix problems without any delay.  Corporations do not receive optimum performance benefits because patchy work leads to patchy results. When there is time for a major deployment that’s when things fail. Probably because most things are exposed to changes at that time.

Having discussed the above areas at a high level let’s get back to the basics of Performance Management and Capacity Planning. To achieve success start with the small things but keep your efforts aligned with equivalent process improvements.

Benefits of adopting a clear performance management and capacity planning strategy may include -

- scalability to accomodate newer projects

- flexibility to do new things or make changes to existing plans

- less management because predictive information is available

- lower business case costs and operating costs

- better training and enhanced skill levels of internal staff

Looking at the merits listed above it is just of supreme importance that IT departments atleast simulate a working environment that embeds performance management and capacity planning if they do not have the resources or budget to implement it right away.

http://blog.cainics.com/?p=23

Reminder – last day to submit your cool virtual app ideas is September 30, 2009

Let us know what you would prefer to have in your VM environment.

At a high level this topic or even the words seem to be complex and confusing.  But they are only seem complex in the absence of the basics of getting a website optimized for Search Engines.

Think of the scenario that if twitter was not search engine optimized how much of revenue could it have generated and would it have become what it is right now.  Secondly, look at the ad revenues that online publication companies earn just because their websites are popular.

We’ll discuss at a high level the core aspects of Search Engine Optimization so that businesses can understand the effort that goes into it.

1) Any business needs to first identify where their website currently ranks and how much traffic do they draw.

2) Once you know where you stand the next step is pretty logical – optimize your website further.

3) To perform optimization a change to html code on your website is mandatory.  HTML code needs to be correctly updated with search engine friendly language. Relevant keywords have to be identified for each business.

4) Not many people understand that just writing a keyword related to a business is not going to give them top rank. Some have thousands of hits on a daily basis and some have probably 2-3 hits a day.

5) Hence, it is important to understand that the specialists know what to use as the right keywords to get you ahead of the rest.

Let’s take a pause here now and think.. would the rest of the world not be trying to get ahead at the same time.

Off course they would be.. that’s why we act smarter and try to be a step ahead. let’s look at the next steps.

6) Subscribe to important websites that will provide you with a high amount of inbound links. Each link is valuable to a search engine but search engines don’t consider any site credible enough for an inbound link. There are only a few they trust.

7) Create and place relevant and key marketing ads.  Don’t just create any ad because you need to promote your company.  Important note to remember – Websites also get penalized and blacklisted by Google and Yahoo if the right language is not used for marketing. So it’s important to create the correct ads.

8 ) Now, monitor your website on a daily basis using specialized and quality software that aren’t free but your search engine optimization company would have paid for. That will allow them to get detailed reporting metrics about how your website is performing and what is the rate of change in its popularity.

9) Once you know how things are improving (or faring badly) tweak your strategy to improve site popularity further and draw more traffic.

10) Finally, understand that there is a specialization for everything.  Only a dentist can take out a tooth (or a boxer probably), only a civil engineer can build a bridge (not an electrical engineer), and only a search engine optimization expert can improve site ranking (not just any website builder).

SEO takes anywhere from a week to a month to achieve top results. Patience with belief is the key and remember that someone is putting in a lot of effort on a daily basis through monitoring, optimization, and re-optimization to get your business on the top.

If you would like more details or wish to get a quote for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) please get in touch by emailing us on sales@cainics.com or  visit our website (www.cainics.com).

What makes us credible -   Search on google and yahoo for the following keywords -     IT infrastructure services winnipeg, Google Apps reseller winnipeg and view our ranking. We rank on the first page of Google and Yahoo in providing IT services.

The benefits of virtualization have been very clearly defined by most product vendors and consulting companies implementing those virtualization solutions. For the most part, everything works well but there are lesser known facts that gain prominence much later when you implement virtualization technology.

While implementing the latest and greatest features of the emerging virtualization technologies out there, take a pause and reflect on the risk factors and business continuity strategies that need to be evolved within your organization so that you can make virtualization a success.

As the saying goes – It’s not only what you do but also how you do it that matters !

CriticalFactors

DMZ – Ensure that your Physical servers hosting the VM’s have multiple NIC cards. This allows you to create a seperate network switch for the DMZ.   Try for a minimum of 4 NIC cards per host. The more the better.  Once you implement a pilot/full project test for VLAN Hopping from the firewall onto a different VLAN on the network. Access from some VM’s in the DMZ has to be opened either to Active Directory servers or Remote Access Servers and that could potentially open up the chances of VLAN hopping.  Ensure that Service Console is not in the DMZ ip range.

OS Hardening – Not many companies go through a proper OS hardening procedure because it takes time. Managers don’t want their team members or even design architects to follow such procedures because they think it is a waste of time.  But physical servers (even though they are internal) have VM’s which are external facing with public IP addresses (either through NAT translation or direct) and can cause a potential security issue. If you use virtualization on a linux server there are pre-hardened server images available that are excellent to use. If not, run through your own OS hardening procedures.

Performance – The risk with performance only arises when actions are taken in violation of best practices. e.g. VMWare has a DRS feature to automatically assign additional resources, move VM’s to another host and so on to ensure performance is not impacted.  A set mentality based on the physical server model can cause a grave violation to Virtualization procedures. Do not physical limit resources per VM and do not physically set resource restrictions in that case. There can be certain settings that can be made – VM isolation, Power off when not in use etc., but they have to follow the basic parameters.   Setting physical limitations may cause performance issues even when part of your infrastructure may lie unused.

Project Risks – New projects coming in always cause interruptions with what you are already doing. Besides users have been taught that virtualization facilitates quick creation of VM’s and so on. This creates a perception that the virtualization administrator is just sitting idle and has nothing to do, so he/she can handle project requests immediately.  Set some internal rules around such requests (Change Requests, Decision Requests, Work Orders etc)

Network Risks – Since virtualization offers increased flexibility projects know that they can use the advanced options. They’ll want isolated server access right from their desktops, access for end users to test in an isolated environment, VLAN seperation, access to your ERP and so on. This creates a lot of overhead since all this work is just temporary. Actual production changes do not require any such things and your virtualized app/server/workstation can just use what’s already setup. Temporary changes that are not well thought can create either security risks or process risks which can lead to outages or downtime. Think that through really well.  Articulate what you can accept in your environment and what you cannot.

Ownership Risks – Some key business projects consider their right to have full control over their servers/apps. While this is fine for the most part there is an area of concern. With virtualization you start using shared infrastructure. Hence the virtualization admins should have a say in signing off on all Change Requests because project level changes may create Organizational level issues.  How about a project fixing 4 CPU’s for one of their servers and the cluster failover does not work because VMWare HA cluster was not able to find 4 free CPU’s on another host. And how about that same change impacting performance for another critical production server, because 4 CPU’s are restricted/reserved for just one VM for a project. Now the critical production server has nowhere to draw resources from. With other issues at play even VMotion may not work. At the same time you are increasing undesired server sprawl since the intention behind virtualization is to reduce the number of servers as possible and to maximize cost savings on license software etc.

Templates – While most organizations create OS templates for ease of deployments it is very important that a template of the physical server that hosts the VM is also available. This is very critical from a business continuity perspective for organizations that don’t actively use their alternate sites.  It is time consuming to create physical server templates but it also offers great advantages in terms of similarity in configuration, hardened OS, tweaked access controls, and integrated interfaces.

Disaster Recovery

Once of the key aspects of any organization is their ability to implement Business Continuity measures.  Experience suggests that mostly everyone  considers it as very significant but practical scenarios show that not everyone follows Business Continuity measures as meticulously as they should. When we talk about not following it, we are not talking about running an Annual DR Test, or showing the capability to restore by restoring a few servers. How does the entire end to end function work is very important and what happens for the rest of the year is equally important as well.

Working with a few corporate bigwigs while in the US, our analysis showed their seriousness in treating the Disaster Recovery site as an operational entity. That meant that infrastructure investment was not focussed solely on one location and there was a balanced resource distribution. Many of us consider the costs of bandwidth to be a major factor and it indeed is, but how about countering that with the all too expensive costs of the inability to provide isolated test environments. Having such environments at the Disaster Recovery site but accessible from the main site allows for the high level upgrades without making major network changes or infrastructure investment.

Companies that rent their alternate sites to be used in the eventuality of a disaster can also take advantage of virtualization. In their scenarios there is a recovery timeline that is mostly upwards of 2 days and all you need to do is setup some physical gear and restore Virtual Machines. Makes a whole lot of common sense when you compare it with restoring physical servers through snapshots. And who’s to say that they would find servers, workstations and other infrastructure readily available when the rest of the companies in the area are also searching for equipment.

Eventually, virtualization will give you everything that you need (atleast much more than a physical environment) but design it carefully with consideration to the risks involved, and factor in the use of your alternate location as much as possible.

You must have heard about many different types of virtualization products and companies but never about us. So we hope to put ourselves to test.

We are relatively small and  less familiar company with a hope to create a unique identity in the IT world. Hence we are embarking on a new project to create an application for a virtual platform.  While we have many ideas from Virtual Center utilities to ESX server configuration applications we would like to know what is really of interest to the outside world.

If you know what you need but can’t find or have a wishlist of smaller applications that you would love to have for a virtual platform, please contact us. Our email address is “sales@cainics.com“ or you can email us from the contact page on our website -    www.cainics.com

We are in the process of collecting ideas and have set ourselves a deadline of September 30, 2009 to have all ideas consolidated and reviewed.

As a company, we are always interested to evaluate new business opportunities as well.  If you have a Project that you would like us to bid on or submit our proposal please do contact us. We are not only experienced with virtualization but have experience over a wide range of IT infrastructure services and solutions.

Hope to hear your ideas soon.  Note that we will not be posting all suggestions here.. Only the top 3 will be posted on this blog.

In the current economic scenario there is a serious effort by finance/accounting to reduce capital expenditure and curtail operational expenses.

To justify that you are on their side and more than willing to participate in such measures it is very important that Analysts and Managers do their bit in identifying areas of non-conformance and non-performance. This brings you the added advantage of trust because you are now working with in cohesion with the financial objectives.

The trust deficit between IT and Accounting is mostly challenging because IT feels it needs to improve on infrastructure, technology, and training in order to provide high availability and continuous stability of its systems. This coupled with the perception that IT spends too much can cause a serious harm to planned projects (unless you are willing to take that risk). By following some simple steps that are outlined below the Trust Deficit can be reduced. These are practical approaches that have been tried and tested in actual environments to drive down costs and benefit internal IT.

1) Review your Requirements

This is not as straightforward as it seems though. Many people interpret this as a review of what was planned to be implemented for a specific project. But what is being referenced instead is ‘the review of the processes and not the task list’.

When someone in IT says “Technology A has to be implemented” it is through research that we know ‘Technology A’ brings technical advantages and cost benefits. So if your response is we’ll run a pilot first it’s an articulate response because you are trying to provide the business with a test case for a new technology that is a priority initiative but being implemented by testing the features first.

It will be easy for your Finance/Accounting Department to split up the dollars for a pilot test and give you money for partial equipment. Once the infrastructure or software setup is completed, it is easy to ramp up to a comprehensive setup and Finance/Accounting have no reason to refuse if you can prove the merits based on statistics that you documented during the Pilot Phase.

2) Don’t promote features just because you can find them on a search engine.

Having top class functionality is wonderful and we have every right to promote them. But since every IT environment is different there might be some challenges that you may fail to include during your analysis. Hence, spend proper time to identify the features and their dependencies so that your Pilot Test does not run into fiscal constraints. This could happen because you under-estimated the hardware or software requirements to implement those very features you desire.

3) Data High Availability and Storage Promises
IT Managers generally have an eager interest to offer things to the Business that they need but never had. Well, that’s what IT managers are supposed to do – recommend and initiate ongoing improvements to improve business objectives.

If any concerns are raised about ensuring consistency in terms of high availability don’t just ignore it. There could be a very valid reason why your entire operation might fall like a pack of cards just because you promised high availability and performance to your business, but implemented it with limited knowledge. Either train in-house staff in advance or use some consulting advice to ensure that you get the industry knowledge required to optimize the design scenarios.

For example –

Organization A implemented a Unix Server Upgrade Project and received equipment at their Primary site and Disaster Recovery Site for failover and high availability. They implemented quality software at high cost and the entire project was completed successfully. Despite all of their achievements, they underestimated network bandwidth upgrade costs between their two sites. The result was they never were able to use failover or high availability since network bandwidth did not come cheap to do the things they promised. The business continuity strategy took days versus the ideal hours and the focus moved to lack of features instead of the good deliverables that were completed.

Organization B made a list of requirements to implement a Unix Server Upgrade Project but added consolidation as a key step. Besides, they used site level failover and faster recovery mechanisms such as snapshot recovery. Not only were they able to complete the Project with much less costs, they were able to recover to their DR site much faster and satisfy the business with the benefits that became available. They finally pushed their Business to accommodate additional costs for real time data replication and make their environment truly “Highly available”.

These are just two approaches but bring different perspectives of planned improvements.

4) Train and Share

Companies that do not focus on learning or knowledge sharing lag behind their competitors and in some cases even bow out. Once recession started, a lot of people started looking for better job prospects elsewhere. This led to a stream of knowledge being lost since companies focussed on developing individual knowledge and not on sharing it with peers. This led to intellectual property loss and led many companies further down the path of failure. To avoid loss of internal knowledge, cross train your staff and ensure that adequate learning management strategies are made available. Most importantly, continuously offer options to upgrade knowledge. It’s an investment well worth it.

5) Implement Quality Tools

Executives and Board Members are primarily concerned with Fiscal Revenue. At the end of the fiscal year the Finance Department is going to report all projects that went beyond their stipulated budgets and it does not augur well for those projects that did not meet their budget. Implement quality tools that track progress, identify missed milestones, and escalate automatically for actions. Besides collaboration tools like Corporate Instant Messaging, Voice over IP, Online Change Management, and Risk Management software are well worth the money paid for them. These initiatives are highly supported and encouraged by top management. Use this to your advantage and plug the loopholes quickly.

These are just a few scenarios amongst the many that form part of best practices. But all of them are useful examples from a real world scenario that have contributed towards organizational savings.

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-Admin

www.cainics.com