Service Catalog 101

Data Center Haiku Contest Winners!!

JUDGING IS HARD. I'm glad I'm not handing out gold medals for figure skating because I'd be there all night whining through my nose, why can't they ALL get a gold?  I just can't decide on one. Because seriously? You all deserve a gold. Well, most of you. Some of you crushed it on the syllable pattern. You got 5-7-5 confused with 7-5-7, but your effort and creative form ranked right up there with PURE GENIUS.

There were over 50 haiku entries, and they were pretty much all brilliant. You can see about 30 or 40 in these post comments.

My favorites were those that folded seamlessly together a seasonal reference with technical vocabulary, making the haiku smooth and funny. And some of you made me think you have a special relationship with your server farm and all I can say is GET HELP. No seriously, those were among my favorites.

And since we couldn't pick just one, we picked three plus a distinguished honorable mention. 

Congratulations to the winners of our Data Center Haiku contest!  They are:

First Place: Mike Kelleher

Second Place: Elisheva Leybovitch

Third Place: Tom Lannelli

Honorable Mention: Kevin Timmons

 

  
 

For the winners, email us and I'll get back to you to confirm the spelling of your name and get a mailing address.  Thanks to all of you for participating!

Virtualization, Cloud Computing Webinar w/ Gartner Analyst A Must See

Virtualization and cloud computing are the two highest-impact technology issues facing enterprise IT today. Are you ready?  Questions that you need to address today are:

	Is virtualization doomed to be another IT science project, or will it deliver the expected ROI?
	Will cloud computing put IT out of work, or can internal IT become more cloud-like?

To learn how an IT Service Catalog can help you achieve the promised virtualization benefits of cost savings and  agility, while paving the way for an internal cloud - join Cameron Haight, Gartner research vice president, and Scott Hammond, president and CEO of newScale, for this on-demand video webcast.

Taming the Virtual Data Center

It goes without saying that virtualization is a phenomenally attractive discipline in the data center.  But with innovation comes risk: 

• The risk of suddenly realizing that you have more virtual servers up than you know about.  And, perhaps more importantly, the risk of not knowing how to FIX your virtual server sprawl problem when you realize you have it.

• The risk of not having pre-determined task orchestration than manages the entire stack of service workloads surrounding your virtualization (storage, network IDs, security, disaster recovery/backup, etc.), and linking that whole process back to the requesters that asked for them in the first place.

• The risk of not being able to leverage your virtualization operating model to include other hosting solutions like physical servers and cloud computing in a visible, controllable way that ensures consistency to the business while staying compliant to IT policies.

Many of our customers have discovered the additive value of having a Service Catalog provide the "operating model" for their virtualization technology.  That's why it's so exciting to us that one of our partners, Anton Systems, Inc., is spreading the word about Taming the Virtual Data Center in a mid-day seminar at the prestigious Doral Resort and Spa in Miami, Florida, this Thursday, October 1, 2009, from 11:00am to 2:00pm. 

A solid line up of virtualization and technology partners including newScale, VMware, and NetApp will present their perspectives on virtualization best practices, ending with yours truly presenting on how newScale's FrontOffice Suite for the Virtual Data Center solution gives you that elusive "operating model" that is extensible and flexible without customization.

Come learn from the industry's best and brightest; click on the link above for more information or to register for the event.  Hey, we're giving away shirts and they're throwing in lunch with the deal so you really can't go wrong.

Service Catalog as Self-Service IT Storefront

Recently the Federal Government announced an initiative out of the General Services Administration called Apps.gov.

The focus of this initiative is to provide a self-service 'storefront' portal to order business applications and cloud services.  It's essentially an IT Service Catalog (although clearly still a work in progress).  

To learn more about Apps.gov and its impact, take a look at the CNET article Five ways that Apps.gov is a trendsetter. 

Trend #1?  It's the IT Service Catalog.

Steve the Server Guy - Will Provision for Food

The VMworld 2009 conference is over but everyone’s still talking about Steve the Server Guy and “Will Provision for Food”. We had some fun with this theme at this major event put on by our friends at VMware.

But to get a feel for the serious message behind this visual - the need to track VM requests, enable self-service IT and to enforce standards that control demand - take a look at this informative video starring "Steve the Server Guy" - also known as newScale's own Steve Watkins.

To learn more about  what all the buzz was about regarding the newScale Service Catalog for VMware - just go to www.newscale.com - you can even request a free trial!

Control Self-Service VM Requests

Exciting news today: Now you can try newScale's market-leading service catalog for free!

In the words of every shameless infomercial promoter, "But wait, there's more!" The trial version is packaged specifically to address the growing number of management challenges surrounding virtual environments.

Check it out and request a free trial: Control Self-Service VM Requests and Reduce Virtual Sprawl with newScale for VMware®.

We interviewed VM admins and heard a number of painful stories; too many of them over and over again.

• Not sure who owns what
• Can't keep track of new requests
• Too many "temporary" VMs
• Too many custom VMs
• No idea what's running on VMs
• ... and so on...

It just so happens that a service catalog is perfectly positioned to solve these problems. And while we'd like to take all the credit for this idea, the fact is that we've had customers putting our service catalog solutions in front of their data centers for years. All we did was listen closely and package up a free trial. Oh, and we developed an integration to VMware that ships out-of-the-box and ready to go.

So what does the solution look like? To touch on a few points:

• Highly configurable self-service portal
• Capture business-centric and other meta-data
• Link VMs with owners
• Automate approval/authorization process
• VMware integration to create, modify and manage VMs
• Import data from existing VMware environments

The great thing is that you don't have to believe me at all. You can download a free trial and check it out yourself. The trial includes a virtual machine with our service catalog pre-installed and configured. "But wait, there's more!" It also comes with a series of self-paced guided activities to walk you through everything you need to know to get started. There's also an online community if you're one of those quick-learner types; and I suspect most of you are.

View the official press release here: newScale Announces New Virtual Appliance and Free Trial of Service Catalog Solution for VMware

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Would you use your telecom company as your Cloud provider?

For folks who are providing computing resources to the rest of the company, virtualization through VMware or Citrix Xen is already a familiar topic.  Virtualizing the computing resources in-house allows you to run multiple virtual servers on a single piece of hardware, which results in cost savings.  However, that means you still have to make capital investments in servers, data center infrastructure and have people to manage them. 

In a climate where CAPEX is hard to come by, public and private clouds can be compelling alternatives.  Some people are concerned that public clouds like Amazon’s may not be secure enough but what do people think about Computing as a Service (CaaS) offerings from large telcos?    See this article on VON about the Verizon offering: http://www.von.com/news/verizon-business-launches-cloud-caas.html. 

What’s interesting for me from this article are some of the value propositions cited:

The portal, which includes extensive reporting capabilities, can also provide management access to any physical servers they may have, and to resources from other providers – a critical differentiator considering that many companies will have physical data center resources in place they may want to retail for various reasons. For example, a business may want to use a virtual environment for staging and development. For business-critical applications, such as database servers, businesses may choose a physical server infrastructure that lets them customize servers as well as select from a range of server configurations.

What’s great there is these are exactly the messages we at newScale send with our newScale FrontOffice Suite for the Virtual Data Center^TM offering.  To be fair, Verizon’s offering looks compelling, hitting many of the same value points.  If you are planning to outsource most if not all of your computing infrastructure, it is worth taking a good look.  However, if you are going to be running a hybrid environment which may include cloud and a couple of in-house virtualization solutions, you may be better off owning a platform neutral solution such as a Service Catalog.  It may provide you better control over the implementation plan and a greater chance of success. 

 

What do you the reader think?

To Cloud, Or Not To Cloud - Do You Have A Choice?

To cloud or not to cloud; that is the question. But do you really have a choice? There is a recent article by Cindy Waxer on CIO.com that outlines a number of potential benefits and pitfalls. The bottom line is that there is no single one answer for everyone. Yes it's certainly cheaper but what happens to your business if Amazon S3 or Google Apps goes down for several hours (again)?

"At this point, the cloud remains too leaky
In the end, it's up to each company to decide how much risk it is willing to take on -- and whether the damages accruing from a service disruption might offset the savings and convenience promised by a cloud computing service."

Is the Cloud Reliable Enough for Your Business? - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership.

Defining a cloud strategy as a company is a daunting task but what about rogue cloud use? What are people doing to prevent or limit individuals within the company from jumping the gun and using cloud computing before the corporate cloud strategy is defined? Are people at your company using cloud systems right now? How do you know?

One strategy for IT to maintain control is to embrace the cloud early - not 100% - but on a smaller, trial basis. Be clear about compliance and governance: what are the recommended uses, what are the limitations (especially concerning sensitive data), etc. Also clearly communicate the value-add of IT: which cloud provider to use, system support, back-up, monitoring, etc.

Of course when it comes to marketing IT services, a service catalog is a great solution. But if you're reading this blog you probably already know that.

-Jamie

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