I’ve noticed a pattern developing: It starts with a renewal notice, usually around 90-days before Subscription Advantage (SA) is set to expire. The reply email comes back within 48 hours: “What is Subscription Advantage?” I answer and then comes question #2: “Why do I need it?” So I think it’s time once again to shed some light on this mystical annual renewal.

Subscription Advantage IS NOT MAINTENANCE!

Subscription Advantage  IS NOT SUPPORT!

Subscription Advantage IS NOT A WARRANTY!

Ok, now that that is out of the way we can focus on what SA is because it is important that you know exactly what you are paying for. Citrix SA is annual license upgrade protection. The first year is included with your license purchase – after that, there’s an annual renewal cost. What does that mean? Well it means that you bought something that is not a set-it-and-forget-it item. Data centers grow and change all time and the tools used in that data center need to change as well. So as the Citrix products evolve (or change names) you as an owner of “upgrade protection” can take advantage of these upgrades, period.

(There is one exception: it is now possible to purchase a bundle of SA and Citrix telephone support for XenApp. We covered this in an earlier blog post.)

The good news is that Citrix SA doesn’t cost as much as traditional “Software Maintenance” from companies that bundle some kind of telephone support with their upgrade protection. The general rule of SA is that it costs about 11% – 13% per year of the cost of the license. In our experience, traditional Software Maintenance that includes support will typically run you 18% – 20% per year for 5 x 8 support, and 25%+ per year for 7 x 24 support.

However, if you have not renewed your SA and wish to upgrade you will need to pay a reinstatement fee or just buy new licenses. Which option is best for you will depend on how long it’s been since you renewed SA. If your SA has been expired for more than a year, it’s going to be pretty expensive to try to get it reinstated.

Citrix upgrades its products often! So what if I have my own Citrix expert on staff and don’t plan on upgrading for 5-6 years anyway? Well, as we all know, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. What about the rest of your data center? Do you not plan to upgrade that in the next 5-6 years either? In many cases old versions of Citrix products will not be compatible with new technology releases. E.g., Citrix just released XenApp 6, which is specifically designed for Windows Server 2008 R2. Earlier versions of XenApp are not compatible with 2008 R2.

Also, Citrix frequently releases “Feature Packs” for older product versions that add functionality (within the technological constraints of the older platform). If your SA is current, you can take advantage of the new features. If not, you…can’t.

Finally, no software company can afford to indefinitely support every product version that they’ve ever released. Everything has a lifecycle. For example, Presentation Server v4.0 hit the “End of Life” point at the end of 2009. That means there is no support available for the product other than the information you may be able to dig out of the Citrix on-line Knowledge Base. Furthermore, all the downloads have been removed, so you have no way to access any security patches, service packs, hotfixes, etc. This is obviously not a good situation for your production environment – so if you’re still running Presentation Server v4.0, you should be working toward upgrading your environment as soon as you possibly can.

Bottom Line: I recommend SA renewal to everyone who buys Citrix licenses. As the person who handles all the renewal notices for our customers, I have, time and time again, seen people try to save a dollar this year but end up spending more then necessary next year. Plus it is just a headache to realize that you need to upgrade – perhaps to solve a problem that (naturally) surfaced after hours or on a weekend – but can’t get the upgrade because your subscription has expired. So, when you get that email notice from me, just remember: I’m really trying to make your life easier by insuring that you’re upgrade rights are protected!

A while back we had a couple of posts talking about application virtualization and server virtualization as part of our “What is Virtualization” series. We continue with our series now with the exploration of storage virtualization.

Storing data has been and will always be an issue for most companies, particularly given the rate at which storage requirements are increasing. Data storage is much more difficult than, say, storage of your own personal physical stuff.

To help me understand a bit better how storage virtualization works I go back to my condo reference. Assume that I live in a condominium complex with a bunch of other people. Since the units are a bit small, the complex offers storage units for the tenants’ use…a place to hold that extra bookcase, the leaf to your dining table, or your velvet Elvis painting. Unfortunately, each tenant gets only one storage unit. This means that if your unit is full it does you no good to know that your neighbor’s unit has nothing in it, because you have no access to it.

Now I like to travel, and when traveling I tend to pick up some knickknacks and tchotchkes from wherever I end up. I get back to my condo and find that my storage unit is already so full there is a note on my door from the fire marshal.  So what do I do? I do what most folks do:  No, I don’t get rid of anything (are you kidding?) – instead I rent a storage unit from the self-storage guys down the street. Now I have stuff in 2 different places. After a few years I have to get a third unit – but the unit down the street is full so I have to rent yet another storage unit across town. Clearly I have a problem: Aside from the obvious problem of being a pack rat, I have 3 storage units in 3 different locations. What happens if I need to find something that I’ve stored?  Will I even know where to look? (Clue: Probably not, because if I was sufficiently organized to keep a record of what stuff is in which storage unit, I probably wouldn’t be the kind of person to accumulate that much stuff in the first place!)

How does this apply to your business data? Well, one of the biggest problems we run into when trying to organize data in the traditional way, where each server has its own local storage, is that Murphy’s Law dictates that free storage space never exists in the server that needs it.  If my Exchange Server is running out of disk space, it does me no good to have 200 Gb free in my file server – just as it does me no good to know that your condo storage space is empty if mine is full.  In fact, it’s even worse. If my condo storage space is full, and I really trust you, I might make a deal with you to use some of your condo storage space – but there’s just no way to make that free space in your file server available to your Exchange Server.

“Storage virtualization” refers to the process of taking a bunch of physical disks and turning them into a central “storage pool,” portions of which can then be allocated back to your individual servers in such a way that they believe that the storage is local to them when, in fact, it is not. This separation of the drives from the individual servers is the key to storage virtualization and its benefits.

Since the drives are now managed as one large pool it is possible to perform tasks that previously were not possible, such as the migration of data between drives without down time, or being able to allocate storage on demand to the servers that need it. Storage virtualization allows you to perform these helpful tasks from a single management point.  We generally refer to this kind of storage virtualization system as a “Storage Area Network,” or “SAN.”

“Thin-provisioning” makes it even better.  Instead of trying to guess in advance how much storage to allocate to each server, and then potentially having to adjust things later, I can tell each server that it has way more storage than is actually available.  For example, I might tell ten different servers that they each had access to a terabyte of storage when, in fact, I only had a total of two or three terabytes of physical space in my storage pool.  I then let my SAN dynamically allocate the physical storage to the servers that need it – but only allocate as much physical storage as necessary to store the actual data.  The SAN will then alert me when I get close to running out of physical space so I can increase the size of my storage pool.

If my condo implemented storage virtualization, I imagine it would work like this. I would have one key and one drop off spot for all my storage items. Once I drop off my velvet Elvis I wouldn’t have to worry about where it would be stored and how much space it would take up. The storage management elves would find a place for it, and fetch it for me again when I requested it.  Since I have so much stuff and my neighbor hardly has any we may end up sharing a storage closet, but neither of us knows, or cares.  Heck, our stuff may be scattered across every storage closet in the complex.

After a bit of traveling, I may have enough stuff to fill up 2 storage closets all by myself. But I can still bring it to the general drop off location and not need to worry about which closet it goes in…because to me it looks like there is only one big closet. If management decides it would be easier to manage my stuff if it was all together in one room, they may elect to put all my stuff in a new, larger storage unit. All this would happen without me knowing or caring where my stuff is physically located.

Storage virtualization is not the newest technology out there – in fact, people were deploying SANs for all of the reasons listed above long before server virtualization became a big deal.  But storage virtualization enables many of the coolest server virtualization features, such as live motion – the ability to migrate a running VM from one virtualization host to another.  And we haven’t even begun to talk about the additional tools you may have for data protection, backup, and disaster recovery, such as the ability to leverage SAN replication to automatically send a copy of your critical data off-site. At the end of the day storage virtualization is great tool to save time, improve hardware utilization, increase agility, and most importantly save you money.

Your data needs to be organized and secure…just like my personal stuff. In fact, protecting your data is arguably more important, because the condo burns down I can probably get an insurance check for my physical stuff. But simply monetary damages may not be sufficient if you lose your data. (Can you even put a price tag on your data? Hint: How much is your business worth? Hint #2: What’s it worth to stay out of jail for violating laws on record retention?) Storage virtualization gives you another big toolbox full of tools to help you organize and secure it.

However it is still not an excuse to not throw a few things out every now and then.

Over the last few years we have seen a decline in trade show attendance. There are several reasons for this:  For one thing, trade shows always seem to suffer in economic downturns, because most organizations are trying to do more with fewer people, which just makes it more difficult to get away from the office to attend.  Plus, much of the product information that we used to go to trade shows to get is now available at your finger tips on the internet anytime you want or need it.  So it makes sense that the trade show world is a bit slower these days. However, there are still many reasons to attend trade shows and ways to make it worth your time to be there.

Education
Many shows have breakout sessions and tech features these days. Even though many breakout sessions focus on products that a particular vendor is pushing, you will often get some good insight and ideas for how their product might be utilized that can be useful to you in ways the speaker never intended. Also, trade show promoters often hire experts in a particular field to speak on a topic rather than a product.  Look online (all trade shows have Web sites these days, right?) and see if there is a list of the sessions before you go, so you can choose the ones you think would be most beneficial.

Networking
You will never meet more people interested in your company and what it does than you will at a trade show.  Use that to your advantage. You might not need a particular product or service now (or ever), but people change job titles, change companies, or just change how they do business. It’s always good to have resources for whatever might happen.

Who knows?  Maybe the person working the vendor’s booth might need your services – don’t be afraid to ask. They might need a personal loan for their kids’ education, and if you’re in banking they could be a potential customer. I’m not suggesting that you try to hard-sell the representatives who are working their booths (although there might be some satisfaction in turning the tables on some of the more annoying sales representatives that you occasionally run into), but you’d be surprised at the opportunities that get uncovered simply by having a business conversation about what you do and what they do.

Yet a third networking opportunity presents itself:  other attendees.  Other people are probably looking for the same things you are, and have many of the same issues that brought you to the trade show. Meet and talk with other attendees  –  they many know of a solution or have recommendations that could help you greatly. Make it a point to talk to as many people as possible while you’re there.

Serendipity
Even if you can read about and learn about anything and everything on the mighty interwebs, you still have to have some idea what you’re looking for in order to find it. Sure, there are trade magazines and blogs (including this one) and any number of places that write about the latest and greatest stuff, but they still have limited reach, and most of them write for the masses.  A trade show is your chance to find that “shiny new thing” you didn’t even know you should be looking for:  a new technology, design, option, or whatever that could potentially help you and your business in a way you hadn’t even thought about.  Making a buying decision is a whole lot easier when you know all of your possible options.

Trade Show Stuff
Not really that important, but hey,  you’ve got to love that trade show swag.  Note pads, pens, and highlighters for a year. T-shirts for your weekend yard work or for drying your car off when you’re done washing it.  Stocking stuffers for the holidays.   Flying toys for your kids.  Quick birthday presents for co-workers.  And nothing says “Happy Anniversary” like a logo-branded, 128 Mb, USB thumb drive.  So stock up.  And follow your nose to the booth that’s giving away the fresh-popped popcorn (there’s always at least one)…early in the day while it’s still fresh!

As all IT professionals are aware, most hardware and software companies offer some type of support/maintenance renewal, WatchGuard Technologies is no different.

They offer a variety of subscription services with their WatchGuard XTM or Firebox X appliances. These services are either sold separately or as a bundle of services for one, two, or three year terms. Services available include:

• SpamBlocker – with virus outbreak detection
• WebBlocker – with HTTP and HTTPS inspection
• Gateway AntiVirus – for signature-based protection from known threats
• Intrusion Prevention Service – with comprehensive attack and spyware protection
• LiveSecurity® Service – hardware replacement warranty, free software updates, 24/7 telephone support

For more information about what each service is please contact us here at info@mooselogic.com.

The main objective of this post is not about the services themselves but rather about the renewal process. Each WatchGuard system we sell comes bundled with LiveSecurity Service for the first year. Since customers who own multiple WatchGuard systems have often bought them at different times, and since it is possible to renew LiveSecurity for multiple years, it is often the case that a customer can have different WatchGuard units whose coverage expires at different times of the year. Some companies prefer to keep these renewals separate to spread out their renewal costs over the year while others prefer to have a single renewal date for all of their WatchGuard units.

When renewing a WatchGuard subscription, Moose Logic will place an order with WatchGuard and typically within 48 hours an email is sent to us as well as to the customer contact who was in charge of the renewal. That email will contain a license key for each renewal. The customer is responsible for logging in to their WatchGuard account and entering those license keys. This will result in the display of a feature key. At this point the customer needs to copy and paste that feature key into the actual WatchGuard unit, only then is the renewal complete – and the services the company has paid for will become available.

(Note that if you don’t have the time or skills to perform these tasks when you renew, Moose Logic will be happy to do it for you. Yes, we will bill you for our time – although if you are a MooseGuard^TM Gold or Platinum customer, that work effort would be covered by your plan.)

Now there is a twist to this. If we change the date of the renewal (e.g., in order to synchronize renewal dates for multiple units) that change is implemented directly by WatchGuard, and NO LICENSE KEY WILL BE SENT TO YOU. Since no new license key is made available to the end user, no email is sent to remind you that you need to log into the WatchGuard online portal and retrieve the feature key to be copied and pasted on the physical unit.

So the important lessons of the day are:

1. If you chose to synchronize your WatchGuard renewal dates it will take a little longer to get the renewal done (usually 4-5 business days) since someone at WatchGuard has to manually update your renewal dates, and
2. It is important to mark your calendar so that you log in to your account after 4-5 days and see if the feature key is available.

If we’re handling the process for you (either because you’re a MooseGuard customer or because you’ve asked us to) it’s not an issue, because we know what the process is. But if you’re handling the renewal yourself…don’t just sit back and think that you’re done just because you’ve placed the renewal order. If the new feature key doesn’t get entered in your unit, the features you’re subscribing to are going to stop working – and that would be what we call, in technical terms, a “bad thing.”

I recently was reading the Puget Sound Business Journal and came across an article titled Customers must remember options when choosing a computer provider. Since Moose Logic is an IT services provider, I wanted to see what suggestions were being offered.

Now to clarify, I did find the article to have good advice (if you’re too busy to read the whole thing, the “quick tips” box they provide will give you the main bullet points), so what I’m about to say is in no way intended to be critical of PSBJ. Moreover, I feel that a series on how to choose a computer, networking, and/or IT services provider would be helpful to many businesses out there. But the article did get me thinking about how easy it is in this information-at-my-fingertips age for someone to suddenly surface and represent him/herself as a “guru” of some area of knowledge. And sometimes the less the average business person knows about the subject, the easier it is for said guru to masquerade as an expert whether s/he really is or not.

Henry Ford famously commented that he didn’t need to know all the answers, he just needed to know who to ask. As business people, we frequently need to hire or contract with someone who can answer our questions. The problem is that some things are so complex that we don’t even know what we need to ask! So we try to educate ourselves on the topic as best we can, if only to help make a decision on what – and who – to ask. Enter the self-proclaimed internet guru, offering their free advice hoping that you will click on their Web page ads.

So what’s my point? Well, I have a couple:

First, anybody can build a Web site for a modest investment and begin to dispense advice (even us ). But if there’s no way to verify the background of this guru, you have no way to know if the advice they are dispensing is worthwhile or effective. I could put up a site tonight and start handing out golf tips, but that would not change the fact that I suck at golf. In fact my tips would probably hurt your game more than help. Second – and this is particularly true in IT – there’s not necessarily only one right way to do anything. Just because something has worked for one person in one market in one geographical location does not mean that it will work for your business, your location, and the current market conditions.

OK, is there great free advice to be found out there in Internet-land? Yes, of course there is! (After all, you’re reading some here.) Just be careful whose advice you follow. Sure, my Web site on golfing tips may eventually fail after enough people try my suggestions and realize that I don’t know what I’m talking about…but in the meantime I may ruin a lot of people’s golf games. Small businesses cannot afford to make a wrong decision on an IT provider. Even though they have the same basic needs as a large business – a reliable IT infrastructure that supports whatever the business does to make money and protects its vital data – the business landscape is unforgiving and intolerant of even the slightest error by a small business owner. IT mistakes that might barely cause a budgetary blip for a large business can literally kill a small one. So do you really want to base the future of your business on an unproven guru of the internet age?

Bottom line: Take advice from those that post a resume, and ask for recommendations when looking to hire any new service provider.

Don’t just take my word for it – I’m just an Internet guru. (And if you don’t believe it, just ask me.)

To continue the discussion of “What is Virtualization?” that I started back on December 4, I bring you the next installment – Application Virtualization.

Application Virtualization is the isolation and separation of an application from its underlying Operating System (OS) as well as from other applications. The application is fooled into believing that it is working as normal, interacting with the OS and using those resources as if the application had been installed directly on the OS as normal.

Additionally, the application can be installed once within the datacenter and preserved as a “golden image” to be delivered out to the end users. This gives you one instance to manage, one instance to patch, one instance to maintain – all housed in one location. This will help cut IT application maintenance costs as well as help control licensing costs as it will be easier to track application utilization.

Since each virtualized application is isolated from other applications it becomes possible to deploy, on the same piece of hardware, applications that typically didn’t play nicely together in the past. This cuts down on the time needed to test application compatibility since each application resides inside its own “bubble” (much like teenagers).

Traditionally, both desktop admins and admins who were in charge of Terminal Servers (and XenApp servers) spent hours and hours on application compatibility testing. When a new application was added to the official desktop or server image, or an existing application was upgraded, regression testing was necessary to insure that the new or upgraded application didn’t break some other application by, for example, overwriting a shared DLL file. By providing a method for virtualizing Registry entries and calls to particular folder locations, application isolation overcomes most of these headaches.

The real trick with application virtualization is the delivery method, since the delivery methods of these virtual applications is what separates the different vendor solutions in this field. The big three application virtualization solutions are Citrix XenApp, VMware ThinApp, and Microsoft Application Virtualization (a.k.a. “App-V”). These three vendors use either one method or a combination of delivery methods to get the applications to the end users.

Application Streaming: This refers to streaming the application over the network to the client PC on demand. The “secret sauce” here is in figuring out how to stream down just enough of the code to launch the application and allow the user to begin interacting with it. The rest of the code can be streamed down when the user attempts to use a feature that requires it, or it can be simply streamed down in the background until all of the application code is cached locally. An added benefit of streaming all of the code down is that it allows the application to continue to be used when the PC is not connected to the network. (E.g., you can unplug your laptop and take it on the road.)

The application streaming technology you use will determine the control and security of the application once it has been streamed to the end user device. For example, Citrix allows you to administratively set a “time to live” limit on how long apps will run in a disconnected state. If the PC isn’t reconnected to the network within that time limit, the app simply stops working – giving you some level of protection if a PC is lost or stolen. For another example, ThinApp allows you to make an application completely portable – you could carry the Office Suite with you on a USB stick, plug it into any PC, use it, and leave no trace behind when you unplugged the USB stick. (Note: Doing this with the Office Suite could result in a violation of the Office EULA!)

Another “secret sauce” ingredient is the ability to allow limited communication between applications, even though they’re running in their own isolation environments (the “bubble” referred to earlier). For example, your accounting application may need to call Excel to render the output of a particular report. Early versions of application isolation required these applications to be “packaged” together, i.e., installed into the same isolation environment – otherwise, the accounting app wouldn’t know that Excel was available, and you’d get an application error. The latest implementations allow enough inter-isolation communication to take place to avoid problems like this while still avoiding application compatibility conflicts.

Application Hosting: This method can take a couple of different forms. The first is to virtualize the presentation of a typical Windows application by installing the application on a Terminal Server (in most cases, a Terminal Server with Citrix XenApp installed on it), and connecting to that Terminal Server using some kind of remote communications protocol (e.g., Microsoft’s RDP, Citrix’s ICA, etc.). We’ve been doing this for years, and thousands of customers and millions of users access applications this way every day.

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with the advantages of this deployment model: centralized deployment and management, tighter security, granular control over what can be saved and/or printed at the client location, etc.

Application Streaming can work with this kind of Application Hosting by allowing you to stream applications to your Terminal Servers rather than having to explicitly install them or build them into your official server image. Citrix XenApp customers have the rights to use the Citrix streaming technology to do this, and Microsoft recently announced that the new Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services CAL (formerly called a Terminal Services CAL) will include the rights to use App-V to stream applications to Terminal Servers.

Web-based applications can also be legitimately called “hosted applications” – whether they’re hosted in your own corporate data center, or by some kind of application service provider (e.g., Salesforce.com). In this scenario, all that’s required on the client PC is a browser – at least in theory.

In fact, the browser then becomes an application that must be managed! For example, you may find that you require a specific version of Java to access a particular hosted Web application – and if the user has local admin rights to the PC, the possibility exists that s/he will inadvertently install something that breaks its compatibility with your critical Web application. Some Microsoft applications require the use of Internet Explorer (e.g., Microsoft CRM is not compatible with Firefox). Some applications may even require a specific browser version. (When IE7 was first released, it caused compatibility issues for users of Microsoft CRM v3.0.)

Also, as a general rule, a Web application will require a more powerful client PC as well as more bandwidth between the client and the Web server to yield a good user experience, compared to an RDP or ICA client device connecting to a Terminal Server.

There is, of course, the option of installing an application directly on a device either by physically visiting the machine with installation media in hand or by using some kind of central management system to push the bits onto the client’s hard drive. These options, however, do not fall under the definition of application virtualization that we’re using here.

The important thing to take away from application virtualization is that no matter how you approach it, it will save you money:

• Hardware – being able to host multiple applications on a single piece of hardware without worrying about application incompatibility. This can virtually eliminate the “silos” of servers with different configurations in large XenApp environments that used to be necessary to isolate those problem apps that wouldn’t play nicely with any others.
• Licensing costs – with all your applications being housed in the data center you will have a better understanding of how many instances of each application you are using and will be able to better track your licensing needs
• Maintenance – being able to update or patch a single instance of the application rather than needing to physically update and patch each machine.
• Management – less hardware to look after, less time spent with helping end users with application issues, less time spent in application regression testing

Hope this clears up that “what is application virtualization” question. However if you have more questions feel free to use the comments or contact me directly.

Virtualization can mean different things depending on who you ask so we are going to take a broad look at what virtualization is, the different forms it comes in, and why it is so popular.

This is going to be pretty basic stuff so if you are looking for more advanced material I promise we will have advanced stuff in future posts.

Virtualization has been getting a lot of buzz the last few years as it moved from being “bleeding edge” technology to becoming an industry standard. You may have even heard that there are lots of benefits to virtualizing your datacenter…but you may not be sure whether it’s for you, how it works, or even what it means.

There are several kinds of virtualization, including server virtualization, storage virtualization, application virtualization, network virtualization, and desktop virtualization. But when most folks talk about virtualization, they’re referring to server virtualization, so that’s what we will cover today.

So, what is server virtualization?  Simply put server virtualization is the technology that is designed to allow multiple (virtual) servers to reside on a single piece of (physical) hardware and share the resources of the physical server – while still maintaining separate operating environments, so that a problem that crops up in one virtual server won’t affect the operation of others that may be running on the same physical “host.” To help explain what this means I’m going to use the house and condo analogy.

Let’s say you’re a land developer and you build residential property. You cut your land into smaller plots and build one house per plot. As part of the land development, you need to bring in all the utilities from the main street to each and every plot. All of this development costs money.  To make matter worse you know that your city’s population is growing, you’re running out of land to build on, and you also need to control the spiraling costs of building materials. How do you cut cost and provide more homes for a growing population on a limited amount of land?

Figure 1 - Typical cul-de-sac USA

Perhaps instead of building single-family homes and having one resident per plot you start building condominiums that hold several residents each. Now the utilities that are brought in to the condo complex are shared by all the residents and yet no one ever sees the other residents’ bills. You’re making more efficient use of the land you have and not wasting time and money bringing in utilities to each individual house. Plus one yard is easier to take care of than ten yards.

Figure 2 - 1 & 2bd Condos Available Now!!

So how does this relate to server virtualization?

Each plot of land is a physical server, the structure you build on that plot is a server “workload” (i.e., Exchange, SQL, file server, print server, etc.), and the city is your data center. The utilities are things like power, cooling, and network connectivity. When there is only one workload per physical server, a lot of space and resources get wasted. It’s common to see only 10-15% (if that) processor utilization on physical servers which run only one operating system and one application.

With server virtualization we can now create several “virtual” servers on one physical piece of hardware – think of the hardware as little “server condos” if you like. Just as you can have one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom units in a single building, you can allocate differing amounts of processing and memory resources to the virtual servers depending on the requirements of each individual workload. Each virtual server can now share the physical resources of the host machine with the other virtual servers and never know that they are sharing. In fact, each virtual server “thinks” it’s running on its own dedicated hardware platform. By doing this you can now utilize 80-90% of the processing power of the hardware you own, and cut down on the total amount of power, cooling, and floor space you need in your data center.

For example (just pulling numbers out of the air), let’s say that you’ve been paying an average of $5K each for servers that would handle a single workload. If you need four of them, that’s $20K in hardware cost. But if you can buy one server for $8 – 10K to virtualize these 4 machines, that’s a significant reduction in hardware cost. And with fewer machines to plug in and keep cool, your savings can be up to 40% on power consumption alone. (Did you know that we’ve now reached the point where, over the service life of a typical new server, it’s going to cost you more to keep it cool than it cost you to buy it?)

Since the virtual servers are all located on one physical box you now have fewer pieces of hardware to maintain – allowing the IT staff to use their time more efficiently. You’ll save space in your data center. You’ll also cut down on the amount of waste (some of it hazardous) that must be recycled or disposed of when your hardware finally reaches its end-of-life.

You’ve also cut down time needed to bring a new server on line. In the past you would have had to acquire the hardware, assemble it, rack it, connect it to the network, install and patch the OS, install and configure the application, test it all, and finally put it into service. Now that the servers are virtual they can be created, configured, and put into production in a few hours as opposed to the weeks it used to take. In some cases, by using templates for commonly-needed workloads, it can take only minutes. This makes for a much more flexible and scalable environment.

So server virtualization can:

• Cut hardware costs
• Cut energy costs (for both power and cooling)
• Cut system maintenance time and costs
• Create a very scalable and flexible data center
• Save space
• Create a more environmentally friendly data center (a.k.a. “green computing”)

These are the main reasons that server virtualization has become an industry standard. According to folks like Gartner, we’ve now reached the point where the majority of new servers placed into service are being virtualized, and the majority of enterprises have made it a standard practice to virtualize all new servers unless there is a compelling reason why a server can’t or shouldn’t be virtualized. Virtualization also makes it easier to implement things like high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity, but that’s a subject for a future post.

I have gone through an interesting business exchange recently. It left me confused and irritated – not to mention I have now wasted way too much time on getting no results. As marketing manager here at Moose Logic I am always trying to find ways to best leverage money vs. time when it comes to marketing activities. Things have been picking up a bit lately and at the time of this story I have 4 confirmed live events happening in the next 3 months. I am realizing that I no longer have time to properly advertise one of the aforementioned events, but I do have budget for it.

To my luck Moose Logic has recently been contacted by a company that is offering the exact services I need. Since I have never contracted out for these services I was in no position to just “sign up” without doing my due diligence. I looked around a bit on the internet to discover certain trends and tips when hiring for these types of marketing services. Feeling better prepared to handle the outsourcing of this task I now went looking for pricing. The marketing company that had contacted Moose Logic (let’s call them Company X) got the benefit of my first call because of their proactive efforts in contacting us.

I asked another co-worker to reach out to this company and find out what their pricing is. The initial contact was simple – they asked what services we were looking for, when we needed the services, etc., all of which we happily answered.  At the end of the conversation my co-worker asked for a quote for their services. A few hours later she received an email from what I assume is the supervisor of the person who answered the phone.

Form Letter from Marketing Company X

This is clearly a form letter that is updated with our information, but totally disregards the phone conversation we just had with them, and more importantly does not give us any pricing for the services just requested.

So we reached out to Company X again to say thanks for the information but we are really trying to getting a quote for services. Shortly afterward we got another email – with a PDF attachment. “Alright, a quote!” I think to myself as I open the attachment.

Boiler Plate PDF from Marketing Company X

This is just page 1 of 3 of the PDF we received from Company X. Needless to say, there was no price attached anywhere – not in the email, not in the PDF.  Just more “boilerplate” saying what a great company they are, how awesome their services are, etc.

So, this got me thinking about how we do business here at Moose Logic. How many road blocks to business do we put up without even being aware of it? Do we try too hard to tell everyone why do business with us, rather than just doing business? If there are hurdles in our business, how do we find them and address them?

What about your business? Do you make it easy for your customers to do business with you, or are you losing business without even realizing it? Who do you ask to find out?

Well, I offer up Moose Logic and this blog post as a forum for anyone who wishes to tell us one way or the other on our business processes and our responsiveness to customer needs, or anyone who just wants to relate a similar story. We may all learn something new.