Hypervisor Convergence: What is it and can it save you money?

Data centers of all sizes are looking for ways to increase the return on investment on their virtualized (desktop and server) infrastructures. Converged infrastructures propose to increase ROI by reducing the number of layers, essentially combining compute, storage and networking into a single tier. But are these architectures right for you? In this webinar, join experts from Storage Switzerland and Scale Computing to find out.

Data centers are a key component of modern companies. Senior management in these enterprises assume that future IT related changes demanded by the business can be accommodated within their data center infrastructures.

Alas, this demand for operational flexibility introduces risks (and costs) into the data center itself and hence to the business as a whole. Unfortunately, most companies don't systematically assess such risks inside their data centers, nor can best practices and rules of thumb adequately address them.

This presentation is about computer modeling of the data center to analyze and quantify the risks of operational flexibility within data centers, with the goal of moving IT operations from being a cost center to becoming a cost-reducing profit center. The approach will be illustrated with a two year case study from a global financial institution.

Flash storage is on top of every IT professional's mind; however, how much flash do you really need? Are you in need of an all-flash or a hybrid solution? Which workloads and applications see most return when used on flash?

In this interview, George Crump, lead analyst with Storage Switzerland, and Len Rosenthal of Load DynamiX engage in a lively discussion to to uncover strategies and the latest technologies available that can help you make the right vendor selections, decide how much flash storage you need, evaluate and assure performance and optimize the cost.

DCIM, standing for DataCenter Infrastructure Management, is an overused and very generic term. It has, however, proven hard to replace it in referring to all aspects of the data center that have to be managed.

We'll attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff by identifying the different areas of responsibilities, taking into account that those are just lines in the sand and constantly shifting.

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions have been around for several years now, but the adoption rate has been slow. This presentation will review the challenges with the “Integration” of DCIM solutions and why there is no “I” in DCIM.

Participants will learn:
- The integration parts and challenges associated with DCIM solutions
- An overview of the control strategies used in today's data centers and the challenges with their integration into DCIM
- Discuss end-user expectations and cost expectations related to DCIM
- Discuss Integrators role in the program management of DCIM

Business requirements are changing continuously which drives change in the data center. The data center is meant to be a flexible, blank slate upon which IT services are quickly built, dismantled and reconfigured continuously to enable business agility. But how agile is your data center? Can you quantify the cost and risk of changing the data center roadmap to accommodate business needs? Are you able to factor into business decisions the risks from change?

In this presentation learn about a new data center performance/risk score called “ACE” (Availability, Capacity and Efficiency) that:

- Quantifies the risk and cost of change in the data center
- Consolidates tracking of three interrelated performance metrics that together capture the very purpose of the data center
- Also learn how ACE calculations are made practical by computer modeling of the physical data center

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) often tends to focus solely on power management. Today's DCIM has advanced to include active management of the entire lifecycle of the data center’s physical infrastructure. Why? Because the costs involved over an asset’s lifetime go well beyond its purchase price and power consumption, into its maintenance, warranty, service and lease costs. In this session, learn how some of the world's largest data centers use today's DCIM to manage the entire lifecycle of their assets, improving cost, internal work processes, compliance, and corporate responsibility.

Storage performance can have a real impact on your IT costs and user experience. This webinar series will help you understand how to manage and maximize storage performance for your vSphere environment. vExpert and author Eric Siebert will cover practical, technical tips and best practices to help you meet the challenges of storage performance in today's virtualized datacenter.

In this session you'll learn:
- how storage performance affects the overall performance of your vSphere environment, and how latency is the silent killer of storage performance.
- about I/O acceleration technologies that help improve the performance of your storage

This is the third installment of the Top 7 Storage Performance Gotchas series - missed the first two webinars? Watch them on-demand now:
Part 1 - Why architecture matters :https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/8609/112139
Part 2 - Latency the silent killer: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/8609/112141

Join us for this informative 60 minute roundtable as we discuss how organizations should measure/compare flash solutions. Is all-flash suitable for all workloads or is a hybrid approach enough? Is a scale-out flash approach superior? Hear from the following panelists:
EMC: Josh Goldstein, VP Marketing & Product Management - XtremIO
HP: Ivan Iannaccone, Product Manager - HP 3PAR
Kaminario: Ritu Jyoti, Chief Product Officer
Pure Storage: Vaughn Stewart, Chief Evangelist

Storage performance can have a real impact on your IT costs and user experience. This webinar series will help you understand how to manage and maximize storage performance for your vSphere environment. vExpert and author Eric Siebert will cover practical, technical tips and best practices to help you meet the challenges of storage performance in today's virtualized datacenter.

In this session you'll learn:
- how latency is the silent killer of storage performance
- all the factors that influence overall storage performance, including understanding VM workloads and how to measure them

Watch the last installment of the Top 7 Storage Performance Gotchas: https://www.brighttalk.com/r/tVd
Missed the first webinar? Watch it on-demand now: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/8609/112139

Storage performance can have a real impact on your IT costs and user experience. This webinar series will help you understand how to manage and maximize storage performance for your vSphere environment. vExpert and author Eric Siebert will cover practical, technical tips and best practices to help you meet the challenges of storage performance in today's virtualized datacenter.

This is the first installment of the "Top 7 Storage Performance Gotchas" series. Join us next time in:
Part 2 of the series - Latency the silent killer: https://www.brighttalk.com/r/FVd
Part 3 of the series - IO acceleration: https://www.brighttalk.com/r/VVd

All Data Centers, whether great or small, have one thing in common; they have a heat transfer (cooling) problem. Not even ten years ago, cooling problems were solved with the purchase and installation of another Computer Room Air Condition (CRAC). Today’s cooling methodologies are truly amazing, but can be very intrusive and expensive to implement. It seems that Data Center Managers ‘stuck’ with a ‘legacy’ data center have been given two options; either adopt the latest and greatest cooling methodologies or move your Information Technology (IT) to the cloud. In many cases today, the question may be “How do we keep the wheels on the donkey cart while we figure out how and when we go to the cloud?”

Join Cask to understand issues such as:
- Why your cooling solution may not be as pathetic as you think.
- How Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can help you understand how heat transfer works (or doesn’t work) in your data center.
- What you can do to inexpensively update your cooling methodology.

Study of data centers reveals the average computer room has cooling capacity that is nearly four times the IT heat load. When running cooling capacity is excessively over-implemented, then potentially large operating cost reductions are possible by turning off cooling units and/or reducing fan speeds for units with variable frequency drives (VFD). Using data from 45 sites reviewed by Upsite Technologies, this presentation will show how you can calculate, benchmark, interpret, and benefit from a simple and practical metric called the Cooling Capacity Factor (CCF). Calculating the CCF is the quickest and easiest way to determine cooling infrastructure utilization and potential gains to be realized by AFM improvements.

The impact of flash memory on data center design will continue to be felt for many years as this disruptive technology permeates the IT infrastructure. What are the significant trends for CIOs and IT management surrounding flash technology? Join this webinar from Fusion-io to learn about the various ways to deploy flash and the significance of the different architectural approaches, hybrid vs. all-flash storage models, the expanding definition of hybrid storage, and criteria for choosing the right flash implementation for your data center.

High availability has traditionally required virtualization and a SAN. Then came virtual storage appliances (VSAs) which were managed like a physical SAN but ran as a virtual machine. Now comes hypervisor convergence, the latest trend that eliminates the entire concept of a SAN, both physical or virtual. Is this hype? Or can this latest technology save you time and money? Let Scale Computing show you how HC3 can radically change your environment for the better.

HC3 represents the cutting edge of infrastructure innovation: A highly available platform with the scalability of the cloud and the security of your own servers, coupled with a radical reduction in both upfront costs and TCO. No more VMware. No more SAN. No more headaches.

In this 45-minute webinar, Patrick Flynn will make the case that the data center is the best and only place we can hope to meet the massive sustainability challenges confronting today’s enterprises and governments. Patrick will describe how data analysis holds the key to energy efficiency, business continuity and a new, better paradigm in performance measurement that will transform infrastructure and IT alike.

Patrick Flynn holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. His work includes identifying, prioritizing and implementing a wide array of projects within IO’s operations and product platform. He is a Professional Engineer (HVAC) and LEED Accredited Professional.

Key performance indicators (KPI) enable organizations to manage their factories, distribution centers, supply chain and other aspects of your business operations in a cost effective manner. This means having metrics that matter covering not only utilization of assets, material consumption and production output. In addition, this means having insight into defects, re-work, lost time due to delays or lost opportunity. IT Data Centers are Information Factories that also need to be monitored for different purposes as well as from various facets and context to have timely insight for effective decision-making. Monitoring ranges from physical facilities or the habitats for technology to the technology and tools that live there (servers, storage, networking, hardware, software) to deliver information services. This webinar looks at how to avoid flying blind gaining situational awareness and timely data center insight monitoring a key enabler for data center infrastructure management (DCIM). Topics that we will discuss include metrics that matter, service level objectives (SLOs), DCIM, PMDB, performance, availability (reliability, accessibility, and durability), capacity, energy and economics (PACEE), cloud, virtualization, sustainability among others.

Key themes:
•Everything is not the same in the data center or information factory
•Metrics that matter from physical to virtual, cloud and where to get them
•Facilities, energy and power, server, storage, networking and software
•Do you know what your costs to deliver a given level of service are?
•Sustainability for productivity and economics without the Green-washing

Data Center Efficiency is part of the new reality for the Mission Critical world. This has been driven by the corporate mantra to reduce operating costs in an era driven by financial constraint and increased focus on cost-effectiveness and efficiency or sometimes the added social pressure to be more sustainable.

The Green Grid created the Power Usage Effectiveness metric “PUE” in 2008 and it is now a globally accepted basic reference for facility infrastructure energy efficiency. However, while PUE was never meant to compare different sites, nonetheless is has been used that way by many people. There are endless press releases about new super-efficient hyperscale data centers having PUE claims of under 1.2, while in contrast many existing data centers that were built only 5-10 years ago may still operate at a PUE of 2.0 or higher.

This presentation will explore the latest technologies and methodologies (and their limitations) that can be considered for retrofit opportunities and practical tips for improving a traditional data center’s energy efficiency, some of which new data centers utilize to achieve extremely low PUE numbers.

Why even condition data centers? What really happens inside IT equipment? Do server fans really account for 20 percent of IT power consumption? This talk presents in-depth information from ASHRAE, IT system vendors, and industry case studies to detail what are the failure mechanisms, how big is the risk and opportunity in using economizers, and what really happens inside the IT equipment when inlet temperatures increase. As a bonus, the talk goes over the updated ASHRAE 2012 IT Equipment Power Trends, providing a unique view into the future power trends roadmapped by the major IT equipment vendors.