Like Westcon Group, Carousel Industries is Bullish on Virtualization – and Teamwork

As a premier global distributor, it’s our responsibility to work closely with our partners to ensure the greatest success possible for their customers.  The
recent efforts of Westcon and Carousel Industries to virtualize our own data
centers has enabled our companies to give customers the perspective they need
to fully realize the benefits of with virtualization and cloud computing.
To elaborate more on this great success story — Kevin Gulley, Editor of Carousel Connect – discusses these efforts in further detail.

Like Westcon Group, Carousel Industries is Bullish on
Virtualization – and Teamwork

At Carousel Industries, we understand the value of teamwork. That’s why we partner with the best and brightest IT vendors in the industry, including Westcon Group. So when they asked us to pull together a guest blog post for the Westcon blog, we were thrilled.  Westcon Group shares our passion for using technology to drive business value, whether it’s through unified communications, data center solutions, infrastructure or security.

And like Westcon, Carousel also “eats its own dog food” when it comes to technology by finding ways to use it effectively on our own internal networks. One recent success story we share is virtualization technology.

To keep up with our rapidly growing requirements for data center resources, in early 2010 Carousel set out to execute on a server virtualization strategy in our Exeter, R.I. headquarters. The idea was to provide greater application functionality and flexibility, especially for mobile users, while giving us some breathing room for expansion and lowering power and cooling costs.

The results have exceeded expectations.  We replaced 100 physical servers with just five machines for peak periods and three for nighttime hours. All told, we’ve virtualized more than two-thirds of our enterprise server infrastructure thus far. As a result, we’re saving lots of money on power, cooling, IT support and operational costs.

Westcon Group has gone even further, as it’s one of the few companies that has virtualized 100% of its server infrastructure. And it is likewise getting some big benefits, as outlined in this story from InformationWeek, which quotes Bill Hurley, CTO and Executive VP of Westcon Group:

The new virtualized environment requires fewer system administrators to manage, saving on managed services expenses, lowered the cost of data center consolidation, and lowered electricity consumption in the new digs. Hurley said getting to 100% virtualized has saved Westcon $1.1 million over a two-year period. He now runs 350 virtual servers on the 22 UCS blades, with some blades hosting only 3-4 virtual machines and some hosting 25-30.

Virtualization is about more than cost savings, as Bill highlighted during a recent CIO Tech Talk he did with us. The technology lays the foundation for lots of other applications that help Carousel and Westcon Group drive more business value, including unified communications, mobility solutions, security and, in particular, cloud computing.

We learned quite a bit during the course of our virtualization project – so much so that we wrote a white paper called “Best Practices in Data Center Virtualization” to share our experiences. One of those best practices is to make good use of expert resources and technology partners.

If you need help with your virtualization project, you’d do well to leverage the expertise and resources of a partner like Westcon Group. For years, Carousel has benefited from the experienced team at Westcon; we encourage you to do the same.

GPN, GPS and Distributor-as-an-agent

One of the great things about being in distribution is  the ability to deliver products and services that can simultaneously generate excitement and create value for both our customers and our vendors.

Westcon prides itself on its global capabilities.  We truly believe that our ability to deliver on the needs of our local customers and simultaneously meet the requirements of our customer’s global deployments really gets to the heart of what Westcon and Comstor is all about.  We have been delivering this capability for a number of years through our Global Procurement Service (GPS) which eliminates much of the complexity normally associated with global logistics.  These complexities are usually in the areas of global trade, customs and duties, tax recoverability, audit, compliance, global staging and configuration, and the ability to manage complex global projects from a single “global desk”. Comstor’s GPS handles this for the reseller.  This gives our customers a single point of contact, consistent global discounts and pricing, a single global contract with consistent credits and terms, local relationships, in-country fulfillment, and local invoicing in 60+ countries.

What gets really exciting is when you can bond together that capability with creative offerings from world-class vendors and technologies that focus on solving end user global business requirements while empowering local
resellers to leverage our global footprint.

One of the poster-children for global technologies is video conferencing.  Not just to drive down the costs of travel (which is a great) but more importantly, to help accelerate the business growth and effectiveness of end users as they globalize their business processes.  Telepresence technologies produce greater business value not just for those firms that are already global but also as a tool to accelerate the maturation of firms who wish to move from “national” to “global”.
As an organization specifically built and operated to distribute Cisco products and services, Comstor is now working with Cisco to leverage our GPS
capabilities and simultaneously create more value for the reseller.  This is what today’s GPN announcement is all about.

The Comstor-Cisco GPN announcement is based on the concept of “distributor as an agent”, which allows customers to better utilize Cisco partner resources to service their global requirements.  Focusing on the Telepresence technologies,
the GPN program basically empowers the reseller to work with their customer’s
headquarters to centralize design and purchasing decisions for the global solution whilst utilizing Comstor and Cisco’s global reseller partner base for local
delivery of the products and services that make up the global solution.  All parties get the Comstor inherent advantage associated with our GPS capabilities as described above.

As the CTO and CIO for Westcon and Comstor there is nothing more rewarding than knowing Comstor’s systems and processes are being leveraged by vendors such as Cisco to help our reseller partners successfully embrace their customer’s ongoing march towards globalization.  Now Comstor and Cisco have a program that can really give the authorized reseller the ability to act globally and locally at
the same time.  It’s always exciting when every member of the channel can work in synch on creative offerings wherein everyone wins.

Cloud Dynamics

We’ve been spending a significant amount of time on two cloud fronts (no pun intended).  First, helping companies understand their potential role and opportunity in the cloud, and second, how they can participate in this burgeoning marketplace without over-committing capital.

Westcon has begun the build out of our cloud platform wherein we continue our role as a distributor.  In the case of the cloud, we see our role as the distributor of cloud services to resellers, systems integrators and service providers globally.  Our partners can then utilize the Westcon cloud platform to provide those cloud services to their end-users/customers. The focus is on education and awareness in addition to the actual technology.  Our platform brings together offerings and markets.  What we will not do is compete with our customers or vendors who are interested in building out the infrastructure necessary for the actual cloud offering.  The Westcon platform is in production in the UK and is now being rolled out globally.  The platform is exciting, and we will have more formal announcements in the near future, but just as interesting and exciting is the ebb and flow in clarity of roles and opportunities within the cloud marketplace.

In the cloud, the traditional vendor to disti to serviceprovider/reseller to enduser dynamic can be turned upside down.  Traditional service providers are now building out infrastructure to house their cloud offerings, while traditional manufacturers/vendors are looking to their customer base to invest and house the necessary infrastructure to “manufacture” the cloud offering.  Not quite, but it almost feels like they are swapping roles within the channel. Some vendors are drawing a line, stating that they want to compete in the cloud, but only as a supplier of hardware and software.  And these vendors are approaching their customer base in a quest to have their customers “manufacture” the cloud service, based on the vendors technology.  This puts the capital onus on the customer base.  So, creative financing becomes more and more critical as these companies do not want to risk that much capital on an unproven market.  Distribution can, and is, stepping into the breach, sometimes quite creatively, to provide potential financing options.

Financing the capital investment required to build out cloud platforms is becoming another important component in the infancy of the cloud industry.  These issues are quite complex, and will take time to mature.  Hence our belief that we are still very, very early in the cloud era, with many unique opportunities in front of every player in the channel.

Hot, Not Hot, and Be On The Lookout For….

Hot

- Flat network – already discussed in earlier posts, but continues to remain an early, “going to get hotter”, topic. Each of the vendors is, or has, recently made significant announcements about their converged Ethernet/fabric/2-tier/1-tier offerings.  Driven in large part by the need for a data center network with lower latency, optimized for virtualization, the network is the data center, and the data center is the network.

- Data Center to Data Center networking – really a subset of the above, but there are nuances such as WAN Acceleration technologies specifically designed for DC to DC as opposed to DC to Campus. This nuance will become more and more of a marketing issue for those better positioned as opposed to those perhaps not really in that DC-to-DC space.

- SBC’s – starting to get the recognition of their importance relative to their role in UC. They can be considered the switch/firewall equivalent for VOIP/UC. As companies and the public overall migrate to VOIP and SIP, SBC’s become critical. Expecting steady growth with an inevitable over-hype by the media once they understand the technology in the next few months.

- Cloud failures – the stories will remain hot for a while. In addition to service failure there will be offering failures – established vendors pulling out of initial cloud forays.

Not Hot

- Cloud success stories – this will take a backseat for a while, but cloud successes will definitely continue nonetheless.

Be on the lookout for:

- Virtualization security – as vendors continue to realize the exposure that virtualization presents, more and more messaging and positioning will appear. The exposure is two-fold. First, the obvious – a new layer in the stack introduces new opportunities for bad people to do bad things. But second, perhaps not as obvious, is the governance associated with the potental consolidation of previously physically separate servers/applications/data onto one single physical server. The IT group doing the consolidation may not recognize the compliance risks they are introducing.  And potentially even more interesting, the hypervisor doesn’t have a mechanism to process business rules associated with the company’s compliance or regulatory policies yet.

- POE – probably not the most exciting discussion point, but POE dedicated vendors have technologies coming out that can help support the powering of all the new video demand going on in the network. This is especially important for the growth of outdoor video/signage (think stadiums and traffic). Many of the vendors embed POE, but some of it is “just enough” and really does not provide the flexibility companies will need as they grow their video usage.

- Tablet Videoconferencing – there is definitely the potential for a schism to appear. I think it is already appearing. We could end up with high end videoconferencing rooms and many low-end video conferencing end points being tablets. The issue over video quality is over. Pretty much every device now has HD capabilities. With the growth of tablets, I pads or Android, the consumerization of IT is forging some new paths in video and UC.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

The ability of an organization to rapidly search, identify and verify who is accessing the systems is a critical aspect of meeting security and compliance requirements for the organization.

An Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions tool is often deployed in order to achieve these goals.

In its simplest form, IAM ensures the right people get access to the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.

Technology is only one the components of IAM. Both processes and supporting tools are critical elements of an efficient IAM strategy.

I will concentrate on the technology aspect of IAM. In particular I will focus on the Single Sign-On piece in this blog . Future blogs will attempt to look at other IAM technologies.

Broadly, IAM comprises the following technology components:

• Authentication: Traditional way of authentication is by means of username and password. There are products that provide methods that are stronger than passwords.
• Authorization: Grants and enforces access
• Enterprise Single Sign-On: Enable users to authenticate once and then be subsequently and automatically authenticated to other target systems.
• Federated Identity Management: Enables identity information to be shared among several and across trust domains.
• User Provisioning: Includes creating, modifying and deleting user accounts and privileges.
• Web Access Management: offers all of the above for Web-applications.

Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO)

Let us for a second imagine a home that comprises of at least 15 rooms (mine is much less) and each room is always locked with a set of keys. Including the main entrance, there will be at least sixteen different keys required to gain access to all of the rooms. The more rooms one needs access to, the more keys one would need to carry.

Life will be much easier for the home owner and anyone that requires access to multiple rooms if there was a master key that can open all the doors (that one have permission to).

Take this analogy and apply it to the IT network;

• House = IT network
• Rooms = Applications on the network
• Person = Username
• The Key(s) = Password

To gain access to any IT network, one generally requires a username and password. The system combines the username and password to represent the identity of the person requesting access to the network.

Gaining access to the network does not necessarily mean that one have access to all the applications on the network. For example access to the HR applications will be restricted to only the HR personnel and this will usually mean another set of username and password.

The more applications you have, the more username and password to manage. Managing a distributed security issues associated with duplicate identity stores is a nightmare for both the end users and IT administrators.

The concept of a master key on the IT network, known as Single Sign-On, is one way of addressing the issue of multiple usernames and passwords.

Single Sign-On (SSO), sometimes called Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) enables users to access all their applications with a single password.

Originally, SSO was to be achieved by developing all applications and tools to use a common security infrastructure with a common format for authentication information.

Creating a common enterprise security infrastructure to replace a heterogeneous infrastructure is without question the best technical approach. However, the task of changing all existing applications to use a common security infrastructure is very difficult.  In addition there is a lack of consensus on a common security infrastructure.

SSO solution as we have it today is implemented more like a proxy; you have the SSO application usually placed between the resource to be accessed and the user (identity) who needs to access the resource.

All applications that use the SSO as a proxy, will have given the SSO application “authorisation” to check users’ credentials on their behalf.  The SSO application will also have a record of all the different permissions and access levels of every authenticated user.

Some Benefits of SSO

For end users

• Only one password to remember and update, and one set of password rules.

For (IT) operations

• A single common registry (directory) of user information.
• A single common way to manage user information.

Security advantages

• Easier to manage and protect common registry.
• Easier to verify user security information and update when necessary rather than tracking down all operational systems. This is particularly valuable when users move to new roles with different access levels.
• Common enterprise-wide password and security policies.
• Users less likely to write down passwords since they only have to remember one.

The key to a successful implementation of SSO is planning. It is crucial that organisation choose the right solution; one that will scale and seamlessly integrate with the other IAM components.

With the ever growing list of security and compliance rules and regulations, the adoption of IAM technology amongst organization of various sizes will continue to grow.

Tablets for the Execs

I have an iPad.  I love it for home use.  And I think it has some significant value in business today.  But the one thing that I don’t understand is the value of an iPad for senior executives. 

Often, senior executives are traveling on planes.  The iPad’s form factor is ideal for this.  And, most senior exec’s live in their email.  They get so much of it.  What confuses me is that if your email platform is Exchange (and I believe the same holds true for Notes) you cannot delete email or move email into folders if you are using an iPad on a plane without wifi.  I am guessing Apple will fix that some day, if they actually think it is a flaw.  But it is really important for senior execs to be aware of this gap in functionality. And, for the exec to understand that it isn’t up to IT to “fix it” – we can’t.

For a CIO, one of the toughest challenges is helping senior executives keep their email managed properly.  Their inboxes can get huge fast, and even with the proper policies and archiving capabilities, senior execs must still aggressively manage their emails almost every minute of the day.  Ideally, being on a plane is a perfect time to tidy up their inbox.  The iPad’s form factor is perfect for that.  Just be aware that if your execs ask for an iPad that they understand the limitations.  It won’t help you help them.

PS – although not an advertisement for Android – my Xoom does allow me to manage emails completely on a non-wifi plane.

CIO Empathy

Last week I attended a small, informal breakfast for CIO’s, mostly located in the New York City area.  The event was well run, with no hidden agenda, and was genuinely about getting CIO’s to talk about their challenges and foster stronger relationships.  We talked about business alignment, challenges with mobile technology (Apple, Android, and enterpise access), security, social networking, fostering innovation, the concept of IT as a profit center, and the day to day joys and misery of being a CIO.  It was about 2 hours.

After the session, I went back to my office and later that afternoon met with my boss for a weekly one on one.  He mentioned in the meeting I seemed more upbeat than I have in a while.  We have been in the midst of some very, very complex projects, and there have been some extremely high highs, and extremely low lows, and I tend to be more impacted by the lows than the highs.  So I have been pretty worn out.  But, I have to say, after that breakfast with the other CIO’s, I have been feeling better.  And, I guess it was noticeable to my boss.  I was more positive in my thinking, comfortable with talking about some good news, and looking at some of the challenges in a more positive light.  I joked with him that I had just come from this CIO breakfast and realized that there are others out there who have just as many problems, or worse, and that the breakfast was a bit like therapy.

The day after that, I read this article from one of the bloggers at HBR and it really hit home.  The blog is on empathy, and how a leader can utilize empathy to be a better leader.  It is a great article.  But it also got me thinking about the CIO breakfast, and that once in a while you just need to talk to some peers who aren’t trying to sell you anything, aren’t trying to “fix it for you”, but have the look in their eye that says, “yeah, I know what you mean”.

The point of this post isn’t so much to talk about a great breakfast meeting or a great article on leadership and empathy.  The point is, that for the channel, there is a great opportunity for you to create this type of environment for your customers – getting them together informally, in small groups of similar backgrounds – to discuss their issues in a non-sales/non-solve-it-now, kind of environment.  The company that ran the breakfast was relatively new to me, but I am now a loyal friend or partner.  They didn’t sell me anything, but they helped me out alot more than they realized.  These types of sessions can be relatively cost effective for you to have with your customers.  You won’t see a dime in the immediate term, but you should expect (if you pick the right mix of participants) to see a stronger, longer, deeper relationship over the long-term.