The Imperative of Integrated Monitoring of Virtual Desktop and Application Delivery Infrastructures

By on May 22, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

The release of Citrix XenDesktop 7 signals a new dawn for end-user computing in terms of mobility, simplicity and security.  CA Technologies is assisting Citrix by addressing requirements for enterprise monitoring and manageability that ensure both the infrastructure and XenDesktop experience can be managed together, with a single solution set, leading to faster problem resolution and optimized service delivery.

CA Technologies has been working closely with Citrix to incorporate key capabilities into our CA Infrastructure Management and CA Nimsoft Monitor offerings to help joint customers gain the visibility into performance, activities, events, metrics, configurations, etc. that affect end-user experience.  (See Citrix’s extensive comments about CA in this IT Canada article.) CA Technologies’ expertise in end-to-end infrastructure management across networks, storage, applications and virtualization layers has successfully unified management silos for our customers.  We are proud to enable our customers to bring virtual applications and desktops into this unification – avoiding their need to use separate islands of management tools.

Citrix XenDesktop 7 unifies virtual applications and desktops and we expect that, together with mobility enhancements, these features are going to drive fast adoption of this new release. We are pleased to inform our joint customers that we have deployed the beta version of Citrix XenDesktop 7 in our own enterprise IT labs.

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Getting Energy Tough

By on May 21, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management, DCIM

We love data centres. There is something special about them – the pristine racks, the modern servers, colourful cables and all that raw processing power. The steady hum of thousands of servers, CRAC units and battery packs is intoxicating. They are great, but the problem is that they are expensive, power hungry and we need more of them. In 2007, data centres in Western Europe consumed a whopping 56 TWh of power, but as automation and online adoption continues to rise, this is estimated to climb up to 104 TWh by 2020. Dwindling oil supplies and tougher environmental legislation mean that generating that extra energy will become more and more expensive. In the current competitive climate, the vision of skyrocketing energy cost – or even energy crisis – is enough to cause sleepless nights for many European CEOs, particularly if they have seen their recent energy bills.

Due to the nature of the beast, data centres are prime targets for energy savings. They are power hungry yet well metered and therefore, great places to start flexing those cost-saving muscles. Most data centre operators have existing monitoring systems in place. At a minimum, these systems can produce totals for utility and IT load, so baselines are there. Savings are easy to estimate, and therefore, the great machine is often asked to do more with less. This is by no means the only challenge data centre operators face today.

These are no idle thoughts. As concerns about our energy reserves grow, everyone should make it a norm to be as energy-efficient as possible. The European Commission Institute for Energy and Transport acknowledged this fact in 2008 by creating a voluntary EU Datacentre Code of Conduct, which, like all similar schemes, will involve submitting annual reports. The submission process will involve energy baselines, initiatives and action plans. Getting baseline data out of a traditional data centre should be easy, but identifying initiatives and formulating action plans could be a headache if the monitoring systems are not capable of producing detailed live reports on how the data centre actually runs. The action plans will most likely include things like virtualization and optimal resource utilization, but without proper monitoring systems it is very difficult to make the right move.

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Virtual Desktops Are Coming: Are Your Management Tools Ready?

By on May 16, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

Virtual desktops are increasingly becoming common in the large enterprise customer environments. The adoption is expected to accelerate as IT departments seek to support remote workers, BYOD and mobility initiatives. Based on several industry estimates the hosted virtual desktop technology market is projected to grow more than 20% (CAGR) for the next 5 years.

The benefits of virtual desktop technology are significant. It simplifies maintenance of user desktops (operating system patches, updates and upgrades of OS versions etc.) that is a major portion of IT Infrastructure management costs. It also improves security of desktops as well as intellectual property since the company data is now stored within secure walls of data-center. Lastly, it improves the user experience and efficiency by providing remote access to the personalized desktops from anywhere and any device.

From the IT Operations perspective, virtual desktop management is expected to follow a similar trajectory as that of server virtualization. In most cases, once the technology has been tested in the lab with test applications and ready for production workloads, the ownership of managing the delivery infrastructure shifts to IT Operations. This ensures proper management and escalations procedures can be established similar to other critical IT infrastructure.

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Chatting About APM, Analytics and End-User Experience

By on May 14, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM

In a perfect world, everyone’s IT infrastructure and the applications it supports would work flawlessly. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and systems are bound to – at a minimum – perform poorly from time to time or even fail.

That’s why we’re hosting a Twitter Chat on application performance management (APM) trends, challenges and best practices on Monday, June 4, 2013 at 10:30a EST using the hashtag #APMchat. During the hour-long discussion, we’ll be asking and discussing these five questions:

  1. What are the biggest application performance challenges organizations face?
  2. Is IT maximizing its investment in APM tools? If not, what’s holding them back?
  3. How do APM analytics provide better quality services and end-user experience?
  4. Are all APM analytics the same? #APMchat
  5. Do multivariate APM analytics mean more work for the IT ops team?
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Service Assurance Weekly Reading List

By on May 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

Here are five stories you may have missed while out shopping for the perfect Mother’s Day gift:

  1. Big Data Gold Isn’t Always Where You Would Expect It
    Many companies are focusing their big data initiatives in areas like sales, marketing, customer service and R&D, but other functions like logistics or finance may offer even greater ROI.
  2. Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is
    Big data! If you don’t have it, you better get yourself some. Your competition has it, after all. Bottom line: If your data is little, your rivals are going to kick sand in your face and steal your girlfriend.
  3. Invest in people, not resources
    There is a supply-and-demand paradox brewing in the software business, and it’s getting worse by the day. Companies are searching for rock-star talent, while at the exact same moment talented people are searching for great work. People on both sides of this issue are frustrated — companies can’t find the right workers, or enough of them and talented workers feel stifled, bored, and in many cases exhausted, and even oppressed, by the work they do find.
  4. 11 signs your IT project is doomed
    No senior buy-in, minimum spec targets, a ‘nothing can go wrong’ mentality — here’s how to sense demise before your IT project meets its ignominious end.
  5. The illusion of simplicity: photographer Peter Belanger on shooting for Apple
    You’ve almost certainly never heard of Peter Belanger, but you’ve definitely seen his photographs. In fact, you may even see his work every day, and it’s likely that you own some of his most famous subjects. Belanger is the man behind some of Apple’s most iconic product images, a San Francisco-based product photographer at the top of his field. Apple is but one of his clients — he’s done work for everyone from eBay and Nike to Pixar and Square — and we sat down with Peter to talk about his work, his background, and some very, very expensive gear.

What’s on your reading list? Tweet us @CAsvcAssur.

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Surveys: BYOD Popular, But Official Policies Still Lacking

By on May 8, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

In not-so-shocking news, the bring your own device (BYOD) to work trend, which in turn allows for easier workshifting where employees can pretty much work from anywhere, is helping drive employee satisfaction. As a work-from-home employee, I can relate as it is a great perk to not have to commute every day.

According to this CloudTweaks article, “With this convenience, organizations are reporting an average of 25% reduction in employee attrition simply because BYOD and work shifting are able to bring more employee satisfaction compared to any other motivational strategies that companies have traditionally implemented.”

While BYOD is hot, IT organizations still seem to be lagging when it comes to having an official BYOD policy. According to a survey conducted by Network Instruments at the ongoing Interop conference in Las Vegas, only a third of respondents said their company has an official policy in place, leaving a two thirds sticking with an ad hoc approach. This approach may have to do with the numbers of people actually using their own devices to access network resources, which seems to be relatively low, according to the survey.

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Video: How Lexmark is Transforming IT

By on May 7, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, CA World

One of the best customer sessions at CA World 2013 was Lance Neal’s session (How Proactively Managing the End-User Experience Is Helping Transform IT at Lexmark) on how Lexmark is transforming the way it handles IT and the role CA Service Assurance tools play in that transformation. My colleague Denise Dubie caught up with Neal at the show for quick interview about why and how Lexmark is undertaking its transformation:



You can download Lance’s presentation from the show here.

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Capacity Planning the DevOps Way

By on May 2, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

The notion of DevOps serves to accelerate time to market through greater cohesion in the release management life cycle.

So called ‘service virtualiation’, such as offerings from IBM and CA LISA, enables modular testing practice by learning typical behavior patterns of defined systems. The effect is a more tightly focused testing process that reduces the dependency on external (inert) services.

Release Automation, such as in the newly acquired Nolio solution, allows the testing process to be further streamlined by providing cohesion through the multistage process. The benefits are most highly felt where complex dependencies and configurations add magnitude to setup and teardown for QA.

Agile methods need agile release management processes, and this is the whole point of DevOps. However the risks in this agile thinking come in end- to-end performance.

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Lexmark's use of CA Service Assurance

5 Observations from CA World 2013

By on May 1, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert, CA World

The whirl-wind that was CA World 2013 ended a week ago, providing plenty of time to digest the torrent of great information presented at the show. For those that attended and those that weren’t able to make it, we’ve posted a majority of the presentations in the CA World 2013 session database. Since that covers some 100 sessions or so, here are five things I found interesting at the show.

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Webcast: Achieving ROI with DCIM: Making the Business Case

By on April 30, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management, DCIM

Your CA Infrastructure Management (CA IM) solution is helping you to centrally manage the various layers of the IT stack such as servers, networks, applications, and services.  The physical layer, however, can present huge risks and costs associated with power, cooling and space of the data center.  Learn how you can leverage your current investment in CA IM by extending IT management to your data center infrastructure and as a result increase your agility in rolling out applications & services, lower your operating costs, and reduce your risk of downtime due to issues with power or physical environment.

Join CA Technologies and Infosys for a joint webcast on Wednesday, May 15th at 10AM Pacific/1PM Eastern, where we’ll share how leading companies have achieved early ROI with DCIM through a combination of greater efficiency, improved availability and reduced power consumption. You’ll also get insights and best practices on how to convert data center efficiency metrics into meaningful analytics for operational improvement.

Register here.

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New CA Technologies eBook challenges conventional IT Ops wisdom

By on April 29, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Living in an “always-connected” world is one of the major challenges that confronts us. If you cannot keep up with customers who are reshaping markets at the speed of thought, those customers will take their business elsewhere – and they’ll often use social media to let the world know about it. The revolution of rising expectations is here to stay. Failing to keep pace with these expectations isn’t an option. This eBook from CA Technologies looks at the customer and employee experience - how their demands affect and are affected by the health of applications, networks and enterprise IT operations and offers latest business insights and recommendations for 2013.

Rapid business transformation is currently being fuelled by unprecedented technological hyper-convergence. Consumer technologies, applications and services are sweeping the enterprise, and your customers and employees expect to engage anywhere, anytime, from any device. IT services that first emerged in the consumer market have now spread to businesses and many organizations are broadly adopting public cloud services and social media to leverage new opportunities to engage with these empowered users. As the effects of disruptive influences such as converged IP / IT, mobile-cloud, social, Big Data, and consumerization take root the operating models of entire industries are being profoundly altered. Even today’s most successful organizations will not survive the converged business future merely by doing better at what they have always done in the past. Organizations which truly harness these technological advances to effectively fuel service innovation will gain and sustain a real competitive advantage. Despite that enormous transformative potential the influence of in-house IT leaders appears to be rapidly diminishing. Why is that?

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Webcast: A Look at CA Application Performance Management 9.5

By on April 23, 2013 in CA Technologies on APM, CA World

Miss our CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) 9.5 announcement yesterday at CA World 2013? You can get all the details on our new Application Behavior Analytics and Browser Response Time Monitor features as well as the new Web-based user interface in this on-demand Webcast.

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