New to the idea of Software as a Service SaaS Virtualization? This video from Salesfor will help bring you up to speed:

This short video clip, produced by Salesforce.com, effectively points out that managed cloud hosting is a superior way to run your business. It’s clear that multitenancy is simply a more efficient way to approach IT infrastructure.

For those of you who are new to cloud, some of the major benefits of cloud computing are that your data is:

• secure
• backed up in another location (redundant)
• not limited in storage or resources

To help you better understand Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Common Craft recently put out a cool little video that is put together like School House Rock for the 21st century.

You can check it out here: Cloud Computing Hosting in Plain English

I always keep an eye open for better ways to explain the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing to not-so-technically-inclined friends as well as potential clients. I found these quick videos to be expremely helpful in succinctly illustrating cloud computing hosting.

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Virtualization of servers has been getting a lot of buzz lately. Let’s see what virtualization is, why it is important and how we can use it to our benefit.

What is Virtualization

Something is said to be virtual when it is visible and perceivable, but does not actually exist physically in its perceived form. From a computing perspective, virtualization is the representation (to the user) of a hardware resource Read more…

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Last week Gartner released a press announcement disclosing that only 16% of workloads run inside virtual machines.

The analysis firm predicted that this amount is going to reach around 50% by 2012, which is equal to 58 million deployed virtual machines.

In May 2007 for example Gartner predicted that virtualization will be part of nearly every aspect of IT by 2015.
In April 2008 Gartner also said that 4 million virtual machines were expected by 2009, while we would have 611 million virtualized PCs by 2011.

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Engine Networks uses VMware for its virtualization offerings and we thought it would be useful to share some stats on how much consolidation we see in the ‘real world’.

Bear in mind that our sales consultants and engineers tailor solutions primarily for web facing, intensive transactional web systems many with high traffic and peaking around events so what we see is quite different from what might be expected in a more ‘normal’ IT situation (if such a thing exists). We also deal with multiple environments for customers – live/production, pre-production/QA and test – each of which has a different profile.

We manage several hundred VMs today and the average consolidation varies enormously environment to environment. In test environments we see perhaps what you would expect, around 20 VMs per ESX. In pre-production/QA environments we are seeing 8 to 15 VMs per ESX and in live/production environments, the average drops to 5-12 VMs per ESX. This is because most customers see the high availability features of VM as most important in production environments, rather than straight cost savings (although 1:3 or 1:5 is already quite a good saving!). In these cases, a host must be able, at any moment, to handle all the Virtual Machines from another host that is experiencing failure.

Quite a range of results, isn’t it? It shows, to us at least, the need for specialist consultancy and experience to get the best out of your infrastructure. See here for more info.

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