There is ‘Snow’ Productivity here!

As the whole country is now firmly under the wrap of mother natures white blanket, many of the UK’s working population have faced major disruption. The usually mundane drive to work now requires the skill of a world rally driver. Planes, trains and automobiles have almost all ground to a halt, and with little sign of an end to this cold weather, the prospect for businesses does not look good.

Reports have emerged of UK businesses suffering power disruptions and in some cases outages for days on end. Couple this with the loss in employee productivity, some business leaders have estimated £10Million per day drop in the economy in some cities, and up to £2bn cost of disruption nationally.

Many companies business continuity and disaster recovery plans have been put to the test with varying success. The topic of remote working raises its head once again. It was only 11 months ago when we saw the last heavy snow fall in the UK and the news was filled with similar stories of lost productivity and disruption. One thing we can count on for sure is that this will not be the last time this country struggles with adverse weather conditions.

So what part can technology play in reducing the impact and disruption of weather? The obvious answer is to address the remote working issue with technologies such as Citrix, Terminal Services or VDI. This also presents an opportunity to look at the cloud computing model, as services can be provisioned to end users regardless of location and device (to a certain extent) from a central resilient and robust data centre environment, come rain or shine. The model gives organisations the opportunity to avoid power disruptions, provision IT services to end users and subsequently continue providing services and products to customers. Let’s not forget the other benefits of a centralised model such as reduced management, maintenance, and operating costs, provisioning and scalability. Most cloud offerings now come with a comprehensive backup, replication and continuity service either included or as a cost option. Businesses can now rest assured their data is safe and available in almost all circumstances.

Many organisations won’t go to the effort of evaluating the cost impact for “snow days” but it perhaps should not be overlooked. For example, a customer services representative on £24k per year could carry a tangible cost of up to £1,500 per week. With 10% of the UK workforce unable to get to work this week, it is not hard to see how costs can soon mount up.

For now, lets brace for the next few days of cold weather!

For information on remote working, cloud computing, business continuity or disaster recovery, please contact me on david.garfit@servo.co.uk or 07747 761 781

What does IT look like in the FreeWorld?

 

This month saw the biggest ever UK lottery win of all time, a whopping £90Million pounds. We have all had those dreamy moments where we explore all the possibilities of life without the constraints of money. Exotic holidays, lavish homes, sports cars and all the finer things in life. Well unfortunately for most, this will continue to be just a dream, but it does raise an interesting thought.

As with most things in life, we are constrained by our circumstances or surroundings, yet we still have objectives and desired states. IT is no different.

Nearly every IT department out there has a desired state, and during these financially turbulent times, most are constrained by money and a finite amount of resource.

IT directors are looking for ways of providing reliable and consistent computing power to their end users and subsequently allowing end users to work in the most effecient way with customers and suppliers. Perhaps a slightly simplistic view, but ultimately true.

So what would IT look like in a FreeWorld? In a FreeWorld, IT directors, CIO’s and CTO’s could provide best of bread, state of the art technology to all users and help drive business productivity levels up with no constraints. IT departments could deploy applications and deliver services into the hands of it’s users in minutes or hours rather than weeks or months. IT growth can be dictated by use and not by the pennies in the bank. Service levels could be consistently achieved and end users can rely on thier technology with whole hearted confidence. Applications and services could be available round the clock without failure! Users could have a choice of protocols and methods to communicate with eachother, customers and suppliers in realtime. Users have the ability to collaborate on workloads and freely exchange information.

For most, this sort of desired state seems a million miles away, for some it is in operation in some shape or form. The point is, most IT departments are striving to achieve a desired state.

November also saw Servo unviel its new Hosting concept, “FreeWorld!”. A concept by which, through our Tier 3 enterprise class data centres, high speed resilient UK network and industry leading support and management services we can help make your desired state a realisty. Industry analysts  IDC, Gartner and Forrester point to hosting as the platform of choice for businesses as it provides a platform from where customers can:

• Reduce operational costs
• Provide scalable IT services
• Deploy new applications and services
• Give users 24/7 access to critical data and services
• Reduce energy consuptions and utiltiy bills
• Improve SLA’s
• Drive productivity in the business

Servo understand that hosting is not for everyone, but we are committed to helping you realise your desired state and working with you to achieve it with the your constraints.

For more information on Freeworld and our Cloud services, you can watch a short video:

FreeWorld Video

 

Virtualisation Update

Unless your head has been burried in the sand for the last year, terms like virtualisation and cloud computing should be starting to sound as familiar as your morning alarm clock. So you’re probably thinking, “What’s new?”…well here we go…

The Virtualisation vendor battle continues, with Microsoft and Citrix releasing stats on their market share for virtualisation projects, each with differing results. These two vendors certainly have increased efforts in this area and have increased the money, time, resource and marketing budgets alike. Here at Servo we try to take an unbiased approach. We have carried out many virtualisation excercises on all three platforms (VMware, Microsoft and Citrix) and there are significant benefits to be had from all three platforms which very much depend on the customers target environment. Interestingly VMware are claiming that 89% of all virtualised applications in the world are sitting on VMware. Not a bad statistic from the market leader.

The ability to drastically reduce the number of servers in your data centre is a no brainer for most, however there seems to be a changing landscape when looking at the driving force behind virtualisation projects.

The No. 1 objective for clients today when undertaking a virtualisation exercise is to improve business continuity and disaster recovery. From a business continuity perspective, our customers are looking to eliminate downtime as much as possible, often in many cases, entirely removing downtime from the business! We now work in an age where availability provides the edge, and downtime costs money, lots of money!

One point i was recently reminded of by a customer is, Planned downtime is still downtime! Virtualisation technologies allows for hardware maintenance without the need to plan downtime or schedule work out of hours. Through the use of tools like VMware’s Vmotion and high availability, users can migrate live virtual servers from one physical host to another, which will allow for maintenance to be carried out. When you consider on average over 60% of downtime is planned, this alone can help customers dramatically.

This is all well and good, but what about the unplanned downtime? VMware’s vSphere 4 now includes enhanced tools for continuity, including the all new Fault tolerance for critical applications. Quite simple, this provides clustering like technology without the massive headache usually expereinced when trying to implement high availability clustering. By creating a mirrored copy of the virtual machine on a different host, if the primary host fails, the mirrored copy takes over, providing continual service with zero downtime. This is advised only for highly critical applications as resources are effectively doubled in the mirrored copy.

As we see more businesses adopt server virtualisation trends are becoming clear. On average, customer deployments of server virtualisation are stopping at 30% of the server estate. As with most new technologies, businesses tread carefully at first and virtualisation is no exception, if anything, the first steps into virtualisation represent a huge risk. For this reason, customers will look to virtualise the “low hanging fruit” first, services such as file and print, AD servers, and less critical business applications. More often than not we see the projects slow as larger, more demanding, and critical applications come into the fold. What will be the impact of bringing exchange onto the virtual platform, how will our database server react to running in a virtual environment?

VMware’s new CapacityIQ tool, recently released, now provides customers the ability to asses of the impact on the virtual environment, should further apps be added. It can also be used to provide intelligence on resource usage patterns so further resources requirements can be accurately planned for.

Why stop at the server? With yesterdays release of Windows 7, the desktop will surely be ear marked for virtualisation. As the majority of businesses never made the jump to Vista, they now face a full OS upgrade to get to 7. Not a simple task, certainly as the desktop count increases, the upgrade resource is likely to hit the roof. Bringing the desktops into the data centre will streamline and simplify management, reduce maintenance costs and support costs and provides an opportunity to increase security.

So what is stopping you? Well besides the initial financial outlay, the time and the human resource to carry out such a significant project, the end user experience is key.

There is little benefit to be had if the end user experience is not as good, or better. Support calls will increase as user find themselves with an unfamiliar desktops and lost personal settings. The bigger the deployment, the bigger the challenge. We have been working with vendors in this area to provide end users with the look and feel of a personalised desktop, whilst still only maintaining a standard desktop image.

But what about my storage costs? The cost of disk space in a fat client is cheaper than ever, with some sources claiming as low as £0.2o per GB as the cost of storage. Bringing the desktop into the data centre means users data will now reside on enterprise class storage at a far higher cost. The good news is, technologies such as de-duplication and storage optimisation can reduce this impact.

I’m out of the office, now what? How do you provide a desktop to your users when they have no connectivity out of the office? A very valid concern! New technologies from the virtualisation vendors allow for offline desktop mode. A user can download a copy of his/her desktop to the client, fully encrypted and work on this desktop copy whilst out of the office. When they next connect to the network, the changes are copied back.

Both desktop and server virtualisation present a real opportunity for businesses to reduce costs on a huge scale. Coupled with the opportunity to reduce management time and support costs, these solutions surely cannot be ignored.

Servo has helped many clients take this a step further with our mature private cloud offering. Having invested over £1million in state of the art technology, our private cloud boasts best of breed storage, servers, software and networking. This tried and tested platform has been used to deploy applications as a service for many clients. With little start up investment required, our customers can deploy new applications out of our Tier 3 datacentre with ease.

For more information on Servo’s cloud offering or  to discuss how we can assist with virtualisation projects visit www.servo.co.uk

Windows 7 Update

As the 22nd October general release date gets closer and closer, I’ll take this opportunity to give a quick update on Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7.

This week I sat through a detailed session on the features and benefits of Windows 7 and its looking exciting, but not without concerns.

Operating system roll outs are no mean feat and it will come as no surprise that many organisations just do not have the resource, capacity or budget to embrace Windows 7 with the love Microsoft would like. Couple this with the potential of not only opening, but smashing  Pandoras box when it comes to application compatability and user acceptance.

So how can your organisation reap the benefits of this new operating system whilst causing as little distruption as possible? Planning and preparation is the answer. Obviously its impossible to foresee all the pitfalls, well, not unless you are Mystic Meg, but there some simple measures that can be taken that will smooth the migration process greatly and this is where Servo can help.

Servo are offering a free Windows 7 Compatability workshop for customers seriously considering the migration. This workshop includes hands on technical involvement with a 30 day assesment which will uncover troublesome applications, hardware compatability issues and possible user disruption across your desktop estate. Think of it as your crystal ball to the Windows 7 future.

For most organisations this operating system upgrade will be the first major upgrade since moving to XP, which raises the question “will our current desktop hardware be up to scratch?”. The prospect of having to upgrade the desktop estate is enough to scare most IT and Finance directors to hide behind their budget spreadsheets in the hope it will all blow over. Well the bad news is, it won’t blow over, so how can you again, minimise the impact????

Perhaps this is the perfect junction at which to consider VDI. Bringing the desktop into the datacentre has huge benefits, both financially and operationally. First and foremost, the ability to upgrade the desktop operating system across the entire business whilst keeping the same hardware infrastructure.

For many, VDI is a new concept and Servo are here to help you learn more about this shift in desktop deployment and management methodology. We invite you to join this high profile Citrix webinar: Secrets Lies & VDI, which promises to be a very valuable session.

If you would like to attend this event, follow this link and register your details:

http://events.unisfair.com/index.jsp?eid=470&seid=25&code=hp_promo_1a

Secrets, Lies & VDI: Citrix Live

VDI is one of the hottest buzzwords in the technology industry and as a solution strategy in its infancy there remains many questions of how this technology can be deployed to maximise business and IT objectives. 

As vendors like Citrix , Microsoft and VMware look to push their respective propositions for VDI or Hosted Virtual Desktop, Servo is actively discussing the pros and cons of different offerings with a number of our customers . As a trusted advisor Servo does not take a vendor biased view on the premise that a particular solution/technology may not be suitable for a customer’s IT environment and there are a number of influencing factors pertinent to each solution.  This is a strength in that Servo will take an unbiased view whereby even other desktop strategies may be deemed more beneficial than VDI.

CitrixLive! is a industry event that will give strategic view of desktop virtualization and discuss the questions which surround this area.

Taking place on the 20^th October,  CitrixLive! will include a keynote and sessions from leading Citrix and industry experts along with booths from a wide range of partners and sponsors. End users will have access to downloadable resources to help drive toward next steps on executing your desktop virtualization strategy.

Register here:

http://events.unisfair.com/index.jsp?eid=470&seid=25&code=hp_promo_1a

A penny for ‘em!

Another week has flown by so here are my thoughts on a couple of topics in the press and projects I am working on:

1. The Cloud

The term is still being touted around the IT media and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change anytime soon. The underlying feeling I get from press, articles, and partners is a real mixed view. There are some real advocates out there and on the other hand there are some serious objections starting to arise. Many of the concerns I read of centre around Security which I find slightly contrary to the comments my customers have raised.

I am currently working with 2 separate organisations on very realistic objectives of moving to a private cloud based infrastructure. Neither of which have named security as the primary concern.

If anything adopting a cloud strategy should simplify security rather than present flaws. Be it from the physical security of having your systems in a professionally maintained, enterprise class data centre through to the simplification of users access and computing experience.

Note my use of the term Private Cloud!!! Much of the confusion and debate around Cloud computing is about the “Private or Public Clouds”.

I strongly believe we are a long way off seeing a “Cloud” offering from any of the ISP’s or internet giants that will be adopted on any notable scale by a major corporate or public body.

Private clouds however are popping up all over the place and almost all of the major data centre providers have either implemented or are evaluating the impact of introducing a private cloud service for their customers.

Here at Servo we have been operating a Private Cloud Service for over 2 years, long before the Cloud hype started. Known to our customers as the VSP (Virtual Shared Platform).

Since moving to our Private Cloud our customers have enjoyed reduced licensing costs, reductions in hardware costs, reduced TCO’s, and improved service levels.

2. Hosting

What’s new on the hosting front? The good old green driver is still there and I’m hearing it more and more from my customers, however with the talk comes little action. The problem with the Green Issue is that many organisations just do not know where to start, what to focus on and how to measure the results. We have been working with some of our customers on helping tackle green issues, but during this difficult economic time, it’s just not priority.

Colocation V’s Managed: Some months ago I started a discussion on this exact topic and the trend was leaning towards the managed offering, however I think we are a long way from seeing co-location services dropping off the market. In fact only this month I have helped one of my customers with co-location from which to run a centralised VoIP service.

Meanwhile I have found managed hosting to be a much more comprehensive offering, providing real quantifiable value. So much so, I believe by wrapping a managed element to your hosting contract we can provide a true ROI over the contract that cannot be matched by co-location alone.

3. Virtual Desktops (VDI)

To many the VDI strategy is a ‘No Brainer’, whilst others remain hesitant about adopting these technologies. Again this seems to be an area of much discussion and debate. I am a strong believe in the case for VDI, however issues surrounding migrating from a fat client strategy to a VDI, profiles and the cost of underlying infrastructure are still proving to be deterrents.

Through the close work we do with vendors in this field, we are confident we can demonstrate high ROI (upwards of 30% Return within 1 year) on VDI projects. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how we can help you achieve these types of ROI.

Servo are scheduled to release a piece of news on the 1st October which will strengthen our case even further as to why we are the perfect choice to hold your hand through this type of Virtualisation project, so watch this space for more info.

4. Linkedin

And finally, I read an article today highlighting the benefits of Linkedin specifically for IT professionals. IT professionals have the 2nd highest adoption of Linkedin amongst UK industries with 46% now having Linkedin profiles. On top of this 29% of UK professionals now have a LinkedIn profile and new profiles are being created at a rate of one new user every two seconds.

CIOs switch focus to business innovation

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/10/237642/cios-switch-focus-to-business-innovation.htm

Over the last 18 months, we as IT suppliers have and service providers have faced difficult constraints  from our customers and prospects when it comes to costs. Is it any wonder…this country has experienced possibly the worst financial meltdown of all time. Our clients need to cut costs and cut them fast but at the same time provide the same level of service or in some cases improve service levels.

We all appreciate the need for immediate cost savings in many circumstances, and I personally am trying to do everything I can to assist my clients with this.

On the flip side, I’ve seen a trend with some of my clients who are looking at IT to improve business effeciency, drive productivity and provide a competitive edge. Subsequently this improves the profit and margins of the business.

Many organisations spend over half their entire IT budget on managing and maintaining existing infrastructures. Does this spend improve the effeciency and productivity of the business? Does this provide the business with a competitive edge?

Managed service providers benefit from economies of scale in people, infrastructure and resources. Support and management is our business and what we know. Surely it makes sense to hand these responsibilities over and free up your resources to focus on improving your business performance.  Take a look at other areas in the business…In HR for example, it is widely acceptable to out task the job of recruitment to a consultancy, so why does IT differ?

“The Cloud” is still a concept very much in its infancy, but the suggested benefits cannot be ignored. The ability to provide your end users with business applications and services without the need to manage, maintain and upgrade the underlying infrastructure is for many, nothing but a distant dream. Whilst a true cloud offering is still yet to be fully deployed in an enterprise environment, I have worked with many organisations to implement a centralised infrastructure on on a managed dynamic virtual platform. Gone are the requirements for the customers to consider hardware upgrades, storage provisioning, patching, and software updates.

In summary, no one understands your business quite like you do, but we certainly know how to achieve the highest efficiency from your IT investments.

Does your IT Budget get Swallowed up by ongoing Support Costs?

Does your IT budget get swallowed up by ongoing support costs?

I have recently been helping my clients reduce support costs associated with hardware and software maintenance. It is widely agreed that over 50% of IT budgets are spend on simply maintaining the current infrastructure and in many cases this can be as high at 90%. The knock on affect is a constraint on improving IT services within the business, development of new systems or the implementation of IT strategies.

To learn where you can save up to 60% on IT support contracts, request your free support costs evaluation from Servo.

Our free support costs evaluation will help you identify cost savings on IT support. Gartner estimates users can save between 30% and 60% by switching to the channel for their support requirements, rather than going direct.

Servo has been working with some of the country’s leading firms, striving to reduce their costs and improve service levels.

I would relish the opportunity to help you. Contact me now for your free no cost, no obligation Support Costs evaluation:

david.garfit@servo.co.uk

07747 761781

Windows 7: Let Servo help make the transition a smooth one!

Very few customers have not heard about the new exciting solutions soon to be released by Microsoft in October 2009.

Benefits such as Direct Access for simplified and cost effective remote access to corporate assets, Branch Cache for optimised WAN access to key documents, AppLocker for controlling unauthorised application access and BitLocker for data encryption are just part of the promised platforms from Microsoft.Paul Russell – Head of Strategic Development at Servo believes “Microsoft has done a very smart thing by aligning the desktop operating system with Windows 7 with the back end server platform with Server 2008 Release 2. Businesses concerned about doing more with less will be keen to examine how these new releases will remove existing third party solutions and therefore cost, whilst moving to a much more optimised infrastructure to reduce the day to day running costs of their IT service. I believe those customers who are already identifying ways to reduce operating costs will be keen to work with Servo to assess their readiness even if they haven’t considered a change until two years out.”

Already Servo has been to visit a number of customers to explain the business and technical benefits of introducing these major enhancements to their infrastructure and as a result, Servo is pleased to announce a new offer to our customers.

Servo’s free half day assessment

As part of the journey to a mature IT infrastructure, Servo is offering customers a free half day readiness assessment to identify key areas that will benefit the customer with a strategy to migrate to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. The assessment will produce a simple report outlining the key stages to achieving a Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 platform.

If you would like to take advantage of this FREE consultation session or would like more info, please contact me at david.garfit@servo.co.uk (07747 761 781)