HP Agrees that Citrix Is PowerSmart
By Clay Ryder
Citrix Systems has announced a unique PowerSmart capability
designed for organizations seeking to reduce datacenter power consumption as
part of their application delivery infrastructure strategy. The new PowerSmart
feature, which will be available as part of the Citrix Presentation Server
product line, will enable organizations to set policies that automatically
adjust server power consumption in response to application traffic levels to
more effectively manage power during non-peak hours. HP is the first server
vendor to demonstrate support for PowerSmart in conjunction with its power
management tools for the HP ProLiant server family. The combination of Citrix’s
application delivery infrastructure with HP’s focus on assisting customers to
achieve better datacenter efficiency should help customers support green
initiatives and best practices by increasing utilization of existing
infrastructure while lowering consumption of power and cooling resources.
Citrix stated that the new PowerSmart feature could help organizations reduce
energy consumption in the datacenter by up to 50%. PowerSmart is compatible
with all current versions and editions of Citrix Presentation Server and
iLO-enabled HP servers. PowerSmart will be available in December to all Citrix
Presentation Server customers as a free download.
We find this announcement interesting as it is in tune with
the marketing mantra du jour, power efficiency, but more importantly as it
illustrates a strategic solution that seeks to deliver enhanced efficiency not
for a specific application or server, but rather for a collection of
applications. For most organizations, there is not just one mission-critical
application, but instead a set of applications that collectively comprise the
mission-critical workflow for an enterprise. The value proposition of
server-based delivery of applications as typified by Presentation Server is
well understood; however, the PowerSmart feature adds considerable value to the
solution as it can reduce the power consumption footprint based upon the
dynamics of several independent applications. Enabling more intelligent server
provisioning and load management that is driven by specific knowledge of each
application’s workload and usage patterns to our way of thinking is a good
thing. When taken in the context of a virtualized IT environment, this latest
capability should further enhance the value proposition of consolidating
application workloads and optimizing application traffic over the network.
HP’s support for PowerSmart is important for Citrix, its
customers, and the market overall. HP is no newcomer to the energy efficiency
discussion and as a leading vendor of servers, its direct support for PowerSmart
on its servers and in its management software should give Citrix and its
customers increased validation in this approach. Further, organizations that
deploy Presentation Server and choose HP as their hardware vendor will have few
reasons not to take advantage of PowerSmart especially if the channel partners
or direct sales forces are doing their jobs. Ideally, customers would not have
to be aware of PowerSmart as the feature would be simply considered a default
part of any solution and would be enabled as a matter of course. Given the
power savings that Citrix states are possible, we doubt that many organizations
would decline the usage of PowerSmart, if they knew it existed.
Overall, we believe this announcement reflects the
considerable value afforded by server-based application delivery technologies,
not only from an application management perspective, but from an energy
efficiency and cost perspective as well. The task at hand for Citrix is to get
the same degree of support from the other major server vendors so that all of
its customers can benefit from the PowerSmart technology while Citrix can be
achieve the enviable position of having a valuable technology become another
checklist item for application servers installations in most any datacenter.
EMC
Acquisition of Voyence Strengthens Configuration and Change Management
By Lawrence D. Dietz
EMC Corporation has
announced its acquisition of privately held Voyence, a provider of network
configuration and change management solutions that automate critical change,
compliance, and activation processes. Voyence’s core software, VoyenceControl,
helps companies reduce operational costs, increase availability, improve
security, and demonstrate regulatory compliance. Voyence’s existing integration
with EMC Smarts enables organizations to
integrate network configuration change events detected by VoyenceControl into
Smarts to resolve issues caused by misconfigurations while Smarts users can
directly access VoyenceControl’s configuration database and launch remediation
procedures from the Smarts interface. VoyenceControl provides an ITIL
framework-compatible network change, configuration, and release management
system to meet these needs. Additionally, the software analyzes network device
security compliance to help ensure that every device is configured with the
most recent security recommendations and software patches. VoyenceControl effectively reduces the time
it takes IT teams to update every device’s security profile from minutes per
device to minutes for the entire network. Voyence will be fully integrated into
EMC’s Resource Management Software business
unit, which offers network change and configuration management solutions to
help organizations automate their datacenter operations through a unique set of
products that enable closed-loop automation for comprehensive discovery,
compliance, analysis, automation, and visualization throughout the IT
infrastructure.
Configuration and change management are constants in large
organizations. Poorly orchestrated management of these functions can
inadvertently lead to significant unplanned expenditures and security
vulnerabilities. Complex, heterogeneous IT environments are especially at risk
because a change in one element can lead to dramatic unintended consequences in
other parts of the infrastructure. It appears that EMC
correctly appreciates some of the not so obvious functions of datacenters,
which provide not just a physical focal point for the IT infrastructure, but a
central management role as well. We believe that the closed-loop approach of
discover, comply, analyze, change, and automate is a logical approach for large
and medium sized organizations that have the technical wherewithal to manage
their own IT infrastructures.
From a market perspective we see EMC
extending its grip on not just the datacenter, but as noted above, datacenter
functions. We believe that configuration and change management can perhaps be
looked at as a major hub of IT
Operations, ultimately affecting all components of the IT infrastructure. We
also believe that integration with provisioning and IT inventory will emerge as
a critical area for governance auditing. This acquisition is another means for EMC
to increase their penetration in the service provider market in addition to
enterprise. However, as with any acquisition, it remains to be seen whether EMC
can smoothly integrate the products from a user perspective and whether the
partners providing the professional services needed to install and maintain the
software can also bring to bear the level of business acumen needed to ensure
effective governance through transparent IT operations.
Trend Micro Enters DLP
Fray by Acquiring Provilla
By Lawrence D. Dietz
Trend Micro Incorporated has announced a definitive
agreement to acquire Provilla, Inc., a provider of fingerprint-based
intelligent endpoint solutions for data leak prevention (DLP)
in organizations. Under the agreement, Provilla will operate as a subsidiary of
Trend Micro’s U.S.
affiliate. Provilla’s data leak prevention personnel and technology and
products will enhance the Trend Micro portfolio of easily deployed and managed
multi-layered content-security solutions for business customers. Provilla’s
LeakProof product suite combines patented DataDNA fingerprinting technology
with intelligent agents to help enterprises protect their intellectual property
and confidential information and maintain regulatory compliance. The technology
lets organizations know the exact locations of sensitive data for active and
effective control. Provilla products also educate and sensitize end users to
corporate policies and regulatory requirements. Trend Micro will continue to
offer Provilla’s stand-alone products for the near term as well as gradually
integrate Provilla’s capabilities into its own enterprise, small, and mid-size
business solutions. Provilla products are deployed in North America,
China, Taiwan,
Europe, and Japan.
This is the second recent acquisition in the DLP
space, coming on the heels of RSA’s
acquisition of Tablus. As antivirus technology continues to spiral into the
world of commodities and attacks become more targeted, sophisticated users are
likely to look for more comprehensive solutions from the same vendor. End-user
organizations are really concerned about the results, not necessarily the
methods. Perhaps in time these same users will demand software as a service
with service level agreements in place to incent vendors to perform.
Now that RSA and Trend
have made their move, what can be expected from McAfee and Symantec? While it
would be convenient to jump on the industry rumor-mill bandwagon and posit that
Symantec will buy Vontu, we actually believe otherwise. Symantec is at a
serious inflection point. Too much time has passed for the company to plead SYMC/VRTS
integration issues, and the recent financial report combined with what appears
to be a serious problem in bookings means to us that Symantec perhaps ought to
be more concerned with correcting the product and support issues that have
likely negatively impacted bookings in the enterprise space. Indeed, we believe
that the term “content protection” should include safeguarding one’s own content
as well protecting the IT infrastructure from malware, phishing, spam, etc.
Absorbing new companies and their products has never been Big Yellow’s strong
suit, although it’s our understanding that much of the Altiris marketing
management has succeeded in supplanting survivors of the Veritas acquisition.
It remains to be seen whether McAfee will follow a me-too approach and buy one
of the remaining DLP vendors.
What does this all mean to the end-user community? In March
we profiled Provilla’s agreement with BigFix and concluded by stating our
belief that “combining detection, prevention, and remediation is a best
practice for end-user organizations. However, this recommendation implies that
end users have already gone through the exercises of classifying their
information and establishing policies to safeguard each level of
classification. This approach is necessary for good governance which reduces
operational risk and demonstrates compliance as a by product of planning ahead
and employing technology to enforce policies.” We stick by our guns and
reiterate that technology is only one leg of the security triangle. Data loss
prevention can only occur after organizations go through the data
classification exercise and synergize their People and processes along with
appropriate technology. Addressing only technology would be like passing out
ice tongs on the Titanic.
IBM
Enhances CDAT with New Toolset
By Clay Ryder
IBM has announced the
availability of a new analysis toolset designed to help IBM
business partners identify opportunities for small businesses to consolidate
and virtualize infrastructure resources to improve their IT economics. The
Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT) helps identify untapped
utilization and hidden servers across a client’s network, and provides
recommendations on how to consolidate and virtualize x86 resources in order to
reduce IT cost by up to 60% and improving compute utilization up to 400%. CDAT
has been expanded with the introduction of the Server Consolidation Made Simple
toolset that certifies partners to provide evaluations to consolidate IT
environments with fewer than fifty servers. An additional service, Server
Consolidation Factory, provides a customized, client-ready server consolidation
proposal for business partners that do not have trained solution developers
in-house. Bundled pricing for the service starts at $500 per fifty servers,
which the company notes is up to five times less expensive than competitive
services.
Channel partners play an important role not only in the
final delivery of technologies to customer’s hand, but equally if not more
important, in educating end-user organizations as to the value and
applicability of a given vendor’s technology as part of the customer’s IT and
datacenter investments. While consolidation and virtualization are two terms
that are handily bandied about the marketplace, for many organizations,
especially in the smaller to midsized segments, assessing their current IT
infrastructure to identify consolidation and virtualization opportunities is
something that simply doesn’t happen due to limited inhouse resources to commit
to the endeavor. For the channel partner, this is an excellent opportunity, yet
the resource cost to manually assess a customer’s environment in the hopes of
achieving a sale later can be difficult to justify. This is where tools such as
the CDAT can play an important role in creating a win-win-win scenario for the
vendor, channel partner, and customer.
For IBM, engaging with
myriad channel partners can be rewarding at best, but challenging at worst.
Being able to consistently deliver a compelling user message as well as partner
value proposition requires effort and works best when demonstrations of
benefits can be replicable and automated as much as possible. With CDAT, a
channel partner can invest its time in its relationship with the customer,
providing the educational and trust-building aspects with knowledge that the
demonstration and assessment can be delivered quickly from toolkit backed by
the vendor. Further, the Server Consolidation Factory takes this a step further
to simplify the proposal creation process and speed to market a partner’s bid
for its customers. The overall reduction in time and effort required by the
channel partner may act as a considerable enticement to keep the partner
focused on consolidation and virtualization opportunities. Given that 70%+ of IBM’s
virtualization engagements have come through the channel, this is very
important for Big Blue as it seeks to drive its virtualization solutions into
the marketplace while continuing to entice its partners to stick with the
company in this competitive segment of the market. Overall, we believe CDAT and similar tools
are an essential part of a successful channel strategy and are further
illustration of IBM’s continued focus on the
mid market and the partners through whom IBM’s
maximizes its economic opportunity in this space.
