Theres been a thunderstorm of white noise surrounding cloud computing this year. Vendors, pundits, and analysts took center stage at industry events and in the news; everyone seems to have an opinion and definition on cloud computing. And with all the chatter came mixed messages, conflicting advice and, well, cloudiness....

Virtualization is a disruptive new technology that can greatly improve IT operational effectiveness while reducing overall costs, making it a critical initiative for IT Directors charged to "do more with less." Virtualization has the potential to transform every layer of the enterprise IT stack, bringing consolidation and increased utilization of physical assets, version control of entire operating systems and applications, and instant virtualization as one of the fastest-growing emerging technologies. Estimates are that the server virtualization software market will grow at a compound annual rate of 28% from 2008 through 2013 (from $1.8 billion to $6.2 billion)....

If you are reading this whitepaper then it is probably safe to say you either have a current stake in virtualization as a technology and a strategy, or you are thinking of deploying virtualization as a platform for your x86 systems. Over the past six years virtualization has become the hottest "thing" in IT, much as Client Server Computing was in the 1990"s and Web technologies following that....

As use of mobile technologies in business increases, more and more critical business and sensitive personal information is being collected, processed and transmitted over shared wireless networks by mobile workers from outside corporate confines. Mobile devices have created a variety of unprecedented exposures and risks, including loss, theft, misuse, and unauthorized access to corporate network and data disclosure. Consequently, many traditional security measures are not able to scale beyond corporate boundaries, leaving organizations unprepared and exposed to risk. Deploying the latest firewall, antivirus or encryption tool is not enough to ward off today's sophisticated intruders. Not just hackers, but organized crime, dishonest insiders and basic human error easily find ways past traditional deterrents especially when critical data lies outside IT controls....

Going 'green' has become an important topic for many people. Organizations are looking at ways of reducing their carbon footprint as an economic and ecological strategy. We will discuss practical and easy strategies for cutting costs while contributing to a cleaner environment. From improving asset utilization to consolidating data centers, there are many strategies to creating effective and sound 'green' data center strategies....

During the implementation phase, GlassHouse has helped companies set themselves up for long term success by putting in place proper procedures and management tools from the beginning. In this paper, we share the four keys to managing this new environment. It is our hope that the information provided will help ensure your success....

The rapid increase in corporate spending on information technology (IT) during the last decade and the diversity of IT initiatives that this created has forced IT executives to devise a set of strategies and management practices to manage the IT assets in their portfolio. Research indicates that in the absence of a clearly defined IT strategy, corporations are at risk of mismanaging their IT resources ' over-committing IT resources in certain areas of the value chain, while other areas are starved of IT support. Developing an IT strategy is a best practice, but it is only the first in a series of steps designed to enable a firm to better manage the cost of IT operations to achieve an increased return on its IT investment....

Predictability, manageability, risk, cost efficiency, and alignment have always been key concerns of the IT executive. Today, with the rapid growth in enterprise storage and the various supporting technologies, the storage manager has similar concerns exacerbated by the ever increasing complexity and cost of storage management, even while storage hardware costs are reducing. What is needed is a discipline to contain and even reduce storage management costs while aligning with and improving service levels to the business units. The Storage Management Lifecycle (SML) framework provides such a discipline. Based on experience with over 400 engagements in the enterprise storage environment, the SML framework has been under continuous development and now reflects industry standards and best practice in effective storage management....

Ongoing data management is where compliance lives or dies. While compliance is often presented as an administrative burden with little opportunity for creating value for the corporation, it should not be so easily dismissed. Recognizing that in the inherent value of information, compliance is more than just following the law; compliance is really about implementing best practices. In this paper, we present a model to help IT management build a checklist of compliance tasks. This involves four processes: data inventory, compliance readiness assessment, data protection policies, and ongoing data management....

As data volumes rise and retention periods increase, the appearance of 'better, faster and cheaper' storage infrastructure seems like an all-encompassing solution to control IT managers burgeoning storage costs. In this paper, we examine four dynamic forces that together shape storage costs. By layering these costs over a three-tiered model of storage infrastructure, we identify how IT managers can decide whether to target cost savings at lower tiers, or service quality and reliability at higher tiers of service. We conclude by advocating the adoption of company-wide storage strategies that specify how purchasing decisions should be made and what issues within the storage environment will trigger those decisions....

What is ILM? What isn it? Why does a CIO need to know about it? How is it implemented? What are the potential ' realistic ' benefits? What are some of the pitfalls to watch for? And what about vendor claims about ILM-based technologies? Are they real? These are just a few of the questions that Jim Damoulakis, GlassHouse CTO, and Dave Ellard, GlassHouse senior vice president and former CIO of EMC and Boston Scientific, address in this white paper. Their hope is that CIOs will use this as a springboard for a discussion and evaluation of their existing IT and business practices. ...

The widespread adoption of networked-based storage, particular storage area networks (SANs) has provided many benefits including improving utilization and better access to data within corporate environments. However, this transition from captive storage tethered to servers to todays independent networked devices has largely taken place under the radar of corporate security groups whose traditional focus has been on areas such as intrusion detection/prevention and protection of host systems. As a result, the storage infrastructure ' both primary storage and especially secondary storage like backup and archives ' is likely to be a company's Achilles' heel when it comes to security....

A recent survey conducted by GlassHouse reveals that more than half of the companies surveyed have no formal policies for protecting enterprise data from theft or tampering. In fact, 54% of storage managers from more than 300 companies around the world responded that they had no documented procedures for protecting enterprise data and 70% of executives rated their storage departments data security as only fair or poor. ...

A recent survey conducted by GlassHouse reveals that companies from regional to multinational will spend 2006 wringing more efficiency from their data storage infrastructures and holding down costs through information lifecycle management (ILM) rather than improving security....

Professor Paul P.Tallon of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College assesses the viability and economics of indefinite email storage. We argue that indefinite storage is not a panacea ' data must still be classified by value with an eye towards later discovery. We offer a working hypothesis to allow firms to look past the technical aspects of indefinite storage to instead focus on how indefinite storage can provide value to the corporation....

In this paper, Professor Paul P.Tallon of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, contrasts physical and IT supply chains, culminating in a series of recommendations for how the IT supply chain can be made more efficient and responsive to the needs of users. ...

CIOs struggle with a set of challenges that refuse to be solved easily. One underlying issue in most organizations is that IT is poorly aligned with the company's overall business processes and mission. Despite huge ongoing investments in enterprise applications, compute and storage capacity, network bandwidth, and security, many CIOs continue to experience low utilization rates, limited or unmeasurable ROI, and an inability to deploy critical applications rapidly....

Many organizations have had enormous success implementing virtualization strategies based on server consolidation, achieving significant ROI in the process. Initially, these organizations were motivated by short-term consolidation benefits. Now it's time for these organizations to take the next step by leveraging the infrastructures they've built to provide ALL the benefits virtualization can offer....

The benefits of server virtualization have been extolled for quite some time. Over the past year, the success stories have been piling up. It's time to make virtualization and its associated auto-provisioning technologies a strategic component of your infrastructure....

You know server virtualization is a good idea. The benefits are significant, both from a capability and financial standpoint. Yet many organizations have not yet moved to take advantage of this technology on a large scale. The purpose of this paper is to both illustrate the benefits of moving quickly to build your VMware ESX-centric infrastructure, and to suggest a framework that will help you to accelerate your deployments....