Highlights from IBM Analyst Insights 2013

By Torsten Volk on Nov 22, 2013 12:47:41 PM

As every year, IBM invited the analyst community to Stamford, CT, for a deep dialogue on today's most important topics in enterprise IT. Here is a short overview for everyone interested in IBM's current world view.

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War of the Stacks: OpenStack vs. CloudStack vs. vCloud vs. Amazon EC2

By Torsten Volk on Oct 11, 2013 11:46:00 AM

When it comes to cloud technologies, discussions often get passionate or even heated. It’s all about the “war of the stacks”, where much Cool Aid is dispensed to get customers to buy into the respective cult. This discussion reminds me of the old days of enterprise IT, where everything was about technology instead of business value. You either bought one thing or the other and then you were locked in for a half decade. Dark times.

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Dell’s Clean Slate Approach to Enterprise IT

By Torsten Volk on May 3, 2013 12:05:21 PM

Breaking News: Dell Acquires Enstratius to Further Complete Its Cloud Story

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The Software Defined Datacenter: Part 4 of 4 – Where We Are Today

By Torsten Volk on Mar 25, 2013 9:34:24 AM

Almost one year into the discussion about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), it is time to take inventory of the state of the discipline. As a reminder, the ultimate goal of the SDDC is to abstract and centralize the
management of compute, network, storage, operating systems, middleware and applications in order to dynamically place workloads where they can run in the most cost efficient, secure and compliant manner.

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The Software-Defined Datacenter: Part 3 of 4 – Questions and Battlefields

By Torsten Volk on Sep 24, 2012 8:58:53 AM

After talking about the “grand vision” of the Software Defined Datacenter (SDD) in part 1 of this series and discussing the individual components required to build out the SDD in part 2, this third part will be all about the three core challenges and controversies:

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EMA Radar for Workload Automation 2012 – Key Findings

By Torsten Volk on Jun 14, 2012 10:57:43 AM

During this year's research for the 2012 EMA Workload Automation (WLA) Radar Report, we encountered a number of very interesting core findings. These research results mostly originated from dozens of conversations with end customers, who have been using WLA software for many years and sometimes even for decades. WLA, by definition, is a mature discipline, as it started during the beginning of mainframe times, then became more complex when organizations adopted distributed computing, and today is faced with a new challenge: the cloud. Please take a look at what our research showed as the most important aspects of a modern WLA solution. The following vendors were included in the report: Arcana, ASCI, ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Cisco, Flux, MVP Systems, Network Automation, ORSYP, Stonebranch, UC4.

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IBM Pulse 2012: Visibility – Control – Automation

By Torsten Volk on Mar 28, 2012 8:42:01 AM

Every March, IBM invites customers and analysts to its annual Pulse user conference. This year, Pulse was all about the more efficient delivery of IT services, a concept that is usually referred to as "cloud". Since cloud has developed into a term that, due to its overuse, is often frowned upon, to say the least, it was great to see IBM try hard to demystify this elusive concept, backing it up with numerous case studies and customer testimonials. The fact that many of these case studies were not as polished as you so often see during this type of show, made the experience actually better. It became clear that these were real customers, implementing "cloud" to solve very specific corporate problems and while doing this, running into very specific IT problems. This is something that just happens when breaking new ground and it speaks for IBM's self confidence to not present only squeaky clean projects at its show.

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Workload Automation Trends and Predictions for 2012

By Torsten Volk on Jan 23, 2012 1:49:16 PM

IT as a Service is one of the hottest topics these days. In a nutshell, it entails the radical alignment of all IT disciplines around strategic business requirements. Instead of having to beg IT for resources and services, as many of us are accustomed to, we can now pick all the resources and services from an easy-to-use online catalog. Workload automation features are finally becoming part of this service catalog, allowing business users to trigger, monitor, and even repair essential job flows.

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Welcome

By Torsten Volk on Oct 31, 2011 9:36:44 AM

Welcome to my Blog on the latest trends in systems management. In this Blog, I will look at systems management from a business process perspective. The initial focus will lie on server virtualization management, cloud systems management and workload automation. Within this context, I will analyze and try to quantify the efficiency gains that the organization can realize by implementing systems management tools and processes. However, as systems management does not exist in a vacuum, it is essential to tie these findings together with the latest developments in neighboring disciplines such as configuration management systems, IT service management, process automation, security, networking, applications management etc.

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Points of Integration

By Dennis Drogseth on Nov 12, 2010 9:17:12 AM

Sometimes… OK most of the time …  the terms and words we use for “things” in service management are in themselves landmines. One of the worst culprits is of course the term “CMDB” which I like to compare to ‘The Holy Roman Empire” – which as H.G. Wells pointed out was neither “holy” nor “Roman” [...]

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