TRACK 1: CONSOLIDATION
Data center managers are under pressure to reduce the number of data centers within the company and to reduce the number of servers within each data center. How do you properly leverage the growing power of commodity hardware and still maintain a manageable infrastructure? How can you provide high performance and availability to diverse offices while achieving the benefits of centralization? These are the kinds of questions are addressed in this track.
Downloads included in this track:(click title to download slides)
Virtualization and Resource Utilization: Saving You Effort, Time and Money
Speaker: Andrew Kutz, University of Texas
Description: This presentation on VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and its resource management technologies demonstrates how virtualization enables and encourages proper resource utilization. It helps businesses reclaim wasted CPU cycles, wasted manual efforts and most importantly, wasted money. Andrew discussed how to handle potential spikes in growth by properly engineering servers to leverage CPU resources. He also dived into how to maximize resource utilization using VI3, introducing and explaining the dynamic resource scheduler (DRS), resource pools and high availability (HA). Finally, Andrew demystified some of the more advanced topics in VI3 such as resource shares, reservations and limits.
Consolidation: The Promises and the Dangers
Speaker: Lars Linden, GlassHouse Technologies, Inc.
Description: The demand for performance and availability guarantees to put real pressure on the infrastructure teams set expectations and develop effective peer to peer relationships with applications development teams and the business as a whole. The real struggle becomes with the balancing act between complexity and manageability. Assuming you can manage those divergent traits how will you measure the successful curbing the growth of data center space and server estates on an ongoing basis? This presentation addresses the following:
- How to assess the right balance of complexity and manageability in your consolidation efforts.
- What approaches work in developing meaningful metrics that help drive the right service demand behavior.
- The commoditization of data center hardware and the opportunities this presents in service offerings.
Today's Consolidation Trends in the Data Center
Speaker: Clay Ryder, The Sageza Group, Inc.
Description: An unabashed spending spree in the late 1990s left most, if not all, data centers with a hodge podge of IT infrastructure that was largely tactically deployed to meet immediate enterprise needs. As the bubble burst, budgets contracted, and arguably cooler headers began to prevail. The data center has been tasked with improving its overall efficiency and ROI while maintaining often disparate applications and resources that are the lifeblood of the enterprise. As a result, the need for consolidation and simplification within the data center has never been greater.
This session discusses the customer and marketplace drivers that are exhorting enterprises to reassess their data center initiatives and implement new strategies to simplify their infrastructure. Among the topics covered are server consolidation through scaling up versus scaling out, blade servers, and new opportunities in an "old" technology (mainframes), as well as storage rationalization through advances in networked storage, information lifecycle management, systems management, and the impact of new compliance regulations. A brief case study of a real world SMB consolidation endeavor is featured at the end of the presentation.
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Other tracks
Disaster Recovery Track
Power and Cooling Track
Virtualization Track
