One of the best papers that I have read on the strategy and vision behind the Citrix Delivery Center.  I suggest everyone involved with the Citrix technology read this.

You can check it out on Thomas Koetzing’s web site.  This paper was written by Nico Luedemann.

I just wanted to share this great video of Gus being introduced at Citrix Synergy.  I love his energy and passion for this technology….if you see him at Synergy stop by and say hello to him.

Catch the video here

Do you remember the end of the last post in this series?  I stated that “even chairmen have to seduce, cajole, and convince to get things done”?  It is so true if you want to accomplish your goal of getting application delivery and/or virtualization discussions to the highest levels of your company.  What I’m going to talk about and what you need to do is build a coalition.

By building a coalition you take your individual authority and you transform it into a collective authority.  The people in your company that will try to knock you down and dismiss you will have a tougher time doing so if you have that collective authority.  My initiatives within HP, I took the time to build the right coalition of management outside my normal “chain of command”.  The few dozen folks that I had put together changed a corporate direction.  The fact that we were organized and we were speaking from conviction was a powerful message to the upper layers of managment and the C-level folks.

Another reason to build a coalition was that my endeavor, like most, didn’t fit neatly into any of the existing organizational “boxes”.  The Citrix environments that were inside the company crossed many business unit boundaries and I need a broad cross-section to make sure that I got my Point of View and “Manifesto/proposal” into the right folks.  I think the folks that I had brought into my little revolution shared the same revolutionary tendencies that I did no matter wherever their current organizational home was.  My mentor took a look at the group that I had put together and he told me that it looked like an ink blot that had bled all over the formal org chart.  He was right.

Another thing that my mentor told me was that I wasn’t the only frustrated, visionary in the company.  This was so true.  I was quickly finding that I wasn’t the only that “got it”.  So how did I find these other revolutionaries?  I asked myself, “who was in my immediate vicinity that I had already been talking to about my ideas?”  Here is what else I looked at:

• were there any staff groups or teams in the company that might be inclined toward my point of view?
• were there any cross-company initiatives that I wasn’t aware of that I could tap into?
• who (across the company) might have a stake in the success of my endeavor?
• were there any internal newsgroups or e-mail distribution lists I could hijack?

Here are some other things that I did. 

• Since Sharepoint sites were easy to put up, I started a Sharepoint site where I could post my “manifesto/proposal”. 
• I started to build an email list of some of the people that I thought would share my views. 
• I created an online forum to where others could share their perspectives and help me to fine-tune my “manifesto/proposal”. 
• I identified some outside experts at our partner, Citrix, that could lend the cause credibility. 
• I created opportunities to work together with the people of my network on some ad hoc projects that I would pull in.

Let me tell you this fact, coalitions get stronger when they focus on a common task.  I looked for other involvement opportunities.  I went to the yearly partner-only conference for Citrix partners, Citrix Summit, and spent quality time with my HP colleagues.

Take this one piece of advice.  Stay underground for a while, at least initially.  Use your network of people to build and strengthen your business case and identify opportunities for early wins.  I saw first hand that as people within my network started to talk to others in their immediate vicinity, the “virus” of my point of view started to spread.  Remember to not get impatient.  If I were to map the curve of my endeavor, it was flat at first and then as the network of people I started to spread the virus we soared.  By that time we started to get the attention of top managment.  With that, don’t be too quick to present your top management with a “go/no go” decision.  I remember this thing my grandfather used to tell me when I was younger and we would go hunting on his farm; “it’s easy to shoot one pheasant out of the sky, but it’s harder to bring down a flock”.  I took that statement to heart, I kept on building my “flock” of people that were thinking the way I was.

As I close this section of the series, let me share with you this little tidbit of information that I learned.  You, like I, have an advantage that top management often doesn’t.  Most of the people that report to them are forced to think like them and don’t think about anything else then what they are told to think about.  These type of people fight to stay alive in corporate life.  People that I put together and you put together fight to win.  Continue to build your coalition and inspire the other revolutionaries in the company.  If you build strength from below, top management will ultimately come to you.  I guarantee that.

In the next part in this series, I’m going to talk about finding the right person in your organization that can say yes and make it stick.

Alessandro Perilli over at virtualization.info posts that the rumor that has been floating around for a while now might be gaining momentum.  What is it?  that EMC may spin off VMware.  This has been floating around the street for a while now, but hasn’t really gotten legs.  I called some old friends from my days in NYC and talked a little bit about this.  They confirm what Alessandro mentions that any kind of spin off would be not likely until after Jan 09.  They mentioned that they were hearing rumors of some consolidation in the storage industry, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens. 

You can read Alessandro’s post here.  You can read the Bloomberg article about EMC here.

Cheers

For those of you that didn’t get a chance to see the webcast live the other day, you can catch the replay of that webcast here.

Cheers

My colleagues over at Saugatech Research Services have posted this research review of the HP/EDS merger.  This is by far one of the best overviews and analysis of the merger.

What Is Hapening?  Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) announced on May 12, 2008 that it reached an agreement to acquire IT consultancy Electronic Data Systems (EDS). At first glance, this acquisition is strongly reminiscent of IBM�s acquisition of Price-Waterhouse Coopers Consulting (PwCC). However, assuming that the deal is completed, the result should be very different. The acquisition of EDS has the potential to elevate HP to be a dominant vendor in the growing markets of SaaS, hosting, and cloud computing. In addition, if the assimilation is managed properly, HP could multiply its strengths in user data centers for services such as systems integration.

Why Is It Happening?  Saugatuck sees EDS as a solid fit within HP’s portfolio, and an enabler of significant growth in two strategic markets for HP � data centers, and cloud-based IT.

HP has been seeking to renew and expand its core IT “legacy” since shortly after Mark Hurd was appointed CEO in 2004. Faced with a commoditized cash-cow printer and supplies market, HP has reinvigorated its PC business to become the worldwide best-selling laptop and PC brand according to several market-tracking sources.

At the same time the PC business was being re-established, HP understood that the PC market will continue to be driven inexorably toward commodity status. As a result, HP recognized the need for positioning for long term, sustainable growth. EDS potentially enables that by vastly increasing HP’s ability to serve user enterprise data centers.

EDS� combination of skills, technologies and massive scale also boosts HP’s ability to serve the rapidly-emerging “cloud computing” marketplace, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-on-demand, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and other host-based services, as well as the broad and deep range of consulting and managed services required to make cloud computing happen for providers and users.

From its inception as General Motors’ “data center”, EDS has been a data-center-centric consulting and services firm. EDS is well known for a skilled staff and dependable services. This reputation is sometimes summarized by EDS being referred to as the “last of the white shirt/black tie IT firms.”  While EDS has developed, and delivers, services in a wide range of technologies and markets, its core competency is still in the design, development, delivery and support of massive, complex, and powerful systems. EDS has very strong positions in markets with massive-scale IT, including governments, telecoms, financial services, and engineering/R&D organizations.

It�s also important to note that the price is right. The announced acquisition price of $13.9B is only slightly higher than EDS’ current market capitalization, and is only 63 percent of EDS’ revenue 2007 run rate of $22.1B. EDS, in short, looks like a bargain for HP � but one with notable flaws, especially its lackluster profitability and growth in recent years (well below what HP has been achieving recently). EDS suffers from relatively high sales costs and other overhead costs compared to leading competitors. As such, we find it hard to believe that HP won’t significantly restructure and cut EDS headcount to better align to broader corporate profit targets and strategic mandates.

Market Impact:  In our opinion, HP’s acquisition of EDS should be noted for its potential, simultaneous impacts on two very different markets � ” old IT” and “cloud computing” � rather than on possible “culture class” issues. It is in this combination of disparate opportunities that HP+EDS is most likely to compete directly with IBM.

The “old IT” aspect:  There is tremendous revenue growth in legacy data centers, from maintenance and operation to upgrades and improvements. Complex data centers are unlikely to go away, or get less complex. EDS gives HP a big boost in presence and revenue in old-style, massive systems integration and consulting that can be bundled with HP’s established data center hardware and services offerings � not to mention HP’s data center management software offerings.

One example is in support of federal / central governments, where decades-long, worldwide governmental IT re-architecting and expansion is just beginning � and where EDS is firmly entrenched. Similarly, EDS is one of the larger providers of IT infrastructure, software and services to telecom providers worldwide. Many large, EDS-written billing systems run on EDS-designed infrastructures that are managed by EDS consultants, often outsourced to EDS data centers.

Cloud computing. The future of IT growth is in the cloud � the provision of all aspects of IT infrastructure and software, and business process functionality, as network-based, on-demand and/or subscription services. If HP can make the acquisition work � and there is no guarantee that it can � Saugatuck sees HP becoming one of the more powerful players in cloud computing.  The HP / EDS combination has the potential to become a key provider of platforms, software development, infrastructure, hosting, and integrative services to providers of all types of cloud-based IT and business process functionality.

You can check out the report here.  You need to register on the site for this report. 

Not that I’m a Sun fan, but they are making a good push.  I asked myself this same question when I saw this article, “What does Sun have to do with virtualization?” From reading the article, the answer is “Plenty”. Here’s an update on how Sun’s virtualization technologies are changing and stacking up in the age of VMware, and how open source fits into Sun’s virtualization plans.

Read the article here at the source.

Daniel Feller over at Citrix posted this great article about virtualizing XenApp environments.  In my ten years of architecting XenApp infrastructures, I get this question just as often as Daniel.  If I had a dollar for every time I had that question, I wouldn’t be working or writing this post…

Here is part of Daniel’s post:  Enjoy!!!

Being a Sr. Architect within Citrix for almost a decade, I’ve been asked by more Citrix administrators than I could ever count, wanting to know if they should virtualize their XenApp environment.  My typical response, which is common for a consultant, was “It depends.”   Unfortunately, this is not an easy yes or no question.  XenApp is a unique beast in the delivery center.  Users don’t interact indirectly with a XenApp server like they do other systems (database, web, etc). Instead, users work on the servers directly.  And if the servers have been designed appropriately, they should reach their memory limit or CPU limit.

Let’s say, for example, your business is to write screenplays for “The Simpsons” and you have a set of XenApp servers hosting a single application for storyboarding.  This application is critical to the business.  On average, throughout the day, the CPU is 60% utilized and the memory is 80% utilized (4GB on Windows 2003 Server).  What advantage would you gain by virtualizing this system?  The hypervisor WILL take resources.  Chances are slim you would be able to host a second virtual server on this physical system.  In this case, I don’t see where server virtualization fits. You could add more memory and additional CPU sockets, but you are spending more money just to try to save money.  Of course there are some XenApp servers that are underutilized.  Why?  Was it an improper design? Or was there a business reason? With underutilized severs, we do have the opportunity to reduce the XenApp hardware footprint somewhat.  But in my opinion, server virtualization is trying to solve a small problem in the XenApp world, consolidation.  With proper hardware design, this can be mitigated. I have seen, based on my experience as a consultant and an administrator, the bigger challenge is management, availability and flexibility.

Read the rest of the post here

This sounds awesome and I know this is going to be great way to get everyone more intimately involved with the event.  Great thinking folks!!!

Do you want to record some of the fun and interesting things you will see during Citrix Synergy conference and share it with your friends and colleagues? We will be handing out 5 flip cameras every day for 3 days (May 20, 2008 - May 22, 200 that’s 15 first come first serve people.  All you have to do is record 1 or more video clips less than 5 min long and give the Flip video back to me. The flip video can record an hour of video.

Read the rest of the post from Vishal here

So in the last post I showed you the first few pictures that I draw during my conversations with folks that either want to know “why application delivery” or for folks that have an application delivery infrastructure, but are only doing XenApp.  The next steps here are to now tell the story of “delivery” instead of “deployment”.  At this level of conversation we are wrapping in Citrix technologies like, Provisioning Server, XenDesktop, XenServer, XenApp, etc.  At the end of this conversation the one thing that you want to get from your management would be the buy-in to get an assessment done.  That way you can make sure that you have a holistic view of your infrastructure and in the case of an already existing environment you aren’t carrying over any problems from the old to the new.

The one thing I want to point out here is that you need a good sized whiteboard.  I like to keep all the drawings on the board so that everyone can see the progression of the discussion.  What you will also find along the way here is that your audience is going to ask a lot of questions.  This is what I love about whiteboarding.  It really gets folks engaged and talking.  You’ll be amazed at how easy the ideas and feedback will flow when you get going.

So this is the point in the conversation that I evolve the conversation into the “delivery” section.  This is really where it starts to get cool.  I start by writing the word “DELIVERY” and drawing this picture but first without the words in the boxes.  So just leave the boxes blank for now:

 So in order to drive the point home about getting out the “old way” of doing things (distributed computing) to more of a delivery architecture the above picture points out a few things.  First, to centralize as many of the applications and desktops as possible, with as few standard images as possible close to your datacenter.  From there you deliver these dynamically, on-demand to end users.

So once you have the picture above and you talk about centralizing and delivering apps and desktops from a central location, explain what you mean.  How?  Easy.  In the first box closer to the “application icon” you will write in “App WL” for “application workload”.  Explain to your audience that what you now have is a standard catalog with a “master” image of all of your application workloads (Exchange, SAP, SQL, etc) that can be delivered dynamically to either your physical or virtual servers.  Of course, I’ll tell you to virtualize as many servers as possible, but by following this thought the rest of the way through you now have a very highly efficient datacenter, even for those servers you can’t virtualize.  Make sense? 

The next box you are going to write in “App UI” for “application user interface”.  For Windows apps this will be the delivery mechanism will be XenApp.  So from here you can either be “virtualized” on the server or streamed to the client and virtualized there for mobile and offline users.  For the web applications your delivery mechanism needs to ensure that the applications are optimized for best perfomance, security, and efficiency.  This delivery mechanism would be NetScaler.  You can better illustrate that concept by drawing a line across the App UI box and on the top of the line writing Win and on the bottom writing Web.

The next box you will label Desktop.  Here is where I love explaining the beauty of Provisioning Server, XenDesktop, and XenServer.  The whole goal here is to separate the delivery of applications and desktops.  By just moving the desktops into the datacenter with all of its application hard-coded in we don’t solve any problems.  My best practice way to do this is to deliver a pristine XP or Vista desktop and then delivery the applications into that desktop from separate application delivery controllers.  You benefit from two things here: 

1. you eliminate compatibility problems
2. you create a more stable, high performance environment

Finally you will draw an arrow to a box labeled “PC” next to the user icon on the previous drawing.  This now illustrates the “delivery network” that will be optimized to deliver apps and desktops to any user around the world in the most efficient manner possible.

The next thing here is to talk about management and “orchestration” of workflows with the necessary tools.  The tool to create those workflows is the Citrix Workflow Studio that I highlighted in an earlier post.  Integrating the individual management consoles for the different components of this type of solution with what you might already have in place from HP, IBM, Microsoft, etc.  You can illustrate that by adding the already existing picture you drew like this:

 Citrix Workflow Studio will allow you to “orchestrate” communications between all the different Citrix products more easily and will make it easier to integrate into your exisitng systems management solutions.

So now you have made your case and management has bought in.  You now need the next steps.  The next steps involve what I like to call a “design discovery”.  You could also call this an Infrastructure Assessment.  Your local partner should be able to help you with this or you can engage Citrix Consulting Services to do this for you.  Why do you want to do an assessment?  This gives you a chance to understand the strengths of your current application delivery environment, the risks and opportunities inherent in your current application delivery approach, how your company strategic goals map to a new approach to application delivery and to roadmap the delivery of applications for both the short-term and the long-term.

I hope this has helped you better formulate a way to get more buy-in from management to expand or implement an application delivery infrastructure.

Let me know your thoughts.