Most organisations today are reliant in one way or another upon their IT infrastructure to conduct their day-to-day business, in many cases operating critical business services across it.
The drive to integrate numerous business functions continues at pace. Functions such as integrated video, voice and data transmission, multimedia presentations, mobile access and e-commerce play an important role in increasing productivity and profitability.
Unified Communications, Mobility, Virtualisation, Convergence and Workspace Management are all buzz words that continue to reverberate around the industry and push the boundaries of an organisations network, revolutionising everything from the data centre to business processes.
Solutions in the field: Application Traffic Management provide web content and applications for the user constantly, securely and quickly. They also ensure that sufficient bandwidth for critical business applications are available at any time. Users with very high bandwidth requirements can reduce the number of connections between their storage systems and computers by means of IP backbone technologies and increase throughput as well as reliability, availability and scalability. This lowers overall costs.
Server-based applications enable companies to centralise their IT systems and offer their employees and customers fast and secure access to data, services and applications. This technology has high growth potential in terms of productivity and cost effectiveness.
There is also a growing trend in the direction of convergent services such as Voice Over IP and video conferencing. This means not only convergence between voice and data, but between communication media such as voicemail, e-mail, fax and messaging. They make it necessary to realise voice and data applications in one network.
To keep pace, today's infrastructure needs to be flexible, sophisticated, intelligent and constantly evolving, able to handle vast amounts of information of all types - data, video and voice, being accessed at any time, from any location. This, coupled with new initiatives around "green" IT, places completely new demands on the networks of the future.
COMPUTERLINKS e-Business division focus is on the dynamic area of intelligent IP-based infrastructure solutions. Through our vendor partnerships, we provide a portfolio of products for today's demanding network and application environments.
Our portfolio includes technologies that address growing demands in the fields of Voice Over IP, application optimisation, bandwidth management, network monitoring, end to end application delivery, workspace management, datacentre management and virtualisation.
By partnering with a combination of innovative and market leading vendors the e-Business division has built, and continues to build, a compelling portfolio of products that can be sold to address a specific point of pressure or combined to deliver an integrated infrastructure solution.
The e-Business division currently incorporates the following vendor partners.
The division assists partners by providing a full-service package of technical, sales and marketing support, practical training and efficient logistics.
1. University education or the education of life, which do you consider to be more important? My time at university I would say ranks as one of the best. I learnt a lot; like how many pints of purple it takes before I couldn't walk let alone breath and that a bottle of cheap red wine doesn't sit very well when followed by several pints of lager! But seriously, university helped me to develop my skills and knowledge in my chosen field that I feel has benefited me in every job I've had since. With regard to gaining an 'education of life', I feel that living away at uni does help achieve this too; developing both your life skills and social skills. So to answer the question, I would say a university education is more important.
2. If you had a million pounds what would you spend it on? Erm, this is a tough one. Firstly I wouldn't tell the wife, as it would be gone before I had a chance to spend it! I think I would be quite sensible really… Pay off my mortgage, rent the property out and buy a new place closer to work, give some to my family, donate some to charity and buy a new car. The remaining, if any, I would save…
3. If you could meet someone living or dead, who would it be and why? Tommy Cooper, Ronnie Barker and Paul Merton… quite simply comedy legends!
4. What is the most interesting trip you've ever taken, and why? Whenever I visit the Lake District, it's such a stunning part of the world. Changes in its weather and the time of year you go have such a dramatic effect on the area making it such an interesting and beautiful place to visit.
5. McDonalds or Burger King? Burger King - XL Bacon Double Cheese Burger every time!
6. What was the last book you read? The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine - By Benjamin Wallace
7. What did you want to be when you were 12 years old? PE Teacher
8. If you were the boss for a day what would you change? I'd change the parking situation, those who live more than 30miles from work get priority on spaces and of course as I'm the boss I'd have a space left free for me!
9. How did you end up working for COMPUTERLINKS? Before joining COMPUTERLINKS I worked as a Product Manager at Gem Distribution for 3 ½ years. I felt it was time for a change and started the long process of updating the CV and sending it out to numerous agencies and recruitment sites. After a few months of applying like mad I received a call from Liz at The Greenhill Group to discuss an opportunity at COMPUTERLINKS. 2 interviews later I was offered the E-business Product Manager Role.
10. Where is the one place you would like to visit before you die and why? Canada, especially the Rockies - The Canadian landscape is stunningly beautiful and feeling on your own in the wilderness would be fantastic.
11. Marmite love it or hate it? I'd rather give myself paper cuts than eat this stuff - it's Satan's spread! - You could also say I hate it!
12. Pub session or meal with a nice bottle of wine, explain why? I do like going for a meal with a nice bottle of wine but I'd prefer a pub session followed by a cheeky curry and a few Cobras.
Virtualisation Piece
Currently one of the hottest topics in the IT marketplace, virtualisation has opened up new and exciting avenues of expertise (and, ultimately, revenue) for the entire IT channel. Many billions of dollars have been pocketed by the likes of VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft and many others off the back of a) something incredibly simple, if we're being honest with ourselves and b) something incredibly old (in IT years that is). Virtualisation, as a term, has come to mean many different things these days, but, for the purposes of this article, I am talking about server virtualisation.
Virtualisation is hardly revolutionary, even if it still seems fresh and shiny to a lot of us. You wouldn't manufacture a carriage for each and every person wanting to travel on a train, you wouldn't provide a drawer for each and every piece of cutlery you wanted to store and you wouldn't send an articulated lorry from London to Inverness with one box on it. So why does it appear to have taken so long for these principles to be applied to servers? Whose idea was it to dedicate a whole server to one single application anyway, when that server should supposedly be capable of "changing the way you do business" or whatever the latest vendor marketing catchphrase happens to be?
Well, IT vendors have been their own worst enemies, to a point. Software having been as infuriatingly unreliable as it is useful, administrators found out many years ago to their cost, that the more you ask a server to do, the more likely it is to fail in one or more of those tasks. Install just one application per server and you give it a fighting chance.
Unlike that piece of cutlery, whose single and only function in this world is to reduce the size of your steak and chips so you can eat it with some semblance of manners, software has a thousand and one things to do, on top of delivering your users the information they want from that application. Added to that, unlike software applications, a fork doesn't have to deal with millions of people all over the world thinking up increasingly ingenious ways to kill it. So, in essence, the more you cut down on what a server is expected to provide, the higher the likelihood it'll provide it.
I am being overly simplistic here, of course. But my point is that, despite the fact virtualisation solutions were invented a long time ago, up until the last few years, there were two main reasons they never really took off.
Firstly, software applications and operating systems weren't technically capable of ignoring their neighbours on a server; each application was like a spoilt child. It wanted all the hardware resources to itself and if anything else tried to butt in, it complained bitterly, then sulked, then went home, taking its football with it.
Secondly, tin got cheaper. So cheap, in fact, that it didn't really make a lot of difference whether you had racks and racks of servers doing very little. Tin is still cheap today, perhaps as cheap as it will ever be, but the big differences now are that organisations are coming under increased pressure to reduce waste and run their departments in a responsible, ecological fashion and, of course, in the last couple of years, the costs of running that cheap tin have sky-rocketed.
The development of the modern hypervisor and improvements in general software architecture changed some of this. Although IBM developed virtualisation technology back in the 1960s, long before VMWare brought out their ESX product, it is widely accepted that VMWare were the founders of modern virtualisation techniques. The ESX hypervisor effectively stood as a sort of strict parent in the midst of those spoilt children, making sure none of them got too obnoxious. The hypervisor sat between the mechanics of a server and the software running on it, in this case an operating system, dishing out commands back and forth.
Then along came Professor Ian Pratt from Cambridge University and the Xen project. They decided to make a hypervisor the way they would have done all along if anybody had actually thought about it properly. Rather than dishing out these commands yourself (emulation), why not get the component parts to talk to each other directly (paravirtualisation)? The chipset knows it's being virtualised and the operating systems are aware too. Everything runs quicker and is more stable. In fact, this solution was so successful, Citrix agreed to shell out 500 million dollars for it in 2007.
Software vendors are also starting to play their part. Making applications act less like spoilt children was probably their duty but, increasingly now, they are also adapting them to better suit virtualised environments. Add in the soaring costs of electricity and a general malaise in the global economy (I refuse to succumb to sensationalism and mention the R word), IT Directors now owe it to themselves and their businesses to look at virtualisation, simply as a cost-saving mechanism, irrespective of the IT management advantages it offers.
Companies such as Citrix (who, arguably, have been "virtualising" applications with their Presentation Server product, now XenApp, for over 15 years) are taking the fundament that is server virtualisation and building on it - to great effect. Citrix call it the Dynamic Data Centre. By this, they mean adapting what is currently little more than a static data repository into a constantly-changing, ever-flexible delivery hub for information and data.
Instead of server farms running all day and all night, requiring irritating downtime (albeit scheduled) when maintenance needs carrying out plus always running the same workload (i.e. applications), Citrix products enable those servers to be put into production as and when required - and, if you so wish, with a different workload on them each time. Automating all of this according to usage metrics and applying the same principles to the desktop, as well as the data centre, are the next exciting steps on a journey that started almost 50 years ago but is only now becoming a reality.
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