Less cost, time and worry for your customers;
more opportunities for you
We’ve all been asked to do more with less at some point and, with the rapidly changing IT landscape, comes the pressure for greater efficiency while cutting costs. According
to research giant Gartner, increasing data center efficiency is the
number one action item on many CEOs’ and CIOs’ to-do lists
for 2011. And one of the key technologies that will have the most
impact is virtualization.
Cisco’s Connected World Report says the vast majority of companies
(67%) have virtualized fewer than half of their production servers.
This means virtualization still offers a long runway of opportunities.
Kevin Fitzsimmons, VMware solution manager for Vicom
Computer Services, a Long Island, NY solutions provider, is very
familiar with what matters most to his clients. “We’re finding
that virtualization is top of mind for everyone. In fact, we’re
seeing a lot of people move from dabbling in virtualization to full
implementation, including business continuity and disaster recovery,
simplifying their IT infrastructure, controlling server sprawl and
managing complexity.
Venture Technologies President Gerard Gibert can attest to that and
sees the greatest impact occurring in the SMB segment. “Customers
are at all different levels of evolution,” he says, “with more SMB
folks realizing how going virtual can help their businesses succeed.”
Dispel Your Fear Of Flying
Some resellers are apprehensive about virtualization taking away
their bread and butter.Fitzsimmons explains that after your client’s data center is
virtualized, VARs still have opportunities to prosper. “The gold
is in the services, the storage, servers and networking it drives. As
people get deeper into virtualization, there are more and more
products that can be offered to end users.”
VMware points this out as a 15:1 ratio. For every dollar in virtual
servers resellers sell, they get $15 in drag from other products and
the managed services they offer. For instance, by consolidating
five of your customer’s servers into one larger server with a Virtual
Machine (VM) layer, you can add SAN or NAS virtual storage
to give them unlimited capacity and yourself the opportunity to
provide pay-for-use remote managed data monitoring and shared
storage that you house for them.
Increasingly customers are getting interested in cloud-based
architectures, especially a private cloud that can give them access
to more applications anywhere, anytime, thereby making doing
business more efficient than ever.
Global IT specialist and solutions provider, Dimension Data’s
National Practice Director for Data Centre Solutions John
Meyer says, “When consulting with clients interested in cloud
computing, we let them know that virtualization is the first step
on that journey.”
Doug Smith, VMware’s vice president of Global Partner Strategy
and Operations, explains that a private cloud enables your
customers to manage infrastructure and maximize the utilization
of resources, consume standardized infrastructure on-demand
out of a service catalog, and provide network security and
workload protection.
“VMware believes a private cloud is an
infrastructure approach in the gradual
evolution toward delivering IT as a service,”
says Smith.
IT as a Service (ITaaS) furthers your customers’
virtualization efficiencies while providing you
with abundant possibilities, including:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers
compute resources, operating systems,
networking and storage to client
environments.
- Storage as a Service (StaaS) offers storage
provisioning from pooled resources for
use as application datasets, backup and
content repositories.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers a
turnkey, managed application offering for
direct use, typically hosted
By offering ITaaS, you expand the breadth
of your business while helping your
customers make the most efficient use of
their time and resources.
Soar To The Cloud
As a leader in virtualization, VMware has
reached out to other partners to address
cloud opportunities. “The VCE Coalition,
made up of VMware, Cisco and EMC,
represents an unprecedented level of
collaboration in development, services
and partner enablement that reduces
risk in the infrastructure virtualization
journey to the cloud,” says James Russell,
solutions account executive with Tech
Data’s AIS Cisco Solutions Goup. “Vblock
Infrastructure Packages deliver a complete
IT infrastructure that integrates best-ofbreed
virtualization, networking, compute,
storage, security and management
technologies. The three companies have
invested in an industry-first collaborative
delivery of seamless customer support with
end-to-end vendor accountability.”
Venture Technologies’ Gibert has found
that the VCE Coalition makes sense for
many of his clients. “We worked with a
pretty standard data center of more than
20 physical servers and, after defining their
present and future needs, we suggested that
they go with the VCE-Coalition solution.”
Venture Technology’s solution included
Cisco’s Unified Computing System
(UCS) servers, EMC’s storage solutions
and VMware’s vSphere software. “Our
customers were immediately happy with
this solution, and the time and money it
saved them. We built a client relationship
for life.”
VMware’s Smith explains “VMware
vSphere includes a number of components
that transform industry-standard hardware
into a shared, main-frame-like resilient
environment with built-in service level
controls for all applications.” VMware
vSphere encompasses infrastructure
services that virtualize server, storage and
network resources to allocate them for
on-demand applications based on the
business need; application services that
provide built-in service level controls to
all applications running on the vSphere
platform; and VMware vCenter Server
that provides a central point of control for
virtualization management.
Microsoft believes that helping customers
adopt cloud computing and being
technology agnostic allows resellers to act
as a trusted advisor to their customers.
Microsoft’s General Manager of U.S. Server
and Cloud Business Shanen Boettcher
explains, “A Microsoft virtualization
solution based on the Hyper-V platform
and Windows Server enables resellers
greater access to follow-on projects, such
as integrated management, operating
system and application upgrades, desktop
virtualization and business process
optimization projects.”
Microsoft’s solution includes Windows
Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which provides
the control and management of physical
and virtual servers, and applications using
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine
Manager. “Microsoft also provides back-up
and recovery, IT process automation and
application health monitoring capabilities
using additional products within the
Microsoft System Center suite so that
organizations can optimize IT operations
and service delivery,” adds Boettcher.
Senior Information Systems Consultant
for James Moore and Company Curtis
McAllister shares the reason his team offers
Microsoft’s products. “Windows Server
2008 with Hyper-V technology is key to our
success with live migration and spillover. It’s
so easy for our customers to use since it is
built on a Microsoft platform.”
John Sandy, James Moore and Company’s
information systems consulting manager,
came to a client’s rescue by switching them
to Microsoft Hyper-V when their system
crashed. “The applications can be moved
easily between servers, creating a reliable
business continuity plan. Plus, Microsoft
Licensing is suited for server/storage
upgrade deployments, which can save
customers money.”
Ensure A Soft Landing
In the past, explaining the benefits of
virtualization was considered a technologyfocused
discussion, but with the bigger
picture encompassing energy efficiency as
well, the group of influencers and decision
makers expands to include those higher up.
It’s up to VARs to help these less technically
savvy individuals to fully understand the
benefits and savings that can be realized by
investing in virtualization.
Many vendors agree that it’s less about
telling and more about showing, and
they’ve made it easy to demonstrate true
ROI to your customers. Using vendorprovided,
easy-to-use ROI calculation tools,
you can assess your customer’s current IT
infrastructure and compare it to industrystandard
reference data providing analysis
and decision support modeling. This can
help them clearly see the cost savings they
will receive by deploying virtualization,
making it easy to understand the logic of
their investment.
When speaking about virtualization to his
clients, Sandy sums it up this way, “Instead
of letting IT manage you, you need to
manage your IT.”
“Adopting a virtual data center can be
intimidating for some business owners,”
says Tech Data’s Vice President and General
Manager of Advanced Infrastructure
Solutions, Chuck Bartlett. “The Tech Data
AIS team provides resellers with the help
they need to ensure their clients make the
best decisions.”
To understand the real-world efficiencies
of virtualization, VARs can demonstrate
solutions to their customers in the
Tech Data Technology Solutions Center.
This technology lab is equipped with
servers, storage and virtualization solutions
from a variety of vendors so resellers can
help their customers find the best fit for
their organization.
Along with our vendor partners,
Tech Data offers training for those
interested in making the most of this
virtualization opportunity. “Tech Data’s
AIS team can help with everything from
virtualization education to providing
you with the right products to suit your
clients’ needs to marketing support and
financial resources,” says Bartlett. “You
can transform your clients’ businesses by
transforming their data centers.”
