Build vs. Buy Decisioning in IT Organizations

Many of our clients are constantly challenged by a growing number of technologies to manage and understand in order to support the growing needs of the business. Our clients have experienced this growth quite a bit recently with the amount of technological advancement in both hardware and software creating even more product options for IT. Coupled with the dynamic and rapidly changing business opportunities available, IT Leaders have a lot of opportunities to manage, which includes placing bets on where to build capability versus buy it as a service. In this case, it could be simply described as “EXaaS” or “Expertise as a Service”.

The breadth of technology needs for SMBs is not that different from the breadth of technology needs for the large enterprises. Many in the IT Organization get caught up in trying to be the one-stop shop for all of their firm’s needs. Often the list of technology skills required to run the organization (not to mention grow) gets longer annually while budgets get tighter and tighter. One of the most common struggles is trying to get the skills required for an ever expanding set of technologies from the current IT staff. Sending engineers away for a week to learn additional skills takes away from the capacity to manage and monitor the technical services required by the business. IT Leaders have to constantly juggle the time to train versus the time to fight. But how much time should they allocate for each? And what fighting methods (software and hardware) are we going to commit to mastering, and what fighting methods are we going to allow others to do for us?

Once an IT Leader sets a training ratio, the organization needs to figure out which technologies it will continue to deliver, and which it will source. There are a number of ways to think about this, but here are two methods for identifying which technologies you need to focus on with internal resources. If you plot the skills (or OEM or topics) against their annual frequency, some surprising insights come about. Firstly, that many technologies come up frequently, and there is a significant drop-off quickly. In Marketing and Statistics, this is called “The Long Tail”. The way it occurs in an IT Organization is needing to send an engineer to training to implement the newest version of a software that is only used by IT. An example might be SDS solutions like DataCore, or a Citrix XenApp Farm migration. The critical assumption on this graph is that the less frequently a technology is used or referenced, the less knowledge an engineer will have about the technology. I spoke Spanish (Catalan, actually) while I lived in Madrid, but within 2 years of arriving back in the US I could barely carry a conversation with the guy working in a Mexican restaurant. We all know that if you don’t use something regularly, you lose the capability rather quickly. And investing the resources for an engineer to learn a technology and then use that skill once for your organization is low cost, but low ROI as well. It’s also higher risk because your organization just became the guinea pig for your engineer to practice; not at all a great scenario all around.

The example I use is car maintenance. The activities you have to do very often and are low skill (change oil, refill windshield wiper fluid, refill brake fluids) you can and should do yourself. The activities that happen very infrequently and you may not have the right tools to do (head gasket replacement, control arm replacement, trans-axle replacement) you should find a car mechanic to take care of. It’s the activities in the middle of those extremes (e.g. spark plug replacement, brake pad replacement) that you will need to decide if you want to develop the talent to deliver those services. One of my close friends has restored Mustangs for years, and has personally done just about everything to service all of his various vehicles for the 20 years I have known him. Yet he will not replace brake pads or touch any part of the braking system himself on any car. He simply doesn’t want the responsibility.

Relating this to your IT Organization, you should determine what is needed to run the organization, and then make a framework for choosing which technologies you will invest the time and resources into mastering versus which technologies you will “rent” the skills. When you build your own graph for the IT Organization, it might looks something like this:

On the far left are the areas you want to have skills in-house. On the far-right are the skills and technologies you will want to rent. With a plotting of the needs of the organization like this you will quickly see the obvious. The trickier part will be choosing where that line should exist. In metaphorical terms, you will have to call everything Black or White. There will be obvious colors that are easy to see, but there will be many shades of Grey that you will have to choose a home for. Don’t worry, it may take 2-3 tires to get this correct, but if you make the effort consistently, your abilities will improve.

And the critical last step is to develop the budget for all of these internally developed skills as well as the costs to source them so the CFO has all the data required to understand the costs of running the business as well as growing.

Karl Burns is the Chief Strategy Officer at ManageOps. He can be reached at karl.burns@www.manage-ops.com.

With nearly all new technologies in the IT space comes confusion over terminology. Some of the confusion is simply because the technology is new, and we’re all trying to understand how it works and how – or whether – it fits the needs of our businesses. Unfortunately, some of the confusion is often caused by technology vendors who want to find a way to label their products in a way that associates them with whatever is perceived as new, cool, innovative, cutting-edge, etc. Today, we’re seeing that happen with terms like “cloud,” “DaaS,” and “VDI.”

“VDI” stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Taken literally, it’s an infrastructure that delivers virtual desktops to users. What is a virtual desktop? It is a (usually Windows) desktop computing environment where the user interface is abstracted and delivered to a remote user over a network using some kind of remote display protocol such as ICA, RDP, or PCoIP. That desktop computing environment is most often virtualized using a platform such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer, but could also be a blade PC or even an ordinary desktop PC. If the virtual desktop is delivered by a service provider (such as ManageOps) for a monthly subscription fee, it is often referred to as “Desktop as a Service,” or “DaaS.”

There are a number of ways to deliver a virtual desktop to a user:

• Run multiple, individual instances of a desktop operating system (e.g., Windows 7 or Windows 8) on a virtualization host that’s running a hypervisor such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer. Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, and Citrix VDI-in-a-Box are all products that enable this model.
• Run multiple, individual instances of a server operating system (e.g., 2008 R2 or 2012 R2) on a virtualization host that’s running a hypervisor such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer. In such a case, a policy pack can be applied that will make the 2008 R2 desktop look like Windows 7, and the 2012 R2 desktop look like Windows 8. In a moment we’ll discuss why you might want to do that.
• Run multiple, individual desktops on a single, shared server operating system, using Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (with or without added functionality from products such as Citrix XenApp). This “remote session host,” to use the Microsoft term, can be a virtual server or a physical server. Once again, the desktop can be made to look like a Windows 7 or Windows 8 desktop even though it’s really a server OS.
• Use a brokering service such as XenDesktop to allow remote users to connect to blade PCs in a data center, or even to connect to their own desktop PCs when they’re out of the office.
• Use client-side virtualization to deliver a company-managed desktop OS instance that will run inside a virtualized “sandbox” on a client PC, such as is the case with Citrix XenClient, or the Citrix Desktop Player for Macintosh. In this case, the virtual desktop can be cached on the local device’s hard disk so it can continue to be accessed after the client device is disconnected from the network.

Although any of the above approaches could lumped into the “VDI” category, the common usage that seems to be emerging is to use the term “VDI” to refer specifically to approaches that deliver an individual operating system instance (desktop or server) to each user. From a service provider perspective, we would characterize that as cloud-based VDI. So, to answer the question we posed in the title of this post, cloud-based VDI is one variant of DaaS, but not all DaaS is delivered using cloud-based VDI – and for a good reason.

Microsoft has chosen not to put its desktop operating systems on the Service Provider License Agreement (“SPLA”). That means there is no legal way for a service provider such as ManageOps to provide a customer with a true Windows 7 or Windows 8 desktop and charge by the month for it. The only  way that can be done is for the customer to purchase all the licenses that would be required for their own on-site VDI deployment (and we’ve written extensively about what licenses those are), and provide those licenses to the service provider, which must then provision dedicated hardware for that customer. That hardware cannot be used to provide any services to any other customer. (Anyone who tells you that there’s any other way to do this is either not telling you the truth, or is violating the Microsoft SPLA!)

Unfortunately, the requirement for dedicated hardware will, in many cases, make the solution unaffordable. Citrix recently published the results of a survey of Citrix Service Providers. They received responses from 718 service providers in 25 countries. 70% of them said that their average customer had fewer than 100 employees. 40% said their average customer had fewer than 50 employees. It is simply not cost-effective for a service provider to dedicate hardware to a customer of that size, and unlikely that it could be done at a price the customer would be willing to pay.

On the other hand, both Microsoft and Citrix have clean, easy-to-understand license models for Remote Desktop Services and XenApp, which is the primary reason why nearly all service providers, including ManageOps, use server-hosted desktops as their primary DaaS delivery method. We all leverage the policy packs that can make a Server 2008 R2 desktop look like a Windows 7 desktop, and a 2012 R2 desktop look like a Windows 8 desktop, but you’re really not getting Windows 7 or Windows 8, and Microsoft is starting to crack down on service providers who fail to make that clear.

Unfortunately, there are still some applications out there that will not run well – or will not run at all – in a remote session hosted environment. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Some applications check for the OS version as part of their installation routines, and simply abort the installation if you’re trying to install them on a server OS.
• Some applications will not run on a 64-bit platform – and Server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 are both exclusively 64-bit platforms.
• Some applications do not follow proper programming conventions, and insist on doing things like writing temp files to a hard-coded path like C:temp. If you have multiple users running that application on the same server via Remote Desktop Services, and each instance of the application is trying to write to the same temp file, serious issues will result. Sometimes we can use application isolation techniques to redirect the writes to a user-specific path, but sometimes we can’t.
• Some applications are so demanding in terms of processor and RAM requirements that anyone else trying to run applications on the same server will experience degraded performance.

There’s not much that a service provider can do to address the first two of these issues, short of going the dedicated-hardware route (for those customers who are large enough to afford it) and provisioning true Windows 7 or Windows 8 desktops. But there is a creative solution for the third and fourth issues, and that’s to use VDI technology to provision individual instances of Server 2008 R2 or Server 2012 R2 per user. From the licensing perspective, it’s no different than supporting multiple users on a remote session host. Once the service provider has licensed a virtualization host for Windows Datacenter edition, there is no limit to the number of Windows Server instances that can be run on that host – you can keep spinning them up until you don’t like the performance anymore. And the Citrix and Microsoft user licensing is the same whether the user has his/her own private server instance, or is sharing the server OS instance with several other users via Remote Desktop Services.

On the positive side, this allows an individual user to be guaranteed a specified amount of CPU and RAM to handle those resource-intensive applications, avoids “noisy neighbor” issues where a single user impacts the performance of other users who happen to be sharing the same Remote Desktop Server, and allows support of applications that just don’t want to run in a multi-user environment. It’s even possible to give the user the ability to install his/her own applications – this may be risky in that the user could break his/her own virtual server instance, but at least the user can’t affect anyone else.

On the negative side, this is a more expensive alternative simply because it is a less efficient way to use the underlying virtualization host. Our tests indicate that we can probably support an average of 75 individual virtual instances of Server 2008 or Server 2012 for VDI on a dual-processor virtualization host with, say, 320 Gb or so of RAM. We can support 200 – 300 concurrent users on the same hardware by running multiple XenApp server instances on it rather than an OS instance per user.

That said, we believe there are times when the positives of cloud-based VDI is worth the extra money, which is why we offer both cloud-based VDI and remote session hosted DaaS powered by Remote Desktop Services and XenApp.

ManageOps leaders will address Technical and Business impacts of Office 365.

Woodinville, WA, August 20, 2014– ManageOps’s Director of Channel Sales, Sid Herron, and CEO, Scott Gorcester, will be supporting speakers for the technical track at SMB Nation 2014. SMB Nation 2014 will be held on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, WA on September 25th and 26th 2014. Office 365 will be covered in depth throughout the conference across three tracks; business, technical and community.

“This is arguably the world’s first independent conference focusing on Office 365. There is both technical and business content. The entire Office 365 ecosystem is analyzed from on-premises server-side to pure cloud (and everything in between). And because we’re independent, we can tell it like it is.” –Excerpt from http://fall2014.smbnation.com/

Sid and Scott will demonstrate the new features of eDiscovery in Office 2013 and Office 365. By attending this session you will learn more about solving the technical challenges as well as some of the business challenges.

As the Director of Channel Sales for ManageOps, Sid has a deep technical background and is the go-to resource at ManageOps for questions about cloud infrastructure options or Microsoft licensing. Prior to ManageOps’s founding, Sid worked with Scott at ManageOps for nearly eighteen years. Sid has earned a number of professional certifications including VM Sales Professional, DataCore Sales Professional, Microsoft Sales and Marketing Competency for Server Platform, and was the first person in the world to earn the Citrix Certified Sales Professional (CCSP).

Scott Gorcester is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ManageOps. He and his team designed and built the technology stacks in use by ManageOps today, currently serving thousands of users across multiple industries across the nation. Prior to founding ManageOps, he was president of ManageOps, an IT company he founded in 1994. ManageOps was one of the original 100 Citrix resellers and Scott was one of the first people to use the technology to provide early cloud computing solutions for clients in 1994.

“SMB Nation has been a valuable resource for many years for VARs and resellers who serve small and medium-sized businesses. We’re pleased to be invited to work with Harry Brelsford and his organization to share information that can help us all do a better job in serving our customers.” – Sid Herron

ManageOps, based near Seattle, WA, is a Cloud Services provider with expertise in cloud solutions based on Microsoft, Citrix and other technologies. Sold mainly through channel partners, the ManageOps cloud platform is stable, secure, scalable, and flexible enough to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. ManageOps works to earn the respect and trust of partners and clients by providing creative technology solutions with friendly and accessible customer support. Learn more at www.ManageOps.com.

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If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Laura Gorcester at 425.939.2704 or email at Laura.Gorcester@www.manage-ops.com.

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft will end support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, 2015. A quick glance at the calendar will confirm that this is now less than a year away. So this is your friendly reminder that if you are still running 2003 servers in production, and you haven’t yet begun planning how you’re going to replace them, you darn well better start soon. Here are a few questions to get you started:

• Are those 2003 servers already virtualized, or do you still have physical servers that will need to be retired/replaced?
• If you have physical 2003 servers, do you have a virtualized infrastructure that you can use for their replacements? (If not, this is a great opportunity to virtualize. If so, do you have enough available capacity on your virtualization hosts? How about storage capacity on your SAN?)
• Can the application workloads on those 2003 servers be moved to 2008 or 2012 servers? If not, what are your options for upgrading those applications to something that will run on a later server version?
• What impact will all this have on your 2015 budget? Have you already budgeted for this? If not, do you still have time to get this into your next budget?
• Would it make more sense from a budget perspective to move those application workloads to the cloud instead of purchasing server upgrades? (Maybe a monthly operating expense will be easier to deal with than the capital expenditure of purchasing the upgrades.)

According to Microsoft, there are more than 9 million 2003 servers still in production worldwide…and the clock is ticking. How many of the 9 million are yours?

This week I am sitting the Stratus everRun Enterprise Technical Certification course, held at Stratus Technologies, headquartered in Maynard, MA. Much to my delight this is an accelerated course where they cram five days of training into three!  I have worked with this and similar technologies originally designed and offered by Marathon Technologies since the nineties, so it’s like old home week coming here. Last year Stratus purchased Marathon and ultimately this is good for the evolution of the everRun product line. This week’s course is designed to train experienced technicians on the newly redesigned everRun Enterprise and I can say that I am very impressed with the new system. Originally built on Citrix XenServer the new product is built on Centos Linux 6.5 and uses the KVM hypervisor. I am a big fan of XenServer but working with this new version of everRun I see the wisdom the Stratus has leveraged in designing this impressive product. The everRun product line is designed to provide a highly fault tolerant server platform to run workloads that require up to five nines of “up time” (less than six minutes of downtime per year). This product is highly regarded as one of the best solutions in the industry for protecting critical applications and data. If you operate computer systems that cannot afford to be down you owe it to yourself to look at this system. Class wraps up tomorrow and I’ll be dashing to the airport to head home to sunny Seattle!