Overview:

More companies are discovering the cost and productivity benefits of
using advanced communication services, such as MPLS, Ethernet and SIP
trunking, which let them combine voice, data, video, imaging and enterprise
applications on the same network. They also see the value in using hosted
services, including hosted audio, video and Web conferencing, as well as hosted
VOIP, contact centers and data centers.

By implementing these advanced services, IT teams not only enable their
business to communicate more effectively, they provide the means to better serve
customers, boost sales and improve employee productivity.

These capabilities are extending over wireless networks, making it easier
not only to serve the remote workers in fixed branch locations, but also those who
are truly mobile. As this unified-communications environment expands to
include other communications modalities, IT decision-makers must understand
the implications for IT planning and investment.

Often, organizations will restructure or consolidate their IT departments
to more effectively manage and monitor voice and data networks. A majority of
organizations have dedicated a “communications group” within IT focused on
providing these services.

Overview:

Advanced Communications Services have become increasingly relevant to
businesses in large part because of the proliferation of branch offices, remote
workers, and the need for access to centrally provided data and applications.
These services, including Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Ethernet,
Internet access, peering, hosted connectivity and mobile offerings, are becoming
even more critical because the way we work is changing dramatically.

The majority of companies now:

• Rely on MPLS VPN services for site-to-site connectivity.
• Are increasingly using Ethernet as part of their WAN strategies, eitherfor access to MPLS-VPNs,
  or to supplement (or even replace MPLSVPN services) with Layer-2 services.
• Are running multiple traffic types including voice, video, and/or data, across their WANs.
• Are increasing demands for bandwidth, both to the branch as well as to the Internet.
• Are deploying SIP trunking to reduce PSTN access costs while increasing call routing flexibility.

Consequently, understanding trends in service availability, features and
pricing around MPLS, Ethernet, Internet and SIP services is vital. IT have
aggressively leveraged these new service options to reduce operating costs, or
reduce per-bit cost of bandwidth enabling their organizations to meet everincreasing
demands for bandwidth with little or no increase in monthly operating
costs.

The limiting factor for many services continues to be availability as larger
providers are often slow to ramp up Ethernet or SIP-trunking service offerings, or
they must overcome challenges related to integrating past acquisitions. This has
led enterprise IT architects to leverage service offerings from emerging providers
as an alternative to their established service providers.

In the never-ending quest to stay ahead of industry trends, IT executives
are investigating hosted peering options to increase Internet resiliency. Finally, a
small number of organizations are investigating IPv6 to provide new
functionality or to meet growing governmental requirements.

Overview:

IT spending is generally up for 2008 and 2009 in terms of overall dollars
devoted to this area. But a growing number of organizations are decreasing their
IT spends or anticipating flat budgets moving into next year.

At the same time, communications budgets are not seeing hard times, with
many companies expecting increases in these budgets. This means that moving
into 2009, a greater percentage of IT spending will go toward communications
services costs.

This volume examines general trends in IT and communications spending.
Additionally, we review how different sizes of companies and different vertical
markets plan to spend their IT and communications dollars.

As the U.S. economy slows, it is key for companies to optimize every dollar
spent both in IT overall and within communications. Given the communications
budget is becoming a larger part of the overall IT budget, it’s imperative to stretch
a nickel into a dime. For example, managed services are one way companies can
leverage their communications spends because those services can help offload the
IT and network staffs.

In order to get the biggest bang for the buck, companies must devote time
and resources to effective carrier contract negotiations and procurement. In this
volume, we provide detailed recommendations on how to get the best deal from
the carriers. We also analyze what companies are doing today and where they fall
short.

Overview:

Advanced Communications Services have become increasingly relevant
to businesses in large part because of the proliferation of branch
offices, remote workers, and the need for access to centrally provided
data and applications. These services, including Multi-Protocol Label
Switching (MPLS), Ethernet, Internet access, peering, hosted
connectivity and mobile offerings, are becoming even more critical
because the way we work is changing dramatically.

The majority of companies now:

• Centralize their applications and data in primary and backup data centers;
• Open new branch locations, with an average growth rate of about 12% a year;
• Expand the percentage of employees who telecommute full- or part-time;
• Implement new collaborative applications to improve productivity, customer service, and remote management of staff.

Overview:

Wireless is emerging as one of the single most transformational technologies for business. Rather than being deployed in the context of enabling business communications, IT managers are deploying wireless to facilitate business computing. Wireless spending is now a key component of IT spending and is tied to revenue production, as well. Transformation is occurring both on the company campus and on the road, as mobile workers increasingly use wireless as their primary means of accessing company data.

Overview:

Advanced Communications Services have become increasingly relevant
to businesses in large part because of the proliferation of branch
offices, remote workers, and the need for access to centrally provided
data and applications. These services, including Multi-Protocol Label
Switching (MPLS), Ethernet, Internet access, peering, hosted
connectivity and mobile offerings, are becoming even more critical
because the way we work is changing dramatically.

The majority of companies now:

• Centralize their applications and data in primary and backup data centers;
• Open new branch locations, with an average growth rate of about 12% a year;
• Expand the percentage of employees who telecommute full- or part-time;
• Implement new collaborative applications to improve productivity, customer service, and remote management of staff.

Overview:

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are poised to change dramatically how IT thinks and works in the enterprise, and how the enterprise thinks about IT as well. The shift from monolithic applications to loosely coupled constellations of collaborating software components is under way, with most of the enterprises we interviewed already having deployed at least a pilot SOA, and a few having completed the journey.

The shift is pervasive and promises to reduce the cost of integrating new systems into an existing infrastructure, as well as the cost of building and maintaining software. It opens the door to fully integrating software provided by service providers—software as a service (SaaS)—into an infrastructure, rather than that being a separate and disconnected island of functionality.

In this volume, we explore the technological and vendor landscape,including the major segments of the market for SOA wares and some vendors in each space. We also investigate the enterprise map of that same territory,including the vendors that participants see as important, even strategic; where participants plan to invest their dollars in the near term; and what they think about the vendors they work with now.

Overview:

SOA creates unique challenges for architecture and governance. SOA is a global phenomenon with local significance. As discussed in Volume 1, "Organizational and Operational Trends," organizations are launching SOA initiatives with the goals of greater business agility and flexibility. SOA facilitates these business goals through increased interoperability, faster integration of applications and services reuse. If one distills down the SOA message to one word, it must be agility. Unfortunately, agility is not a term widely used to describe architecture and certainly not a terms used to describe governance. In fact, rigidity and static are far more common descriptors. After discussing these issued with participants, it had become clear that to us that the same driving goals of SOA-Flexibility and agility-must also drive architecture and governance. For organizations to be successful, they must implement an agile architecture with agile governance.

Overview:

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are poised to change dramatically how IT thinks and works in the enterprise, and how the enterprise thinks about IT as well. The shift from monolithic applications to loosely coupled constellations of collaborating software components is under way, with most of the enterprise IT executives with whom we spoke already having deployed at least a pilot SOA, and a few having completed the journey.

The shift is pervasive and promises to reduce the cost of integrating new systems into an existing infrastructure as well as the cost of building and maintaining software. It opens the door to fully integrating software provided by service providers – software as a service – into an infrastructure, rather than that being a separate and disconnected island of functionality.

In the first volume of this benchmark, we explore the basic organizational
and operational characteristics of the move to SOA: Why organizations pursue it (or choose not to), how much they are spending and how it is paid for, how IT and the enterprise organize around it, and what benefits they are seeing from it.

Overview:

It’s been a long time coming, but the indications are that security and information protection are finally within spitting distance of getting the mindshare they merit, based on the only metric that really matters: Cash on the barrelhead.

In volume 1 of our ground-breaking benchmark, "Security and Information Protection: Trends and Organizational Issues", we highlight the acceleration in spending on security and information protection, discuss critical drivers, and drill down into the organizational and operational impacts. Security budgets have grown another 20% since our last benchmark (in 2005), and indications are that double-digit growth will continue through 2008 and beyond. Moreover, that growth is increasingly shifting away from consultants and staff and toward products and services—good news for vendors and providers. Security organizations are evolving as well, with the most significant trend being the shift in focus from “chief security officer” to “chief risk mitigation officer,” mirroring the overall organizational shift in focus from security to risk mitigation.In line with this shift, security teams are picking up responsibility for areas they don’t historically support (such as business continuance and facilities) but which, if not well managed, can increase an organization’s risk. And security remains a great career path: along with this increased responsibility comes a welcome (and sustained) increase in salary. In our upcoming volumes, we drill down into the specifics.

Overview: 

It’s been a long time coming, but the indications are that security and information protection are finally within spitting distance of getting the mindshare they merit, based on the only metric that really matters: Cash on the barrelhead.

In volume 1 of our ground-breaking benchmark, "Security and Information Protection: Trends and Organizational Issues", we highlight the acceleration in spending on security and information protection, discuss critical drivers, and drill down into the organizational and operational impacts. Security budgets have grown another 20% since our last benchmark (in 2005), and indications are that double-digit growth will continue through 2008 and beyond. Moreover, that growth is increasingly shifting away from consultants and staff and toward products and services—good news for vendors and providers. Security organizations are evolving as well, with the most significant trend being the shift in focus from “chief security officer” to “chief risk mitigation officer,” mirroring the overall organizational shift in focus from security to risk mitigation. In line with this shift, security teams are picking up responsibility for areas they don’t historically support (such as business continuance and facilities) but which, if not well managed, can increase an organization’s risk. And security remains a great career path: along with this increased responsibility comes a welcome (and sustained) increase in salary.

Overview

A growing number of organizations are dealing with a growing number of virtual workers. What does it mean to operate in a virtual workplace? Employees work in multiple locations, away from their supervisors or their work-groups at least some of the time. Basically, virtual workers do not have a single place where they conduct all of their business. The number of employees who work from home (either full or part time) has risen to 17% in this year’s benchmark, up from 10% last year. And only 8.5% work in headquarters, on average.

These figures are creating new challenges for both business and IT staffs, to make sure the right network infrastructure, collaborative applications, and emerging technologies are in place to make virtual workers as productive as possible.

Nemertes’ latest groundbreaking benchmark, “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace,” examines several key areas: WAN and branch-office infrastructure, convergence deployments, collaboration and unified-communications best practices, and mobility strategies. Nemertes will detail the findings, based on discussions with 120 IT executives, in this detailed research in nine volumes, in addition to upcoming vertical-market studies.

Volume 1: "Branch Office Best Practices" presents and analyzes the latest trends and best practices for maximizing the effectiveness of branch offices and the employees in them.

Volume 2: "Collaboration Business Case" presents and analyzes the latest key trends and best practices for usage of collaboration tools and technologies. The interest level in collaborative technologies is on the rise, but organizations continue to struggle with the actual cost and benefits of various types of collaborative applications. The productivity benefits are clear with most of these applications. Nemertes shows how you turn that productivity into dollars and cents.

Read The Benchmark

Nemertes Benchmarks are available to clients only. If you're not a client and would like to receive a copy of the complete benchmark, please contact sales@nemertes.com

Clients - Read "Building A Successful Virtual Workplace"

Overview

A growing number of organizations are dealing with a growing number of virtual workers. What does it mean to operate in a virtual workplace? Employees work in multiple locations, away from their supervisors or their workgroups at least some of the time. Basically, virtual workers do not have a single place where they conduct all of their business. The number of employees who work from home (either full or part time) has risen to 17% in this year’s benchmark, up from 10% last year. And only 8.5% work in headquarters, on average.

These figures are creating new challenges for both business and IT staffs, to make sure the right network infrastructure, collaborative applications, and emerging technologies are in place to make virtual workers as productive as possible.

Overview

The enterprise is in a strange new position when it comes to providing its employees with the tools they need to perform their duties.

On the one hand, the tools continue to become, or come to rely on, information systems. Companies and industries convert processes that were paper-based (such as medical records management) to be all-digital. Physical tools (like packaging machines on a factory floor) continue not only to be driven by ever more sophisticated automation, but also are increasingly tied into the rest of the IT infrastructure by supply-chain management or other software.

Table of Contents
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4
2 THE NEW DATA CENTER 5
2.1 OVERVIEW 5
2.2 KEY THEMES 5
3 TRENDS IN NETWORK ARCHITECTURE 8
3.1 THE IMPACT OF DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATION ON WAN ARCHITECTURE 8
3.2 DATA CENTER INTERCONNECTS 10
3.3 DATA CENTER BANDWIDTH: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? 12
3.4 MPLS AND THE DATA CENTER 14
3.5 WAN REDUNDANCY STRATEGIES 20
3.6 THE ROLE OF THE INTERNET 22
3.7 NETWORKING INSIDE THE DATA CENTER: STORAGE NETWORKING 25
3.8 NETWORKING INSIDE THE DATA CENTER: SERVER INTERCONNECTS 28
4 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 32
5 APPENDIX A - BENCHMARK METHODOLOGY 35
5.1 PROCESS 35

Branch Office Best Practices

Table of Contents

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 6
2 BRANCH-OFFICE STRATEGIES 7
2.1 WHAT MAKES A ‘BRANCH OFFICE?’ 7
2.2 BRANCH-OFFICE DECISION MAKERS 8
2.3 INVENTORY ANALYSIS 9
2.3.1 Tier One 10
2.3.2 Tier Two 11
2.3.3 Tier Three 11
2.3.4 Tier Four 12
2.3.5 Tier Five 13
2.3.6 Inventory Recommendations 13
2.4 BRANCH OFFICE MANTRA: ‘BETTER, FASTER!’ 14
2.5 GROWTH IN BRANCH OFFICES 17
2.6 BRANCH-OFFICE MANAGEMENT 18
2.6.1 Centralized 20
2.6.2 Distributed 22
2.6.3 Combination 22
2.6.4 Service Provider 23
2.6.5 Time Spent on Managing Branch 23

Table of Contents
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4
2 THE NEW DATA CENTER 5
2.1 OVERVIEW 5
2.2 KEY THEMES 5
3 DATA STORAGE 8
3.1 STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES (SAN, NAS, DAS, TAPE) 8
3.2 STORAGE GROWTH: THE CURSE OF CHEAP DISK 11
3.3 STORAGE GROWTH AND CAPACITY BY INDUSTRY 12
3.4 STORAGE MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 13
3.5 STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION (VSAN AND VTAPE) 17
3.6 STORAGE NETWORKING 19
3.7 STRUCTURED DATA: RELATIONAL DATABASES 21
3.8 DATABASE ADMINISTRATION 22
3.9 SUCCESS OF STORAGE STRATEGIES 23
4 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 25
5 APPENDIX A - BENCHMARK METHODOLOGY 29
5.1 PROCESS 29

Table of Contents
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4
2 THE NEW DATA CENTER 5
2.1 OVERVIEW 5
2.2 KEY THEMES 5
3 COMPUTING 8
3.1 PLATFORMS 8
3.2 OPERATING SYSTEMS 9
3.3 DENSITY OF SERVERS IN THE DATA CENTER 10
3.4 BLADE SERVERS AND VIRTUALIZATION 13
4 SERVER VIRTUALIZATION 15
4.1 INTRODUCTION TO SERVER VIRTUALIZATION 15
4.2 VIRTUALIZATION CURRENT STATE 17
4.3 VIRTUALIZATION COST SAVINGS 20
4.4 SERVER VIRTUALIZATION SOLUTIONS 21
4.5 VIRTUALIZATION FOR SERVER CONSOLIDATION 23
4.6 VIRTUALIZATION AS ABSTRACTION LAYER 29
4.7 VIRTUALIZATION FOR BUSINESS RECOVERY 31
4.8 VIRTUALIZATION AND LIVE-MIGRATION FOR MAINTENANCE OR LOAD BALANCING 34
4.9 VIRTUALIZATION FOR TESTING AND QUALITY ASSURANCE 37
4.10 VIRTUALIZATION FOR PATCHING 40
4.11 VIRTUALIZATION FOR SECURITY 41
4.12 VIRTUALIZATION FOR THIN-CLIENT DESKTOP 44
5 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 48

The data center has undergone tremendous transformation in the last few years. With new demands from business and new technologies such as blades, dense storage and virtualization, the data center is the new exciting frontier of IT.

Nemertes’ groundbreaking benchmark, “The New Data Center 2006,” details
these changes and their impacts, highlights critical issues for IT executives to keep in mind, and provides best practices and success strategies for organizations seeking to deploy and leverage this new data center.

In Volume 1, we examine the overall state of the data center, uncover the four major themes of consolidation, explosive growth, always-on availability and operational

In Volumes 2 through 7, we look at the six disciplines of the data center and the major trends in each:

Computing – Major trends such as virtualization and dense computing.
Storage – Extreme growth in storage demand and storage virtualization.
Networking – Optical interconnects, high-speed server interconnects and more reliance on the WAN to deliver applications.
Facilities – Power and cooling for dense computing and storage.
Management – Business service management, Web services, ITIL and CMDB.
Security – Re-trenched perimeter, mobility and identity.

Volumes 5,6 and 7 look specifically at how the enterprise addresses its challenges in three core disciplines – management, security and facilities – looking at both strategy and tactics at architectural, operational, and technological levels.

Complete benchmarks are available to clients only. If you're not a client and would like to receive a copy of the complete benchmark, send us a message