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Digital Communities
Industry Members
Virtually Virtual...
October 9, 2008 By Carl Drescher
For those of us who have been around long enough to remember the days when the mainframe - or "big iron" was the only real platform that serious business applications ran on, virtualization of system resources was the norm. Each application ran in its own "machine" and more system resources could be added as needed. This provided an efficient use of system resources when hardware costs were quite large as compared to today. Application software vendors supported their applications running in these virtual machine environments without question.
Fast forward to the present. Over the last few years the concept of virtualization has taken hold in PC based servers. Most organizations - such as mine - have implemented or have a strategy to implement this technology as a natural efficient use of the computing resources, as a way to better manage these systems, and to battle data center issues such as power consumption and data center cooling. Unfortunately our experience with the software vendors has not been one of support in terms of their applications running as a production system in these virtual environments. I am assured that this will be changing over time with the introduction of Microsoft's virtual solution and software vendor experience in this virtual world. In the mean time we hear statements like: "Well you can run your test and training in those environments, but we will not support your production in that environment", or " why would you want to incur the cost of training staff and capital costs of that hardware? Individual servers are inexpensive." When I have tried to place the requirement of supporting virtualization in as part of our RFP language I am told that such a requirement is too restrictive and that I am eliminating vendors who otherwise can provide adequate solutions.
I am curious if anyone has been
successful in getting software vendors to fully support
virtualization in a PC server environment. What specifications or
requirements were listed as part of the purchasing or contract
process? Am I the only one seeing this?
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Government-to-Government IT Services: What Works and What's Left to Work OutThis Digital Communities white paper highlights discussions with IT officials in four counties that have adopted shared services models. Our aim was to learn about the obstacles these governments have faced when it comes to shared services and what it takes to overcome those roadblocks. We also spoke with several members of the IT industry who have thought long and hard about these issues. The paper offers some best practices for shared government-to-government services, but also points out challenges that government and industry still must overcome before this model gains widespread adoption.
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