Going ‘green’ has become an important topic for many people. Organizations are looking at ways of reducing their carbon footprint as an economic and ecological strategy. We will discuss practical and easy strategies for cutting costs while contributing to a cleaner environment. From improving asset utilization to consolidating data centers, there are many strategies to creating effective and sound ‘green’ data center strategies.

Today, GlassHouse is introducing Managed Services for Virtual Environments at VMWorld 2008 (Booth #440). The new offering fills a significant gap in the market – the lack of managed services that are purpose-built for virtual environments – at a time when organizations are increasingly adopting virtualization technologies. Learn more about this unique service by reading our press release or listening to our podcast featuring GlassHouse’s virtualization experts, Ron Oglesby and Rob Zylowski.

The rapid increase in corporate spending on information technology (IT) during the last decade and the diversity of IT initiatives that this created has forced IT executives to devise a set of strategies and management practices to manage the IT assets in their portfolio. Research indicates that in the absence of a clearly defined IT strategy, corporations are at risk of mismanaging their IT resources – over-committing IT resources in certain areas of the value chain, while other areas are starved of IT support. Developing an IT strategy is a best practice, but it is only the first in a series of steps designed to enable a firm to better manage the cost of IT operations to achieve an increased return on its IT investment.

Predictability, manageability, risk, cost efficiency, and alignment have always been key concerns of the IT executive. Today, with the rapid growth in enterprise storage and the various supporting technologies, the storage manager has similar concerns exacerbated by the ever increasing complexity and cost of storage management, even while storage hardware costs are reducing. What is needed is a discipline to contain and even reduce storage management costs while aligning with and improving service levels to the business units. The Storage Management Lifecycle (SML) framework provides such a discipline. Based on experience with over 400 engagements in the enterprise storage environment, the SML framework has been under continuous development and now reflects industry standards and best practice in effective storage management.

Ongoing data management is where compliance lives or dies. While compliance is often presented as an administrative burden with little opportunity for creating value for the corporation, it should not be so easily dismissed. Recognizing that in the inherent value of information, compliance is more than just following the law; compliance is really about implementing best practices. In this paper, we present a model to help IT management build a checklist of compliance tasks. This involves four processes: data inventory, compliance readiness assessment, data protection policies, and ongoing data management.

As data volumes rise and retention periods increase, the appearance of “better, faster and cheaper” storage infrastructure seems like an all-encompassing solution to control IT manager's burgeoning storage costs. In this paper, we examine four dynamic forces that together shape storage costs. By layering these costs over a three-tiered model of storage infrastructure, we identify how IT managers can decide whether to target cost savings at lower tiers, or service quality and reliability at higher tiers of service. We conclude by advocating the adoption of company-wide storage strategies that specify how purchasing decisions should be made and what issues within the storage environment will trigger those decisions.

What is ILM? What isn't it? Why does a CIO need to know about it? How is it implemented? What are the potential – realistic – benefits? What are some of the pitfalls to watch for? And what about vendor claims about ILM-based technologies? Are they real? These are just a few of the questions that Jim Damoulakis, GlassHouse CTO, and Dave Ellard, GlassHouse senior vice president and former CIO of EMC and Boston Scientific, address in this white paper. Their hope is that CIOs will use this as a springboard for a discussion and evaluation of their existing IT and business practices.

The widespread adoption of networked-based storage, particular storage area networks (SANs) has provided many benefits including improving utilization and better access to data within corporate environments. However, this transition from captive storage tethered to servers to today's independent networked devices has largely taken place under the radar of corporate security groups whose traditional focus has been on areas such as intrusion detection/prevention and protection of host systems. As a result, the storage infrastructure – both primary storage and especially secondary storage like backup and archives – is likely to be a company’s Achilles’ heel when it comes to security.

A recent survey conducted by GlassHouse reveals that more than half of the companies surveyed have no formal policies for protecting enterprise data from theft or tampering. In fact, 54% of storage managers from more than 300 companies around the world responded that they had no documented procedures for protecting enterprise data and 70% of executives rated their storage departments data security as only fair or poor.

A recent survey conducted by GlassHouse reveals that companies from regional to multinationa will spend 2006 wringing more efficiency from their data storage infrastructures and holding down costs through information lifecycle management (ILM) rather than improving security.

Professor Paul P.Tallon of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College assesses the viability and economics of indefinite email storage. We argue that indefinite storage is not a panacea – data must still be classified by value with an eye towards later discovery. We offer a working hypothesis to allow firms to look past the technical aspects of indefinite storage to instead focus on how indefinite storage can provide value to the corporation.

In this paper, Professor Paul P.Tallon of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, contrasts physical and IT supply chains, culminating in a series of recommendations for how the IT supply chain can be made more efficient and responsive to the needs of users.

CIOs struggle with a set of challenges that refuse to be solved easily. One underlying issue in most organizations is that IT is poorly aligned with the company’s overall business processes and mission. Despite huge ongoing investments in enterprise applications, compute and storage capacity, network bandwidth, and security, many CIOs continue to experience low utilization rates, limited or unmeasurable ROI, and an inability to deploy critical applications rapidly.

Many organizations have had enormous success implementing virtualization strategies based on server consolidation, achieving significant ROI in the process. Initially, these organizations were motivated by short-term consolidation benefits. Now it�s time for these organizations to take the next step by leveraging the infrastructures they�ve built to provide ALL the benefits virtualization can offer.

The benefits of server virtualization have been extolled for quite some time. Over the past year, the success stories have been piling up. It’s time to make virtualization and its associated auto-provisioning technologies a strategic component of your infrastructure.

You know server virtualization is a good idea. The benefits are significant, both from a capability and financial standpoint. Yet many organizations have not yet moved to take advantage of this technology on a large scale. The purpose of this paper is to both illustrate the benefits of moving quickly to build your VMware ESX-centric infrastructure, and to suggest a framework that will help you to accelerate your deployments.

GlassHouse Technologies provides a number of services that help organizations to manage their IT infrastructures, addressing issues such as a lack of reporting tools or an ability to analyze or interpret the results, a lack of skills or coverage, lack of service levels, and the management of policies and processes. Many organizations do not have the resources either in terms of skills or people to adequately manage their IT infrastructures. An advantage of the GlassHouse approach is that its tools are hardware agnostic, enabling them to be deployed across heterogeneous environments to provide a single view of their infrastructure. The company has addressed a previous weakness following strategic acquisitions, by extending its services offerings to include applications and virtualisation. The services are targeted at organizations that have between 100 and 5,000 servers and are relevant across all market sectors.