The AT&T Center
1 AT&T Center Pkwy.

San Antonio, TX 78219

Driving Directions

Sigma Solutions and EMC invite you to watch the San Antonio Spurs during the Western Conference Finals (Game 5) in an exclusive AT&T Center Suite!

Please note this event is full.  If you would like to attend, please reach out to your Sigma Solutions Account Representative and request to be put on the waiting list.

On the bright side, that represents a significant increase in IT agility over the next two years. Less than 2 percent of IT organizations are sufficiently responsive today.

Clearly, IT is not keeping pace with the business despite the growing use of virtualization, scale-out storage and other technologies that facilitate IT agility. The authors of the Gartner report explain that the problem is operational rather than technological. Pressured to ensure high availability and data integrity, IT has become risk averse and reluctant to change its processes and internal controls. Yet change it must in order to meet business demands.

Obviously, change can’t be implemented willy-nilly. Gartner recommends that IT organizations review their change management processes from both a business and IT perspective in order to better balance risk aversion against business velocity. Only then can they ensure that the right people, processes and technologies are in place.

Let’s skip the “people” component for a moment and focus on the other two. Many IT organizations continue to rely on manual or semi-automated processes that fail to capitalize on the efficiencies of today’s data center technologies. In many cases, IT also lacks the management tools needed to optimize operations — or, worse, has a growing array of management point products without an overarching operational structure or sufficient staff to watch all the little needles and dials.

With constrained budgets, skills gaps and increasingly stringent SLAs, it’s little wonder that IT is loath to abandon what has worked in the past. Few IT organizations have the resources and expertise to support current workloads and data volumes — much less effect real operational change.

This is where IT-Operations-as-a-Service can help. IT-Operations-as-a-Service goes beyond commodity managed services programs to help IT shops create an optimized operational environment. We’re not talking about ensuring a “green light” — we’re talking about an operational model that can scale rapidly to meet changing business requirements. And, oh by the way, it can deliver significant cost savings through improved efficiency and lower personnel costs.

IT-Operations-as-a-Service is able to achieve these benefits through automated processes and procedures and a secure and auditable management platform that supports proactive maintenance, task management and remote support. The service provider should deliver 24×7 support coverage, problem ownership and streamlined escalation in a flexible model that meets the customer’s SLAs and business requirements.

Of course, if process and automation were the only things necessary to optimize IT operations, many more organizations would be prepared to handle the accelerated pace of business change. The IT-Operations-as-a-Service provider should also have deep experience deploying and supporting large, heterogeneous networks and expertise spanning all IT operational functions and key enabling technologies.

In a future post we will examine how both IT-Operations-as-a-Service and supplemental staffing can fill skills gaps and how to choose the best solution for a particular function. In the meantime, we would be interested in hearing about how your IT organization is managing the pace of business change.

Grand Hyatt San Antonio
600 East Market Street
San Antonio, Texas 78205 USA

Stop by booth #7 to hear all about Sigma Solutions’ Managed Services.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Port Aransas, TX

Sigma Solutions invites you to take part in our 1st Annual Fishing Tournament!

Join forces with one of our strategic vendors for the fishing event of the season! Each team will have a designated boat competing for prizes and of course, bragging rights! Please reach out to Whitney Deal or your Sigma Solutions Account Executive for more information concerning this event.

Unified storage provides a solution to this quandary by allowing organizations to consolidate and virtualize storage across protocols, environments and mixed storage platforms. Combinations of block storage (Fibre Channel or iSCSI) and file storage (NAS systems with CIFS or NFS) can be managed via a common set of features such as snapshots, thin provisioning, tiered provisioning, replication, synchronous mirroring and data migration — all from a single user interface. This shift toward a shared infrastructure enables organizations to achieve storage utilization rates of 85 percent or more, compared to the sub-50-percent rates in standalone storage silos.

Unified storage remains an evolving technology, however. Typically, these systems leverage virtualization to create deeper integration of file- and block-based storage. New to the mix is the addition of object storage.

In a file-based system, a data file is accessed by locating the specific address within the file system hierarchy. With object storage, a unique identifier plus the file’s metadata is used to locate the file. Because objects are retrieved using their unique identifiers, there’s no need to know a directory path or even the object’s location. This location transparency makes object storage ideal for managing and archiving large quantities of static information in the cloud.

In fact, object storage is geared toward the cloud — it uses the HTTP protocol rather than file or block storage standards. Applications access data using open standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer), which are designed to look for the unique identifiers.

Object storage is particularly well suited to unstructured data such as videos, images and sound files that don’t necessarily need hierarchical indexing. That’s why sites such as Facebook use object storage to handle massive volumes of multimedia files, and some enterprises are using it for archiving unstructured data, email and virtual machine images.

Interest in object storage is increasing due to the explosion in unstructured data growth driven by regulatory compliance requirements and data analytics. In addition to distributed access, object storage gives you the ability to store millions of objects without running up against the restrictions associated with file-based storage systems. Object storage also uses a flat address space, reducing complexity by eliminating the need to manage logical unit numbers (LUNs). And it makes sense to build a storage infrastructure based upon the public cloud model if you’re implementing a private cloud.

Object storage is not a replacement for file- and block-based storage. It is not well-suited to data that changes frequently, and the HTTP protocol limits throughput. The fixed attributes of file storage are needed to ensure consistency in shared-file applications, and the performance of block storage is required for high-performance OLTP applications.

However, organizations grappling with growing volumes of unstructured data should consider adding object storage to the mix. Sigma can help you evaluate and deploy an intelligent, object-based storage solution that helps combat storage sprawl and increase efficiency.

IT-as-a-Service is the new nirvana, an agile IT infrastructure that enables rapid response to changing business conditions and needs. Some people refer to this agile infrastructure as the private cloud. Whatever you want to call it, it represents a transformation of the traditional data center architecture.

Traditionally, IT infrastructure was built vertically to support individual applications. That monolithic structure made it difficult to scale the environment to meet increased storage or performance demands. The new agile IT infrastructure is built out horizontally, with applications spread across pools of virtualized compute, storage and networking resources. Because those pools can readily scale in response to changing requirements, this new architecture is much more flexible and efficient.

There are three ways to go about building an agile environment. One option is to go out and buy best-of-breed components and construct it from the ground up. The beauty of that strategy is that it’s extremely flexible and can be finely tuned to existing infrastructure and specific business requirements. The downside is that there is a good deal of complexity and effort involved. That’s why customers call Sigma — we have proven experience helping customers build private clouds.

At the other end of the spectrum is a converged infrastructure solution such as Vblock from VCE. Vblocks are validated “stacks” that integrate best-in-class virtualization, networking, compute, storage, security and management technologies. They offer a more streamlined approach to creating private clouds, and Sigma has the certifications and expertise to successfully integrate Vblocks into the IT environment. But while Vblocks deliver pervasive virtualization and scale, a pre-engineered, pre-integrated solution may be somewhat limiting in certain environments.

A third option is to use a reference architecture — a tested and validated design based upon best-of-breed technologies. NetApp’s FlexPod solution, for example, is a predesigned base configuration comprising the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco Nexus data center switches and NetApp FAS storage. The reference architecture is modular or “pod-like,” such that the configuration of each customer’s FlexPod may vary. Nevertheless, a FlexPod unit can easily be scaled up by adding resources or scaled out by adding FlexPods. It creates an agile computing environment that can meet ever-increasing performance demands and support “big data” workloads.

A Sigma customer recently experienced the benefits of the FlexPod approach. The customer had already implemented NetApp storage, Cisco UCS and a Nexus fabric, and opted to leverage that infrastructure to create a FlexPod. Sigma engineers helped the customer tune the configuration in order to validate the design. It enabled the customer to rapidly expand a virtual desktop initiative with the confidence that the infrastructure could support the workload.

EMC’s VSPEX is another reference architecture. With VSPEX, customers can combine their choice of industry-leading compute, networking and virtualization technologies in a proven infrastructure validated by EMC and built on highly flexible EMC storage and backup infrastructure. As a result, VSPEX Proven Infrastructures significantly reduce the planning, sizing and configuration burdens associated with private cloud deployments.

Of course, Sigma has been providing these types of solutions for a number of years now. Sigma’s broad and deep experience across the data center enables us to create robust yet highly flexible environments based upon best-of-breed technologies. Whatever solution best meets the customer’s needs, Sigma has the knowledge and experience to transform the IT infrastructure and achieve the nirvana of the IT-as-a-Service model.

News 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

NetApp Honors Sigma’s Chris Norris 

Norris recognized for his outstanding achievements in delivering NetApp storage solutions to customers. 

SAN ANTONIO — November 30, 2012 — Sigma Solutions announced today that Senior Systems Engineer Chris Norris received the award for Outstanding Contribution by a NetApp Tech Team Partner. Winners of this award were nominated by NetApp field teams and executives. The award was presented during NetApp Insight Americas 2012, held Nov. 5-8 in Las Vegas, and Norris was invited to attend a luncheon with NetApp executives and other honorees.

“We are very proud that Chris has been recognized by NetApp for his outstanding achievements,” said James Smith, Director of Solutions Engineering, Sigma Solutions. “Chris has helped numerous customers take advantage of NetApp’s storage technologies in their data centers. This award recognizes his demonstrated expertise in NetApp solutions.”

Norris also wrote and delivered a technical presentation during Insight Americas 2012, and will be doing the same during Insight APAC, which will be held Dec. 11-13 in Macau. The presentation is a competitive analysis of the auto-tiering technologies of five storage vendors: NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, HP and Dell.

“I am honored to have received this award and to present during NetApp’s global technical conferences,” Norris said. “One thing that has always drawn me to NetApp is its unified storage approach. I can put different types of applications and use any of the storage protocols on one system without having to go through a lot of complexity and bolt together a bunch of different components. NetApp’s ease of management is another selling point. Sigma’s focus is always to provide the very best solution to meet each customer’s specific needs, and in many situations that means NetApp.”

About Sigma Solutions 

Founded in 1992, Sigma Solutions is a privately owned company that specializes in advanced IT infrastructure solutions. Sigma is leading the new IT conversation, enabling clients to rethink IT and take advantage of technologies that are powering the next-generation data center on the journey to the cloud. Sigma’s technologists and sales team advise clients on current trends such as consumerization, collaboration and cloud, and recommend solutions that are proven to meet these challenges. Sigma’s extensive, diverse and local skill base enables clients to get the most out of their IT investment by reducing costs and increasing business impact. For more information visit www.sigmasol.com.

Contact: 

John Flores
Vice President, Marketing & Business Development
(P) 210.572.1304
(C) 210.744.4460
jflores@sigmasol.com

News 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Sigma Solutions Welcomes Mike Moates as VP of Sales

Moates will lead Sigma’s sales activities and vendor partnerships across 11 regional markets to help Sigma continue its aggressive growth. 

SAN ANTONIO — November 30, 2012 — Sigma Solutions announced today that IT industry veteran Mike Moates has joined its executive management team as Vice President of Sales. Moates will lead Sigma’s sales organization and work closely with Sigma’s vendor partners to develop and implement strategies for accelerating Sigma’s growth while maintaining its commitment to its customers’ success.

“We are very excited to have a professional of Mike’s caliber in this strategic position,” said Scott Gruendler, President, Sigma Solutions. “This is a new position within Sigma, one that will enable us to unify our sales operations across our 11 regional offices. We believe Mike will help us build upon our strong organic growth and take the company to the next level.”

“I’ve been involved with Sigma in one form or another for the last 15 years and have had the pleasure of seeing the company grow and differentiate itself in the marketplace by focusing on its customers, enabling them to derive business value from their IT investments.” Moates said. “Sigma has a strong presence in multiple markets but each office operates somewhat independently. My job is to bring these independent operations together and bring greater consistency to our go-to-market message.”

Moates began his career in the IT industry at IBM and with resellers ComputerLand and Datasys Corporation. He then spent 15 years with Sun Microsystems in both channel and direct sales, serving as Area Vice President for the Central and Southern US. Since 2010, Moates has served as VMware’s Director of Partner Sales for the South Central U.S.

“It’s very exciting to return to the reseller channel, particularly in today’s dynamic IT environment,” said Moates. “Customers look to systems integrators to help them select and implement the right technologies. Vendors leverage their relationships with reseller partners in

order to grow. Sigma is uniquely positioned to bring together products from various vendors to provide the complete solution customers are looking for today.

“Collectively, Sigma has expertise across all the key data center technologies, broad visibility across the customer’s enterprise and strong relationships with its vendor partners. I am looking forward to helping Sigma fuse these resources and demonstrate to both partners and customers the core strengths we bring to the marketplace.”

About Sigma Solutions 

Founded in 1992, Sigma Solutions is a privately owned company that specializes in advanced IT infrastructure solutions. Sigma is leading the new IT conversation, enabling clients to rethink IT and take advantage of technologies that are powering the next-generation data center on the journey to the cloud. Sigma’s technologists and sales team advise clients on current trends such as consumerization, collaboration and cloud, and recommend solutions that are proven to meet these challenges. Sigma’s extensive, diverse and local skill base enables clients to get the most out of their IT investment by reducing costs and increasing business impact. For more information visit www.sigmasol.com

Contact: 

John Flores
Vice President, Marketing & Business Development
(P) 210.572.1304
(C) 210.744.4460
jflores@sigmasol.com

In part one, I offered a high-level overview of a suggested end-user computing strategy. Let’s break down the topics, starting with the desktop strategy.

Desktop Strategy
While we may be in the post-PC era, it doesn’t mean that physical desktops and laptops are going to disappear. We need to continue to fine-tune and deploy desktop management tools like Microsoft SCCM and others. On the other hand, ignoring desktop virtualization and VDI is also not acceptable anymore and continuing the rhetoric and debate about CAPEX vs. OPEX costs and the exaggerated costs of VDI is just a bunch of “malarkey” (sorry, I had to find a use for this word).

A well-planned and designed desktop virtualization infrastructure can be very cost-effective and cheaper than a physical implementation. It is also about time to position the benefits of desktop virtualization from a business perspective, BC/DR, flexibility and more. We must look beyond how much is it going to cost and consider what we gain. Anyone can lie with numbers and you can make them look the way you want, so let’s agree to just get past the TCO of desktop virtualization — it has a place and it is an integral part of the strategy.

MDM/MAM/MIM
Mobile Device Management, Mobile Application Management and Mobile Information Management — they’re all new terms, all colorful terms. And so, with the mobile device explosion we need to evolve our mindset from one that has traditionally always been about controlling the device to one that governs the device. Better yet, we should govern enterprise resources on these devices. MDM will aid in enforcing device passwords, remote selective wipe of the enterprise resources on the device, encryption, reporting, etc.

MAM is about mobile applications, sandboxing and encapsulating mobile applications so that we can apply policies against them. Without sandbox or application wrapping, it will be very difficult for enterprises to control what applications can and cannot do. This is especially apparent with native e-mail clients. Without sandboxing the e-mail client, mobile applications that get installed on the device could gain access to corporate contacts and information that otherwise would not be allowed. Native e-mail clients are also so embedded into the mobile OS that it is difficult to sandbox them. That’s why organizations such as Citrix, VMware and others now provide their own version of a sandboxed e-mail as a complimentary alternative.

MAM can also serve as a consolidated application store for the enterprise where Windows, SaaS, mobile and other applications can be consumed. This is, again, a technology where there might be overlap between MDM vendors and enterprises such as Citrix and VMware. As you are making your technology selection, choose a MAM solution that could integrate best with your desktop strategy and technology partner selection.

Mobile Information Management, also known as Mobile Data Management, provides essentially a Dropbox-like functionality for the enterprise. The idea here is to enforce policy-driven security that would allow or deny file syncing to certain devices in certain locations. More granularly, it would allow or disallow certain file types on certain devices, etc.

Social Enterprise / Collaboration
Do you really enjoy sending one-word e-mails, e-mails that say “Thank you” or “Yes”? Do you enjoy searching through thousands of e-mails to locate the conversation you were having, or to find a file attachment? If you are like me, you probably despise e-mail — I truly hate e-mail and in my consulting world, when working on a customer’s statement of work, we start versioning the SOW and send it back and forth. There has got to be an easier way. What if we had a Facebook-like enterprise where we can collaborate with colleagues? Better yet, what if this social enterprise can be linked to our MIM solution so that we can drag files and collaborate on them while they are in a centralized, secure location?

Of course social platforms still need to mature somewhat for the enterprise and you have to be able to answer questions such as:

• What level of use of social networking will you allow?
• Are any social networking services more enterprise-friendly than others?
• How are they used for work purposes? (crucial question)
• How do you see social enterprise changing communication and collaboration behavior at your company?

I will take one step further and say that I believe social enterprise platforms such as SocialCast and Podio and others have the potential to become the next desktop and I have blogged about them here several times.

Wireless
Every customer tells me they have a wireless infrastructure and while I recognize that a wireless infrastructure is part of the DNA of every enterprise, for the most part, what many dismiss or disregard is that these wireless infrastructures were not built to handle the number of devices that are or will be connecting connecting to the infrastructure. More important, however, are the types of services delivered over these wireless infrastructures that are significantly different.

Remember, in an end-user computing strategy, you have to take into account remoting protocols like PCoIP, HDX, RDP and others. You also have to take into account the new and updated technologies that could make other services better. So, please don’t ignore the wireless infrastructure.

We are also looking for a secure and scalable infrastructure with pervasive coverage to detect and mitigate sources of interference. A wireless infrastructure capable of location tracking will tie very nicely with your MDM tools to enable or disable certain functionality depending on your geographic location.

Security
There is no way you are thinking about an end-user computing strategy and BYOD in particular without taking into account security generally and network access control in particular. You should be investigating and planning to control wired and wireless access and dynamic differentiated access policies, enforcing context-based security, and providing self-service access and guest lifecycle management via agent or agentless approaches.

Now it’s your turn. Do you agree that an end-user computing strategy is needed? And if so, how we can refine and fine-tune the strategy I laid out here? Comment away!

End-user computing has expanded so much and gotten even more complex. In this two-part series, we will explore the strategies that could be used in enterprises to address all the current issues: from consumerization and BYOD, to desktop virtualization and physical desktop management.

It used to be fairly simple and straightforward: End-users either got a desktop or a laptop and those who needed a bit more accessibility got a Blackberry for mobile email, and that was it. Sophisticated enterprises managed those desktops with Microsoft SCCM, Symantec Altiris, LANdesk or similar technologies.

Those days are gone and the situation has radically changed, with the needs and requirements of end-users having evolved to the point that they have, on average, two or three devices — a PC and smartphone and/or tablet.

Access to resources has also changed. We used to just load everything on the laptop, but now end-users want and need selective access to resources on their preferred device from anywhere at any time over any connection.

That means it’s time to rethink the end-user computing strategy.

For many years, IT treated the end-user space as a second-class citizen, with no real IT talent devoted to it or any serious planning or strategy. The attitude was to just get it done no matter how sloppy the method. Most of our time and effort was focused on the data center, the crown jewel of every IT engineer’s resume. We wanted to go through the ranks, through the help desk and get to the data center — where real computing happens.

Well, today, enterprises are demanding that the same level of seriousness we dedicated to the data center now gets focused on the end-user computing side.

Where do we start? Let’s begin by identifying the components of this new strategy:

• Desktop Strategy — this means a strategy for physical and virtual desktops and applications
• MDM/MAM/MIM — necessary to govern the mobile devices, applications and data
• Collaboration — a modern way of collaborating between end-users that goes beyond the traditional tools to reach the social enterprise
• Wireless Infrastructure — a robust, dynamic and scalable wireless infrastructure to support the influx of devices and services
• Security — at the heart of any strategy is security, and end-user computing security in the age of BYOD is crucial

Now, the challenge is the ability to weave all these technologies together and avoid overlap, as some of the vendors in question provide similar capabilities. For instance, most MDM vendors now have some sort of Dropbox-like functionality, but so do desktop virtualization vendors such as VMware and Citrix.

Next time, we’ll break down these components and discuss the strategy in more details. In the meantime, please share with me in the comments section your feedback, especially if I have missed any high-level topics.