Join me in Las Vegas in February for HIMSS 2012, the definitive Health Industry IT Conference.  I will be working daily providing demos on how healthcare providers are leveraging self service portals, capacity on demand, and dynamic data centers to achieve a private cloud on VMware vSphere 5 and vCloud Director.

Join me at HIMSS Conference 2012

Looks like the news just broke on another VMware Acquisition. This time, the SaaS Provider called Digital Fuel will add IT Management Financial Management services to the portfolio. The new acquisition will allow customers to realize and manage IT Spend for IT Operations. The Digital Fuel portfolio of tools almost makes IT Financial Management fun. This acquisition adds to the Software As A Service (SaaS) portfolio that is growing quickly at VMware. Recent additions such as SlideRocket, Mozy, Shavlik, Integrien, TriCipher, and Zimbra continue to expand the SaaS collection.

“Cloud computing represents a fundamentally new model for IT, enabling enterprises to realize unprecedented gains in operational efficiency, while also understanding, managing and optimizing IT resources based on granular business metrics,” said Boaz Chalamish, VP and General Manager, VMware. “New levels of financial visibility and control in cloud environments will enable CIOs to engage with the CFO, line of business stakeholders and others around how IT investments translate to real business value. As an authority on helping organizations navigate the business operations of IT, Digital Fuel will add a significant capability to our portfolio, broadening beyond operational management to include business-centric capabilities.”

I look forward to the Digital Fuel tools rolling into the enterprise allowing IT management to make more educated financial assessments of the IT Spend, ROI, TCO, Capacity, and operational trends.

Key Benefits

• Analyze the business of IT anytime, anywhere with dashboards and reports on the iPad
• Enable detailed cost visibility through IT cost models
• Justify and control IT spending by tracking the TCO for all IT services
• Improve cost efficiency by calculating and tracking the unit cost of all IT services
• Gain predictability in IT spend with demanded and goal-based budgeting and planning
• Optimize IT costs by running accurate “what if” analysis
• Empower all business units to prevent waste with detailed IT bills
• Comply with taxation, regulatory, and margin needs through usage-based cost allocation
• Improve decision making using comparisons against industry benchmarks
• Measure business value received from IT services by tracking SLAs and KPIs

Automate core IT financial processes including:

• IT Costing — Easily map the connections between IT services and their underlying cost drivers using an intuitive graphical approach that enables TCO and unit cost tracking.
• IT Demand Management & Budget Planning — Facilitate accurate and fact-based IT budgeting, planning, and forecasting.
• IT Showback & Chargeback — Give business units visibility into IT costs and alternatives all the way to full billing and chargeback with an itemized bill of IT.
• IT Cost Optimization — Automatically identify potential areas for ongoing cost reduction, such as candidates for virtualization and consolidation, storage tiering, SLA reduction, end of life, deferral of upgrades, support reduction, and more.
• IT Vendor Management — Gain a control and optimization mechanism for vendor agreements that proactively governs contractual commitments.
• IT SLA & KPI Management — Set, track, and report on SLAs, KPIs, and KVIs for services, vendors, customers, as well as perform root cause and business impact analysis at all levels.

Spent the better part of a week reworking the current network for the lab. I was concerned that my single access point to the Internet would be too limiting and was ready to invest in a pool of static IP addresses when I discovered that Comcast Teleworker services rock! (Did I mention I also saw 63Mbps download throughput the other day!)

Turns out, my cable modem allows for two IP Addresses to be dynamically assigned to two different MAC addresses. So, a quick connection from the cable modem to a simple switch and two different routers means I now have a dedicated Lab network and a dedicated public network. Each is using DynDNS for IP Address assignment for the domain names.

So, if you were wondering where the site was for a few days, it was offline while I redesigned the network. Some of the side benefits, OpenVPN, Dedicated DMZ, Traffic Filtering, QOS Tagging, and WAN Link balancing. The DNS, QNAP NAS, and ESX virtual networks are also split across two networks which makes updates to the public side far easier.

So, with that… I should be back up and online for a while again. I don’t foresee any updates impacting the public network until the next physical upgrade.