From big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtual
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InfoWorld - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC&#39;s VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company&#39;s zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes.
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Teen-friendly virtual world books musicians for in-world appearances.
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When Verizon wanted visitors to its Verizon Experience store to have a wholly different encounter than they would at a typical cell phone retailer, it took cues from an unlikely source. The company entrusted its interactive agency, R/GA&#x2014;better known for its work in cyberspace than anything consumers can actually touch&#x2014;to incorporate the principles of e-commerce. The result was 70 touch-screen kiosks of production demonstrations in the store, which opened outside Dallas Oct. 31.
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By Stephanie Armour  As the job market heats up, interest in online business networking is starting to soar -- turning a one-time novelty into a necessity for millions of business professionals in search of jobs or business contacts.
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Retailers and manufacturers are setting up shop in Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, hoping that users will steer their avatars to real world stores.
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New service lets consumers access an all-in-one mailbox from anywhere with a phone or the Internet.
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Teams of digital designers rake in piles of cash as businesses scramble to set up shop in the virtual world. By the Associated Press.
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Entertainment companies increasingly turn to virtual worlds as a source for new content.
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The country's netizens have become experts at wielding the power of the web to settle personal squabbles. This time, they took on a major tech company--and won
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By Julia Stuart  They come home from school, ignore their toyboxes and log on. Mouses in hand, they enter a virtual world and play with their dolls online. The real thing, it appears, is no longer cool.   There is a plethora of internet sites now catering for young girls.
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In the U.S., Microsoft will offer training vouchers, migration products and online tech support to NetWare users considering a switch.
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As travelers spend billions online, Internet options keep growing.
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software, will be a featured solution provider at the 2007 HP Technology Forum &amp; Expo in Las Vegas this week.
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The net is having to grow in order to meet fresh demands such as high definition video on the web.
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LOS ANGELES -- When Toyota Motor Corp. wanted to promote its new Scion model, it turned to Millions of Us, one of the growing number of digital design companies doing business in the popular online universe Second Life.
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By Andrew Eder, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.  Mar. 1--The Internet and e-mail have given American workers the ability  to access a world of data and connect with colleagues and clients across the  globe in an instant.