Introduction

Welcome!

The first blog post has finally found its way to the blogosphere. With this first blog post it is also the launch of marcoblijenberg.nl. Another website about IT infrastructure related news, mainly Application Delivery and Virtualization stuff….but also with a mission! This blog is trying to find out which building blocks are needed in order to get the ultimate IT experience from both business and IT operator perspective.

Probably this will go to be a long journey, checking out all kinds of tools en techniques. A lot of comparisons and trade-offs will be made. I also expect this journey will never end..so what, at least we will have some fun discussing the several products. Because of my IT experience the main focus will be on Application Delivery and Virtualization infrastructures (eg. Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft APP-V, Microsoft Windows 7, VMWare vSphere, RES PowerFuse, RES Wisdom, etcetera). But also networking and storage will be part of the building blocks. The question to be answered is: Which infrastructure building blocks do we use to build the ultimate IT experience….there is no “one size fits all”, so which vendors, which combination of products will do the best…..let’s find out!


Of course there are several use cases and there will be no solution to fit in all use cases, but every organization has to deal with different types of users (task workers, knowledge workers,..etc). Goal is to define a best fit for these different user groups.

To start the journey, the first thing we have to do is: How should we define the ultimate IT experience? Binary code becomes data and data becomes information. For the end user (business) it is all about getting the right information at the right moment on the right place. This information can be presented in several ways, it could be via mail, website, application or even voice. Should applications be like an ATM machine, these are the most used applications and every type of user can handle it. And what about the interactive TV, everyone can create his own favorites with just the remote control.

All these different kind of information sources need to be managed, that’s where the IT operator comes in. What should be the ultimate IT experience from the IT operator perspective? Single instance management? Simplicity? No more repetitive tasks?

In the next blog post about this topic the ultimate IT experience will be defined. Because we need to know where we’re aiming at.