OnX Cloud Blog

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Paul Khawaja to Drive Company’s Federated Cloud Strategy Following OnX’s $20 Million Investment

TORONTO, Ontario and NEW YORK, NY – July 26, 2012 – OnX Enterprise Solutions, a leading global provider of enterprise data center solutions, today announced the appointment of Paul Khawaja as Executive Vice President of Canada and Chief Operating Officer of the company’s Cloud and Managed Services division. Khawaja brings to OnX over 20 years of executive experience in global information and communications technology.

Reporting directly to the president and CEO, Ed Vos, Khawaja is responsible for building OnX’s business in Canada and driving the company’s global cloud and managed services strategy.  The COO role for the Cloud and Managed Services division is a new position created by OnX following a $20 million investment in OnX’s cloud and data center infrastructure.  With this investment, OnX became one of the first solution providers to bring a dual data center-cloud strategy to market in Canada.  This new investment positions OnX to expand its team and build a robust offering for enterprise clients throughout North America who seek a high-availability solution with multiple facility failover capacity.

“Paul brings a wealth of valuable experience in IT and Managed Services to OnX,” said OnX president and CEO Ed Vos. “His depth of IT and market expertise will help us execute our Federated Cloud vision and greatly accelerate deployments of our solutions and services for clients across the globe,” added Vos.

Prior to joining OnX, Khawaja served as Vice President of Bell and President of xwave, one of Canada’s largest technology firms with over 1,100 employees and more than $350 million in annual revenues. Khawaja also held leadership positions in sales and business development at MITI Information Technology.

“OnX’s continued investment in Cloud and Managed Services, in conjunction with the attainment of outstanding leadership and technical skills, positions the organization for momentous growth,” said Paul Khawaja.  “This is a very exciting time to be joining OnX and I am confident that we will establish a leadership role in enabling clients to take advantage of our Cloud and Managed Services offerings.”

A decision to virtualize desktop infrastructure is not made in a day. Many organizations that look into virtualizing their desktop infrastructure go through distinct stages of learning, understanding and accepting VDI.  These are the three stages of VDI acceptance I typically see.
Stage 1 – Excitement
When we first learn what VDI promises to deliver, it does sound exciting – no more need to get to a user’s desk to look at a broken desktop or laptop; users can fix most of the issues just by restarting their VDI session, etc., etc. Oh! And those Thin Client devices are so cool and shiny. If we can replace traditional desktops with thin clients we already are saving so much money. After all, industry analysts promise 40% TCO savings with VDI.
Stage 2 – Denial
But wait… We need to buy so much extra VDI software, servers and storage hardware. Plus, what about our heavy graphics applications, old homegrown software and user experience? Forget about it! This looks too expensive and there are too many unknowns here.
Stage 3 – Cautious acceptance
Okay… It looks like we should not expect to save much on the hardware and software after all. On the other hand we still need to support more users with less IT staff, provision desktops faster, make sure that our sensitive data is not sitting on desktops and laptops, and that we can easily roll-out new applications on end-user devices. VDI will also help us migrate to Windows 7, possibly Windows 8, and maybe even help us implement a BYOD (bring your own device) policy.
After going through these stages, most organizations come to the conclusion that VDI can address some of the challenges they need to solve. Now it is time to figure out how to deploy a desktop virtualization solution.
Way too many IT departments jump directly into a pilot. Some of those quickly discover that the combination of VDI software and hardware they are trying is not a “one size fits all” solution, and some user types cannot even run their applications in the pilot environment. In some cases these pilots are proclaimed to be grossly unsuccessful and the organization perceives VDI to be a bad choice for their IT.
There is a better way. Starting from a well thought out plan and leveraging assessment toolsets to profile existing clients can maximize VDI benefits and optimize desktop infrastructure costs. And speaking of costs, thorough cost analysis is one of the most important steps when planning for VDI. VDI cost structure is very different from that of traditional desktops:

To make an unbiased and informed decision on whether VDI is a good fit for your organization, all those new costs need to be accurately forecasted and compared to costs of the legacy desktop infrastructure. That’s where OnX can help. For over six years OnX has been providing in-depth financial analysis of desktop infrastructure virtualization initiatives including detailed financial metrics covering ROI, TCO savings, Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR).

Igor Gifrin, Technology Cost Management Practice Lead, Office of the CTO, OnX

It’s summer time and, like most parents, I have kids around the house a bit more than normal at this time of year. This leads to some interesting question and answer sessions … Where does the water come from that falls as rain and how does it get up in the sky? Why do people like motorcycles that are so loud? How come mosquito bites itch? One of my favorites came up the other day, but in a different way. I was asked by my child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Interestingly, this is a question being asked by many mid-career IT professionals, and I encounter it frequently as I speak with CIO’s about the changing face of their IT organization. We are seeing a fundamental shift in the way IT organizations are structured, and in the responsibilities being placed on people’s shoulders. The traditional realm of the “Network Admin” or “Server Support Specialist” is being changed. Newer IT organizations are dealing with internal and external cloud providers, which means IT professionals are working with Service Level Agreements and performance metrics. Servers are provisioned through self-serve portals instead of being managed by a server administrator. Backups are managed through cloud a storage provider which is changing the role of the backup administrator. In short, IT professionals are changing roles to become managers of Services instead of managers of Infrastructure or Applications.

This change is also driving change in the governance structure of the IT organizations I meet with. CIO’s are looking for IT Service Management experience in their employees and partners. There’s more time spent on the relationship with a supplier instead of just commodity pricing. Governance meetings are driven by metrics and dashboards, not change management. Some organizations are struggling with this change; especially those with older work forces who are used to maintaining responsibility “silos” of operational control. For these organizations they risk IT becoming more of an inhibitor than an enabler to the business. When this happens, IT becomes marginalized and Business Units end up going around the roadblock to get what they need. How many IT organizations have said, “no” to a project, only to find out six months later that a Business Unit is now using a SaaS offering to do the same function without IT involvement? There is no doubt about it. IT organizations are being faced with this question, “What do we want to be when we grow up?” Some will become enablers to the business, while others will become inhibitors, and will eventually be marginalized or outsourced.

Well, needless to say I did not try and explain all this to my child when I was asked the question. Instead, being reminded of the words of my spouse who regularly reminds me I’m the biggest kid in the family, I responded, “Honey, I don’t ever want to grow up!” She laughed and we went outside to play in our backyard.

Steve Harris, Chief Technology Officer – Canada, OnX

Walking through a large building with 20 huge reel-to-reel, collared tapes on each arm, looking like the Michelin Man, was not really my idea of what “working in IT” was about while I was in school. We had about 20,000 of these tapes to move to a different section of the office to make way for some brand-new tech – 3 very large, dodecagon-sided automated tape library. Three other similar-aged kids (we were, basically) were tasked with this.

This was 1988 and I was 16 years old, in my first full-time IT job since leaving school. I worked for a major financial institution in the City of London, England. It was my dream job. But I didn’t expect to be carrying these tapes or indeed, having to clean the vacuum tubes of two dozen IBM 3420 tape drive systems 4 times per shift.

The hulking IBM mainframes we used back then still used the reel-to-reel approach for several more years while they slowly converted to the automated cartridge loading system, so my day-, night- and weekend-shifts were still filled with the smell of Isopropyl Alcohol tape-drive-cleaning wipes but at least we had progressed. A couple of years before I joined they were still using punched cards to load data onto systems so at least they kept progressing.

Staying with that company for 10 years and advancing from “Backup Tape Monkey” (really I was an Assistant Computer Operator) to programming the massive DEC Vax Alpha systems we had, it had set me up for a career in IT and an appreciation of data backups, their importance and the technology around it – I’d put the hard graft in during my formative years there and it instilled a desire to improve backups. Try re-racking around 500 numerically-ordered reel tapes at 3am and it’ll happen to you too!

Today things are better for data backups. Actually they’re much, much better. Sure, people are still using tapes (for some crazy reason, usually legal) but the quantum leaps in the technology in the last few years is leading the way and making the lives of backup guys & gals, department heads, business units and companies a joy (I may be overstating that slightly).

But the capabilities are there and available. There’s isn’t a single type or size of data that cannot be protected by the major backup application players these days. From virtualized systems, to remote sites, to super-large databases to desktop users, it’s all there. It’s a rich arena that a lot of companies unfortunately feel is still out of their financial reach.
For someone such as me, who has the Backup gene active in their DNA, it’s a wonderful time to be architecting backup solutions for my customers, large and small. No longer is it a case to “just buy more tape drives”. No longer are Backup Architects the poor cousin to Storage Architects – the type of cousin who used to have jam on his face and wear his socks a little too high.

Backup has grown up and is here to stay. I was there. I saw the battles, I stood in the trenches, I suffered the defeats (broken tape drives) and celebrated the victories. It’s now the golden age of Backup.

David Attreed, Senior Solutions Architect, Data Protection, OnX

OnX OnDemand Consulting is a time and materials based IT Staff Augmentation consulting model and service that provides clients with flexible and expert resources for all technologies and solutions available from OnX. From infrastructure services to application development and everything within the system development life cycle to cloud and managed services – we offer deep domain expertise in each of these areas, when and where you need it, anywhere in the world.

In IT Staff Augmentation space there are really only four factors to consider when looking for a partner:
1. Cost – how much is this going to run me?
2. Speed – How fast can I get the resources in place?
3. Quality – Are the resources any good?
4. Risk – How much exposure do I have when using 3rd part resources?
In the traditional IT Staffing space, no one company could offer their clients a solution that didn’t sacrifice one or more of these critical factors.  No one except for OnX.

Option A is using a Staffing agency.  They are fast and cheap but they don’t deliver consistent quality and thus they are considered high risk.

Option B is using a Global Solution Provider.  They are deliver high quality with lower risk but are very expensive making them an unattractive option where there is cost sensitivity (which these days is pretty much all the time).

Option C is where the OnX OnDemand innovation comes in.  We developed a model that allows us to be as fast as the Staffing Agency, with the high quality of the Global Solution Providers at a cost that falls between the previous two options.  Add one of our highly talented OnX Engagement Managers to the mix and we’ll responsively validate your resource requirement, the actual skill level of each resource, and then integrate, support, and manage the provided resource throughout each engagement. Through this validation process we help each client minimize their resource-related risk and activate the right resource at the right time and at the right cost.

Please check out my video message for some more info on this industry leading service.

Scott McCormick, Global Director – OnDemand Consulting, OnX

I recently participated in the Toronto FIX protocol conference in Toronto to introduce the new OnX offering of an integrated High Performance trading stack (Consortium). It was a learning experience and extremely exhilarating.  Outside of the fact that our OnX Gnome “Gary” was hugely popular our solution was not to be beat.
I learned that many organizations invest significant funds in applications to make trade processing faster and more accurate. Every micro second counts. Yet to my surprise, hardware is not of primary concern and usually an afterthought.  Functionality is sacrificed for speed, and data collection is a luxury beyond many. This is especially true for smaller trading houses that do not have the funds to spend even on the application and algorithms to make their trading efficient.

The solution we brought “engine” was well received and found to be innovative and of great value to all that visited our booth. Although integrated infrastructure stacks is not a new concept, it is a stack that is pre-tested and configured specifically for the purpose of high performance trading that is new to the market space. Some of the feedback we heard was:
• An integrated stack that ensures performance and speed can significantly enhance the applications running on them
• Applications currently being built can only perform to a certain level and the infrastructure can ensure higher performance with minimal expenditure
• The stack offers great value and takes away headaches from IT team in trying to create configuration that are rarely tested
• With this offering, what used to be out of reach for many brokerage houses is now within reach
•  This solution would speed up time to market specifically since deploying it to the exchange DC’s that are familiar with the hardware stack, would make the approval and implementation process quicker. Hardware is certified, tested
Today, there is a lack of industry recognised benchmarks for designers which can demonstrate solutions have ‘high performance’ characteristics. To achieve performance and agility, with low up-front and ongoing operating costs, trade infrastructure implementation teams need to source the best available components from different innovative specialist vendors, integrate them and tune their interoperability

Paresh Vyas, Director of Technology, Financial Services and Insurance, OnX

New SVP Previously Served As Group VP at Oracle

TORONTO, Ontario and NEW YORK, NY – June 18, 2012 — OnX Enterprise Solutions, a leading global provider of enterprise data center solutions, today announced the appointment of Tom Wagner as Senior Vice President of the United States Western Region.  Wagner will be responsible for Sales, Operations and Channel Partner Relations in the Western U.S. and will report directly to Enza Alexander, OnX EVP and GM, U.S.

In this role, Wagner will be responsible for executive sales leadership, vendor council participation, professional services, sales development, general management as well as strategic planning for the Western U.S region.  Additionally, he will spearhead efforts to drive profitable growth through enterprise initiatives focused on operational excellence, employee engagement and customer engagement.

“Tom brings to OnX decades of large enterprise IT experience coupled with a deep understanding of client and partner issues and inter-workings,” said Ed Vos, OnX president and CEO. “His reputation and insight from having worked with global technology leaders including Oracle and Sun is invaluable to OnX at this time as we look to expand further in the U.S. and continue to build strong and successful relationships with enterprise and commercial clients.”

Wagner joins OnX after two and a half years with Oracle as Group Vice President of North America Hardware Alliances and Channels Sales. During that time, he was responsible for all aspects of channel operations, including channel go-to-market strategy, partner development and management, and tactical sales execution. Prior to Oracle, he served as VP of Partner Sales at Sun Microsystems where he took on executive leadership of Sun’s business partner sales efforts and partner ecosystem, including channel development partners, consulting and outsourcing system integrators, value added resellers, direct marketing resellers, and big brand ISVs.

“This is a very exciting time to join OnX in this role as the company looks to further invest in its technology and channel partnerships,” said Wagner.  “I’m also looking forward to working closely with the OnX executive team that’s focused, strong and 100 percent committed to its clients, partnerships and employees alike.  Opportunities for OnX globally are unlimited.”

In this new role, Wagner will manage OnX’s U.S. sales team. Those reporting to Wagner include Jim Cross, Director of Sales, Western Region – Chicago; Arnie Lujan, Director of Sales, Western Region – California; and Scott Noble, Vice President of Sales, Western Region – TOLAZ.

In today’s modern and fast paced society, it appears to be all about how quickly and efficiently you can get the tasks at hand done.  So, this begs the question, how fast are your applications performing?

Is it time to look at your application infrastructure or your database and make changes?
Have you budgeted and are you prepared to rip and replace your infrastructure to make a change?
Would you like to make a smaller more incremental change and recognize a greater potential return on that performance investment?

Well, if you are ready to make a change and yearning for greater performance for your applications, then maybe it is time to look at flash technologies.

Today’s flash technologies come in many forms, and from many vendors. Basically they look and act like modern storage solutions, but perform much closer to memory speeds than disk speeds.
For the enterprise customer, there are three major flash technologies worth looking at.  They each have their pros and cons to implementation and performance.  Let’s take look at them and some of their basic characteristics.

Solid State Disk (SSD)

SSD’s have been around for several years and are one of the easiest forms to implement.  Many servers and storage systems allow for hot swap and most SSD’s can therefore be swapped into a live system.  SSD uses flash memory packaged into a 2.5″ or 3.5″  enclosure along with a controller to present itself as a SAS or SATA drive. Placing files on one of these drives can create an immediate performance increase either in IOPS or available throughput.  As a rule of thumb, a 15k RPM drive can support ~185 IOPS and ~200MB of random/sequential performance.  A SSD is around ~20,000 IOPS and ~400MB of random/ sequential performance.

Put a database file or log here and you can have instant potential performance gains.

PCIe

Another implementation of flash technology comes in the form of PCIe cards that get installed into the physical server.  Depending on the manufacturer, you can have cards sized in the Terabyte range.  8TB implementations are not out of reach.  Much like the SSD, these cards can present themselves as single or as multiple disks. It takes a little more work to install and set up one of these cards, but the density benefits and tuned controller can provide greater performance and management benefits to the applications.

Trying one of these cards can give you random IOPS performance well into the hundreds of thousands and sequential transfer rates well into the Gigabytes.

Flash Array

Lastly, flash memory configured into a purpose built storage enclosure would be a flash array.  These arrays can provide capacities into the 10′s of Terabyte range, configurations of 20TB and above in a 3U enclosure are not unheard of.  These arrays are generally the most high-performing implementations, since the entire storage array is built around flash memory and the performance characteristics of flash, dedicated tuned controllers and RAID implementations are common here.

These devices still present themselves as disk LUNS and can be directly attached or on a SAN.  Interconnects such as SAS, Fiber Channel, iSCSI and infiniband are common in this space.

1,000,000 IOPS and 6GB transfer rates can be achieved.   With the capacities capable in this space, entire databases and application storage needs can be housed in these arrays, providing tremendous performance benefits.

Conclusions

If your applications are starting to slow down or you are seeing IO performance bottlenecks in your infrastructure, maybe it is now time to bring some of these technologies into your environment and kick the tires. I think you will like what you see.

Thanks for reading & have a great day !

Joe Ciocco, CTO Strategist – Service Provider Division, OnX

At OnX, the dedicated Healthcare Practice understands the business requirements of Healthcare and is determined to respond with world-class technology solutions to help clients achieve better results. Poised to make a difference in Healthcare, Team OnX and its best in class partners are SOLUTION FOCUSED + OUTCOME DRIVEN! Together we share a common goal of reducing the cost of healthcare, delivering more responsive patient services and addressing the challenges of delivering the highest quality patient care across the continuum of care.
Our “5 Rights” approach to service excellence
• Right Solution
• Right Provider
• Right Place
• Right Time
• Right Price
The strategic relationships of the OnX Healthcare Practice are positioned to be responsive to current healthcare industry demands. Challenged by fiscal constraints, increased service demand, data requirements and consumer expectations, the Healthcare Practice remains focused on client solutions that will improve operational efficiency and clinical outcomes. In response, OnX forged a strategic partnership with MEDSEEK on January 16, 2012, http://www.onx.com/News/News-Releases/OnX-Enterprise-Solutions-Signs-Strategic-Partnership-Deal-with-MEDSEEK/ . We want the healthcare community to know that we listened….we understand your issues……we want to be your partner…..we want to make a difference together!
Why MEDSEEK?
MEDSEEK, an industry-leading provider of eHealth and content management solutions to hospitals and healthcare organizations is able to put the pieces of the healthcare information technology (IT) puzzle together. Their eHealth ecosystem is a portfolio of web-based solutions that work together to leverage existing IT investments and infrastructure facilitating secure health information exchange inside institutional walls, throughout the community and beyond. MEDSEEK uses enhanced portal technology to create an unparalleled user experience for patients, physicians, employees and consumers. The user specific unified, single view of relevant information provides secure anywhere, anytime access.
Team OnX “EcoSystem”
Partnering for success is the OnX Healthcare Practice’s mantra. Partnering with world-class vendors for the best client solution and partnering with clients to address needs will transform the exchange of health information. In the Team OnX “EcoSystem”, the OnX/MEDSEEK partnership will leverage MEDSEEK’s customer facing eHealth solutions and OnX’s Federated Cloud Framework to help healthcare organizations optimize their IT investments.
The value this partnership brings to healthcare is unprecedented. The cost-effective, quick-time-to-market reliable solution offering is transformational. Institutions no longer need to struggle with disparate data systems, data fragmentation, multiple passwords and different views.
As a Registered Nurse and former CIO of a multi-facility organization who purchased and installed the MEDSEEK physician, employee and consumer portals, I experienced firsthand eHealth/digital hospital system transformation. The benefits were far reaching!

Judy Middleton  | Sr. Healthcare Strategist, Healthcare Practice

What are the three most important factors in retail? Location, location, and location.  Now this same question about location is creeping into the conversations of CTO’s and IT data center managers alike.  Where do we put our next data center?  In years past there was an easy answer, in the same office as the employees.  But now that is becoming harder to justify with the increase in data center costs.   According to U.S. Department of Energy, data centers can consume 100x more energy than a standard office building. Often, less than 15% of original source energy is used for the information technology equipment within a data center.  (http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/program/dc_energy_consumption.html )

Another factor is the transformation of a work force that doesn’t need to be “in an office” to be productive.  With remote access getting easier and easier, the need for a desktop computer is becoming obsolete.  Without desktops, the question becomes whether or not the data center needs to be located in the office?  This is a tough question to answer.  While access might be getting easier, auditing and security concerns are growing at a fantastic rate.  Is this where clouds come into the picture?  Maybe,   cloud solutions are growing, and as Gartner pointed out with its’ latest data center trends, they are not going away.  If anything, one of the major trends will be how IT will manage “Hybrid” datacenters.  The hybrid datacenter, as the name suggests, is a mixture of private and public clouds both on and off premise.

Choosing the correct solution, whether it’s a public, hybrid, or hosted datacenter needs to be based on application and business needs, not the physical location of users.  When choosing a datacenter partner, choices are paramount.  A single solution or cloud will not fit every application or every business need you have.  The last thing you want is to get locked into the wrong data center strategy.  Having a cloud partner that will work with you to assess your current environment and help you move into the correct data center strategy is key.  Just having a cloud offering is not enough.  IT data center managers need choices and solutions that are flexible and they need partners that can help them navigate the new hybrid data center landscape.

Remember, choosing the wrong datacenter strategy can be disastrous.  You don’t want to end up having your datacenter in the wrong location.

Mike Kleid, FCCE Manager, Office of the CTO, OnX

From now until June 8^th public voting is open for sessions at VMworld 2012. If you go to www.vmworld.com and log in with your VMworld account (you will have to create one if you do not have one already) you can follow the link on the main page: Call for Papers Public Voting

. There is a large list of interesting sessions available. You can use the filter button to display the sessions in a specific track, area of interest or technical level. This can help reduce the sessions to the ones you are interested in evaluating. Once you find a session you would like to see just click the “thumbs up” icon next to it to register your vote. Note that the icon is a toggle switch, if you hit it the second time you turn your vote off. In other words, you can only vote for any session once. By voting for sessions that you like you can have a say into what content is presented at VMworld 2012.

This year OnX has a proposed technical session on VMware Chargeback and ideas on how to use it to meter your cloud resources. Make sure to check out and vote for my proposed session “Consuming the Cloud – Deep Dive into vCloud Consumption Models and How to Integrate Them with Chargeback”. All your votes will be appreciated.