The Risk-Free Cloud

There is so much waste in the data centers of Fortune 1000 companies today that a CIO – as an officer of the company – could be considered in breach of their fiduciary duty to stockholders given the dollars in question.  Of course that requires costs transparency, so sadly most are safe for now.  It seems that every new technology innovation brings the promise of greater efficiencies and cost savin

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Fit-for-Purpose Data Center Infrastructure in the Clouds

The trigger for this post is a conversation I’ve had far too often with an IT executive who has  an ambitious plan to leverage hypervisor virtualization to create a new data center infrastructure upon which his entire business would run.  The goals are laudable; dramatic cost reductions, increased availability, decreased time to market (as measured by how long it takes to provision a VM)…all things

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Stop Designing Data Centers from the Bottom Up

Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of swinging a hammer for a living or to pay for a semester of school knows this fundamental truth:  build a solid foundation or whatever you place on top of it stands a pretty good chance of toppling over at some point in the future.  This truth is perpetuated everywhere, in the Bible, in the story of the Three Little Pigs...it’s as old as time.

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Enterprise Clouds will fail without Dynamic Monitoring

Congratulations!  You’ve successfully virtualized your network/server/storage environments and saved xx% (insert percentage).  But who besides your CFO really cares?  All you’ve done is lower the cost of an increasingly commoditized service, and anyone who’s spent a day working for a vendor knows that’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

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Jump Start your Diagnostic Process

Have you ever been pulled into a troubleshooting call, where all the support teams report their monitoring systems are reporting a ‘green’ status, but the users are reporting horrendous performance?  Unfortunately, this happens more frequently than most of us would care to admit.  When I get pulled into one of these situations, I avoid all the recriminations of the “could of” and “should of” done’s, which do not amount to much as the customer is in the background pulling their hair out in frustration.

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For IT going green is more than just a catch phrase.

What does it really mean to be green in IT? Is it just decreasing a datacenter’s power consumption by making the cooling process more efficient and thus consuming less energy? Is it addressing the footprint of the data center and examining the infrastructure to ensure that the design is as efficient as possible? Is it taking a hard look at what runs across the data center in terms of applications and services to find redundancies?

The answer is that all of these options must be considered in order to make a sustainable approach to efficiency in the data center.

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IT Can be the Innovation Driver

In a recent blog about IT and innovation, the point was made that there are numerous untapped opportunities for IT to become an enabler of the business as opposed to just a cost center to be tolerated.

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IT is Recession Relevant

A recent blog mentioned the importance of the business to consider strategic investments during this recession. IT should be a significant participant in this effort. This is an opportunity to perform strategic house cleaning, while helping the business manage costs, while establishing the premise that IT is the strategic partner to prepare for the post recession surge. IT is recession relevant, the question is how and what to do to make that relevance clear.

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Enterprise IT as a Marketplace- Infrastructure as a Service

Now that the gold rush of mortgage backed securities trading has led to a severe crash, what do surviving investment banks do with all that hardware (i.e.10 million dollars plus for each institution or more)? Why not become a service marketplace, reduce the risk that comes from directly trading in such securities, and get a cut of the proceeds by being the facilitator of flow? Banks should become flexible and offer their technical expertise as a service.

So why should banks become an infrastructure service provider for hedge funds?:

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Conquering Latency—An Incredible FEET

Network vendors are starting to provide 10GigE connections, switches and fabric, and given the exponentially increasing demand for bandwidth, enterprises will buy this equipment. Applications that can gobble up the bandwidth will soon follow-there is simply never enough bandwidth. It is becoming clear that those responsible for the applications in datacenters should also be concerned about the proximity of collaborating applications and the number of hops critical transactions take. The importance of this can be better visualized in FEET.

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What would a 5 billion share trading day look like?

The current volatility of the financial markets is an example of why understanding demand is so important. The inter-connections across all aspects of our global village, Insurance, Capital Markets, commodity supplies such as energy, forces questions about the characteristics of demand to be answered. Example: How would a financial services company answer "What does a 5 billion share day look like?" How would it affect all of your infrastructure throughout the day.

For an Financial Services company, it is not just about the sheer volume, it is about increased errors rates in the incoming data, increased alerts, increases in overnight processing which already have tight operational windows. It is about increased network latency as temporary servers are brought on line, anywhere there is room to handle the demand.

Even if your company is not financial services, the cascading impact of any large event on transaction traffic and queries, are important for IT executives to consider. In any dynamic market, financial services or otherwise, the demand profile would change as the volume increases. Example- after Thanksgiving, retail stores can expect surges in volume that will last through the New Year, but what is the proportion of browsing to sales, and how does that affect fulfillment. With the increase in streaming media as a key attractor for potential buyers, what is the effect on the network, storage and compute? How does meeting the needs of the client facing systems affect the resources required for back end and fulfillment systems? How does severe weather affect a whole range of companies? The needs could change inter-day, (heavy client facing demand during the day and heavy fulfillment and inventory replacement at night).

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Tailoring the right set of network solutions- the Network Ensemble

A complex system such as an enterprise network is subjected to many kinds of stresses from a large variety of business applications that have different demand profiles. Dig deeper into any large network and you will see that one solution doesn't solve all problems. Pockets of point solutions are installed to solve problems as they arise, this is rarely efficient in a large network. The big question for IT is whether it is possible to be forward thinking when deploying these solutions through the use of network ensembles.

What is a network ensemble? A network ensemble is an integrated collection of services and functions that are engineered to work together to optimize specific behavior.

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Business Driven Virtual Data Center Strategy

Virtualization has many advocates and is the latest IT bandwagon rallying cry. The approaches to virtualization have taken two distinct paths. The supply side path is usually undertaken by IT operations in an attempt to mask hardware differences and minimize complexity; this approach does not go far enough. The other path involves a business demand driven approach. The demand driven approach needs to be taken to ensure that virtualization is executed in a strategic manner.

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Drowning in Data, Thirsting for Knowledge.

This metaphor about executives seeing all the data but not being able to use it is a very old battle cry in IT. Data comes in faster than ever, has greater density every year and the crisis only deepens. As stated in a previous blog,the network is the nervous system of the enterprise, and as such it must help the stimuli flow. Everyone uses the network to pass information, so what’s the problem? Congestion, priority conflict, bad timing such as sending gigabyte files over the network during regular business hours, and the endless copying of the same data set, so that “I can be in control of my own destiny”.

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The $100 million dollar blade- the ultimate change

I have gotten some responses to the first two blogs, and the most compelling so far has been “What if your conscious (the top manager) doesn’t understand, is lazy, thinks it is too costly or too much work, etc? This is a good article but, I think, it takes for granted that someone wants really manage the change and sees the benefits”. This person is absolutely correct. What is a beleaguered visionary, with no high level decision-making powers to do?

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Network Evolution- How to Harness Change

If the network is like the human body (and it is), the question now becomes how to embrace the inevitable forces of change and harness the possibility and power of co-evolution. There are critical questions to ask related to the mechanics of change that drive co-evolution:

• What is the environment doing?
• What are the capabilities to respond?
• How can the effects of demand and the effects of change be measured?
• How can demand and supply be met in an optimal manner with minimal waste?

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The network is like a human body

As the business evolves, so must the network which supports all of the applications used to run the business. It is co-evolution: The change in a business' needs drive the demand and any increased network capability enhances the responsiveness of the business, often driving further change. The burning question for most businesses is whether this cyclic behavior has become a consciously observed pattern, or is just subject to the "whims of forces beyond any control." To understand how we can harness and embrace this change, it would help to see the results of co-evolution in other networks. If we explore the use of networks in the human body, what can we derive as lessons learned?

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