Bladewatch.com

PC Pro

Weakening economies will push spending on IT products and services down 3% this year after seven years of growth, according to Forrester Research. The technology research firm says that recessions in the US and other countries would be the main driver for slower spending and that currency fluctuations will be a secondary factor.

While the research indicated a 3% growth rate for 2009 based on a weighted average of local currencies, Forrester said that in US dollar terms the global market would fall 3% to $1.66 billion, after rising 8% in 2008.

IT spending will set to be challenging for the time being, what we’ll see is a switch from investment to more support and ‘keeping everything working’, at the same time though, we’ve got the challenges associated with needing to deploy more within the same data center or operating conditions, with that in mind I suspect that investment long term will continue.

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Greenresearch

Dell received a lot of attention for its claim last summer that it had become carbon neutral. The company claimed it was “saving more than $3 million annually and avoiding nearly 20,000 tons of CO2 through facilities improvements and a global power-management initiative.”

Dell’s claim of having achieved carbon neutrality became the focal point of a recent skeptical article (subscription required) in the Wall Street Journal. The article pointed out that the carbon emissions Dell claims to have neutralized don’t include those of its suppliers or “the diesel and jet fuel used to ship those computers around the world, or the coal-fired electricity used to run them.” This is a valid point. But Dell says that it’s method of measuring its carbon footprint is a start, and the most practical one at that, since many of its suppliers are not currently able to account for their own carbon footprint.

An interesting and relevant article which raises some good points. We need to accentuate the positives, what vendors and service providers are doing right when it comes to discussing/measuring and reporting their carbon footprint, at the same time we need to recognize that it’s being declared or discussed is the first step, next we need to agree some kind of standard, some kind of value that we can then use as a measure to establish how we can continue to deploy infrastructure that meets the business need whilst reducing the impact on the environment and preventing unnecessary costs in power and cooling.

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I was reading an interview with a CEO talking about his growing business, about how much investment they were making in their IT. The company shall remain nameless (that’s immaterial), it raised a few thoughts:

• How do we measure success in our IT – our IT budget, meeting SLA’s or that it works for the end user – the number of emails/quotes saying “IT IS RUBBISH”
• When we say our investment in or spending on IT – what do we mean? Is this support (keeping everything online) or investment (buying newer more efficient and resilient systems)
• How does this link to your corporate social responsibility?
• What range of smart (efficient) technologies are being used to deliver IT – are we concerned with cost, empowerment or the environmental aspect?

A few thoughts, I could be at this point be accused of being overly specifc, but is it not more important that we uphold IT to the same standards as we would ‘the business’ the service but at the same time be prepared to invest and support it as we would any other department? By that I mean how do I measure my IT’s ability to deliver and how can I continue improving and innovating not only the technology, but the way we do business whilst managing or reducing the operating costs? Does it not require a reboot of the way I do business? Do I really need everyone working on site? Does every user need their own ‘work computer’, could I not give the user a citrix based web portal, a usb stick with an image? If we want to transform what we get from our IT either in terms of number of calls processed, how many failures we have or how fast an application is, do we not need to focus on the supply chain, the big picture? To understand as a business the following:

For each department/business role what is it that they need from IT?

Do HR need desktops, or do they need effectively gmail, access to their HR applications and functions, and their training tools?

What does a typical user need and what different service level agreements, performance and scalability does each usergroup need?

Should I be focussing on deploying a cross business common platform for business and one for the front line business revenue generating part? One common IT which all users use and work from, with different specific groups being given priority in terms of availability or scale dependent on need. Can I take that dual core desktop we’re buying, and take one core and allocate it to our grid?

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Sys-con.com

CANTON, Mass., Jan. 7 /PRNewswire/ — Expanding its focus on the North American data center marketplace, CrossTech Media today announced that the third annual BladeSystems Insight will include a special session on The Next Data Center as part of its April 19-21, 2009 event in Phoenix, Arizona. The program will set the stage for the national series of The Next Data Center one-day summits to take place in key cities across the United States.

“Our recent acquisition of BladeSystems Insight, the premier blade server event, has put us in position to use the platform of this uniquely successful brand to launch The Next Data Center Summit series,” says Nick Saber, President of CrossTech Media. “Each summit will offer its own advantages as a standalone event but will deliver even more value when used in combination by IT vendors as part of an overall data center strategy.”

An industry-defining event, BladeSystems Insight continues to grow exponentially as the premier summit focused on blade servers and systems, virtualization, power and cooling and other core data center technologies. It is an annual national event that takes place over two and a half days and provides a travel participation package for a C-level audience of IT executives. The Next Data Center is a series of regional one-day summits that will attract an audience of IT executives starting in June 2009 in Dallas, October 2009 in Chicago, and March 2010 in Atlanta.

This sounds very interesting, the BladeSystems Insight conferences always have some great panels and it’s also a great opportunity to speak with colleagues and vendors alike. I’ll need to see if I can attend.

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Comms-Express

Computer giant IBM has teamed up with internet retailer Ash City to provide the firm with a new energy efficient data centre at its headquarters.

The new network has a reduced carbon footprint up to 50 per cent smaller than a standard data centre.

Ash City’s new network will reduce costs and energy consumption, according to IBM.

I wonder what technologies they’ll be using, including infrastructure tools like energy efficient power supplies, the air conditioning and air flow as well as the configuration of the hardware and software. We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more.

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CNN Money

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and BNP Paribas, the largest French company and the fifth largest in the banking industry worldwide, today announced a 318 million euro (exclusive of VAT), six-year agreement for their existing joint venture, BP2I, to support and manage the overall information technology (IT) infrastructure operations of BNP Paribas’ subsidiary office, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in Italy.

By extending BP2I to Italy, BP2I will be able to provide flexible solutions across both its French and Italian operations. BP2I will provide significant cost savings to the BNP Paribas Group by transforming BNL’s IT infrastructure and aligning it with BNP Paribas’ current infrastructure and standard processes. The agreement will also enable BNP Paribas Group to strengthen BNL’s capabilities to better manage the globalization requirements of the retail banking business.

In signing this agreement, BNP Paribas is expanding its existing partnership with IBM, which began in 2004 when IBM proposed a new IT infrastructure management for BNP Paribas Group’s Retail and Insurance branches across France, and in doing so, created BNP Paribas Partners for Innovation (BP2I), the IT services company equally owned by BNP Paribas SA and IBM.

These kind of deals are increasingly popular in the finance sector as I’ve written before, it can be an ideal vehicle for investment or innovation with IT or in the way you supply and deliver IT. That it works for your business is all that matters, everything else is noise.

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Channel Insider

No longer content with just providing the networking pipes, Cisco’s intent to manufacture servers could disrupt the $50 billion server market dominated by Dell, HP and IBM.

Cisco Systems is planning a big move into the server space, threatening to chip away at the market-leading status enjoyed by Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM in the $50 billion server market, The New York Times reports.

Cisco’s first server, expected in the next few months, will cater only to virtualized applications, and will feature sophisticated software from VMware, of which Cisco owns a 2 percent stake, according to analysts.

For years, Cisco has dominated the networking market, making nearly $40 billion a year in revenue mostly from such products as routers and switches.

I remain genuinely excited on several levels about this news. It would be great to see Cisco enter the market for a number of reasons. That we might get more competition a bit more innovation in the market has to be a good thing for the end user and the vendors, at the same time, it will be interesting to see what they’re take on virtualization is, what innovations/features that they can bring to the table. By that I mean you ask a networks guy about virtualization and you’ll typically get a different conversation to a server or middleware guy. Could we see, Cisco launch a virtualization device in a box? Where I plug it in, allocate it some storage and just virtualize my machines on to it? What system management features could it include?

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Trading Markets

Jan 21, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) — STEL | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — The city of Aurora, Colorado, has selected VMware’s Infrastructure 3, a management and virtualization suite, as the platform for more than 20 applications, including mission-critical systems for the city’s police and fire department, to improve timeliness and reliability of public services.

It’s always good to read how people are benefiting from virtualization and what they are doing with the technology to achieve their project goals. This article is talking about how this city is using VMware to deliver some elements of its IT, I’m off to read up more.

The more we talk about how we’re using the technology the more opportunities for the vendors and end user community to deliver their project requirements, the more possibilities for empowerment and innovation of the platform, we’ll see.

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Government Technology

CIO Teri Takai is ready to give California a major IT tune-up, one that’s even bigger than the consolidation she performed as Michigan’s CIO.

Takai told Government Technology on Tuesday that California’s $40 billion budget deficit has driven home the importance of a statewide IT consolidation.

“I think it was obviously something [Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger] wanted, to make sure that we get efficiencies in government,” Takai said, “particularly as we’re talking about the revenue crisis that we face, and so this was a part of his overall plan.”

I was reading this article, it highlighted a few things which I think we’re seeing in more places, convergence of operations, standardization and consolidation of the platforms to reduce costs, and improve the ‘time to live’, with this presents benefits in terms of cost and delivery, in scalability and hopefully reliability. Unfortunately unless the investment/costing and delivery is done in the right way, it creates an overhead, a cost of doing business, in many respects, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does raise some key questions (this is all off the top of my head so apologies if I miss anything):

• What level of availbility is it that you need
• What level of logging of fault resolution and flexibility is it that you need
• What level of performance is it that you need
• What is your ‘budget’ and what stakeholders/terms are attached to it?

By this I mean the following:

• The more available the system needs to be, the more failover, redundancy and capacity we need to pre-provision, I might need a cluster, load balanced servers and disaster recovery – all adding to the support/investment cost.
• How effective is the service at noting and recovering from outages, if it’s a desktop can we just give you whatever the cheapest pc or thin client it is that we can find at that point of time, or do you want a standardized user experience, with locked down or standardized configurations to manage user experience?
• What level of performance is it that you need, the sub second trade times or that when the user presses submit to book their meeting room it comes back in a few seconds with a reply.
• The budget and stakeholders in terms of operating costs/environmental considerations, carbon neutral or energy efficient – do you really need pcs or would a thin client do? Related to this and not in a dismissive way are we capex or opex neutral or both? Is it the lowest possible green cost or the lowest capex cost and everything covered by a support cost or warranty – desktops which we replace every year or servers which we’re virtualizing in the next two years anyway.
• Related to these is what is it you want from the application or service, do you want to own the underlying hardware, the support, the tin or do you just want it to work.

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PRNewswire

WAYNE, Pa., Jan. 21 /PRNewswire/ — SunGard has added more than 500 cores to a grid computing cluster setup to host SunGard’s iWorks Prophet actuarial solution, the enterprise risk management application in the iWorks solution suite. The grid uses Sun Microsystems’ Sun Blade X6250 server modules, Intel’s Quad-Core Xeon processors and software from Microsoft to achieve high-performance computing capacity that facilitates the development, execution and support of actuarial models. The use of network-distributed parallel processing clusters, which can be integrated into any Microsoft-based platform, will help improve processing times for real-time risk management. SunGard plans to expand this environment to accommodate a services offering, whereby users may lease cores when needed.

An article talking about how this organization is using grid computing as part of it’s risk management solution. I wonder if we wont see grid becoming more mainstream not just in terms of ‘application virtualization’, deploying your workload to a grid, as well as the virtualization style grid, where I have a virtual cloud which powers my virtual machines, where I can online or offline capacity as the business or end users require it.

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