Bladewatch.com

A brilliant example of this was brought to my attention recently by a friend who’s working for a multi-national, they’re taking part in a virtualization and data center consolidation project to reduce their IT and operational costs.

The data center and server teams were told to identify legacy hardware first to do one of two things, virtualize the existing system, or provide a new virtual machine (with supported OS/middleware) that the application team could migrate to.

As part of this, the teams had an email from the CEO which illustrated that the project had full business backing, that you not participating was delaying excellence (I’ve paraphrased the email to protect identity):

“Organization name is taking part in a billion dollar investment programme to virtualize and consolidate our data centers to reduce our operation costs and increase revenue.

As part of this your server has been selected as a candidate for virtualization and decommissioning.  You have ten days to respond to this email, escalating any operational issues as to why your server cannot be virtualized. If you do not, I hereby grant permission to IT to virtualize and recycle the physical server as part of this programme.

Regards

CEO’s name”

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Finextra

An IBM survey of over 2750 banking executives worldwide forecasts a new world order for the financial services industry, characterised by a shift to specialisation, more transparency and lower overall returns.

The study predicts significant consolidation in segments wrought with over-capacity – such as investment banking, asset management, and wealth management – as firms adapt to a new lower-margin landscape where they will need to specialise around services that clients value rather than continuing to provide a full range of in-house services. Enhanced regulation and transparency will also eliminate opacity, with previously high-margin activities becoming commoditised.

To compete effectively, IBM’s analysis suggests that most firms will have to cut their costs by another 20%, over and above the economies they realise from redundancies and divestitures. This could prove difficult, as many of the financial institutions that went through the recession at the start of the decade have already implemented the most obvious cost-cutting measures. Moreover, Only 12% think that their firms are effective at capitalising on new technologies, even though 39% believe that this is a key attribute.

An interesting article, the financial sector is going through challenging times, there have been many redundancies and re-structuring as banks seek to reduce costs and exposure to more risky markets or areas which add less value.

The interesting thing in the IT world is that there are three component failures which have not helped:

1. Lack of investment in the right way
2. Ruled by the business without retrospective fix
3. Reactive consumption, a business strategy but where’s IT?

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PR News Wire

LAS VEGAS, April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), a leader in application-optimized, high performance server solutions, today unveiled live SuperBlade(R) server demonstrations including new solutions optimized for Intel(R) Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processors at BladeSystems Insight 2009 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada (booth 305). At last year’s BladeSystems Insight, Supermicro’s SuperBlade(R) won the Best Green Data Center Solution award. Easy to deploy, easy to use, and offering the best price-to-performance and profit potential available, the SuperBlade(R) was also ranked number one by CRN over IBM and Dell in its May 2008 cover story entitled Blades of Glory.

“Our new Nehalem blade solutions include the world’s first SAS2-enabled blade server in the world, doubling the storage data transfer rate from 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s per channel,” said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. “Featuring the industry’s highest efficiency (93%*) power supplies, cooling subsystems and motherboard designs, our SuperBlade(R) solutions deliver the best system-level efficiency in the industry. This increases the maximum computing power per rack and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO), while also reducing energy consumption and preserving the environment.”

Great news that Super Micro continue to innovate their blade offering, anything the vendors can do to improve energy efficiency and reduce the costs/barriers to entry of the blade platform has to be a good thing. Do check it out.

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Finextra

The Bank of New York Mellon has installed a 76 kilowatt solar powered system at its offices in Everett, Massachusetts in a move to reduce its carbon footprint and cut costs.

The new system has begun supplying power to the bank’s 385,000 square foot office complex, home to more than 1000 employees and an operations centre for securities servicing and payments processing businesses.

The 5762 square foot array is a “direct tie” system, with electricity generated by 364 solar modules flowing directly into the building’s power lines, effectively reducing power needs from the utility in direct proportion to system output.

an interesting read, it’s always great to see how people have used energy efficient technologies and best practice to reduce their operating costs and carbon footprint, I’m off to read up more.

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Finextra

Sweden’s Handelsbanken has deployed virtualisation technology using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM’s System z servers and operating system.

Red Hat says the technology will help the bank maintain a resilient and secure network that scales based on business demands. The virtualised environment has helped lower costs by minimising the need for additional systems that require more energy and space, translating into a greener IT infrastructure.

Handelsbanken is using IBM’s System z clustering technology, Parallel Sysplex, and the vendor’s availability and disaster recovery offering to maintain operations for its 660 branch offices across Sweden, Great Britain and the Nordic countries.

It’s always good to see what range of technologies are being used to deliver an IT service using tools like virtualization, it’s interesting to see that they’re using IBM’s Sysrem Z servers, I’m off to read up more.

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Finextra

Citi’s new Frankfurt data centre has become the first building of its kind to receive platinum accreditation for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (Leed) from the US Green Building Council.

The bank outlined plans back in August 2007 to spend EUR170 million to build one of the “greenest” data centres in the world in the German city, which provides IT services for Emea operations.

The 230,000 square foot building, opened last year, is the first data centre to receive platinum accreditation. Citi says it cost no more than conventional data centres and does not affect the reliability and resilience of the systems it houses.

The new building uses 30% of the power required for a conventional data centre and cuts carbon dioxide emissions by around 11,750 tons per annum.

It’s always good to see how the technology and best practice are being used to develop an energy efficient platform for a business solution. Being green can not only be good in terms of your data center carbon footprint, it can make a substantial difference to your operating costs, less power means less cost.

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I got asked my viewpoints on re-using servers. Now don’t get me wrong operationally it makes sense, but long term, if you think of the IT strategy, of data center capacity, power, support costs, the big picture if you will. Your lack of investment is going to cost you several times around directly or indirectly.

Re-using your old production servers as development, or taking servers for recycling and making them proof of concept for a project or as a platform to test builds/settings has been normal practice for many in the enterprise and SME markets. Ideally as we move to a virtual world we can provision on demand allocating more resources, more virtual machines as they are needed within our the constraints of capacity.

Why do we re-use servers?

• No budget – the task we want to use them for does not have a specified budget, for example to upgrade development from Windows 2000 to WIndows 2008, or for the DL380 G2 to DL380 G6 or virtual machines.
• Unexpected project requirement – application team has an urgent need for a server for something, the application needs a file server, we wont get a new server installed in time or approval to buy a box.
• Urgent business requirement – extra capacity for the corporate web site, we need a temporary machine whilst we order new ones.
• Opportunities presented – we can see where that server could be re-used to solve a problem, testing or monitoring an application or network, providing a new internal IT or customer facing solution which might not justify buying a server.
• The role isn’t demand enough, it “doesn’t need” to be a new server, it’s a file server, a ping monitor or box to store and run monitoring scripts.

Re-using servers presents the following issues:

• Encourages or supports the concept of sitting still which creates costs  – we haven’t validated against Windows 2003, the application doesn’t work on .Net 2.5, all these kind of things create barriers to keeping your infrastructure up to date, keeping in line with support, and creates a support overhead. By that I mean, we get into the situation where we might have applications and business processes dependent on one platform, one operating system and one database, the cost of move being so great, that I have no option but to support DEC servers running an unsupported version of Alpha, with NT4 web servers creating an additional risk to service and support/security overhead.
• Insource/outsource/merger or acquisition, sometimes as part of the outsourcing activity the service provider will ‘buy’ or take ownership of the servers, this can mean from a financial standpoint the assets clock is reset, “it’s not 7 years old, we’ve only taken ownership of it”.
• Standards in place but being over-ruled, as a service provider this can be particularly difficult, “we don’t support DL380 G2′s, yes you do what’s the cost?” The support cost might be proportional to the capital cost of buying a new machine, and the extra overhead – new disks, more memory or network cards that might be needed.
• The older servers are typically:
  • Less energy efficient
  • More of a support overhead – the operating system might be nearing end of life, the hardware will be getting older and more prone to failure, the systems will need managed more and actively engaged.
  • Less space efficient – compare a new server with one of four years ago in terms of storage support, memory and cpu – a 1u box might easily be powerful enough to replace that 5u box from 6 years ago.
  • More time consuming to repair and fewer components can be ‘hot swapped’, newer servers are designed to be hot swap, the parts will be more readily available, try logging a call with your service provider for a system board for a Compaq server from 10 years ago, they will have one, but what’s the lead time? Days?
• How can I put this politely a focus on cost in the wrong way? Avoiding capex is one thing, but you need to ensure that you are not simply moving the expense, the budget around. I save £3000 by not upgrading my server, that means as IT, I have to:
  • Continue paying support for that operating system which might create an additional cost
  • Continue keeping additional components on site (which might be chargeable) to support that server
  • The server might easily be a support overhead -  small disks, not enough memory, be the cause of so many calls a year
  • The server might need cleaned up, brought in line with current standards, have the layered components, component firmware upgraded, it all takes time and organization
  • The server therefore might so easily generate 50% of it’s capital cost in support cost if you think about it, and what happens if we want additional local hard drives or memory – the cost of legacy components can be horrific.

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Search Server Virtualization

If server vendors have embraced virtualization over the years, it’s because the technology tended to be deployed alongside brand-new, high-end boxes. But now that IT budgets are in decline, are IT professionals forsaking new hardware purchases and installing virtualization software on servers they already own?

Yes and no.

“Anecdotally, we’re hearing more interest from the part of our customers to virtualize on existing systems,” said Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s vice president of product marketing, server business unit. “People are extending the useful life of their hardware beyond the typical three-year depreciation cycle.”

But repurposed older servers aren’t typically sent into production, said Rich Brambley, a senior infrastructure consultant at Softchoice Optimus Solutions, a Gold status VMware Authorized Consultant partner in Norcross, Ga., and a blogger at VM/ETC.”I am seeing the repurposing of hardware purchased in the last three years as recovery site virtualization hosts, for example. In some cases they are used as development environments.”

There are a degree of barriers to entry in using older servers for your VMware hosts, these mainly though come in terms of the number of virtual machines on that host coupled with the performance expectations of the end user community. Let’s not forget that as an infrastructure guy I might think it’s only development, a developer might be on a shocking amount of money, a day’s downtime to a development team might have paid for a new ESX server. Keep in mind also the hidden cost, it’s fine to take a DL580 G2, whack on VMware and say there you go, there’s a fully working development environment for the risk guys. Fine, we want to upgrade from the 2.2GHz Xeons to the 2.8GHz, also can we have more storage, so some SAN please, and 8GB RAM isn’t enough, we’ll have 32GB. Just you watch the upgrade cost. Remember, you’re current requirements are those, we need an infrastructure that has room for growth, we need to avoid the situation where the next development virtual machine costs £12,000 because they need to buy an ESX server and all the associated bits.

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PR Newswire

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — At its third-annual Virtualization Week event, being held in Palo Alto from April 20-22, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) is bringing together customers and partners to address how virtualization is currently used in SAP landscapes as well as future trends and issues. One key theme of this year’s Virtualization Week is that virtualization technologies themselves are increasingly becoming one piece of a much larger puzzle related to sustainability and Green IT. To support an ongoing dialogue around these topics, SAP, together with key members of its ecosystem, announced a new community focused on facilitating “Green IT” collaboration and solution creation. This effort is part of SAP’s long-term strategic focus on sustainability (see “SAP Increases Focus on Sustainable Business“), which comprises SAP’s own operations as well as developing sustainable business process and green IT solutions that help SAP customers operate in a more sustainable way.

That we spread the Green IT message across the business lines and user communities has to be a good thing, showing how not only can we develop a solution that is environmentally efficient, it can be operationally and financially benefitial to your business. I’ll need to have a look at their site and check out if there are any whitepapers.

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NY Times

Clouds, clouds, clouds. Everyone talks about Google-style cloud computing — software as services off in the Internet “cloud” — as the future.

But while cloud computing is a marketing triumph, new research from McKinsey & Company asserts that trying to adopt the cloud model would be a money-losing mistake for most large corporations. The research is being presented at a symposium on Wednesday afternoon, sponsored by the Uptime Institute, a research and advisory organization that focuses on improving the efficiency of data centers.

The McKinsey study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” concludes that outsourcing a typical corporate data center to a cloud service would more than double the cost. Its study uses Amazon.com’s Web service offering as the price of outsourced cloud computing, since its service is the best-known and it publishes its costs. On that basis, according to McKinsey, the total cost of the data center functions would be $366 a month per unit of computing output, compared with $150 a month for the conventional data center.

An interesting article, for the enterprise what we’ll find is that we outsource those activities or workloads that are not in themselves business critical. By that I mean, my raw data processing for my risk reports, or for other organizations it might include the email or file storing/backup processes.  We have to manage the need to be efficient in the way we provide service whilst managing corporate identity/security and stay in line with compliance and regulations. Related to this are the olden days (though possibly necessary) issues of data and security, if I rent 300 blades (in terms of cpu time) the static data generated at that point in time, is it deleted? Is it unique to me as a business customer? The application code is that securely erased, the existing issues with white labelling, providing the same service/application might occur in the cloud environment, though arguably if these issues do occur, it might be that you are not using cloud in the way that it was intended, that you’re trying to apply an application or service which is cloud compatible but not cloud suited.

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