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PR NewsWire

BOSTON, May 26 /PRNewswire/ — Seanodes, the creator and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced first official customer shipments of its Storage Virtual Appliance, the award-winning Exanodes(TM) software for VMware environments.

Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) is ideal for designing high-end, clustered virtual iSCSI SANs that leverage the storage resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a powerful virtual SAN in minutes. Users can configure shared virtual storage to maximize capacity, reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional network storage. Exanodes VM Edition presents a compelling value for SMBs and hosted storage services such as cloud computing struggling to contain storage costs in VMware deployments without sacrificing availability or performance.

This does sound cool, anything we can do to make aid in virtualization solutions particularly in the storage arena has to be a welcome announcement, off to check it out.

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PR Newswire

RSA, the Security Division of EMC, Integrates with Cisco Mobility Solutions to Combine Security Intelligence with Geo-location Technology, Helping Accelerate Threat Identification and Response

LAS VEGAS, May 22 /PRNewswire/ — INTEROP 2009 — RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), today announced it has integrated the RSA enVision(R) security information and event management (SIEM) solution with the Cisco(R) Mobility Services Engine (MSE) platform. This integration can help organizations to enhance IT operations, enforce security policy and accelerate response to security threats by providing IT professionals with actionable event information that is designed to include the real-time, physical location of users, hosts and devices connected to wired and wireless networks.

Data and asset security have been in the news today in fact, I published a blog post about a laptop with data that had gone missing. It’s all to easy to lose devices, usb sticks or mobile phones/pda’s. Anything vendors and service providers can do to make data more accessible but secure online or offline for those remote working scenarios has to be a good thing, I’m off to check out more.

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I was having a chat with a student the other day, she asked me to publish a few thoughts on the benefits and challenges with Green IT.  I explained that the concepts are beginning to hit through for a number of reasons, but we still have a way to go.

We need to fight the battles we can win and move on from there, my prime example of this is actually in relation to cars (history, cars and computing, my main areas of interest apart from cooking).

About every six months, someone wakes up and publishes an article highlighting the damage that a 4×4 or a luxury car does to the environment and they’re right. But we’re ignoring the so many millions of legacy cars, those classic cars, those 11 year old ones which haven’t been serviced, use leaded fuel, don’t have a catalytic convertor or offer shocking fuel economy and are not monitored for emissions etc.

If we translate this to IT, we’d have the guy ranting that legacy server72 needs so much power and has a horrific hardware support cost (and indeed I am guilty of this in some respects), without putting it in context – the cost of a re-code is 7 million against 1.5 million support and no-one wants to sign off the risk. Change behavior, focus on what we can achieve and everything else will follow.

As with IT, we need to tackle from both issues, go for the quick wins, which we’ve discussed before, and move on to air flow, to solar power, carbon offsetting, data center design, application coding and looking at the way we do business and our core requirements.

Anyway, rant over, back to my email.

I’ve published the email I sent to him, hope you enjoy it, and if you have any thoughts, do let me know:

Why Green IT can deliver:

• Reduced operating costs – simply upgrading the hardware can achieve direct savings in your support contract and also in the cost of powering the systems
• Enhanced functionality, though this tends to be as a result of combining energy efficient technologies and best practice as part of a consolidation or virtualization project. We might for example be switching our server estate to one based on new servers running VMware, we get the benefits of the energy efficiency savings from the servers combined with virtualization.
• Data center constraints and the cost of power have indirectly mandated it as a technical issue outside of the Public Relations or Corporate Social Responsibility arenas – IT got told but we want more, to achieve this we had to look at where we were allocating power, space and cooling.
• Costs – being green can drive real returns on investment, and often at a low marginal cost, so adopting a blank screensaver costs nothing, but means the pc has less to do when it’s idle, powering off the pc costs very little, have a bios power on and power off setting, and that can save £30 per pc in power.

Challenges with Green IT

• Lack of understanding or preaching – by this I mean we need to sell the concept in line with business objectives – avoid the it’s for the children language and brand the message for the target market, whether it’s business or IT. Energy efficient pc, low operating costs, fantastic performance and serviceability etc.
• Managing the need to act now in terms of what we can achieve now at marginal cost with a great rate of return, and what is a longer term return on investment, which requires more business buy-in and investment. I can’t build a new data center or transform my application to be more efficient and better coded overnight.
• Explaining the concepts – simple statements like, is it really the super fast, super watt processor you want or the mid range one, you know the compute difference is marginal.
• Discussing best practice and ways to achieve it or brand it within the IT, within the business – empower IT to know how to sell it, how to package and deliver it. If they don’t understand the concepts in a way that they can speak to the business, then you’ve got stopped at the front door.

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I wonder if cloud, grid, and virtualization are not all a very polite distraction from the core issue of delivery, consistency and stabilization of the core. Of IT and service delivery management.

If we abstract ourselves from the current data center, power, support cost and strategy and work in the here and now:

What is it you want from your IT?

That it works?

That it’s virtual or grid, or comes in blue?

I would suggest that the core objective is that it works, and all too often we focus on the future, we focus on it’ll get sorted as part of project z, (virtualiation, grid, hardware refresh etc), but understand that your support cost, your call out and outages could all be not erased, but reduced through proper investment in man time in stabilizing your platforms; the network switch configuration, the cluster setups, the windows server configurations and everything else. Just some effort spent on looking at what we have, making sometimes small changes to improve settings and configurations can provide not the stability you want, but need.

Let’s remember my DL360 web server with 18Gb disk space is never going to give you the space your application needs long term, but here and now, for the next few months, we can clear down space, defragment the drive, optimize the page file, the anti virus and the other settings, and at least make it the best DL360 you have in the estate at relatively no capital cost and marginal support cost. All you need is a check list, are these settings applied, and you could even have scripted/automated jobs running everything against each server one at a time to validate the configuration. Anyway, back to the article I was originally posting about:

Information Week

While last week’s Interop event in Las Vegas showcased a wide range of innovative enterprise technologies including mobility, WAN optimization, security, storage, smartphones, data center infrastructure, servers, and more, the biggest CIO-level activity was centered around cloud computing, whose acceptance and potential are growing rapidly, and virtualization, which has already become a cornerstone in 21st-century enterprise IT strategy.

Faced with tighter budgets and the relentless charter to find ways to do more with less, CIOs today are pushing harder than ever on their IT vendors and partners to help them uncover innovative approaches and technologies that (a) let them replace old, brittle, and expensive infrastructure with new gear that’s less expensive and is built for openness, speed, and reliability, and (b) give them new capabilities and growth potential in the online-driven global economy.

Is it cloud computing CIOs or CEOs want or is it like a CIO said to me yesterday:

“I don’t care what you call it, how you package or charge it, my budget is x, you need to meet it if you want the business, I need control or ownership of the data.”

Interesting, as an analyst and a server guy, my view is somewhat different, on a day to day business, we’re fighting fires, dealing with incidents, dealing with requests and changes to meet business needs. Strategically am I thinking about cloud computing? Well I am and I’m not, you see, my main concern revolves around the simple steps, you see the steps to success to get to the point where we can contemplate cloud computing, or virtualization or grid, or any other cool things are:

Understand the environment – who owns what, what range of servers, operating systems, applications, layered products and middleware we have – what we’ve got, where are and where we should be.

Deal with the immediates – I have 100 calls, 76 requests in the helpdesk queue, arguably, that’s 176 people that need help, that need dealt with first.

Focus on the hear and now – what steps can I take to resolve the helpdesk queue – the quick wins, fix them and move on.

Fundamentally though it’s about as my good friend taught me about 7 years ago, it’s all about ”STABILIZING THE CORE. By that he meant, first of all get your area, your core fixed, whether that’s the network, the server or the printers, once that’s done, everything else will follow. It’s not glamorous, it’s not exciting, but after years of server support, I can tell you it’s true.

By getting all the NT4 servers to SP6, fixing disk space issues, reducing those unnecessary tasks, upgrading to supported drivers and firmware, fixing share permissions and moving towards a consistent platform, we get stability, we get reliability and crucially we get an understanding of the estate. I know server19 lacks disk space by 19th of every month, so I can make sure just before then, I clear down some space whilst we look for a longer term fix.

So are we thinking about cloud computing, virtualization and grid? Yes. But I wonder if we might obtain the same business benefit at lower cost, by stabilizing the core, of course we need to move on, we need to adopt new technologies, but we need to make sure, that I’m not moving a problem from one platform to another long term. Unfortunately there remains that concept, that “we’ll fix it” as we go, a fine concept, but how long, and how much cost, outage or disruption are we prepared to accept until that club class event happens, that my IT is virtualized, that my applications are all grid, web or citrix based and everything just works. Can we not do both? We get fixated on waste of money of duplicated effort, but it’s only duplicated, it’s only an issue if it’s not adding value, and we have to balance the marginal cost of having a guy sort out permissions now, to the cost of having them done on go-live when we’ve moved everything to a virtual machine and the project manager is screaming “we didn’t have this problem with the physical server”.

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Eweek Europe

Local government is stealing a march on central government in its use of virtualisation to harness cost savings and power efficiencies,

Local government is leading the way with its use of virtualisation, a UK virtualisation specialist claimed earlier this week.

The Green Government Computing event, hosted by specialist technology provider, Intercept gathered technology leaders from the public sector together to discuss the financial and environmental savings available from the latest virtualisation technologies.

Gary Collins, Intercept chief technology officer told eWEEK Europe that local government organisations were stealing a march over their central government counterparts.

“Local government is leading the way with virtualisation because they can adapt more quickly that central government,” Collins said. “Project lifecycles can be managed a lot quicker. And they do speak a lot to each other, share best practice and help to spur each other’s projects on.”

By contrast, he said government departments worked more with systems integrators, operating within long-term contracts on projects of much larger scale and scope.

It’s great to see local government adopting virtualization both in terms of efficiency and in proving the concepts and technology.

In terms of savings it’s not just the tangible ones, the energy savings from having one server not four for example, or the hardware support costs. It’s the abstraction of the application and the end user from one physical device, that if server7 goes on it’s holidays, life continues, oh we might argue there is an impact, but it’s marginal, it’s not the complete system down for possibly days. It’s the ability to dynamically re-allocate resources, bring online another server on demand, to have an IT that is more scalable, reliable and energy efficient.

That local government can run their platforms on a virtual solution, could that highlight the concepts to central government, to enterprise and small business customers? We’ll have to see, an interesting read, do check it out.

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TechTarget

VMware’s vNetwork Distributed Switch is quite possibly the most badass new feature of the 150 new technologies in VMware vSphere, which became available last week.

Included in vSphere 4 (or VMware Infrastructure 4) Enterprise Plus edition, the feature provides a centralized point of control within VMware vCenter Server for cluster-level networking so administrators don’t have to provision network configurations for each virtual machine (VM) individually.

“So instead of going to each individual server and making sure the connections are exactly the same, vNetwork sets up cluster-level network configurations across many servers, making configurations quick and very simple,” said Leena Joshi, a product manager at VMware.

The feature is immensely useful to network administrators, because tools like Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) that move VMs from one server to another work only if every host server has the same port group and network connections, and getting all the servers configured this way is a real time suck, Joshi explained.

Check out this article talking about VMware’s vNetwork Distributed Switch, it does sound exciting, anything we can do to improve what we can achieve with the virtual infrastructure and at the same time, improve systems management has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more about it.

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http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20083

Troubled Scandinavian IT services vendor Tieto is cutting 220 jobs in Finland and temporarily laying off a further 1500 staff in the country as it looks to slash costs.

The firm warned in April that around 300 jobs would be lost in Finland as part of a plan to cut 620 positions from its operations worldwide.

It has now confirmed 220 job cuts, with 100 made during June and July and the rest by the end of the year. Most jobs will go in the Helsinki area but there will be redundancies in other locations in Finland too.

Although 80 fewer jobs than expected have gone permanently, a further 1500 employees – out of a Finish workforce of 5700 – will be laid off temporarily, either for a fixed period or until further notice.

Reducing costs is to be expected in the current economic conditions, how your business and employees react to this is an important part of the management and delivery process. Letting people go is unfortunate for the business and employees involved, I wish them all the very best.

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Finextra

A laptop containing the unencrypted personal details of 109,000 Pensions Trust members has been stolen from the offices of HR software and services provider NorthgateArinso.

NorthgateArinso, which provides the Pension Trust’s computerised admin system, was using the laptop as a database for development, training and performance testing at its offices in Marlow in Buckinghamshire.

The password protected machine, stolen on 23 March, contained personal details, accurate as of May 2007, for members of six of the Pension Trust’s 39 schemes.

Data security whether in the physical or virtual worlds remains an issue, how you protect your data, and the underlying infrastructure depends on your business and your IT systems. Loosing customer or user data can expose you to liabilities in terms of legislation and potentially affect your client relationships and related revenue.

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Business Week

I would have liked to attend the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium  on Wednesday. I couldn’t make it to Boston but I followed the conference via blogs and the Twitter stream of CIO reporter Kim Nash. Panelists discussed the evolving role of the CIO in light of cloud computing. Some suggested that the job of CIOs would be radically different when enterprise technology moves to the cloud and that CIOs might even need new titles.

I think these discussions are premature at best. While software as a service and cloud computing are making their way into portions of the enterprise, most CIOs are taking baby steps. It will take years before CIOs at Fortune 500 companies need to worry about new job titles. Surveys show that cloud computing and software as a service aren’t currently high priorities for CIOs.

A 2009 survey on IT spending by Goldman Sachs ranked cloud services #33 on the list of spending priorities among CIOs, with about 50 percent saying that it was a low priority. Software as a service ranked even lower at #36, with more than 60 percent categorizing it as a low priority. Check out the chart here.

An interesting post talking about cloud computing. There’s been a lot of buzz and talk about cloud computing, people saying it’s a concern of big business, others saying it’s rubbish, both are right and wrong at the same time. In many respects the CIO is often so busy doing the day to day work, resourcing, dealing with issues, keeping different stakeholders happy, that moving onto a new platform for business might not be at the top of their concerns as much as headcount, budgets or data center space?

The fundamental justification for CIO will come from specific needs or services which are needed but might be better funded and provided by an external provider, they might not necessarily be key or core to the business. So we might see a derivative of cloud in the respect of an external internal cloud. By that I mean, I want capacity for my analytics application, I need 1500 blades running windows, I don’t want to buy them or provide the data center space, the vendor provides everything and I pay per cpu, per blade or whatever model we can make that meets my cost or investment criteria (no capex etc). I wonder also if we might see this more in the disaster recovery area? Where I might buy a data center with virtualization infrastructure put in place – but again in the enterprise, it’s going to be more likely customer specific in terms of specification and data, until we deal with issues relating to data ownership, concepts about billing and context – the what if scenarios regarding billing, upgrades, changes to configuration and requirements.

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Daily Finance

Dell (DELL) has been losing market share in the PC industry to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Asia-based Lenovo and Acer. It has not been able to come up with novel machines to attract a new wave of buyers. Its earnings today are expected to be poor.

HP at least partially solved it reliance on hardware by expanding into the IT services business. Since it bought EDS, its services division has grown tremendously and has strong margins. Dell has not made anywhere near the effort that HP has to diversify away from PC and server sales.

An interesting read suggesting that the services market is crowded and that Dell might face increasing competition. But let’s not forget that Dell has the brand recognition, it’s already in the door so to speak, it might therefore not be that hard a sell to say we can provide the hardware and additional professional services. Does it need to improve it’s revenue from professional services? naturally any business needs to continue improving revenues and it needs to see what opportunities it can create in products and services.

For me though, the conversation seems like a mute point, as we move away from the enterprise customers to the small/medium business market, it is community mixed with professional services that we want to be going for. That when you buy a Dell, a Lenovo or HP laptop, that you’re eligible for their special community giving you a support portal, documentation and best practice – it’s content that’s so easily written but often so easily ignored or not put into practice properly.  Could the vendors not reduce their support costs so much by having the first line documentation they have on their screen re-configured for end users?

Community really is where it’s at and is the way of getting across your message, a sales guy is one thing having him turn up with the new laptop, the new server, but a networking event where I can come along get a glass of wine, some cheese and play with it, then speak to someone is such a more effective and lower cost way of doing things. You know your customers, use community to access them – find out where the issues and opportunities are and fix them – you’re keyboards broken, don’t worry we’ll post one to you… £3 of cost for much much more in value through recommendation, and onboarding.

Just look at what VMware/Apple have achieved – there really is no reason we can’t achieve the same with the desktop, with the server and everything else. There are so many bloggers out there in the Windows world that are writing the content for free, aggregate it and share it to your support/community portal.

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