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IT World

The City of San Diego boasts a 55 per cent virtualized IT environment, with plans to take out another 100 physical machines from the data centre by 2010. The hardware cost differential post-virtualization.

Before the City of San Diego became a 55 per cent virtualized IT environment, its biggest IT challenge was server sprawl and underutilization of hardware.

The integrated service providers with which the City of San Diego worked support their application on particular hardware, so the environment couldn’t be mixed and matched, recounted Rick Scherer, virtual infrastructure architect with the City.

“We have a number of servers utilizing three to 10 per cent of the CPU and memory resources,” explained Scherer. And, because of the ISV setup, he added, “we had a one-for-one in our physical environment.”

The one-server-to-application ratio also meant that the City was challenged by high procurement costs, on average about $7,000 for the hardware alone, said Scherer.

It’s always great to read how organizations are utilizing virtualization as a platform for organizational and technical transformation. Looking at the server estate, understanding which components could be easily virtualized, how we can achieve more efficiency, more value from our hardware can be the first step to virtualization of the server estate with impressive results.

Of the top of my head in the enterprises, I would be looking at the back office IT systems, those management, script, generic ghost servers that don’t appear to be heavily utilized to prove the concept and from there we can move on to ‘client’ servers, those application servers and illustrate the technology working without impact combining the right level of chargeback and flexibility with the platform possibilities and ownership in delivery.

A great article, do check it out, the more we talk about the benefits of the concepts, how we got it working for us, absolve ourselves of the technicalities at the higher level, the hypervisor choice debates etc, the more relevant we can make it to the stakeholders, putting the technology, the business benefits across to the right target users in the right way.

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IT PRO

Reducing cost is imperative to any business, particularly during an economic downturn.

However, budget cuts are not always an effective means of realising this. Fortunately, there is another way – or seven, to be precise – according to Gartner.

“While responding to contracting budgets, IT managers are expected to deliver an ever-increasing level of service to users, and many are charged with showing tangible financial savings as part of cost-cutting measures,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner.

“Significant savings can be made in the data center. For example, removing a single x86 server will result in savings of more than $400 a year in energy costs alone.”

An interesting and relevant article talking about reducing IT costs, and I think we’re seeing this more and more in combination with data center renewal or migration costs, where we analyze what we’re moving and migrating on to virtual machines, on to newer hardware rather than move that legacy x86 cost. To do this though requires buy-in from the business units/application teams, sign-off on the possible new platforms and an understanding that renewing or virtualizing the server might require some investment but that we’ll reclaim this in support cost or in data center space and power which can be just as important.

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VNUnet

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is implementing high-performance grid computing to cope with the increasing demand for risk analysis and financial modelling scenarios.

The improvements in the IMF platform are intended to boost performance and efficiency of complex financial applications in a cost-effective manner. Such models rely on simulations that were previously run on individual workstations and servers, which stalled productivity due to the resulting latency and computation run-time.

Increasing workloads and the limitations of the current set-up prompted the institution to adopt the on-demand high-performance computing system, which is hoped to provide a tenfold boost in processing time for economic modelling computations.

Under the new system, complex economic computations are distributed across under-utilised smaller computers within the IMF network, allowing calculations to complete faster and in a more predictable fashion.

Grid/HPC solutions are becoming ever more appropriate in current economic conditions whether it’s to provide a more efficient platform for computing requirements, as well as those risk analytics or pricing applications for knowing your trading positions. An interesting read, do check it out.

Getting the application compatible with grid/hpc solutions isn’t necessarily the challenge, it’s managing user expectations on delivery and support, managing the concept of ownership, reporting on usage, and maintaining a unified voice for grid technology. The benefits in grid technology can be significant and impressive, in one organization they had reduced their end of day analysis from 16 hours to 2 hours, which allowed traders, and back office staff to know their position and price more effectively, something which once deployed and working in the right way which can be much more valuable than just in financial terms, knowing your position, being confident in your deals, your revenue can transform the way you do business.

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Guardian

European versions of Microsoft‘s new Windows 7 operating will not include a copy of the company’s Internet Explorer browser, as a result of the software company’s long-running tangle with officials in Brussels.

After a series of run-ins with European regulators that have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in fines in recent years, Microsoft announced yesterday that it would be removing copies of Internet Explorer from copies of Windows 7 available in the EU when the system goes on sale in October.

According to Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, the company will not be including Internet Explorer in versions of Windows 7 that it supplies to computer manufacturers or retailers.

“We’re committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time that it launches in the rest of the world, but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch the product,” he said.

“Given the pending legal proceeding, we’ve decided that instead of including Internet Explorer in Windows 7 in Europe, we will offer it separately and on an easy-to-install basis to both computer manufacturers and users.”

I’ve got mixed opinions on the whole Internet Explorer and Windows thing, for a few reasons, how many users will download it anyway? Does not having a browser installed by default in the operating system restrict it’s functionality to the end user? Could we not just ask that Microsoft Bundle FireFox, Google’s Chrome say and have an icon on the desktop giving the user choice? Do users know about the other browsers if they weren’t installed? A topic that will continue, at least Microsoft are complying with the legislation I suppose.

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Microsoft

Version: 1.1

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for June 2009.

With the release of the bulletins for June 2009, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued June 4, 2009. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on June 10, 2009, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the June Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft also provides information to help customers prioritize monthly security updates with any non-security, high-priority updates that are being released on the same day as the monthly security updates. Please see the section, Other Information.

Check to see if your systems are in scope and affected by the latest Microsoft secuirty patches that have been released to fix specific issues, not only is this best practice to protect your virtual or physical servers, it’s also the first thing the vendor/service provider will ask when logging a call, that all the patches have been applied.

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Eweek

The United Nations group charged with managing IT and telecoms standards and development has claimed that green IT is central to its mission and that technology could help cut emissions from other industries by as much as 40 percent.

Technology not only contributes to climate change but can also help combat it, said Malcolm Johnson, director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU),  in a video interview, which echoed what many in the industry have been saying – for instance in our interview with Johnson’s boss, Dr Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the ITU.

“In terms of the emissions in other sectors that can be reduced by using ICT, the transport sector, the energy generation sector, buildings and waste disposal, estimates vary between 15 percent and 40 percent,” said Johnson in an interview with Lightreading.com.

An interesting read, we need to reduce the impact that IT has on the environment whether as a vehicle for reducing cost, meeting our corporate social responsibility requirements, or even as a manager had said to me the other day, “…to help investment during the credit crunch…”

When we look at reducing the impact of IT on emissions are we looking at the whole picture?

• How much data do we need to be online and at what level of accessibility in terms of time – if my email archive required a restore taking two hours would it be an issue?
• What core services does the desktop/laptop/phone need to provide and what can be hosted/powered online – do we need such powerful devices?
• How can we change the nature of the way we provision, manage and support our data centers, best practice is 20 degrees, what if I said 30 and signed off the risk on the basis that my hardware will be refreshed before heat would result in a direct component failure.
• When will we address those legacy platforms directly by investing and migrating – will carbon footprint of the data center mandate those legacy platforms?

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http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Apple has released an updated iPhone! I’m off to read up more!

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http://www.dell.com/business/storage

Dell now offers a suite of end-to-end consulting services to help customers understand deduplication technology, quantify the benefits, and design a deduplication solution to best meet their needs. Dell’s consulting services are different in that they provide practical, action-oriented plans to deliver specific, predictable and measured outcomes through high-impact, short duration projects.

• The Dell Storage Simplification Workshop helps customers cut through the marketing clutter surrounding deduplication and develop a clear understanding of the considerations and potential benefits.  In a free, half-day session, Dell consultants work with customers  to determine a potential solution or technology areas that can yield measureable results with predictable outcomes, pricing and timelines.
• The Dell Backup, Recovery, Archive Assessment helps customers avoid wasting resources on improper or overly optimistic solutions. While general ROI numbers pervade the industry, benefits can vary widely across environments, applications and methods. This assessment delivers a detailed report built upon metrics and insights from the customer’s own environment showing an impact analysis with estimates of storage and/or network traffic reduction, amount of backup data, backup frequency, retention periods and frequency of data changes.
• The Backup/Restore Stabilisation, Optimisation and Deduplication Design service helps customers avoid one-size-fits all solutions that fail to understand their unique requirements.
• These services design a tailored solution for each customer environment with specific product recommendations, service catalog and implementation plan.

Dell offering additional consultancy services in the storage space could create further opportunities in the enterprise and SMB sectors. Data storage demands continue, keeping more data available for legislative requirements, email mailboxes being used as reference points, at the same time managing duplicate data, with the data storage and recovery issues can be a significant part of your costs and failure to delivery.  Dell were explaining their approach to consulting, involving the business sponsors through workshops, looking at the provisioning, the backups and archive activities as part of a wholistic approach which does sound cool. There was a lot of talk on data de-duplication which is a significant part of the solution, working out where we can reduce duplication within the storage, be more efficient with the storage we use and need can help re-claim unnecessary storage and prevent unnecessary spend.

Anything Dell and the other vendors can do to aid business achieve their goals with energy efficiency and operating costs in mind has to be a good thing, when looking at issues relating to data, to data duplication we need to look at is infrastructure and application and data design.

• Application design – how much logging is needed, what level of data needs to be kept online and available – how we can share the information/results between applications to reduce the amount of duplicate code and logging on the network. By this I mean we might have Front Office making it’s purchases, this being written to a Front Office database and a deal capture application or database, do we not need one database doing both functions? How do we manage the need to split business tasks but share common infrastructure?
• Infrastructure design – how configure the infrastructure, what range of storage platforms we provision, scale and provide storage. Could Tier 1 application systems use the Tier 1 storage, and have separate environments? How do we manage the need to replicate development or uat with ‘live data’ for testing? What different technologies do we use, SAN boot is fine, but is it not a very expensive way of providing storage for an operating system?
• Data design – by this I mean when you ask a user how available their data needs to be, how long they want to keep the backup, often they don’t know or they say archive everything, we need to introduce the concept of cost when it comes to data. We can archive everything but there is an operating cost and infrastructure cost of doing so.  At the same time we need to see how we can be moving users’ data around to the most efficient data platform, for example, restrict user profiles to say 300MB to reduce the amount of space and data following the user around the network, and put it on a filer to shared storage, rather than Tier1 production storage.

Related to this though is the rules surrounding charge-back/costings and user buy-in of storage coupled with investment. I’ve got three main examples from a few different organizations to illustrate this and it shows you how good practice gets undermined by process and investment.

Investment

Medium sized business with several large sites around the UK, four hundred servers operating in the investment sector. The CIO and architects agreed to separate development and production storage, then implemented new storage SANs and migrated the relevant servers to the new relevant  SANs.  The problem was that there was a lack of investment on the development SAN, it had not been scaled and the budget could not be signed off to increase the storage on the development SAN. As a result development/uat data and applications got moved on to the production storage to meet the storage requirements, resulting in the same position that the organization was previously.

Chargeback

The challenge of making SAN attractive in terms of delivery and cost, whilst defining a difference in cost between production and non-production storage, the prime example was the team that requested 300Gb of Tier2 storage for ‘UAT’ only to then try and apply the storage to production in order to save the difference in cost. Also the need to manage volume purchasing, that it might actually be cheaper to buy more expensive SAN rather than buy different types of storage for the different tiers.

Buy-in

We need business buy-in and commitment to the storage, both in terms of adoption, of managing storage demand and using appropriate storage for the appropriate application or use. The understanding that we can continue to buy as much storage as you require, but it comes at a cost, and maybe we need to look at how we are using the storage, implement the:

• Non-critical/scratch data – build disks, application packages archive etc – could this be a filer or shared file cluster?
• Medium data – user profiles, application data which is recoverable from tape/snapshot – some kind of filer and SAN solution.
• Critical – Tier1 data which can be recovered immediately, which is replicated and backed up in line with requirements – trading data, email, applications and web portals? Probably a SAN solution – but local data where appropriate – we don’t need web server logs kept on this storage as it’s transitional and point in time data.

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HP

HP today expanded its Total Care initiative for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with several new products, solutions and services that reduce costs, improve productivity and enhance efficiency.⁽¹⁾

To help SMB customers keep their businesses up and running with less capital and fewer employees and technology resources, HP has introduced infrastructure offerings including storage, virtualization, remote access and consolidation solutions.

“In today’s economic climate, SMBs need technology solutions that take out costs while helping drive even greater competitive advantage so they can survive and thrive,” said Kathy Chou, vice president, Worldwide Small and Medium Business Strategy, HP. “Through our Total Care initiative, HP is helping customers achieve their business goals.”

I attended their Small Business Meeting and it was great to meet different members of the HP team and see what innovations they were announcing in order to meet the SMB sector, interestingly the topics seemed to be around reducing costs, coping with extra demand as well as environmental sustainability.  There were a range of technologies announced/discussed including:

• HP StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 Network Storage Systems – this brings storage in a box, including file deduplication, increased useable capacity and file serving performance.
• HP StorageWorks 2000i and 2000sa G2 Modualr Smart Arrays – this brings further storage opportunities to scale in line with business need, now offering iSCSI and Fibre Channel connecitvity.
• HP Virtualization Bundle – a range of solutions to help businesses with their virtualization projects and requirements through a range of software and hardware.
• HP ProBook notebooks – with improved performance a low price point and at the same time with their SpareKey feature to help with password lock outs, their File Sanitizer to securely delete files on the notebook for security and compliance.
• HP and Cobweb Hosted Solutions – offering Software as a Service solutions with the SMB in mind offering for example Exchange Server and SharePoint.

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So I’m waiting for todays’ keynote at the Apple World Wide Developer Connection, the web has many articles stating that a mini iPhone is being announced, that there might be a netbook or similar Apple devices.  As an Apple customer and fan I shall be waiting to see the announcements on the Apple site. A mini iPhone could be a brilliant revenue vehicle for Apple, something around the £100 mark might bring on more customers, those that want an iPhone but find the £300 or £35 a month just that bit too much.

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