Bladewatch.com

Chris called me up on Christmas eve asking for help, one of their backup Citrix license servers had an issue, the conversation is below and as ever I have removed references to Chris and his company in order to allow him to remain below the radar in sunny Canary Wharf (East London).

“Hi, I have an emotional DL380 G3 which keeps failing the disks, which then rebuilds, it’s also rebooted a few times, any ideas? I did not want to mess with drivers and firmware on Christmas Eve.” asks Chris

“Yes your array controller appears to be getting ready for the holidays, log a call and get it swapped.

Check though, last time I had that the guy swapped both the array controller and the system board as he didn’t like the look of either.

Could you not virtualize it? What does it do?” I ask.

“Its the backup Citrix license server for one of our subsidiary groups, they don’t replace the hardware ever, I think we gave them one of our old DC’s just to get them of a Compaq 1850. I’ll have chat with them and see what they think, it might be easier besides I can get them off that old box.” he replies

Chris did indeed replace the broken DL380 G3 server with a virtual machine, (he told me a few hours later by text).

It is not that the server was beyond economic repair, or that it was out of support, it was deemed with his manager the quickest way forward, after a brief chat with the business owner for the server they were given a choice, wait up to four hours for parts, or two hours for a virtual machine. Virtualizing the broken DL380 G3 server enabled IT to return service, and recycle a server which IT had deemed out of economic support and a candidate for virtualization or decommission and recycling.

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So I put together a few bullet points and thoughts about 2010, in terms of what I feel end users will be thinking about, what technologies we might see being in demand and what vendors to keep an eye on. I have no doubt forgotten some vendors/technologies, and for that I apologize.

In the meantime, may I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous and joyful New Year for 2010, wherever you are.

With that, back to the 2010 type content stuff:

Top issues/predictions for 2010

• More companies looking seriously at cloud – particularly for hosting particular components or services – a virtualization or Exchange cloud
• Further interest in the convergence of storage and Ethernet down the one connection – it reduces your support and deployment times
• Debates about carbon reporting, data center efficiency and data center management or design
• Investigations or discussions about follow the sun or follow the moon ways of doing business and IT
• Ongoing data center consolidation and virtualization
• Change in enterprise computing, I wonder if there will be a flatter de-centralized way of doing business combined with more white labelling?
• Business competition, complexity and agility to increase as we bring on new markets and new business units – do we use the same branding, the same infrastructure?
• Integration of IT services to business lines, or business lines to IT in the enterprise?

Top 2010 technologies

• Blade servers
• Virtualization -server, desktop and network
• Converged network and storage adaptors
• SAN storages
• Solid state disks
• Application virtualization
• Converged systems management possibly to the application layer – achieving more with less

Top vendors to monitor for 2010

• Cisco – Unified Computing System and where that leads us
• Dell – their servers continue to get better
• HP – in terms of systems management/business agility
• DataSynapse – what they can do to aid virtualization and grid computing
• Platform – scaling up the possibilities of grid computing
• Iceotope – how they will help wiith data center capacity and systems cooling
• Teradici – can we extend the possibilities of their technology to further desktop virtualization – can I have a pc down a wire from the cheapest geographical location on my network – London pcs from India, from China?
• VMware – wonder how they will continue to protect market share and innovation of the virtual platform
• Citrix and Microsoft in terms of their products in the virtualization space.

Which countries am I watching with interest for developments/demand? Easy – East is where the innovation, the money and the excitement is:

Russia, India and China – components of what economists call the BRIC countries.

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http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/21/enterprise-information-business-technology-cio-network-woods.html

Right now, about 70% of IT costs go toward keep existing systems running; only 30% finances new development. Without chargeback, business has little incentive to demand efficiency. The size and scope of existing systems grows, crowding out innovation.

A great article and absolutely right, the challenge is that business users often do not understand and are often not willing to participate or pay their true cost – £900 for a fully supported desktop, that is outrageous, I can buy a pc from Dell/HP/Acer for half that price. Correct, but it needs to be the enterprise build, it needs to have specific application based support, (IT cannot say it’s your problem, the pc is fine) we have to diagnose and investigate. Also, as part of that cost, we have to provide email infrastructure, user drive space, departmental drives, file and print services, backup and restore, helpdesk, standards and an enterprise build which continues to evolve with the business need and vendor recommendations.

We need to therefore could look at moving towards in essence the compartmentalized approach offering clear distinctions and migration paths between support levels:
Entry level – if it breaks it is replaced at no cost/reconfigured to an operational state based on enteprise standards
Medium level – we will diagnose the issue for three hours and then rebuild or replace
Maximum level – we will diagnose the issue and escalate to vendors to resolve the issue.

The challenge is that everyone tends to either go for entry or medium level support but expect maximum level support, and what IT needs to be doing as a business is saying in essence, do you want the best service at the lowest cost? Yes. Fine, rip and replace  is the concept. It is inefficient to have people spending days analyzing commodity problems and issues, why are we rebuilding a four year old desktop when it is out of warranty and has little or no asset value? Why are we rebuilding legacy x86 servers when I can provide you with a virtual machine working out of the box in say 35 minutes?

The problem is threefold, it’s a cultural shift:
Users can feel that they are not getting value for money, and if your IT isn’t managed properly it gets lazy and just replaces everything rather than fix it – when its actually ok and just needs say a rebuild or a new disk fitted – the example we had last week with a colleague, he had logged a call to rebuild his Dell Optiplex GX270 with Windows XP because it was getting a bit bloated and slow, to be told it’s out of support, buy a new machine – unreasonable he thought.

IT needs to have the preanswers, the costs, the business justification and not the usual IT stuff that are told to users – users have pcs at home, they understand what a server is, out of support just isn’t good enough. IT needs to own what it does, have a unified voice, a relationship with its user base, change the conversation away from the existing business as usual, to innovative service improving, making a difference answering the business need. In most cases, it’s ever such simple stuff, clearing down the pc drives, defragging the servers and applying the firmware/patches, being proactive.

If we continue down the computer says no route we are in danger of ourselves on two fronts, in danger because we are perceived rightly or wrongly not to deliver – who can we get to make it work, and secondly from cloud, from grid or outsourcing, because they can make it work, regardless of what spin or debates we put in place.

Let us as end users and as an IT community step up to the game, establish where we can make a difference, start a dialogue with the business sponsors on agreed quick win scenarios and work on fixing the real issues along side the simple ones. With the easy calls sorted, we will have more time to spend on innovation, service improvement and adding value.

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I got this email yesterday from a colleague working for a medium sized company in the city, it is an illustration which wonderfully shows that we really do need to change from the box selling/cost center management way of doing business and support, moving towards a service delivery model.

At the same time not only does IT as a business unit need to adopt this stance, so does the end user community – the concept I have been talking about is “running IT as a business”

I got emailed the emails/conversations between the user and helpdesk, I have annoted parts to explain things that might not be clear, and removed the email headers/anything that might identify people.

“Good morning, our printer is broken and needs to be fixed urgently, it’s printer accounts_7 on server9, it’s a laser printer. Can someone come and fix it.”

Desktop support engineer is sent and looks at the printer. The cartridge/toner is ok, as is the drum, there are no jams. The printer is power cycled, the queues cleared and the print jobs resubmitted. Printing fails to work, the paper wont load and there are no paper jams. Desktop engineer escalates to their manager, noting the serial number and model of printer. The printer is for this department specifically, the users are told they can still print to the generic shared printers throughout the office, but that would mean manually loading headed note paper when they wanted to print official letters which they are reluctant to do.

The helpdesk manager:

“Good morning, call 7128290 relating to your laser printer accounts_7.

We have had a look at it, unfortunately there appears to be a hardware fault with the printer which we are unable to fix, we have no spare parts for the printer and would therefore have to call out an engineer to investigate. 

An engineer is £350, plus parts and an hourly fee, alternatively, we can supply a printer for £700 and I can have Mike (who looked at your printer) set it all up for you, please advise how you would like to proceed.

I would like to avoid calling an engineer if possible due to the age of the printer, it would be better replaced in the long run.

Regards, Janice”.

“Please call an engineer today to have the printer fixed, we are not buying a new printer, the printer is only four years old, it cannot have that much wrong with it.”

An engineer is called with the emergency call out fee to have the guy visit that day and inspects the printer. 

Printer fix it guy:

 ”Your printer is shafted mate.”

“I will replace the main logic board and then we may need to replace one of the feeders.”

Three hours later, with a new board and a few other parts fitted, the printer is ready for use. Jobs are submitted, but the alignment is wrong, the engineer looks and says he will need to call for more parts, but that will be additional cost, does the end user wish to pay?  Yes they reply, so additional time is allocated to have more parts fitted, this is done, and again printing is tested, the user is not happy with the results, it does not look right, the engineer agrees, he will need to investigate further and possibly call for more parts.

After a few further hours the CIO walking the halls notices the engineer wonders whats going on, finds out and takes over the situation.

“Send the guy home, this is nuts, I am not paying hundreds of pounds to fix a printer that should have been recycled years ago. I will deal with this.”, the CIO emails the users department manager copying in the helpdesk manager.

“Mike,

Your printer is broken and it is ancient, I’m having one of the guys bring a new one up, it really isn’t worth the money or the hassle trying to fix your old one.

If you don’t want to have your own departmental printer, let me or Janice know and I will have the team reconfigure the desktops to print to our new shared ones.

Regards

Bill”

We need to change two things, thinking of IT as a cost and thinking about departmental costs against the indirect costs and those economic “marginal costs”. By that I mean, looking at the lowest cost of deliverying services both in terms of finance and convenience. Had we replaced the printer in the first place, Janice could have allocated her desktop engineer to do other calls, be more productive rather than sit watching a guy replace printer parts, so let us look at the billable costs involved:

Printer fix it guy costs: £350 call out, plus £45 emergency fee, and £297.42 in parts, plus £45 per hour for four hours

Desktop support guy: 1 hour to look at the printer £20 (internal billable value), plus a further four hours watching printer guy.

Replacement printer: £700

CIO time / helpdesk manager/helpdesk to take the call : internal billable cost £375 for emaling and escalation

Total company cost: £2167.42 for a £700 printer issue.

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NT4 web site

I was having a chat with a manager that I had met at one of the conferences I had attended in the last few months, anyway he was telling me his challenges during one of the debates about virtualization and next generation technologies, the conversation is below, I have removed comments identifying his organization, his statements are indented.

“That’s great what he’s saying but that’s not my problem, my problem is the 37 Windows NT4 servers running on obsolete hardware, what do I do with these?”

Virtualize them, it’s easy, there is no reason that you can’t take your old Compaq/Dell or IBMs and virtualize them, you can even as part of this increase the disk space and the memory, making them a bit more supportable. I replied.

But NT4 is out of support, that does not solve the problem I have supporting NT4 servers.

No it does not, but it solves the main one, and let us not forget that:
1.) We as end users are always going to be out of support, the vendors have their recommendations and best practice, but I live in the real world, where my application has been coded for NT4 cannot be easily ported to Windows 2000/2003, in which case, I would rather have an easy to support virtual NT4 server than worrying about how the server was built (all raid5 etc), whether the server will come back if I reboot it or that it only has a 2GB c drive which is constantly full and generating alerts/workload.
2.) Hardware is relatively more expensive to support operationally and in terms of power, in which case I would rather have something that is out of support on a more manageable hardware platform.

My best example, the small business I met last week, they had a Compaq Proliant 1850 with three disk shelves attached to the back of it, proudly giving them 400GB of storage which had been carved up into various drives for different business units. Their concern? That the desktops and their small log onscripts etc all pointed to a certain name and no one wanted to change that, but the server would not run Windows 2008, so they were stuck.

That Proliant 1850 could easily be replaced with a 1u box running VMware or the equivalent with a couple of large drives, saving power and the support costs in terms of the older hardware. I said.

But you are still running NT4. – what do you do after you have virtualized? Aren’t you taking your existing problems into your new clean virtual environment?

Well you could say that, but then I have always preferred to be making some progress rather than none. I need to reduce my hardware support costs mainly from a marginal cost base standpoint, I do not want to be spending company money and effort supporting 4GB/9GB disks in old servers which are using more units of power per performance than I need to. 

We cannot change the universe overnight, let us make small steps to make life a little bit easier, with the older hardware gone and out of the debate, I can then focus on understanding what the barriers to moving off NT4 might be, what we can do to resolve this going forward.

Running legacy platforms is only a problem, an issue if you make it so, if your systems are configured, if you have the right systems in place, being in a position to support (granted possibly on a best endeavours basis) might not be that difficult or represent that much more risk over a newer platform. That the business unit, the sponsor understands the associated risks of their platform, might mitigate those risks, the is it £2 million we want to pay for a recode of an application or service which is going next year, or £100,000 we would rather spend on virtualization to extend its life and reduce support costs until we replace or decommission it.

Added to this, there is no reason that as we virtualize each of your servers that we cannot clean them, right size them as we go, we can make the C drive that little bit bigger, 4gb instead of 2GB, give that d drive for the logs a bit more space than the 4GB or so, and we can give it a bit more RAM 1GB instead of the 256 or 512 it has now, all these things can improve performance and allow us to make mini improvements at marginal cost.

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http://blog.averesystems.com/2009/12/14/record-setting-latency-and-why-it-matters/

Low latency is near and dear to our hearts at Avere Systems. In my last blog post, I talked about our record-breaking SPECsfs2008 performance results in general. In this post, I’m only going to talk about latency. Our results were not only one of the highest throughput results, but at 1.38 ms of overall response time (ORT) it represents one of the lowest latency results ever posted for SPECsfs2008.

Check out this post about latency, something the guys were always talking about whenever we got talking about application performance and grid technology, an interesting read.

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http://www.bladewatch.com/resources/

The pages links to specific content that has been written with a view to making the information more accessible.

The information is always a work in progress, please double check with your service provider or the vendor for the latest information on drivers and firmware.

I have updated the blog to include a new resources page, which makes the content that has been published more accessible, as part of this we now have pages for several vendors with their firmware, as well as specific pages about the ILO, and about the bladewatch servers, do check it out.

• Cisco
• Dell
• HP (includes Compaq)
• IBM
• Sun/Oracle

As part of that, at the top of the blog, I have also added an ilo tab, again this is simply a page which brings many of the posts that I have written together on one page for easy review.

HP ilo information – RIB / RILOE / ILO / ILO2

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HP

HP today announced three new offerings to help businesses and telecommunication service providers realize the benefits of cloud computing while optimizing costs and mitigating the risk of adoption. Research conducted on behalf of HP shows that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable in the next few years. As a result, 75 percent of the surveyed chief information officers (CIOs) acknowledge the need to invest in more flexible technology, be able to scale it up and down rapidly, and communicate faster with technology partners.(1)

Anything the vendors and service providers can do to reduce the costs, and improve the access to cloud computing solutions has to be a good thing for cloud as a platform, and in illustrating its business relevance and platform opportunities. I’m off to read up more about what HP is offering in this space.

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Platform Computing

LONDON, UK, Dec. 7, 2009 ― Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced that Sporting Index, world leaders in sports spread betting, has selected Platform Symphony for high-performance grid computing. The company is using Platform Symphony grid management software to increase the volume of transactions and event updates that it is able to handle, and in doing so underpin its expansion plans.

Sporting Index is experiencing significant growth in bet numbers, and with the rapid rate of partner sign-ups to its betting services business, Sporting Solutions, it is relying on Platform Symphony’s scheduling to increase server utilization and keep a control on costs.

“With circa four out of five sports spread bets placed in the UK coming through our systems, our core requirements have risen from around 300 to over 3,000 prices published per second” says Eachan Fletcher, Sporting Index’s CIO. “The growth that we’re experiencing in our B2B business is pushing up the number of sports and markets we need to cater for, and Platform’s grid computing technology is a great way for Sporting Index to scale up. Platform has helped us customize some of the grid components we’re using, on time and within budget so we can deliver the highest possible level of service to our customers.”

Grid computing solutions can be used as a vehicle to improve utilization, to achieve more capacity with less technology, as a business differentiator, (faster or more reliable), or in the case above to improve capacity for new business or new markets, an interesting read do check it out.

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http://www.bull.com/hpc/mobull.html

mobull features an innovative combination of containers and fully dedicated mobility technologies to provide the enterprise with as much power as it needs to innovate, to be more competitive and reduce costs –all in less than eight weeks. With its combined advantages of high density, low energy consumption and ease of installation, mobull makes it possible for the enterprise to fast-track the implementation of the best solutions available for computer simulation, for data processing and for storage.

I was doing some research on data center containers and noticed that Bull have released one, very cool, I need to read up more about them.

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