Bladewatch.com

Finextra

The reluctance of banks to place innovation at the centre of their strategy is partially a result of pressure from governments, regulators and consumers, which is making some firms risk-averse and “creating a culture of introversion and inflexibility,” according to Richard De Lotto, principal research analyst, Gartner.

“The predominant view of IT is that it is only useful for cutting costs so tactical thinking about automation and rationalisation overwhelms longer-term decision and strategic plans and goals,” he says.

Check out this article talking about banks being reluctant to try new technologies, it’s an interesting read, there is a mixture of reasons for aversion to change. People don’t tend to like change anyway, but there can so easily be the mindset of don’t change something that is not broken, the unexpected, coupled with organizational issues around ownership, budgets and control. The old way of doing business, of IT providing servers, network and storage, gives individual business units control, allows them to clearly see that server17 is used for risk calculations, nothing else, that it is left alone until they ask for something to be changed. The problem is, the individual business unit cost mentality and aversion to risks costs us more in operational costs and inflexibility, that when front office is busy, I cannot simply allocate more resources to it because back office own their back office servers, their storage and connections.

Only as we start looking at ‘IT as a business’ can we start looking at two things the greater good economically and operationally, combined with business flexibility.  Only then can we be seeing what it is we are spending our money, do we see that Bob from accounts spent $400 on memory for his four year old HP pc because he didnt’ want to spend $400 capex on a new machine.

We need to break down the costs, the support structure and move to a lowest overall cost concept, anything out of warranty replace, no questions, no debate, combined with virtualization of the infrastructure and the application.

We can still provide each business line with its own infrastructure, its own 72GB SCSI disk in its own server in its own cabinet, but from a cost standpoint, from a transaction cost is that what we want to do? Do we not want to be moving to more dynamic technologies, more dynamic ways of running IT? Should we not be sharing resources where we can, operating internal clouds and looking at the application map rather than deploying the same solution regardless of the business requirement – Fred from accounts wants to host a web site gets a DL380 when what he actually needs is some cpu time, a few hundred megabytes of disk space and an ip address on anyone elses server?

We have commoditized the IT, the server, the network and the storage which is a good thing for the end user, it gives flexibility and affordability. Now the next step is to take these concepts into the enterprise, coupling with tiering of the application to the point where we have the value concept:

• Tier1 – always on – in the always on data center, on the always on infrastructure, possibly grid or virtualized, using redundancies and failover technologies/best practices – world ending, corporate web site/trading system down.
• Tier2 – always on with high availability and failover services in slightly less redundant and expensive data centers – back office processing/end user disruption, semi world ending.
• Tier3 – always on but with resilience, if the service goes down, it impacts, but it is not world ending.
• UAT/Dev – this can be as important as Tier1 in terms of development time and time to live, the business constantly want innovation, enhanced functionality, bug fixes, more power, more of this stuff, therefore a development system outage might delay onboarding that new platform, adding more functionality or platforms for end users – how do we benchmark the importance of this in the scheme of things. Do our applications not define our business, services and pricing mechanisms?

I wonder though two things, do we not need more:

• Follow the sun/follow the moon concepts – use the technology we have more effectively, and switch it off when we don’t need it – have the application and the data center follow the sun, or have the data center powered wherever it is cheapest in terms of power?
• More personalized, more regionalized services in the financial services industry, have we not moved to the commoditized computer says no type solution only to find that we might be moving back again? People like the human touch, the local branch to speak to people, we can remove that to a certain extent – is this not where kiva/zopa come into play?

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http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2010/january/imperial_college.html

World Leading University Selects SGI® Altix® ICE 8200 EX With Latest Intel® “Nehalem” Architecture for Core HPC Requirements

FREMONT, Calif., and Reading, England — January 6, 2010 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that Imperial College London, one of the UK’s most prestigious educational establishments, has selected SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) solution, to add to its central high performance computing (HPC) service.

Consistently rated among the world’s best universities, Imperial is a science-based institution with a global reputation for high quality teaching and academic research. Imperial College required an advanced computing solution for students and researchers to conduct course work and research that depend on extremely complex process modeling. The college selected the SGI dual-rail Infiniband supercomputer, Altix ICE 8200 EX, which uses the latest Intel® Xeon® Nehalem processors.

Well done to SGI with this announcement, it’s interesting to note that they are using x86 powered servers for their HPC service, I’m off to read up more about it and the SGI solution.

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Netex

NetEx will support Microsoft management products in Hyper-V in the next release of HyperIP due in Q1 2010. The addition of Microsoft support leverages the company’s expertise and market leadership in the VMware virtualization market where HyperIP optimizes long-distance data movement for more than a dozen VM management applications. NetEx was the first company to deliver a software only WAN acceleration solution to enable the live migration of VMware data across WAN distances, using HyperIP to accelerate the movement of VMotion and Storage VMotion images to remote sites. According to test results from DeepStorage Labs, HyperIP can accelerate VMotion migration by 1000 percent compared to native VMware speeds. HyperIP also supports vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vCenter Converter to optimize the migration of physical-to-virtual images.

Check out this announcement from NetEx, anything they can do to further the scalability and high availability of Hyper-V has to be a good thing for the end user community and virtualization as a platform. I’m off to read up more about the announcement and what this means in the Hyper-V space.

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PublicTechnology.net

Essex County Council has signed an eight-year, £5.4 billion agreement with IBM that it claims will deliver significant savings to local resident tax payers and which some claim will be a template for similar deals under a Tory national government.

The aim of the deal is to make a saving of 20% of the authority’s annual budget of £1.2billion within three years. As strategic partner, IBM will provide services including the design, management and delivery of front-end customer services, back-office and corporate systems as well as business consulting and technology implementation and integration.

“Working together [with IBM] we will also be able to keep council tax low and deliver real value for money for Essex residents,” said Lord Hanningfield, leader of Essex County Council. “This is the most ambitious project that the Council has undertaken, and finding the right partner to help us deliver it is a vitally important step.

It will be interesting to see how this deal works going forward and if it includes any consolidation or improvements in the IT space, any cloud or data center services? We’ll have to see, do check out the article.

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http://www.wbjournal.com/news45351.html

The future of cloud computing is anything but cloudy.

Business and IT executives are saying the pay-per-use advantages of cloud technologies make it the wave of the future.

“I think the recession has really accelerated the evaluation of cloud technology,” said Michael Werner, senior platform strategist with Microsoft out of the company’s Waltham offices.

“Everyone’s taking a look at how to optimize their business, and they’re taking a look at the technology that runs their business specifically”

I think we will see more of cloud, I wonder how much of this is being driven by the adoption of new technology, or businesses rationalizing their services and saying that’s not core, and having the service provided by another provider, whether it’s email or a virtualization environment. Do check out the article.

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