Bladewatch.com

I was interviewing Mike about best practice in the Windows design field for an article I am researching. Windows design means taking the Windows operating system and creating an image, a corporate build standard that can then be deployed to servers throughout the enterprise in order to have a standard platform for business. The concept being that if I build a server in New York, it should be the same as a server build in New Hampshire. By having a unified build, the design team can establish the core requirements, mandate security baselines, drivers and layered components in order to meet IT Security standards and policies.

Mike however has an interesting organizational challenge which we were talking about.

“We have to support whatever servers are in the support matrix”

“That means our build, has to be able to support everything from a DL360 G3 (we have just changed what is supported) up to the latest and finest servers that are being bought by the HPC team or the business unit deploying new web infrastructure or Citrix servers.”

The challenge being that what is acceptable in a small remote site supporting fifteen users, might not be in a large deployment, similarly what is suitable or standard in a large site, might not be possible or supported in remote small offices, where a DL360G1 is in effect all they need.

Mike’s challenge?

As the range of servers expands, the build is designed from an infrastructure lowest total cost of ownership angle – it therefore does not necessarily keep up with the latest and greatest versions of .NET and we have to validate configurations, and drivers retrospectively and going forward, the drivers we load have to be compatible with the DL360 G3 and the ML370s, we need to be all things to all people. This causes an issue, as the range of servers supported grows so does the amount of time spent on validating the server build against the different platforms.

There is a drive to virtualize legacy servers from the production guys in our London head office, they deem anything that’s older than three years as legacy, that’s not necessarily the same for our sites supporting say 30 users in an Exchange and DC scenario. As production in London reduce the number of legacy servers in an effort to reduce costs including their hardware support contract, where does this leave us in terms of support both in testing and validating for specific platforms.

What else is an issue?

Hardware failures – operationally in that it can take longer to get parts for an out of support system

Maintenance debate – whether we should continue paying to support an obsolete system

Marginal design cost – am I validating the build against a platform that might be only used in 8 of their 100 offices?

Being able to easily drop support for a platform – how many sites/customers will that impact and who defines what is in and out of support or operationally a production risk?

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I got an email from Geoffrey:

Hi Martin,

We’re not really IT people, we’re a real estate office and we have a HP Proliant DL380 G3 for our email. One of the disks is flashing orange, any ideas what could be wrong? I didn’t know whether we should call our tech guys.

Regards

Geoffrey Price

Hi Geoffrey,

Thanks for your email. There are two typical type errors relating to your disk. A flashing orange light on the disk means that the disk is predictive failure mode and should be replaced in the near future to prevent data loss. A disk which shows an orange light which does not flash indicates that the drive has failed and would need to be replaced to prevent data loss (this is assuming that the disk is a member of a RAID set).

I would send an email or call your tech guys, they will need to know the drive size, type and speed, for example 18GB (drive size) Ultra 3 or Ultra 320 (drive type) and the 10k or 15k (which is the drive speed), (18GB, Ultra 320, 15k)these details will be on a sticker on the drive itself.

Regards

Martin

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HP

HP today announced that HP Integrity customers will gain the advantages of Intel’s latest quad-core processor, enabling them to enhance business results and maximize their technology infrastructure investments for the future.

The Intel® Itanium® 9300 processor, formerly known as Tukwila, brings significantly increased performance along with a range of new reliability, scalability and virtualization features. By incorporating this processor into the next generation of HP Integrity servers, HP is positioned to deliver innovations in resiliency, flexibility and automation through a Converged Infrastructure.

Combined with the advanced virtualization, business continuity and automation capabilities of the HP-UX 11i operating environment, the features of the new processor will allow customers to quickly address changing mission-critical demands to drive business growth.

I remain a fan of the Itanium processor, granted it’s not something that I would recommend for everyone, but deployed in the right configuration, and using an optimized operating system, they can be an effective high performance solution, anything Intel and HP can do to continue evolving the platform has to be a good thing for the industry and in competition between the high performance processor platforms.

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HP have released updated firmware for the ILO2. It’s now version 1.81 (January 18th, 2010). It includes some enhancements and bug fixes:

Optional: Users should update to this firmware version if their system is affected by one of the documented fixes or if there is a desire to utilize any of the enhanced functionality provided by this version.

Addressed an issue that could cause the fans on a c-Class enclosure to spin up and remain close to 100% when iLO 2 does not obtain HDD temperature data for more than one minute

Addressed an issue that could cause a system with redundant fans to shut down when one fan rotor failed before POST

Do check it out, and consider that firmware and drivers will be one of the things your service provider or HP may ask when logging a call.

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http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/09/04/the-need-to-launch-it-training-university-v2-0/ and http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/12/15/short-essay-on-training-the-next-generation/

I have written a few posts about educating the next generation of IT and business people going forward, and I know there are so many groups and individuals working on this going forward, whether it’s education based around a specific platform, or qualification and certification against a set of processes or concepts like ITIL, like Prince 2. I still feel though that what I needed when I was thinking about IT was a grounding a rules of engagement training coupled with interactive or real life concepts to ready me for the real world – where we can’t just rebuild the server or order a new switch, there are processes and procedures to be followed. At the same time though, in an environment where we have people that think outside the box, “..have you thought about this,  since you can’t do that..” – how refreshing, how engaging.

The world is changing, university needs to evolve with it, I loved my time at university and finances permitted, I always said I’d go back to doing a degree in history or economics. I wonder had my university course been more like it would have been had I decided on a career in medicine it might have proved more valuable financially, emotionally and professionally. What we need to do is bridge the gap between academic study which is so important with the real world scenarios, real world qualifications and experiences so that our graduates and post graduates can not only hit the ground running know the help desk process, service level agreements and understand concepts like ITIL, virtualization or grid, but understand the economics, the business pressures the just in time, the on demand business – all the stuff that dad taught me all these years:

“…don’t reply to that she’s well meaning person, this is what you do and say…”

“…No, no, no, you run the diagnostics, you verify the patches and service packs, rule out the infrastructure, what else could it be? Could it be the application at fault? Oh dear, oh dear..”.

With that then, what would I have wanted from my IT degree going forward, from a university, from an online IT degree course, what would I have recommended as useful, what case studies would I have used and what concepts would I have wished I had experienced? There are so many, there are also so many limitations, reasons why we just cannot do that, but let us continue to live in “Martin-world” where everything is possible, where the barriers can be dealt with, and slowly head back on our journey to reality.

The core skills and subjects I would have asked for would have been:

• Economics and business studies – concepts of marginal cost combining how it should be and how it is in some businesses – direct and indirect costs, elasticity of demand
• Project management including Prince 2
• ITIL training maybe not the complete course, but the basics the incident, the service request, the change process what it all means and why they are different
• Human resource management – in terms of interacting with customers, managing expectations, dealing with failure, how to communicate in business
• Green IT – the possibilities, the justification both environmentally and economically – what it can mean from the desktop to the data center

What technical experience might I have wanted?

• Operating system – Windows/Linux/Unix
• Database – Oracle/MySQL/SQL
• Development – C++/HTML/XML
• Virtualization – Xen/VMware
• Grid/cloud – DataSynapse/Platform
• MiddleWare – MQ Series/IIS/Websphere/Apache
• Monitoring – Ganglia/NSM/OpenView

What experiences would I have wanted?

• Hardware – server stuff, SAN, RAID, network, what a server looks like, playing with blades, understanding how it all fits together
• Concepts – latency, performance per watt, redundancy, high availability and business continuity, operational risk and risk mitigation
• On call and help desk – incident case studies including failures – what went wrong and how could it have been prevented – how the teams fit together

Could we train our IT people like we do our teachers, our other professionals, provide them with the type of degree which balances the right range of theoretical and practical skills which makes them more prepared more effective members of the team? Could we have the degree which is focused around a role, development, infrastructure or application support, leadership or project management? Could the MA be the qualification which includes less technical, but more human resources and leadership training, could the degree rather than focus just on the how good is your development, but also include the documentation, the application release process and roll back?

Going forward how do we translate the traditional IT qualifications and ways of teaching students to be more business relevant, more centric to the challenges that we face today? What range of businesses, start-ups and innovations could we see simply by illustrating to the next generation here is where we are, what do you think we should do, what is your take on it? Only when you are standing outside the issue can you really see objectively where the issues are and what you might change.

Our next generation business and IT leaders share a common path, the boundaries between business and IT continue to change, as they do on several levels being just an IT person or just a business person is no longer good enough, I expect you to understand a credit derivative the return on investment on that project you are trying to get funded, just as I expect you to know what a server is, what a data center is and why it matters to your business. Complacency is no longer an option, in yesterdays world we could say “that’s an IT problem”, and we could let it be one, but as the business becomes ever more dependent on the IT, and becomes in some respects the IT, what affects your IT affects your business, what affects your business affects your IT. A lack of data center space might cause operational issues for the IT, but could be devastating to your business, more capacity, sure in 2011 once the second phase of your data center is completed, for now, no more disk space or servers installed please.

In summary, put it another way could the next generation Martin MacLeod, not just leave university with a BA or a BSC, but also a Prince2, an ITIL and be Cisco/HP/Dell/IBM/Sun/Oracle/Microsoft certified as part of that degree? Could I not be educationally and professionally suited and booted as much as the next man?

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Virtensys

MANCHESTER, U.K. – February 3rd, 2010 — Virtensys™, Ltd, a leader in next-generation I/O solutions for datacentres, today announced it is expanding its network of channel partners in EMEA in response to the strong demand for its VIO 4000 I/O virtualisation switches from organisations of all sizes across the region.

The award-winning VIO 4000 switches consolidate, virtualise and share the server networking and storage connectivity, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI and SAS/SATA without requiring any changes be made to the servers or networks. The switches deliver the full connectivity bandwidth to servers and significantly reduce I/O power consumption, equipment costs and server management complexity and expenses by more than 60 percent. This results in providing servers with the industry’s best I/O price/performance and lowest energy consumption for accessing the networks and storage infrastructures.

Virtensys has established strategic partnership agreements with specialist resellers in the UK, including Nviron, COAL, Virso, SGI and ADA Computer Systems. With this announcement, Virtensys is also revealing details of its channel partner programme. Through this programme, the company offers its channel partners strong margins, financial incentives, lead generation, and extensive technical training and sales support.

I met with the guys from Virtensys, they do I/O virtualization solutions and it was great talking with them about their solution and the topic of convergence of network and storage down the one interface, about how they could help with the typical issues that we face in the operational world.  The more barriers we can remove to delivery, deployments and support, whether they are process, people or technical, the more we can be seen to deliver value to the business which has to be a good thing.

I/O virtualization going forward is going to become increasingly popular as we struggle with the requirements of reducing the complexity of the systems management, improving the efficiency of the infrastructure and removing the barriers to success, that Fred has to be called to change the physical patch cable from one switch port to another switch port and everything that involves.  The interesting thing around the whole space is that we need not fear such change or innovation, the more we abstract and resolve the nuts and bolts activities, the more I can have my team add real business value and concentrate on the strategy on the continuing service improvement, put another way I can either be pressing respond on your help desk interface as a networks guy, responding to port allocations, or I can be identifying bottlenecks, looking at your traffic patterns and establish going forward how we can make small changes for greater service improvement.

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http://www.poweredbycloud.com/

PoweredByCloud was the first major cloud computing conference to take place outside the US. Although other events have subsequently taken place, this year’s conference will confirm the event as the Market Leader for business leaders and strategists in the space. Technology buyers and media from across Europe, the Middle East and Asia — not just on the consumer side but also on the enterprise side — are likely to be represented in force. If your company is serious about communicating with the paying early adopters in cloud, then our 2010 event is likely to be the best venue to do that.

Check out this cloud conference, I wonder what topics around the cloud space will be discussed, whenever I mention cloud it means so many different things to different people, from a hosted Exchange environment to a pay on use virtualization or grid service, we’ll have to see.

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http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21032

Nationwide’s data centre transformation programme is designed to improve IT architecture while cutting operational and energy cots. The firm says that by removing old hardware, improving service continuity, simplifying disaster recovery and increasing hardware utilisation through server virtualisation, it will make significant savings.

To date, the company has seen a twelve to one reduction in the number of physical servers, saving space and shrinking its carbon footprint through a reduction in power and air-conditioning usage.

Check out this article from Finextra talking about how this financial organization has made savings through activities including removing their old hardware, increasing utilization and examining the way they manage their IT, topics I have blogged before, it’s an interesting read and it’s great to see how they have achieved these savings.

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Realwire

Slough, UK, 1st February 2010 – International solutions provider, Logicalis, today announces it has implemented a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) at Winterflood Securities Ltd, an international capital markets firm and leading liquidity provider headquartered in London.  This is the first Cisco UCS to be deployed in the UK, and will deliver significant first-mover performance and competitive advantage benefits to Winterflood Securities.

As a leading electronic market maker in the UK, Winterflood Securities provides coverage of major global markets.  With data connections into each market, the company regularly processes in the order of 250 million market data updates a day with peaks often passing 30,000 updates in a second.  Winterflood has seen a ten-fold increase in market data volumes through their systems in the past three years and expect this trend to continue.   For Winterflood Securities, the accuracy and ‘speed’ of their data processing is intrinsically linked to client and company profitability.

Wayne Davies, manager networks & infrastructure for Winterflood Securities, comments, “The sheer volume of data processed and value transacted makes our IT infrastructure mission critical.  Platform performance, resilience, and stability are essential for our traders, as is the ability to flex and scale according to market requirements.  Implementing solutions to accelerate data processing and both automate and simplify IT operations play an important role in mitigating risk to the business.

It’s always interesting to read what technologies people have deployed, this article talks about how this company has deployed UCS to deliver competitive advantage, very cool, I’m off to find out more, it’s great to read how people are using the technology and what benefits they expect to see, how it will work for their business.

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http://www.isaca.org/

Rolling Meadows, IL, USA (3rd February 2010)—ISACA’s European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference (EuroCACS) is the must-attend, hot-topic event for IT audit, security and governance professionals in Europe. It attracts the best and brightest with its content-rich and thought-provoking sessions that delve into some of the biggest challenges facing IT professionals. ISACA’s EuroCACS Conference will be held 21-24 March 2010 at the Kempinski Hotel Corvinus, Budapest, Hungary.

Organized by ISACA, a nonprofit association serving 86,000 IT governance professionals, the conference contains 40 sessions that will focus on the latest strategies to address the challenges from business, managerial and operational perspectives, as well as new technologies and system approaches, while identifying risks and opportunities. Reflective of ISACA’s high standards, speakers are industry experts from all over the world.
Dániel Némethy, CIO of Hungarian Kereskedelmi es Hitelbank will present the keynote address on the best governance model to manage the challenges of aligning business goals with information and communication technology goals. Némethy will present a case study showing how the KBC Global Services branch in Hungary used the Pan-European model to continually improve processes, thus ensuring greater quality of services. The presentation will explain the governance model, share his implementation experience, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and look to the future of the governance model.

IT Auditing both in terms of compliance, charge back and security remains a topic of interest for many. It’s not just about reporting and service delivery, its about managing the need to get everything done on demand in the here and now, whilst ensuring that we are able to identify and isolate risks, manage user expectations and meet compliance or auditing requirements, ever more so as we enter a more monitored financial sector going forward. The conference sounds interesting, it’s always great to hear what people are talking about, what the different parts of the IT organization are thinking, the more I understand your drivers, your business, the more we can operate in a way that meets your expectations.

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