Bladewatch.com

You may have guessed that since I’m off work, and for all purposes off the radar in the UK, I’m catching up on my emails more formally.

Anyway I got asked over email would I swap a failed hard drive on production application server running linux, in this case it was a HP Proliant DL385 G1. The concern was about potential data loss, outage to the application or the server as a result of possible issues from swapping the disk.

My reply, was that it is something that can be done online without shutting the server down and is a day to day function that engineers perform regularly without outage, now for some considerations:

• If it’s tier 1 – leave it and obtain scheduled downtime during a non busy period if there is genuine concern
• If it’s anything i’d say older than 2003, I would swap out of hours simply due to the age of the servers and the experience that I have had with some emotional early servers where a disk swap should have been fine but wasn’t for about twelve different reasons.
• Also I tend to leave the disk until it’s in a proper orange failed state, as I’ve had a few issues and arguments with servers and array controllers in the past. Swapping a failed disk is pretty binary, predictive failure should be but if you’ve got ghosts in your array configuration or both disks in a RAID1/O set reporting as predictive failure, swapping the disk might not mean it rebuilds correctly.

Ultimately it depends on your support models, your comfort in carrying out the disk swap, I always tend to work on the basis of cautious optimism, but be prepared for any fall out, not to an extreme level, simple things check the backups, check the application was working so that when we do swap the drive and if something goes wrong we can rule out the disk swap as the problem.

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I got this emailed to me last week and I just replied, I thought in the interests of openess I’d include my reply for all to see and correct me if necesary.

Hi Martin,

The IT guys are telling me we should look at the HP SL6500, what is it and how is it different from the DL range of servers?

Thanks

Bill

IT Architect

Companyx

My reply is below:

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your mail, it’s always great to get emails. Anyway, the SL is HP’s scalable server platform which is designed for high scale out environments. That is it’s a server that is designed to be deployed in volume, providing the maximum number of nodes ina given footprint but not quite going down the blade route which some customers have felt was not quite right for them. HP sometimes refer to it as their ExSO or Extreme Scale Out server.

They have two ranges the SL6000 and SL6500, both with different selling points and features, but with common features, in that you buy a tray upon which you can have two or more servers in that tray dependent on the configurations that you require, the number of disks, the u-size etc.

Are they a suitable alternative to DL servers? Briefly, yes but it’s a platform that is designed for volume deployments, and might not necessarily deliver the flexibility that you have with your existing rack servers.

IBM offer a similar product which is equally good and worth looking at, they refer to it as the IBM System x iDataPlex, both platforms have their benefits and are better in some areas than others, so which you choose to examine is going to depend on your business, your IT and where you are in the server space.

There’s also Dell’s cloud server solution, their C series rack servers which were designed with cloud in mind, they’re interesting rack servers and feature some unique and very cool features.

Hope that helps, if you need anything, do get back to me.

Regards

Martin MacLeod

Martin237@gmail.com

Bladewatch.com

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For the second time I was having one of those conversations with a colleague who works in the IT Governance part of the business, we were debating a rather devisive concept. How do you manage or evaluate an IT department.

My colleague, Tim we’ll call him works for a multi national outside London and is in the Governance function, that is managing IT from a business standpoint ensuring that it delivers value.

So Tim, how do you judge that IT is delivering value:

Firstly that it is operating within budgets, overspend is a sign of poor management and a lack of focus on the important things, secondly based on the call statistics and number of outages in a given time period, also comparing our stance in the Compass reports, how close are we to exceeding the industry standards.

Tim then asks me, why how do you perceive IT value?

Mainly on two values:

Not service level agreements as they can hide underlying issues, I’d focus on the number of P1 (business impacting calls), combined with the reports on IT’s ability to respond to a call, I’m not as concerned with them resolving a call quickly as to the teams responding to the users and communicating effectively.

Secondly is end user opinion within a day of working at any site you can normally attribute the end user relationship to IT, and it’s amazing how a few simple comments can define the end user satisfaction and perception of IT as a business. You can also how effective a team are by workload, whether a team is defined by an individuals or set of individuals, “call networks, Jenny picks up, no one else does”.

Right but you can’t value or monetize end user perception, you can’t really identify your second point financially or in a graph, says Tim. “What do you think then defines an effective team, say networks, how would you say that one network team is more effective than another?”

Let me step it back a second and translate it another way, in any IT function, or SLA (service level agreement) environment we can adjust the statistics, let me respond to your call, email you, acknowledge you but not get back for days, weeks with the call in a state under which I don’t breach the SLA, additionally too much focus on SLA leads to a skew of delivery and the end user experience, the I’m sorry that’s not supported, or your out of support, we don’t do Windows 2000 on DL380 G3 servers only the G2, again meeting SLA but resulting in a day or even a week until the actual issue is resolved.

You can tell an effective team from another in several ways, my key definitions for success would be:

• Picking up the phone as a team – it never rings more than three times
• Responding to emails – with politeness and willingness to help – not the it’s not my issue, more a “sorry you need to speak to Tokyo support, I’ve included them in the email”
• Responding to helpdesk calls and changes, detailing the calls, relating them and completing them accurately – the call log indicates attention to detail  – we of course have to take this with a pinch of salt, I don’t want a novel, nor do I want unnecessary content for the sake of content.
• Effective documentation – being able to say what are the standard spec switches we buy, why and what configurations are loaded all published and relatively up to date (within say a few weeks or month, not six month old data)
• Effective process FAQ/resources – what CTI to use, how to request common things that both the helpdesk and end user community can read – how do I request multicast for my development server and what CTI should I use – does it mean changing the IP
• No surprises and team working relationship – owning and sharing a problem, an avoidance of the “server guys haven’t set their network card on server22 to 100/full”, rather than a ranting email, a network scan, a call to the team saying here are the servers that aren’t 100/full please co-ordinate them to be set correctly.

It’s all in the attitude and mind set in how the team defines itself and operates. There is a difference between being busy through lack of organization and co-0rdination, of dealing on the future and not the hear and now.

So you’re suggesting a big brother approach then? Again not measurable argues Tim, how can I report on how many phone rings there are, how sub optimal emails were sent, or how poor both IT and business users perceive an IT team behaves – in effect nonsense in my opinion.

Possibly, but consider this, the difficulty in maany internal and outsourced IT ventures have is not technical nor operational as much as it is financial, it is balancing the budgets and saying:

Your platform is out of support and therefore we are unable to provide additional support until it is brough into a supported configuration

Your request for out of hours support is absolutely fine, however your contract does not include on site out of hours planned work, therefore we will have to bill you a man day per engineer for that

Your request is not a supported configuration and such will require further sign off and possibly a different support platform which would require additional support element.

It’s little things that can be joined with investment projects to keep the lights on and deliver a next generation platform for business. You need an IT team that are looking both backwards and forwards, what is wrong with the current infrastructure and processes, and what do we want to change as we move forward, but crucially I don’t want change to wait until the next operating system if there are quick wins we can achive.

In essence, the lack of investment, of running your IT as you would your trade floor has resulted in operational challenges in which you need to change the dynamics of your management and your team from one of reactive, to purely technical in focus, and in marginal cost to one of the big picture cost, of looking forward, strategy and delivery. One in which I want the money we spend focussed on making a difference, in investment where it counts rather than on nuts and bolts and being miss spent on poor returns on delivery and end user perception. For example, operationally I would prefer IT standardize and update the desktop to Windows 7 on new desktops than continue spending thousands of pounds a month keeping legacy desktops on an operating system which is nearing end of life, but at the same time, for those users that haven’t been migrated, can we not have a little bit of effort on platform stabilization:

• Chkdsk and defragment the drives
• Clear down disk space and old files so the pcs have space to breath
• Upgrade memory or reallocating pcs from pcs that are going out the door

It’s a debate that’s set to continue, there are of course things that Tim and I agree on, measuring performance is important, but equally important is effective management, effective focus on the fundamentals, combined with an understanding that statistics are part of the message, underlying those statistics could be a range of issues operational, technical and financial.

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http://www.cirrascale.com/press/PR081010.asp

Cirrascale™ Corporation today announced the launch of its new business providing industry-leading independent blade-based cloud computing and cloud storage platforms for conventional and containerized data centers. Cirrascale, originally organized under the name “Verari Technologies”, acquired the intellectual property and other assets of Verari Systems in January 2010.

“Being able to base our cloud storage and compute products on Verari’s world class BladeRack® 2 Series technology and FOREST containerized data center infrastructure puts us at the front of the pack to serve the demanding cloud customer,” said Marc Brown, President and COO, Cirrascale. “These products, based on Verari’s patented Vertical Cooling Technology, generated over $500 Million in installed systems in the high performance computing and enterprise markets; these customer segments are the foundation of the burgeoning cloud market of today. This technology is a winning formula for the cloud customer.”

It’s great to see Verari being renamed Cirrascale and innovating in the blade and cloud based space, it will be exciting to see what developments we see from this new venture. We always need to be open to different vendors, both in terms of services / software and hardware, the more competition and choice, the better for the end user both in terms offerings and in competition in price and innovation.

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I got an email from Victor asking me if I had heard about virtualization being used in the mortgage industry, if it had been adopted by firms in order to deliver services or as a way of providing the IT infrastructure.

I emailed Victor back after a few days having spoken to a few colleagues and analysts, see my reply:

Hi Victor,

Virtualization is being used in a range of different business sectors from education to manufacturing and financial services, as to what elements of the infrastructure have been virtualized, and on what technologies I am unable to provide you with specifics.

In regards to it’s suitability for the mortgage industry, I suspect that would be a discussion for the individual business units or organizations to have, off the top of my head:

The benefits could be:

• Consolidation of resources – doing more with less
• More dynamic infrastructure – being able to allocate capacity on demand where it is needed
• You can argue that it’s more energy efficient in terms of achieving more with less, say 4 servers instead of 16

Considerations:

• Legilslative issues, there may be instances where for whatever reason my businesses or departments cannot run on the same physical platforms, the ‘Chinese Wall’ scenario though this is mainly an issue where we are white labelling (re-selling services under a different name or organization).
• There might be some legacy platforms and applications which for operating system, cost or complexity might be best left to run on physical hardware when we do a cost benefit analysis.
• Financial organizations are using virtualization, whether it’s in client facing production platforms or back office/development ones, is going to be a matter of internal IT and business policy combined with any operational issues involved. For example if you’re deploying ATMs it might be easier to deploy an ATM rather than a virtual ATM solution as we have ATM deployment processes, trained engineers etc.

Apologies for not going into specifics, I have spoken with colleagues in the business and IT space that work in retail banks and the financial sectors, they all use virtualization in different ways and for different reasons, some have adopted it fully, some have experimented the concept, others have roled it back, again it depends on where you are in the IT space, business agility, busines transformation, or lowest cost irrespective of platform to deliver the required services.

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I got asked by a small business I know to put together a script that they could run when they had to rebuild a server or ordered a new server to update the drivers and firmware. I’ve pasted it below, it is very simple and designed to be run and then forgot about.

So the rules as follows.  You download the sytem firmware, name it system.exe, download the the nic firmware nic.exe, and any other bits you need and run them. Below is the part that does the firmware and installs the video driver., then the chipset drivers which were missing on their servers when they did a base Windows 2003 Sp2 install.

cd\

c:

copy \\accounts\it\r610\*.* c:\temp\dellcd c:\temp\dell

msiexec /i delldset.msi /passive

diags.exe /s

video.exe /f /s /l=video.txt

idrac.exe /s

nic.exe /s

system.exe /s

sas.exe /s

setup.exe -s -b

So from above it’s doing

1. Install Dell Dset utility
2. Install/update the Dell diagnostics
3. Run the videodriver install and log the results to video.txt
4. Run the idrac firmware upgrade
5. Run the network card firmware upgrade
6. Run the system firmware upgrade
7. Run the SAS (storage controller) firmware upgrade
8. Run the Intel Chipset update and reboot.

Having downloaded these files (from the Dell support site)

• video driver
• intelchipset – named setup
• dellset – named delldset
• diags – dell 32bit diagnostics update
• idrac firmware
• nic firmware
• sas backplane firmware
• system firmware

As with anything do check it works for you before proceeding or change as you see fit, you might want to add the network card drivers to it.

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I’m in Texas meeting with HP and some fellow bloggers/analysts to see what’s new in the HP space and discuss current and future topics, I’m looking forward to it.

I wonder if there will be any discussions about the HP Proliant G7 range of servers, about cloud computing or HP’s Converged infrastructure.

If you want to get hold of me whilst I’m over in the US, I’m on my mobile, or mail me: martin237@gmail.com.

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http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/central-gov/viewpoint-how-push-ahead-green-it-amid-cuts

Green IT is the discipline of managing IT assets to meet the goal of being environmentally sustainable, including being carbon neutral or carbon negative (i.e. sequestering more carbon than is created).  This goal is some way off being achieved by most organisations and the closest anyone tends to get is a path to ‘greening’ IT – i.e. making it more environmentally sustainable and reducing IT’s carbon footprint within organisations but not yet neutral.

The public sector has an unusual conundrum to deal with in the domain of Green IT; whereas the private sector can almost pay lip service to the whole concept whilst picking up specific brownie points that are in the public domain, the public sector is being expected to be more holistic in its approach.  So it is the public sector, specialist charities and focus groups that are likely to lead the way in Greening IT.

An interesting article talking about Green IT in the public sector, it’s a conversation that is on going in the public and private sectors. The public sector has lead some elements of the Green IT movement, but simple realities have changed mindsets and illustrated the need for a more effective approach to delivering IT, particularly in some parts of London where there were power constraints in the data center space.

We need to be tackling the issue from both sides, identifying from an application and an infrastructure standpoint how we can deliver our serivces at a lower operational cost financially and environmentally, what is always going to be the challenge, is the marginal cost element, how much are we prepared to invest to reduce our costs. That said many service providers are already having to build in energy efficient and low impact infrastructure in order to deliver services at a cost which clients are willing to pay.

Interestingly, I wonder if when we talk about Green IT, we should not just be talking about air flow, energy efficient components, but the application footprint, by that I mean, do we need to be hosting that service ourselves or could we purchase that capacity in the cloud space, on a pay on use model, how always on do we really need our application and services to be? It’s an issue that is set to continue as we tier the applications and the infrastructure, and goes hand in hand with the follow the moon/follow the sun model, can I reduce my environmental impact by running resources and services where the impact is lowest, where I can have renewable energy on tap?

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I met with one of my Windows server manager friends and asked him over a Starbucks coffee what his priorities were for 2011, it was interesting to hear his objectives. Danny (we’ll call him) works for a mutlinational financial with 450 staff over three time zones supporting approximately two hundred Windows application and infrastructure servers.

His objectives:

Reduce the hardware support contract – this was done by taking servers off the vendor support contract, and also switching funds from support to investment

Implementing a server verification and improvement plan – basically standardizing configuration and reducing the complexity of the estate, fewer operating systems, fewer deviations from the standard, two operating systems, no legacy platforms, two server models as opposed to eight.

Virtualization drive – but with pilot projects in Microsoft Hyper-V for the development estate

Standardization of processes – agreed best practices for server or component failures, more focus on the service desk processes, handing more first line activities to the helpdesk or application teams, and more out of hours support co-ordinated by the other regions.

Increase the permanent head count – more stability in the platforms combined with stability in our resources, which can be co-ordinated and re-deployed with business needs in mind, with building relationships and specilism in specific business areas, George learns the Exchange environment, but everyone knows it enough for when he goes on holiday.

Unify the team brand – one voice for standards, for processes and for the team message – the manager writing a weekly summary of activities, achievements and improvements made all on the team SharePoint site using RSS.

Improve and build our relationships with the business sponsors and application teams that we work with on a day to day basis.

More cross regional relationship building with the various infrastructure teams, standard security patching, standard requests for resources or hardware, with standard specifications both in buying and supporting platforms. A system built for the team in New York is built in the same way and using the same drivers and service packs/hot fixes as a box in London.

A change of mindset from mediocrity, of it can’t be done – to get on with it, to in effect spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of workload and delegating it, on communicating across the team, across levels, so that when you do that storage migration of application A, can you also check the drivers and firmware, verify the share configurations and access levels meet our standards and if not raise a call to retrospectively fix them.

An end to what I call “the one mind set approach”, “we’re here to install SP2 on your server so that it works with the new SAN switch, logically apart from paranoia, is there any reason you aren’t doing the Emulex and vendor drivers/firmware so we don’t have to revisit it again in three to six months?”

I suspect his objectives form many in the same and different ways when compared to others, the most interesting thing he mentioned though was cloud.  He was quite nervous but ready to embrace it:

“We need to be the differentiator, the team adding value, consistently delivering, responding and pre-empting issues for the business, whether it’s doing the work directly (building and supporting servers) or being the broker between the business, the other sponsors and the vendor, ensuring that what the business need and what they think they needs gets translated to a service offering and something that works for them.

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I needed this the other day, I got asked a question by one the small business owners I know how I could tell how long the warranty was left on his server and using google quickly, found this : (enter the model number and serial number)

http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/wlup

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