Blade Watch

One of the conversations I have been having with colleagues and CIOs is a question that’s been on my mind for some time. What I am about to say is in no way negative and is not to be taken as criticism of the way ahead. There are exciting times ahead for the end user community, for vendors and investors alike. The question is as follows.

As we virtualize and commoditize the infrastructure, the individual components become less significant in a way, whether it’s a server from vendor1 or vendor 11, does the actual underlying tin matter?

1. Absolutely – I have a specific price point that I seek to achieve, that can only be done through our purchasing agreement with vendor8, or absolutely because we want the management software, the extra bits which you just don’t get from any other vendor (real or perceived).
2. No – it will be replaced every few years and besides my servers, my applications are abstracted from it, I want the cheapest hardware financially and operationally.

The problem is that we’re for the time being going forward. (The time being between now and when the data center is virtualized and floats around the enterprise, the cloud or whatever device can power and host it at the lowest cost, a Mac Mini perhaps).  Between now and the future then, data center 3.0 I’ll call it, how do we differentiate ourselves? How do we isolate our servers, our software from the competition?

• Price – but dear me, many a business has gone down that route and volume is key at this point else margins eat your profits – and what about concepts like support costs and service delivery?
• Functionality – great, but dear me reader, functionality is expensive and requires real investment and do our beloved users want to pay for said functionality, everyone says yes until the invoice arrives for approval and sign off
• Apple-ness – by this I mean belief in the product, belief in the service that only Apple seem to be able to achieve in the notebook/pc world – you mean you haven’t got one of these, oh well, maybe next year

I wonder then, going forward as the industry changes, both inside IT and outside the IT industry where the lines are drawn and where go, going forward, is branding enough? Is price or feature competition effective enough as a vehicle to protect revenues. Is Apple’s benefit that regardless of the perceived limitations not that the fans just sit and go wow, look at the design and buy it anyway? How do we then do this in the IT industry? Where commoditization, where hierarchical structures are changing, it used to be that server guy Mike made the recommendations on servers, but Fred who runs trading now wants to know what can be done about this data center space problem, IT is crossing the boundaries that we spent years creating, how then do we change the marketing, the lines of communication and support frameworks to meet this new target audience?

How do we sell servers or software, or a concept to a business unit, a CEO or CFO when concepts of MegaHertz, memory support, or number of PCI slots don’t quite raise the excitement that Mike has when the nice account manager says take a look at this, 5 pci slots and a redundant power supply!

We could go down the services route, indeed, fantastic, would you like  a 2u server or a virtualization product as part of a service? No capex, I repeat No capex, but as the world gets smaller, that poses the old problem, fine I’d love to have my virtual desktops powered by your service, but just one thing, I’ll have it hosted in India, at India prices, not at your UK prices, no they’re too much, and can I have that free mouse mat. I like mouse mats.

We need change, we need progress and development, a move to a scenario where the IT and business merge to create a unified platform for revenue generation, I just wonder if combined the two business units, are ready for this new world as are the vendors. Does this mean a rebrand of IT, a convergence where we offer a range of solutions mixing software and hardware with services and service delivery an overall solution comprising of everything you need, and does that mean the user gets closer or further away from the vendor? We’ll have to see,

Day 2 was great, it had some great topics, discussion and a chance to be shown around their factory, to see a blade being built, very, very cool.  The day started with an overview of desktop virtualization, something we have covered many a time at Bladewatch. We saw a demonstration of the work is doing in this area, including in their lab, and some interesting conversations about desktop virtualization admittedly I commented on this quite a bit. There is still a degree of perception for and against, to some up, against it is the cost, is the fact that our desktop infrastructure might actually work ok. The benefits though, of abstracting the user from their individual desktop, of breaking down the end user requirements to the core applications and services that they actually need, rather than providing a one size fits all approach, combined with the savings and distractions around the desktop support, not always about direct or indirect cost, but more to a disposable reliable desktop solution that meets user requirements. Is it a desktop I actually need or just the ability to check the online phonebook, check my email and book meeting rooms, is it therefore a pc I need, or a thin client with a web browser and everything stored online.

We then got a tour of the HP Factory Express and HP POD facilities. I’ve published pictures, apologies they were all taken with my iPhone, but nonetheless you’ll get the idea. On the POD it was great to see the two demo units that they had and discuss the opportunities and uses for the different form factor (sizes) of POD, there is the smaller more portable and the standard larger one, both could have specific benefits dependent on their size and scale. I remain a fan of the POD concept and remember writing about it being a perfect solution for those data center virtualization projects, deliver one, virtualize on to it, then once you’ve decommissioned and removed the legacy estate, P2V migrate back into your existing data center – virtualization in a can if you like.

Back to the HP Factory Express center which was great, walking around seeing how the servers were built to customers specifications, then tested, verified and packaged ready for shipment was very cool. Check out the pictures on flickr.

http://www.realwire.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=1718

London and Buenos Aires – 25 February 2010 – A new report by international consulting firm BroadGroup forecasts space growth averaging 61% across 7 key markets by 2014. Yet this is still likely to leave a space shortage following significant enterprise outsourcing.

In a new report published today, Data Centres Latin America – Competition, Demand Drivers and Growth, (http://sales.broad-group.com/sp/ecom/?cmlc=DCLatinAmerica ) BroadGroup forecasts sustained sector growth across the region. This is the first report that assesses the Latin America marketplace for data centres and identifies key trends across the seven main markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Peru with a total of more than 200 data centres (excluding enterprise data centres).

Check out this artilce talking about data center growth in developming markets, certainly as economies grow and new opportunities for bringing online businesses and end users to services, the demand for data centers grows accordingly. I wonder if we might not find similar activities and developments in the middle east? I’m off to check out more.

So I am officially in Texas at the moment, and in fact am blogging having just completed my visit to H-E-B to get some mineral water. I’ll be doing some research and blogging over the next few days so if there’s anything I should be aware off, do get in touch, I’m on my iPhone so drop me a mail and I’ll give you a call.

I got asked if I have a server move document to aid in the server move process by Norman, a Project Manager for a medium business in Wales, it’s actually something I’m working on and will publish shortly.

Norman is moving from their old data center to a new one, he has 170 mixed serves running unix and Windows and needed a document which he could issue to the engineers in the technical team.  Off the top of my head, the information I would need would be:

Server name – Accounts1

Asset number/serial number – 8KZ283TY8

Operating system – Windows 2003

Make and Model – HP DL380 G3

Current IP address – 10.11.101.13 / 255.255.255.0 / 10.11.101.254

New IP address – 10.22.110.11 / 255.255.255.0 / 10.22.110.254

Current Lights out IP – 100.11.234.25 / 255.255.255.254 / 10.11.234.245

New Lights out IP – 10.9.17.20  / 255.255.255.0 / 10.9.17.254

SAN Storage – Y/N – with World wide addresses if appropriate

Current cabinet – AJ11

New cabinet – A01

Anyway, I’ll put something together online shortly. We need to distinguish between the core information and an audit document for everything involving the move.

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.

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.

rpath blog

Let’s face it: Nobody likes change.

And nobody likes it less than enterprise IT, which has come to fear change as a malevolent force—the unwelcomed houseguest—that invariably leads to unintended consequences.

When change arrives, bad things tend to happen.

Of course, IT has good reason to be fearful—change is incredibly disruptive to production environments. And it’s becoming more so with the growing complexity of software systems—more sources of change, faster rates of change and more systems to maintain.

IT has good reason to be afraid.

An interesting post, I have often thought that we should be looking at service delivery improvement projects from about three different angles, and it’s something I discussed with a consultancy a few years ago, the three phased approach:

• End user perceived experience – what is the level of service I actually get when logging a call regardless of your statistics?
• Application support team experience – what is their level of service, what barriers to delivery do they have technically/operationally and what issues are affecting them?
• Infrastructure support team experience – what issues are they having in their delivery and how could we streamline support and delivery – lights out connectivity – simply refreshing the hardware?

Tied into all this though is inventory, inventory, inventory, this includes application mapping to infrastructure resources and business lines, combined with infrastructure mapping knowing what it is we have and what the priorities should be. The more we understand the applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more we can do proper change analysis, the more we can examine where the bottlenecks are, take the big decisions and work on a basis of service transformation, rather than Keeping the Show On the Road – KSOR as we sometimes call it. Keeping still leads to:

• Legacy infrastructure with its inherent support and maintenance issues
• Issues relating to application source code, reliability as well as limits to bug fixes or functionality enhancements, sorry Windows 2000 does not support .Net 3.5
• Data center space being used inefficiently – we have five hundred servers taking which could be replaced with 90 new ones – what savings are we not realizing?
• User perception issues – users can so easily just accept mediocrity and rather than complain – what do you mean we’re rubbish and you’re taking service elsewhere, you’ve never said, is there any point?
• Everything becomes a massive project – we’re changing our SAN switch which suddenly means new fibre cards, new servers, new operating systems, new application code and new server names, all because we left everything age rather continue to evolve and invest in the infrastructure.

I was reading an interesting article talking about virtualization of storage being the next big thing, and for many it will be. I wonder though if we should not be looking more towards the follow the moon vehicle for IT infrastructure, the concept of data center virtualization.

We need to be thinking of virtualization as an evolving path, in which we continue to further abstract the end user from the infrastructure and the application, where we move towards service down a wire or online rather than locking the user to a specific device with a client application, with all the anciliary components to deliver that service.  At the same time from an IT cost and business empowerment angle virtualization of the data center allows us to transform not only how we organize and support the IT services that the business needs, it allows us to look at how we host and power these services towards a follow the moon approach.

In IT support a few years ago, colleagues and CIOs were talking about the concept of follow the sun. This was quite simple, they wanted to unify the support, in a given enterprise if a London server went down which Tokyo needed to use, traditionally the regional politics would get in the way of fixing the problem, the operations team in Tokyo would have to call London, ask a London engineer to log on and see what the issue is, ok so say a 30 minute delay in most cases not world ending, but if the engineer couldn’t access that system, if the engineer had to visit the site, we could be talking Tokyo being unable to access that application for the best part of the day. So we adopted or looked at follow the sun support models, where APP Support looked after and had access to all their systems gloablly, that as Tokyo monitored their batch, if a London server went on its holidays, they could log on, take a look, try and fix it, and if they couldn’t then they could call London IT and ask for a server guy. It requires a degree of trust, of new thinking and organization, why could Tokyo server guy not look at the server, that was deemed as a step too far for some.

Anyway, follow the sun brought us a more fluidic support model reducing response times and empowered overnight changes and upgrades to the systems that previously might have been more challenging to action. If London had to reboot a network switch at 3am, that was fine, globally there was cover from APP Support who were on site who could log on and check the batch, the web site or the application was still working ok.

We introduced the world to server virtualization where instead of having a server per application, we could buy a server with a bit more memory, a bit more storage and have that ‘cut up’ and shared amongst the business units. It worked on the whole very well, but IT was still a bit confused and still is in many ways about how we charge for it and how we ‘make a profit’ for their cost center, you see we can only absorb so much before someone has to pay for the underlying infrastructure the 400TB of storage, the 32GB of RAM in each server, and compare that with the 1u special that might be good enough for a given application, keeping the per unit virtual machine cost competitive could be a challenge if we didn’t look at the way we billed for capacity, for delivering IT service.

At the same time we had application virtualization which meant instead of having a server per application, we could so easily have a shared pool of resources which I could ask my application to use, that my application only worked 9-5 meant that I could buy 9-5 compute resources from that shared pool. However this meant less perceived control to the application team, IT couldn’t understand again that in this concept it’s not about making a profit on the grid infrastructure, covering your costs, its about onboarding applications in order to spread the cost, spread the business benefits, and reduce your server count which will save you money anyway. 

We had the networks team talking about network virtualization, putting many lans down the one connection which was fantastic, coupled with people asking about storage virtualization, “why do I care where my files are stored” and they were right. But the challenges came when application teams and business sponsors didn’t quite understand what their actual requirements were in terms of performance and availability, “the cheapest they might say”, or “the fastest”, but if no one is going through in the background and archiving the data, asking do you really need to keep this all online, and if the backups work but take forever to restore, then we simply just keep eating more and more storage, regardless of how that storage is provided.

Moving back then to follow the moon, what is it that I feel we are trying to achieve?

Data center virtualization delivered through abstraction of the infrastructure and application delivery process. (in the IT world)

Having my IT services, my infrastructure and my application operate wherever the power, the carbon footprint or the support costs are cheapest to have the lowest operational costs at any point in time. (in the business world)

A statement that sounds more complex than it is, but let us take Martinsbank as an example, it has offices in Tokyo, New York, London and Paris. London is the hub, it connects all the regions. At the moment if London goes down the world ends, so it needs high availbility, it needs expensive data centers with all the bells and whistles, as this is where some of the core applications and services are hosted, additionally we cannot quite shut elements of London down and do ‘maintenance’ on the data center, it might take 6 months to get approval to power down the bcp London data center. Therefore any upgrade work is time consuming, prohibitively disruptive and ‘expensive to end users’, so it gets put off for longer which simply perpetuates the workload until it just has to get done, at which point end users are outraged at the disruption.

Think about this though. If I had my data center virtualized, that is I had my server, my network and my storage virtualized, (independent of how the application is set up), could I not quite easily say to Tokyo, “be London for the day”, here are the London virtual machines, their storage, their network infrastructure configurations, be London, let me failover London to Tokyo.  Think of what that could do for the data center for IT. With this scenario, with a data center if you like as a set of config files, a few TB of storage and virtual machine configurations, I could start a number of concepts:

• Business continuity between regions – why have London bcp site if New York can run it all be it a little bit slower, but run it nonetheless
• Data centers hosted by power or carbon cost – why not have my data center London, run in Mumbai, in China or Iceland, wherever I can purchase power, cooling and people at the lowest operational cost. But you see we can take this to the next level, where we have my London office run on servers, on infrastructure overnight in the region where the power is cheaper but have everything supported by my staff in London who are working.
• Upgrades become possible, want to deploy 10GB Ethernet, fine we can failover the data center workloads to a range of offices or data centers, whilst we do what we have always wanted to do, whether it’s upgrade the cooling, re-do the cabling which has become a mess, or simply refresh to the latest most efficient server hardware without the twelve month projects, the debates, the costs and the disruption.
• We can move towards an exciting concept where the IT for the business is in effect a few files, granted very large ones, but files nonetheless which move around our own internal cloud delivering the services we need, at a price and availability that we can afford, down to the possibility at a granular level.

A right size application hosting scenario, development we want that wickedly fast and always on (our developers are expensive), fine we host that on our Tier3 data centers, Production also needs to be stable and available, performance is also important, fine we put that on our tier1 data center, tier3 production is important but if it goes down there are redundant systems or other ways around it, so can we put that on the cheaper data centers, and our UAT applications put in a box somewhere we only need them when we have to do application validation for a project go-live.

Taken a little further then, we could extend the concept of follow the moon, I’ll have my data center move around the globe following power costs and combine it with follow the sun, so I have no need for oncall, where I can power down sites, data centers that aren’t needed. I have one data center, one application pool, which moves around the globe rather than a data center per region on 24/7 with 99.995% availability, when I can have 8 hour slots in which the US is online, EMEA is online, and the rest of the globe is online. I just need operations to co-ordinate the data center hand over process which might not necessarily be that difficult.  We can though evolve follow the moon, with follow the sun, to cloud, to a position where instead of each region having their own set of services and applications, we have credit which has regional components for each region, but is one application pool providing credit for that organization, with one set of infrastructure, a credit cloud, if you want to subscribe, not a problem it’s pay on use. The same with the email, with dns, with accounts and HR. Oh there will be data privacy and ownership issues to discuss and deal with, but they can be in the right format, with that we can change the nature of the organization from one of regions deviating from the master plan, to one in which the organization adjusts itself to that region – no more of the “can I have a DL380 in Tokyo, please we buy IBM”, resolve those regional and historical issues which always got explained by that magical statement, that is not how we do things. As we standardize and customize on a per region basis, we can further consolidate applications, reduce costs and be more dynamic in the enterprise. With this model, Tokyo needing more capacity for their credit system as the markets go wild, is not an issue, we can turn on London and have them share resources. We can right size:

• Regional requirements – how much of Tokyo’s capacity is duplicate and how much is actually used – how much could we consolidate and have London or New York use that capacity?
• Application requirements – right sizing the infrastructure to the application, stop having everything on all day every day on the fastest systems hosted in the most expensive data centers, could the London phonebook system not shut down when London systems are no longer in use?
• Infrastructure – examine what we have an how we can do things better, have the infrastructure aligned with the business need and able to cater to its requirements on the many operational levels that we have, UAT, development/test, production and production that just can’t go down.

Interestingly, I wonder how much of these possibilities will be constrained by the business, the application teams and the IT? Are people ready for change, and are we ready to evolve the business to a point in which it is working on the basis of revenue combined with the greater good, than the regional cost center or center of excellence concept – oh New York does email/dns/active directory, afterall we’re a US company, why can’t the dns, email, and active directory be a shared business service that works wherever it is cheapest and most efficient operationally? Does the infrastructure need to be in New York, or can my New York teams run the service wherever the services move around the globe following the sun.

Whether this goes ahead is one thing, but with follow the moon concepts, with the evolution of application and infrastructure virtualization, we can consolidate our cost base, transform our delivery, and interestingly start the move to taking the enterprise to enterprise 2.0.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1378092,00.html

Data center managers are not going “green” out of benevolence to the environment and society. It’s all about keeping costs low. In this tip, I will explore various data center technologies that claim to improve efficiency and indicate those that are cost effective; saving money from the bottom line of the operations.

Check out this post talking about which data center tactics provide the best value, it raises some great points particularly in terms of raising the temperature of the data center. Ideally we would be looking at the data center in combination with the application, so that we are covering both angles in terms of consolidating and virtualizing the application and business services, and putting those services on the most efficient servers in an optimized data center.