Archive for How IT works
May 11, 2008 at 8:11 pm · Filed under How IT works
I was speaking with Chris, he called me asking for advice, and the following conversation resulted:
“ow would you deal with this? A team approved a change which resulted in their server being rebooted, their application didn’t start as a result causing disruption to service on Monday morning and they’re getting emotional and wanting to ask how I’m going to fix it.
It’s a difficult one, the person approving the change you could argue takes liability for any issues of that change, the person doing the work should check if there are any processes that need restarted, the application team should check their application afterwards, however in this case this hasn’t happened, either due to the change not highlighting a reboot was to occur, that the person doing the work wasn’t aware of the documentation/processes to check the application afterwards, or the application team didn’t think a reboot was going to happen and logged on to check their processes.
The first thing I’d do is call the person who approved it, the application team/business line, have a chat with them, understand the impact, understand where they’re going, in the respect that if we’re going to be emotional then I’ll need to understand the chain of events, the responsibilities involved, but before all this, I’d try and reboot the conversation, in the following respect, by saying something like “A reboot happened as part of change 90873, this was approved by the .. team, we will update our processes and documentation to limit this happening again, I’m happy to discuss this, but life really is too short, let’s move on.” Phrase it in the right way though.
This is not to suggest, I’m lacking in interest. It’s simply the following, there was a break down in communication, in process, now obviously IT need to work on improving this, but debating it, who did what steps leading to the loss of service adds little benefit to the end user, to service delivery. In the time spent doing the accountability work, we could have rebuilt the servers, we could have upgraded the application code, defragmented the file system to improve performance, anything that’s more productive from and end user perspective. I’m all for discusssion, for accountability, but when it’s of value to process, to service delivery or the business teams - how you approach this will depend on you and your business.
April 15, 2008 at 4:30 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23916.wss
PARIS - 14 Apr 2008: TRANSALLIANCE, a major European operator for transport and logistics markets based in Nancy, France, today announces an agreement with IBM (NYSE: IBM) to host its servers, manage its information technology (IT) security and its databases. The four million euro contract will run for the next five years.
With plans to expand its presence in Europe and to develop its logistics business, TRANSALLIANCE asked IBM to help respond to challenges regarding the continuity of services and the optimization of IT costs. One of the objectives was also to improve the flexibility of the information system in order to integrate new entities.
An article talking about how IBM is going to supply IT services to this European transport organization. It’s an interesting read and discusses the different services/elements of the infrastructure that IBM are going to provide - the demand for outsourcing elements of your business, the backoffice/admin, the IT or support function can be a real enabler, the challenge being how you fit this within the way you do business. Establishing what is included, what is constituted as support, as business activity or investment is an important part of the relationship and the operational cost of doing so - rebuilding a server, is that Investment or support? Do check out the release.
April 10, 2008 at 11:01 pm · Filed under How IT works, rackmounts
http://www.pressebox.de/pressemeldungen/ibm-deutschland-gmbh-4/boxid-165608.html
(pressebox) SAN FRANCISCO, 09.04.2008 - At a customer event here today, IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced two high-end Power Systems models - the world’s fastest UNIX® server and a unique water-cooled supercomputer. The new systems offer sophisticated IBM virtualization technology and energy-saving capabilities to help dramatically reduce bottom-line operating costs, such as those for energy, floor space and systems management, while improving system performance, helping customers transition to a new enterprise data center.
The new UNIX enterprise server, the Power(TM) 595, designed to extend IBM’s leadership in the UNIX market, will be attractive to existing IBM clients as well as Sun Solaris and HP UNIX users. For example, IBM’s Power enterprise 64-core server delivers twice the performance at a comparable price as a similarly configured HP Superdome Itanium® system. (1)
Very cool, I’ll need to read up about these new Power Systems, they do sound very cool. More choice in platforms and innovation has to be a good thing for the market and the end user in terms of choice and options for their business.
April 10, 2008 at 10:12 pm · Filed under Grid, How IT works
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080402006390&newsLang=en
PLANO, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Layered Technologies, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of “on demand” IT infrastructure, and 3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of grid computing technology and utility computing services for Web applications, today announce support for Woopra, the real-time Web analytics platform. The companies will provide 100 grid-based servers in order to assist Woopra as it experiences a huge market demand prior to official launch.
“We are extremely pleased that Layered Technologies has stepped up to pledge the infrastructure necessary for us to meet the growing demand for Woopra,” said Elie Khoury, CIO of Woopra. “We are also grateful for all of the public feedback and support we have been given in the past 48 hours. We vow to work as quickly as possible to make Woopra available to as many as 100,000 Web sites within the next few weeks.”
Woopra provides real-time stats delivered via a revolutionary client-server application, and includes unique features such as the ability to identify and chat real time with visitors to the monitored site. The beta version of Woopra was quietly unveiled to a select audience of 200 at WordCamp Dallas, but news rapidly spread to over 2 million as buzz began to grow.
“We are excited about the launch of Woopra and the fact that we will be hosting it on The Grid,” said Todd Abrams, COO and President of Layered Technologies. “With such high demand, we are working closely with Woopra to ensure that all of Layered Technologies’ clients can gain access to the application as quickly as possible.”
With more than 12,000 servers and nearly a decade of experience, Layered Technologies has developed an expertise in data center operations. Using 3Tera’s award-winning AppLogic OS, Layered Technologies is able to provide grid computing solutions by harnessing the power of their data centers and making it available on-demand - processing power, bandwidth, and storage capacity. 3Tera’s AppLogic Grid OS allows a customer to package their entire application into a single self-contained logical entity. The packaged system can be scaled from a fraction of a CPU to hundreds of machines without any code modification.
Check out this article talking about grid/utility or ‘on demand’ technologies being used as an enabler, it’s always interesting to see how the technology is being used, very cool.
April 10, 2008 at 12:18 am · Filed under Grid, How IT works
http://www.business-standard.com/common/news_article.php?autono=319376&leftnm=4&subLeft=0&chkFlg
The first years of the new century have seen a dramatic increase in the number of internet users (1.3 billion — or 20 per cent of the world population), usage and bandwidth demand as new patterns of usage (Web 2.0) grow exponentially. Against this backdrop now comes the promise of a superfast internet, based on technology which has the computing power to change the way in which future generations collaborate and communicate. The technology is an offshoot of the ‘Big Bang’ idea from the European Centre for Nuclear Research — often referred to as ‘The Birthplace of the Internet’ — which is being used to increase the speed of the internet by almost 10,000 times.
The action started when CERN began working on a much-debated plan 15 years ago to recreate the Big Bang. Despite opposition, the technology is complete and now in a cooling process. On the ‘Red Button Day’ (later this summer), scientists will turn on CERN’s particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and also open ‘The Grid’. The 27-km-long LHC will shoot beams of protons at one another in a bid to recreate conditions similar to those that followed the Big Bang. This will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs. The data cannot be stored locally. It needs a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data — which explains the need of a grid.
Check out this article which is talking about CERN and it’s work with grid computing, it’s an interesting read and illustrates the use of grid technology - very cool.
April 8, 2008 at 10:55 pm · Filed under How IT works, virtualization
http://www.itpro.co.uk/applications/news/184236/gartner-virtualisation-to-rewrite-it-rules.html
Virtualisation is so likely to have the greatest impact on operations and infrastructure, Gartner has today published a special report on its potential to rewrite the rules of IT management, deployment, planning and purchasing.
The latest, software-based consolidation craze will be the highest impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, according to the technology analyst. It predicts virtualisation will transform how IT is managed, bought, deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged.
“As a result, virtualisation is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years,” it said.
Phil Dawson, Gartner vice president, distinguished analyst and the report’s author was quick to point out that and virtualisation is not a new concept. Storage has already been virtualised - albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures - and networking is also virtualised, he said.
But Dawson added: “As both server and PC virtualisation become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT.”
Check out this article, it’s an interesting read. It’s not just the cross chargin, the operations etc that change. Interestingly ownership and support has to change, who owns the virtual machine/ESX server? What constitutes a change to the infrastructure? In a virtual world do we not move to a more fluid type infrastructure? By making the server instance a commodity, does that change how it is supported? Who supports it? It’s something we’ll need to watch and see.
April 1, 2008 at 11:21 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=18284
Canada’s Scotiabank is using technology from Microsoft to introduce an internal Web 2.0 social networking platform aimed at encouraging information sharing and collaboration among its staff.
Based on Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007, the platform enables employees to share, store, organise, search and manage information using blogs and wikis. As part of the programme, the bank is creating online user profiles for staff members.
Scotiabank, which is currently piloting the system at its international division, says the technology will transform how staff share knowledge and best practices.
Commenting on the move, Robert Fournier, SVP, enterprise architecture and methodology, Scotiabank, says: “By leveraging the knowledge and experience of the Scotiabank team with a business focused social networking platform we are enabling staff to better serve customers by sharing best practices and identifying experts and skill sets regardless of geographic and organizational boundaries.”
Dan Bloch, director, financial services, Microsoft Canada, says the SharePoint system includes native support for wikis, blogs and RSS feeds as well as privacy and security mechanisms so that employees can connect and share knowledge via a customisable and security-enhanced interface.
I think this is fantastic and wonder if it might not be a great way for IT to communicate whether we’re talking about those monthly reports, or even best practice/tips etc.
For example for the Windows team you might have:
- Name of engineer
- Core skills/application experience
- Bank application knowledge
- Contact details - phone number/instant message/email
So I can quickly see, I’ve got a problem with my Citrix application which engineer has experience with Citrix or with my applicationOr in best practice:
- The recommended way of installing services in a cluster
- How to create a share in a cluster
- What’s the correct process to make changes to a production server
- What operating systems are supported
- What hardware is supported
- How do I rebuild a Windows server
- How do I tell who owns a server - link to our inventory site - http://serverinventory.mycompany.net
In terms of reporting:
- A daily update, what we as a team are up to - whos on-call and what their contact details are
- What we read on the news today, or even news feeds for Windows etc
- Our core issues - a non emotional summary - call volumes relating to a specific platform/application or business line - linking to our help desk reports
- What outage or issues we are having - the development network failed taking out the following servers this morning the cause is - go to http://networks.mycompany.net for more information
Our bullet points statistics
- For the weekending 27th of March we had 133 incidents, 48 requests, 95% success rate in response, 85% success rate in resolution, the core calls were for this issue:
- Reboot server
- Backup failure
Just think how this could transform communication and interaction or is it me thinking this?
March 27, 2008 at 11:33 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://weblog.infoworld.com/real-time-enterprise/archives/2008/03/datacenter_in_a.html
One of the biggest barriers to innovation today, is dealing with current datacenter complexity. This forces the largest IT investment dollars to be focused on keeping the lights on and containing infrastructure sprawl. The inability to focus a majority of time and investments on innovating and differentiating the business thru IT causes continued missed expectations and disappointment within the business user community.
It is essential to understand that past design choices resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers and cost models that don’t work for the customer or best in class distinction. The lack of transparency of what has been done in the past and how datacenter build-out continues to be a “don’t change” mindset – results in continued misalignment with business needs. This prevents business agility and reduces shareholder value.
Check out this great article from infoworld talking about the data center. It’s interesting topic of discussion for a mixture of reasons. I’ve often thought about this, but like to turn it around a bit, mix it up with the business viewpoint and suggest another way. Could we not have business transformation through data center transformation?
Could I not have the ability to fail over the data center, the IT infrastructure wherever the power is cheapest, which allows me to do data center wide updates in terms of security patching, systems upgrades, application releases? Think about it, I could deploy the application code to Sinagpore (when it’s offline), have my developers test it, and have it signed off ready for the Singapore users to come in, switch on and find their now on version 6.81 of the organization trading portal. Where we can fail over applications between sites for functionality, for performance or availability; “New York grid is bigger than Hong Kong’s, so Hong Kong use New York when they close for the day”.
If we want to truly take the data center to the next level we need to align the IT to the business and the business to the IT. Our architecture (usually application architecture and infrastructure architecture), our strategy needs to be done at the high level, at the business level with (and this will sound binary, harsh/lacking in due thought - please stay with me), rules applied from the top down, we need to fix the cost of IT by moving to a service provisioning model. Granted we can’t do this overnight but we can move towards the concept, gaining savings in energy efficiency, hardware support cost and evolution of the platform. What I mean in essence firstly is to do the adhoc rule number 9 type thing:
- All Windows 2000 servers need decommissioned by September 27th 2008.
- All x86 server which is older than 3 years needs to be decommissioned by August 4th.
- Any x86 server with storage array shelves needs converted to SAN or large physical drive by July 23rd - I’ll have an end to those 14×9.1GB drives and have a few 300GB ones please
Right why these rules.
A server older than three years is typically performance per watt wise giving you a poor return on investment, it’s contributing heavily to your hardware support contract, and giving you pound for pound less value than a newer server in terms of cpu,ram and storage. The 6 year old DL380 might be perfectly adequate for your application needs, but then does this application need that u space, that power? Could we not have a new box hosting three of these applications in a virtual machine?
Let’s abstract the user, the application from these issues.
Additionally, I don’t want people tied to the server, I don’t want application code that might be sticky, or dependent on build version 7.1.3, I want the server to be seen as a means to an end, a processing device, in essence a glorified desktop that we swap regularly to give you the enhanced functionality and performance you need. To keep evolving the operating system in line with support and allow me to be more efficient in the data center and reduce the hardware costs. In doing so we move to a model of abstraction from the tin, granted we still need server78 for equities, but if I deploy server 439, they should be able to port their code to the new server. With the ability to port the applications, porting them to grid, to Citrix or web should be the next step.
With these rules in place, I can then implement the smart technologies, the smart processes such as consolidation, virtualization or even grid, or the shared infrastructure. With directive, with buy in from the CEO level, I can approach that application team and say, “Hi, you’re running a DL380 Pentium 733 with 256mb ram, running your web site on Windows 2000. You can either request a new virtual machine, a new physical server, or switch to our shared web farm.”
Let me explain the buy in thing. If the CIO mandates all servers over 3 years old must be decommissioned, and is then indirectly or directly over-ruled by business line A, application team B, you undermine the CIO’s ability to drive through change. Now obviously change needs to be actioned in line with business need, in line with the constraints organizationally and from the application. But with CEO/board level buy in, we can be infrastructure led, we can be dynamic, focused on deliver, looking at the big picture, not in the situation where application A haven’t got budget to buy a new server, so we’re rebuilding a server which is relatively energy inefficient (performance per watt), which lacks lights out administration, the ability to host the newer operating systems and support the memory configuration that might be needed in the near future. At the same time, it’s using your organization wide data center space, Application C which uses the latest and greatest is in effect you could argue subsidizing application A. Fine, there are situations where this is the cost of doing business, where upgrading the application code would cost more than the ‘fixed support cost’, but can we not limit our exposure, in doing so limit our operational costs? Focus on revenue generation?
March 27, 2008 at 10:47 pm · Filed under How IT works, virtualization, vmware
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/top/?p=299
Tall fences make good neighbors. That goes for life in suburbia and, apparently, on the inside of computers.
The profile of virtualization is growing and, with it, the importance of virtualized security. It makes sense that this would be a big issue. It is impossible to get something for nothing: Virtualization squeezes multiple operating systems onto a single physical machine. That saves space and overhead — good things, certainly — but also creates the possibility of a problem impacting a greater proportion of what the company is doing.
This week, VMware patched a critical vulnerability found by Core Security. The problem, according to this SC Security report, appears to be a big one: In a properly working machine, resident virtualized systems (guests) can transfer data to non-virtualized host systems. In scenarios using shared folders, the vulnerability enables hackers to move from being a guest to taking full control of the host machine. The versions of VMware impacted are Workstation 6.0.2 and earlier; VMware Workstation 5.5.4 and earlier; VMware Player 2.0.2 and earlier; VMware Player 1.0.4 and earlier; VMware ACE 2.0.2 and earlier and VMware ACE 1.0.2 and earlier.
An interesting article about virtualization security, an issue that continues to be a topic of focus for many. Think about the big picture, just because you’ve taken that DL360 and made it a virtual machine, doesn’t mean you don’t need to apply the same level of auditing, access control and security/software patching that you would in the physical world. At the same time, defining ownership, establishing that the various components of the virtual environment comply to base lines (excluding those specific exceptions on an application basis), that the ESX server is secured, the Windows/Linux boxes are locked down to the right level with the right security patches is the ‘cost of doing business’. Do check out the article.
March 24, 2008 at 4:35 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article3602122.ece
IF the past eight months in the City have been grim, then the financial sector should hold on tight: the situation is likely to get worse and job losses in London could surpass those seen after the dotcom crash, according to experts.
As the City digests the bailout of Bear Stearns and prepares for an economic downturn, forecasters are tearing up the job-market predictions they made only a few months ago.
Experian Business Strategies said that job losses from a workforce of about 350,000 in London’s financial-services sector may reach as high as 20,000 - nearly 20% more than the 17,000 witnessed after the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000.
An interesting article, I wonder a mixture of things relating to this. Firstly no one likes to loose their job, whether they’re an employee or a contractor, but it is the cost of doing business. I wonder though how much of this is a result of losses, and how much is simply ‘restructuring’ the cost of doing business. What I think we might find is a mixture of things, we might find there is more a tendency to outsource elements of the IT; a drive to more efficiency in the way we do things in terms of people and the kit. A focus on delivery and achieving more with less, grid or virtualization being examples. Related to to this is the way we not only provision the server, but the way we pay for and charge back the IT teams, as we move to a 24/7 operation we need to work smarter, be able to have our people work when the business requires them, whilst providing the standard 8-6 kind of infrastructure support they expect. Does this mean we move to the follow the support model? Where the guys from New York can do oncall for the London support teams? Where Singapore can do some of the weekend work? How we structure this in terms of payment, structure (the way we do things in London is…), as well as the compliance and security issues is going to depend on your business.
Some back office roles might go, some trading positions might go, IT could be a target for efficiency drives. What you will find is a more focus on the revenue generation against cost argument, the statistics conversations - number of help desk calls closed, revenue vs cost comparisons etc. Interesting times are ahead, as with many industries, what raises itself as a downturn can often create even more jobs and opportunities - hardware recycling for free? On-demand IT engineers - Can I rent a grid/vm or Wintel guy? I need him between 7pm to 7am. The role might be the same, who signs the pay check, how you’re paid for might not be.
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