Blade Watch

Finextra

Don Callahan, Citi’s chief administrative administrative officer, told Computerworld UK that the bank was moving forcefully to hit targets of slashing $3 billion from operational and technology costs by 2011.

The pledge to butcher IT budgets was undertaken by Citi CEO Vikram Pandit in April 2008, as the bank faced up to massive losses from subprime debts. One of Pandit’s first moves was to centralise IT decisions in New York under Callahan.

Callahan told Computerworld that Citi was “well ahead of schedule” with the O&T savings. “We intend to be one of the most efficient operators in our industry, and we have made and continue to make significant progress against that goal.”

An article talking about how this bank is seeking to reduce its IT spend through centralization and improving efficiency, it’s interesting once you look at your costs to see where savings can be made, not just on the technology, but on the operations, the on call. We need to be looking at the way we do business so to speak to identify where our operational costs are, but from several levels for it to be effective, from the engineer to the architect through to the CIO, as all have valid opinions. It was the CIO that told me the story that he was looking through the order approvals and noted that the order included the standard CDROM drive £29 plus the optional DVD, when he asked he got told, it’s always been ike that, the server comes with a CDROM drive but the build is on DVD, so we have to order a DVD drive, fine, he asked, anyone ask if we can not have the CD? Oh I thought purchasing would have said was the reply, purchasing though only ever ordered what they got asked to quote for, the standard server quote included a CDROM. I always at this point quote that rhyme I was taught as a child:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

It can be so easily translated into your IT, in so many ways and so many levels. One example I was using the other day with an IT manager for a medium enterprise complaining about his on call costs and ’stability’ of his server estate. I asked him, what proactive steps on your infrastructure do you take? What do you mean he replied, we respond to the alerts we get in MOM?

No proactive steps:

• Clearing down disk space – operating system and data drives, do we need the web logs from 2007 – can they be archived off or compressed, clearing the temp drive, the old hot fixes etc
• Security patching – this by the very nature of the activity forces a reboot, which clears down all the memory and ensures that the server is up to supported revisions
• Defragmentation of the file systems – this can make a big difference to system performance and end user experience – check though if you’re using thin provisioning
• Upgrading the system and component firmware – again forces a reboot and ensures that your system is operating as recommended by the vendor
• System configuration and fault analysis, are we logging failures and looking for patterns, adapting monitoring tools to suit on a per box basis?

Responding to alerts is fine, but you get what you put in, even a legacy server estate running NT4, Windows 2000, can be made to run very efficiently and with a degree of stability, what you need to do is focus on the core, the server platform, standardizing and bringing everything up to date, just doing this and combining with a “health check” (disk space, memory, configuration) can make a world of difference to your on call, to your support costs and your end user perception.

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.

Finextra has an interesting article talking about how some consumers were affected when IT systems failed as a result of a year 2000 bug, do check it out. IT and business people can often overlook legacy platforms and applications if they ‘just keep working’ or the infamous, that will be replaced by 2010, one of the reasons (combined with cost) that I remain a fan of virtualizing and upgrading legacy platforms.

So I put together a few bullet points and thoughts about 2010, in terms of what I feel end users will be thinking about, what technologies we might see being in demand and what vendors to keep an eye on. I have no doubt forgotten some vendors/technologies, and for that I apologize.

In the meantime, may I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous and joyful New Year for 2010, wherever you are.

With that, back to the 2010 type content stuff:

Top issues/predictions for 2010

• More companies looking seriously at cloud – particularly for hosting particular components or services – a virtualization or Exchange cloud
• Further interest in the convergence of storage and Ethernet down the one connection – it reduces your support and deployment times
• Debates about carbon reporting, data center efficiency and data center management or design
• Investigations or discussions about follow the sun or follow the moon ways of doing business and IT
• Ongoing data center consolidation and virtualization
• Change in enterprise computing, I wonder if there will be a flatter de-centralized way of doing business combined with more white labelling?
• Business competition, complexity and agility to increase as we bring on new markets and new business units – do we use the same branding, the same infrastructure?
• Integration of IT services to business lines, or business lines to IT in the enterprise?

Top 2010 technologies

• Blade servers
• Virtualization -server, desktop and network
• Converged network and storage adaptors
• SAN storages
• Solid state disks
• Application virtualization
• Converged systems management possibly to the application layer – achieving more with less

Top vendors to monitor for 2010

• Cisco – Unified Computing System and where that leads us
• Dell – their servers continue to get better
• HP – in terms of systems management/business agility
• DataSynapse – what they can do to aid virtualization and grid computing
• Platform – scaling up the possibilities of grid computing
• Iceotope – how they will help wiith data center capacity and systems cooling
• Teradici – can we extend the possibilities of their technology to further desktop virtualization – can I have a pc down a wire from the cheapest geographical location on my network – London pcs from India, from China?
• VMware – wonder how they will continue to protect market share and innovation of the virtual platform
• Citrix and Microsoft in terms of their products in the virtualization space.

Which countries am I watching with interest for developments/demand? Easy – East is where the innovation, the money and the excitement is:

Russia, India and China – components of what economists call the BRIC countries.

http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1861005

SANTA CLARA » 12/10/2009 » Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) announced today that Rankin County, which ranks among the top 10 percent of fastest-growing U.S. counties, has deployed Citrix® XenServer™ to upgrade, consolidate and maintain the county’s server infrastructure. XenServer is an open and powerful server virtualization solution that helps reduce datacenter costs by transforming static and complex datacenter environments into more dynamic, easy to manage IT service delivery centers.

The IT team for Rankin County, Mississippi serves more than 20 departments across disparate locations. Technology support across the county includes the 911 emergency call center, police officers on patrol and county government officials. Running out of space in the county’s server room and faced with aging hardware, Rankin County needed a way to make room for more servers to support the county’s IT needs while maintaining services around the clock. In response, the Rankin County Board of Supervisors funded a virtualization project that uses Citrix XenServer to provide a way to upgrade and update mission-critical server applications without any service outages or downtime.

“A majority of the county’s IT functions – sheriff’s office, emergency responders, 911 – are critical and need to be live and functioning 24-7,” said Billy Rials, Rankin County IT department manager. “I answer to users and to citizens of my county. When services aren’t available due to a computer glitch, that falls on my shoulders. Virtualizing the servers means users never have to quit working so citizens are not put in harm’s way.”

An interesting article illustrating how virtualization technologies have been used to empower this emergency services, it is great to see how end users are using the technology and what perceived advantages or benefits they have realized. That it works is all that matters to them, everything else is noise.

I asked one of the IT Managers to give me some quick tips on how to reduce the carbon footprint of your data center, his replies are below: (Thanks Danny)

• Establish the infrastructure requirements – does this data center, and the underlying applications require N-1 resilience? What tier is the data center and therefore what level of backup and resilience do we need, are we over provisioining?
• Look at the data center temperature in terms of raising it to reduce the cooling costs yet not risk a specific risk to production or a resultant increase in support costs?
• Examine the air flow, the power distribution and the energy efficiency in the data center space
• Use the technologies that are available, lights out, KVM, reduce all the anciliary components that we do not need, whilst managing the on site need at 3am when an engineer needs console access.
• Right size infrastructure, can we ensure that the systems we deploy are not over specified for the actual role, that DL380 necessary for that file server, or could we use a 360? A virtual machine? Could we use SAN storage or NAS rather than an array shelf of physical external disks?
• Consolidate applications, roles and infrastructure – do we need everything that we have, this includes reducing the complexity of the feeds and services – what duplicate roles and feeds do we have in this space – operationally and technically – could we have one service providing the feeds rather than eight different ones owned by several business lines

I spent this morning updating the layout and the content of the site to make it easier to access documentation and information on the site. It is easy to publish everything on one page, but quickly you get a massive list of documents which can be a bit difficult to view the information you are after.

With this in mind, I have played around the with the layout. So if you go to the Dell page on the site, it shows the Dell specific content and the firmware underneath, but as always you can just go to the Dell firmware page if you just want to download our spreadsheet, the same applies for our other vendor specific content below:

Cisco page

Dell page

HP page

IBM page

I have also separated some of the pictures/videos and content for the Bladewatch servers we have, again so that our documentation page only has documentation, hopefully this will make our information more accessible to our readers.

Burton Group

I would like to welcome the Burton Group to our blog (bladewatch.com), it is great that they have decided to support us in delivering our content to you. The Burton Group provide in-depth IT research and advisory services with a focus on strategic business technologies to executives and technologists. They have launched a new series of training videos which are informative, interesting to watch and crucially (as an end user) affordable, so do check them out, they cover topics including virtualization, data center economics and SharePoint.

Download the report here:

I was talking with Finlay MacLeod about his views on the changing nature of IT, how we need to think about the ever increasing pressures on cost reduction combined with sustaining service delivery at commercial grade pricing.  It was very interesting, the following are a few thoughts of the top of my head, though Finlay had some great ideas and commentary on the issue.

We need to be having a discussion around the way we fund and deliver our IT services internally and externally to customers, how much longer can we continue to ‘cut costs’ manage costs towards zero year on year whilst still maintaining production service.  IT needs to be efficient, it needs to deliver technical change and innovation swiftly.

Finlay recently gave a talk in London talking about the challenges in sourcing and paying for IT, this document is the report from that forum and discussion. It’s well worth a read, if you would like to get in touch with Finlay to discuss you can email him here.

A little about Finlay:

Finlay has managed start-up and turnaround situations (£2m – £75m) and excels in solving business issues where his stakeholder management, influencing and cross-functional skills, experience and unswerving focus on delivery can be fully utilised. Working to deliver business aligned project results, in the IT, Telco, Multi Media and Financial sectors for the Enterprise Corporate/Financial/SME markets (B2B, and B2C), he finds challenge and change heavy motivating factors (focused on achievement), with a good sense of humour.

His experience involves setting up, managing and delivering business and cultural change programmes across UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy and USA.

Business News

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Banco Pastor, the seventh largest Spanish banking group with 650 branch offices in Spain and a presence in the US and the main capital cities in Europe and Latin America, has migrated its critical human resources and corporate emailing systems running SAP NetWeaver ® and SAP ERP and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10, Banco Pastor has experienced decreased annual IT costs of 30 percent for the platform supporting its emailing system, improved performance and increased scalability for the platforms running its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications.

By the end of 2008, Banco Pastor looked to update its human resources management system and opted for SAP solutions for its payroll, career and training systems. Banco Pastor desired a new operating platform that would help it to scale with growth, reduce costs and provide flexibility for the infrastructure supporting those applications. The bank’s email system, based on IBM Lotus Notes, also needed an updated operating platform base to provide the reliability, security and efficiency needed to serve its professional workforce, as well as the critical internal applications that rely on the platform. Banco Pastor’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 reflects its confidence in one of the world’s most sophisticated business servers, with the equivalent computing capacity of nearly 1,500 x86 servers with an 85 percent smaller footprint and up to 85 percent lower energy costs.

An interesting article illustrating how consolidation to an IBM System z10 has reduced their operating costs and energy costs, it’s always great to see what people are doing to reduce their costs and improve delivery.