Blade Watch

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.

VMware

New Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture Enhances Security When Sharing Data Center Resources Across Virtualized and Enterprise Cloud Environments

SILICON VALLEY, Calif.—Jan. 26, 2010—As enterprises move toward a data center that is 100 percent virtualized, Cisco, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) today announced that they are expanding their long-standing collaboration to deliver new design architectures that help customers evolve virtualized data centers to be more efficient, dynamic and secure. The three companies introduced an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that provides enhanced security in cloud environments by isolating the information technology (IT) resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure. As part of their collaboration, Cisco, NetApp and VMware will also offer a cooperative support model for these pretested and validated design architectures to help customers quickly build a unified, virtualized infrastructure.

“It’s clear that a tremendous opportunity exists for Cisco, NetApp and VMware to enable real change in the data center,” said Tom Georgens, president and CEO of NetApp. “Our visions are aligned around the concept of a dynamic data center that will be the foundation of cloud computing and that will enable enterprises, integrators and service providers to deliver IT as a service [ITaaS]. In this scenario, IT becomes a dynamic asset that is more efficient and can better adapt to changing business needs. This new era of IT has stringent infrastructure requirements that our companies are ready to meet today—together.”

“Virtualization of the network, server and storage infrastructure is radically reshaping today’s data center,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO, VMware. “The dynamic data center built on VMware® vSphere™, along with Cisco and NetApp® technologies, will provide the foundation for both private and public clouds and the ability to move data and applications between these clouds. A shared virtual infrastructure requires that resources for different tenants are isolated while delivering on promised service levels. We have integrated our technology with Cisco and NetApp not only to accelerate our customers’ journey through their data center transition, but also to deliver an outstanding customer experience.”

I’m genuinely excited about this announcement, and I am hopeful that we will see some interesting results going forward, I wonder if this might bring us closer to data center virtualization, the concept of taking the IT infrastructure to the next generation through collaboration from these three platforms. The more we can evolve the data center both in support, in architecture and in delivery, the more we can fully utilize the capacity we have, to deliver the services we need, on budget, on time and in a way that meets our corporate social responsibility and business sponsor requirements.

Next Tuesday Microsoft are releasing their monthly security patches so do make sure you check them out at www.microsoft.com/technet/security.

The patch appears to be critical (for Windows 2000) and is in relation to remote code execution.

Whether they are deemed as in scope in your organization will depend on your standards and procedures. Although as we have said on many a post, remember that the first thing a vendor will ask when logging a call is have you applied all the hot fixes and security patches?

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.

Netex

NetEx will support Microsoft management products in Hyper-V in the next release of HyperIP due in Q1 2010. The addition of Microsoft support leverages the company’s expertise and market leadership in the VMware virtualization market where HyperIP optimizes long-distance data movement for more than a dozen VM management applications. NetEx was the first company to deliver a software only WAN acceleration solution to enable the live migration of VMware data across WAN distances, using HyperIP to accelerate the movement of VMotion and Storage VMotion images to remote sites. According to test results from DeepStorage Labs, HyperIP can accelerate VMotion migration by 1000 percent compared to native VMware speeds. HyperIP also supports vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vCenter Converter to optimize the migration of physical-to-virtual images.

Check out this announcement from NetEx, anything they can do to further the scalability and high availability of Hyper-V has to be a good thing for the end user community and virtualization as a platform. I’m off to read up more about the announcement and what this means in the Hyper-V space.

Chris called me up on Christmas eve asking for help, one of their backup Citrix license servers had an issue, the conversation is below and as ever I have removed references to Chris and his company in order to allow him to remain below the radar in sunny Canary Wharf (East London).

“Hi, I have an emotional DL380 G3 which keeps failing the disks, which then rebuilds, it’s also rebooted a few times, any ideas? I did not want to mess with drivers and firmware on Christmas Eve.” asks Chris

“Yes your array controller appears to be getting ready for the holidays, log a call and get it swapped.

Check though, last time I had that the guy swapped both the array controller and the system board as he didn’t like the look of either.

Could you not virtualize it? What does it do?” I ask.

“Its the backup Citrix license server for one of our subsidiary groups, they don’t replace the hardware ever, I think we gave them one of our old DC’s just to get them of a Compaq 1850. I’ll have chat with them and see what they think, it might be easier besides I can get them off that old box.” he replies

Chris did indeed replace the broken DL380 G3 server with a virtual machine, (he told me a few hours later by text).

It is not that the server was beyond economic repair, or that it was out of support, it was deemed with his manager the quickest way forward, after a brief chat with the business owner for the server they were given a choice, wait up to four hours for parts, or two hours for a virtual machine. Virtualizing the broken DL380 G3 server enabled IT to return service, and recycle a server which IT had deemed out of economic support and a candidate for virtualization or decommission and recycling.

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.

NT4 web site

I was having a chat with a manager that I had met at one of the conferences I had attended in the last few months, anyway he was telling me his challenges during one of the debates about virtualization and next generation technologies, the conversation is below, I have removed comments identifying his organization, his statements are indented.

“That’s great what he’s saying but that’s not my problem, my problem is the 37 Windows NT4 servers running on obsolete hardware, what do I do with these?”

Virtualize them, it’s easy, there is no reason that you can’t take your old Compaq/Dell or IBMs and virtualize them, you can even as part of this increase the disk space and the memory, making them a bit more supportable. I replied.

But NT4 is out of support, that does not solve the problem I have supporting NT4 servers.

No it does not, but it solves the main one, and let us not forget that:
1.) We as end users are always going to be out of support, the vendors have their recommendations and best practice, but I live in the real world, where my application has been coded for NT4 cannot be easily ported to Windows 2000/2003, in which case, I would rather have an easy to support virtual NT4 server than worrying about how the server was built (all raid5 etc), whether the server will come back if I reboot it or that it only has a 2GB c drive which is constantly full and generating alerts/workload.
2.) Hardware is relatively more expensive to support operationally and in terms of power, in which case I would rather have something that is out of support on a more manageable hardware platform.

My best example, the small business I met last week, they had a Compaq Proliant 1850 with three disk shelves attached to the back of it, proudly giving them 400GB of storage which had been carved up into various drives for different business units. Their concern? That the desktops and their small log onscripts etc all pointed to a certain name and no one wanted to change that, but the server would not run Windows 2008, so they were stuck.

That Proliant 1850 could easily be replaced with a 1u box running VMware or the equivalent with a couple of large drives, saving power and the support costs in terms of the older hardware. I said.

But you are still running NT4. – what do you do after you have virtualized? Aren’t you taking your existing problems into your new clean virtual environment?

Well you could say that, but then I have always preferred to be making some progress rather than none. I need to reduce my hardware support costs mainly from a marginal cost base standpoint, I do not want to be spending company money and effort supporting 4GB/9GB disks in old servers which are using more units of power per performance than I need to. 

We cannot change the universe overnight, let us make small steps to make life a little bit easier, with the older hardware gone and out of the debate, I can then focus on understanding what the barriers to moving off NT4 might be, what we can do to resolve this going forward.

Running legacy platforms is only a problem, an issue if you make it so, if your systems are configured, if you have the right systems in place, being in a position to support (granted possibly on a best endeavours basis) might not be that difficult or represent that much more risk over a newer platform. That the business unit, the sponsor understands the associated risks of their platform, might mitigate those risks, the is it £2 million we want to pay for a recode of an application or service which is going next year, or £100,000 we would rather spend on virtualization to extend its life and reduce support costs until we replace or decommission it.

Added to this, there is no reason that as we virtualize each of your servers that we cannot clean them, right size them as we go, we can make the C drive that little bit bigger, 4gb instead of 2GB, give that d drive for the logs a bit more space than the 4GB or so, and we can give it a bit more RAM 1GB instead of the 256 or 512 it has now, all these things can improve performance and allow us to make mini improvements at marginal cost.

http://www.bladewatch.com/resources/

The pages links to specific content that has been written with a view to making the information more accessible.

The information is always a work in progress, please double check with your service provider or the vendor for the latest information on drivers and firmware.

I have updated the blog to include a new resources page, which makes the content that has been published more accessible, as part of this we now have pages for several vendors with their firmware, as well as specific pages about the ILO, and about the bladewatch servers, do check it out.

• Cisco
• Dell
• HP (includes Compaq)
• IBM
• Sun/Oracle

As part of that, at the top of the blog, I have also added an ilo tab, again this is simply a page which brings many of the posts that I have written together on one page for easy review.

HP ilo information – RIB / RILOE / ILO / ILO2

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.