Archive for the ‘CIO Strategy’ Category
Data center building, power, and cooling disciplines are not IT disciplines.
Your expertise on applications, software architecture, network, server and storage design is not expertise on building tier IV data centers with 99.995% uptime.
Likewise, experts on mission critical facilities like hardened data center buildings, data center power redundancy and cooling are rarely experts on mission critical systems and applications.
A best-of-breed CIO strategy would include expertise in both information technology systems design and highly available data center facilities. How is this done?
If your organization likes to “roll your own” enterprise data center, you probably hire design/build experts to help you accomplish your goals of high data center uptime. Although the capital costs associated with in-house data centers can be enormous, internal data centers offer the highest level of control.
If your organization is considering outsourcing the facilities disciplines, wholesale colocation offers a simple way to offload the “landlord” side of the data center without losing control of the systems.
It’s often best to outsource data center facilities when you’re great at IT but not so great at building data centers.
Midwest colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers offer F5 tornado resistant buildings,N+N power and cooling redundancy, and access to many telecom providers. Midwest data centers offer low power costs also give you peace of mind that you’ve done the best job at solving the data center downtime problem using an affordable colocation solution.
Are you trying to be an expert in both facilities and IT? Talk it over with the mission critical facilities experts.
James Hamilton – 42: The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
2011
Yesterday the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites was announced. The Top500 list shows the most powerful commercially available supercomputer systems in the world. This list represents the very outside of what supercomputer performance is possible when cost is no object. The top placement on the list is always owned by a sovereign funded laboratory. These are the systems that only government funded agencies can purchase. But they have great interest for me because, as the cost of computing continues to fall, these performance levels will become commercially available to companies wanting to run high scale models and data intensive computing. In effect, the Top500 predicts the future so I’m always interested in the systems on the list.
What makes this list of the fastest supercomputers in the world released yesterday particularly unusual can be found at position #42. 42 is an anomaly of the first order. In fact, #42 is an anomaly across enough dimensions that its worth digging much deeper.
Virtualization Tax is Now Affordable:
I remember reading through the detailed specifications when the Cray 1 supercomputer was announced and marveling that it didn’t even use virtual memory. It was believed at the time that only real-mode memory access could deliver the performance needed.
More of the Perspectives blog post from James Hamilton
Political debate in the United States today is highly polarized. Many in Congress are so beholden to the dogma of their political party that they are unable to make rational choices that might even give a hint that the “other side” has a point. The result is that Congress seems unable to act in the best interests of the citizens it is supposed to serve, resulting in historically low approval ratings.
IT is not immune from such polarization. There are, for example, many IT decision-makers who simply swear by open source. They believe so much in the open source model, and have had such positive initial experiences with open source tools, that they have taken the dogmatic position that all of their future software acquisitions will be made from within the open source portfolio.
On the other hand, there are decision-makers who have fully and with little reservation married themselves to proprietary platforms. The support and sense of security they get from platform buy-in has become entrenched in their go-to-market strategy, and the very mention of open source may elicit an actual, audible snort.
More of the Computerworld article from Christopher O’Malley
Mark Davidson, Sustainability Officer for JouleX, an innovator in enterprise energy management systems for data centers, distributed office environments and facilities.
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been called “The Holy Grail” of data center energy metrics so often that we actually found it impossible to find out who coined the term. As time, technology and sustainability efforts evolve, the PUE metric is no longer the stopping point for energy efficiency measurement, but it has become just one more piece in the larger picture.
What does PUE do? It measures how much of the energy entering a data center facility is used to power the computing devices within, versus the amount used for cooling and overhead of the facility. That’s it.
More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Mark Davidson
IT and business process outsourcing activity declined in the third quarter of 2011, but if the economy weakens, analysts expect more outsourcing–particularly offshore–in the coming months.
The IT outsourcing market saw its first substantial decline in twelve months during the third quarter of this year. Transaction volumes fell for both the IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) markets, by seven percent and 12 percent respectively, according to the outsourcing consultancy Everest Group’s quarterly report on the global services industry. The average contract value of BPO transactions plummeted by 50 percent, while the average contract value for IT contracts increased by 14 percent, thanks largely to three billion-dollar plus deals signed during the quarter.
More of the CIO.com article from Stephanie Overby
Organization Momentum Accelerates with Publication of Cloud Application Development and Resiliency Paper, Strategic Standards Collaborations, HP and Computer Associates Join Organization
NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2011 – Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members will triple cloud deployment in the next 2 years according to a report published by the organization today. This adoption is 5X faster than Q2’2011 IDC market forecasts [1] (Source: IDC Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2011-2015 Forecast (Doc # 228485, June 2011) for the >$90B expected invested in cloud operations worldwide in the next two years and reflects growing member confidence in delivery of industry standard cloud solutions that align with top customer requirements outlined by the organization earlier this year.
The member forecast was delivered as the organization’s leadership outlined its next major advancements in addressing the top obstacles to cloud adoption including publication of best practices for cloud application development and resiliency as well as collaborations on potential standards with the leading industry organizations for cloud security and management, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The announcements are the latest details to emerge from the organization as it moves towards its goal of accelerating over $50B in cloud investment over the next three years.
More of the CloudTweaks.com blog post
Do your worst-behaved applications define your data center requirements?
In Part 1, I talked about the most important applications in your business, also know as your mission critical applications. I covered reasons that many of these mission critical applications are ill-behaved and require special care and feeding in your enterprise data center. These reasons include high bandwidth requirements on the headquarters or wide area network, expensive overbuilt servers, and additional hours of maintenance overhead per month.
How do these worst-behaved applications affect your data center requirements?
Bandwidth – Many applications generate large amounts of network traffic for even the smallest user activity. These levels of traffic can cause the applications to perform poorly via the Internet or small remote office connections. These apps can influence your decision on the location of the primary data center. It often seems simplest to place the data center close (in the same building) to your highest number of users. Yet an in-house data center may not fully support your data center uptime requirements.
Interoperability – If your most important applications link up to other important applications, you may be forced to put these applications in the same data center. If your manufacturing system is feeding data to your customer management system and your accounting system, reliability becomes more important, because a small amount downtime can affect three important software systems, not just one.
Souped-up, expensive servers – Experience has taught your IT staff to overbuild server and storage hardware to solve some of the bad behaviors of your mission critical applications. These non-standard configurations can drive up costs. Non-standard configurations are also more difficult to operate in cloud computing environments, forcing the data center to remain physical, instead of virtual.
More Maintenance – More problems mean more maintenance work to solve them. This drives up FTE requirements and makes outsourcing more complex and expensive. Maintenance load can influence location and staff requirements for the data center.
Costly uptime – Problem applications are harder to keep running and often require more technology for high uptime levels. Expensive high uptime technologies like clustering greatly drive up the costs of keeping the application alive and well.
Ill-behaved line-of-business applications influence strategic data center decisions:
Primary data center location – Would your data center be better off in-house, in the cloud, in an outsourced data center facility or a hybrid of all three?
Wide area network design – Where is the hub of the network? How many telecom providers should I use? How much bandwidth do I buy? How can I get the best pricing?
Server hardware ownership and maintenance – Do I buy my own servers for maximum control? Do I use virtual servers in the cloud? Do I use a combination of both?
Maintenance – Does in-house staff do maintenance or do I outsource it?
Good CIO strategy includes a clear understanding of the mission critical applications and their data center requirements.
More CIOs are using these tools to mitigate the risks of their worst-behaved applications:
- Thin application delivery via software by VMware and Citrix to solve bandwidth problems
- Affordable colocation to build in 99.995% uptime on the data center power and cooling
- Cloud computing services like virtual private servers for predictable mission critical applications
- Change management discipline to manage application behaviors and reduce maintenance
Don’t let your worst-behaved applications cause you to make bad decisions about your data center.
CSO — Our coverage of the annual Global Information Security Survey conducted by CSO and CIO magazines in partnership with PwC has sparked some interesting discussions about what it takes to be a security leader. Specifically, the discussion is about how organizations can move from being a security laggard to something better. As part of those discussions, we spoke with Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai Technologies. Ellis is responsible for overseeing the security architecture and compliance of the company’s globally distributed network and sets the strategic direction of its security.
CSO: What attributes must an enterprise leader in risk management have?Ellis: This is a hard thing to measure. I think the important thing is that the organization actually understands the risks that apply to them, and that they are making intelligent decisions based on that risk profile. These are the organizations that are actually out front, leading the way, defining new risk models for themselves and selecting technologies and solutions that are appropriate for their business. It’s about paving the way, not following somebody else’s cookie cutter.
Companies seem to be spending a lot on security products, but not as much on strategic efforts. Do you think it’s indicative of their already having effective strategies in place? Or, are they focusing just on the technology?In a down economy, you probably aren’t spending time revamping your strategy. Hopefully, you’re executing. That would be my guess as to what a lot of these organizations are doing. I think what you could be seeing is organizations saying “Look, I’m not going to try and rebuild my business continuity plan this year. It’s not like we actually added a thousand people. I can run with the existing plan. It’s much more important. Let’s go execute on the strategy that we didn’t finish from last year.” I think industry often spends more time thinking about strategy and less time executing. That’s what we’re seeing in the survey results: “Hey, let’s protect our jobs by going and executing on what people can see.” Many times enterprises can see a strategic change in security, and if management can’t see it, it may not have much perceived value.
More of the CIO.com article from George V Hulme
PC World — On Monday, we polled IT and business leaders about how they’re using public and private clouds. The respondents to our pair of suveys who say they are well on the way to a completely virtual data center outnumber those who haven’t started using the cloud at all.
Nearly one-quarter of respondents to each of our two polls–one for IT managers and another for business managers–said they’re on the way to a virtualized data center. Only 17 percent of people who took either poll said they’re not using the cloud at all. The remainder have some sort of cloud initiative in place, either public or private.
Based on these results, small businesses seem to be buying into the notion of the cloud, but taking extra precautions against data loss. A spring survey by In-Stat shows that even when SMBs are buying cloud storage, they are also buying NAS systems for internal use to back up the online storage.
More of the CIO.com article from Logan G Harbaugh
There are few areas of IT that generate as much confusion as change management. Most IT organisations today have a plethora of tools with many different IT domains that are misidentified as change management tools. Getting it right requires a serious commitment to the creation of an enterprise wide change management process. Unfortunately, many IT organisations have immature processes and policies in place, according to Gartner analyst, Kris Brittain.
This is often due to a lack of clear metrics. Brittain said metrics are needed to provide a baseline for a process, determine the effect of process improvements, identify areas where the process may be ineffectual or broken and assess and prioritise improvements that could make the process more effective or efficient. However, it is important to understand how documented and reported metrics will be leveraged from a management perspective.
Brittain said senior management need to communicate and evaluate how change management metrics map critical success factors (CSFs) and key performance indicators (KPIs).
More of the Computerworld article from Sandra Van Dijk
