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Next Generation Datacenters: From Legacy to the Cloud

Tue, 17 May 2011 10:45:00 +0000

In the first two articles in this series I provided details as to the problems with legacy datacenter models & started laying out a proven method to attack the legacy problems by implementing a day in the life approach to get the truth of what is happening from the business to the datacenter and/or what decisions and actions have been taken to cause the day in the life to not execute as expected.

Next Generation Datacenters: From Legacy to the Cloud

Sat, 07 May 2011 19:00:00 +0000

In the first article in this series I stated that there is not silver bullet or single strategy that solves all. There is however, proven methods and successful strategies that multiple firms have employed to attack the legacy problems in their existing datacenter infrastructures and iterate their way towards next generation datacenters and IT delivery ala Cloud Computing Models.

From Legacy to the Cloud: Next Generation Datacenters

Mon, 02 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

One of the fundamental barriers to business today is the intersection of the “day in the life” of the business and how that executes across the IT supply chain. The barriers caused by this Business-IT Chasm, include limits placed on customer interaction, ineffective & inconsistent decision-making, time to react to market changes and the cost to do business.

IT Change Management 101

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:00:00 +0000

IT shops continually struggle with keeping resource documentation up to date. Too often IT departments seem resigned to accept mediocre results, as if the world conspires against them. Resource tracking is a prime example of this. Fundamentally, the different organizational aspects refuse to comply with these manual processes to keep a CMDB updated. Furthermore, advancements in virtualization have made the situation worse, as software resources have been severed from physical resources. Traditional resource tracking methods are further confused as the virtual resources change physical location over time.

Cloud Expo Keynoter on Four Critical Steps to Datacenter Transformation

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:00:00 +0000

A global 2000 Enterprise IT group is caught in a groundswell of chaos. The current economic malaise is forcing a challenge from the business to IT to cut operating expenses by 20 percent or greater while preserving capital ferociously. All this while the IT team is faced with another reality, the main corporate datacenter has six to 18 months left in terms of shelf life.

Enterprise Cloud Computing: Exclusive Q&A with a Cloud Revolutionary

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Founder, Chairman and CEO of Adaptivity, Inc, the company that is putting "IT Blueprinting" on the map of Enterprise IT, is adamant: IT must invest in architecture and engineering, and it must do so right away, here and now in 2010, 2011 and beyond. An innovative IT executive, with an excellent track record in strategy, design, and the implementation of business-aligned enterprise technology platforms across large organizations, before founding Adaptivity Bishop served as SVP and Chief Architect of Wachovia's Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group, where his team designed, built, and implemented a leading-edge service-oriented architecture and utility computing infrastructure. So he knows whereof he speaks. And speak he does, including an upcoming keynote on The Enterprise Cloud Revolution that he is due to deliver next month at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, the seventh in the worldwide Cloud Expo series and the biggest yet (November 1-4, 2010 | Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA). He also blogs and appears on discussion panels, in newspaper interviews, and indeed anywhere that enterprise-grade industry thought leadership is to be found.

Private Clouds: Affords Enterprises Trust & Control While Creating Agility

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

As the debate rages on regarding whether to cloud or not to cloud across enterprise IT, it is important for IT executives and strategists to keep in mind some of the following: What other IT delivery fulfillment strategy is available today that when applied in a proper manner can enable IT to build agility and flexibility into the delivery paradigm while affording greater trust and control? The answer – a private cloud. Trust and Control come when you have effective mechanisms, procedures, policies and processes. Legacy silos that have hard wired systems, hard-coded passwords, no service orchestration, along with lack of integrated virtualization and automation does not equate to trust and control.

IT Innovation: From Cost Centers To Sales Enhancers

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:15:00 +0000

IT must innovate - it's the new clarion call in this looming recession. Given the cost pressures required just to keep the lights on, how would IT be able to convince business to let IT innovate beyond a datacenter clean-up focus? The answer lies in the basic principle for any IT investment: Intelligence is king, only now IT needs to be that king in real time. Here are some scenarios to illustrate the power of real-time information correlation that makes IT a sales enabler: A standard insurance company function is to have a service center accept calls about changes to addresses, it is likely that call center is off-shore. The real question is whether anything is done besides registering the address for billing purposes. A new move might mean a new zip code. There are statistics available about the demographics of zip codes, could the people moving be going to a wealthier zip code, a retirement zip code, moving from the city to the suburbs, or empty nesters moving from the suburbs to the city. There is a likely chance that the move is the result of a life event change. It would pay for the insurance company to have an idea about that and reach out to that consumer. It would be an opportunity to upgrade service, cross-sell, etc.

Nine Design Principles of an Enterprise Cloud-oriented Datacenter Blueprint

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0000

An Enterprise Cloud-oriented datacenter is a top-down, demand driven datacenter design that maximizes efficiency and minimizes traditional IT waste of power, cooling, space, and capacity under-utilization while providing enhanced levels of service and control. The following design principles are proven to enable firms to create an enterprise cloud-oriented datacenter.

ERP for IT (ERP4IT) - An Approach to Creating Greater Shareholder Value

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:00:00 +0000

The management of people, capital, relationships, assets, and information is one of the most critical functions of business AND information technology. However, the resource planning and management of IT across the enterprise is typically either an undisciplined practice or an underinvested operation. The ramification of either of these approaches to ERP4IT results in misalignment with the business

The Enterprise IT Economic Model Blueprint for the Cloud

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:55:00 +0000

The Economic Model for Enterprise IT can be thought of as the Business & IT linkage of demand and supply. In particular, it is the interactive dynamics of consumption of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT. An economic model blueprint for Enterprise IT must orientate service delivery (people, process and technology) as a digital supply chain. This supply chain must adhere and be managed against the IT economic model.

SOA + Cloud Computing: Next-Generation Enterprise Computing Blueprint

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Today's IT organizations face a dual challenge of "keeping the lights on" while providing "new services" at unprecedented rates with reduced investment support from the business. At the same time, the very business model of IT is changing – how applications, content, information, and infrastructure are delivered. One of the biggest barriers to business execution and innovation today is managing complexity. This barrier forces the largest IT investment spend to be focused on keeping lights on while containing infrastructure sprawl. IT's inability to focus a majority of its time and investment dollars on innovating and differentiating business through IT leads to missed expectations and disappointment within the business user community.

Enabling Enterprise Cloud Models

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:00:00 +0000

In moving to the cloud, Enterprise IT needs to get their arms around the cause/effect and limitations that existing datacenter infrastructure design has on their agility to adopt and exploit cloud-computing models. Previous datacenter design choices have resulted in not meeting the needs of the business. In particular, these design choices have resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers, and cost models that don't work for the business. Lack of understanding and transparency of what has been done in the past will continue to create misalignment with business needs if not addressed. Moving to an enterprise cloud model without understanding the datacenter infrastructure mistakes is like automating and extending an already bad process.

Enterprise Cloud Unified Footprint – Network Ensemble(s)

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:30:00 +0000

A complex system such as an enterprise network is subjected to many kinds of stresses from a large variety of business applications that have different demand profiles. Dig deeper into any large network and you will see that one solution doesn't solve all problems. Pockets of point solutions are installed to solve problems as they arise; this is rarely efficient in a large network. The big question for IT is whether it is possible to be forward thinking when deploying these solutions through the use of network ensembles which are essential for migrating the enterprise networked footprint to the cloud. What is a network ensemble? A network ensemble is an integrated collection of services and functions that are engineered to work together to optimize specific behavior.

The Workload Is the Secret to the Cloud

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

IT has struggled to solve the business needs that have surfaced due to a mismatch in service expectations between business and the delivery that IT has accomplished. IT is being forced to restructure itself by offering IT as a service, which changes the mind-set of the datacenter as an infinite resource to the datacenter as a utility, with service levels tied to costs that the business can relate back to growth. The business cannot do that now, and the reasons are worth explaining. There are a variety of applications that support numerous business lines across an enterprise. These applications exhibit a wide range of operational characteristics as they service the diverse business demands. That diversity is the key to business success, but it has consequences.

IT Change Management: The Foundation to the Cloud

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:23:00 +0000

IT shops continually struggle with keeping resource documentation up to date. Too often IT departments seem resigned to accepting mediocre results, as if the world conspires against them. Resource tracking is a prime example of this. Fundamentally, the different organizational aspects refuse to comply with these manual processes to keep a CMDB updated. This creates the number one barrier to moving to some form of a cloud-like delivery model. Furthermore, advancements in virtualization have made the situation worse, as software resources have been severed from physical resources. Traditional resource tracking methods are further confused as the virtual resources change their physical location over time.

Realizing Cloud for the Enterprise

Sun, 16 May 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Most organizations today continue to view technology as merely a back-office cost center, a viewpoint that diminishes the breadth of Enterprise IT's impact on a firm's competitive profile. To contribute to strategic growth, IT's role has to be understood as far more than a repository of software and hardware applications. Instead, it should be seen from a meta-IT perspective, a perception that examines and understands the management of IT as a firm-wide service and infrastructure fabric in the cloud that collaborates with business units to respond rapidly, innovatively, and cost-effectively to changing market conditions. Traditional IT strategy and governance models fail because they do not take into account the changing needs of the markets in which businesses operate and the new cloud-enabling technologies that are now available to expedite and facilitate optimized IT management. The strategy to fill this void is the concept of a meta-IT model in which IT is positioned as complementary to other strategies for attaining greater market agility.

Enterprise Cloud Design and Understanding Latency

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Design of enterprise clouds incorporate multiple dimensions (security, data,service brokering, infrastructure management, etc..) and one of the most critical to understand is the impact of latency. With Network vendors starting to provide 10GigE connections, switches and fabric, and given the exponentially increasing demand for bandwidth, enterprises will buy this equipment. Design considerations for eterprise clouds must be aware and accomodate for applications that can gobble up ubiquitous and on-demand bandwidth of cloud delivery model. It is becoming clear that those responsible for the applications in datacenters AND responsible for building Cloud like delivery models should also be concerned about the proximity of collaborating applications and the number of hops critical transactions take.

Nine Steps To an Enterprise Cloud Service Utility

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Virtualization is the topic du jour in IT today. The technology is cool, the attributes are slick and now the stock market even is tracking it. The adoption problem that is facing virtualization strategies stems from a bottom up IT driven approach versus a top down business aligned approach. Furthermore, the technology is limitingin value unless it is implemented as a “virtual enterprise cloud service oriented platform architecture” with a dynamic operational model. The playbook for exploiting virtualizaiton AND other key enabling technology components is outlined in nine steps below. Fundamentally, an enterprise cloud vs a public cloud is specifically business aligned to the enteprise. The program creates a virtual oriented cloud utility platform that incorporates the needs of the business, the control over execution and the leverage of everything virtual.

The Service Orientation of IT

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:45:00 +0000

We are entering a new phase of IT where organizations must orient delivery of service across the entire IT supply chain to behave and operate in a real-time manner. Those organizations that don’t embark on this transformational journey will not deliver the desired business growth and maximized shareholder value that is the fiduciary responsibilities of IT executives in support of their businesses.

Enterprise Cloud Computing as the Digital Nervous System of the Enterprise

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Businesses today face a tsunami of challenges unlike it has ever faced in history: globalization, geo-political, rise of the Internet consumer, customer mind-share dynamics, proliferation of information and content to manage and maintain (with regulatory & security concerns). This requires new ways to do business: 1) provide an enriched and consistent quality customer experience; 2) conduct business over any form of electronic channel; 3) rapid adoption of new business models; 4) transact business in the most efficient & effective means possible; 5) incorporate "turn on dime" transaction workflow, and rapidly make informed decisions.

New CIO Playbook: Positioning IT as Strategic to the Business

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:00:00 +0000

According to a Smart Enterprise Magazine CIO report, three-quarters of today's CIOs help their companies develop new products or services. Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." This move away from "keeping the lights on" to a focus on business strategy and external customer interaction is completely changing the day to day activities of today's CIO. The result of IT's executive leadership becoming a "part of" vs. a "supporter of" the business is forcing a shift of culture and mindset across the IT organization. If CIOs do not approach this change with a sound plan, inertia may set in due to passive/aggressive behavior and create operational risk.

The American Dream Is Alive with Cloud Computing

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:45:00 +0000

The principles and freedoms of the American dream are finding themselves resurrected again with cloud computing. The following blog will outline background, details and living proof that cloud computing is one of the catalysts of the future that will bring the American dream back! As an immigrant and soon to be citizen of the United States of America, I have experienced first hand and continue to experience the greatness of this country and rewards of the American dream.

Enterprise Cloud Computing Utilities

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Today’s CIO organizations face a complex array of challenges in managing the Business Platform (the group of applications and services that implement the Business Value Chain (BVC)). The business expects technology innovation as a business differentiator, demands application portfolio stability, requires change requests to be handled promptly, experiences growth rates that are often unpredictable and exponential, and exerts continuous pressure to reduce product time to market. Complicating this, these challenges are being made to IT with reduced investment support from the business. At the same time, the very business model of IT is changing—how applications, content, information, and infrastructure are delivered.

Eleven Key Components of the Enterprise Cloud

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Define the business and IT linkage of demand and supply. Orient the analysis and model creations around the interactive dynamics of consumption of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT. This needs to be correlated with the value-chain function and the corresponding products or services, differentiated by business type (liquidity, risk transference, advice), business importance (margin, labor, flow) and cost to transact.

Secure Enterprise Cloud Computing at Cloud Expo

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:15:00 +0000

There is so much waste in the data centers of Fortune 1000 companies today that a CIO – as an officer of the company – could be considered in breach of their fiduciary duty to stockholders given the dollars in question. Of course that requires costs transparency, so sadly most are safe for now. It seems that every new technology innovation brings the promise of greater efficiencies and cost savings but in reality tends to leave a mess of ‘legacy’ infrastructure on the floor that results in a net higher TCO than the CIO had in the first place. So what does this have to do with Cloud Computing? While there is no shortage of companies trying to ply their wares as the ideal enabler for Cloud, I am surprised by the lack of attention from vendors that have the most to gain – the Cloud providers themselves. If I put on my CIO shoes here are the things I care about:

Four Steps and 90 Days to Transform a Datacenter to the Cloud

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:15:00 +0000

All this while the IT team is faced with another reality, the main corporate datacenter has 6-18 months left in terms of shelf life. The datacenter's power distribution and patch panel design was not built to handle the massive density and cooling power requirements. The sprawl of unstructured data, app servers, web servers and now virtual machines is proliferating at a pace that will force a space crunch in a time frame that is counter to the challenge from the business in terms of capital preservation and opex reduction.

Enterprise Cloud Computing Requires Service-Level Discipline

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0000

The Enterprise Cloud Requires a real time infrastructure and a management discipline that understands and can enforce service level discipline. Organizations have become increasingly dependent on technical infrastructure to enable customer interactions. As such, the business has a vested interest in making sure its technology partners understand what constitutes good customer experience so that it’s prepared for projected volumes and rapidly knows how to resolve any impediments.

How the Enterprise Cloud Computing Affects the Datacenter

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:00:00 +0000

There are a variety of applications that support numerous business lines across an enterprise. These applications exhibit a wide range of operational characteristics as they service the diverse business demands. That diversity is the key to business success, but it has consequences. Ask an enterprise application architect about how IT should run a data center and you will find that the range of behaviours exhibited across the portfolio of applications cannot be run on one set of standard platform configurations. Most critical applications have extreme operational requirements that require specialised adjustments to operating environments.

The Risk-Free Cloud

Tony Bishop — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:05:10 +0000

So what does this have to do with Cloud Computing? While there is no shortage of companies trying to ply their wares as the ideal enabler for Cloud, I am surprised by the lack of attention from vendors that have the most to gain – the Cloud providers themselves. If I put on my CIO shoes here are the things I care about:

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Fit for Purpose Datacenters to Enable Clouds

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:45:00 +0000

The trigger for this post is a conversation I've had far too often with an IT executive who has an ambitious plan to leverage hypervisor virtualization to create a new data center infrastructure upon which his entire business would run. The goals are laudable; dramatic cost reductions, increased availability, decreased time to market (as measured by how long it takes to provision a VM)...all things any sensible business or IT executive wants, right? But when I asked about their plans for business applications that didn't fit his deployment options (literally small, medium, and large) I got an answer that made me cringe: "they'll have to".

Clouds for the Enterprise Security & Performance

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:00:00 +0000

The intent of the blogs is to provide the thought leadership for readers seeking to create a sound strategy for exploiting cloud computing for the enterprise. The other lesson we learned is the transfer and access of highly confidential data in a shared environment/multitenant cloud model requires advanced encryption in a performance-oriented capability. Unisys is a firm we collaborate with that provides software technology and integration expertise that scrambles data packets being transferred or in motion and scrambles associated data in a multitenant stored environment with advanced encryption and compression to ensure both performance and security.

Fit-for-Purpose Data Center Infrastructure in the Clouds

Tony Bishop — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:22:14 +0000

The trigger for this post is a conversation I’ve had far too often with an IT executive who has an ambitious plan to leverage hypervisor virtualization to create a new data center infrastructure upon which his entire business would run. The goals are laudable; dramatic cost reductions, increased availability, decreased time to market (as measured by how long it takes to provision a VM)…all things any sensible business or IT executive wants, right? But when I asked about their plans for business applications that didn’t fit his deployment options (literally small, medium, and large) I got an answer that made me cringe: “they’ll have to”.

When did The Business start existing for the sake of IT instead of the other way around? Did I miss a memo?

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Fit-for-Purpose Data Center Infrastructure in the Clouds

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:22:00 +0000

Enterprise-Class Clouds

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:00:00 +0000

The intent of these blogs is to provide the thought leadership for readers seeking to create a sound strategy for exploiting cloud computing for the enterprise.

Foundational principles of enterprise-class clouds

Stop Designing Data Centers from the Bottom Up

Tony Bishop — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:58:06 +0000

Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of swinging a hammer for a living or to pay for a semester of school knows this fundamental truth: build a solid foundation or whatever you place on top of it stands a pretty good chance of toppling over at some point in the future. This truth is perpetuated everywhere, in the Bible, in the story of the Three Little Pigs...it’s as old as time.

But a data center isn’t about a building. Ok, so the structure itself is, but at its core it serves a very different role than that of a habitat for survival. I’ve watched data centers evolve over the past 20 years in this business and the Truth that I’ve learned is that no matter how well you build your foundation the only things that stay the same are the outside walls. The best laid plans are sabotaged by changes in the business (M&A, organic growth or lack thereof) and changes in technology - the ever-shrinking components that consume more power and generate more heat in a fraction of the floor space that was originally allocated. Anyone had the pleasure to walk through a telco central office that’s more than 30 years old? Or been in a corporate data center that has enough open area to play hockey but is “out of capacity”?

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Stop Designing Data Centers from the Bottom Up

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:58:06 +0000

Enterprise Clouds will fail without Dynamic Monitoring

Tony Bishop — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:34:32 +0000

Congratulations! You’ve successfully virtualized your network/server/storage environments and saved xx% (insert percentage). But who besides your CFO really cares? All you’ve done is lower the cost of an increasingly commoditized service, and anyone who’s spent a day working for a vendor knows that’s a very uncomfortable place to be. Unless you’ve also dramatically improved the service delivered to your end users…providing service how they want it, when they want it, and with the ability to transparently adapt to fluctuating demand…the only thing you’ve accomplished is to make it easier for an outsourcing provider to come in and take over your job.

I was reading Art Wittmann’s Practical Analysis the other day and he made several great points – successful vendors focus on user perception of service as much as implementing whiz-bang technologies to make their delivery more efficient. He also describes how tried and true Service Assurance disciplines can work wonders to improve that perception.

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Enterprise Clouds will fail without Dynamic Monitoring

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:34:32 +0000

Four critical steps to datacenter transformation

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:00:00 +0000

IT Change Management 101: You can't change what you don't know

Mon, 04 May 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Jump Start your Diagnostic Process

Tony Bishop — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:48:52 +0000

Have you ever been pulled into a troubleshooting call, where all the support teams report their monitoring systems are reporting a ‘green’ status, but the users are reporting horrendous performance? Unfortunately, this happens more frequently than most of us would care to admit. When I get pulled into one of these situations, I avoid all the recriminations of the “could of” and “should of” done’s, which do not amount to much as the customer is in the background pulling their hair out in frustration.

When my phone rings the debugging process is usually stalled, and all the basic and traditional debugging approaches have failed the team already. Essentially everyone’s looking at each other shrugging and not knowing what to do next.

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Jump Start your Diagnostic Process

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:48:52 +0000

For IT going green is more than just a catch phrase.

Tony Bishop — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:57:20 +0000

What does it really mean to be green in IT? Is it just decreasing a datacenter’s power consumption by making the cooling process more efficient and thus consuming less energy? Is it addressing the footprint of the data center and examining the infrastructure to ensure that the design is as efficient as possible? Is it taking a hard look at what runs across the data center in terms of applications and services to find redundancies? The answer is that all of these options must be considered in order to make a sustainable approach to efficiency in the data center. The difficulty in taking this approach stems from the way IT typically serves the business. Datacenter staff focuses on ensuring that the hardware resources they manage can be reliably maintained. Application developers focus on making their applications solve the business requirements. IT managers want to ensure that they are in total control of the resources they need to succeed, so shared resources are viewed with skepticism. These three efforts are often at cross purposes. Focusing on how the hardware is easily maintained is a supply side view of the problem, which often causes any particular application's hardware to be sprawled across the datacenter inducing unnecessary delays. Focusing on the needs of one application will usually cause significant over-provisioning to handle period peak loads causing every system to have excess capacity that cannot be reused. Hands on scope of control for all aspects of system delivery will guarantee that reuse is discouraged, and that common services are de-emphasized. So while everyone is doing what they think is best for the business, datacenter utilization grows. In the current economic downturn where growth has been stalled or reversed, emphasizes the lack of correlation between business growth and IT expense. This situation wastes energy and money. Datacenter growth is not going to correct itself because it is likely that one of the downturn's aftermaths is greater regulation, more compliance and more sophisticated risk modeling, all of which will increase the need for datacenter resources, even as business growth is stalled. Moving to a greener datacenter is not just PR savvy; it is a key survival trait and will become a competitive advantage because IT growth and business growth should have a reasonable correlation. Becoming green involves technical changes, but those changes, radical as they can be, pale in comparison to the cultural and organizational changes required to enable an IT organization to become green. IT must become more business aligned, and this alignment must translate to changes in the datacenter. This alignment must start with an understanding of how each business line uses the totality of the technical solution to satisfy the day to day services that the business must perform. In large organizations with thousands of applications, this will seem like a daunting task, but so is building another datacenter. It is important to remember that in most large organizations, 30% of the applications consume 70% of the infrastructure during peak. Making a 25% efficiency improvement in those applications could yield a 15% overall datacenter improvement across an enterprise. Technology is not enough, process is not enough, but both are necessary, but they are only the beginning. IT becoming green means a paradigm shift in terms of how application work is viewed. More on this in the weeks to come.

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For IT going green is more than just a catch phrase.

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:57:20 +0000

Enterprise clouds: The secret is the workload

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:06:39 +0000

IT Can be the Innovation Driver

Tony Bishop — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:38:58 +0000

In a recent blog about IT and innovation, the point was made that there are numerous untapped opportunities for IT to become an enabler of the business as opposed to just a cost center to be tolerated. The examples in the blog emphasized that real time intelligence is king: For instance turn a mundane activity at an insurance company such as client's address change into new selling opportunities by putting the information in context and pushing correlated information to other applications that could drive new sales opportunities. IT becomes an enabler, not just a cost center.

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IT Can be the Innovation Driver

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:38:58 +0000

IT is Recession Relevant

Tony Bishop — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:29:53 +0000

A recent blog mentioned the importance of the business to consider strategic investments during this recession. IT should be a significant participant in this effort. This is an opportunity to perform strategic house cleaning, while helping the business manage costs, while establishing the premise that IT is the strategic partner to prepare for the post recession surge. IT is recession relevant, the question is how and what to do to make that relevance clear.

* In a time of limited large scale initiatives, IT should consider rationalization first and foremost. Rationalization should go beyond the normal point solution to some server consolidation or virtual machine farms. In times that we face there is a great urge to slash and burn without a strategy, much like there never seems to be a time to have a strategy when business is booming. It is time to stop the madness. IT should take the opportunity to align with the business by driving programs to discover application redundancy across business lines: Some natural examples

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IT is Recession Relevant

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:29:53 +0000

Business execution and recession

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:16:29 +0000

IT innovation: Cost centers to sales enhancers

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:14:50 +0000

Wall Street as the first business infrastructure as a service

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:00:00 +0000

Enterprise IT as a Marketplace- Infrastructure as a Service

Tony Bishop — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:34:43 +0000

Now that the gold rush of mortgage backed securities trading has led to a severe crash, what do surviving investment banks do with all that hardware (i.e.10 million dollars plus for each institution or more)? Why not become a service marketplace, reduce the risk that comes from directly trading in such securities, and get a cut of the proceeds by being the facilitator of flow? Banks should become flexible and offer their technical expertise as a service.

So why should banks become an infrastructure service provider for hedge funds?:

1-No use in sight-Banks may not be able to generate the kinds of business that would justify running that large store of hardware that used to run the derivative trading system infrastructure.

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Enterprise IT as a Marketplace- Infrastructure as a Service

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:34:43 +0000

SOA realized = Enterprise computing + cloud computing

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:55:40 +0000

Conquering Latency—An Incredible FEET

Tony Bishop — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:10:51 +0000

Network vendors are starting to provide 10GigE connections, switches and fabric, and given the exponentially increasing demand for bandwidth, enterprises will buy this equipment. Applications that can gobble up the bandwidth will soon follow-there is simply never enough bandwidth. It is becoming clear that those responsible for the applications in datacenters should also be concerned about the proximity of collaborating applications and the number of hops critical transactions take. The importance of this can be better visualized in FEET.

10Gig E means that the communication medium will transmit 10 billion bits per second, but what does a billionth of a second mean to a message? It means about 11 3/4 inches, almost a foot. A message response time of 40 milliseconds between two virtual machines, which would be considered important to achieve, translates to about 39 million feet, equaling about 7,451 miles, or about one third around the world. While this seems like plenty of speed to play with, it is important to remember how much wiring goes into a single computer (or network switch) and the time involved in message translation and protocol switching. If an enterprise has two datacenters for high availability in a city, a typical distance between them might be 5-10 miles. If highly collaborative systems have been communicating between sites to service critical transactions due to some configuration oversights, it becomes quickly apparent that feet begin to matter. To further the complexities, disaster recovery strategies often require a 100-250 mile distance between the two sites; if consolidation strategies force the DR site to become active to save costs, careful consideration needs to be given to how systems will interact over such distances.

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Conquering Latency—An Incredible FEET

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:10:51 +0000

What would a 5 billion share trading day look like?

Tony Bishop — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:19:01 +0000

The current volatility of the financial markets is an example of why understanding demand is so important. The inter-connections across all aspects of our global village, Insurance, Capital Markets, commodity supplies such as energy, forces questions about the characteristics of demand to be answered. Example: How would a financial services company answer "What does a 5 billion share day look like?" How would it affect all of your infrastructure throughout the day.

For an Financial Services company, it is not just about the sheer volume, it is about increased errors rates in the incoming data, increased alerts, increases in overnight processing which already have tight operational windows. It is about increased network latency as temporary servers are brought on line, anywhere there is room to handle the demand.

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What would a 5 billion share trading day look like?

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:19:01 +0000

Top 4 datacenter design mistakes

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:25:35 +0000

Tailoring the right set of network solutions- the Network Ensemble

Tony Bishop — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 06:37:10 +0000

What is a network ensemble? A network ensemble is an integrated collection of services and functions that are engineered to work together to optimize specific behavior.

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Business Driven Virtual Data Center Strategy

Tony Bishop — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:22:40 +0000

Virtualization has many advocates and is the latest IT bandwagon rallying cry. The approaches to virtualization have taken two distinct paths. The supply side path is usually undertaken by IT operations in an attempt to mask hardware differences and minimize complexity; this approach does not go far enough. The other path involves a business demand driven approach. The demand driven approach needs to be taken to ensure that virtualization is executed in a strategic manner.

A recent article titled How to create a business-boosting virtualization plan http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc5/081808-ndc-virtualization-strategic-planning.html?page=1 highlights the differences in the two approaches giving examples of each approach and highlighting the limitations of supply side virtualization. The blog titled: The $100 million dollar blade illustrates the dangers of unbridled server growth http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28963.

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Drowning in Data, Thirsting for Knowledge.

Tony Bishop — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:06:07 +0000

This metaphor about executives seeing all the data but not being able to use it is a very old battle cry in IT. Data comes in faster than ever, has greater density every year and the crisis only deepens. As stated in a previous blog,the network is the nervous system of the enterprise, and as such it must help the stimuli flow. Everyone uses the network to pass information, so what’s the problem? Congestion, priority conflict, bad timing such as sending gigabyte files over the network during regular business hours, and the endless copying of the same data set, so that “I can be in control of my own destiny”.

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The $100 million dollar blade- the ultimate change

Tony Bishop — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:39:46 +0000

I have gotten some responses to the first two blogs, and the most compelling so far has been “What if your conscious (the top manager) doesn’t understand, is lazy, thinks it is too costly or too much work, etc? This is a good article but, I think, it takes for granted that someone wants really manage the change and sees the benefits”. This person is absolutely correct. What is a beleaguered visionary, with no high level decision-making powers to do?

Senior IT executives are plagued by requests and constant firefighting, and are often forced to choose between immediate accommodation of direct business related requests and a longer term investment in infrastructure. As I said in my previous post http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28060 if you think of the network as a human body, then sometimes it will suffer an illness, especially if it abused. Let's call this one insanity (doing the same thing each time and expecting different results). What is - “The $100 million dollar blade”? How could a $2,500 dollar blade cost that much? Easy, when the only place to put it is in a new datacenter, because there is no room, or power, or too much heat exists in the current one.

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Network Evolution- How to Harness Change

Tony Bishop — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:33:03 +0000

If the network is like the human body (and it is), the question now becomes how to embrace the inevitable forces of change and harness the possibility and power of co-evolution. There are critical questions to ask related to the mechanics of change that drive co-evolution:

What is the environment doing?
What are the capabilities to respond?
How can the effects of demand and the effects of change be measured?
How can demand and supply be met in an optimal manner with minimal waste?

From a process point-of-view, harnessing co-evolution requires a conscious effort to understand the change and make it an ally, because ultimately change is driven by the business environment. Processes such as the following become necessary:

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The network is like a human body

Tony Bishop — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:02:12 +0000

As the business evolves, so must the network which supports all of the applications used to run the business. It is co-evolution: The change in a business' needs drive the demand and any increased network capability enhances the responsiveness of the business, often driving further change. The burning question for most businesses is whether this cyclic behavior has become a consciously observed pattern, or is just subject to the "whims of forces beyond any control." To understand how we can harness and embrace this change, it would help to see the results of co-evolution in other networks. If we explore the use of networks in the human body, what can we derive as lessons learned?

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The Consumerization of the Enterprise

Mon, 05 May 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Enterprise users are coming to expect the same options they get as consumers, heralding the Platform as a Service (PaaS) movement