IT Infrastructure

A Killer Disease? IT’s Unhealthy Obsession With Itself

Stephen Mann — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:47:07 +0000

While sitting at a hotel desk at "silly o'clock" this morning preparing for the Forrester I&O Forum in Las Vegas, I saw a Tweet from Ian Aitchison of LANDesk that was an obvious but little realized truth:

"Is the IT industry unique in its obsession with its own possible future demise? The sky is always falling in. #ITRapture"

IMO the average IT organization does appear to be somewhat Chicken Little-like and my response of "I think it is because IT is obsessed with itself :)" started me off …

While we have not necessarily fallen in love with our own reflection, it is difficult to argue that we are not overly obsessed with what WE are doing rather than what the business is doing - as per yesterday's blog "Why Is IT Operations Like Pizza Delivery?"

Consider this exaggerated story

You meet two people at a soiree (that's a posh cocktail party BTW). The first introduces themselves: "Hi, I'm Ian. I work for LANDesk. I do all sorts of product marketing nonsense." The second does the same. Well, I say the same; there's a big difference - "Hi, I'm Stephen. I work in IT."

That's it. That's all they say. To me it speaks volumes about how many who work in IT (I deliberately didn't use the phrase "IT people") see themselves and their employer. IT is their employer. They know or care little about the fact that they work for a company that makes and sells widgets. When you work in a large organization it is easy to lose sight of your "bigger picture" role. But this is not an excuse.

Why Is IT Operations Like Pizza Delivery?

Stephen Mann — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:48:34 +0000

Whilst with a software vendor yesterday I reused a favorite IT service delivery analogy that was inspired by, or was it borrowed from, James Finister at least two years ago. At the Forrester I&O Forum in Las Vegas this Thursday I will use it again when Glenn O'Donnell and I present on "A Mindset Change Is Needed: Support The People, Not The Technology."

To me the analogy is indicative of the fact that despite all of the investments organizations have made in increasing IT service management maturity and IT service delivery we still seem to measure our relative success in terms of IT rather than business outcomes.

So consider this somewhat frivolous analogy: comparing IT operations to pizza delivery operations

The pizza company has a palatial store and has invested in the best catering equipment (read state-of-the-art data center). It employs highly-qualified chefs who take pride in creating culinary masterpieces. When the pizza leaves the store it scores ten out of ten on the internal measurement system. This is, however, measuring at the point of creation rather than the point of consumption.

Now consider the customer view of the pizza when it arrives: it is late, cold, has too much cheese, the wrong toppings (even toppings that are unrecognizable to the customer), and it costs more than the customer expected (and wanted) to pay.

How much of this example can be applied to IT delivery?

Unfortunately too much IMO, and because we measure our success at the wrong point(s) and are too internally focused we easily miss the fact that we are not really meeting customer needs.

So have a think about how you view your relative success; or even better, ask a customer.

Private Cloud: 'Everyone’s Got One. Where’s Yours?'

Lauren Nelson — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:43:53 +0000

Sound familiar? Executives across the globe feel peer and competitive pressure to "get to yes" on private cloud. This burden falls on IT to provide a cloud solution -- oh, and by the way, we need it by the end of the year. With this clock ticking, it's hard to think about private cloud strategically. In fact, why not to just cloudwash your virtual environment and buy your team time? Many enterprises (yes, even those presenting at events) have gone down this road. And some vendors will suggest this as a short-term fix. DON'T DO IT.

You're cutting yourself short on what you could achieve with this environment while losing credibility with the business and your peers. Sound overdramatic? The consumerization of IT is forcing IT to connect with the business or risk circumvention. For many, the existing relationship isn't great. And each future interaction could either improve or worsen that relationship. Promising the business a cloud delivered within your own data center, and then failing to provide basic functionality of a cloud will just make future initiatives and interactions even harder. In the meantime, the business will continue to circumvent your department. If you're going to invest the resources/time to build this environment and rope in rogue cloud users -- make sure you get to cloud.

The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse For Client Management Vendors

David Johnson — Fri, 18 May 2012 07:45:45 +0000

Those of you paying attention in Sunday School may remember this thing called the apocalypse. Earl Robert Maze II was my Sunday School teacher, and he may be the most fearsome schoolmaster ever to scratch a chalkboard. One spitwad and there was sure to be a rapture. Mr. Maze would get pretty wrapped up in the lesson of the day and we'd all have to keep at least one eye on him as he paced back and forth. Not because we were worried about being asked a question, but because as he paced and talked, he'd build up globs of white something or other in the corners of his mouth, and every so often one of them would take flight and land on some unsuspecting front row pupil's hand, to their horror.

As luck would have it, I was late to class on the day Mr. Maze deemed that we were, at last, ready for the book of Revelation; I took the last seat -- In the front row -- Right in the line of fire. Sure enough, he was so worked up by the time he got to the part about the divine apocalypse, that one of those white gobs of goop chose that moment to set itself free and was headed for me like a heat-seeking missile. There was nothing I could do! And so to this day, the term apocalypse conjures up a frightening memory for me.

Which brings me to the current situation in the client management vendor landscape. The apocalypse was to be foretold by four horsemen representing conquest, war, famine and death (if you've ever worked for a company whose business has been disrupted, as I have, you've probably met with all four!). The four horsemen before us now in the client management market in the second quarter of 2012, are:

NVIDIA's VGX: Traction Control for Hosted Virtual Desktops

David Johnson — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:40:13 +0000

Driving in the snow is an experience normally reserved for those of us denizens of the northern climes who haven't yet figured out how to make a paycheck mixing Mai Tais in the Caymans. Behind the wheel in the snow, everything happens a little slower. Turn the wheel above 30 on the speedo and it could be a second or two before the car responds, and you'll overshoot the turn and take out the neighbor's shrubs.

Hosted Virtual Desktops are a bit like driving in the snow. Every link in the chain between the data on a hard drive in the datacenter and the pixels on the user's screen introduces a delay that the user perceives as lag, and the laws of physics apply. Too much lag or too much snow and it's hard to get anywhere, as citizens of Anchorage, Alaska after this years' record snowfalls, or anyone trying to use a hosted virtual desktop half a world away from the server will testify.

NVIDIA Brings Gaming Know-How to HVD
Last week I spent a day with NVIDIA's soft-spoken, enthusiastic CEO, Jensen Huang who put the whole latency issue for VDI into a practical perspective (thanks Jensen). These days, he says, home game consoles run about 100-150 milliseconds from the time a player hits the fire button to the time they see their plasma cannon blast away an opponent on the screen. For comparison, the blink of an eye is 200-400 milliseconds, and the best gamers can react to things they see on screen as fast as 50 milliseconds.

To Be Private Cloud, Or Be Public Cloud: Is That Really The Question?

James Staten — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:10:39 +0000

Shakespeare wrote in his famous play Hamlet,"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more." He of course was talking about the betrayal in his family but the quote is just as appropriate today in the world of cloud computing. Because in the minds of many I&O professionals, the business is conducting the betrayal.

2012 Huawei Global Analyst Summit: Enterprise is Part of the Plan

Henry Dewing — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:06:42 +0000

Henry Dewing with Dan Bieler, Katyayan Gupta, Tirthankar Sen, and Bryan Wang

Buldings on Huawei's Headquarters Campus in Shenzen, China

unified communications and collaboration

ARM Arrives – Calxeda Shows Real Hardware Running Linux

Richard Fichera — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:38:53 +0000

I said last year that this would happen sometime in the first half of this year, but for some reason my colleagues and clients have kept asking me exactly when we would see a real ARM server running a real OS. How about now?

To copy from Calxeda's most recent blog post:

"This week, Calxeda is showing a live Calxeda cluster running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on real EnergyCore hardware at the Ubuntu Developer and Cloud Summit events in Oakland, CA. … This is the real deal; quad-core, w/ 4MB cache, secure management engine, and Calxeda's fabric all up and running."

This is a significant milestone for many reasons. It proves that Calxeda can indeed deliver a working server based on its scalable fabric architecture, although having HP signing up as a partner meant that this was essentially a non-issue, but still, proof is good. It also establishes that at least one Linux distribution provider, in this case Ubuntu, is willing to provide a real supported distribution. My guess is that Red Hat and Centos will jump on the bus fairly soon as well.

Most importantly, we can get on with the important work of characterizing real benchmarks on real systems with real OS support. HP's discovery centers will certainly play a part in this process as well, and I am willing to bet that by the end of the summer we will have some compelling data on whether the ARM server will deliver on its performance and energy efficiency promises. It's not a slam dunk guaranteed win - Intel has been steadily ratcheting up its energy efficiency, and the latest generation of x86 server from HP, IBM, Dell, and others show promise of much better throughput per watt than their predecessors. Add to that the demonstration of a Xeon-based system by Sea Micro (ironically now owned by AMD) that delivered Xeon CPUs at a 10 W per CPU power overhead, an unheard of efficiency.

IBM Rounds Out Its Linux Offerings With Power Linux

Richard Fichera — Sun, 06 May 2012 22:50:17 +0000

In the latest evolution of its Linux push, IBM has added to its non-x86 Linux server line with the introduction of new dedicated Power 7 rack and blade servers that only run Linux. "Hah!" you say. "Power already runs Linux, and quite well according to IBM." This is indeed true, but when you look at the price/performance of Linux on standard Power, the picture is not quite as advantageous, with the higher cost of Power servers compared to x86 servers offsetting much if not all of the performance advantage.

Enter the new Flex System p24L (Linux) Compute Node blade for the new PureFlex system and the IBM PowerLinuxTM 7R2 rack server. Both are dedicated Linux-only systems with 2 Power 7 6/8 core, 4 threads/core processors, and are shipped with unlimited licenses for IBM's PowerVM hypervisor. Most importantly, these systems, in exchange for the limitation that they will run only Linux, are priced competitively with similarly configured x86 systems from major competitors, and IBM is betting on the improvement in performance, shown by IBM-supplied benchmarks, to overcome any resistance to running Linux on a non-x86 system. Note that this is a different proposition than Linux running on an IFL in a zSeries, since the mainframe is usually not the entry for the customer -- IBM typically sells to customers with existing mainframe, whereas with Power Linux they will also be attempting to sell to net new customers as well as established accounts.

IBM Raises The Bar On Converged Infrastructure With PureFlex And PureApplication Integrated Offerings

Richard Fichera — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:53:28 +0000

IBM Jumps On CI With Both Feet

Over the last couple of years, IBM, despite having a rich internal technology ecosystem and a number of competitive blade and CI offerings, has not had a comprehensive integrated offering to challenge HP's CloudSystem Matrix and Cisco's UCS. This past week IBM effectively silenced its critics and jumped to the head of the CI queue with the announcement of two products, PureFlex and PureApplication, the results of a massive multi-year engineering investment in blade hardware, systems management, networking, and storage integration. Based on a new modular blade architecture and new management architecture, the two products are really more of a continuum of a product defined by the level of software rather than two separate technology offerings.

PureFlex is the base product, consisting of the new hardware (which despite having the same number of blades as the existing HS blade products, is in fact a totally new piece of hardware), which integrates both BNT-based networking as well as a new object-based management architecture which can manage up to four chassis and provide a powerful setoff optimization, installation, and self-diagnostic functions for the hardware and software stack up to and including the OS images and VMs. In addition IBM appears to have integrated the complete suite of Open Fabric Manager and Virtual Fabric for remapping MAC/WWN UIDs and managing VM networking connections, and storage integration via the embedded V7000 storage unit, which serves as both a storage pool and an aggregation point for virtualizing external storage. The laundry list of features and functions is too long to itemize here, but PureFlex, especially with its hypervisor-neutrality and IBM's Cloud FastStart option, is a complete platform for an enterprise private cloud or a horizontal VM compute farm, however you choose to label a shared VM utility.

Employees Are Shelling Out Big Bucks To Ditch IT

David Johnson — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:50:26 +0000

The term "individual contributor" covers a lot of ground -- from brain surgeon to the shipping and receiving clerk at your local Wal-Mart. I'm not sure which of these two is a better fit for a virtual desktop, or which one has a Mac at home, but I do know that the individual contributors who spent their own money on technology last year to do their jobs, shelled out $1,252.60 on hardware alone, and another $556.90 on software. That's a heap o' cash.

When we asked them why they spent the money, 42% said it was something they use in their personal lives that they wanted to use for work. Another 27% said their own equipment is better than what their companies provide (presumably CT scanners, portable defibrillators and Sony PSPs can be ruled out). How do their companies feel about them using their own devices and software? 48% said their firms would either not approve, or make them stop using it.

Of course we know the usual reasons why: Security and company policy, and the "benefits" of centralized IT and shared services, among others. I don't know about you, but I always found "shared services" to be a bit of a sham. You know how it works: the VP with the biggest, high-profile project gets all of the services, and the rest of the plebes get to "share" the table scraps. Want a copy of Microsoft Project or a new laptop for that customer service rep who starts next week? Sorry…Steve's program is using all of the Project licenses, and all we have left in the closet is Pentium II desktops…but they have ergonomic keyboards!

Man Alive, It’s COBIT 5: How Are You Governing And Managing Enterprise IT?

Stephen Mann — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:10:09 +0000

You think that this blog title is bad? Be thankful that I didn't try something like: "There's No Obit For COBIT."

Anyways, today sees ISACA (an international professional association for IT Governance) release COBIT 5 - the latest version of its internationally recognized "Business Framework for the Governance and Management of Enterprise IT."

As in previous blogs such as "It's Time To Realize That ITIL Is Not The Only Fruit," the industry's obsession with ITIL needs to be both tempered and supplemented with more pragmatic guidance on IT management and IT service management. COBIT can help with this in spades. In fact, some would argue that ITIL should be used to supplement COBIT - try some of Rob England's (The IT Skeptic, and a great supporter of COBIT) short COBIT blog posts on for size: "The difference between ITIL and COBIT for consultants: four words" or "COBIT 5 will be released in April."

So What's New?

ISACA states that:

"COBIT 5 builds and expands on COBIT 4.1 by integrating other major frameworks, standards and resources, including ISACA's Val IT and Risk IT, ITIL ("the IT service management best practice framework") and related standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)."

Dell Gets Thin: Words to the Wyse

David Johnson — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:01:06 +0000

On the night of his 18th birthday, Gregg Allman drew a bull's-eye on his shoe, then shot himself in the foot to avoid the draft. If next week, Forrester's IT department declared that I should be expecting a box with a thin client PC at my desk, and I would be expected to use it instead of my MacBook Air for work, I'd be drawing a bull's-eye but not on my shoe. It would be on the box.

I suspect most road warriors and office workers alike would feel the same way. Ever try to go to a meeting in a conference room with a thin client? It's bolted to your desk. As long as all of the information you ever need for meetings is crammed between your eustachian tubes, you're good to go. If however you're like the rest of us, there are benefits to taking your computer (and applications and data) with you, like showing more than one other person what you've been working on.

That's where client virtualization (as opposed to simply VDI) comes in, and it's in this context that Dell's acquisition of Wyse makes some sense. Wyse makes thin and zero clients, as most of us hopefully know, and surely not by pure coincidence…so does HP. But thin clients as a standalone tool for most of us, is a non-starter. But as part of a mosaic of virtualization technologies that taken together offer me my work environment no matter where I am, have potential.

Are Macs Vulnerable? Wrong Question.

David Johnson — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 04:51:59 +0000

The misinformation and rhetoric surrounding the recent discovery of the Flashback trojan for Macs is vehement, and says more about the historically stable state of Mac security, and the irrational way many think about it than it reveals about its weaknesses. Even long-time industry observers, who should know better, are jumping into the fray to say: See! I told you so! The Mac is vulnerable! Well…duh…that's not exactly news, folks.

Of course the Mac is vulnerable. EVERY internet connected device is vulnerable. What matters is probability, frequency and potential impact. So the correct question then, is whether or not your prevention, detection and recovery mechanisms are effective. For example, I'm not convinced that traditional anti-virus approaches are right for the Mac. The track record of these tools in the Windows world is abysmal in my view. They're among the most intrusive technologies to the user - hogging system resources and making even basic tasks impossible as they inspect every file, every day, often several times a day. And…they're reactive. Think: death by a thousand papercuts over a period of years, only to be interrupted by a rare strain of encephalitis, followed by a partial lobotomy and organ transplant to get the patient breathing again, and you're in the ballpark. Application whitelisting will hopefully come to be seen as a better approach.

IT Service Management And ITIL Thinking – Brawn, Brains, Or Heart?

Stephen Mann — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:36:02 +0000

Some great IT service management (ITSM) conversations with BMC this week got me thinking about ITSM people "stereotypes" and what we can learn from them in terms of communication, education, and ITSM tool selection. It started from my mental 2D matrix that plotted organizational ITSM tool need against the axes of organization size, e.g. enterprise, and level of ITSM maturity - with the latter, in my opinion, being a better gauge as to the ITSM tool that is most appropriate.

Conversations about the people within the organizations, however, made me wonder about the need for a third axis of "ITSM mindset" which could further better help to pin down the type of ITSM tool for a particular organization through a now-3D matrix.

Did Somebody Mention Stereotypes?

Oops, yes that was me. My imagination conjured up three stereotypes, and perhaps there are many more, but I liked that they leant themselves to a collective description of Brawn, Brain, and Heart (oh yes, it's a little "Wizard of Oz").

Where the stereotypes are:

IT Infrastructure

A Killer Disease? IT’s Unhealthy Obsession With Itself

Categories:

Why Is IT Operations Like Pizza Delivery?

Categories:

Private Cloud: 'Everyone’s Got One. Where’s Yours?'

Categories:

The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse For Client Management Vendors

Categories:

NVIDIA's VGX: Traction Control for Hosted Virtual Desktops

Categories:

To Be Private Cloud, Or Be Public Cloud: Is That Really The Question?

Categories:

2012 Huawei Global Analyst Summit: Enterprise is Part of the Plan

Categories:

ARM Arrives – Calxeda Shows Real Hardware Running Linux

Categories:

IBM Rounds Out Its Linux Offerings With Power Linux

Categories:

IBM Raises The Bar On Converged Infrastructure With PureFlex And PureApplication Integrated Offerings

Categories:

Employees Are Shelling Out Big Bucks To Ditch IT

Man Alive, It’s COBIT 5: How Are You Governing And Managing Enterprise IT?

Categories:

Dell Gets Thin: Words to the Wyse

Are Macs Vulnerable? Wrong Question.

Categories:

IT Service Management And ITIL Thinking – Brawn, Brains, Or Heart?

Categories: