So why do you need a data center? There needs to be a good business case for having a data center today. If your business is not running data centers, why do you have one - when you can rent computing for cheap.
This is the same thing that a hundred years ago, if you were a manufacturing company you wanted to have your power plant, then came along the utility companies and turned the whole concept on its head. Earlier if you didn't have a power generating plant, you were not competitive. Once the electric power transmission technology matured the companies with captive power plants found themselves with millstones around their necks. Same is happening to the data centers, the data center is akin to the power plants of years bygone.
Cloud is not a marketing buzzword anymore, a mere review of acquisitions and investments being made by IT vendors to know that there is a lot of money riding on this strategy. The IT vendors are positioning for major overhaul in the computing strategy. The switch is on, next couple of years there would be a huge shift.
P B R Trials and Tribulations
In past seven years I have come across (directly and indirectly) five large companies that have embraced Plan Build and Run model. I think much has to be said about that. The attraction of the process is its simplicity, closeness to Demings quality cycle and ITIL framework to some extent. Its graphical elegance has many a companies flocking towards it. In my experience I have seen that execution of this is simple when starting out new. For a company with existing systems and processes this is always a very confusing and trying strategy to implement. Immediately the process, based on my first hand experience, erects glass walls separating infrastructure teams. In absence of good workflow tools, it becomes a major headache to track, who is doing what, and who needs to approve what. The customers initially on the face of it, love the single point of contact with plan team, but soon find out that for delivery other teams are more important than Plan.
Build and Run teams feel marginalized in planning and complain. Us versus them mentality develops almost over night. Planners want to rush away from any kind of delivery support, and "Run" protects its domain by erecting the wall of operational standards. "Plan" plans to meet customer requirements, can't get "Build" and "Run" to participate in design - because typically "it is not their function". As soon as the design is presented a deafening cry can be heard, "Who designed this? This is not standard, and can't be done. Would it not make sense if those who are supposed to support this were included in designing?"
Have seen this happen again and again and again. In one progressive company I saw that the "Run" operation was totally homogenized - analysts were responsible for entire stack. In case of problem raise it to Tier II which happened to be "Build/Plan" team. One can imagine how much sense of insecurity would that have created for those who spent years specializing.
I wonder what is the way to implement PBR? If there is a silver bullet approach? What roles do the leaders play in making this change a success. What kind of change process needs to be embraced to bring the organization onboard this strategy. Thought?
Build and Run teams feel marginalized in planning and complain. Us versus them mentality develops almost over night. Planners want to rush away from any kind of delivery support, and "Run" protects its domain by erecting the wall of operational standards. "Plan" plans to meet customer requirements, can't get "Build" and "Run" to participate in design - because typically "it is not their function". As soon as the design is presented a deafening cry can be heard, "Who designed this? This is not standard, and can't be done. Would it not make sense if those who are supposed to support this
Have seen this happen again and again and again. In one progressive company I saw that the "Run" operation was totally homogenized - analysts were responsible for entire stack. In case of problem raise it to Tier II which happened to be "Build/Plan" team. One can imagine how much sense of insecurity would that have created for those who spent years specializing.
I wonder what is the way to implement PBR? If there is a silver bullet approach? What roles do the leaders play in making this change a success. What kind of change process needs to be embraced to bring the organization onboard this strategy. Thought?
Know-How Dimension
Reading Ram Charan's "Know-How" I started thinking in terms of what is needed to lead an IT organization in twenty first century.
The economy is still stuck in the low gear (Cisco forecast send shudders down the wall street), but innovation in IT seems to be in overdrive. So how do CIOs respond to this new normal? Agility is expected (and is a threshold requirement for IT team), social network integration is imperative to reach the focus market. The vendor partners seem to be finding back doors into IT from the front door. "Cloud computing" has made its way into marketing vocabulary, so would CIO be the catalyst or be the hurdle to it.
The essentials of CIO thought leadership would be - range of altitude, cognitive bandwidth and ability to reposition quickly. The IT leader needs to have the ability to transcend from heights of strategy to depths of tactics. She should be self aware of gaps in her own skills and capabilities to surround herself with the leaders who complement her. With such pace that IT is going through the leader needs to register the clouds of change in the horizon.
What do you think are the essential know-hows for an IT leader? Share your thoughts.
The economy is still stuck in the low gear (Cisco forecast send shudders down the wall street), but innovation in IT seems to be in overdrive. So how do CIOs respond to this new normal? Agility is expected (and is a threshold requirement for IT team), social network integration is imperative to reach the focus market. The vendor partners seem to be finding back doors into IT from the front door. "Cloud computing" has made its way into marketing vocabulary, so would CIO be the catalyst or be the hurdle to it.
The essentials of CIO thought leadership would be - range of altitude, cognitive bandwidth and ability to reposition quickly. The IT leader needs to have the ability to transcend from heights of strategy to depths of tactics. She should be self aware of gaps in her own skills and capabilities to surround herself with the leaders who complement her. With such pace that IT is going through the leader needs to register the clouds of change in the horizon.
What do you think are the essential know-hows for an IT leader? Share your thoughts.
Cloud-Based Infrastructure as a Service Comes to Government
Cloud-Based Infrastructure as a Service Comes to Government
From Apps.gov agencies can access "on demand self service to utilize and discontinue use of products when and as needed. Unlimited storage, monitoring of resource utilization, rapid elasticity, customizable scaling of service, automatic provisioning of virtual machines, storage, chargeback, order management through measured services."
FCC to float cloud computing - Alex Byers - POLITICO.com
FCC to float cloud computing - Alex Byers - POLITICO.com
How big is this news? Per the news article "this will be the first major federal agency to use cloud computing technology to completely power its main web presence".
The website would be hosted on cloud early 2011, to be followed by cloud based storage and email. For security of data the route they are taking is encrypted laptops and VDI.
Enterprises should start developing their cloud strategies, identify low risk data and start testing cloud now.
Fabric based computing infrastructure
Tight integration and sharing of IO resources - data, network, interprocessor, to create virtualized infrastructure in a nutshell is fabric based computing. Cisco UCS is the most publicized example. Obvious benefits "wire once", integrated management, rapid provisioning of compute resources, increased capacity utilization, integration with legacy SAN and LAN infrastructure. High speed network interconnect based on 10gb Ethernet, FCoE provide unified fabric. Migration from legacy compute to UCS would be facilitated by virtualization, vmotion the VM's out of legacy platform to UCS (caveat - source and target CPU's must be compatible). Please share your thoughts on what are the reasons (besides legacy asset life) IT infrastructure managers would not go to fabric based computing.
Storage manager's conundrum
IBM buys XIV, HP snatches 3Par, Dell acquires EqualLogic, IBM buys Netezza, Isilon is part of EMC. All these changes in a short span of 3 - 6 months. If as a storage manager you are scratching your head, you are not alone. This is a hot segment of IT industry. The silver lining in all this is - more options. Technology upheavals from such upstarts have brought breath of fresh air for storage managers. New technologies are fundamentally changing storage paradigms. Thin provisioning, wide striping, virtualization, deduplication, compression, grid processing, ssd, FCoE, pNFS, Hadoop are offering so many choices that didn't exist before
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