NetApp - Add Mayo

Seeking Counsel

Talk to your trusted advisor. In the time of shrinking IT budgets, it's diligent to access new ideas, new methods and innovative technology proposals. Without revealing to sales reps secrets held within the mind of IT leadership, achieving trusted advisor status is not without pain. Initially, the sales reps endure extremely long sales cycles and most importantly, they admit to their customers that the technology that they are pushing, is in fact, imperfect. To say the least, this is a humbling experiment, only to be undertaken by the most studious sales people (it really helps to have a great relationship with management as well).

Trusted advisors have earned a seat at the IT leadership table. Of course new architectures and proposals will come from internal IT teams, however its always prudent to have access to a trusted advisor, who has the support of his entire organization, to present proposals and services when needed. In some cases, they opt out on potential new business. This is why they are trusted.

The Forecast Could Be Cloudy

With a title like that, I'll avoid any reference to the world economy.  Oh wait, I just did.  Cloud computing, the new buzz, is loosely defined as an array of shared infrastructure (servers, storage or both) that gives users the ability to expand and shrink processing power based on demand.  An additional, alleged benefit includes increased availability.  Because of the hosting costs and strictly regulated operations, cloud computing farms are usually offered as a service by hosting providers.  Here are some brief videos that give you a glimpse into the user interface of the cloud farms at Google, Amazon, GoGrid and AppNexus. 

Just like any major IT decision, it's a risk versus reward equation:
Risks: Setup is not easy.  There will be operational challenges initially.  This is a maturing space.  Carefully manage expectations. 
Limited flexibility in application configuration.  If business process changes it will be a challenge to adjust the cloud to the new business workflows and integrations.  Because of the limited flexibility, users will be constrained to a fixed menu of services.  They will not see it as "helping them to help themselves."
Lastly, perception may exceed reality due to the hype around cloud.  Because you're in the cloud doesn't mean a poorly designed application will instantly be great!  You can spray perfume on a skunk but...

Rewards: Because of the fixed menu of services, users will adjust design requirements to comply.  This eliminates varied configurations (variations keeps IT busy being detectives instead of innovators). 
Faster response to new requests and the ability to dynamically grow capacity with minimal or no downtime makes it compelling.

Cloud computing is a good idea and an even better marketing tag (even though its just a recycling of the the term "grid computing").  With all that said, to me, it's less about technology and more about process discipline and people.  How will the best car help the worst driver?

Its Your Protocol

Whatever happened to the notion of "dial tone" IT services?  It seems many IT organizations have been consumed in reactive mode, that this concept has evaporated.  Dial Tone Service is a unifying strategy and an IT goal that would rally the IT troops around a mission (some would say, "red meat").  Oh, and this is an objective that would actually bring tremendous empirical value to the business.  Today, the array of storage protocols in data centers almost directly correlates to rising support costs and operational complexity.  Tier 1 SANs, Tier 2 NAS, Tier 3 streaming media devices (tapes), as well as the ubiquitous direct attached storage devices, have become the segmented norm.  Try this on: protocols should be irrelevant.  Here's a newsflash:  the business doesn't care about protocols, they want the service!  To achieve a true enterprise class storage operation, the management and administration across all tiers must be seamless.  The ability to provision, optimize, secure, archive, and restore within the same management ecosystem (without customization) is a requirement for a first class service oriented IT organization.  You design your application, plug it in, and storage (and all the mirroring, snapshot and backup policies) are already in place.  That's dial tone.  Does your storage vendor enable you to eliminate complexity and cost by managing tiers of storage in a unified manner?  It's your protocol - to simplify and change for the better.

Now, More Than Ever, Is The Time...

…To Do More With Less. As the economic picture changes just like chips on a Las Vegas roulette table, it’s never been more important to review IT operational efficiency. Even though IT budgets will continue to shrink, the work will not stop. Global projects and initiatives will continue. IT groups will remain under pressure to deliver better service to the business while reducing cost. It is an increasingly difficult challenge to balance IT progress (proactively managing business demand) with reactive incident and problem management. The wrong balance can quickly result in a coup from all directions.

Reduced budgets will force the reprioritization of the ambitious, new “Cadillac” applications with the “Honda Hybrid” projects (constantly low ranking operational improvement projects). Let’s face it, the large projects will surely add more complexity to an already over-burdened operations. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig (yea, I went there). It is well understood that the business must partner with IT to continue to innovate, however, as Confucius says, Is it wise to build a house on sand?

Now is the time for IT to go back to the business and a present plans for boosting operational efficiency with programs like storage consolidation, automation and the development of a comprehensive service catalog. Only with this implemented as a foundation, can IT do more with less.

Knowledge Management Just Makes Cents

First, what is it? I’m not Webster, but some define it as: the process of capturing and reusing intellectual property. This is essential to any business: from high tech, construction, to babysitting.

The process sounds simple. Gathering tribal knowledge from subject matter experts and disseminating that knowledge to others to rapidly improve on tasks, and reduce (ideally eliminate) repeated mistakes. This process has broad applicability. Three examples:

• Technical Support Organization – resolving a customer issue and posting the resolution in a central database. Calls are received and “suggested” resolutions immediately appears, all queried from the knowledge database.
• Construction – just completed a 50 million dollar project. In a final review, you’ve discovered that ergonomics of the entry and exit are severely flawed. This must be centrally logged for all current and new projects to see.
• Babysitting – (don’t laugh) wouldn’t it be nice to know before you toss your nephew in the air that he has unpleasant biological reaction to being thrown? Here, knowledge management would provide a “Do” and “Do Not” list for kids, created from the findings of others. Hey, wait a minute, sounds like an idea for a side business!

Anyone can try implementing this but to make it useful and core to your business, you need to consider a few major components:

1. A program or application with a rich and dynamic user interface to draw your audience
2. Must be intuitive – if it takes more than 2 clicks to submit knowledge, forget it, get a mulligan.
3. Incentive programs – you are asking people to submit knowledge, in addition to their daily jobs. You’ll need to answer the question: “What’s in it for me?”
4. Motivation – close to incentive programs just a bit more aggressive. Two examples:

• Technical Support Organization and Construction – build knowledge management time into their schedules and monthly goals (which may influence pay)
• Babysitting – parents who want an un-interrupted date night will be self motivated to provide knowledge about their kids

The goal of any knowledge management process is to gain efficiency. For a business, efficiency results translate to better customer experience and dollars. And that’s why were in the game.

Business Continues...or Not

You’re an IT executive and you’ve got a big smile on your face because you’ve just launched a shiny new CRM application as well as deployed richly featured IP phones, world wide. What a happy place, until, a F5 hurricane visits.

Your datacenter is now powered off indefinitely. How will your customers and prospects reach you? How will you receive and process new orders?

Business Continuity requires this level of planning (or paranoia). First, let’s be clear. Business Continuity is not disaster recovery. It may, however, include disaster recovery as a component. The ability to take new orders, respond and support your customers after a catastrophe is, in fact continuing your business. Storing tapes in a mountain can be considered by some as a disaster recovery plan however, it will be a challenge, at best, to continue your business with a truck full of tapes.

In my experience, keeping the planning simple is key. I’ll say this up front: BC is not a project, it’s a program. Start with a triangle approach: People, Process and Technology.

People – Unless you live in the Matrix, humans would need to be involved to plan, prioritize, test and ultimately execute this plan. This planning is a company wide effort but I suggest you tackle it in stages. Start with generic business processes like “Quote to Cash” or “Customer Support Lifecycle”. .

Process – To ensure the Business Continuity program follows a disciplined process, it’s best to utilize rigorous process frameworks such as ITIL.

Technology – Too many BC programs begin with technology. Technology should be viewed as an enabler of the Process (second step). The output of a well documented and proven process will produce opportunities to automate and streamline. Any technology introduced into the environment must involve and eventually become a segment of operations. All changes in the production environment must be reflected in the BC environment and managed by the operations team.

Like any program of this magnitude, it’s a really good idea to test it. Reviewing and improving on test results will give you more experience and visibility in the true priorities for your business.

To the IT pros: Ask yourself, if an 8.0 earthquake strikes your datacenter, will your business continue…or not?

Be Green With Maturity

I suspect in the near future we’ll have mandatory recycling, new environmental standards for commercial/residential property, oh yes, coming soon are hybrids that give us over 100 miles per gallon [insert oil companies cringing here].  Let's be ready to get our "Green" ON!

Virtualization in the data center is IT speak for “going green”. Today, IT organizations are investing heavily in virtualization technology with primarily two goals in mind:

1. Contain cost – Migrating largely underutilized physical servers and operating system/applications to a smaller number of physical servers that contains multiple operating systems/applications (it’s like getting many more miles to the gallon). Reducing the moving parts in the data center means less power consumption, curtails data center footprint growth, which saves $$.
2. Improved responsiveness to business demands – Provisioning an entire application ecosystem (storage, server, operating system, application, and database) within minutes on a shared physical platform, IT will become an enabler and be in a position to give the business a competitive advantage.

There are huge implications when implementing virtualization technology in the data center. Consider a few:

• Unified storage architecture– Virtualized environments can be optimized by using a shared storage platform
• Build new virtualized environment or migrate in-place?
• What is the least disruptive migration strategy?
• What are the limitations? Hardware or virtualization software?
• Many New Polices: H/W, S/W, Application, Monitoring, Archival, Compliance, Networking, Wiring, Racks, and many more

Before introducing a virtualization offering in your data center, you’ll need an extremely detailed view of current state. These considerations must be well thought out, tested and documented in such a way that the current IT processes must mature to accommodate the desired outcomes.

Storage Backup @ Home and Work - Part III

Let’s go back in time. In 1998, what were the most prevalent operating systems in your datacenter? NT4? Novell? Probably both, plus and mix of old versions Solaris and Linux. All of those operating systems supported critical business applications… at that point in time. What would it take to restore the entire 1998 ecosystem (application and storage), including making it available for use? What about for just five years ago in 2003? I suspect many storage architects or IT managers can’t answer that question. The false sense of comfort is the fact that we have backup tapes dating back 5, 10 or more years, adding no value or purpose. Unlike personal data (photos and movies) in Parts I and II, much of the critical company storage is only usable when presented within an application. These applications are often upgraded more than once a year. How can you ensure that you can this data is useful after so many years on tape and after multiple application upgrades? I know, through personal experiences in IT, it’s a big challenge for anyone. Let’s tackle this in phases. First, don’t go to the business and tell them you have 15 years of useless archived data! Well, you can if you like an exciting exit. At a very high level, try this approach:

§ Phase 1: Document (and negotiate if necessary) data retention policies

§ Phase 2: In parallel, assess your current data storage environment. This assessment will determine how your current compliance to policies. Some examples below.

§ Phase 3: Design, Test and Deploy a solution that seamlessly moves the “right” data to second tiered storage, VTL or tape. Sounds daunting, but this can be done with minimal disruption.

I should note that Phase 1 and 2 are interchangeable based on the maturity of your organization. Regarding document/data retention, some companies have published policies, others have abstract statements. In this case, IT could be bold about establishing more detail.

At both home and work, we want the data (archived or not), easily searchable, available when we need it and protected. Whether it’s a home networked drive or Virtual Tape library technology, it will take some planning and effort. Yes, that means more work!

Storage and Backup @ Home and Work - Part II

Got space? In Part I of this series I talked about the reasons why there is a huge demand to address this growing storage “problem” at home. I mentioned a possible solution - using internet accounts as storage repositories for home users, similar to email accounts. Coincidentally, while working in London, I learned that British Telecom (BT) offers exactly this solution to their customers. Digital Vault is exactly what I described as a possible solution in Part I. Imagine my surprise. Digital Vault is largely possible because of the extremely high bandwidth offered to end users in the UK. After reading about it, my next thought was, “If this is available in the United Kingdom, is it available in these United States of America?” So I contacted the sales department of one of the largest internet providers in the U.S. No names to protect the not so innocent. I proceeded to asked if there was “Digital Vault like” solution available. After an uncomfortable pause, the sales person responded. “I think you may need tech support?” No, I don’t think so.

There may be internet solutions for storage services offered by smaller companies, however, to gain the confidence of the masses, the largest ISPs would need to publish an offering. Why would this be good for you? Because of their huge customer base and other areas of business (TV, wireless), they would have no choice but to establish 100% availability and security, 24 hours a day. Just one failure would cause consumer confidence to diminish…and we’d contact the competition. Shareholders will not stand for that! However, for this type of service to grow in the U.S., the ISPs would need to increase bandwidth to our homes. We all can sneeze 50GB (at least) of personal storage. To migrate this amount of data to an ISP over a high speed line in the US… Not pretty in most cases.

Here’s another possible solution: DVRs - Use your cable digital video recorder (DVR) as a storage cache. Upload your personal files to your DVR at home network (LAN) speeds. Most people already have the equipment - many of us have cable service with a DVR. DVRs are simply storage devices with menus and cool programming. For backup protection, the DVRs would upload data changes to a central location in the background. Maybe DVRs should have ONTAP!

Storage and Backup @ Home...and Work - Part I

If you had enough storage at home, would you ever delete any personal photos, music, movies or any other files? While I believe most will answer “No” to this question, it’s the “If” where we all struggle. I read Chris’ 3 keystroke post and it’s the perfect example of why there is no simple solution to the increase in usage data storage at home.

With our new digital age, almost all media we use at home requires storage. Home movies and digital cameras continue to place huge demands on our personal disk drives as picture quality continues to improve. Since paper photo albums have been replaced with movies and picture slide shows, we are all left with attempting to keep upgrading our storage capacity at home. To me, deleting isn’t an option! This causes all types of challenges: archiving the old data, choosing the new storage device (disk upgrade), migration of data, controlling access, just to mention a few. Sounds like yet another full time job just to manage it all. Allow me to give some perspective. Recently, I went to a large computer store and browsed through the home networked disk drive products. Many options, however, of all the products, there was only one box left. Good news is, we are not alone

Just like production data at work, many of us want an easy way to store personal data at home, easily expand it when needed, have the ability to easily search through it all, and lastly protect it forever. That’s right, forever. Would you throw away your baby photos? What about old tax returns? (maybe a bad example) What about the home movies? Placing personal these files on CD or DVD is like archiving data to tape at work and results in low confidence that data is easily accessible or available for various reasons (damage, storing process). Perhaps the ideal solution is to add general storage space to our internet accounts? I’ve had my internet email account for years. It’s searchable, protected (meaning always available, secure is another topic) and accessible. At least with this solution, it will keep my house from becoming a data center.

Ultimately, growing media demands is causing us to become system administrators in our homes. It’s like having a second job where YOU pay to play. You can run but you can’t hide.