Category Archives: Bussiness

Attending The Converged Infrastructure Think Tank At Dell Technology Camp 2013

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I’m travelling to Amsterdam tomorrow to contribute in a “Think Thank on Converged Infrastructure” during the Dell Technology Camp 2013. The topic of this technology camp is the Evolution of the Data Center, hence the think tank on the converged infrastructure.

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If you have any views on this subject, questions, or perhaps even “angsts” share them via twitter and we’ll see if we can discuss these. Don’t be shy! I’m pretty much a practical guys and for me any technology, no matter how much fun I have with them, is a means to an end. That means I think that a converged infrastructure can work for both the SMB/SME & large Enterprises if you do it right and at a good & affordable price level. Right sizing without getting stuck in that size, whilst not overpaying for future proofing is important. Long term in IT is a crap shoot Smile.

The biggest risks here is that the vendors don’t get what doing it right means & what is affordable. From the Microsoft community we’ve been discussing concepts like a Cluster in Box as a building block and other features that Windows Server 2012 enables for us. So far we’ve seen very low interest from the big vendors. From SMB to SME, we sometimes feel that OEMs look more at each other than at their customers needs and pursue agendas that fit only the bigger environments & pockets. Some partners look way to hard at their bottom line to be considered trusted advisors; They’ve lost the “VA” in Value Added Reseller. Serve your customers needs and you’ll have a business. Ignore us and you’ won’t ever have to deal with or worry about us again Winking smile.

On the other side I see the bigger players struggle with processes, methodologies and separation of roles that only hinder progress and prevent agile and dynamic IT.

We’ll see what the other attendees have to say, as I’m very interested in that. Looking at what other industries & roles think and do – and why – can be very educational. Vendors & Partners have a very different view on the matters than end customers have and the good ones know how to match both worlds to everyone’s benefit & satisfaction.

Follow the action on twitter via  #DellTechCamp, via live streams on http://www.fittotweet.com/events/techcamplive/ or https://www.etouches.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=53104&.

The Zombie ISV®

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The Zombie ISV® is the type that should have been extinct based on the current state of technology. Let me give you an idea what that current state of technology means in our neck of the woods. Last week our team started deploying some DELL R720  PowerEdge servers to replace the last W2K8R2 Hyper-V cluster in the company with a Windows Server 2012 one. The older hardware will be recycled. Some will live on as test servers, backup media servers. All running Windows Server 2012 of course. One of them will become our physical (SAN) LUN to VHDX converter server so we can move our large LUNS (2T-15TB) to vhdx. Later this year 10Gbps networking, RDMA Mellanox cards and ODX will provide for fast vhdx movement to their new virtual hosts. Work in progress, but it should give you an idea about what we’re working with.

It may surprise you but even we have 2 Windows Server 2003 physical servers left. One is a DELL NX1950 Storage server that has been serving local workspace to a team that does image parsing (12TB). That one is >6 years old and is slated for retirement. We don’t need this concept anymore. We can build anything we want for such purposes using Windows Server 2012 Storage spaces and if required leverage the in box iSCSI target. To build it we can just draw disk bays, disk, servers from the retired hardware shelf, no sweat. We have plenty of spare parts and it works just fine. If it’s cost efficient and an effective solution, we roll that way.

The other one is a server for the financial software sold by a company (the Zombie ISV®) that does not believe in virtualization. It’s running code that’s over a 12 years old (legacy java run times and even that was a success because it used to be JInitiator until a a few years ago). There is no life cycle planning what so ever and when after 5 years the hardware needed replacing we got nothing but silence form the vendor. After months of asking for a meeting on the what and how (OS upgrade, x64, virtualization) and being ignored we just took a decommissioned server that had two years of warranty left and transplanted the disks. Even if the warranty runs out on that one we have some of the same model in the spare parts cabinet.

The workload itself runs just fine virtualized but they don’t support that. Luckily for the people that have to do it in their environment they run zero change of that Zombie ISV® ever noticing that a server is virtualized anyway. They also don’t get the concept of a dedicated service account in windows. So they end up with the database or BI services running under their remote support credentials that expire and get disabled by the helpdesk. Sigh. They don’t see the need to proactively support operating systems above Windows XP or browsers after IE 6.0. We did a lot of hacks to keep that system working and came to despise the total lack of technological expertise and professionalism of the vendor. Their “consultants” that’s don grasp x64 bit, or they download installers for 4 hours during a paid day of consulting … sickening to the stomach. Meetings with the account managers (they seem to travel in packs) is a lot of vacant bank stares and apathy. They don’t have answers, they don’t look for answers, they simply don’t care. The idea was to replace the package, but it was not to be. But in the end we settled for throwing all responsibility for it so they’ll find a place to host it and our bookkeepers can access over a secure remote connection. At least we have gotten rid of this security risk in our environment.

That people, is the miserable state of some ISVs in the 21st century. But it’s not just them. It’s a testimonial to the degree in which companies get tied up and locked in to mediocre solutions and technology debt. In the infrastructure world (storage, networking, servers, virtualization) people who know what they’re doing do not allow this to happen. As more and more decisions on software and applications are made by business & analyst types we are seeing an increase in technology debt and lack of any life cycle management. So where we have seen infrastructure get more and more bang for the buck we’ve also seen the software & services cost explode and on top of that incur technology debt, expenses and risks on the business. That’s pretty bad. I see a growing divide in a lot of companies between ever more efficient and cost effective infrastructure (combined with cloud solutions) and the slowness of getting custom software into production combined with issues concerning supportability and upgradeability. All this at ever increasing costs and FTEs. That’s not supposed to happen but it is, despite the high investments in * analysts, business consultants, architects, * coaches, project managers, IT managers etc. in the era of the cloud. This is regression.  It all sounds like the result of the feel good EQ approach to business without results but hey, no one feels left behind Confused smile. I believe a mate of mine calls this the race to the bottom. No wonder some companies that I know have done away with all this and just let business units organize themselves organically. They either fail and disappear of thrive and prosper, but a no time to they fall in to the trap of over organized pseudo flat structure (i.e. pass the hot potato and no responsibility) that still manages to create ever more managerial positions (flat?) whilst realizing ever less results. We’ve seen the financial and housing market charades collapse. Guess what’s next? There won’t be a bail out for you or me, beware of that.

Personal Best of MMS 2012 Series “Why We Fail–An Architect’s Journey to the Private Cloud”

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Introduction

The speaker (Alex Jauch) addresses cloud terminology confusion and points out that yet everyone wants it. So the pressure is on to deliver cloud.

But as an architect you can’t build with such vague notions of what it is. That just doesn’t work. 78% of enterprise IT Shops will deploy a private cloud by 2014 (Gartner) 62% of all IT Projects fail. For the record, building a private cloud is not an easy project.

For one, what are you building? What is it, way to may definitions. NIST seems to be one of the better definitions around. Specific, direct and actionable. We can work with that. I suggest you visit the NIST site for more information on:

  • Deployment Models:Private Cloud, Hybrid, Public.
  • Service models SAAS, PAAS, IAAS
  • The Essential Characteristics
    The Common Characteristics

Why We Fail

What happens:

  • Install Hyper-V
  • Deploy System Center
  • Build a solution

The essential element of cloud is that  “The cloud is a customer centric business model, not technology”.It’s approached to much as a technology problem and that’s why we fail.

The architect should not allow this to happen so he is to blame. The architectural practice is to marry business needs and wants to technology as a solution. This really hits home but there are more people involved and than there is the entire business / IT alignment fiasco as you can read in my blog The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse? , but the bucks ends with the architect..

How do we add value to the business? Commodities do not add value, they are necessities. So we need to decide what business we are in. Meeting standards is not a goal. Enabling business is the goal. So they think you’re doing a great job empowering them. After all they are paying for it.

The Take Away

Traditional IT needs to evolve (fast) to customer centric IT.  End user departments define the goals. Our operational proficiency used to be our pride but what does it mean to the customer? Problems that do not affect the business don’t matter. So talk to customers to find out about what they want and need. They don’t care about your skill set or certifications. You’ll need t extract the need from their wants.

The ability to take pain points away from customers. Small & medium sized projects do very well at this. But in a lot of companies they don’t promote you for those “smaller” projects. So the business also has to evolve.

I’d like to add that Old style IT is also promoted by  a lot of misguided security officers and business lawyers. Strict rules as a guidance and instrument are their instruments and no those are also not always in the business best interest.

This relates to IT Portfolio Management: Strategic, High Potential, Key Operational & Support. We need to realize that whatever we work on might be strategic or high potential will move to key operational and support. They all need different approaches and types of management. So choose your methodologies wisely. Don’t just pick one and force that square peg in the round hole. This is my advice to both business and IT. I’ve seen business decisions change support level products turned into high cost  high maintenance because due to bad decisions. So we might not have to be our brothers keeper towards the business but than again do we really need those bridging functions and those guys or gals need to be at the top of their game as I stated in The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

So keep things a simple and as effective as possible. Do it fast, ride and repeat. You’ll learn a lot and improve along the way. So here comes the build or buy decision and the link to the NetApp plug by the speaker. This is very dependent on the situation of the organization at hand. So the fast track has it’s place here. Is speed of delivery of key importance or absolute flexibility and adaptability? So it will depend. Yes the consultants answer. But being a real consultant is a very respectable job. I can’t hell it that the word has become meaningless due to missuses and inflationary titles for temps for hire.  The System Center stack and how NetApp improves and leverages all this is briefly discussed. He ties the fast track into the discussion of portfolio management and working in a customer centric way.

Conclusion

Why are we doing what we do? Think about it. There is a nice book on this subject  “Why we fail? by Alex Jauch.

The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

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We still have a serious problem in ICT. Even in this second decade of the 21st century. While the entire industry has been buzzing with IT-Business alignment for many, many years now, I often notice that we have not gotten very far. For one the divide between business & IT is an artificial disconnect. This artifact does exist, but we’ve created it, and all we need to do is stop doing that. No one is giving this much attention to the struggling relations of business with the HRM or the finance departments.

In contradiction of what we might expect, while this artifact is detrimental to the success & profitability of IT, it is not taken seriously enough. Sure the business absolutely needs to define what they need. But in an ever more rapidly changing technology world they do not have the knowledge needed to do that. So we need bridge builders, people with the skills to translate technology used in IT into competitive solutions and highly efficient & profitable systems. It takes a special breed & some serious skills to act on opportunities and see them materialize with the help of IT solutions. It also takes a whole lot of common sense. The latter often seems to be lacking. Why does this happen?

This is not just about business and not just about technology. It’s something in between. As a result it’s often seen as not that critical and this leads to staffing these functions with the wrong skillsets. At best they are populated by people who want to get into the IT sector but don’t like technology that much. This is enforced by all those campaigns to make IT more sexy and attractive to the new generations who associate IT with nerds. It’s beyond me why we’d want to attract people who think so superficially but hey, that’s just me. But aren’t we building our own future nightmare this way? At worst it is used to get people in better pay grades. The functions might very well mandate better pay due to its complexity and the required skill set but this only holds true if you get the right people in those functions. Whatever the reason, this is a major pain point. Why?

The neglect of these bridging functions lets people without the necessary skillsets take responsibility for decisions they are incapable of making. Their knowledge of the technical matters is not up to that task and business wise they’re often in the same boat. So now we have a bunch of people who have way too little understanding of what IT and business is and what they themselves should achieve in that bridging role. Oh great, so fundamentally critical decisions are being made by the unqualified. People who lack skills, experience and context will fall back to methodologies & theories. They use them as cook books. Unfortunately reading and using a cookbook doesn’t make any one a chef. And these are the roles where we need chefs’ people. In reality there is a giant gap between reality and all the theories, methodologies & real or perceived knowledge on how IT can be better aligned with the business and be run more successfully and profitably.

I can only conclude that allowing this to happen means that the functions that are supposed to be bridge that cap is not taken seriously enough. For all the lip service to these efforts it cannot be for lack of acknowledgement of the pain points. But the solution often seems more of what doesn’t work, thereby eroding any credibility of the bridging functions. This is costing us dearly and it will only get worse if we don’t stop this madness. There is of cause the fact that projects become more and more expensive with all the * architects, * analysts & * officers. On top of that the complexity keeps rising and we don’t seem to be very good at managing that. Ask any engineer what the worst enemy in any project is and you’ll get uncontrolled and unmanageable complexity as an answer. But even worse, you are faced with the fact that best people in the business, bridge and technical positions eventually leave. Tired & worn out by the environment that doesn’t value them as they don’t understand their true contribution and skill set.

This means that even today IT retreats into its technical areas of expertise and the business doesn’t learn what IT is & can do. If we don’t get better at bridging that gap we are doomed to keep failing at ever higher costs and you’ll lose ever more valuable employees. The only difference will be we’ll have more parties than IT and business to point our fingers at as the ones to blame.