IT Solutions Blog

When Manufacturer's Support Doesn't Cut It

If you’ve ever tried to get IT support from a manufacturer, you’ve probably hit a brick wall a time or two. It isn’t that the manufacturer isn’t knowledgeable or capable when it comes to their product (although that certainly is the case with some manufacturers). More often than not, it’s a problem with understanding your organization’s specific needs, or with trying to work through compatibility issues with equipment or software from another vendor.

It isn’t even that your manufacturer is inept, or that they don’t want to stand behind their product. In many cases, a manufacturer is just unable to support your needs because their expertise is limited to their product.

The good news is that you have options. For most IT hardware and software, there are solutions providers who can work with you to really understand your organizational structure, your business needs, and your overall technology configurations and strategies.

Here are some considerations to look at when deciding whether to rely on manufacturer support or to contract with a service provider:

Response Time
Manufacturer support can, in some cases, be slower than service provider support. In some instances, the manufacturer may not have local resources that can be deployed to your site to address your issues. If the problem can’t be solved remotely, you may have to wait.

You choose a solutions provider, in part, on their proximity to your organization. You want someone nearby who can get to your location and provide the response you need. Even if your organization has disparate physical locations, chances are you can find a service provider who will be able to reach most of those locations. This means that a solutions provider can often get to you and fix your problem long before a manufacturer’s technician can even be on site.

Cross-Technology Support
One of the risks in relying on manufacturer support is the inevitable finger-pointing that occurs. One vendor blames another for a problem, and the other points back. A solutions provider takes end-to-end ownership, and can ferret out a problem and recommend a solution without worrying about who gets the blame.

Beyond Break-Fix
Many manufacturers offer little in the way of support beyond break-fix. System repair and replacement of parts is about as far as many go. In contrast, a service provider can tailor a solution to your specific needs. They can design service-level agreements that go beyond a manufacturer’s capabilities to insure your systems are humming along like they need to be.

Customized Solutions
A solutions provider offers you more than an out-of-the-box approach. They offer solutions that are unique to your organization and its business needs. They can be tailored to fit your risk management strategy and your unique organizational culture.
A solutions provider gives you resources you can’t get from manufacturer’s support alone. Many solutions providers will work with you in order to take care of your IT needs, either exclusively or in conjunction with your manufacturer support options.

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Cloud Computing Basics

One of the hottest trends in small business and enterprise-sized IT is cloud computing. Cloud computing represents a major shift in the way companies view their technology infrastructure. This type of approach to IT relies on the Internet, and usually involves provisioned, scalable, dynamic and virtual solutions. Cloud computing pulls the details of IT infrastructure management away from the business and puts it squarely in the hands of true experts.

The Internet is at the core of the concept of cloud computing, and it is the Internet that the term “cloud” refers to. This type of solution gives business application service online via a web browser or, in some cases, a client application. The software and data are stored on servers not on site, but out on the Internet.

There are three general categories of services offered in cloud computing, and they have to do with the type of solution provide. They are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). While SaaS is by far the most common type of cloud computing implementation today, other types are rapidly gaining popularity as companies see the cost and expertise advantages of each.

It’s important to distinguish cloud computing from several similar models that are often confused for cloud computing. Grid computing, for example, uses a virtual super computer composed of networked, connected computers that act in concert to perform significantly large tasks. Utility computing is a model where computer resources are packaged and provided as a metered service, in the same way that traditional public utilities are packaged and provided. Finally, autonomic computing is often confused with cloud computing. This is a system of computing where the systems are capable of managing themselves.

Cloud computing models may have similarities to these models, and many cloud implementations use grids and have similar characteristics to utility or autonomic computing. Others, like Skype or BitTorrent, have no centralized infrastructure whatsoever.

With a cloud computing model, the company doesn’t own the physical infrastructure. This helps to avoid capital expenditures, and the infrastructure is essentially rented from a third party. The company uses resources and pays for only the specific resources they use. This can improve utilization rates, because servers aren’t typically left idle.

The rise in large bandwidth possibilities for companies is responsible, in part, for the rise in cloud computing. It’s reasonable, in many applications, to get the same response times from remote servers as it is from local infrastructure.

One of the primary benefits of cloud computing is that it can reduce both capital expenditures on infrastructure, as well as operational expenditures on infrastructure maintenance and engineering. In this way, companies pay only for what they use, or they subscribe to a service over time. Cloud computing has a relatively low barrier to entry, a low management overhead, and rapid access to a wide range of application types. Cloud computing providers generally offer service level agreements (SLAs) to insure that the company is able to access the systems they need and that uptime will be similar, or even higher, than locally-based solutions.

 Introduction to Cloud Computing

In our complimentary guide, "Cloud Computing Infrastructure and Architecture," you'll learn how cloud computing transforms the way we design, build, and deliver applications. Covered in this guide are:

     1. Cloud computing infrastructure models and benefits
     2. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architectural approaches
     3. Sun's technologies that support cloud computing
Click here to download the free guide

The Solutions Provider Edge

More and more, it just makes good business sense to offload some of your IT overhead and put it squarely in the hands of experts. Whether you’re looking at a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution or whether you’re looking for infrastructure support services, choosing a solutions provider can be not only a good business decision, but a way to increase your organization’s efficiency, effectiveness and even improve your bottom line.

There are several compelling reasons to choose a solutions provider, depending on your particular situation. A solutions provider is often a better option than an in-house solution or a vendor-based solution.

Take, for example, the issue of network infrastructure. You may have a network infrastructure that utilized technologies from a number of different vendors. You might, for example, use Cisco routers at the edge, Alcatel switches at the core, and appliance devices for security. If you contract with Cisco for support, you still need to find support for your non-Cisco equipment. This can multiply your support costs exponentially, as each manufacturer or vendor struggles to get their piece of the support pie.

With a solutions provider, you avoid these costs. You can carefully choose the right solutions provider for your needs – one who can support all of your network infrastructure, not just one piece at a time. This provides the added benefit of singular responsibility. You avoid the finger-pointing that often occurs between vendors, as your single provider takes end-to-end responsibility.

The same principle applies when comparing the option of a solutions provider with in-house expertise. Here again, you need several times the staff expertise to handle the entire network. That may come in the form of additional employees or it may come in the form of increased training costs. Regardless, you’re looking at a much more significant investment than you would have with a solutions provider. They already have the expertise, and you can utilize them as needed.

Solutions providers give you a versatility you don’t have when you do things in-house. They give you access to expertise you don’t have with a vendor-only service agreement. They can also help to reduce your overall IT costs, all while increasing efficiency of your IT resources.

Reducing Cost with Strategic Rightsourcing

The Forrester Whitepaper, Reducing Cost with Strategic Rightsourcing, discusses these new models and offers guidance for:

• Which services to outsource and which to own
• How to focus your staff on mission-critical projects
• What steps to take to keep your rightsourcing under control

Click here to download.

Reducing Capital Expenditures in IT

One of the biggest challenges facing IT managers today is reducing capital expenditures in IT. It’s not the 1990s anymore; there is more and more pressure on IT management to justify their costs to a sometimes-apathetic senior management. Add to this the increasing familiarity that senior management have with IT issues in general, and you can find yourself being constantly pressured to get costs down, both in terms of lowering ongoing costs and reducing capital expenditures.

Fortunately, there are some ways you can help contain costs and reduce capital expenditures in IT:

Review Your Portfolio
Take a look at all of the applications used in your organization. Identify the ones that are underutilized, ones that are duplicative and ones that may be absent altogether. Create an extensive list of applications, users and owners across the entire organization. This portfolio review will help you to be able to prioritize capital expenditures going forward, and it will also identify places where the organization has multiple apps that perform essentially identical tasks.

Review and Renegotiate Contracts
For many organizations, contracts are a large portion of your IT budget. Maintenance and support services are necessary and important, but you need to get a handle on them. Figure out where they exist – even outside of the IT department – and identify places where you can leverage savings or save on licensing.

Once you know where your contracts are, you can begin to renegotiate. Create a situation where vendors can compete to lower costs while getting rid of overlapping applications at the same time. Consider lengthening contracts to give you cost savings.

Analyze and Prioritize Projects
Take a strategic look at projects. Use a consistent prioritization approach. Break down projects into strategic points that can benefit the organization in the immediate future, rather than the entire project implementation which can take years.

Part of this process involves determining where benefits can occur and how fast. The quicker you deliver benefits to the company, the lower the overall cost and the more justified the expenditures.

Manage Lifecycle
Older IT systems have higher costs in terms of maintenance and retaining inefficient hardware and software. Take a look at older systems, and analyze the true cost of keeping legacy equipment. In many cases, systems beyond their lifecycle serve only as something of a security blanket for a department. In many cases, the data in those systems can be retained offline through ERM or imaging. In other cases, the data can be converted to an SQL database with query tools. Getting rid of legacy equipment will get rid of operating costs, maintenance costs and may even save money on the electricity bill.

Analyze Return
As more and more IT projects come under closer scrutiny, linking those projects to specific organizational objectives and/or financial returns is important. Look at project goals, and define measurable outcomes. Find ways that new projects can actually save the company money, free up organization resources or promote a company’s overall strategies. If a project can’t do these things, it should be reconsidered.

IDC White Paper: Lowering Operational Costs through Automation. Click here to download. 

Is Your Data Center Optimized?

A data center is the focal point of an organization’s technology infrastructure. When the data center works properly, the organization works properly. If something is amiss at the data center, something is amiss across the organization. At the same time, if the data center isn’t optimized, the organization isn’t optimized.

There are several areas in which a data center can be optimized. From effective business management to power consumption, the data center is ripe with opportunities to increase efficiency and performance all while keeping costs low. When you optimize your data center, you add significant value to your IT assets and you free up valuable resources that can be directed toward business-critical tasks.

Cost Priority Optimization

IT budgets are dropping, and managers are finding it harder and harder to convince senior executives of the justification for data center expenses. An optimized data center, however, is about more than just cost. It’s about what business processes are supported by the data center, how critical those processes are, and what the impact of a temporary loss of service is. A server that handles stock trading is, for example, more valuable than a server that hosts a HR intranet.

Value assessment is part of the optimization process. Determining which systems are business critical and funneling proportionate budgets to those systems will help insure their availability and reliability. Using lower-cost equipment for business-critical applications is akin to scaling down from semi-trucks to pickups. You won’t be able to deliver your product on time, and you’ll have significantly higher operating costs than if you just pay for the right equipment up front.

Platforming Optimization
Another part of this process is choosing the right platform for a given job. You need to choose a platform that has the performance, availability and reliability you need, and that’s scalable. The more mission-critical the application, the more unique the platform has to be.

Platforming is, of course, tied closely to cost priority. In most cases, mission-critical applications that require a unique platform are more expensive than systems that are not mission-critical. The key to watch out for is less critical applications that demand a high degree of uniqueness. If you have relatively basic materials management needs yet have a highly-customized system in the data center, it may be time to consider a move.

Power Optimization

More than political or altruistic concerns, there are solid business reasons to optimize the power requirements in your data center. Fortunately, technology manufacturers are making great strides in this area. From “green” servers to more efficient cooling systems, there are plenty of options available to data center managers today.

One study estimates than around one percent of the power at a data center reaches the processor. There is power loss in the electrical distribution network. There are power losses in the conversion process, as well. Perhaps the area that consumes the most power, however, is cooling. Reducing power consumption in these areas will increase your data center's optimization.

 Download the White Paper Today!

 The economic realities of the data center’s drain on the bottom line are hitting home in all market corners. IT managers know that optimizing existing data center space is the best way to lower capital and operating costs; reduce carbon footprint; and at the same time, boost business continuity and efficiency.

http://www.unitiv.com/data-center-optimization/

Top 5 Technology Procurement Mistakes

Getting the right technology into your organization can be a challenge. Between finding reliable vendors and keeping on top of new technological developments, the last thing you need is a problem with the procurement process.

Here are five things that will gum up the works in your technology procurement process and how to avoid them:

1.    Not establishing a business case. Before you ever write an RFP or contact a single vendor, you need to have a solid business case lined up. The business case for any given IT project is not just useful for getting the project approved and getting senior management's backing. You need to be able to provide the business case to potential vendors so that they are clear on what you expect the solution to do for your company. Without that essential information, the solution you wind up with may not do what you've promised management it will do.

2.    Not using technology specific procurement methodology. If you try to apply standard procurement methodology to IT, you're going to wind up with some seriously non-ideal responses. In addition, evaluating vendors is a complex and technical issue that is more highly specialized than, for example, evaluating office furniture vendors. Because procurement can vary in these requirements, you need to be able to make specific adjustments. You need to give vendors the opportunity to differentiate their proposals while making sure that the proposals are addressing the same needs.

3.    Choosing single-vendor solutions. Getting the right piece of equipment for the job is essential in IT. When you use a single vendor, your IT needs are at their mercy. If they go under, or if their product proves to be sub-standard, you have to do a complete overhaul to get things right. By choosing the right equipment for the job, you avoid this problem. In addition, you gain access to solutions providers who can design, implement and support solutions without being beholden to a single vendor.

4.    Procuring temporary solutions. Sometimes, a business will experience a sudden burst in need. Whether it's the sudden need for extra data storage in response to new regulatory changes or whether it's increased processing power for a new application, the temptation can be to procure a bandage solution just to get up and running. This may solve a short-term problem but creates a larger problem in the long run, in that it may be much more expensive to procure an incremental solution. Here is a situation when a cloud computing option, such as SaaS, may be a good fit.

5.    Misrepresentation or misunderstanding. Sometimes, a manufacturer or vendor misrepresents a product. You need to make sure you know what's being offered, and ask specific questions of the vendor. Carefully evaluating contractual language is key here, and it doesn't hurt to have the legal department take a look before you make your procurement.

Find out more about Unitiv's Technology Procurement. 

Get Your Storage for Nothing and Your Bits for Free

Well . . . maybe not quite “for nothing” or “for free”, like Mark Knopfler sang in the popular Dire Straits song from the 80’s, but you can delay your storage CAPEX spending and flat line your OPEX spending for the next couple of years by making use of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) and the Storage Reclamation Service from HDS.

The benefits of consolidated storage promised by SAN technologies have never been fully realized.  On the positive side, a migration from direct attached storage to SAN technologies has centralized the management of storage and provided some level of efficiency in space utilization.  However, inflexible storage systems, operating systems, and file systems have caused unanticipated practices that have introduced new storage inefficiencies.  These new inefficiencies are not unlike the old physical stovepipes of unused storage created by storage directly connected to hosts.  Even though you have a consolidated SAN, logical stovepipes of storage have emerged due to over estimating storage requirements for future growth and then not being able to reclaim that storage when the application doesn’t use it all because the file system and volume can’t easily be shrunk.

HDP, along with its Thin Provisioning and Zero Page Reclaim capabilities, can actually reclaim the unused storage by virtualizing the application’s volume into a storage pool with HDP and then using Zero Page Reclaim to free up allocated but unused data pages that contain only zeros.  The resulting smaller volume is now thin-provisioned from the hardware point of view but looks to the application as if it is still the size of the original volume.  HDP is available on the HDS USP V, USP VM, and AMS2000 storage lines.

And you don’t even have to have HDS storage – HDP and the Storage Reclamation service are effective in reclaiming unused storage on EMC and other manufacturer’s hardware through the temporary use of a Hitachi USP VM diskless rack-mounted unit and virtualizing the external non-HDS storage with Universal Volume Manager.

Now back to that “storage for nothing” thing.  Assuming Gartner’s 2007 analysis of Fiber Attached Storage being utilized at a rate of between 45% and 65% still holds true, there is a lot of stranded storage out there to be reclaimed.  For example, if you are currently at 50% utilization of your allocated storage and HDP boosts utilization up to 80%, you literally would be getting 30% of your “storage for nothing”.  Hitachi has seen increases in utilization by more then 30% for many customers with some companies reclaiming 40% or more of their physical storage.

In a recession economy, organizations are looking to leverage current investments and increase ROA (return on assets) rather than make new investments.  “Based on end-user inquiry, Gartner has observed that most storage infrastructure is managed inefficiently.  By improving storage utilization, IT departments can delay incremental storage acquisitions.”*  This is where the Storage Reclamation Service comes in to free up your stranded storage, increase your ROA, and enable you to delay additional capital purchases.

To learn more about Hitachi’s Storage Reclamation Service using HDP, click on the link below and check out the various white papers and success stories, or call Unitiv and let us help you delay CAPEX and reduce OPEX by making your storage environment more efficient with HDP.  All you need to do now is be like Sting and sing “I want my, I want my, I want my HDP”.
http://www.hds.com/services/professional-services/optimize/storage-reclamation.html

*Source: Invest in Storage Professional Services, Not More Hardware, Adam W. Couture, Gartner, Inc., February 2009, ID#: G00165133

Enterprise Class Storage Requirements from Mike Workman

In case you haven't read Mike Workman's (CEO of Pillar Data) blog,take a look at this latest post "Homey don't play dat."

Here is a snippet from the post where he argues the point of exactly what can be considered
"Enterprise Class" Storage: 

Let’s put down a few basic requirements of “Enterprise Class” that I would imagine we could all agree to:

1. I’d say at least 4-9s' of data availability, perhaps in many environments over 5. No single point of failure is necessary to achieve this requirement. Regardless of the failure, it should have limited consequences on performance or LUN access. Nobody claims a machine is Enterprise class when it is sold in single-controller models; This is just silly.
2. Systems should not be designed to assume there is “idle time” in every 24 hour window. Most Enterprises run 24x7, not 24x5, nor even 12x5.  It is clear when rebuilds, “data progression”, LUN layouts are stalled for days behind system load that they are not ready for the Enterprise.
3. Non-disruptive upgrades. This doesn’t usually include upgrades to new machines or new platforms, but code point-releases while system is in operation.
4. Failures during operation do not result in Filesystems or LUNs off –line by design. Not that they don’t ever go offline, but that he usually should not, and when they do it is a defect-not a design attribute.
5. Serviceability from the front or back of the rack.  In other words, field replaceable units do not involve pulling boxes out of racks and opening lids, using a pair of pliers or a soldering iron (see… hyperbole can be fun).
6. Reliability, which means that the quality of components in the system doesn’t necessitate constant intrusion in the data center. Regardless of #1, it is never desirable to have someone pushing a wheelbarrow of full of bad parts through the isles -- especially if it takes days to rebuild and restore the system to an all-normal condition, like in the case of many of our competitors.

A system which stops all I/O on a class of drives for 25 to 60 seconds when one drive fails is not Enterprise class. Yet there is a company out there in which this characteristic is indeed always present by design; a dumb design for the Enterprise to say the least.  The company is Compellent – or as I referred to them in my last post CML (their ticker symbol, this wasn’t a slight any more than people calling Sun “JAVA”).  Here are some of the test results for a Compellent system under I/O load. The figure below is a  plot of IOPs after a drive fails, versus the same thing on a similarly set-up Axiom. The IOPs were normalized to 100% for the no-fault performance on both arrays, and both had a similar number of spindles (both systems are current, not old stuff, and the code revision level of the CML system tested was 4.2.3 ).

 

Personally, while I recognize we all make mistakes, we all have flaws, and none of our systems are perfect, I believe that some of statements and claims in the storage industry are just deceptive, or reckless to say the least.

Read more about Pillar Data including the latests posts by Mike Workman by clicking here. 

Single-Console Server Management with HP Insight

HP Insight is one of the most useful and versatile server management tools on the market today. HP Insight gives you control of your entire server environment, including HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS, NonStop and Windows systems. Even if you’re not running HP servers, this software can perform many server management tasks right from its single management console.

In addition, if you have HP server hardware in your enterprise, HP Insight provides hardware-level management. HP insight covers a number of different HP systems. In the server realm, it will manage ProLiant, Integrity and HP 9000 servers. It will handle HP BladeSystems. In the storage array category, HP Insight can handle Storage Works MSA, EVA and XP arrays.

Here are some of the things HP insight can provide you, all from a single console:
•    Automatic discovery and identification. The autodiscovery feature even includes filter so that you can prevent HP Insight from locating unwanted types of devices.
•    Automatic event handling.  This feature lets you configure specific policies that will execute scripts in response to an event. It can notify relevant users and forward those events through pager, email or even SMS.
•    Quick and easy installation. HP insight’s installation Wizard gives you easy-to-follow instructions for getting Insight set up. It also helps you to configure the settings for HP Insight on the CMS (Central Management Server).
•    Fault management. HP Insight gives you a proactive notification of failure alerts, whether they’ve already failed or whether failure is impending.
•    Security. This application uses the security of your Operating Systems to create both SSL and SSH encrypted communications, so you can be sure your remote management is kept safe and secure. In addition, you can delegate management responsibilities using a role-based security system, allowing you to give particular job functions on particular devices to particular users.
•    Management of multiple systems. You can use HP Insight from your CMS to perform a specific task across multiple servers. This frees up your time, saving you from the tedious process of performing the task on each individual server.
•    Snapshots. You can use HP Insight to take snapshots of as many as four different configurations, whether on different servers or the same server, and compare them to one another.
•    Version control. Insight will get the most recent updates for your Integrity and your Proliant Windows or Linux servers. This includes everything from BIOS to drivers to agent updates. You can then release those updates across a group of servers all at once.
•    Interfaces. You can use either the GUI or the CLI interface at your console in order to manage HP Insight.
•    WBEM indications. You can subscribe (or unsubscribe, for that matter) to Web-Based Enterprise Management indications for SMI-S, Linux and HP-UX as well.

HP Insight is perhaps the most versatile and useful single-console server management solution you can choose, especially if you rely on HP servers for any or all of your server infrastructure.

Click here to receive a white paper on HP Insight Orchestration software.

 

Deduplication: A Better Way to Store Data

The article recently published about data deduplication on Forbes.com, "A Better Way to Store Data" is an excellent opportunity to hear from Bill Hobbib, VP Marketing of Exagrid:

The issues with tape backup that Bill mentions in the article ("Backups fail. Restores fail. It's probably the dirtiest job left in IT, but there has been no way to solve it") and the significant value of disk backup with deduplication brings are among many things that make ExaGrid a great company in an exciting space.

I invite you to consider the analogy made in the article between old VCRs with VHS tapes and DVDs.  How many of those reading this post still use VHS tapes for viewing movies at home?  And how many of you moved to DVDs or DVRs, even before your old VCR died?  Tape libraries, like the old VHS tapes, represent "old technology that's well past its limits."  Just like DVD players have reached a price/performance level that for most people has made them a no-brainer versus VCRs, we're now at the inflection point where disk with deduplication costs about the same as tape.  Given the advantages of faster backups and restores, greater reliability, ease-of-use, scalability, and cost parity, it should be a simple decision to move to disk.  Do you agree?

For more information on Exagrid, please go to http://www.unitiv.com/partners/storage-partners/exagrid/.