IT Solutions Blog

The New Voice of the CIO

The voice of the CIO is being heard in new ways—as CIOs are increasingly recognized as full-fledged members of the senior executive team. Successful CIOs are much more actively engaged in setting strategy, enabling flexibility and change, and solving business problems, not just IT problems.

Today’s CIOs spend an impressive 55 percent of their time on activities that spur innovation. These activities include generating buy-in for innovative plans, implementing new technologies and managing non-technology business issues. The remaining 45 percent is spent on essential, more traditional CIO tasks related to managing the ongoing technology environment. This includes reducing IT costs, mitigating enterprise risks and leveraging automation to lower costs elsewhere in the business.

CIOs universally acknowledge that some of their most important objectives too often seem to clash: How can we support the introduction of new services while avoiding the disruption of existing services? How can I reduce costs while improving services? How will I balance the need to influence business strategy with the need to provide top-notch IT support?

Complementary, yet sometimes conflicting roles

An Electronics CIO summed it up well: “In IT, we are not magicians, but we are certainly jugglers.” On any given day, CIOs are poised for the unexpected, leading an organization that solves a myriad of problems for customers, both internal and external. Without question, IT functions represent the lifeblood of most businesses. But CIOs told us that they can only turn more attention to new technology ideas after addressing current IT needs.

After thousands of interviews, we found that successful CIOs actually blend three pairs of roles. These dual roles seem contradictory, but they are actually complementary. To characterize each role, we have coined a term that describes its dominant quality. At any given time, a CIO is:

• An Insightful Visionary and an Able Pragmatist
• A Savvy Value Creator and a Relentless Cost Cutter
• A Collaborative Business Leader and an Inspiring IT Manager

By integrating these three pairs of roles, the CIO:

Makes innovation real
It’s not enough to just plan for innovation—it needs a robust foundation. When acting as an Insightful Visionary, a CIO is perceptive, promoting a broad technology agenda to help the business profit from leading-edge initiatives. The flip side of the Visionary is the Able Pragmatist role. As a Pragmatist, a CIO deals with the realities of the business. The Pragmatist also facilitates the productivity of current IT solutions to allow more time and budget for innovation.

Raises the ROI of IT
Using IT to produce greater business value is vital, accompanied by an ongoing focus on lower costs and higher efficiency. A Savvy Value Creator finds new ways to help customers and the organization profit from how data is used. The Relentless Cost Cutter, its counterpart, is focused on managing budgets and processes to eliminate or reduce costs.

Expands business impact
To contribute the most to the organization, proven expertise in both business and technical matters is essential. Part of the time, CIOs will engage with the enterprise as Collaborative Business Leaders, to drive new business initiatives and cultural shifts jointly with fellow CxOs. At other times, the Inspiring IT Manager role occupies center stage to motivate the IT organization and deliver superior IT performance.

This excerpt is taken from IBM's Global CIO Study, The New Voice of the CIO. To download the entire paper, click here.

Energy Management and Data Center Costs

Keeping data center costs down is an important priority, especially during tough economic times. One of the areas that's ripe for savings is the area of energy management. Some of the biggest names in IT are working on getting data center costs down in the area of energy demands.

Take, for example, the supercomputing program at Notre Dame. The folks in South Bend are working today with Cisco to come up with a new way to manage energy that will significantly reduce energy consumption. This work is leading to new patents on technology and concepts.

Effective energy management can produce significant cost savings to a data center environment, especially if you know where to start. While progress is still being made, there are things you can do today.

One area to look at is cooling. You need to be able to determine the right temperature for your data center. This will vary based on your particular components and hardware, but even a degree or two difference can make a significant impact on your energy expenditures.

Some of the most innovative energy management ideas related to cooling have to do with breaking free of expensive air conditioning units. While it's not likely that you can support a data center using only outside air during August, in many places across the country and across the world there are several months out of the year that outside air provides a perfect alternative to air conditioning. Air handling systems that incorporate cool outside air can save significant amounts of money.

Energy management software solutions can help, as well. These applications are becoming more and more sophisticated, and able to push power to exactly where it's needed when it's needed. Yes, there is a capital expenditure to get the system into place, but once it's up and running it will reduce your ongoing energy expenditures in a significant way. Cisco's EnergyWise is an example of this kind of solution, and more and more organizations are turning to energy management software as a quick and easy fix.

Virtualization is often bantered about as a way to save money on energy costs. This is true, to some degree, but it's important to look at the larger picture. Taking an inventory of your hardware and applications and retiring inefficient equipment in favor of new equipment or even virtualization can create significant energy cost savings, as well as savings in the areas of ongoing maintenance and support.

Ultimately, you need to take a holistic approach to the issue of energy management. Look at your data center's energy consumption from all angles, and decide where you can get the most benefit for the least cost.

Green Networking in the Data Center

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• The challenge of a complex data center
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How to Know if Virtualization Makes Sense for Your Business

Virtualization is, as you’re already aware, one of the hottest trends right now in business. Virtualization is designed to speed up routine IT administrative tasks, increase the availability of applications, be able to respond immediately to the changing needs of a business, provide data security and backup, and even promote business continuity and disaster recovery. You’ll hear all of these things from VMware, one of the leading vendors of virtualization products.

If you listen to the hype, you’ll assume that any business can benefit from virtualization.

On the other side of the spectrum you have Dell. Dell, of course, doesn’t deal in virtualization products. According to Dell, it’s often not worth it for businesses to invest in virtualization.

So, who’s right?

Well, to some degree, they both are. There are some cases in which virtualization makes sense, and some in which it doesn’t.

The Benefits of Virtualization for Your Business

Virtualizations allows your business to reduce the time your IT staff spend on basic administrative tasks, including things like handling server workloads and adding new employees. It saves time in developing and launching new applications, and it helps your IT department become more responsive to business needs. Virtualization accomplishes all of this by reducing the amount of hardware that has to be maintained and by consolidating services in such a way as to only need to handle certain tasks once. Create an account for a new employee and it can be propagated across the enterprise, for example.

The main reason that any business chooses virtualization, however, is to improve their server utilization. They want to make more effective use of their servers, and they want to either reduce the number of servers in their environment or at least contain the number where it is today.

When Virtualization Doesn’t Make Sense

However, not every environment needs improvements in these areas. For example, if you have five servers in your business and they’re all running at less than 50% capacity and running smoothly, you probably don’t need to invest in virtualization. You’re dealing with finite numbers. You’re probably not dealing with a huge IT staff, either.

In fact, most small businesses have fewer than five or six servers at the most. We’re not running severely intensive applications, or ones that require high amounts of storage capacity or CPU capacity.

While it’s not a hard and fast rule, a company with less than 100 employees isn’t probably likely to see to much benefit from virtualization.

 When to Virtualize Your Servers

This article outlines five steps you should take to determine when to virtualize your servers. There are a number of server virtualization solutions available today. However, this article isn’t about which solution to choose. Many virtualization questions are “solution agnostic,”and the question of “when” to virtualize your servers is one of them.

Click here to download the article. 

3 Approaches to Heterogeneous Infrastructure Support

The enterprise of today is a mish-mash of various hardware, appliances and operating systems. The fact of the matter is that you can’t really get everything you need, in terms of IT solutions, from a single vendor. Even the best efforts at homogeny are almost guaranteed to have some degree or another of variance.

The question, then, isn’t whether you have a heterogeneous infrastructure. The question is how to support your heterogeneous infrastructure. You have, in essence, three options.

Manufacturer-based Support

Many companies assume that, in order to get the best infrastructure support, you need to go right to the manufacturer. In some limited cases, this is probably true. However, unless your company has a near-limitless IT ops budget, it’s not likely that you can afford it. By the time Cisco, Microsoft and Dell get their fair share, there’s little left over for support for the obscure industry-specific applications – which are often the ones that need support the most. For many enterprises, manufacturer-based support just isn’t realistic.

In-house/Minimalist Support

You can go the opposite route, of course. You can try to structure your company’s resources so as to be able to support your infrastructure from an internal perspective. This is, in terms of support contract costs, the least expensive option. You save support contracts to cover only catastrophic hardware failure, and you leave everything else in the hands of your staff.

There are several problems with this approach. First off, it’s not realistic to think your in-house support system will in any way be as qualified as an external one – at least not in every area. Sure, there may be some aspects in which you can do a fine job in-house, but overall you’re going to need some outside help.

There is, of course, also the troublesome issue of availability. Your employees get vacation days, sick days and holidays. Sometimes, they’re just not available. That’s not the case with external support contracts.

Service Provider Support

The middle ground is where most enterprises will fit best. You find a solutions service provider to support your heterogeneous infrastructure. The solutions provider can give you the same kind of expertise that you’d get from the manufacturer, and usually for a lower price. In addition, a service provider can support multiple technologies from multiple manufacturers, reducing the sheer number of service contracts that you have to maintain and reducing the points of contact you need for service.

In addition, you can create a service level agreement with your service provider. This will allow you the peace of mind that, even if your best network engineer is sipping Mai Tai’s on the beach in Cancun, you can still get your network up and running within a matter of hours.

The kind of infrastructure support you choose will, ultimately, depend on your budget, your business priorities and how much risk you’re willing to accept.

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How to Consolidate Data Center Services

Today’s economic and business environment is putting a lot of pressure on CIOs and on IT departments. Several factors have created a perfect storm in which IT departments are expected to produce more and more and offer more advanced services, and to do it with less money.

On top of this, the distributed workforce means that the end users aren’t necessarily in the same location as the data center. Trying to make the data center accessible while at the same time consolidating and optimizing puts a huge amount of strain on the bottom line.

Fortunately, by consolidating your data center services, you can offer your users more without having to increase your budgets. Here are some of the most cost-effective ways to consolidate your data center services:

Get the Big Picture

Look at more than just server counts. If you’re going to consolidate your data center services, you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Look at physical locations, if you have multiple data centers, and consider moving from several smaller data centers to a lower number of larger centers.

This is true inside a single data center, too. You need to make sure you have an accurate assessment of your existing facility, infrastructure and assets. Make sure the footprint within the data center isn’t any larger than it needs to be.

Develop a Roadmap

Data center consolidation requires that you take specific steps in a specific order. Make sure you know from one day to the next what changes are taking place and what the impact will be during the process.

Working through the roadmap will help you understand contingencies, as well. When you decommission a given server and move its applications to another, for example, you need to be able to identify what other apps need to be redirected.

Communication is Key

Both within your data center and within your organization, consolidation requires open lines of communication. You need to make sure that any affected business units know what to expect during and after the consolidation process. Whether it’s a matter of notifying about a brief outage or whether it’s watching for some sort of performance impact on the end user, you need to be able to get information out to your users and to be able to get feedback from them.

IT Assessment Services

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Top 5 CIO Priorities for the New Decade

While it isn't 1990 anymore, it's not 2000 either. The fact of the matter is that technology has moved at an alarming rate in the past decade, and 2010 is shaping up to have its own significant challenges for CIOs. As the technological landscape changes, an effective CIO needs to reevaluate her priorities and bring them in line with what's going on it the world around her.

Here are some of the most essential focus areas for the successful CIO in the 2010s:

1.    Cost reduction. If Y2K was the high point of technology spending, 2010 is quickly becoming the low point. CIOs are expected to provide greater functionality to their users on a fraction of the budget they had a decade ago. The recession hasn't helped this situation, and even though the economy may recover just fine many organizations will be hesitant to reopen the flood gates of IT spending. The effective and successful CIO will need to find ways to reduce IT costs all while providing improved levels of service. Your organization expects you to work miracles, so you need to find ways to do just that.

2.    Alignment. There was a time when IT was on its own. It may have been a small little hungry monster living under the Finance Department's desk, or it may have been tucked away in operations. Today, however, that's changed. The fact that IT deserves an officer-level executive is testament to this fact. Still, many IT departments find themselves at odds with the organization's business focus. Bringing your area into alignment with the overall organization's goals and processes is key to being successful. It will also make it much easier to provide business justifcations as you struggle for funding.

3.    Strategic planning. To be sure, in a down economy it's easy to become more tactical or even go into survivalist mode. However, you still need to have the big picture in mind. You need to be able to look forward five years and have a realistic picture of where your organization's IT needs are going to be, and then make decisions today that contribute to the organization's long-term health and goals. Even when you're forced to use stopgap measures, you can't lose sight of how things ought to work out in the end.

4.    Process re-engineering. Even though tech changes at a breakneck pace, people don't. They like to do things the same way over and over again. Even your true cutting-edge engineers fall into old habits when it comes to business processes. Regularly reevaluating and improving your business process lets you run a tight ship and keep thing effecient.

5.    Security. While it may not be 2002 anymore, security is still a top priority for successful CIOs. New threats, particularly in the realm of cyberterrorism, pose problems for your organization. Evaluating your organization's overall security strategy and integrating physical along with informational strategy are essential to keeping your organization safe from the kinds of threats.

 

Reduce Costs 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

Pillar Data Systems Blog: Pass the Morton's Salt

This post is taken from Mike Workman's recent blog post, Pass the Morton's Salt.

When I was quite a bit younger some really great folks at IBM gave me the opportunity to help start a Hard Disk Drive OEM business.  I was part of the Storage division in San Jose California. At the time we built proprietary, non-standard products with all custom mechanical and electrical parts.

The writing was on the wall, the future lay in using high volume, and hence lower cost parts. Not only did this amortize engineering costs (NRE), but tooling and test process costs could be amortized over a much larger volume as well. The idea was – use custom parts only where they provided a distinct competitive advantage. Then, build designs that could be sold into many products, not just one.

IBM wasn’t alone in this, the rest of the world was trying to gain leverage by producing standardized components as well. Seagate was building an empire out of providing 5.25” standard form factor drives to everyone, including the IBM PC (AT back then).  But IBM had invented the disk drive, and its leadership was furious about ceding the high volume low cost drives to the likes of Seagate, and Conner Peripherals. Besides, it was clear that before long, the mechanical advantages of smaller form factors and advancing technologies would obsolete the “big drives” that were sold two or four spindles to the refrigerator sized box.

The IBM AS400 group had the same idea: Build smaller drives with advanced IBM technology to sell to internal customers like the AS400 and IBM PC groups. While the AS400 came from the “custom” world, the IBM PC guys new that they needed best of breed cost in all their components, and the thought of being locked in to some over-transfer-priced HDD from another division was repugnant. The Rochester team made an “almost standard” product: Little things like non-standard mounting holes were rendering their drives incompatible for PCs inside or outside of IBM.

I was asked by “The Chairman” and a few San Jose execs to build an entrepreneurial program inside IBM – the goal of which was a) To build a standard form-factor and interface HDD, and b) Build one packed with enough technology like MR heads to allow even the high-end storage guys to incorporate it into a modular version of the product.  Unfortunately the IBM Rochester team was heading in a similar direction, so a political battle ensued in which after a squabble, I landed in Rochester, Minnesota. As my California friends said at the time “He really must have pissed someone off to be sent to Minnesota”. From Rochester (home of the Mayo clinic) I managed what I named Allicat – an enterprise class drive in reliability and performance that fit Industry standard electrical and mechanical specifications.  The “Alli” in Allicat came from the Alliance of San Jose and Rochester. At 2GB, 5400 RPM, SCSI and IPI-2 interfaces, the drive was the beginning of the OEM HDD storage team within IBM. We went from about $0 top-line revenue to about $4.6B in the next 11 years. 

Disk drives today are indeed labeled as a commodity. Lots of definitions of a commodity exist including simply something that is bought or sold. I maintain that when most of us think commodity, we think about a product that has minor differentiation against others that are adequate substitutes. Table salt for example: Nobody says “Please pass the Morton’s Table Salt”.  Instead, salt is salt, and rarely is anything but “Please pass the salt” heard at any table. Likewise, gold is gold, wheat is wheat, etc.  Differentiation of one commodity over another is usually at the fringes -- fringes which are desperately held on to by manufactures (But when it rains, this salt still pours!).

Moving up the food chain buyers of PCs and Servers that incorporate HDDs always make sure that their commodities include two or more sources. Same for muffin fans, chassis, cables and connectors.

What about storage arrays? Well the more complicated the system, and the smaller the volume requirements are for a system, the less easily it is commoditized. After all, the how many Golden Gate bridges are needed in the world and how standard is the interface between the bridge and the terra firma it sits on? So the truth is, while buyers try and push arrays toward the commodity spectrum, it is difficult to substitute one array for another at some level. Training, management, interoperability, application APIs are all different enough that one vendor is much easier than three, and disparate types of arrays at some level cost the buyer money by shear reason of their differences.

What are some of the consequences of commoditization in the storage business? Here are a few, I am sure that many of you can add to this list:

1. Disk will continue as a commodity.
2. SSD will become a commodity. Manufacturers will struggle valiantly but much like the HDD business, that large OEMs will drive toward standardization and multiple sources as volumes increase. One might argue that we are nearly there already, but firmware maturity is still disparate amongst manufacturers. 
3. The number of manufacturers of SSDs will grow for awhile, and eventually decline as margins force consolidation.
4. Flash memory used in SSDs will become a commodity. Today there are still some differences but there will be a convergence.
5. Plug-in Cache modules (PCIe based Flash Memory) will converge into a commodity. Right now many players are striving to differentiate themselves, but the pace will be fast and furious and largely decided by large volume OEM’s wins.
6. As SSDs reduce in price and increase in capacity, there will be larger and larger a substitution of SSDs for HDDs. 
7. A trend toward SSDs over HDDs will cause all storage arrays to be re-architected. Today’s arrays are not built properly for maximum utilization of the performance benefits of SSD. This will affect everybody in the business. Pillar’s advanced Axiom architecture is already under development. This will be fun.

Oh, and I like Minnesota, really. Sure it is cold, but that wasn’t the real problem. Rather, it was how long it was cold. And thank goodness for the commoditization of salt, because they use a heck of a lot of it.

- Mike Workman, Chairman & CEO, Pillar Data Systems

 

3 Ways to Decrease IT Energy Spend

Companies aren’t just going green for the sake of the planet, the fact of the matter is that many green initiatives actually save companies money. Conserving energy in a data center or IT server room, for example, will not only help the environment, it will also help with operating costs.

Still, many IT directors, managers and CIOs are at a loss of how exactly they can go about decreasing IT energy spending. Fortunately, there are some easy steps you can take to get started cutting the energy costs of your IT department.

#1: Consolidation
Data center consolidation or server consolidation will save you serious amounts of capital in terms of equipment costs. In addition, fewer pieces of hardware will require less electricity. Consolidation makes good business sense.

The trick is, however, to make sure that consolidation makes good organizational sense. If consolidation reduces service levels to the point where they impact production, the money you’re saving on energy spending is going to be immediately lost several times over. A thorough consolidation study should be able to identify areas where consolidation is possible and where it will have minimal performace and production impact.

#2: Service Providers
Most IT departments would benefit from offloading one or more IT tasks to a service provider. Whether it’s a specialized application that can be run in a SaaS mode, or whether it’s another scenario, outsourcing part of the IT function sometimes makes good business sense.

Using a service provider has the advantage over an in-house solution in that you don’t have to lay out capital expenditures for equipment, and you don’t have to provide support or maintenance. Additionally, using a service provider insures that you’ve got a true expert in the field supporting your IT function, and you don’t have to worry about training in-house personnel that are already probably spread too thin.

Service provider utilization also reduces your energy spending. If the servers and/or other infrastructure are off site, you don’t have to power them. The costs for their power are wrapped up in your service agreement.

#3: Efficient Cooling Systems
One of the most expensive components, in terms of energy spending in IT, is the cost of cooling your technology. A data center can have significant cooling requirements, and therefore create a serious power draw.

There have been amazing advances in the area of cooling systems in recent years. For example, one data center for a Fortune 500 company uses a fan intake system that draws air in from the outside, through the data center and back out. As temps rise in the data center, the fans kick in and provide the kind of cooling the systems need. In that particular case study, the new cooling system has decreased overall cooling energy costs by six percent, which is a significant savings in terms of dollars.

Ultimately, decreasing your IT energy spending requires some solid research and examination of your current situation, creative thinking and thoughtful implementations.

White Paper: The Modern Virtualized Data Center

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