Posted by Crystal Nichols on Sun, Mar 28, 2010 @ 06:47 AM
Energy management is, in the most basic sense, the way you save energy in your business. It's the process of monitoring, controlling and conserving energy across your IT infrastructure, and ultimately across your entire organization. Energy management can save you big bucks in ongoing power costs.
Still, any successful energy management process has to start somewhere. Here are the steps involved in getting a handle on energy management for your organziation:
1. The first thing you need to do is measure. You need to be able to meter your energy consumption and collect some serious data. The more data you can collect, the better of you'll be. Ideally, you can implement an interval metering system. This kind of a system will automatically record your energy consumption at short intervals, helping you to track how and when your organization is using the most power. IT will help you discover patterns of use, and patterns of waste.
2. Next, you'll need to identify and quantify ways to save energy. There are a number of ways you can save energy, many of which don't require much of a capital outlay. Simple things like utilizing an existing advanced environmental control system can greatly reduce power. Even simple behavior and cultural steps – like getting staff to turn off equipment when the day is over – can help with energy management.
3. Once you've identified those opportunities, you need to implement them. In some cases, this means upgrading equipment or insulation. In other cases, it means getting buy-in from upper management to make procedural or organizational changes. In many ways, energy mangement is more about budget management and people management than it is about energy.
4. After you've made changes, you need to track them. You need to see how effective your changes have (or have not) been. Here again, like at the outset, you're going to be collecting lots of data. In some cases, you may even need to collect data in order to justify purchases and cost savings. If you have made changes to control equipment, you should regularly check back that everything is working in the way it ought to be. In some cases, losing power can cause a system to reset to factory, and you might miss it if you're not checking on it regularly.
5. Recognize that this is an ongoing process. You're going to need to reevaluate your energy consuption from time to time. It's normal for an unwatched building, for example, to become less effecient as time goes on. While energy management isn't something that you need to address on a weekly basis, you should nevertheless keep it on your radar and make energy monitoring and tracking a normal part of your maintenance and service activities.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Mar 26, 2010 @ 06:49 AM
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Mar 24, 2010 @ 06:56 AM
At the core of any good technology implementation is a strong project manager or a strong project management team. The fact of the matter is that it’s the people working a project, for the most part, which will determine whether the project succeeds and whether it does so in a cost-effective way.
And that’s where it really matters, too: the cost of a project. With effective project management techniques, you can make sure that your project come in under budget and ahead of their deadline.
Here are five ways to use project management to reduce the costs of your project:
1. Correctly identify costs in the planning phase. The planning process is, in many ways, based on guesswork. You’re making a bet that your project implementation team will be able to get your project done the way you want it done and at a certain cost. Accurately identifying costs is key to avoiding unexpected items down the road as the project gets underway. You need to include the scope of work baseline, the project schedule, your human resource plan, a risk assessment and environmental factors all in your budget process, too.
2. Utilize in-house expertise appropriately and effectively. Now, some project managers wind up trying to turn in-house personnel into experts in fields they really aren’t that knowledgeable in. Furthermore, it’s often an inefficient use of your company’s resources to use in-house personnel when you can hire the work out. For example, if you’re using your network engineering team to crimp cable, you’re going to save money on the project but cost the company in other ways.
3. Effectively manage your human resources. Find ways to make sure that your project team and anyone working on your project are working efficiently. Audit hours, and be ready for things like planned vacations and other contingencies. Few things will cost you more than having to hire in an expert at the last minute because one of your key personnel has had her honeymoon on the calendar or six months.
4. Constantly audit. Know where you’re at, in terms of your budget, at all times. Make sure you’re not over on costs, and if you are make sure that those who need to know about it do. If you need to have the project budget revised, do it sooner rather than later.
5. Know how to handle your vendors. If a vendor isn’t cutting it, keep on them. If a vendor finds a cost overrun for a situation that should really have been (or even was) suggested during the budget process, put the necessary pressure on the vendor to meet your needs as promised for the price as promised. When that’s not possible, make sure that you’re still getting the best value, and that the vendor isn’t passing along the costs of last-minute necessities to you.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Mar 22, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
Your business can’t go on if your IT department can’t go on. You need to be ready to provide continuous access to data services as soon after a disaster as needed by critical business units. If that’s going to happen – if your company is going to survive a major disaster – there are some specific priorities you need to follow.
Here are the top 5 areas your IT department must focus on in order to recover from a disaster and provide business continuity:
1. IT disaster recovery must be informed by and inform the overall business continuity plan of your company. This means dialogue. You need to have key business units identify which resources are mission critical. From there, you can allocate specific planning and disaster preparation activities, based on the idea of providing services as rapidly as possible after a disaster. Likewise, IT needs to be able to give the other business units a reasonable estimate of how long it will take to restore services and under what circumstances they will be restored.
2. IT disaster recovery must be explicit in its recovery point objectives and recovery timeframe objectives. For some firms, that might mean zero data loss. For others, it may be start of business or end of the previous business day. For less mission-critical applications, it might mean period ending, or a weekly or monthly backup. The same holds true for how long it will take to get back up and running. The plan needs to provide the other business units with a reliable estimate of how long it’s going to take before they can be back in business.
3. IT disaster recovery plans must detail specific activities needed to restore business critical IT services. This includes step-by-step methodology for switching over to a failsafe data center, for example, or detailed instructions on how to restore from backup. While there’s some disagreement as to what level of detail is necessary, the most effective IT disaster recovery plans will have enough detail that even someone not entirely familiar with the particular environment could accomplish the tasks.
4. IT disaster recovery plans must include a communications structure. It’s going to be necessary for IT personnel to communicate with one another, as well as with key individuals in various business units across the enterprise. The specific lines of communication should be defined within the disaster recovery plan.
5. IT disaster recovery plans should include a detailed description of the specific roles and responsibilities of anyone involved in the recovery process. That way, anyone that is assigned to a specific role within the recovery process team will have a clear expectation. If at all possible, the plan should refer to position titles rather than names, in order to make the disaster recovery plan workable beyond the confines of the immediate future.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Mar 19, 2010 @ 08:30 AM
Storage management, like so many other areas of technology, is changing on an almost daily basis. Those involved in storage management, from the end-user support specialist up through the CIO, need to have a handle on what’s going on so that they can provide the best possible results to their business.
Here are 5 of the most significant storage management trends you should be familiar with:
Life Cycle Management
Information life cycle management is the process of actively managing your data from the time that it’s created all the way through the process until it’s not ever needed. Life cycle management is one of the most effective ways to reduce your overall storage costs while making better use of your resources. You can classify your company’s data according to how business critical it is and then put that data on the most reliable (and most expensive) storage. Less important data can then be kept on less expensive storage. Life cycle management lets you create multiple tiers of priority, and ultimately reduce infrastructure costs.
Consolidation/Virtualization
For the past few years, virtualization has been at the center of just about any discussion of data management, and that trend continues. By reducing the number of servers, as well as the kind of servers you have on site will help reduce the complexities involved in storage management. Virtualization also lets you place data in locations that are most conducive to the critical performance needs of the enterprise.
Capacity Planning
Constant monitoring of your storage utilization is key to being able to predict and plan what your storage needs will be in the future. Capacity planning involves more than just volume size; it includes things like bandwidth and CPU utilization, as well.
Centralization
Here’s another trend that’s been hot for several years, and that continues today. By having a centralized team manage your storage requirements, you wind up with fewer overall hassles as well as the ability to aggregate your available capacity into usable and managed pools.
Resource Management
SRM is finally catching up with us. SRM is more than just tracking and monitoring backup data, however. It’s all about taking all of your data-related needs and managing them from the time the data is generated through the entire lifecycle.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Mar 15, 2010 @ 09:50 AM
Data center automation is one of the most prevalent areas today when it comes to IT spending. In fact, data center automation is included in about 50 percent of all spending plans in IT organzations in the United States. This puts data center automation firmly in the top 10 priorities for IT spending.
Why is automation becoming such a priority? To be sure, automation makes some big promises. Automation is said to not only improve service levels, but to free up resources that can be then used to invest in data center infrastructure.
In fact, data center automation is becoming a necessity. When you combine low cost servers, tends toward consolidation and the increasing demands of operations, automation is the last best hope for reigning in the chaos that comes with a data center. In addition, virtualization is one of the key components of being an adaptive and flexible enterprise. Virtualization is almost necessary if service oriented architecture and virtualization are to be fully and effeciently implemented.
Still, data center automation is a rather broad category. Originally, data center automation applications were simply provisioning tools used for server management. Today, data center management is a much broader area. It brings in server administration, maintenance of applications, management for stoage and more. It's no surprise, then, that adoption of data center automation is growing, when you look at all of the various aspects it includes.
There are data center automation products available from many well-known and respected vendors in the IT field. Computer Associates offers data center automation solutions, as does HP. While some of these solutions tend to be a bit proprietary and focused on a particular vendor's product, most have applicaitons outside of that narrow focus. Indeed, if a product can't stretch into multiple areas it becomes much less useful, at least to a heterogeneous environment.
Data center automation must be personalized and customized, if it is to be effective. Some automation efforts won't make sense in some data centers. For example, virtualization is not always a good option for every application, or even for every organization.
Rather than throwing money randomly into the data center automation bucket, an organization needs to do some real legwork. They need to know what options are available to them, but more importantly they need to be able to decide what options are most useful for their organization.
In order to realize the benefits of data center automation, the project team has to focus efforts where they'll bring the biggest payback. Data center automation efforts are only as good as the process used to implement them.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 @ 06:27 AM
Storage management is, in many ways, at the heart of many businesses. Your company needs its data, and it needs to be able to access that data quickly and utilize it for its intended purposes. Part of making sure that this happens is keeping on top of your storage performance management.
There are plenty of storage performance management solutions available on the market. Unfortunately, storage performance management isn’t an inexpensive investment. You’re going to have to shell out some money, and it’s not always money that your department has.
When you need storage performance management solutions but are on a budget, here are several principles you should keep in mind:
• Make sure the solution integrates with your environment. You should look for a single solution that will handle your storage performance needs from one end of the enterprise to the other. If you have to piecemeal your solutions, you’re going to incur much more severe costs in the long term. Make sure the solution can handle your Unix servers, as well as your Exchange servers.
• Prioritize desired features. You might want to have automated network discovery, but some solutions don’t offer effective discovery. Pick and choose the features that you know you’re going to need, and accept the fact that you’re going to have to deal with some less functionality than what you were hoping for.
• Stay focused on business priorities. Your storage performance solution needs to be able to give you the tools you need in order to provide availability to your end users that need it most. If you can’t allocate and reallocate resources in an effective way, the storage management application just won’t do.
• Be realistic. If you can’t afford to implement a solution, you may need to go back to the well. Build a business case and take it to upper management. Be sure to outline exactly what benefits a good storage performance management solution can provide to your business. Express those benefits in business terms, and demonstrate the long-term savings provided by the efficiency that storage performance management will bring.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Mar 10, 2010 @ 06:40 AM
Data center costs are higher than ever, despite the best efforts of data center managers and IT executives to make changes to the contrary. From greening the data center to offloading certain applications and services to a cloud environment, data center administrators are doing what they can to control costs. While not every effort meets with success, to ignore these steps means even more severely increased costs for the data
Here are 5 of the top ways to reduce your data center costs:
1. Energy reduction. Greening the data center is the first step in reducing your data center costs. The thing is that you need to be smart about the kind of greening you do. Depending on the location of the data center, for example, installing solar panels might not do much good. You may be better off, especially in Northern climates, to install more advanced cooling technology that makes use of the outside air, rather than something like solar panels. The key here is to get the most bang for your greening buck.
2. Virtualization. Virtualization is a great way to free up floor space at your data center. You reduce your power consumption (see #1 above) and you also reduce your ongoing operational costs of keeping some of your servers in production. Virtualization just makes sense in the data center. The key is to make sure that you’re really getting a benefit from virtualization, and that you can maintain the same kinds of performance levels with virtualization that you had prior to the virtualization process.
3. Cloud computing. Like virtualization, utilizing the cloud will reduce the footprint of your data center as well as power consumption. You’ll get similar benefits from cloud computing that you’ll get from virtualization, but you also incur the ongoing service costs as well. Here again, you need to do a cost analysis to make sure you’re really saving money.
4. Rationalize your hardware. Take out systems that are old and underutilized and move their workload to more efficient systems. You can reduce your server count by anywhere from five to 20 percent just by doing this.
5. Consolidate sites. If you have multiple data center sites, you can consolidate them into a smaller number of larger sites. This will, in the long term, provide you with significant savings both in terms of facilities and in terms of increased opportunity for things like virtualization.
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Click here to download the IDC white paper.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Mar 08, 2010 @ 06:20 AM
One of the most telling aspects of your business is how it does in a crisis. A business that’s ready for disaster and prepared to move forward in spite of difficulties is one that investors can bank on, and it’s one that’s likely to be around for decades to come.
When it comes to IT, there’s no area that’s more in need of disaster recovery and business continuity planning than the data center. The data center is in many ways the conduit through which data flow in your company. Plug the conduit and you’ve got a real problem. Customers can’t get the information they need, bills won’t get paid and, eventually, the whole thing will shut down.
So, how do you prepare for a disaster with your data center? And, how do you insure that, if disaster strikes, you’ll be able to offer the same services that you offer your business today?
It’s not an easy task, but there are some specific areas that you can think about starting with:
• Identify the business units that your data center supports, as well as the operational objectives that are related to each business units.
• Identify the assets in your data center, inventory them, and rank them based on how critical they are to the business objectives you support.
• Identify threats that could pose a risk to your critical assets. Try to keep these in general terms. Rather than saying “fire,” say “catastrophic physical damage” which could include fire but also other causes such as explosions or earthquakes.
• Identify vulnerabilities to your critical assets. There may be specific weaknesses already when it comes to some of your most business-critical assets.
• Prioritize your risks. Focus your efforts on identifying credible disaster threats combined with vulnerabilities you already know exist.
• Create strategies that will reduce the possibility of disaster while still giving you a decent Return On Investment.
These kinds of steps don’t come lightly. You need to have someone skilled in risk assessment working with you in this process. In addition, you need the technical expertise of someone who’s familiar with business continuity and disaster recovery for your specific technological needs.
Perhaps more important than all of that, however, is getting buy-in. You need buy-in from your IT staff if they’re going to follow through and do the things that need to be done to put your business continuity plan in place. You’ll need buy-in from upper management if you’re going to get the kind of funding you need to create business continuity solutions, and you’ll need the authority of their support to make the kids of structural and organizational changes that are often an integral part of the risk assessment and disaster recovery planning processes.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 06:18 AM
Virtualization is one of the hottest trends in IT, and for good reason. Virtualization can help save your organization plenty of money, as well as reduce your overall ongoing staffing, support and maintenance needs.
Still, virtualization isn't a universal remedy. There are several things virtualization can't do for your organization, and understanding the limitations of virtualization is as important as understanding the benefits.
Here are some of the biggest virtualization myths:
1. Virtual machines have higher availablility and reliability. This is one of the "features" of virtualization that vendors often talk about. They point out how applications can easily be restarted during an outage, for example. Unfortunately, virtualization also creates a single point of failure in the one physical machine. Complement your virtualization with orchestration management, however, and you can actually wind up increasing both availability and reliability.
2. Virtualization will allow applications to perform exactly as they did before. The fact of the matter is that performance is likely to degrade. The degree to which it degrades depends on the physical hardware of the server, as well as the rest of the server environment. In many cases, the degredation will be so small as to be irrelevant, however.
3. Virtualization always saves money. To be sure, most virtualization implementations will reduce the total cost of ownership. However, it's important to recognize that some of the potential savings have to do with staffing levels. If you virtualize a great deal of your environment but still wind up having to staff the same number of admins or engineers, or if you're not willing to downsize some, you're going to wind up paying more in the long run.
4. Virtualization is important for SOA. Some SOA applications do provide good prospects for virtual machines. The application services can be encapsulated, and then hosted on as many machines as the organzation needs. Still, there are many other factors as to whether virtualization will perform for SOA, including communications architecture, application design and host configuration.
5. Virtualization is more secure. In some ways, virtualization makes security resposne more effecient. If a single virtual machine is breached, then that machine can be stopped and reloaded without impacting other virtual machines. Still, the virtual machine technological layer may or may not be secure in and of itself, and virtual machines that have been compromised could have also corrupted shared data.
6. Any organization can be ready for virtualization. There are many issues that have to be addressed before virtualization can be considered, such as managment team issues, development issues and process issues. This is to say nothing of the potential human impact of virtualization, and the political fallout it could cause in a larger environment. A rush to virtualize can cause catastrophic damage in other areas.
7. Virtualization doesn't require specialized knowledge. Regardless of what proponents might say, adding an entirely new layer of software and migrating applicaitons from individual servers to a single larger machine takes some knowledge, both in terms of the virtualization technology and in the application area.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Mar 03, 2010 @ 06:24 AM
Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing trends in data center technology. Companies are able to offload much of their server and networking load to the cloud, thereby reducing their in-house technology infrastructure. This provides a higher degree of expertise, service and reliability than what most companies are able to create on their own. Cloud computing is a win-win for most businesses, at least in terms of the actual service that it provides to the business.
There's another way in which cloud computing is a boon, however. Cloud computing can actually save you significant amounts of money when it comes to your data center, both in terms of capital expenditures and in operations costs.
Less Hardware Means Less Capital Outlay
When you offload services and applications to the cloud, you reduce the amount of hardware you have on site at your data center. You cut down on the sheer number of servers present. This saves you, first of all, the significant amounts of capital involved in getting those servers on site and operational at your data center. You don't have to buy new hardware just to keep pace with business growth or application changes - the cloud paces itself with those needs.
Reduced Support Costs
Yes, you need to pay monthly service fees for cloud computing solutions. but you also reduce your ongoing maintenance costs and service contracts. In this way, your operating budget is reduced. While it’s not going to be reduced so much as to make the cloud computing solution a zero-sum game, the savings will nevertheless be significant.
We’ll lump training and personnel costs in here, as well. Because you don’t need to maintain servers and because you don’t have to worry about things like patching, a cloud computing solution is much less expensive than an in-house solution. You can let your in-house experts focus on what they’re really good at, and let your service provider worry about what’s going on in the cloud.
Don’t Underestimate Power Savings
Data centers – even the greenest of them – use a heck of a lot of power. They are huge buildings that have sometimes hundreds or even thousands of servers. They require not only power to operate the servers, but they require cooling and other environmental controls. For every server you place in a data center, you need that much more cooling capacity. Cloud computing offloads some of your energy costs by reducing the number of servers you need to have at your data center. Even installing solar panels, ultimately, won’t give you the kind of energy boost that you can get just by not having as much in the way of servers sucking juice out of the grid.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Mar 01, 2010 @ 06:27 AM
As any project manager can tell you, some projects hang by a thread. Knock just one element out of sync, and the entire thing can come tumbling down like a house of cards. Rather than spend your time figuring out how to recover from a disaster, here are some of the biggest pitfalls you should avoid in the first place:
1. Forgetting to pay attention to the small details. While it might seem relatively unimportant, spelling the name of your client’s company in project updates for weeks on end is a serious black mark against you. Minor oversights can cause significant but unnecessary friction. Even the most minor details of a project process – such as backing up the data servers that store project plans or other relevant information – can cause huge issues.
2. Missing scheduled milestones. For a project to be successful, you and your project team must hit certain deadlines. It isn’t always something external, like a supply chain issue either. Sometimes, it can be as simple as forgetting that a crucial team member is on vacation during a critical week.
3. Faking it. If you don’t know the answer to a question, don’t pretend you do. You might wind up working overtime just to keep up with the project. In addition, you can wind up with serious cost overruns just because you weren’t knowlegable enough to answer a question accurately. You need to admit your own limitations before they wind up totally breaking down your project. Ask for help if you need it, but never make a guess if you can help it.
4. Accepting the blame for someone else’s mistakes. Carrying someone else’s black mark is never a good thing. Just like you need to own up to your own problems or limitations, don’t allow someone else to get away with pushing the blame off on you.
5. Underestimating people issues. The fact of the matter is that some teams are forced to work together in spite of their own protestations. Factions can develop, as well. In some cases, it’s just a matter of “Us vs. Them“ between contractors and employees, or between several contractors. Watch out for tension across the team, and be prepared to address people issues firmly and effectively.
6. Ignoring the end user. Whether it’s the development of a customized application or whether it’s building a new facility, you need to keep the lines of communication open with the end user. Otherwise, you’ll wind up undoing all sorts of work on your project. Get the stakeholders and users involved with the process.
7. Not learning from mistakes. No, the world of project management is, in general, not very tolerant of mistakes. However, having a project fail due to carelessness is a vastly different proposition than having a proect fail while you were doing your best. If you can learn from your mistakes at every stage of the game and on every project, and apply those lessons to future projects, you’ll be light years ahead.
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