Posted by Crystal Nichols on Sun, May 24, 2009 @ 09:17
I recently came across some very interesting statistics regarding females in engineering. According to The National Engineers Week Foundation only 20% of students in U.S. undergraduate engineering programs are women. A study done at Purdue showed that out of the 6,400 engineering majors, only 1,275 were women (20%). This number rose from 18% between 1994 to 1998; however, there has been no change since 1998.
Since I have a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (and still remember my college days), these figures came as no big surprise. I was about to start reading another article when it hit me...why aren't more women pursuing careers in engineering and technology?
The final conclusion of the Purdue study indicates that there is no single silver bullet to explain the lack of female engineering majors. However they also concluded that the image of engineering and technology careers conflicts with the goals of most young women. What is this goal you ask? Simple, they want to "help people" or "make a difference." A noble idea no doubt, however are we engineers nothing more than cold, calculating destroyers of the world? More about that later.
So what exactly do women want (I'm only discussing careers here)? The Association of American Colleges say that 47.8% of first year medical students were women. This statistic directly attacks the old idea that women are not good at technology. However according to the AAC women need their future careers to have some "social relevance" more so than men.
Returning to my previous point about the image of engineers in society, why can't we make a difference? Of course we do, we are just far more subtle. For example to all the difference-making ladies entering the medical field, where do you think all those x-ray images are stored? When a hospital patient needs urgent attention, how are all the doctors and nurses notified in real time without human intervention?
Well I'm sure you see what I'm getting at, but it seems that it is not so obvious to everyone. It seems to me that people (mostly women) see technology as not just impersonal, but to some extent evil. To that I say, technology is not sentient (not yet anyway) and it is what we make it. So while it pollutes and destroys, the main focus of virtually any new high-tech invention is to improve quality of life. Perhaps technology (and engineers) needs a better publicist or perhaps the field just needs more ladies in order to make it seem warmer and more personable.
So what is being done today to change the demographics of engineering and high-tech careers? The first thing that I can think of are the IBM commercials which frequent my favorite TV programs. I'm sure you know the ones...they talk about reducing pollution by changing traffic patterns, building smart cities and becoming IBMers. Not a bad start, however according to Kristen Lamoreaux the founder of SIM Women (Society for Information Management) it will take much more than that. She states that there aren't enough female success stories in the IT industry for women to relate to and that successful women should do more to share their stories with the younger generation. Lamoreaux also states that women in IT have not yet found their "Hannah Montana" that speaks to this younger generation.
For now it seems that the female demographic in engineering is not going to increase, however at least engineering is starting to be talked about in the context of humanity and society.
For more information, go to www.Unitiv.com.
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Posted by Shawn McGee on Thu, May 21, 2009 @ 04:39
It's official, the GPL license is strong and is standing up in courts. Cisco finally came to terms with it and settled with the Free Software Foundation, FSF because of the GPL code it was using in its Linksys routers.
Verizon and Cisco have both settled with the FSF in the past year. It does seem the days that a company would steal open source code, sell it as their own product have now past.
The question is, what does this mean for us?
Before we answer that, let's see the differences between open source and proprietary software.
With proprietary software, you cannot modify it, you cannot copy it, and many times you do not own it, you are only leasing the rights to use the software as the owner of the software wants you to.
You cannot modify it and cannot use the code in it in your own application even if it is to make the original product better for your needs. Software companies place built in restrictions in their software and collect information about its users.
Open Source let's you do with it whatever you want as long as you give credit appropriately and share your work with others.
Linux, MySQL, audacity, blender, firefox, thunderbird, gimp, and openoffice are just a few of the examples of open source software which are as well known as the proprietary software they compete against for users.
The first thing it means to us is that open Source is safe and not going to go away. It's crucial to understand open source and its business model whether you are an end user of the software or a competitor.
The second item to learn is that people are becoming more mature in which costs they want to pay for software. Many more users are able to make software decisions based upon initial software cost, maintenance of the software, infrastructure to support the software, freedom within the software, privacy, and other factors that go into system costs.
This in turn will make the creators of proprietary software more aware of what customers want and make software their software fit the needs of the customer. At the same time open source software will be doing the same thing.
The end result is that everyone will benefit from a strong open source community that can stand on its own and defend itself.
For more information, please visit www.unitiv.com.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Thu, May 21, 2009 @ 11:55 AM
In today’s economy, more and more companies have to learn how to implement one of the oldest sayings in the book, “Do MORE with LESS”.
Generally no department is safe from this philosophy, especially the IT Department and the internal Network Infrastructure. For many IT Directors this leaves a dismal puzzle of questions that are hard to answer. Hardware dies…Software malfunctions. How does one continue to provide quality support for the everyday business operations and accomplish this on a reduced budget?
The potential for errors and failures can tend to leave many executives stressed and suffer from a long string of sleepless nights. Fortunately the IT industry as a whole, has developed different strategies and solutions that, when implemented properly, can lower the overall cost of operations and greatly reduce the amount of stress on the IT Department. Virtualization solutions are at the forefront of cutting edge technology, that are more than able to achieve the goal of doing more with less. VMWare, Citrix, and even Microsoft have stepped up to the plate in these tough economic times with viable, cost saving solutions.
Virtualization of a server farm is one of the best cost saving advantages that companies need to take seriously into consideration. In most cases, server farms using 100 plus servers can reduce down to a dozen systems, without impacting network performance, reliability and overall speed.
A non-intrusive software tool can be installed and collect network utilization data, which delivers a customized detailed report and recommendations on potential virtualization options. Even virtualizing your Exchange can match or exceed your native performance while reducing your infrastructure footprint. By reducing your foot print, you are lowering your overall annual hardware, software, and support costs. In most cases, these annual costs are reduced by 50% or greater!
Additional advantages to virtualization are:
- Consolidation of Server Databases
- Applications will have a more Dynamic Infrastructure
- Minimizes Infrastructure costs
- Guarantees Application QOS and Accelerates Application Delivery
- High availability and Failover Redundancy
Many organizations are already implementing or have implemented virtual solutions and in turn have already begun to see the cost saving advantages. However, with version updates and software changes, many organizations are unaware of additional savings that can be utilized with the existing virtualization vendor they selected. It is our job as trusted solution advisors, to educate our clients about these savings available to them. It is not every day our customers are approached by a company that wants to help them SAVE more money, rather than SPEND more money.
For more information, please visit www.unitiv.com.
Posted by Mike Magee on Thu, May 21, 2009 @ 11:13 AM
Before I read anything about cloud computing, I thought it might be similar to grid computing. Grid computing was where IT took many computers, tied them together, and made them work together to solve a problem.
The second thought I had was maybe it is the DMZ. The DMZ is where companies place systems outside their network but not on the internet. It allows companies to test applications and run programs without affecting company.
Lastly, I thought it was some sort of ungoverned out of control Internet mess. I am sure others will disagree and say the cloud computing is well on its way to solving many corporate computing problems. I wish I could say yes. But, it is not true.
Again, this is what I thought before I did any research at all. I thought it was important not to read much about this new technology frontier because that would corrupt my own genius and ability to think differently. I know, I am nuts.
Still not researching any, I came to the conclusion that cloud computing is still unsafe, unreliable, and just plain scary. Why would any corporation wish to throw their important business applications up into a cloud and let others see it and possibly take data? I heard stories where some companies were placing selective applications on the cloud and crunching specific data. Isn't that grid computing? It could be.
Then, I started to see what was different. The cloud was allowing the customer to expand out the application across many servers to accomplish the task quickly. The application would scale across virtual machines to meet the needs of the application. In return for being provided this service the customer would pay the cloud for its use. I thought to myself, interesting! Pay as you go computing.
OK, how does that work? Who decides who pays what?
These questions about who should pay is key to cloud computing. There are businesses offering cloud computing and charging for it. That is great but what about......? There were too many questions to ask and answer. Therefore, before we ever need to approach those questions we need to determine whether anybody should really use cloud computing. My thought is not yet! Or at least not the cloud.
Why jump into something with so many questions with answers that bring up more questions. So I thought to myself, what would be the next best thing. How about internal cloud computing. I call it a Green House.
Why deal with any of those cloud computing issues if until you solve the basic challenges first. Why internal cloud computing first? The main reason is control. Information Technology is full of control freaks. Really, to be an IT manager you have to be. When things go wrong you can't point at others, especially to the Cloud.
You would think that shifting the responsibility to the cloud would be appealing. Well it is, but the lack of control over all the service level agreements will make this appealing option very unappealing when applications start failing and the cloud starts to rain on you.
The end users in the corporation will not accept the idea that it is the cloud slowing down the application or it is the cloud that lost their data. You can see where this is going.
Where Green House computing saves the day is by providing all the benefits of the cloud computing without the unreliable, unsecured scary stuff. The IT manager can control the vendor SLA's and provide a fee structure to the end user. With this knowledge the IT Manager can control the outcome and any issues can be addressed directly.
If the idea of going to the cloud is interesting to you but you can see the possibility rainy days. Than consider using the Green House for your first internal cloud computing solution.
Please feel free to reach out to me by leaving a comment and I will share what I have learned since researching all the possible solutions available for internal cloud computing.
For more information, go to www.Unitiv.com.
Posted by Shawn McGee on Wed, May 20, 2009 @ 11:49
This is a followup to a previous post of mine. To summarize this post, I referenced a friend of mine who is improving his up time by using older technologies. I mentioned how I believed this was short-sighted.
John made three counter points to my posting.
"IT governance policies can often be created to satisfy an audit or business need, but not actually reflect anything actually performed. Or worse, the Byzantine processes are actually followed resulting in ridiculous turnaround times for simple, safe, and routine tasks."
I do not want to spend much time with John's first point. He works for a company who thought that the best way to create controls was using the accounting and finance arms of the companies. Companies who have done this have given their companies a sword of Damocles, which will bring down the IT to business relationship. I do not believe this is typical of most companies.
His next two points are very closely related.
"Most IT professionals in the workforce don't have a solid understanding of the technologies or systems with which they work...management adds fuel to the fire by purchasing an ever increasing number of easy-to-use products designed to address such issues that -if they had skilled people- wouldn't be issues in the first place."
"I think there are a lot of IT shops that own more than enough hardware and software tools to support their business, but the real bottleneck for such shops is how their staff deploy and manage what they already own"
John's second point is an IT centric point of view which is only part of the equation. Their are two opposing points of view at work:
- The IT point of view. If you want 'X' I can give you that if you give me 'a', 'b', and 'c'.
- The business point of view. I either need to grow the business or make the current business more efficient to meet stakeholder demands.
This has brought us to the bane of IT purchasing, ROI purchases. I can't do anything unless I can show a Return On Investment. This is a direct violation of the 'Premature Optimization Rule.' There is no process running in any business that cannot grow the bottom line if it were done better. By only looking to save money on current needs, you are waving the red flag at making the business better. (PS - If you want to challenge me on this, drop me a line.)
This means IT has gotten to a point where they are trying to use what they have most efficiently instead of trying to make the outcome the best for the business while new technologies coming into the business are only trying to make the processes more efficient instead of improving them.
John's third point emphasizes this thinking. Management sees an opportunity to make some tasks more inexpensive. This includes personnel as well as technology and processes. This is to say that businesses are wrong here. It is very difficult to make business cases for hiring the best available talent. Unless you can grow an aspect of a business, management is forced to find junior people to take over tasks to keep stakeholders satisfied.
I'm going to follow this with an example of a current technology, Cloud Computing, which can address John's needs which he is not in a position to consider.
For more information, go to www.Unitiv.com.
Posted by Shawn McGee on Wed, May 20, 2009 @ 05:00
When I start writing an article, I spend some time researching the topics. This past week, I wrote down a few topics I wanted to write about and found out that there are articles out there already which are well written.
First here's a great article about 10 reasons companies would not want to move to an External Cloud. But here is a better article which took the tact I was going to take for me blog idea. In short I believe regulatory issues will stop many large companies, and foreign companies will not be allowed to use US based clouds (due to local laws) because of the Patriot Act. When you combine this with unknown costs and the fact IT is working for most companies, External Clouds face an uphill battle.
Next, here's an article debunking people who say that Cloud computing is the same Data Center Management with a catchier name.
I recently went to a Gartner presentation and though I didn't learn anything new, I did find some people who were talking with customers and clouds regularly. Here's a good example of up to date knowledge from them. Four myths of Cloud Computing. That would have been a good idea.
Finally, I decided I would write an article on why Utility Computing and Cloud computing were different. You guessed it, I found a great article here.
Well, there was one article I did not find, but the topic wasn't very long (which is why you got a bunch of links to start off with). I will use information from the above links, so all your clicking will be worthwhile
Why Software as a Service is not true Cloud Computing.
First Grid Computing is where a small number of requesters make a large number of requests to allocate computing power. This isn't too far removed from the old batch job processing we ran on servers in the late 80's and early 90's.
Cloud Computing is where a large number or requesters make a large number of requests to allocate computing power. This is where you have real time access to computing power and the notion of peak access does not exist.
While Software as a Service certainly does have a large number of requesters of computing power, they do have the concept of peak usage times and the current SaaS 'Clouds' cannot guarantee real time availability unless more money is spent.
What this leads us to is that larger customers will hoard the peak computing assets and smaller customers no longer have access to on demand computing power which is the entire reason they would use the cloud.
Think twice if you want to use Software as a Service for your Cloud Computing needs. If you want more information about Infrastructure as a Service, please drop me a line.
For more information, please visit www.unitiv.com.
Posted by Shawn McGee on Wed, May 20, 2009 @ 12:59
After having a conversation with a IT Executive, John, about my premature optimization post, I was encouraged to write a second post answering his very valid points. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about how Cloud Computing could solve some of his primary dilemmas.
As an aside, I could have used Sun's T2 architecture or Amber Road technology or HDS' Storage Virtualization technology. However, I wanted to pick something on the very leading edge with Cloud Computing. This is a technology that John likes to talk with me quite a bit about, but has zero intention of even considering it in house.
John's assertion is that he has enough technology in house already and he needs to make it run better and to get people to use it effectively.
I submit that he is throwing good resources after bad.
This is the first part of my argument - If a technology is not being properly adopted by the people who were designed to be the users of the technology, then the technology was a bad purchase. There are a lot of reasons for this: insufficient information ahead of time, a change in the business, a change in the environment (like economic conditions), a change in the user base, or a change in technology. However, spending more money on resources to make the technology work will not turn it into a good purchase.
The second part of the argument - The resources being used to try and save a bad purchase could be directed towards something that will improve the bottom line.
What's remarkable is there are new technologies that solve both of these issues. The primary technology is actually a group of technologies we refer to as Cloud Computing.
Cloud computing is essentially virtualization of all IT resources. All the resources exist in a cloud that people can draw upon as needed.
From John's perspective this is too nebulous. He has to answer specific questions about uptime, security, availability, and response. However, Cloud Computing has a response back and it's called an Internal Cloud. At Unitiv, we are developing a Green House, which is an Internal Cloud in which to grow your applications.
If he were to deploy a Green House, he would not have to worry about each server's uptime anymore. Cloud Computing has built in fault tolerance and load balancing. He could be optimizing his cloud and then not worry about each application.
In the Green House, his response time would be easier to control. He could shift his virtual resources around without taking systems or applications down. He could put some applications in Tier 1 systems and other in Tier 2 systems. He could divide up his resources based on his SLAs, not on his equipment.
Best of all, since it is internal to his network, his current infrastructure security and application security will stay as is. He won't have to worry about cross network security issues unless he wants to for Disaster Recovery or overflow work.
To summarize, new technologies are doing more than upgrading hardware and software. They are changing the way IT operates in ways that benefit IT. Cloud Computing is a great technology that everyone can benefit from.
If you would like to learn how it can benefit you, please let me know.
For more information, please go to www.Unitiv.com. Join our Internal Cloud Computing Group at LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com
Posted by Mike McFadden on Mon, May 18, 2009 @ 10:30 AM
Sun has taken what it knows well and applied that innovation to storage. This includes extensive file system development (ZFS), operating system analytics (D Trace) and solid-state disk (SSD) technology. The 7000 series Open Storage platform takes full advantage of the server and Solaris functionality which Sun has pioneered.
ZFS is the file system managing the 7000 and offers many benefits. Here are two specific examples:
First, ZFS allows and recognizes SSDs to be classified as a unique storage tier. This means high cost, high-electricity 15K RPM disk drives are no longer necessary for performance needs and SATA drives can be staged behing SSDs to create a large capacity pool resulting in dramatically lower costs and power and cooling requirements. Competitive arrays allow SSDs to be used but simply as replacement for Fiber Channel drives and not as a separate storage tier. That is the unique part ZFS enables with a dramatic cost impact.
Second, ZFS allows high performing software-based RAID protection, reducing the cost and complexity of hardware-based RAID along with the other components required, such as HBAs, etc.
D Trace was developed as part of the Solaris 10 operating system and it has now been wrapped in a graphical user interface and applied to the management and analysis of the 7000 series. This allows users to identify hot files, look at read/write statistics, evaluate CPU and memory utilization, monitor network bandwidth and perform many other functions to minimize troubleshooting and to optimize performance.
The analytics available with the 7000 are significantly different than what has been previously available in the storage world.
SSDs as the performance tier are powerful because a single SSD equals the I/O per second (IOPS) of 100 rotating disk drives while requiring only 1/500th the power for that IOPS workload.
The 7000 series also delivers all data protocols and data services at no additional charge, other than the initial frame purchase. This means there are no incremental fees to add protocols such as NFS or CIFS and there is also no additional licensing cost for mirroring, striping, compression, snapshots, remote replication capabilities to name a few.
Finally, the 7000 series is based on industry-standard components and the open storage software community. This allows customers to mix and match their storage while lowering overall deployment costs and speeding up technology adoption and software development.
The combination of all of these capabilities is what enables the 7000 series to offer high-performing, flexible, tunable and easy-to-administer storage at a half to a third the cost of many competing storage arrays.
For more information, please go to www.Unitiv.com.
Posted by Gabor Hodacs on Wed, May 13, 2009 @ 06:59
Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it has agreed to buy Virtual Iron Software Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The privately held Lowell, Mass. company makes virtualization software, which increases data center capacity. Oracle, which expects the deal to close this summer, agreed last month to buy server and software maker Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in cash.
Oracle's two latest acquisitions are a big change in the strategy of the third largest software company in the world. It seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is looking to challenge IBM and HP in the data center where Sun and Virtual Iron could become key components. Oracle has acknowledged that current industry trends are driving the demand for virtualization, the reduction of hardware in data centers and green IT strategies.
That being said Oracle is not just out to put pressure on VMware, but also Citrix and Microsoft the other two major players in the virtualization market. Market researcher Gartner estimates that virtualization sales will grow 43% in 2009 and Oracle is ready to grab its piece of the pie.
Even though the red hot virtualization market is also feeling the effects of the down economy, can one really underestimate Oracle? With Oracle's innovative thinking and "take no prisoners" mentality, the virtualization market has just become smaller for everyone else. There is already speculation on how Oracle can tweak their new virtualization technology to better work with their database software, middleware and business management programs.
With Oracle being the number one database company in the world, not to mention having one of the largest sales forces in the industry the possibilities are endless.
Of course it is not just Oracle who brings something to the table in this acquisition. Market analysts have described Virtual Iron as having "a solid product" comparable to its much larger competitors. The main reason it has not reached the heights of VMware is mostly because of the lack of marketing muscle which is something that Oracle has plenty of.
Finally Oracle is not new to the virtualization space. Oracle VM which was released in 2007 is primarily used with the Linux operating system and competes with similar products from Red Hat and Novell. Virtual Iron will complement this offering by focusing on the much larger segment of the virtualization market - machines running Microsoft Windows where currently VMware is king.
It is most likely that Oracle VM will also be improved by the Virtual Iron acquisition by using its far superior management capabilities. With both products already being quite similar (already using the same Xen open source hypervisors) such integration should not take too long or be costly.
Virtualization for Oracle, sounds disconcerting for other major players in the IT world, but would an even scarier word be integration? With the possibility of Oracle databases, running on (Sun) Oracle servers on top of (Virtual Iron) Oracle virtualization software HP and IBM have something new to worry about. Personally I can not wait for the inevitable acquisition firestorm this could create...unless Oracle decides to open its checkbook and beat everyone else to the punch.
For more information, go to www.Unitiv.com.
Posted by Jef Allen on Fri, May 01, 2009 @ 10:31 AM
Are we finally reaching the “Enough, already!” point in information saturation?
Neilsen shook up the media trackers last week by announcing that their data showed that 60 percent of Twitter users quit using the service after one month. When their data was questioned as not taking into account third-party applications that utilize Twitter, Neilsen went back and reran the study. According to their results, there was no change.
Is this a normal attrition for a service that might have been over-subscribed due the hype process it has gone through in recent months, or does it indicate that we have finally hit the wall, that people have deciding that there is only so much “immediacy” necessary in regard to our need to stay informed?
This is not an insignificant question for companies that are constantly being challenged to revamp their marketing strategies, tools, and messages to stay one step ahead of their target audience. No company wants to be perceived as out-of-touch or old school, especially a technology or consumer products provider that depends on a leading-edge image to maintain market position. On the other hand, nobody wants to be that annoying chatterer that doesn’t know when to shut up. The tendency to over-inform is a tremendous risk today, because the technology allows you to go from “that’s cool!” to “who cares?” in a heartbeat if not managed properly.
It would seem that the key to success in this arena is to stay close to your clients and prospects. Are they tuning in, or turning off? Manage your information flow with a critical eye toward the immediacy value of the information that you are posting to technology that pushes text to portable devices. Keep your value high and be sensitive to feedback.
Marketing specialists, and those who care about their company’s image, need to stay alert in these times. Constantly chasing the latest technology trends and tools can do more harm than good if there is not a master strategy for what our clients are looking for. We all need to be aware that, at some point, enough is enough. Getting in the last word may do more harm than good.
For more information, go to www.Unitiv.com.