David J. Cappuccio
Research VP
6 years at Gartner
41 years IT industry
David J. Cappuccio is a managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with Gartner, responsible for research in data center futures, servers, power/cooling, green IT, enterprise management and IT operations. Read Full Bio
by Dave Cappuccio | May 20, 2011 | Comments Off
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Infrastructure Operations and Management conference coming up the 2nd week of June in Orlando. At a time when every IT dollar counts, our 5-track agenda provides the strategic guidance and pragmatic recommendations needed to demonstrate the business value of I&O as you meet the challenges of modernization, transformation and convergence. We’ll extensively explore today’s I&O hot spots, including virtualization environments, assessing a public vs. private cloud strategy, aggressively optimizing legacy systems, achieving operational excellence despite limited resources and much more. Get ready to identify new business models, data center design strategies and technology approaches that can deliver ROI fast, efficiently and effectively. Your takeaway: the ability to leverage real-world experience and knowledge gleaned from more than 40 sessions, including analyst-user roundtables and end-user case studies.
The agenda will feature comprehensive tracks to drill down on the I&O topics most important today, with track sessions containing 6 to 8 highly focused presentations from Gartner analysts. .
If you’re going to attend, stop me in the hallway and say hello.
Category: Data Centers IT Operations Tags:
by Dave Cappuccio | May 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
Over the past few years, data center design has shifted away from the traditional idea of building out large expanses of IT-ready floor space to an era where smaller component-based solutions are the trend. A variety of different options from vendors have been introduced, and the two prevailing trends we see are container-based prebuilt solutions or modular component-based assembled on site) solutions. Since these solutions are fairly new to the market, and the terminology can be confusing, this research will outline the differences between the solutions and offer possible use case scenarios for you to consider.
What Are Containers or Container Based Data Centers?
A data center container is a shipping container set up to accommodate IT equipment. The typical data center container is based on ISO standards for ease of shipping; also, it may be modified in a number of ways to better support the secure and practical use of IT equipment. The basic equipment that most of these containers are designed to support includes servers, storage and networking gear. In addition, containers may be designed to support some combination of uninterruptible power supply (UPS), generators and/or chillers, with some of that equipment supported in the same containers as the servers and storage equipment, or in separate and distinct containers. Generally, data center containers have some connectivity elements, so that power input, cooling capabilities (e.g., water pipes) and network traffic can be fed into the container from the outside.
Containers are designed to be weather resistant, and, in some cases, are weather hardened for use in extreme environments, although most use cases see them being implemented within existing buildings or shells of buildings. Containers are also designed to be TIA-942 Tier 3 capable (depending on supporting infrastructure), and focus on high levels of energy efficiency, typically with a PUE of 1.3 or below.
What Are Modular or Component-Based Data Centers?
Modular data centers evolved from the basic premise of containers — that, if designed appropriately, extreme levels of performance could be attained in data centers using a consistent design technique, and capital costs could be reduced by standardizing components, construction and the supply chain. The modular design approach has actually split in two directions over the past few years. While some vendors have focused on the overall design of a complete data center solutions (e.g., HP FlexDC and i/o’s Data Systems i/o Anywhere), others have moved the modular design concept down to the rack or row level (e.g., APC InfraStruxure or Emerson SmartAisle).
In modular data centers, a core infrastructure design is developed that will eventually support multiple IT areas. The IT areas can be added as needed to support future growth, until the base power requirements are exceeded, at which time either the base module can be upgraded or another modular unit is put into place. Most of the vendor offerings in this space start with a base module of 250kVA or more and IT space of at least 500 to 2,500 square feet, which can then be scaled, but, as the market evolves, we expect to see a greater variety of choices (essentially modules on demand) to support individual needs.
In modular component designs, vendors have begun to focus on self-contained row or rack solutions where a predefined unit (e.g., eight racks) is delivered on-site and is already configured for power and cooling support. These units can be as simple as basic racks with monitoring and directed air cooling, or as complex as completely self-contained environments with either air, water or refrigerant-based cooling for extreme densities. UPS support can be delivered by the customer or integrated as part of the solution.
Bottom Line
When planning for data center growth, it is important that all alternatives be reviewed. Newer modular design techniques and container-based solutions should be a critical piece of your analysis. When used appropriately, they can solve specific problems, while reducing capital costs and the time it takes to implement new capacity.
Category: Data Center Design Data Centers Green IT Power and Cooling Tags: Container, Data Center, Modular
by Dave Cappuccio | March 23, 2011 | 1 Comment
What follows is an article written 12 years ago, when the Internet was still seen as the new kid on the block. Douglas Adams of “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” fame decided to put things into perspective.
Written by Douglas Adams in 1999. Could easily apply 99% of this still today.
A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.
But the change is real. I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’
‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’
‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’
‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Of course, there’s a great deal wrong with the Internet. For one thing, only a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected. I recently heard some pundit on the radio arguing that the internet would always be just another unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor for the following reasons – that computers would always be expensive in themselves, that you had to buy lots of extras like modems, and you had to keep upgrading your software. The list sounds impressive but doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. The cost of powerful computers, which used to be around the level of jet aircraft, is now down amongst the colour television sets and still dropping like a stone. Modems these days are mostly built-in, and standalone models have become such cheap commodities that companies, like Hayes, whose sole business was manufacturing them are beginning to go bust.. Internet software from Microsoft or Netscape is famously free. Phone charges in the UK are still high but dropping. In the US local calls are free. In other words the cost of connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every single additional person who joins it. It’s in everybody’s interest for costs to keep dropping closer and closer to nothing until every last person on the planet is connected.
Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.
However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. “We are herd animals,” he says. “These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving.” Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will “bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.”
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.
Category: Consumerization Food for Thought Tags: Food for Thought
by Dave Cappuccio | March 23, 2011 | Comments Off
When it comes to storage a variety of fundamental changes are occurring, which have more to do with access than growth. Cloud-based alternatives are forcing companies to re-examine storage from a business perspective. If data is not-critical then a less costly cloud platform is feasible, assuming service levels can be agreed upon.
Virtualization is also another change factor. Those virtualized servers that have network-attached or SAN storage offer a greater number of possibilities for workload management, business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Energy consumption is opening up new conversations about how a multi-tiered approach may afford greater capacities overall, while reducing energy consumption and floor space.
Lastly, with the proliferation of smart phones and the subsequent extension of work hours to “whenever needed,” employees, partners and consumers have adopted an expectation of “always available” for any information (data) they need, wherever they are.
So what’s the result? All these factors are changing how we design, install, manage, configure and extend our storage infrastructures. It’s a challenging topic and one that will be examined from all angles at this year’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit in Orlando on June 13-15. I’m especially excited to be delivering the opening keynote for the Summit. The topic: 10 Critical Trends Impacting I&O in the Next 5 Years. I’ll also be presenting a conference session on The Future of Data Centers and will be on hand for one-on-one sessions.
For those of you who haven’t been to a Gartner conference, you should be aware that attendees can request a “one-on-one” meeting with the analyst of their choice. So be sure to book your one-on-one session early as they tend to fill up quickly. In the meantime, for more information about the conference itself, visit www.gartner.com/us/iom.
Category: Data Centers Tags: Data Center, Infrastructure Technology, IT-Operations-NA
by Dave Cappuccio | January 2, 2011 | 4 Comments
in the area of data center staffing there is both a crisis looming, and an opportunity, for those thinking ahead.
The crisis is developing from three directions at once. First, it is becoming very difficult for data center managers to retain their best and brightest staff. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s labor force will have an average of 14 different jobs by the time they are 38. The days of job security and company loyalty as motivating factors are long gone, and data center managers need to develop new ways to retain staff. Worse, the staff at greatest risk are those with the most in demand skills, and consequently the most difficult (and costly) to replace.
Secondly the first Baby Boomer’s are beginning to reach retirement age in 2011. The first wave of Boomers will reach 65 this year and in North America we can expect an average of 10,000 people reaching retirement age, every day, for the next 19 years. But the issue is not the people in many cases – it’s the knowledge that’s retiring with them.
And third, a staffing crisis is being driven by virtualization – or the movement towards converged infrastructures as a whole. IT managers are realizing that as more and more technologies converge, the responsibility (end to end) for a given process changes. Take for example the movement towards converged storage infrastructures. Traditionally a storage manager had end-to-end responsibility for capacity, throughput, performance and availability. But when virtual infrastructures are using SAN’s, and Fiber Channel is running over Ethernet, who has responsibility for the overall storage environment; the network team, storage team, virtualization team, or server team? The answer is “all of the above”. Which brings up a huge issue in vertically organized shops today. And the solution in many organizations is to stress a broader vs. a deeper skill set – or as some like to call it: the T shaped employee.
If you look at any employee within the IT group, try to imagine them as represented by a capital letter “T,” where the center post of the T represents their depth of knowledge in their primary skill set. Some people can drill down that center post to a frightening level of detail, but, in a sense, the depth of the T represents their strength as a technologist, and, in most organizations, it’s the key to their credibility in the organization, and to their success within IT. It’s their core.
The cross bar of the T is not about technology per se, but about the relationship between converging technologies (and the business) and how much that employee understands about these relationships. As you increase the number of relationships (or technology linkages), the broader the crossbar on the T becomes. Now sit back and think about the most valuable people in the IT organization — those people who always get the projects handed to them, because we know they’ll get things done, regardless. If you look at the strengths they bring to any project, it’s rarely depth of knowledge (the vertical T), but breadth of understanding (all the linkages). Drill-down specialists are available in all disciplines, but the linkage masters are hard to find.
This then becomes a motivational tool for organizations. Let’s begin to recognize what we really value in IT — not depth (except in junior people), but breadth across multiple disciplines coupled with depth in a primary discipline. It’s difficult to train people with this knowledge, except through real world experiences with a business context; your business, and your projects. In some cases, it may take forced change in disciplines, but force the change in a related discipline with the idea of expanding knowledge and creating those linkages. The most effective IT people are always looking for new things to learn, and, in many cases, the most interesting areas are in the unknown, not the known areas. Enabling this learning — even incenting it — is a critical success factor as we move toward fully virtualized environments. And when employees realize that their value is not only how much they know in a discipline, but how much they understand the linkages between disciplines, IT as a whole will become a much stronger organization, and more able to adapt to changing environments.
Developing people with these kinds of skills can help alleviate both the baby boomer/skills transfer issue, as well as the issue of keeping your best people challenged and growing their skill sets, while continually increasing their value to the company.
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags:
by Dave Cappuccio | November 8, 2010 | 2 Comments
There are a few outside forces in the market today which are going to impact Data Centers in a big way over the next 5 years; smarter designs, Green pressures, conquering density and cloud computing. Not surprisingly many data center managers today are trying to figure out how to design and plan for the future, especially with the huge capital outlays it takes to build a leading edge data center today.
However, these forces mentioned above can actually work in your favor, providing the means and motivation to apply innovative designs, reduce both capital and operating cost, increase long term scale, and keep up with the business as well. Sound impossible? Let’s take a look at each of these trends at a macro level.
Smarter Designs - Traditional methods of designing data centers were created during the mainframe era, and subsequently many of us did all the wrong things, for all the right reasons. Consolidation mainframe and Unix environments in many cases consisted of large groups of the same equipment, with similar operating characteristics (power draw, heat generation, etc), and with similar performance targets. Because of their high costs many mainframes were targeted for average performance ranges in the mid 90% during production time slots, and therefore there was minimal variation in the operating temperature or power consumption over long periods of time. With these “known” variables it was a simple exercise in mathematics to design a large floorspace with enough power drops and underfloor cooling to support projected workloads, even for an “at capacity” data center.
Not anymore. Today’s data centers have many different demands on mechanical/electrical systems, depending on workload mix, function and the age of equipment. New designs have taken this into account by adding different density zones for different workload types. It’s not uncommon to see a high density zone supporting fully configured blade enclosures, or high density racks positioned in a cold or hot containment room. This zone might employ directed cold air, or even in rack cooling (air or refrigerant) to support very high density workloads with minimal disruption, or impact, on the rest of the floor. Secondary zones would support steady state applications that consume a consistent amount of power and produce manageable heat loads, while low density zones would be designed to support low power equipment – perhaps telecom and storage.
Green Pressure – The Green movement has had a curious impact on data centers and data center design. Most data center managers paid little attention to the “greening of IT” unless they were pressured into it by senior management or the public (particularly in EMEA). But as awareness has increased there has been a constant uptick in the attention being paid to energy consumption within data centers. Traditionally this was a concern of the Facilities team, since they usually paid the electric bill each month, but even they didn’t look at efficiency relative to the consumption of energy as something in the purview of IT. All that has changed and new data centers take a very hard look at energy efficiency in both design and execution. The development and marketing of PUE by The Green Grid continues to gain ground in the market and many new data centers are being developed with specific PUE targets in mind, both for the energy efficiency advantages as well as the public relations impact (e.g. the Yahoo Coop Data Center with a sub 1.1 PUE target).
Conquering Density – With smarter designs and Green pressures data center managers and designers have begun to focus on the compute density within their environments. Most data centers today are woefully underutilized from a space perspective. The physical floor space may be nearing capacity, but in many cases the actual compute space within racks, and within servers themselves, are very poorly used. Average rack densities today approach 60% worldwide except in very well managed (and designed) environments. This is not a failing of IT, but a reality IT had to live with when higher densities created excess heat which the existing infrastructure could not deal with. The solution was to buy more racks and spread the load across more floor space. Newer designs focus on this issue and are developed to allow optimal rack density, often approaching 85-90% on average, thus increasing the compute per square foot dramatically. Likewise server performance has become another target where optimal performance averages are approaching 55%-70% for virtualized devices, depending on workload mix. This increases the compute per kilowatt significantly, as that server running at 15% utilization is using almost as much energy as when it runs at 55%.
Cloud Computing – No, we are not going to move all workloads to the cloud, at least not in the foreseeable future. But the concept of cloud computing – obtaining resources outside of my data center, when I need them, for however long I need them, is a compelling argument. The question becomes; what resources, and for what applications or workloads? An intriguing choice data center managers are beginning to deal with is the possibility of shifting non-essential workloads to a cloud provider, freeing up much needed floor space, power and cooling that can then be focused on more critical production workloads, and extending the useful life of the data center.
Shifting workloads is not new, many companies use colocation facilities as an overflow mechanism, but the difference is that with colocation the compute resource is still owned and managed by the application owner. With offloading services to the cloud, ownership and management of the IT assets is shifted to the provider, essentially outsourcing the service to someone else.
As this practice increases in popularity the landscape for what remains of the corporate data center will change significantly. Only core business functions – those that differentiate a business from it’s competition, or are truly mission critical will remain in the primary data center. All other non-critical services will eventually migrate to external providers, having the long term affect of shrinking physical data center requirements.
By 2018 expect data center requirements to shrink by as much as 60%, with a focus on only core business services. And even those these services continue to demand more IT resources, the shrinking landscape of servers and storage (and telecom equipment) will more than offset that growth.
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Data Center, GartnerDC
by Dave Cappuccio | July 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
I have been working with members of Gartner’s Global IT Council for the past 8 months as they discussed the most pressing issues with IT Maintenance in their organizations.
The Gartner Global IT Council for IT Maintenance consists of CIOs and senior IT leaders of large global enterprises who work together to create actionable real-world recommendations and drive fundamental changes in the way the IT industry works.
The Council’s Code of Conduct codifies some of the highest-priority rights and responsibilities of vendors and IT organizations, to spark a discussion about how maintenance services can be applied efficiently and cost-effectively, without damaging mission-critical business processes.
The Councils preliminary findings and a detailed overview of their Charter can be found at http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/reports/global-it-council.jsp
Category: Maintenance Tags:
by Dave Cappuccio | June 13, 2010 | Comments Off
One of the cruel ironies within data centers is that the one constant within them is the need for continuous change. Locked between the dual forces of applications growth and equipment obsolescence, capacity planning has become one of the critical skills in data centers. Now if we all had unlimited white space to grow into, and unlimited power and cooling for that growth, life would be good.
Alas, not so much. However there is an interesting trend going on in IT of late, both on the server side and with storage, which could possibly help us solve multiple problems at the same time. The problems are intertwined in almost all data centers; capacity, space and power, each which is impacted almost every time equipment is added or changed on the floor. Historically what capacity planners have done is focus on new applications growth and a continuous drive towards virtualization, while keeping existing equipment in “maintenance mode”, trying to get the most work out of it over the longest time – especially when faced with tight budgets. It turns out that this prudent use of resources was not necessarily the most prudent thing to do, as the energy requirements of older servers in some cases is 3 to 4 times greater than current equipment.
Which brings up an interesting trend; X86 server performance is doubling (or more) with each new generation while at the same time becoming much more energy efficient.
Double the performance, halve the power – same space; what a concept! If you look at either AMD or Intel performance numbers over the last few generations, and then compare the energy consumption for each of those generations you’ll notice that we’ve seen a rather dramatic increase in processor performance, while at the same time seeing a significant reduction in energy consumption (and heat generation) for those servers. I’ve already run the model and the cost savings by implementing newer models can be a compelling argument indeed. I’ll be publishing the results in an upcoming Gartner Research Note.
So, rather than delaying the introduction of new servers and extending the life cycles of your existing inventory, consider a massive upgrade in place. Depending on the generation of server being replaced you could easily discover that the energy savings alone will cost justify the change – and as a side benefit you’ll get dramatic performance increases. And since the power required is less, you’ll also be extending the life of that data center – just a little bit more.
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Capacity Planning, Data Centers, GartnerDC, Power and Cooling
by Dave Cappuccio | May 1, 2010 | Comments Off
No, this is not a 2010 version of the matrix management agenda; I’ve been there, done that. However, in an era where everything in IT seems to be consolidating, virtualizing, converging and “cloudifying”, surprisingly few people are talking about our IT staffs and how all this change is affecting them. In all but the most enlightened organizations IT is generally organized horizontally at the very top, but vertically by technology skills and/or traditional support constructs (applications, servers, storage, networks, desktop). Historically these support silos have been very efficient in getting the job done, as they’ve built deep technical expertise in their assigned silo and have a very clear understanding of what their goals are, whether it be storage management, network performance, or server performance and deployments, to name a few.
But as we move towards more and more virtualization the lines are beginning to blur about who is responsible for what – and who has the ultimate authority to implement change. If you can create dozens of images on a single server who has the final say in what applications are allowed to run ? The virtualization experts, who likely have a clear idea of how resources are utilized in a VM? The applications team, who understand how applications interact and when or where peaks in performance will happen? Or the server team who are continually looking at optimal performance levels across all servers, power usage and heat generation? Or is it the storage team, who are more and more often concerned with I/O bottlenecks in highly virtualized environments and the most efficient placement of VM’s relative to I/O throughput. It turns out that all of these groups have a vested interest in what’s going on, but that current organizational constructs may in fact inhibit their ability to be effective in their roles. Worse yet, these vertical structures often exacerbate issues around who has control and can cause chaos in an organization where employees are compensated on their overall impact. Giving up technology turf is not in our DNA – and expecting people to do it for the good of the organization not likely to happen consistently.
So how do we motivate people to change – for the good of the organization – and for their own good? There are two common techniques which will most often fail miserably (without VERY strong management), and a newer technique which has been emerging from the ground up which I’ll discuss in a moment. The two tried and not-so-true techniques used most often are organizational shift and financial incentives. Organizational shift is a technique whereby slight changes in management structure take place which in turn create a shift in technical (employee) responsibilities, with the express goal of forcing greater control on the assigned group. What often happens is that the newly formed group is comprised of individuals from the former vertical coverage areas, and those individuals first assignment in the new group is to maintain their current coverage area “during the transition”. Not surprisingly the transition period rarely ends and IT groups find themselves with new organizational constructs still supporting the same vertical groups – with the same basic staff.
Financial incentives can work, but rarely do it effectively. Financial change tends to be a short term motivator and unless there is some inherent impact to the individual’s self-worth, within a short time the perceived incentive no longer has value. This idea of individual self-worth has been known for many years, but it’s surprising how little we pay attention to it, even when the advantages can be incredible – and at very little additional cost. Given that, here’s the third alterative that is beginning to gain momentum ; call it the T Shaped Technician for lack of a better term.
If you look at any employee within the IT group try to imagine them as represented by a capital letter “T” where the center post of the T represents their depth of knowledge in their primary skill set. Some people can drill down that center post to a frightening level of detail, but in a sense the depth of the T represents their strength as a technologist, and in most organizations it’s the key to their credibility in the organization, and to their success within IT. It’s their core. The cross bar of the T is not about technology per se, but about the relationship between converging technologies (and the business) and how much that employee understands about these relationships. As you increase the number of relationships (or technology linkages), the broader the crossbar on the T becomes.
Now sit back and think about the most valuable people in the IT organization – those people who always get the projects handed to them, because we know they’ll get things done, regardless. If you look at the strengths they bring to any project it’s rarely depth of knowledge (the vertical T), but breath of understanding (all the linkages). Drill down specialists are available in all disciplines, but the linkage masters are hard to find.
This then becomes a motivational tool for organizations. Let’s begin to recognize what we really value in IT – not depth (except in junior people), but breadth across multiple disciplines coupled with depth in a primary discipline. It’s difficult to train people with this knowledge, except through real world experiences with a business context; your business, and your projects. In some cases it may take forced change in disciplines, but force the change in a related discipline with the idea of expanding knowledge and creating those linkages. The most effective IT people are always looking for new things to learn and in many cases the most interesting areas are in the unknown, not the known areas. Enabling this learning – even incenting it, is a critical success factor as we move toward fully virtualized environments. And when employees realize that their value is not only how much they know in a discipline, but how much they understand the linkages between disciplines, IT as a whole will become a much stronger organization, and more able to adapt to these changing environments.
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: GartnerDC
by Dave Cappuccio | September 25, 2009 | 2 Comments
One of the hidden beauties of any virtualized state is the clear disaggregation of hardware and software, the logical separation of traditionally tightly coupled environments, allowing us much greater flexibility in deciding what applications to run where, and for what reasons. This flexibility in and of itself is a good thing, and we all benefit from it, but I suspect that if we’re not careful in how we use virtualization some apparently intelligent decisions today may in fact turn out to be significant problems in the future.
Take for example some of our legacy applications. Not the ones we’ve been living with on mainframes or large Unix systems for the past 30 years, but legacy x86 applications. You know, those early Windows applications written in C or C++ (or even early Java) which now run quietly every day on those older Windows NT or Windows 2000 sever platforms. Like many older applications from the Big Iron days, these are often poorly documented and not designed with the reusable constructs of SOA, but as stand alone, end to end systems.
In many companies these are clear targets for virtualization. They often have stable performance characteristics (few peaks and valleys), allowing a high number of images per physical server. Since they are older applications the platform itself is not likely to change and the amount of enhancements to the application have been minimized over the years.
As newer Operating Systems emerge and servers grow into 8 and more cores there is a risk that these legacy applications will suffer compatibility or performance problems and will require significant and costly retooling. But with development budgets shrinking, or staying stable at best, higher priority projects will most often get the funding over legacy rewrites, so the prudent IT manager will keep these applications running on the older OS’s in a standardized virtual container as long as possible. This costs very little, does not impact the performance or reliability of the application, and gives IT some breathing room before a large, and possibly complex rewrite begins.
Sounds like yet another side benefit of virtualization, and for the near term it certainly is, as emulating older environments on newer technologies has been practiced for years, and the financial benefits are obvious.
However, as the underlying operating systems get older, updates, patches, and support begins to get marginalized by vendors, and eventually formal maintenance support from the vendor will reach an end. At this point enterprises will have another difficult decision to make – to continue emulation of an older application on an unsupported platform, or to begin the replacement (or rewrite) process for the application. Either choice is fraught with risks, costs and business impact, and in many organizations this will not be a single decision, because as we continue this march towards virtualization the number of legacy applications marginalized into self contained environments will continue to grow.
So what are the impacts? In a best case scenario this is just the ranting of a cynical naysayer and we will continue to upgrade and improve applications as needed, and migrate them to newer platforms when appropriate. It’s a non-issue. But the alternate world view is that the beauty of virtualization is that once an environment is created it can run “as is” indefinitely, with little or no attention from the outside. If this happens IT will almost always focus on near term issues, because these issues are what drive us – after all we are a reactive crowd – and when budgets are always tight the funding to fix what isn’t broken rarely materializes.
In the second world view we may find ourselves scrambling to update scores or even hundreds of these applications to run on newer platforms when we are least prepared to do so. This is similar to Y2K in some respects in that these problems are not caused by lack of knowledge or awareness, but just by years of pushing the issue into that low priority bucket that’s so convenient to use during the planning cycle.
Just a thought……
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Cloud Computing, Infrastructure Technology, Virtualization, VMware
