By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 26th January 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Thanks to x86 and other "commodity" components, users usually get good value for money from their server systems. However, storage subsystems and their connectivity remain stubbornly complex and costly. This has got to change - and for some this has started to happen.

When I wrote about Coraid last summer, I wondered about storage users' familiarity with ATA over Ethernet (AoE), especially when running Windows for which is fairly new. Coraid is belatedly betting its shirt on AoE which can be blisteringly fast. It developed the "protocol/compute layer" as far back as 2004 then donated it as open source to the Linux community, not then realising what it had; AoE has been part of the Linux kernel since 2005.

Coraid's progress in the past year has been solid - a user base of around 1,500 customers compared with 1,000 a year ago - and expansion in Europe from its UK office as well as a small start in APAC. In its storage arrays, it has now added flash to mix and match with SAS and various SATA drives (in a choice of RAID levels or JBOD) in the SAN.

But CEO Kevin Brown has a bigger vision for its AoE approach - which is to drive a commodity pricing revolution for storage. "Storage is like a mainframe when rest of system has become commoditised" Brown told me. This contrasted with servers long commoditised with x86 and, for instance, a 10GbE port could cost under $500. (EMC and NetApp may not take this too seriously but could perhaps be caught short, especially at the low-end.)

Using Coraid's AoE technique, the SAN (theirs or another's), appears to VMware of Hyper-V as a single direct-attached storage (DAS) drive - as a single SCSI controller "except that it has latency under one second" Brown added. Then the Coraid architecture covers the whole network, both initiating and receiving the storage data requests that cross the Ethernet wires. This, he said, removed several layers of complexity and was simple to set up, not least because everyone's server has long provided DAS connectivity.

The potential from this is manifesting itself in several ways that also help define Coraid's roadmap for the coming months. For instance, Brown wants to complement AoE by making everything simple. So Coraid is aiming for an end-user on-screen Q&A to define the storage need without concern for LUNs or HBAs - from which the software automatically tailors all the configuring and manages day-to-day operation. This helps explain the company's purchase of cloud orchestration software vendor Yunteq late last year as, for instance - it brought in a policy engine; the first fruits of this may appear mid-year.

In turn, this reflects another trend Brown told me he was witnessing. More and more internal and external clouds are appearing - and VARs were realising that, as well as reselling AoE, they could also start to offer cloud services of their own. However, that, in turn, put pressure on Coraid to automate its storage tiering management and to make sure security was sufficiently granular and robust (although the VARs can already provide complementary third party solutions). On the positive side, its own operating system and architecture was designed from scratch as distributed and scale-out, allowing very rapid expansion, as may be needed in clouds.

This week, Coraid announced a technology alliance partnership with Veeam. Veeam complements Coraid's EtherDrive and EtherFlash with innovative data protection, recovery, DR and management for virtual data centres - that is designed from the ground up for virtualised server environments. Recovery can be for a whole VM or individual file or application item.

It has also not been lost on Coraid that, by controlling storage data traffic end-to-end across the network, it is well placed to provide useful performance measurement software. That could be another nice little earner (but no date has been set for that yet).

Brown sees little value in chasing after conservative enterprises with wall-to-wall Fibre Channel (FC) storage connectivity but everyone else is ripe for this AoE-based storage commoditisation to cut costs and boost performance. The coming year should be enough to confirm whether AoE is likely to break through to make commoditisation a reality.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 6th December 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has launched the first flash storage incorporating hardware high availability (HA) features aimed at taking on large disk subsystems - the RamSan 720.

The SANflash 1U high enclosure includes 6 or 12TB of SSD, a centralised RAID controller, and uses about 3-400W in power. The company says this works out at about $20 per GB - making it price-competitive with the fastest (15,000 rpm) spinning disk subsystems, especially when an ongoing saving in power and cooling is factored in.

The HA features achieve no single point of failure, through a change of design from its previous 710 model. These include: dual port gateway (40 or 80Gb flash chip on each module), 9+1 parity, hot-swap flashcards, ECC error correction, dual RAID controllers as well as two-dimensional variable-stripe RAID 5 (TMS patented) - with dynamic re-striping of data. The backplane has one module as an active spare, so the system can fix data at the lowest level on the board - re-generating the whole board and clock if necessary.

Chip over-capacity (c20%) provides for partial failure recovery, the system continuing to run live with no human intervention needed for maintenance.

While TMS is going for a potential $1Bn market, it knows it will find it hard to displace large OEM incumbents who provide hard disk arrays and back-end support. Even if one of these is willing to incorporate the RamSan 720 as its own, it will undoubtedly place tight controls on pricing and strategy.

So TMS is also focusing heavily on its worldwide third party reseller relationships, also diversifying to add more outside the federal and financial sectors in which it had its major past successes. The low maintenance with HA should strike a chord with mid-market users who have little internal support resource, but need screaming performance at tier 0 or 1. The RamSan 720 size, marginally less than a standard rack-mounted server, allows for a half PB of storage to be held in a single rack.

As of now, the RamSan 720 supports fibre channel (FC) and Infiniband, the company claiming it can achieve aggregated "straight-through" performance through the ports - for instance for 8Gb FC using four ports an aggregate of reads and writes of nearly 6GB/s is practical (Infiniband slightly better).

All in all, this looks like an attractive high performance storage package, which should get some early wins in the mid-market as it gradually makes inroads further up the food chain.

With solid state disks (SSD) reducing in price by around 25% per annum, and reliability techniques built in to achieve usability for as much as 10 years, this type of device is already becoming a strong competitor for the high performance (and price) top-end spinning disk market. It is then a matter of time before the 10K rpm drives are seriously challenged...and so on.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 13th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Nimble Storage is not a very familiar name this side of the pond, but that is about to change - and how! Today is its official launch into Europe; it has a new EMEA sales director, Philip Turner, and is about to open offices in London, Germany and Benelux.

This may appear rather fast growth for a small VC start-up that sells entirely through the channel - and seeks European channel partners - until you look at the innovation it offers under the covers. In fact I find it difficult to know where to start. I have not seen this in operation, of course, so I can only report on what the company has told me - and leave others to check it out in practice. However, its US growth-figures from a first release in August 2010 in a crowded and competitive mid-marketplace - over 150 customers - are hard to ignore.

The company started with a blank canvas (but a technical team with storage innovation experience from the likes of NetApp and Data Domain), and came up with something that just does things differently. More importantly, it overcomes the performance OR space dilemma, by getting the best of both.

Its CS (converged storage) Series of arrays incorporate a new 'Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout' architecture that leverages flash memory alongside high capacity SATA drives to produce phenomenally high performance for a low price-tag. The data received is compressed in-line straight away with no performance hit (so, typically, saving 50% storage space); storage is in variable-size blocks with data written out sequentially in full RAID stripes - averaging 100% faster than to fixed layout disk. "Hot" (active) data is duplicated in flash memory for ultra-fast reads - but it is all stored on low-RPM but high-capacity SATA disks.

The CS210 has c8TB disk capacity, 160 or 320GB flash and 4x1GbE ports, the CS220/G 12 or 16TB and 320/640GB flash, the CS240/G 24/32TB and 640/1300GB flash - with both CS220 and CS240 either 6x1GbE ports or 2x10GbE + 2x1GbE (G models). All carry high availability features including dual hot-swappable controllers, power supplies and mirrored NVRAM.

All of this is in a 3U high cabinet, which effectively provides all the functionality, performance and capacity of three primary storage units and a backup device. Thin provisioning is all inherently included - while the GUI is designed for simple operation by IT generalists. Dan Leary, Nimble Storage's VP of marketing, told me that scale-out connectivity, with the ability to group multiple arrays, will be available next year - without hardware changes being needed.

At the risk of boring readers, I will continue to talk technology...

The architecture converges storage, backup and disaster recovery (DR) so that near-instant delta re-direct-on-write snapshots are the backup; DR can be achieved in seconds with WAN-efficient replication as standard. This means longer retention of backups is possible (so, for instance, 30 days retention will cover 90% of recovery requests).

However, the systems are designed more than anything for virtual environments. For instance, Nimble has a close working relationship with VMware and its GUI is available inside vCenter. Instant clones of 'gold' storage configuration images are provided through vCenter plug-ins to help optimise matching storage with the VMs using it. The architecture directly addresses performance contention problems typically experienced when accessing storage between competing VMs.

Prices, unpublished, are said by Nimble to be typically under a third of competition for the same capacity - and twice the throughput, plus backup in seconds and recovery in minutes (instead of hours and even days). For me, such statistics make the Nimble Storage offering a real storage game-changer.

Downsides? I am not yet in a position to judge, but it almost sounds too good to be true for the mid-market at least. So, obviously, you need to prove for yourself whether I am painting a fair picture. Clearly, it has to contend with fierce competition, and not a little "FUD" I suspect. But I will watch with interest to see how this stirs the likes of NetApp, HP and Dell (Equallogic, Compellent) for instance.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 11th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Overland Storage today launches its completely new SnapServer DX Series for SMBs, adding some 'enterprise-level' features, simplified management and, especially, very aggressive pricing.

Its target is SMBs who want features they can't normally afford, such as replication and thin provisioning. One result is that its long-established Guardian OS has been revamped so much in the new version 7.0 that it is no longer backwards-compatible.

In today's release are two models, the 1U high SnapServer DX1 houses four drives, the 2U SnapServer DX2 eight, comprising any mix of SAS and SATA-II enterprise of desktop drives. However, total capacities can grow to 120 or 288TB respectively using its SnapExpansion capability to add more units.

Overland identifies three main challenges for SMBs that these models are addressing: i) budgets insufficient to add capacity and functionality to keep pace with data growth, ii) complexity in storage management and, iii) volume management including continuous monitoring to avoid hitting a capacity limit brick wall. Despite the familiar 'Snap' name, the SnapServer DX Series is a completely new development, with a very distinctive look.

Andy Walsky, Overland's VP for EMEA and APAC Sales, who described this as the start of a "rebrand and refresh" for its systems, said the most disruptive element was the very aggressive pricing. The company was well-placed to achieve this because the hardware and operating system were its own.

So, for instance, a SnapServer DX1 with 4TB (4x1TB drives) has a (US) recommended price $1,999, while a SnapServer DX2 with 36TB (12x3TB) is $7,199. Even at these prices, the channel would get good margins, he said.

The Dynamic RAID capability (an optional alternative to standard RAID), combines RAID with single or dual parity across all units. New capacity can be added, or disk units hot-swapped, without downtime. The total storage within a single DX1 or DX2 can be treated as a common pool.

Overland's own form of thin provisioning means storage usage is maximised, and overall capacity monitoring means system-generated warnings in advance of the need to add more capacity. This removes most of the headache of capacity prediction and constant monitoring.

Other features include Snap Enterprise Data Replicator (SnapEDR) which will replicate data between locations for collaboration and data protection, full integration with either Windows Active Directory or UNIX/Linux Domains, and a unified block and file storage capability. Overland also claims a transfer rate of over 350MB/s on the DX2. Overall, this appears to provide a lot of functionality for little outlay.

The SMB market is very competitive, but Overland has a long-established worldwide reseller channel with over 2,000 partners, with sales and service support in more than 60 countries. Conversely, this might trigger something of a price-war - as everyone from Dell, NetApp and EMC to Iomega and Buffalo has products for SMBs.

Overland itself has been involved in something of a re-launch, and now has a completely new management team and strategy. Walsky told me, "Overand has thrown out its old paradigm. It is now a storage solutions company." It had moved away from its former focus towards tape, and was gearing its products for all of on-line, near-line and off-line storage including archive, he said.

Overland has also ceased to be an OEM provider; it supplies its own systems 100% through the channel.

Overland has struggled with a weak financial position for a few years, but its huge infrastructure helped it achieve revenues of nearly $78m in 2010. Other initiatives, such as stronger action on patent infringement, may create an extra revenue stream. Without firm predictions, the company hopes to reach profitability again very soon. What will happen in the next few months is certainly worth watching.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 19th September 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Virsto has announced the next dimension to its storage virtualisation solution - Virsto for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) vSphere (VMware) edition. According to the company, this will typically boost storage performance by 50%, greatly reduce storage and speed deployment by up to three-quarters.

Storage performance problems for virtual desktops, which typically number hundreds per host, are multiplied versus virtual servers that may be no more than, say, 10-20. The randomness caused by multiple VMs writing to shared storage is the principle performance-killing culprit; this is typically worse even for the same number of virtual desktops as servers.

Virsto's approach, writing to a sequential log-file from which it updates the storage in the background, removes this real-time randomisation. The software also deploys automated thin provisioning with capacity reuse after deletion, potentially reducing allocated storage space by 90%. So this is a neat solution to boost performance and reduce storage costs - or to allow higher desktop densities.

Virsto vDisks are handled within the existing vSphere management; a Virsto tab on the vCenter management GUI enables installing, configuring extra wizards that optimise selected VDI workflows (such as bulk rapid provisioning of thousands of desktops needing high performance). Bulk updating can reduce provisioning and deployment time by nearly three-quarters. It also supports vMotion in VDI environments, not so much for failover as being able to move desktops off a host to be patched.

Now in beta, Virsto for VDI will be fully available before year-end, priced at $2,800 per host.

But the bigger picture is even more interesting. This is the third implementation of the Virsto solution, after Virsto for VSI (virtual server infrastructure) and VDI for Hyper-V - with the roadmap adding VSI for vSphere (when vSphere version 5 appears early next year) and Xen also within the 2012 timeframe. So, by the end of 2012, this should achieve near enough hypervisor heterogeneity - with its bonus of easy storage migration between hypervisors.

Speaking to me this week, Virsto's VP of marketing Gregg Holsrichter said, "We want to do for storage what VMware did for servers." He pointed out that VMware started out small (like Virsto) and was initially only used in the techie community. Virsto's basic concept for storage mimics VMware's move to extract the server to a logical layer.

However, Virsto's opportunity right now relates to users experiencing a shared storage performance problem which the VM providers did not foresee or therefore address. Equally, while VMs can be created and removed in seconds, the VM providers could not automate bringing shared storage into line with these VM changes, so it remains a time-consuming headache. Virsto fills these gaps.

It was a shrewd move to start out on Microsoft's Hyper-V. Microsoft saw the advantages in joint deployment while Virsto was proving its technology's capabilities. Yet VMware, with around 70% market share, is the bigger prize. Virsto's heterogeneity will also be attractive to enterprises who fear being locked in to one hypervisor or who already use a mix of them.

This may even have bigger potential than the virtual server revolution, partly because storage costs are now typically five times server costs. Virsto's performance and provisioning approach can lead to storage consolidation and reduction and/or lower-cost commodity storage hardware in virtualised environments - quickly paying for itself. By being software-only, it can be integrated with other vendors' complementary storage hardware and software solutions. It seems to me made for cloud storage environments and especially attractive to SMEs who can't afford to throw storage hardware at the performance problem.

So Virsto's vision is not unrealistic. It is still a VC start-up and privately owned, and I for one hope it can stay independent long enough to drag virtual storage up to the level that server and desktop virtualisation has already achieved, bringing the agile enterprise another step closer.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 5th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

A snippet in Private Eye earlier this year (8 July, 2011) showed how touchy companies can get about the use of their brand names. Following the unfortunate death of a festival goer in a toilet at Glastonbury (who also happened to be a political activist and friend of the UK’s Prime Minister), a number of publications reported that the body has been found in a Portaloo®. Apparently, this was not true; it was not a Portaloo®, but some other brand of “mobile toilet”. Portakabin, who owns the Portaloo® brand, had written to the publications in question complaining at this misrepresentation. This seems an unnecessary quibble, there was no suggestion the toilet had contributed to the death and no maligning of the brand per se. However, other misuses of brand names are not so innocuous.

A growing concern over the past decade or so has been the abuse of brand names online. This includes both the misleading use of domain names and misrepresentation and/or illegal use of brands in other ways. Back in 2000, the UK rock band Jethro Tull won a case against a cyber-squatter who had registered a number of domains including www.jethrotull.com and was trying to sell them on to those with an obvious interest. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) found in the band’s favour; ruling that the squatter “had set up the addresses in bad faith and failed to show a legitimate interest in them”.

While most well-known organisations now have control of the high-level domains associated with their brand, the growing number of available domains still makes it relatively easy for someone to mislead through the use of a slightly more obscure domain. This might mean that cyber-squatting is less prevalent but it does mean brand-jacking is easier. There are two reasons for doing this; to benefit by association and, more seriously, to perpetrate fraud. The later involves either selling fake branded products or convincing someone to give up personal information thinking they are visiting a legitimate branded web site, for example, that of a bank (usually attracting them in the first place with phishing emails or messages on social media sites). "It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you"

Of course, the selling a fake branded goods does not need a spoofed web site, this can just as easily be done via markets such as eBay. So, the need to monitor and protect brands is a far-reaching exercise. To that end, a number of services have been developed to help organisations achieve just that from vendors such as MarkMonitor, Envisional and PICA. Their services range through domain name monitoring, identifying online brand name misuse, spotting sales of counterfeit goods and getting rogue sites associated with phishing campaigns shut down.

MarkMonitor publishes a freely available Brandjacking Index report, which shows the prevalence of brand abuse over the years and focuses in on specific issues, such as diverting genuine enquiries for hotel bookings (spring 2011 edition).  Its customers include manufacturers like Epson and Deckers, where it has helped stem the sale of counterfeit goods, and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, where it consolidated and protected its wide range of domain names.

A strong recognisable brand is an invaluable asset for any organisation; however, misuse can see strong brands rapidly devalued. The exploitation of brands has become much easier as the world has moved online over the last few decades. It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you. Failing to ensure this will lead to a loss of business and may cause rapid deterioration of your brand's value.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 1st September 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Virtual infrastructures may appear simple on the surface, but there is a lot going between the servers and storage across the network; it's complex. So pity the poor IT or storage manager who knows something is wrong but can't pinpoint it.

Problems need to be identified fast and resolved quickly - or, for instance, SLAs could be violated - and a tool to give a clear infrastructure view in real time is really a must to achieve that.

Virtual Instruments is one company dedicated to addressing this type of problem, at least for fibre channel (FC) SANs. Its latest software, VirtualWisdom 3.0, carries out analysis of SAN I-O traffic in real time - and can do this in relation to individual business critical applications running within a virtualised setup.

VirtualWisdom includes a GUI dashboard that, unusually, visually tracks all functions - servers, networks and storage - in a single display. This cross-domain, vendor-neutral, view facilitates rapid and precise performance tuning and fault diagnosis.

More typical is what Virtual Instruments refers to as "SAN blindness", caused by a lack of appropriate monitoring tools; performance monitoring tools usually focus only on one part of the infrastructure so, even if comprehensive for that, they cannot present a collated view, let alone in real-time.

With the rapid advance of virtual servers and virtual storage, including in the cloud, such tools should be a must. Indeed, the move to a single storage pool servicing multiple virtual server applications frequently results in major performance degradation, and testing with an appropriate application mix should quickly pinpoint what is the bottleneck. So, it is remarkable that so few such performance tools exist today.

This week's release also includes a new 8Gb-capable SAN hardware performance probe that significantly adds to the metrics displayed. It can monitor up to eight FC links at once, looking at each frame in a FC SAN to give stats on storage I-O between a VM and the storage array LUN being accessed. The probe has redundant and hot-swappable power supplies and cooling fans; as some of Virtual Instruments' users have pointed out, if the monitoring devices themselves were to fail, SAN blindness would immediately return.

Also new to VirtualWisdom 3.0 is the RemoteWisdom Access Platform, facilitating remote file access into VirtualWisdom servers by Virtual Instruments' own support personnel. This will help streamline support and minimise disruption if VirtualWisdom monitoring problems occur. It is also a sign of three-year-old US start-up Virtual Instruments' international expansion plans; for instance, it now has 34 staff in UK, France and Germany.

Other data gathering devices include a virtual server probe for VMware vSphere environments, a SAN availability probe to monitor SAN directors and switches, and the SANInsight TAP patch panel system which accesses data passively from the fibre optical physical layer. The system is agentless.

I see this as almost a must have for large FC SAN users (plus FCoE) as many of them already know. My question is: who is out there with this capability for SAN types other than FC in a virtual environment? For them, it seems, SAN blindness will live on for a while yet.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 30th August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Drobo's prosumer pedigree provides the clue as to why its new B1200i (iSCSI) storage box is the lowest cost business storage SAN appliance and has ultra-simple configuring and operation.

Consumers demand devices with simple, automated operation. So when Drobo (formerly Data Robotics) started to sell its storage boxes to SMBs as well as to professional consumers (prosumers) it already had a built-in simplicity ethos. Drobo has now extended this through its automated data-aware tiering technology.

The B1200i is a 3U rackmount box housing up to 12 standard SSD, SAS or SATA drives in any mix (so a theoretical maximum of 36TB). But it's the automation bit that SMBs should like - especially that it automatically optimises performance across these drives of mixed speeds, all the time in real-time, regardless of the application workload mix.

This new feature complements other automation already found in its earlier B800i and B800fs boxes. Its 'BeyondRAID' automated RAID management maintains operation if two drives fail, supports this mix of drive speeds and manufacturers, and allows drive hot-swapping and reordering to facilitate fast upgrades. The automated thin provisioning includes reclamation of 'deleted' storage; it is aware of whole disk array utilisation and can permit more capacity to be configured than current available.

The B1200i entry-level price is around $10,000, or below $20,000 with SSDs, probably less than a quarter of similar-sized storage from competitors. So Drobo hopes SMBs will jump at the ultra-low CAPEX and spot a potentially low OPEX as no administrator is needed to repeatedly configure, tune, test then adjust settings to create and maintain optimum performance.

Drobo's market is now 50-50 SMB/prosumer. It has over 25,000 users increasing by 2,500 per quarter. So it knows the needs of this specific market - low CAPEX and OPEX, with no waste through over-configuring, minimised breakdown risk and plug-and-go operation. Its resellers should have an easy sales story and are probably expecting a low level of ongoing support.

The B1200i is absolutely not designed for enterprises (except perhaps for departmental storage), but who can touch it in its space? The likes of EMC, Dell and HP may sneer at a "ridiculously low" price-tag and argue that "you get what you pay for"; but I doubt that this will deter many SMBs anxious for big savings.

Drobo's immediate challenges are probably for the B1200i to perform to its promised spec, without serious teething troubles, and to meet demand through a new production line. I will watch market take-up and feedback with interest.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 19th August 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

We knew that HP was in acquisition mode for enterprise software, and it seems the $10 billion apple in HP's eye is UK-based software giant Autonomy.

We'll know more after the US markets close today and HP has its earnings statement for the most recent quarter. But if the Autonomy acquisition is true, it tells us some very important things about HP, its direction and strategy.

Let's look at what HP did not buy (yet). No open source platform and infrastructure (Red Hat), no open source relational data bases (Ingres), no middleware (TIBCO). No business apps (NetSuite). [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Instead HP is apparently targeting the element of IT that cuts across all growth areas: information management. Information is exploding and the places it needs to go are expanding rapidly, including all manner of mobile devices.

HP has the data center server hardware, storage and networking infrastructure to support a converged infrastructure—from soup to nuts—that supports information in all its forms. That is information inside of applications, databases, flat files, PCs, Tvs, smartphones, cars, refrigerators, and anything else connected and always on. These days that's just about everything.

This information is the key ingredient and life blood to business intelligence, business process management, cloud computing, integration, overall management/governance, social media and networking, and the web of sensors and embedded devices that will create even more … information.

Apple has its various business revenues lined up around consumer content, media and entertainment, and is doing quite well. HP has he opportunity to do the same to the content, media and data that under girds all business, all over the world, all the time.

We also hear that HP will spin off—a la Agilent—its PC business. Smart move. This is a global and vibrant business that will continue to generate nice profits on thin margins, but not the growth business HP needs to be in to prosper against IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. They too, incidentally, know the value of having a business that earns based on the flow and ebb of data and information. But they are too relational database (RDB)-centric.

If we're in the post PC-era—and we are—we may also well be in the post-RDB era, too. And so then what's the era still going strong? Information, and how to make it strategic and managed for all aspects of business and commerce. The middle of the middle of all that grows is a good place to be. Information is the common denominator to all computing and business alignment.

We now know that HP is basing its future of the business of supporting businesses, and in working to dominate the next growth areas. Information use and management will drive the growth in hardware, networking, storage, consulting, and applications development and testing.

And, back to the future, IBM is the only other firm with a similarly full arsenal to take on this task, with Oracle as the third-place wildcard.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 16th August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

SAN products vendor Nexsan has announced the first models in its E5000 family of 'plug-and-play' NAS storage systems, incorporating its new FASTier solid state disk (SSD) caching which may boost random I-O performance by as much as 600 percent.

The E5110 and E5310 are aimed firmly at mid-sized companies without specialist IT skills, and complement its existing E Series SATABoy/Beast block-mode SANs. Among many features is an innovative graphical user interface (GUI) designed for fast, error-free set-up (achievable in 15 minutes) and management - even of dispersed systems.

The FASTier cache uses SSD RAM (E5110) or three tiers of SSD DRAM (E5310) working transparently to boost performance, especially in high random I-O situations - for instance, where applications in multiple virtual servers are accessing the same storage pool. For the second time in a month I find myself reporting on a storage vendor countering what can be a performance-killer - virtualisation resulting in multiplied random writes. It is something that all storage hardware vendors will need to face up to going forward.

The diminutive E5110 provides 8-62TB of storage capacity in 3-6U rack space; the E5310 is a 3U NAS head enabling 9-720TB storage expansion to only 19U rack space - less than any competitor at this time. High availability features include dual redundant hot-pluggable storage controllers with automatic failover. 1 and 10Gb Ethernet connection are supported.

All Nexsan's products are sold through its worldwide channel of over 600 partners. They should like the easy implementation, low energy and space, high spec and scalability - that should assist their market penetration without the need for major re-training. CTO Gary Watson told me that the company was confident of new clients as well as add-ons for existing users.

Most importantly, albeit real-world benchmarks are not yet available, the SSD-boost should mean performance holds up well for users as they move to virtualised VMware, Hyper-V or Xen environments.

Another neat addition is Nexsan's "Extreme Density with Active Drawer Technology" to simplify maintenance in high density storage; operation is not interrupted by a drive drawer being opened to service disks or fans. In the same vein, users can pool multiple LUNs and add storage on-the-fly followed by auto-rebalancing of I-O; the systems allow sharing of CIFS and NFS files simultaneously.

Among other features are power-saving AutoMAID idle disk power-down technology, reservation-less snapshots, thin provisioning, asynchronous replication, and NDMP v4. Watson said an iSCSI version should appear before year end. The E5000 range should give the likes of EMC, Dell and NetApp something to think about in the mid-market.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 27th July 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

You move your servers to VMware or Hyper-V and everything is fine. Then you virtualise your storage and, without even changing your application, everything slows right down. Even if you know what is going on, you may not see any obvious way to get around the problem-and particularly if you are on a tight budget (and who isn't?).

For instance, if your storage has been thin provisioned to economise on disk usage, the last thing you want is to need to spread out your data to fully allocate disks, to get a performance boost; that would undo the capacity and energy savings that had reduced your operating costs. Nor, typically, would you want to embark on major systems changes at the same time as virtualising your storage.

What typically causes this slowdown is that the storage pool is now being accessed from, say, a dozen different virtual servers at once. While the overall volume of transactions may not have changed much, the randomness of record reading and writing will have multiplied. Writing in particular is slowed down through much greater drive contention and latency (longer seek times, greater head movement, longer average data transfer rates). This will affect everything sharing the storage pool from production applications to backups, snapshots and clones.

One company addressing this problem is Virsto (fairly obviously VIRtual STOrage), a recent VC start-up. It has test results showing a slowdown of three times for a Hyper-V environment and sometimes as high as nine times for a snapshot in the more widely adopted VMware.

Virsto uses a conceptually simple way to obviate this problem. The technique is not new to database vendors but has not been seen in the wider storage world until recently. What happens is that all the write requests are serviced initially by the record being written into a journal log file (not visible in the namespace), which creates a 100% sequential data stream irrespective of the number of virtual servers running at the time. This is fast because it removes the randomness and, as soon as the record has been written there, the requesting application gets the OK to continue. Meanwhile, an asynchronous background process works through the log file to write the records into the storage pool. So, two writes are needed but contention is removed.

There are of course a few technical wrinkles to manage, such as handling a read request for a record already due for updating from the journal, so as to ensure the latest image is used. Also, to maximise performance, the log file could be placed on a separate hard drive, or an SSD for which random reads are ultra-fast, but that is for the user (or channel partner) to decide-because I am describing a purely software solution.

Once installed, with the devices mounted through Virsto's management GUI, the software operates transparently within the existing storage and backup environment. So operation remains as it was before in the virtualised server-storage environment-only faster. It is complementary to existing storage applications, not competitive or a replacement. So, for instance, thin provisioning can continue without causing performance degradation.

Virsto sees the virtual desktop market as having even greater potential. Instead of tens of virtual servers sharing the storage pool there may be 100s of virtual desktops, so the company has developed two versions of the software which share the same processing engine.

The company released a Hyper-V version last year, and this now has around 40 users. Its VMware ESX vCenter version, now in alpha, is due for a Q4 release and, according to Virsto, results are showing performance slightly exceeding that for a fully allocated disk configuration without the software. With that release, users will also have a way of migrating between Hyper-V and VMware environments (reducing vendor lock-in). A Xen desktop version is on its way and due for release in 2012.

I can see some in the channel being ambivalent to this. It can address the needs of their users, expecially SMEs, suffering performance problems-and keep their costs down by maintaining the existing infrastructure; this could reduce the amount of new hardware they purchase in the short-term. Virsto is also maintaining direct sales, not least because some enterprise customers want to try it as the solution spans all business sizes. OEM deals can also be expected a little further down the line.

It is incredible to me that this problem was not foreseen by the virtualisation vendors or, if it was, that they didn't take steps of this kind to address it from the outset. I can also see no good reason (except for a few patents pending) why they should not develop their own solutions in the future. In the meantime, their loss is Virsto's gain-with their easy way out for those suffering a virtual storage performance collapse.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 1st July 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Storage data communication has become too complicated and expensive. So I love it when I see a technology that genuinely reduces complexity-and saves money-without an obvious performance downside. I am sure cash-strapped small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular would concur.

Are you familiar with ATA over Ethernet (or AoE for short)? If you're a Linux user you may well be, as it has been part of the Linux kernel since 2005. But, according to Kevin Brown, CEO of storage SAN provider Coraid, which is betting its shirt on this technology, "AoE is disruptive technology but has been flying below the radar". Coraid developed AoE in 2004, then made it open source.

So what is it? Some refer to it as a protocol; others, including Coraid, are more ambivalent, preferring to call it a raw Ethernet compute layer-because the data travels over the wires using Ethernet's own frames (packets). In a sense it is a bare-metal level 2 data transport method.

Coraid has been quietly exploiting AoE within the Linux community for a few years, while also working on some missing "must haves" to make it more robust and reliable, holding back wider takeup. Nor has it even been available for Windows. Coraid's AoE EtherDrive scale-out storage and SAN solution now has a Windows driver, snapshots and replication cloning capabilities.

With $35m in new VC funding and a new professional team and advisory board, Coraid is raising the company's and the technology's profile. For instance, it is now building an EMEA operation through channel partners. Yet, this does not demonstrate a clear potential for storage market disruption.

So let me take a step back. One can install VMware and create a new virtual server in, say, five minutes; but ask a user how long it can take to get all the relevant storage networking in place and aligned with the VMs. If this takes days or weeks-and it often does-that gets in the way of an agile enterprise IT infrastructure. To rub this in, Coraid has made a video demonstrating its AoE storage installation taking 60 seconds. Coraid also estimates 80% cost-savings using its commodity Ethernet scale-out solution versus an FC equivalent-which is potentially big bucks for most FC installations which cost above $100, 000.

Of course, existing FC or iSCSI users may not be about to abandon their investments, including in their expert personnel, and solution vendors will point to question-marks over AoE; yet these are also cash-strapped times for most businesses. So Brown sees Coraid's potential in new projects through which users can evaluate and prove the technology for themselves.

One such scenario is where FC users move to Ethernet because they see 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) costing as little as $500 per port. If, when moving, they could include an evaluation of the merits of Coraid's AoE solution by trying it out on one project. The FC user should find the Coraid commodity hardware working out at around one-fifth of the FC price per TB-and that it also out-performs it, not least because 10GbE enables massively parallel data communications. That alone could impress enough for a business to decide to gradually spread the technology at FC's expense.

"They [FC users] come from layers of complexity, switch configuring, HBAs and storage controllers, operating system-to one tier for all equipment," says Brown. So this is nothing like introducing a new technology; rather, if they abandoned FC/FCoE (or iSCSI), it would actually reduce layers. (The argument is a little weaker versus the relatively new iSCSI, but the price differential and performance could still be significant.)

Despite this, I suspect that AoE will be adopted more quickly by SMEs who are less likely to have FC. Storage requirements rise by 60-80% each year-there is a big cost difference between perhaps $2-5K per TB plus multiple skilled administrators and $5-700 with minimal administration for the Coraid solution. A further small benefit for some, because of the way the solution works, is that AoE can be inserted to replace direct-attach storage (DAS) transparently to the user, adding overall flexibility.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th June 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Cloud computing and mobility are redefining how people live, how organizations operate and how the world interacts. Enterprises must constantly adjust then to meet the changing needs of users, customers and the public by driving innovation and agility through technology.

Yet IT sprawl and outdated IT models and processes are causing enterprise complexity and crippling organizations’ abilities to keep pace with enterprise demands. Enterprises know they need to change, and they also have a pretty good idea of the IT operations and support they'd like to have. Now, it's a matter of getting there.

To help mobilize IT for the new order, HP today announced several Converged Infrastructure solutions that improve enterprise agility by simplifying deployment and speeding IT delivery. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Designed to be a key element in an Instant-On Enterprise, these offerings are designed in coordination to help reduce IT sprawl and turn technology assets into interoperable, shared pools of resources with a common management platform. They include:

• Converged Systems, a new portfolio of turnkey, optimized and converged hardware, software, tailored consulting and HP Solution Support services that enable users to be up and running with new applications in hours vs. months.
• Converged Storage architecture and portfolio, which integrates HP Store360 scale-out software with HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant hardware to reduce storage administration, speed time to service delivery, increase energy efficiency and improve access for any data type or application workload. The offerings are complemented by new Storage Consulting services.
• Converged Data Center, a new class of HP Performance Optimized Data Centers (PODs) that can be deployed in just 12 weeks – and at a quarter of the cost when compared to a traditional brick-and-mortar data center. The HP POD 240a, also referred to as the “HP EcoPOD,” uses 95 percent less facilities energy.
• HP Server Automation 9.1, which provides heterogeneous, automated server life cycle management for enterprise servers and applications for both converged and traditional environments. With new integrated database automation, it enables IT to significantly reduce the time it takes to achieve full application life cycle automation

Research conducted on behalf of HP found that 95 percent of private and public sector executives consider agility important to the success of their organizations. Plus, more than two-thirds of C-suite executives believe that enterprise agility is driven by technology solutions.

For me, enterprise IT strategists now basically know what they need for their data centers to meet the coming hybrid and cloud requirements. They will be using more virtualization, relying on standard hardware, managing their servers, storage and networks with increased harmony, supporting big data business intelligence, and dealing with more mobile devices.

More ways to move to modernization
HP is coming out with data center assets and services that—pretty much better than ever for IT—provide many on-ramps to modernizing all core IT infrastructure. The new and augmented products can be used by many types for organizations—and at any stages of maturity—to set out to meet modern and compete IT requirements. And they can do so knowing the capital and operating costs can be measured, managed and contained. These total IT costs are also being driven down from advancements in utilization, management, modular data center growth and pervasive energy conservation.

There are only a very few vendors that can supply the end-to-end data center transformation portfolio for the major domains of servers, storage, network and operational management. And HP is providing these globally with holistic and strategic integration so that the operational reliance and flexibility to scale and adapt become givens.

Most vendors are either hardware-heavy or software-centric, or lack depth in a major category like networking. HP has stated it plans to augment its software, and in the mean time is supporting best-of-breed choice on heterogeneous platforms, middleware and business applications—including open source.

Additions to HP Technology Services were also announced, aimed at a life cycle of consulting support including strategy, assessment, design, test, implementation and training. HP Solution Support provides single-point-of-contact services for the entire turnkey solution, including third-party software.

Converged Storage for rapid response
Legacy monolithic and unified storage architectures were designed to address predictable workloads, structured data and dedicated access. Today’s requirements, however, are exactly opposite, with unpredictable application workloads, such as cloud, virtualization and big data applications, said Martin Whittaker, Vice President for Systems and Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN), HP Enterprise Business.

HP’s Converged Storage architecture changes how data is accessed by integrating scale-out storage software with converged server and storage hardware platforms. Advanced management tools that span the architecture help speed IT service delivery. As a result, users can deploy and grow storage 41 percent faster while reducing administration time by up to 90 percent.

New solutions include:

• HP X5000 G2 Network Storage Systems, which are built on HP BladeSystem technology. They can be deployed in minutes and reduce power requirements up to 58 percent, cooling needs up to 63 percent and storage footprint up to 50 percent.
• HP X9000 IBRIX Network Storage Systems that optimize retention of unstructured data with new compliance features and the capacity for more than one million snapshots. The solution provides insight to the enterprise on trends, market dynamics and other pertinent facts by simplifying management of massive data sets. Policy management capabilities automate the movement of data to optimize resources.

Enhanced storage systems and services
HP’s fifth-generation Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family includes the new HP P6000 EVA, offering thin provisioning and Dynamic LUN Migration software along with 8Gb Fibre Channel, 10 Gb iSCSI and fibre channel over ethernet (FCoE) support. This enables users to consolidate application data to speed administration and reduce total cost of ownership.

HP Enterprise Services has integrated HP 3PAR Storage into the HP Data Center Storage Package, which offers storage management services that allow users to “flex” their storage needs up and down with changes in demand.

HP also offers new Storage Consulting Services that help users to design and deploy a Converged Storage environment, optimize the storage infrastructure, reduce costs, and protect and align data while preparing storage for cloud computing.

HP VirtualSystem
Virtualization technology has been widely adopted to consolidate servers, gain flexibility and optimize return on investment. However, virtualized environments can be difficult to plan, deploy and operate due to the proliferation of management tools, uncertain performance characteristics and unaddressed security concerns.

The new HP VirtualSystem portfolio, based on HP Converged Infrastructure, consists of turnkey server and client virtualization solutions.

The offerings are built on the HP BladeSystem platform, HP Lefthand/3PAR storage and HP FlexFabric networking technologies. As a result, they support up to three times more virtual machines per server, three times the I/O bandwidth and twice the memory as competing offerings. Also, the HP VirtualSystem portfolio is heterogeneous, supporting existing IT investments, multiple hypervisor strategies and operating systems with a common architecture, management and security model.

Further, HP VirtualSystem provides a path to cloud computing by utilizing similar hardware infrastructure and management environments as HP CloudSystem. To extend their environments and evolve to cloud computing, users follow a simple, rapid upgrade process, said James Jackson, Vice President for Marketing Strategy, ESSN in HP Enterprise Business.

HP offers three scalable deployment systems for small, midsize and large enterprises. Each includes leading hypervisor technologies from Microsoft or VMware, as well as the leading operating systems and applications.

The open, modular design of HP VirtualSystem simplifies management with a single-pane-of-glass view into each layer of the virtualized stack. HP TippingPoint security can be added for comprehensive threat protection of both physical and virtual platforms.

Users can increase the availability, performance, capacity allocation and real-time recovery of their HP VirtualSystem solutions with HP SiteScope, HP Data Protector, HP Insight Control and HP Storage Essentials software extensions.

Client Virtualization Reference Architecture for Enterprise includes Citrix or VMware software and HP Mission Critical Virtualization Reference Architecture complement the HP VirtualSystem solutions. The reference architecture resources contain a consistent set of architectural best practices, which enable users to rapidly deploy virtualized systems, improve security and performance, and reduce operating costs.

Life cycle support and consulting
To further reduce the complexity of virtual environments, HP Technology Services provides a full life cycle of consulting services, from strategy, assessment, design, test, implementation, training, and then transition to HP Solution Support for ongoing peace of mind.

HP VirtualSystem solutions are expected to begin shipping in the third quarter of this year. Availability of HP Client Virtualization Reference Architecture for Enterprise is expected in June and HP Mission Critical Virtualization Reference Architecture is expected in the third quarter of this year.

On-demand replays of the HP Discover press conference are available at www.hp.com/go/agileIT. Additional information about HP’s announcements at HP DISCOVER is available at www.hp.com/go/agility2011.

By: Martino Corbelli, Director of Marketing, Star Posted: 12th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

For many businesses, the traditional role of the CIO is to help drive the company’s business strategy forward through the appropriate application of technology to automate processes, reduce costs and open up access to new markets and opportunities. There are many challenges facing IT leaders ranging from mobile working to security and data protection. Unfortunately, most of the people working in the IT department today are primarily occupied with maintaining and updating existing systems, or working hard just to ‘keep the lights on’, so to speak. If they are not doing routine work of this nature then they are typically fire-fighting as entropy sets in to existing systems and processes making them fail as they become outdated.

This means that most people working in IT are working reactively and it’s no surprise they are finding it difficult to do more with an ever-decreasing IT budget. The result for most IT departments is that they are now being challenged by their business leaders who do not believe that IT is serving them sufficiently to help meet their corporate goals. Having recently conducted a survey of 360 senior IT managers across every sector of UK enterprise, we discovered that 60% of managers cite administration and trouble shooting as the main time consumers within their jobs. Now is the time to begin to challenge this poor application of important resources and ensure that the role the IT department plays is securing business success by accelerating the execution of business objectives. So the big question for CIOs and their IT people is how do you move from being seen as the maintenance team to a key strategic enabler?

Why IT matters
Despite the fact that IT can be harnessed to provide an important driving force for any organisation, 44% of IT managers feel that they are not consulted on business issues because senior managers see them as the maintenance engineers. This is because they are often locked into the hardware and software upgrade and maintenance cycle, an area proving to be increasingly challenging with dwindling budgets. This cycle is holding them and their business leaders back from realising their potential.

This is not helped by the fact that many managers still feel that IT vendors do not really understand small and medium sized companies in the UK, nor have a workable business model to match their needs. Historically, the mid-market has been neglected by the larger vendors, mainly because it was seen as more desirable to focus on large enterprises. There has been a recent shift in attention but it’s not nearly enough. 11% of respondents in the survey said they are already using managed services that are hosted by a third party and this is providing them with the platform they need to get more of the existing IT resources they already have and freeing them up from the undesirable day-to-day tasks to focus more on activity that adds value to the business. This is the strategic and innovative focus that 53% of IT Managers believe their role should be about.

Blending IT with cloud computing services
For some businesses, managed services delivered via a cloud computing platform are the only way they can afford to deliver new services to their staff. However, many businesses are unsure how to link hosted services and integrate them with existing systems and 38% of IT managers in UK SMEs are challenged by the ‘perceived’ loss of control.

Business leaders want their IT to be better, faster and cheaper, and technology needs to provide the platform that delivers business agility, aiding organisations to focus their existing people and resources where they need them most. To do this they must align IT resources to the business strategy, not just the pursuit of keeping the lights on so existing systems don’t fail. This is an opportunity for everyone concerned, although it is often preferred to be seen as the exact opposite. As time and money becomes more stretched the warped view that cloud computing is a threat to IT department is now beginning to be understood.

In smaller businesses, IT departments do not always have expert and specialist skills or the budget to take on new solutions and support them. Cutting costs is still the big issue for many UK SMEs and to do this many are now turning to cloud computing services that provide easy access to enterprise-grade solutions with no hardware or software to buy. The services are easy to use and pay for, at a low and predictable monthly per user fee. It’s a great way to cut out the drain of capital from the business. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the on-demand aspect, meaning that businesses only pay for the services they consume. This means the expenditure is seen to be accounted for as an operation expense, which is usually much more desirable.

These services are appealing because they can be delivered securely to any employee, wherever they are and at anytime. Deploying the right technologies to the business without having to recruit more IT people is a great advantage.

Seeking operational excellence
Every CEO and CFO wants and expects excellence from the IT investments that they sign off. At the very least they want to ensure that any operational and financial risks are mitigated. What is often taken for granted is how difficult it is to run IT systems with the required power and cooling, not to mention the right level of security to ensure the environment is kept safe and enough resiliency and back up systems to ensure business continuity. What many of them are now realising is that their data and applications are much safer and better provisioned when they are hosted in a professionally run third party data centre and wrapped around with a solid Service Level Agreement. This is in stark contrast to when their business critical systems are hastily cobbled together from their own facilities that simply can’t compete with the level of investment and sophistication on offer from a managed service provider.

As more business leaders push their IT departments down this route the role of the CIO is now becoming one of managing relationships rather than managing technology and getting lost in the detail. This is an exciting proposition as cloud computing is freeing up IT professionals to think more strategically and offload the donkey work to someone who can do it better, faster and cheaper, allowing them to focus on the key aspects that differentiate the business from its competitors. This is the real role of the Chief Information (or ‘Innovation’) Officer.

Download a free copy of The Cloud Computing Guide from: www.star.co.uk/cloud

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 21st December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

I recently presented at a webinar alongside LogLogic on the issues of compliance for IT professionals. Here is an edited transcript of my talk.

Until fairly recently, information security people were buried away in server rooms configuring firewalls and patching servers. With the sudden surge of compliance and regulatory requirements being placed onto a business, IT security people are now required to understand and help implement compliance solutions.

But how can security teams help join the dots between their security work and compliance issues? How can compliance requirements be met without placing undue strain on the organisation causing paralysis by analysis? How can information security people add value to a business following a compliance agenda?

The pressure to deliver a secure IT infrastructure against a background of constantly changing compliance and regulatory demands is tough, and not helped by a reduction in budgets to achieve this ever-changing goal. The first part of this process is to get an understanding of exactly what compliance requirements you need to be worried about and, more importantly, those that can be put to the background. Not only do we need to consider state laws, federal laws and international laws, there are industry-specific regulations that further complicate the picture. Those organisations trading across international boundaries face even more challenges as they get to grips with different legal structures and cultural demands. During this webinar you will have a chance to learn about the realities of achieving an acceptable level of compliance for your organisation, and hopefully get some help for your work down in the trenches.

I would imagine that everyone knows only too well the demands on us as information security professionals. I think it could be argued that we have one of the most difficult jobs in the IT business as we need to be seen to add value whilst at the same time often saying no—often a contradictory position.

As the current financial situation rolls on we are faced with doing more with less, and organisations are increasingly worried about reputational risk more than ever before as any damage to the business will have an affect on often slim profits. This work needs to be balanced with the relentless slog of dealing with malware and other unexpected gotchas waiting in the wings to pounce.

Some of us are lucky enough to enjoy a lot of support from the executive team downwards. Unfortunately other boards may see the information security role as nothing but a pain and something they wish they could make go away. If this is your position you have my sympathies!

Data security is now getting a lot of attention as it is subject to legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Failing to adhere to appropriate laws and regulations can result in legal actions, fines, reputational risk and maybe, in extreme circumstances, imprisonment.

The benfits of compliance
Achieving  compliance, in the broadest sense of the word, can be a good thing as it often instils good practices and procedures.

On the other hand over-compliance can be detrimental as the business can be bogged down in achieving a goal that delivers little direct business benefit. Many medium-sized businesses are struggling with compliance requirements as they are big enough to be caught by various requirements but too small to have resources to cope. Of course failing a compliance audit can result in lots of difficult questions from the board of directors, shareholders and partners.

The only thing we can promise is that there will be more compliance and regulatory requirements coming down the line to affect data handling and security. The demands of a business culture that is becoming more and more compliance oriented can be major. The problem is that this change in culture leads to some strange ideas.

One objection to additional security spend I hear from businesses is that they are fully compliant, as proved by external auditors, and therefore don’t need much or any more investment in their IT security systems. Some business managers are then astonished when they realise that security has been breached, especially after they had spent considerable sums on establishing this compliant business environment. Indeed, the fact that the business is compliant, whatever that means, has induced a level of complacency in some as regards information security.

IT security managers have a need to help educate business managers in the differences between compliance and security. That way a business can make investment decisions based on accurate information rather than assumptions.

I feel for medium-sized businesses that are captured by the compliance net but have little or no resources to meet what can be seen as an onerous requirement. Fortunately some compliance and regulatory demands have planned for this and offer suitable break points so that small and medium sized business don’t fall foul of regulations whilst being able to run their day to day business.

The cost of poor compliance
So what about the real cost of poor compliance and bad information security? In March 2010 Zurich Insurance announced that it was going to improve its information security after losing personal financial information on 46,000 British clients through careless handling of unencrypted back-up tapes.

The back-up tape, which also contained personal details of 1,800 third party insurance claimants from the UK, was lost by Zurich's South African sister company during what was described as a routine transfer to a data storage facility in South Africa in August 2008.

In total, 51,000 British records were on the tape, along with a much larger number of details about Zurich customers in South Africa (550,000) and Botswana (40,000). Zurich's UK arm wasn't informed about the problem until a year later.

They were fined the equivalent of $5m by the Financial Services Authority, the highest fine levied in the UK on a single firm for data security failings. This is the cost of non-compliance.

US compliance
In many respects, the United States has led when it comes to data security laws that mandate stricter requirements and harsher penalties if data is compromised.

The implementation of state-level data breach notification laws in California in 2002 was seen as a prime example of addressing individuals' concerns about their data privacy. In this case, if personally identifiable data has been lost then those individuals possibly affected must be notified and steps taken to help them manage any ongoing consequences. 44 of the US states now have similar laws in place but, of course, if data has been demonstrably encrypted, then there would be no obligation to disclose its loss.

Since 2002, many US states have introduced even more draconian laws. The state of Massachusetts has introduced regulation 201 that is designed to protect personal data, for which encryption plays a big part. The compliance date was set for January 2010 and violators face penalties of $5,000 per infringement.

Other US laws encompass data security and imply that data encryption is required, even if it is not explicatively stated in the legislation.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 gives powers to the Department of Health and Human Services to watch over and enforce rules applicable to the safe and secure handling of patient data, including that which contains personally-identifiable health information. It is applicable to all entities that use such data, including healthcare providers, insurance companies and public health authorities. There are three safeguards that need to be implemented covering administration, physical and technical areas of data management. The technical safeguards require that patient health information is not improperly modified and any deliberate misuse could result in a prison term.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was intended to improve the regulation and accountability of publicly owned companies following the spectacular corporate failures that occurred in the early part of that decade. Under Section 404: Management Assessment of Internal Controls of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, there is a need to prove the integrity and confidentiality of financial information.

The U.S. Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act, in 1999 to assist in the growth of the US financial services industry. One part of the Act (Sec. 501b) addresses the safeguarding of customer information including the integrity and confidentiality of non-public personal information and customer records.

EU compliance
The EU has a very different make up to the United States. The European Union currently comprises 27 member states. It was established following the Maastricht treaty in 1993, which renewed the union originally called the European Economic Community, or EEC. The EU generates approximately 30% of worldwide GDP and has around 500 million citizens.

The EU has developed a system of laws that apply to the movement of goods and people and the creation of a single trading entity. Each member state is subject to both EU and their own locally created national laws. There are countries that form part of Europe geographically but do not have membership of the EU, for example Switzerland. These countries are therefore not subject to EU-based laws.

As part of its remit, the EU has created business-related compliance and regulatory requirements, including laws that cover the safe keeping and management of data in computer systems. Failure to comply with these laws can result in criminal proceedings and prosecutions, so any organisation operating in the EU needs to take such laws as seriously as those developed by individual nation states.

When considering EU law it is important to understand the structure of the EU and how laws are enacted.

The EU Council represents national governments and is a council of ministers run by a 6-month rotating presidency. National ministers attend meetings as appropriate to their portfolio. The European Parliament is elected every five years by citizens of the member states. Members of the European Parliament have geographically-based constituencies that are generally larger than those for members of a national parliament.

The European Commission acts as a civil service and drafts new laws, which are passed to the European Parliament for discussion and enactment. The EU is based on a rule of law, which is laid down in a series of treaties and directives. These then become a collective legislative act of the EU, which is then enacted in member state laws. If a member state fails to enact a suitable law then action can be taken against that state in the European Courts of Justice, which is the judicial institution of the Community.

The compliance and regulatory framework in EMEA is never far from the spotlight, more so as the current worldwide financial situation is forcing regulators to review their oversight and regulatory activities in an attempt to prevent a similar crisis happening again. This is against a backdrop of relentless data loss incidents across both the private and public sector.

So let’s look at some key requirements in detail. The UK Data Protection Act is a useful example of a data privacy law and the PCI DSS is an interesting example of an international requirement put in place by a non-state organisation.

Data Protection Act
The UK Data Protection Act imposes legal obligations on anyone processing personal data to ensure there is good practice and management of that data. In part 1 of the Act there are 8 enforceable principles of good personal information handling. Data must be:

• Accurate and up to date.
• Fairly and lawfully processed.
• Secured.
• Not allowed to leave the UK unless the destination countries have similar legislation.
• Processed in line with a person’s rights.
• Only kept for as long as necessary.
• Processed for limited purposes.
• Adequate, relevant and not excessive.

Part 2 of the act gives individuals rights to find out what personal information is held about them on computers and most paper records. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has legal powers to ensure that organisations comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act. A data controller who persistently breaches the Act and has been served with an enforcement notice can be prosecuted for failing to comply with a notice. From April 2010 the ICO can impose penalties not exceeding £500,000 for serious breaches of this act. We are still waiting for the “big one” to hit, but I understand there are some ongoing investigations that may result in the maximum fine. Certainly if the loss of 25 million records, as happened a couple of years ago by the UK’s HM Revenue and Customs happened today then the ICO has publicly stated that it would have levied the maximum fine. Then, of course, we have discussions about public money travelling from one place to another but that is beyond the scope of this presentation.

In Germany the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG), adheres to the seven basic principles of EU Directive 95/46/EC in the protection of data relating to individuals or data that allows an individual to be identified. The 16 Länder have their own data protection regulations that cover local public bodies. These local regulations are similar in spirit to the Federal Data Protection Act. In July 2009, German legislature passed a number of amendments to the act to strengthen its powers. Most notably there was a new requirement introduced to provide notification of data breaches in a similar way to the United States. These were effective as from 1st September 2009.

PCI DSS
This is probably one of these regulations that appears to have achieved a good compliance vs. effort balance as organisations that I work with are generally satisfied that they can achieve their required level of PCI DSS compliance without it breaking their businesses. If you take a look at the 12 requirements of PCI DSS no one could argue against the sanity of putting in place these measures:

• Build and maintain a secure network including installing and maintaining a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data and not using default passwords.
• Protect cardholder data and encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks.
• Maintain a vulnerability management program and use regularly updated anti-virus software. Develop and maintain secure systems and applications.
• Implement strong access control measures and restrict access to cardholder data on a need-to-know basis. Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access and restrict physical access to cardholder data.
• Regularly monitor and test networks and track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data.
• Maintain a policy that addresses information security.

I don’t see how any information security professional could argue against implementing these requirements as they all go to make up a commonsense set of security structures. Having recently had my credit card details stolen I am as keen as anyone to see merchants achieve a better level of security and compliance.

Contrast the relative clarity of PCI DSS with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements in the US. This imposes rather mystical requirements on information security. For example section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley requires organisations to, “provide internal controls and report on their effectiveness” and section 802 says that organisations must, “ensure the integrity and availability of records”. This is a charter for auditors to make a lot of money!

As we have seen, compliance is now a big requirement for many businesses and I think most people would agree that the depth and breadth of compliance requirements is only going to deepen. As organisations switch on to the world of compliance they realise that it is far more cost-effective to run compliant systems 24/7 rather than hastily scrabble to clean up prior to an audit. Those days should be long gone and organisations should ideally be “audit ready” at all times, or at least strive to be. Any investments in systems that assist in gathering data and then produce compliance documentation will inevitably be proven to be a wise one, if even in the short term there is some practical and fiscal pain in purchasing and implementing the system.

This is where knowing the unknowns can pay dividends. I worked with a very large organisation recently that was feeling under pressure to come up to scratch from a compliance viewpoint. The IT infrastructure was (and indeed is) huge, and quite frankly systems, servers, networks and deployments ran away with themselves for a number of years. The IT management was feeling overwhelmed and needed to try and get a grip. To that end they installed and configured some automatic discovery tools to try and scan the network to see how it matched with their “official” documentation. The scale of additional network segments, hidden wireless access points, secret departmental databases and a wealth of other unauthorised IT was frightening.

This shook up the management and lead to a far more structured planning and network management process. Luckily they managed to get most of these issues addressed prior to a looming audit.

Compliance adding value
We, as information security professionals, need to be adding value to the business. Instead of being seen as the people that say no, we should be a conduit to ease the implementation of compliance systems. By understanding not only the technical challenges of compliance requirements but also the business context we can be seen to add value from the off. The good news is that, as we have seen, investing in compliance can also help us deliver a secure working environment. That said, it is beholden on us to ensure the business really understands the difference between compliance and security but at the same time sees the improved business case of delivering appropriate security projects on the back of a compliance requirement. Information technology can be notoriously complex and we often see business managers chased away from involvement in decisions related to technology. Whilst this may be appropriate in very narrow technical decisions it is important that business understands IT and how it is benefiting the business.

From a compliance perspective it is very easy for the business to be frightened by talk of liabilities, whilst technicians appear to spend budgets with limited care for the overall business benefit. When considering IT compliance, it is imperative that a strategic approach is taken based on clear, rational thinking. Many businesses have rushed into a technical solution that was sold as solving compliance issues only for them to quickly realise the limitations of the product.

IT security professionals have a responsibility not only to define an effective technical solution but to ensure that the solution is developed and deployed to mitigate fully the exposure and risks facing the business. Businesses must recognise that IT security is not only an important aspect of today’s business requirements but a permanent feature, the importance of which will only grow as the rights of the individual are ever more politicised and enshrined in EU and national law.

Data is either static or on the move. In both cases businesses must be able to secure it and to demonstrate to all parties that it is doing so. In our industry nothing stays still for long.

A word of caution now needs to be sounded about cloud-based systems and compliance. The race to the cloud has seen a number of organisations fall foul of data protection regulations and issues such as data privacy. Of course the cloud delivers some interesting business benefits but these must be balanced against the associated security and regulatory issues—joining the dots between security and compliance initiatives when talking about cloud computing can be very tricky.

The good news is that aligning information security and compliance, although a challenge, is probably getting easier now than it was up until a couple of years ago. The availability of tools to help in this process should reduce the compliance headache and help us get some value out of the compliance process.

New compliance requirements
We have seen new compliance and legislative requirements continually emerge in response to political initiatives, market dynamics and the need to manage new technologies.

Although many of these were not directly aimed at IT systems it is inevitable that such systems will be used to transport, store and manage data that will be subject to audit and control. There will therefore be a need for data to be held and moved demonstrably in a safe and secure way such that integrity is retained.

Examples include the UK’s smart metering initiative, where household energy meters will be upgraded to devices connected to a network and data transferred automatically to central billing facilities. Requests for data privacy comments have been made by OFGEM, the energy regulator. Although a lot of existing regulations and laws such as the Data Protection Act will be applicable it would not be surprising if tailored requirements emerge.

Effective governance that protects all constituents and demonstrates compliance and clear corporate responsibility will become an increasingly key component of data-related business solutions. Increasing awareness of the consequences of non-compliance will drive requirements for transparency and complete end-to-end visibility of data movements within the enterprise and, ultimately, throughout the value and supply chain.

Does compliance = MOT?
I will leave you with one last thought. Here in the UK, after the second world war, lots of people were driving cars that were in pretty bad repair—brakes were poor, lights were damaged and steering was often ropey. This lead to accidents and injuries that could have been prevented. In 1960 the Ministry of Transport introduced a compulsory test, now commonly called the MOT,  on all vehicles over 10 years old in an effort to ban the most dangerous cars from the road. Over time the age of annual tests reduced to its current of 3 years and the breadth and depth of the MOT has now expanded to incorporate new technologies such as catalytic converters.

Is the growth in IT related regulations and compliance requirements following a similar trajectory to the evolution of the MOT test?

All in all we now see far fewer old bangers or clunkers on the road than at anytime in the past and I wonder whether we will benefit in seeing fewer data breaches and security lapses as computer systems are put through regular audits or MOTs.

Of course the mistake many people make when buying a car is to assume that a current MOT certificate is proof that a vehicle is roadworthy. Of course it isn’t—all it means is that at the time of testing the car was able to pass the MOT test.

In a similar way a computer system may pass an audit but very rapidly collapse into a state of non-compliance due to mismanagement. Constant attention to audit and compliance is the only sensible way to manage these needs.

Who knows, with the development of decent compliance and regulations we may see less dangerous IT systems and fewer data loss accidents and mishaps!

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 20th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

It is time of year when we are expected to make predictions about the following year. My predictions for next year are, in no particular order:

1. We won’t see any less hype next year. Probably more.
2. Confusion will continue to spread, mostly because of 1.
3. Cloud computing won’t take over the world.
4. The advocates of cloud computing will say that it is taking over the world (see 1).
5. Most people won’t be much clearer about what cloud computing is and what it isn’t and what the different types of cloud computing are (see 2). For example, it needs to be understood that XaaS (something as a service) is not the same thing as cloud computing and that there are (maybe) 3 types of cloud computing: public, private and hosted, where the last of these is effectively a private cloud that it is run for you by someone else. But what is the difference between a flexible on-premise infrastructure and a private cloud? And what is the difference between an outsourced infrastructure and a hosted cloud? Beats me.
6. We will run out of letters to put before aaS (see 2). Just kidding. I wonder how many have actually been used up?
7. Virtualisation will continue to be the next greatest buzz word; at the latest count applying to at least four different technologies (see 1 and 2). Currently we have desktop virtualisation, server virtualisation, data virtualisation (which refers to having a virtual data model and is therefore completely different) and we are about to see the emergence of the polar opposite of server virtualisation (making one big system look like a lot of small ones) whereby you make a cluster of small systems look like one big one, which will also use the v word.
8. We will hear lots more about big data (see 1). From the amount of noise about it (see 1) you would think big data was the number one issue in data management. It isn’t. It is certainly important for some companies but those companies are a relatively small fraction of the total. Most companies are more concerned with mundane issues like performance and meeting user demands for new reports than they are with big data. But big data means big bucks, particularly if you are a disk manufacturer, so expect more 1.
9. In order to meet the demands of big data there will be more sets of initials: SQL, NoSQL and NOSQL aren’t nearly enough: someone will certainly invent some more (see 1 and 2).
10. The number of proprietary data warehousing vendors will fall though not enough to compensate for the growth in NoSQL, NOSQL and other initial-based open source database vendors claiming to address the big data problem.
11. It won’t get any better in 2012 so you might as well enjoy 2011 while you can.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Three megatrends are shaping the next generation of successful businesses and governments. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications, highly responsive cloud-computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration.

Indeed, by the year 2020, The Economist newspaper predicts there will be two trillion devices connected to the Internet. And taking a look at where we are right now, McKinsey Quarterly reported in August that in 2010 some four billion people have cell phones, and 450 million have access to a full web experience.

Moreover, Jupiter Research reports that by 2014 there will be 130 million enterprise users involved with mobile cloud activities. Not only is access pervasive, but the amount of information available is also exploding. The Economist again reports that in 2005 mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data … and in 2010 we will create fully eight times more data.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

As these trends literally rearrange business ecosystems, a gap will surely emerge between the companies that master change -- and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

For those that do step up to the challenge -- expect a relentless emphasis on rapidly recurring innovation to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands.

Our latest BriefingsDirect podcast therefore focuses on how these trends -- and rapidly evolving customer, citizen, and user expectations -- are newly impacting the enterprise. We also examine how technology advancements are making it possible to drive innovation to meet these new demands for instant gratification.

Please join HP executive Dave Shirk, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business, as we explore how HP is working to make headway, so that the next few years bring about a generational opportunity -- and not a downward complexity spiral. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shirk: We're seeing a lot of shift going on in the marketplace right now. When we look at where consumers are driving business or where citizens are driving government, it's fundamentally changing the way they operate. We've seen three core things come out.

The business models are all starting to change the way in which people approach markets across the globe. That's having to really rethink the ways in which they've approached them versus traditional methods.

The second thing we see is this whole shift in mobile computing meeting cloud computing and the enterprise trying to figure out exactly how to take best advantage of that to create this competitive advantage. Then, the overall demographic piece weighs into that.

We've seen the rise of the millennials, as they're being referred to. All of these things are forcing business and government to stop and say, "You know what, if we're going to grow or we're going to create a service differentiation, we're really going to need to do things differently and we're going to have to do it way faster than we've ever done it before."

According to the Society for Engineers, you now have over 800,000 graduates in China, over 300,000 graduates in India, 100,000 some in Japan, etc. It's over the last 10 to 12 years that each of those graduation rates has occurred. They are part of the workforce now.

When they went through that process, they were always connected and they always were involved in a social network-based environment. They have a level of their lifestyle that is all tied to this always-connected environment. When you think about the ubiquitous computing that that has brought to them, as they enter the workforce, they are looking at things a lot differently than ever before.

They bring new ideas. They bring new ways to that. They're looking for businesses that will support that kind of methodology and structure. ... So, when we think about that Gen X group that's out there, we see them driving an enormous part of this change.

The last statistic I saw was that they are now over 50 percent of the workforce. The analogy that's always used is that, to them, being connected and always involved in some type of networking-based collaboration or information sharing of some sort is about the same as it is for you and me to pick up our remote controls and turn on our television sets. That's already having a very profound effect on how business and government are changing and the expectations that are out there in the marketplace.

It's this [demand for] immediate or instant gratification: "If I can't get what I want in the following way, I’ll find the business or government environment where I can." While the government piece maybe a bit harder to change, the business piece isn't, and so the competitive pressure to serve this audience, both as the consumer and also as employees, is a big part of that shift.

We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

We call that the "Now Problem." They want this, they want it done now, and they want it to work a certain way. We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

This is probably best represented in the words of Professor Gary Hamel, who is the foremost business visionary person out there in the marketplace. In his book, Future of Management, he described it as "whiplash change."

That's very much the case when I speak with our clients both on the business side and the government side. That's exactly what they're sitting there and thinking and working through right now.

Role of technology

We look at the technology piece of [the change] and say that you really can't [react] any other way -- the pace of it, the speed of it, and some of the complexity associated with it. For a long time, business has tried to use labor as an arbitrage to try to work their way through this and just throw bodies at it. That's quickly dissipating. The speed and the connectedness that we see, and the confidence level that all of these types of services require make it no longer possible to go through that.

What we see is IT completely embedded in the business. Over the next couple of years, that's going to continue to be the trend and the strategy that will play out in the way in which business and government work this. Ultimately, that's going to be the differentiator that drives an ability not only to serve these constituencies but to out-serve them, and that's going to be the name of the game.

[The solution] starts with a desire to change and to drive innovation in a different way. We sit and we think about the fundamental change in this. We talked for years that the business was focused on business processes and business process reengineering. While that’s still very important, it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It's becoming obvious that the bigger driver and the more significant trend is the information process, understanding the segments of business or government that need to be addressed. What their needs are, what they want, what they want to talk about, the ways in which they want to interact is all part of this change that’s taking place.

Closing the gap

So, as we start to pull back and step back from this, we look at that and we look at this vision that we have for the Instant-On Enterprise and how we’re enabling end-users to become a part of that, how we’re enabling businesses and governments to provide that type of capability. It really is about closing the gap between what IT can provide and what the business needs to be able to serve each of those audiences.

What we’ve launched with this vision is to put the foundations in place to make that possible and take a journey with our clients both from the business side and government side and help them move down that particular path, find ways to navigate these challenges and these trends, and to out-serve and to over-serve all the audiences that they need to meet the needs of.

[This change] is inevitable. Different businesses and governments will have, at different times, one of these four elements be more important or more significant to them at different points. All of them share the innovation requirement. We see that in all things.

Our view is that the innovation has to take place throughout that information process. It doesn’t matter whether it happens back at the data center or at every touch point. Innovation has to take place throughout for the business to meet the needs of those segments I’ve referred to earlier -- how it services it, how it conducts itself, and ultimately how it meets our needs or exceeds the needs of the audiences.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used.

Agility, optimization, and risk all vary in and out with innovation in terms of their need and their level of importance.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used. A big part of technology’s trouble in the past was that we created all of these things and we never had a plan for ending their lifecycle or turning them down slightly, so that we could turn up other activities or other possibilities in an instant-on environment and an instant-on enterprise. A core part of the vision that we see is being able to drive that agility to meet those changing business needs.

When HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense. There are some things that are much easier to focus on first and then, over time, to gain more and more of an Instant-On nature.

Critical success factors

Flexibility, security, speed, automation, and insight, those absolutely are attributes that we look for. We see them as the critical success factors in the way in which every part of the environment that IT leverages, drives, and embeds in the business has to come forward.

And yet, everybody is stuck in this mode of an enormous legacy that they have to deal with, and that gets in the way of being able to provide some of these new capabilities.

We’ve spent a lot of time and gotten a lot of expertise over the years trying to figure out the best ways to address these albatrosses that are keeping IT from being able to deal with the needs of the business. In the Instant-On Enterprise journey, that's a big part of the set of steps that we have to work through and work with our clients to make sure that they understand where to prioritize.

In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

Our view is that we work with our clients and figure out ways that they can, as we say, shift that equation. How do you shift from 70 percent of that equation being focused on operational management, and 30 percent, if you are lucky, being spent on new and innovation-based capabilities to help or assist the business and its growth versus shifting it the other way? How do you get to 30 percent operational mode, and move forward with 70 percent focused on the business?

Changing business models

When I spend time with clients and listen to them, a big part of what they're asking for is, "We’ve got these pressures. We're seeing the business models change and we're experimenting with some things. We're seeing the mobile and the cloud computing pieces coming at us like a freight train. At the same time, we're seeing the demographic shift both on the end-user consumer side and on our employee side. We need strategic partners to help us with this. How do we navigate this? What is the way in which we should do that? HP, do you have a point of view?"

We're in a unique position, because we're the only company in the marketplace that has a full suite of consumer products, and yet we stretch all the way back through to the data center. All the capability, all the offerings, that are in between, all the services that are necessary to address each of those pieces, are contained inside the portfolio capability that HP has of hardware, software, and services.

We looked at this and said, "How do we take the best combination of that breadth of portfolio and bring those together in a set of solutions to best address what we are hearing over-and-over from some of the research that we’ve done and listening that we’ve done with our clients?"

They need to figure out how to modernize their applications. We want to make sure that we are there and we’ve got a set of solutions for that. They’ve got huge data-center issues in terms of how they're going to transform their data centers and deal with more virtualization-based techniques and capabilities and bring networking and storage and compute power together in some fashion.

They’ve got this issue of enterprise security. They need to figure out how to secure the enterprise. I don’t mean desktops, but all points, all touch points of the enterprise -- how they build applications, how this information is accessed inside and outside of the organization, and then fundamentally optimizing that information, the ways in which you store it, the way in which you deliver it, the way in which you print it for that matter, all those pieces.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

Then, they need to underpin that by the best way to figure out how to deliver it. Do we do it for them? Do they build it themselves with our architecture, and our capability set, and our consulting expertise? What combination of ways makes the most sense to set that up?

... We help our clients work their way through that with a series of workshops that we do to get in and investigate. We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

There’s an enormous amount of talk about cloud in the marketplace today. HP has been at the forefront of that, but we have a little different position. We think it’s unique and we think we're the only ones out there that are really positioned to do this, which is the concept of hybrid IT, where you’ve got a mix. You’ve got a mix of traditional on-premises-based capabilities, but then you figure out what private cloud or public cloud-based capabilities best serve your business on a global basis.

HP comes in and, unlike other companies that try to force you into a one-size-fits-all structure, we sit down with the client. Our unique IP in this area is that we have an incredible depth of intellectual capital in this particular area, which is helping the clients figure out the best balance or mix of the delivery methods.

We can help them build it. They can host it or we can host it for them. We can provide those services from our public cloud-based capabilities or from our private cloud based capabilities. We really don’t care, if that blend changes over time. That’s the beauty to the journey to this Instant-On Enterprise.

Starting small

Our data says that most customers still start with a small private cloud implementation to really understand the value of the cloud and demystify it. We’ve said that there is going to be something after cloud. We don’t know what that level or that style of computing is going to be, but our architecture is built such that we’ll be ready for that. For our clients, we’ll help navigate them through each of these pieces, and that’s the important thing for us.

We have our new HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service, which is a place for a client to start, get a basic orientation, sit down and understand kind of where we think they might consider beginning that journey. So that, along with a number of other capabilities that we have to help them through these various workshops, I think is really the best place for them to start.

There are a whole series of workshops globally that our teams are set up to do, everything from a small couple-of-hour based interaction to a full suite of in-depth analysis and consulting engagements to work with a client. ... We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• Shoemaker on how HP CSA Aids Total Visibility in Services Management Lifecycle for Cloud Computing
• HP Business Service Automation portfolio gives IT the tools it needs to compete with clouds
• HP eyes automated apps deployment, 'standardized' private cloud creation with integrated CloudStart package
• HP adds new consulting services to smooth the enterprise path to cloud adoption

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The lives of IT admins in Windows environments should get a little easier with the launch of rPath's rBuilder 5.8 for "push-button" deployment of Windows Server instances.

The Raleigh, N.C. company's rBuilder 5.8 introduces release automation to the world of Windows Server applications. With the new software, rBuilder 5.8 earns bragging rights as a first commercial solution to address deployment automation for Windows instances and apps. [Disclosure: rPath is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The deployment challenge

For most IT organizations, deploying Windows apps into production is complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming. That complexity can lead to long delays in full deployments that leave a dark cloud hanging over service levels and business agility.

The rise of public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 has further motivated IT to become more responsive to business lines.

With its automation approach, rBuilder 5.8 is wrestling that challenge to the ground with what it calls “push-button deployment” of Windows apps. This software helps to automatically resolve dependencies to virtually eliminate deployment-time failures, automatically generate standard MSI packages that are ready to deploy, apply version control to all packaged elements, and eliminate drift between dev, test, and production release stages, says rPath.

rBuilder 5.8 also generates image output on demand for rapid deployment or retargeting between physical, virtual, and cloud environments, makes way for targeted changes for low-overhead, conflict-free maintenance, and provides a single enterprise solution for automated deployment of any application, running any platform, deployed to any execution environment -- physical, virtual, or cloud, said rPath.

There are some more resources available on the capabilities and new release: Attend a free, live webinar Nov. 16; watch a short video; read a whitepaper, and learn more.

The need for deployment speed

Deployment dysfunction is a primary source of delay in delivering IT services in response to business demand. The rPath solution also works to complement Microsoft development and operating environments, including Team Foundation Server and System Center Configuration Manager.

With some 70 to 80 percent of IT spending due to operating expenses, nearly half is attributable to deployment-related tasks. This is particularly true for Microsoft Windows environments, which constitute 74 percent of the data-center server market. If rBuilder 5.8 lives up to its promises, it could find a home in many Windows-based IT departments. And it lends a hand in migration and hybrid deployments, too.

rPath has also joined the Microsoft System Center Alliance, a partner community in support of the System Center ecosystem. The System Center Alliance provides an online community that aims to help partners collaborate on the creation of solutions for the System Center and deliver an information resource about these new solutions for customers and sales channel partners.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

You may also be interested in:

• rPath brings data center automation to Windows environments
  
• Trio of cloud companies collaborate on new private cloud platform offerings
  
• rPath offers free management tool for applications aspiring to the cloud

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

How do IT architectures at software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers provide significant advantages over traditional enterprise IT architectures?

We answer that "Architecture is Destiny" question by looking at how one human resources management (HRM), financial management and payroll SaaS provider, Workday, has from the very beginning moved beyond relational databases and distributed architectures that date to the mid-1990s.

Instead, Workday has designed its architecture to provide secure transactions, wider integrations, and deep analysis off of the same optimized data source—all to better serve business needs. The advantages of these modern services-based architecture can be passed on to the end users—and across the ecosystem of business process partners—at significantly lower cost than conventional IT.

Joining us here is a technology executive from Workday, Petros Dermetzis, Vice President of Development there, to explore how architecting properly provides the means to adapt and extend how businesses need to operate, and not be limited by how IT has to operate. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dermetzis: We have a unique opportunity to stand back and see what history and evolution provided over the past 20 years and say, "Okay, how can we provide one technology stack that starts addressing all those individual problems that started appearing over time?"

If you think of the majority of the systems out there, the way we describe them is that they were built from the ground up as islands. It was really very data-centric. The whole idea was that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system gave all the solutions, which in reality isn't true.

What we tried to do at Workday was start from a completely white sheet of paper. The reality around ERP systems is actually making all this work together. You want your transactions, you want your validations, you want to secure your data, and at the same time you want access to that data and to be able to analyze it. So, that’s the problem we set out to do.

What drove our technology architecture was first, we have a very simple mentality. You have a central system that stores transactions, and you make sure that it's safe, secure, encrypted, and all these great words. At the same time, we appreciate that systems, as well as humans, interact with this central transactional system. So we treat them not as an afterthought, but as equal citizens.

If you go back in time to when mainframes started appearing, it was about transactions, capturing transactions, and safeguarding those transactions. IT was the center of the universe and they called the shots. As it evolved over time, IT began to realize that departments wanted their own solutions. They try to extract the data and take them into areas, such as spreadsheets and what have you, for further analysis.

ERP solutions evolved over time and started adding technology solutions as problems occurred. They started with a need to report data and very quickly realized it was like climbing a ladder of hierarchic needs. When you get your basic reporting right, you need to start analyzing data.

The technologies at the time, around the relational models, don’t actually address that very well. Then, you find other industries, like business intelligence (BI) vendors, appeared who tried to solve those problems.

The way things evolved, you started with an application, and integrations were an afterthought; they got bolted on. ... They kept on adding more and more and more layers of vendors, and the more the poor enterprise IT customers are trying to peel it, the more they start crying—crying in terms of maintenance and maintenance dollars.

Old approach won't scale
Right now, the state of the art is hard-wiring most of these central solutions to these third-party solutions, and that basically doesn't scale. That’s where technology kicks in and you have to adopt new open standard and web services standards.

What we try to do at Workday is understand holistically what the current problems are today, and say, "This is a golden opportunity." This is opposed to finding all existing technologies, cobbling them all together, and trying to solve the problems exactly the same way.

If you're managing any system with HRM systems, you need to communicate with other systems, be it for background checks, for providing information to benefit providers, connecting to third-party payrolls, or what have you.

Obviously, [traditional ERP vendors] were solving the problem incrementally, as they were going along. What we tried to do was address it all in the same place. Where we are right now is what I would describe as very business transaction-centric in what I define as legacy applications. Then, we want to take it more to an area which is business interactions, and interactions can happen from humans or machines.

We're creating a revolution in the ERP industry. As always, you have early adopters. At the other end of the bell-shaped curve, you've got the laggards. When you're talking to forward thinking, modern thinking, profit-oriented, innovative companies, they very quickly appreciate that the way to go is SaaS.

Now, they've got a bunch of questions, and most of the questions are around security—"Is my data safe?" We have a huge variety of ways of assuring our customers that these are actually probably safer in our environment than on-premise.

Some customers wait, and some will just jump in the pool with everyone else. We are in our fifth year of existence, and it’s very interesting to see how our customers are scaling from the small, lower end, to huge companies and corporations that are running on Workday.

A blast from the past
Applications are built on top of relational databases today, and then they are being designed thinking about the end-user, sitting in front of a browser, interacting with the system. But, really they were designed around capturing the transaction and being able to report straight-off that transaction.

The idea of integrating with third parties was an afterthought. Being an afterthought, what happened was that you find this new industry emerging, which is around extract, transform and load (ETL) tools and integration tools. It was a realization that we have to coexist within the many systems.

What happened was that they bolted on these integration third-party systems straight onto the database. That sounds very good. However, all the business logic, all the security, and the whole data structure that hangs together is known by the application—and not by the database. When you bolt-on an integration technology on the side, you lose all that. You have to recreate it in the third-party technology.

Similarly, when it comes to reporting, relational technology does a phenomenal job with the use of SQL and producing reports, which I will define as two-dimensional reports, for producing lists, matrix reports, and summary reports. But, eventually, as business evolves, you need to analyze data and you have to create this idea of dimensionality. Well, yet another industry was created—and it was bolted back onto the database level, which is the [BI] analytics, and this created cubes.

In fact, what they used were object-oriented technologies and in-memory solutions for reasons of performance to be able to analyze data. This is currently the state of the art.

The same treatment
Conversely, any request that comes into our system, be it from a UI or from a third-party system by integrations, we treat exactly the same way. They go through exactly the same functional application security. It knows exactly what the structure of your object model is. It gets evaluated exactly the same way and then it serves back the answer. So that fundamental principle solves most of our integration problems.

On the integration side, we just work off open standards. The only way that you can talk with a third-party system with Workday is through web services, and those services are contracts that we spec to the outside world. We may change things internally, but that’s our problem.

That’s the point where we have a technology around our enterprise service plus our integration server that actually talks the language that we do, standards web service based. At the same time, it's able to transform any bit of that information to whatever the receiving component wants, whether it’s banking, the various formats, or whatever is out there.

We put the technology into the hands of our customers to be able to ratchet down the latest technology to whatever other file structures that they currently have. We provide that to our customers, so they can connect them to the card-scanning systems, security systems, badging systems, or even their own financial systems that they may have in house.

We're a SaaS vendor, and we do modify things and we add things, but those external contracts, which are the Web services talking to third-party systems, we respect and we don’t change. So, in effect, we do not break the integrations.

Best way to access data
The next architectural benefit is about analyzing data. As I said, there are a lot of technologies out there that do a very good job at lists and matrix reporting. Eventually, most of these things end up in spreadsheets, where people do further analysis.

But the dream that we are aiming for continuously is: When you are looking at a screen, you see a number. That number could be an accumulation of counts that you'd be really interested in clicking on and finding out what those counts are—name of applicants, name of positions, number of assets that you have. Or, it's an accumulation. You look at the balance sheet. You look at the big number. You want to click and figure out what comprises that number.

To do that, you have to have that analytical component and your transactional component all in the same place. You can't afford what I call I/Os. It's a huge penalty to go back and forth through a relational database on a disk. So, that forces you to bring everything into memory, because people expect to click something and within earth time get a response.

The technology solutions that we opted for was this totally in-memory object model that allows us to do the basic embedded analytics, taking action on everything you see on the screen.When you are traversing, you come to a number in a balance sheet, and as you're drilling around, what you are really doing in effect is traversing an object model underneath, and you should be able to get that for nothing.

So the persistence layer is really forced by the analytical components. When you're analyzing information, it has to perform extremely fast. You only have one option, and that is memory. So, you have to bring everything up in-memory.

We do use a relational component, but not as a relational database. We use a relational database, which is really good at securing your data, encrypting your data, backing up your data, restoring it, replicating it, and all these great utilities the database gives you, but we don’t use a relational model. We use an object model, which is all in-memory.

But, you need to store things somewhere. In fact, we have a belief at Workday that the disk, which is more the relational component, is the future tape. What you used to use in legacy systems was putting things on tape for safety and archiving reasons. We use disk, and we actually believe, if you look at the future, that nearly everything will be done exclusively in-memory.

Make way for metadata
And, there is another bit of technology that you add to that. We're a totally metadata-driven technology stack. Right now, we put out what we describe as updates three times a year. You put new applications, new features, and new innovations into the hands of your customers, and being in only one central place, we get immediate feedback on the usage, which we can enhance. And, we just keep on going on and keep on adding and adding more and more and more.

This is something that was an absolute luxury in your legacy stack, to take a complete release. You have to live through all the breakages that we mentioned before around integrations and the analytical component.

As soon as you can have the luxury of maintaining one system, let's call it one code line, and you're hanging our customers, our tenants, off that one single code line, it allows you to do very, very frequent upgrades or updates or new releases, if you wish, to that central code line, because you only have to maintain one thing.

Multi-tenancy is also one of the core ingredients, if you want to become a SaaS vendor. Now, I'm not an advocate of saying multi-tenancy A is better than multi-tenancy B. There are different ways you can solve the multi-tenancy problems. You can do it at the database level, the application level, or the hardware level. There’s no right or wrong one. The main difference is, what does it cost?

All we're looking at is one single code line that we have to maintain and secure continuously. We believe in one single code line, and multiple tenants are sharing that single code line. That reduces all our efforts around revving it and updating it. That does result in cost savings for the vendor, in other words, ourselves.

And as far back as I can remember, when humans realized that you take time and material, package that for a profit, and send it to your end-market, as soon as you can reduce your cost of the time or the material, you can either pocket the difference, or move that cost saving onto your customers.

We believe that multi-tenancy is one of the key ingredients of reducing the cost of maintenance that we have internally. At the same time, it allows us to rev new innovative applications out to the market very quickly, get feedback for it, and pass that cost savings on to our customers, which then they can take that and invest in whatever they do—making carpets, yogurt, or electric motors.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 9th November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

I met with Brian Gentile, CEO of open source BI vendor Jaspersoft. Brian is a self-proclaimed “fan of new generation software”. Here is what he believes constitutes new generation software—and how it differs from traditional enterprise software. This article explores further the tenets of the recent article ‘Is the traditional BI market in decline?’.

First, Jaspersoft has built a club of volunteers who give time and effort to the cause. It’s a bit like the parents’ committee at a well-run primary school where parents want a stake in creating the best learning environment for their kids. Jaspersoft has 175,000 registered programmers in its ‘community’ of fans who have a similar ownership stake in Jaspersoft.

These unpaid end users fix bugs and develop enhancements to Jaspersoft’s open source product, iReport. They champion the product, and provide ‘free’ programming and powerful word-of-mouth recommendations to other potential users. In addition they vote on the new features for the next release—so product development is largely driven by user priorities.

Second, the software architecture is lightweight, web-based, has open APIs, and is easy to install and upgrade. Everything is built on the Java platform and the whole software suite is only 500MB. It requires little installation and professional services consulting support, and is available both for web download and through Jaspersoft’s OEM partners as a SaaS deployment.

Third, it’s low-cost and affordable. The entry level price for the commercial version is $10,000.

Compare this with how the enterprise software vendors tackle these areas:

First, enterprise software vendors have a network of resellers, complementary software vendors, and systems integrators and consultants. These mercenaries add value to the core product only where and when it is in their best commercial interest. Vendor loyalty is typically low—software and services partners often jump ship to where the profit potential is highest. Acts of charity are not high on their agenda.

Product development rests on the needs of a small number of key customers—who may or may not be representative of the market. The vendors control which features are included or excluded from the commercial release.

Second, the traditional enterprise software architecture is heavyweight and leans towards proprietary lock-ins. For example, SAP Business Objects’ BI suite is said to contain c. 30GB of code (ie 60x the size of Jaspersoft’s BI suite). Installation and upgrades are typically long and rely on on-site consulting and services provision over many months.

Third, enterprise software is expensive. Brian reckons Jaspersoft software costs around 1/10 of the cost of comparable commercial enterprise software. The enterprise vendors’ business models demand a premium price in excess of $100K for the most part. Implementation services expenses could double that cost.

So, Jaspersoft has built quite a compelling value proposition. Participative, collaborative, lightweight, fast to implement, transparent and open, and lower cost than its legacy competitors. Granted, it is mainly adopted and used by techie programmers, and it doesn’t offer the sexy front end user experience of SAP Business Object’s Crystal reports, for example. Neither does Jaspersoft offer the comfort of the size and support resources of an SAP or similar. However Jaspersoft is clearly doing something right as iReport downloads are now at the staggering rate of a 250,000 per month.

So what can customers learn from Jaspersoft’s software development techniques?

1) Engage with the hearts and minds of your community (ie ‘The Business’)—not on the basis of “it’s your job to help IT” but rather that “it’s fun to be involved and your contribution will be recognised”. Co-creation and collaboration are the watchwords.

2) Create and choose software that is light, flexible, and easy, and incorporates ‘the wisdom of crowds’. Don’t get dragged down by miles of inflexible code that cannot be re-purposed to reflect the business challenges of tomorrow. SOA is very important here.

3) Experiment with low cost web-based solutions. If they don’t work, junk them, and try something else. Don't put all your eggs in one big enterprise software investment basket with an uncertain outcome.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 4th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The rapidly evolving landscape for global business—and the consequent need for IT to relate differently to businesses so they together serve their customers in innovative ways—has to mean more than business as usual from technology suppliers.

While a majority of vendors seem to be hunkering down around an entrenched set of core products and aging IT approaches, HP this week shared a different vision, what it calls the “Instant-On Enterprise." [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The Instant-On Enterprise, as HP defines it, is a data-driven organization that leverages technology for everything—but specifically to better address the ever-evolving needs of end-users. As users' expectations and experience change, so too must the ways enterprises relate to them, are perceived by them.

The next several years will form a culmination of now-clear mega trends that have only just begun to roil conventional business practices. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications use, highly responsive cloud computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration. More than just these shifts, there also needs to be an increasingly automated, secure, and harmonizing management capability that combines and reinforces them.

As these trends literally re-arrange business ecosystems and re-established the service delivery order, a gap will surely grow between the companies that master change and exploit enabling technologies—and those that fall ever further behind.

With that in mind, HP has rolled out new solutions that aim to help both business and government create their own Instant-On Enterprise. Not surprisingly, the driver of the Instant-On Enterprise is everything becoming connected and immediate, people expect responses regardless of sourcing and/or partner ecosystems—and within seconds instead of days.

“It takes a special kind of enterprise to close the expectation gap between what customers and citizens expect and what the enterprise can deliver,” says Tom Hogan, executive vice president of Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Strategy at HP. “The Instant-On Enterprise delivers differentiated competitive advantage, serving customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they want and need, instantly…"

Embedding Tech
New HP research reveals that the role of IT is shifting from chiefly being the administrator of the enterprise to becoming one and the same with the enterprise. This means enabling rapid, recurring business process improvements to meet dynamic customer demands, as well as gaining near-instant insights into shifting markets.

Coleman Parkes research conducted for HP in October reveals that 86 percent of senior business and government executives believe they must rapidly adapt the enterprise to meet changes in consumer expectations. The research also indicates that 78 percent believe technology is the key to business and government innovation, and 85 percent indicated that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service

HP’s new solutions work to help enterprises and government leverage technology in ways that will meet those goals. HP sees it as a reinvention of how technology is used to deliver innovation at every point in the value chain. That covers the services that are delivered, the mobile devices that provide the access, and the global data centers required to power the Instant-On Enterprise.

Instant-On Puzzle Pieces
There are several components to HP’s Instant-On Enterprise: HP Application Transformation, HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Enterprise Security, and HP Information Optimization:

• HP Application Transformation solutions work to help enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility by governing their responsiveness and pace of change.
• HP Converged Infrastructure solutions are engineered to drive out costs and provide the foundation for agile service delivery. HP promises this solution delivers the data center of the future.
• HP Enterprise Security solutions secures the IT infrastructure by people, processes, technology and content. These solutions aim to aligns security to meet business and government demands without losing flexibility.
• HP Information Optimization solutions deal with how information is gathered, stored and used. The idea is to harness the power of information and ensure its integrity and protection while delivering it in the context of the enterprise.

Realizing that there is no one single delivery model that meets every end-user need, HP also introduced two new Hybrid Delivery services. HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service offers a patent-pending, model-driven framework to introduce hybrid delivery concepts into their existing environments.

HP Hybrid Delivery Workload Analysis Service offers experts that gather service usage and demand profile data, and then develop a set of recommendations on how to best characterize and combine workloads in hybrid environments.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

What if you could buy and sell cloud-computing capacity the same way people book hotel rooms on Priceline or Hotwire? Startup SpotCloud, the brainchild of Toronto-based Enomaly, aims to find out.

Acting as an online clearing house, SpotCloud will allow cloud providers to offer unused capacity to keep servers busy and will allow cloud users to buy spot cloud capacity at bargain prices.

SpotCloud uses the concept of Random Access Compute Capacity, similar to cloud bursting or the dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

However, unlike cloud bursting, which refers strictly to expanding the application to an external cloud to handle spikes in demand, SpotCloud's cloud spanning includes scenarios in which applications components are continuously distributed across multiple localized cloud providers.

The capacity itself is provided via a global pool of regional cloud providers. SpotCloud treats providers as a nameless, faceless, and possibly unsecured group of providers of raw, localized computing capability. While buyers can purchase capacity based on performance and price and the location of the provider, the name of the provider remains hidden until after the purchase is made. This is to prevent undercutting the provider's retail sales of capacity.

Wasted capacity
According to Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist of Enomaly, the idea came about because of numerous cloud providers whose companies—often the first such enterprise in their respective countries—weren't well known and had excess capacity. With no way to make themselves known to potential buyers on a broad scale, they were watching that capacity go to waste.

At the same time, cost-conscious buyers would benefit from being able to make quick purchases of capacity, as well as location, at favorable prices. Selecting a provider becomes easier with the clearing house, because potential buyers don't need to scour the Internet looking for potential providers. Also, buyers can continually monitor the site and determine the best price at which to buy computing resources.

The process becomes easier for both sides because SpotCloud will provide the invoicing and billing. Providers avoid the hassle of trying to bill customers for small spot jobs, and buyers, who may spread their cloud use among several providers, will have to deal with only one payment. SpotCloud will make its money by charging a fee to the seller.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 28th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Businesses are looking to cloud-computing models to foster agility and improve time-to-market for new services. Yet attaining cloud benefits can founder without higher levels of unified server, data, network, storage, and applications management.

These typically disparate forms of management must now come together in new ways to mutually support a variety of different cloud approaches -- public, private, and hybrid. Without adoption of such Business Service Automation (BSA) capabilities, those deploying applications on private and hybrid clouds will almost certainly encounter increased complexity, higher risk, and stubborn cost structures.

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion therefore focuses on finding low-risk, high-reward paths to cloud computing by using increased automation and proven reference models for cloud management—and by breaking down traditional IT management silos. In doing so, the progression toward cloud benefits will come more quickly, at lower total cost, and with an ability to rapidly scale to even more applications and data.

We're here with two executives from HP Software & Solutions to learn more about what BSA is and why it's proving essential to managed and productive cloud computing adoption: Mark Shoemaker, Executive Program Manager for Cloud Computing in the Software & Solutions Group at HP, and Venkat Devraj, Chief Technology Officer for Application Automation, also in HP’s Software & Solutions Group. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shoemaker: There is hardly a place we go that we don’t end up talking to our customers about cloud. Most of the enterprise customers we talk to are looking at private cloud, the internal cloud solution that they own, that they then provide to their business partners, whether that’s the development teams or other elements in their business. Most of them are looking to build on the virtualization work that they've already done.

They want to improve their productivity, definitely get better utilization out of what they have already got. They want IT to be your better partner in the business. What that means is to shorten the time that the business has to wait for the services.

Devraj: There is also an interesting micro trend that’s occurring. A lot of the application teams, end-user business teams, are getting increasingly sophisticated. They're learning about private cloud implementations. Consequently, they're demanding levels of service from IT that are difficult to provide without a private cloud.

For example, because of things like agile development methodologies, application teams are doing a lot more application deployments and code releases than ever before. It's not uncommon to see dozens of application releases for different applications happening during the same day.

IT operations are just bombarded with these requirements and requests, and they are just unable to keep up based on yesterday’s processes, which are relatively static. These application teams and business unit teams are quite influential.

They're even willing to fund specific initiatives to allow their teams to work in self-service mode, and IT ops are finding themselves in reactive mode. They have to support them, make their internal processes more fluid and dynamic, and leveraging technology that allows that kind of dynamism.

... The third-party companies, the cloud providers, the pure-play server enablers, have an unfair advantage. Because they were started relatively recently, in the last few years, they have the advantage of standardized platforms and delivery units.

They can say, "Okay, I'm going to deliver only Linux-based platforms, Windows-based platforms, or certain applications." When you look at the typical enterprise today, however, IT has a lot more to deliver.

There is a lot of prevailing heterogeneity in terms of multiple software platforms and versions. There is a lack of standardization. It's very difficult to talk about cloud and delivery within the enterprise in the same breath, when you look at these kinds of technical challenges.

As a result, IT is undergoing a lot of pressure—but they have to deliver given the kind of challenges that they face. That’s going to require a lot of education and access to the right kind of technology, training, and guidance.

Shoemaker: Just to add to Venkat’s comment, we're seeing the business driving IT and demanding that agility and that flexibility. We talk to a lot of our customers, where their own coworkers have taken corporate credit cards and gone out into the public cloud, procured space, and have begun developing outside of them. IT really has to get in front of this. They have to manage all this.

... The one thing that’s different about cloud is that it really is a supply chain. It’s the supply chain of IT technology that the business consumes. If you think about what a supply chain is, it’s something that’s got to be repeatable. It has to be governed, and it provides a baseline or foundation and building blocks to build those services that you can then customize on top of the business.

So, the farther up that you can go with your standard building blocks, the less difficult it is to manage and focus on the custom business-facing functions on the front-end.

To do this, cloud has helped us out in a lot of ways. One of the challenges IT has always had is to get the business to consume standards. Because of a lot of hype in the market, the business absolutely is convinced that they get it, and they want the business benefits that cloud offers.

Even if the business decides to go to a public cloud, they still have to consume those elements in a standard fashion. There's no way out of that.

Devraj: And yet, the software used by these enterprises tends to be disparate, heterogeneous, and requires a lot of domain knowledge to be able to manage, resulting in significant delays and bottlenecks associated with service delivery. Those processes just don’t scale in the cloud.

At Stratavia we had built a patented technology to manage and control varied software stacks, such as databases, web servers, application servers, and even well-known packaged applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Oracle E-Business Suite, and SAP.

The content that I talk about becomes an abstraction layer, where the customer, the end user, the people who consume the services, see a very easy to understand service catalog. They can click on it. They can choose some menu options, some values from a drop-down box, and then specify exactly what they need, and have the response come back in minutes and in hours, rather than days and weeks, as is traditionally the case.

For example, just at the database layer, within the enterprise, it's very common to see four or five different platforms in use, such as DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, and so on. By automating the operations management lifecycle around these layers, Stratavia has made it possible for the enterprise to deliver and manage these assets as a service within the context of the cloud.

As more and more of HP’s and Stratavia’s joint customers started seeing value in that capability, HP brought Stratavia into its BSA/Business Technology Optimization umbrella.

There's a big gap in IT today, which is IT/Ops Engineering or IT/Ops Architecture. That’s a big missing silo within IT/Ops. And a lot of the operators today that rely on scripts, command-line stuff, and point-and-click tools need to evolve themselves to more of an architect approach. They need more of taking stock of the big picture, and taking the tribal knowledge that they have in their heads and looking at the out-of-the-box content that HP provides and selecting the right content that corresponds to their tribal knowledge.

When they go into the cloud, the underlying management, things like compliance and governance, are not out of whack. They're able to successfully take that knowledge, put it in there, and then, in their new role as architects or engineering folks, they're able to watch, measure, and make modifications as appropriate.

So, the role that people play, that key subject matter experts play, is very crucial as part of walking before running with automation.

Gardner: Now that you have mentioned Stratavia, and for the benefit of our listeners and readers, HP has acquired Stratavia, and there was also quite a bit of related product and service news on Sept. 15 around BSA as the acquisition was unveiled.

Shoemaker: Obviously, the Stratavia acquisition was a huge, huge win for us, and puts us in a great position to help our customers transform their infrastructure. ... And several other things have happened in the last 60 days. We had VMworld, and we presented a cohesive strategy for infrastructure and even PaaS built on the BladeSystem Matrix hardware platform that we have, Converged Infrastructure. We've combined that with two other pieces and a piece of Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software.

CloudStart is a consulting and a professional services-led engagement capability where we come in and work with the customer to get that transformation process nailed, so we can quickly get them moving into the cloud benefits.

On the back end of that, there is another piece that we announced called Cloud Maps, which is really more knowledge, but in a different capacity, in that it offers downloadable templates, preconfigured applications, and best practices for sizing.

We see the Stratavia acquisition fueling this fire, because in the end, cloud is a solution, and a solution needs content, and content wins. Content is what the customer is able to consume and use day one, when the solution is in. So it's important. And we've done a lot there.

We now have a best-in-class content provider in Stratavia that’s come on board to help round out the capabilities and add more into what the customer can get out of our solutions in very quick order.

All that sits on a recently refreshed BSA portfolio, with significant enhancements and new capabilities across network, automations, servers, and storage, that really makes all this happen.

... Let's face it, a lot of the CIOs are looking at a data center that’s packed full of applications that they probably don’t feel as if they have got a good handle on. Now, cloud is coming into the picture, and they've got two things to do here.

Number one, they need to start applying those new business methodologies to IT around providing cloud and the things that go with that, but also they have got a transformation piece to go along. And that can be very daunting.

What we've done is looked at the experience of helping previous customers do that work and we have applied that into the CloudStart and Cloud Maps, CloudStart being the planning and the upfront work that you need to get done.

So, we're right there with you. You don’t have to read chapter one of the book.

Then, as we put the infrastructure in with CSA for Matrix in the frame, we're embedding some of the CSA software inside of the Blade Matrix frame. So you have a way to build infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and manage it through the platform throughout the lifecycle.

Then, on the back end of that, we have the preconfigured application templates. If I need a SQL Server image to put into the system, I can pull that from Cloud Maps, build it into a framework and offer that very quickly. I don’t have to go and figure out how to size for this piece or what golden template looks like for this application.

It's really about obtaining a running start into the cloud, and one that’s not going to leave you wanting in a year or two. You have to be careful. Cloud is a great enablement technology and a lot of people are looking at IaaS, but that’s the starting point for it, and then you have to manage everything that you put inside of that as well.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 25th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Last week I looked at the effect of open source and new agile vendors such as Qliktech on the BI market in the article ‘Is the Traditional BI in decline?’. Is the CRM market similar or different?

As with the BI industry, the heavy boot prints of the large enterprise applications vendors, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are all over the CRM industry. Also similar to the BI market, most of the CRM old stagers are still hanging in there, many albeit under new ownership e.g. CDC (Pivotal) Sage (Saleslogix), Pegasystems (Chordiant), Consona (Onyx). The CRM market during the last decade has been a roller-coaster with many vendor casualties, whereas the BI market has grown in a more linear fashion.

The most successful CRM vendor in recent times has been salesforce.com which now has $1.3Bn in revenue, 4,500 employees, and has grown its revenues in the $250–$300m range for each of the last 3 years. Salesforce loves to spend money (c. 50% of its revenues) on sales and marketing, especially for its mega Cloudforce conferences that provide the speaking platform for its charismatic and outspoken CEO, Marc Benioff.

Salesforce is great for the CRM SaaS market and its cousin the open source CRM market in ‘taking on’ the rhetoric of the enterprise vendors. One vendor described Benioff as a ‘lightening rod’ for attracting media attention: “we just enjoy being in the salesforce.com slipstream”.

Unlike BI, where there are relatively few open source vendors, in CRM applications there are at least 60 open source CRM packages regularly downloaded from Sourceforge. The crown prince of the market is SugarCRM.

SugarCRM, like Qliktech in the BI market, is growing revenues at over 50% per annum. It claims 7 million downloads and serves 600,000 end users. 6,000 customers have the ‘paid for’ SugarCRM Professional or Enterprise editions. The Professional edition starts at only $30 per user per month on an annual subscription contract. The new version SugarCRM 6 incorporates an intuitive interface, social CRM and search functions that keep it pretty much in touch with the product developments of the mega vendors.

SugarCRM is a low cost alternative to salesforce.com, Microsoft and Sage for Sales Force Automation (SFA). In addition SugarCRM offers some basic call centre support features and marketing functions such as campaign management. A key strategic question for CRM suppliers is whether to stay focused on the triumvirate of Sales / Marketing / and Customer Support applications? Few, if any, vendors do all 3 of these applications brilliantly today.

The alternative is to branch out wider into integrated Accounting and eCommerce as a SaaS-based small business suite, as Netsuite or up-and-coming UK vendor Brightpearl do. The latter offers the Brightpearl CRM / Accounting / Time Management suite all for just £20 per user per month.

In summary, the CRM market is still growing nicely and is now well out of its early adolescent growing pains. Some segments of the market, such as SFA and marketing campaign management, are starting to look increasingly commodity in nature, as tumbling prices and the many SaaS and open source alternatives are testament. Customers should choose vendors with strong strategies, and who are willing to continuously innovate in products and their own business models in order to remain competitive. Salesforce.com has shown remarkable agility and foresight in this regard to date.

Always a good sign is when the venture capital (VC) community is prepared to sign the cheques. To date, SugarCRM has raised $46 million in VC funding and an IPO in the future seems likely. So maybe the CRM market looks like a pretty good place to be after all.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 15th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

At the end of September 2010, TIBCO unveiled their strategy to support “Enterprise 3.0” at TIBCO NOW. To understand the strategy, you first need to understand what Enterprise 3.0 is all about.

The term was coined by Sramana Mitra who is an an entrepreneur and has been a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994. Mitra defines Enterprise 3.0 as an organisation, being a confederation of customers, partners, suppliers, outsourcers, distributors, resellers, and other kinds of entities, rather than one monolithic organisation. “Collaboration” and “sharing” become the key words in making this all work. However, TIBCO have a simpler view of Enterprise 3.0 as the evolution of the traditional transaction-based enterprise into one where real-time event-based information is taking an ever more important role.

Stefan Farestam, TIBCO’s EMEA Director of Product Marketing defined the difference between Enterprise 2.0 and 3.0 as:

• Information has moved from being static to dynamic in nature
• Processing has moved from transaction-based to event-based
• Processing of data has moved from database to Enterprise Service Bus
  
• Applications have moved from ERP to BPMS based sitting on top of legacy applications
• Business intelligence has moved to real time business rules
• From a 2 dimensional world to a 3 dimensional one.

Farestam went on to explain how TIBCO were going to help organisations achieve what he called “The Two Second Advantage”—using a quote from Vivek Ranadive “A little bit of the right information, just a little before hand—whether it is a couple of seconds, minutes or hours—is more valuable than all of the information in the world weeks or months later.” Farestam and other presenters illustrated this concept by talking about a number of TIBCO customer scenarios showing how business is event-based, whereas IT systems are transaction-based:

• Citibank, in Hong Kong, where they track all financial events that preceded the withdrawal of cash at the ATM and intelligently guesses that the person withdrawing cash is, for example, at the hospital with his pregnant wife and thus interested in a promotion for baby store.
• Southwest Airlines, who are able to notify customers when a flight is delayed or cancelled (and rebook automatically) and reroute flights.
• Bank of America, who have 145 million customers and 10–20 thousand events per second, which adds up to 1 billion events (not processes) per second.

Alan Harrington, Worldwide Director of Business Optimization, added to this theme by saying, “Organisations have massive amounts of data and more events but with little time to understand them. The pace of business is not going to change so this situation will only be exasperated.” Harrington went to suggest that there were 4 critical requirements to providing a solution to this issue:

• The ability to handle events on a massive scale;
• Universal development tools that allow an organisation freedom to innovate;
• The ability to integrate people naturally; and
• The ability to deploy software where and when you needed it.

Harrington and then Thierry Schang, Vice-President Engineering, then described how TIBCO’s new universal platform would support Enterprise 3.0 and the 2-Second Advantage. Figure 1 shows the high-level architecture diagram that was used.

Figure 1:TIBCO ActiveMatrix Universal Application Platform (Source: TIBCO)

This product architecture shows how TIBCO have, over the last few years, been pulling together their various acquisitions and home grown products into a single cohesive whole that is able to work together as one, whilst, at the same time, being open to work with competitor products. However this still doesn’t cover the whole portfolio, such as Spotfire for business intelligence and the new Silver suite, which is part of the part of the Deploy message providing build-scale environment to develop for clouds. It consists of:

• Silver Fabric: construct self-service clouds
• Silver Grid: local and external cloud scalable deployments
• Silver CAP: develop solutions for clouds
• Silver BPM: run BPM solutions in the cloud
• Plus applications built on the platform such as Silver Formline, tibbr, and Silver Spotfire.

To support the need for an application development environment which supplies the ability to innovate freely, TIBCO have what is now branded ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks; their model-driven approach to application integration and process orchestration that requires no coding. As part of this environment, there is a free download TIBCO Business Studio Developer.

TIBCO now have some 130 adapters that form their ActiveMatrix Adapters product to support the needs of businesses to integrate naturally. The engine driving integration is ActiveMatrix Enterprise Service Bus. This is a key component in TIBCO’s support for SOA. An underlying grid-based architecture makes it possible to scale up and out dynamically at runtime. To support the building of composite applications, TIBCO have ActiveMatrix Service Grid, which is built on open standards, thus being complete application neutral with support for both Java and .NET.

Governance, from TIBCO’s viewpoint, includes Management. I am not sure that I fully agree with this. There is often confusion between monitoring and management; I see the former as the passive ability to see what is happening while management is about active control. TIBCO have an impressive portfolio of products, including ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager, which provides active management of SLAs, and Hawk. The other 2 components on offer to support Governance is TIBCO ActiveMatrix Lifecycle Governance Framework, which provides an SOA registry and repository foundation, and ActiveMatrix Policy Manager, which defines policies across services hosted on heterogeneous SOA environments, mediated by the ActiveMatrix Service Bus and through TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus for authentication and authorisation, encryption, logging, auditing, and service versioning.

That leaves Process in their diagram. TIBCO, through ActiveMatrix, are providing solutions for in-house and cloud as well as for complex event processing. What wasn’t clear to me was if or how ActiveMatrix BPM and Silver BPM are connected to TIBCO’s CEP product BusinessEvents.

Figure 2: TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM Architecture (Source: TIBCO)

Justin Blunt, Senior Product Manager for BPM, presented TIBCO’s solutions as 3rd Generation BPM. Interesting; have we already reached that number?! If we forget which generation, TIBCO, since the Staffware acquisition, have always been able to place them at the top of the pile in BPM, and many analyst reviews have it placed in the top area. TIBCO understand how critical to business processes are in terms of supporting customers, delivering goods and services and managing operations. They also recognise that business processes involve not just applications/systems but also people, both inside and outside organisation boundaries. Our business processes don’t exist on their own. The critical mission, as TIBCO sees it, is to manage business processes as a managed service within an organisation. To aid the speed of development, TIBCO have developed the concept of “workflow patterns”. These provide built-in, model-driven support for control, resource, and data patterns (an initiative based on the work of a joint effort of Eindhoven University of Technology and Queensland University of Technology), eliminating the need for complex code or rules.

This was the first time that I have started to understand how the TIBCO portfolio fits together. Yes there are some still some holes, but that is more due to time-constraints of trying to cram into a set time, information on the complete portfolio. Bloor applaud TIBCO for developing a strategy that both pulls together all their product portfolio into a seamless whole whilst at the same time being able to offer the ability to switch parts of the portfolio out because of the big use of open standards. Well done TIBCO. More please.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The trend toward converged infrastructure—a whole greater than sum of the traditional IT hardware, software, networking and storage parts—is going both downstream and upstream.

HP today announced how combining and simplifying the parts of IT infrastructure makes the solution value far higher on either end of the applications distribution equation: At branch offices and the next-generation of compact and mobile all-in-one data center containers.

Called the HP Branch Office Networking Solution, the idea is that engineering the fuller IT and communications infrastructure solution, rather then leaving the IT staff and—even worse—the branch office managers to do the integrating, not only saves money, it allows the business to focus just on the applications and processes. This focus, by the way, on applications and processes—not the systems integration, VOIP, updates and maintenance—is driving the broad interest in cloud computing, SaaS and outsourcing. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP's announcements today in Barcelona are also marked by an emphasis on an ecosystem of partners approach, especially the branch office solution, which packages 14 brand-name apps, appliances and networking elements to make smaller sub-organizations an integrated part of the larger enterprise IT effort. The partner applications include WAN acceleration, security, unified communications and service delivery management.

Appliances need integration too
You could think of it as a kitchen counter approach to appliances, which work well alone but don't exactly bake the whole cake. Organizing, attaching and managing the appliances—with an emphasis on security and centralized control for the whole set-up—has clearly been missing in branch offices. The E5400 series switch accomplishes the convergence of the discrete network appliances. The HP E5400 switch with new HP Advanced Services ZL module is available worldwide today with pricing starting at $8,294.

Today's HP news also follows a slew of product announcements last month that targeted the SMB market, and the "parts is parts" side of building out IT solutions.

To automate the branch office IT needs, HP is bringing together elements of the branch IT equation from the likes of Citrix, Avaya, Microsoft, and Riverbed. They match these up with routers, switches and management of the appliances into a solution. Security and access control across the branches and the integrated systems are being addressed via HP TippingPoint security services. These provide granular control of application access, with the ability to block access to entire websites—or features—across the enterprise and its branches.

Worried about too much Twitter usage at those branches? The new HP Application Digital Vaccine (AppDV) service delivers specifically-designed filters to the HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), which easily control access to, or dictate usage of, non-business applications.

The branch automation approach also support a variety of network types, which opens the branch offices to be able to exploit more types of applications delivery: from terminal serving apps, to desktop virtualization, to wireless and mobile. The all-WiFi office might soon only need a single, remotely and centrally managed locked-down rack in a lights-out closet, with untethered smartphones, tablets and notebooks as the worker nodes. Neat.

When you think of it, the new optimized branch office (say 25 seats and up) should be the leader in cloud adoption, not a laggard. The HP Branch Office Networking Solution—with these market-leading technology partners—might just allow the branches to demonstrate a few productivity tricks to the rest of the enterprise.

Indeed, we might just think of many more "branch offices" as myriad nodes within and across the global enterprises, where geography becomes essentially irrelevant. Moreover, the branch office is the SMB, supported by any number and types of service providers, internal and external, public and private, SaaS and cloud.

Data centers get legs
Which brings us to the other end of the HP spectrum for today's news. The same "service providers" that must support these automated branch offices—in all their flavors and across the org chart vagaries and far-flung global locations—must also re-engineer their data centers for the new kinds of workloads, wavy demand curves, and energy- and cost-stingy operational requirements.

So HP has built a sprawling complex in Houston—the POD Works—to build an adaptable family of modular data centers—the HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD)—in the shape of 20- and 40-foot tractor-trailer-like containers. As we've seen from some other vendors, these mobile data centers in a box demand only that you drive the things up, lock the brake and hook up electricity, water and a high-speed network. I suppose you also drop them on the roof with a helicopter, but you get the point.

But in today's economy, the efficiency data rules the roost. The HP PODs deliver 37 percent more efficiency and cost 45 percent less than a traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, says HP.

Inside, the custom-designed container is stuffed with highly engineered racks and the cooling, optimized networks and storage, as well as the server horsepower—in this case HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable Systems, from 1 to 1,000 nodes. While HP is targeting these at the high performance computing and service provider needs—those that are delivering high-scale and/or high transactional power—the adaptability and data center-level design may well become more the norm than the exception.

The PODs are flexible at supporting the converged infrastructure engines for energy efficiency, flexibility and serviceability, said HP. And the management is converged too, via Integrated Lights-Out Advanced (ILO 3), part of HP Insight Control.

The POD parts to be managed are essentially as many as eight servers, or up to four servers with 12 graphic processing units (GPU), in single four-rack unit enclosures. The solution further includes the HP ProLiant s6500 chassis, the HP ProLiant SL390s G7 server and the HP ProLiant SL170s G6 servers. These guts can be flexibly upped to accommodate flexible POD designs, for a wide variety and scale of data-center-level performance and applications support requirements.

Built-in energy consciousness
You may not want to paint the containers green, but you might as well. The first release features optimized energy efficiency with HP ProLiant SL Advanced Power Manager and HP Intelligent Power Discovery to improve power management, as well as power supplies designed with 94 percent greater energy efficiently, said HP.

Start saving energy with delivering more than a teraFLOP per unit of rack space to increase compute power for scientific rendering and modeling applications. Other uses may well make themselves apparent.

Have data center POD, will travel? At least the wait for a POD is more reasonable. With HP POD-Works, PODs can be assembled, tested and shipped in as little as six weeks, compared with one year or longer, to build a traditional brick-and-mortar data center, said HP.

Hey, come to think of it, for those not blocking it with the TippingPoint IPS, I wish Twitter had a few of these on those PODs on the bird strings instead of that fail whale. Twitter should also know that multiple PODs or a POD farm can support large hosting operations and web-based or compute-intensive applications, in case they want to buy Google or Facebook.

Indeed, as cloud computing grains traction, data centers may be located (and co-located) based on more than whale tails. Compliance to local laws, for business continuity and to best serve all those thousands of automated branch offices might also spur demand for flexible and efficient mobile data centers.

Converged infrastructure may have found a converged IT market, even one that spans the globe.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 4th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Look for a sharp uptick in cloud computing from financial services firms over the next two years, along with similar increases in cluster and grid technologies. This increased interest comes from a concern over the current data explosion and the firms' lack of scalable environments, insufficient capacity to run complex analytics, and contention for computing resources.

These findings come from a recent survey conducted by Wall Street & Technology in conjunction with Platform Computing, SAS, and the TABB Group. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Completed in July, the survey found noteworthy differences in the challenges being faced by both buy- and sell-side firms, with sell-side institutions more likely to report a lack of a scalable environment, insufficient capacity to run complex analytics, and contention for computing resources as significant challenges.

According to the survey, data proliferation and the need to better manage it are at the root of many of the challenges being faced by financial institutions of all sizes. Two-thirds (66 percent) of buy-side firms and more than half (56 percent) of sell-side firms are grappling with siloed data sources. The silo problem is being exacerbated by organizational constraints, including policies prohibiting data sharing and access, network bandwidth issues and input/output (I/O) bottlenecks.

Too much data
Ever-increasing data growth is also cause for concern, with firms reporting that they are dealing with too much market data. Sixty-six percent of respondents didn't think their analytics infrastructures would be able to keep pace with demand over time.

Both buy- and sell-side firms plan to increase their focus on liquidity and counterparty risk in the next 12 months. Counterparty risk management was ranked as the highest priority for the sell side (45 percent) with liquidity risk following at 43 percent. Liquidity risk and counterparty risk scored high for the buy side with 36 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

The financial institutions plan to turn to a combination of technologies including cloud computing and grid technologies. Within the next two years, 51 percent of all respondents are considering or likely to invest in cluster technology, 53 percent are considering or likely to buy grid technology, and 57 percent are considering or likely to purchase cloud technology.

The report, “The State of Business Analytics in Financial Services: Examining Current Preparedness for Future Demands,” is available for download at http://www.grid-analytics.wallstreetandtech.com. (Registration required.) Wall Street & Technology, in conjunction with the survey sponsors, will host a webinar to discuss in-depth key findings of the survey on October 7 at 12 pm ET/9 am PT. For more information, visit: http://tinyurl.com/2ulcesm.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

An often-overlooked aspect of data center transformation (DCT) is what to do with the older assets as newer systems come online. Much of the retiring IT equipment can possess sensitive data, may be sources of significant economic return, or at least need to be recycled according to various regulations.

Improperly disposing of data and other IT assets can cause embarrassing security breaches, increase costs, and pose the risk of regulatory penalties. Indeed, many IT organizations are largely unaware of the hazards and risks of selling older systems into auction sites, secondary markets or via untested suppliers.

Compliance and recycling issues, as well as data security concerns and proper software disposition, should therefore be top of mind early in the DCT process, not as an after-thought.

In a recent podcast discussion, I tapped two HP executives on how to best manages productive transitions of data center assets—from security and environmental impact, to recycling and resale, and even to rental of transitional systems during a managed upgrade process. I spoke with Helen Tang, Worldwide Data Center Transformation Lead for HP Enterprise Business, and Jim O'Grady, Director of Global Life Cycle Asset Management Services with HP Financial Services.

Here are some excerpts:

Helen Tang: Today there are the new things coming about that everybody is really excited about, such as virtualization, and private cloud. ... This time around, enterprises don’t want to repeat past mistakes, in terms of buying just piles of stuff that are disconnected. Instead, they want a bigger strategy that is able to modernize their assets and tie into a strategic growth enablement asset for the entire business.

Yet throughout the entire DCT process, there's a lot to think about when you look at existing hardware and software assets that are probably aged, and won’t really meet today’s demands for supporting modern applications.

How to dispose of those assets? Most people don’t really think about it nor understand all of the risks involved. ... Even experienced IT professionals, who have been in the business for maybe 10, 20 years, don’t quite have the skills and understanding to grasp all of this.

We're starting to see this  sort of IT hybrid role called the IT controller, that typically reports to the CIO, but also dot-lines into the CFO, so that the two organizations can work together from the very beginning of a data center project to understand how best to optimize both the technology, as well as the financial aspects.

Jim O'Grady: We see that a lot of companies try to manage this themselves, and they don’t have the internal expertise to do it. Often, it’s done in a very disconnected way in the company. Because it’s disconnected and done in many different ways, it leads to more risks than people think.

You are putting your company’s brand at stake, through improper environmental recycling compliance, or exposing your clients, customers, or patients’ data to a security breach. This is definitely one of those areas you don’t want to read about in a newspaper to figure out what went wrong.

One of the most common areas where our clients are caught unaware of is the complexity of the data security, and the e-waste legislation requirements that are out there, and especially the pace of its change.

We suggest that they have a well thought-out plan for destroying or clearing data prior to the asset decommissioning and/or prior to the asset leaving the physical premise of the site. Use your outsource partner, if you have one, as a final validation for data security. So, do it on site, as well as do it off site.

Have a well-established plan and budget up-front, one that’s sponsored by a corporate officer, to handle all of the end-of-use assets well before the end-of-use period comes.

E-waste legislation resides at the state, local, national, and regional levels, and they all differ. There's some conflict, but some are in line with each other. So it's very difficult to understand what your legislative requirements are and how to comply. Your best bet is to deal with a highest standard and pick someone that knows and has experience in meeting these legislative requirements.

There are tremendous amounts of global complexities that customers are trying to overcome, especially when they try to do data center consolidation and transformation, throughout their enterprise across different geographies and country borders.

You're talking about a variety of regulatory practices and directives, especially in the EU, that are emerging and restrict how you move used and non-working product across borders. There are a variety of different data-security practices and environmental waste laws that you need to be aware of.

A lot of our clients choose to outsource this work to a partner. But they need to keep in mind that they are sharing risk with whomever they partner with. So they have to be very cautious and be extremely picky about who they select as a partner.

This may sound a bit self-serving, but I always suggest for enterprises to resist smaller local vendors. ... If you don’t kick the tires with your partner and you don’t find out that the partner consists of a man, a dog, and a pickup truck, you just may have a hard time defending yourself as to why you selected that partner.

Also, develop a very strong vendor audit qualification and ongoing inspection process. Visit that vendor prior to the selection and know where your waste stream is going to end up. Whatever they do with the waste stream, it’s your waste stream. You are a part of the chain of custody, so you are responsible for what happens to that waste stream, no matter what that vendor does with it.

You need to create rigorous documented end-to-end controls and audit processes to provide audit trails for any future legal issues. And finally, select a partner with a brand name and reputation for trust and integrity. Essentially, share the risk.

Enterprises should well consider how they retire and recover value for their entire end-of-use IT equipment, whether it's a PDA or supercomputer, HP or non-HP product. Most data center transformations and consolidations typically end with a lot of excess or end-of-use product.

We can help educate customers on the hidden risk and dispositioning that end-of-use equipment into the secondary market. This is a strength of HP Financial Services (HPFS).

Typically, what we find with companies trying to recover value for product is that they give it to their facilities guys or the local business units. These guys love to put it on eBay and try to advertise for the best price. But, that’s not always the best way to recover the best value for your data center equipment.

Your best bet is to work with a disposition provider that has a very, very strong re-marketing reach into the global markets, and especially a strong demonstrative recovery process.

We're now seeing it migrate into the procurement arm. These guys typically put it out for bid and select the highest bid from a lot of the open market brokers. A better strategy to recover value, but not the best.

Your best bet is to work with a disposition provider that has a very, very strong re-marketing reach into the global markets, and especially a strong demonstrative recovery process.

From a financial asset ownership model, HPFS has the ability to come in and work with a client, understand their asset management strategy, and help them to personalize the financial asset ownership model that makes sense for them.

For example, if you look at a leasing organization, when you lease a product, it's going to come back. A key strength in terms of managing your residual is to recover the value for the product as it comes back, and we do that on a worldwide basis.

We have the ability to reach emerging markets or find the market of highest recovery to be able to recover the value for that product. As we work with clients and they give us their equipment to remarket on their behalf, we bring it into the same process.

When you think about it, an asset recovery program is really the same thing as a lease return. It's really a lot of reverse logistics—bring it into a technical center, where it's audited, the data is wiped, the product is tested, there’s some level of refurbishment done, especially if we can enhance the market value. Then, we bring it into our global markets to recover value for that product.

We have skilled product traders within our product families who know how to hold product, and wait for the right time to release it into the secondary market. If you take a lot of product and sell it in one day, you increase the supply, and all of the recovery rates for the brokers drop overnight. So, you have to be pretty smart. You have to know when to release product in small lot sizes to maximize that recovery value for the client.

We're seeing a big uptake in the need to support legacy product, especially in DCT. We're able to provide highly customized pre-owned authentic legacy HP product solutions, sometimes going back 20 years or more. The need for temporary equipment just scaling out legacy data center hardware platform capacity that’s legacy locked is an increasing need that we see from our clients.

Clients also need to ensure their product is legally licensed and they do not encounter intellectual property right infringements. Lastly, they want to trust that the vendor has the right technical skills to deal with the legacy configuration and compatibility issues.

Our short-term rental program covers new or legacy products. Again, many customers need access to temporary product to prove out some concepts, or just to test some software application on compatibility issues. Or, if you're in the midst of a transformation, you may need access to temporary swing gear to enable the move.

We also help clients understand strategies to recover the best value for decommissioned assets, as well as how to evaluate and how to put in place a good data-security plan.

We help them understand whether data security should be done on-site versus off-site, or is it worth the cost to do it on-site and off-site. We also help them understand the complexities of data wiping enterprise product, versus just the plain PC.

The one thing we help customers understand, and it’s the real hidden complexity is how to set up an effective reverse logistic strategy.

Most of the local vendors and providers out there are skilled in wiping data for PCs, but when you get into enterprise products, it can get really complex. You need to make sure that you understand those complexities, so you can secure the data properly.

Lastly, the one thing we help customers understand, and it’s the real hidden complexity, is how to set up an effective reverse logistic strategy, especially on a global basis. How do you get the timing down for all the products coming back on a return basis?

Tang: We reach out to our customers in various interactions to talk them through the whole process from beginning to end.

One of the great starting points we recommend is something we called the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, where we actually bring together your financial side, your operations people, and your CIOs, so all the key stakeholders in the same room, and walk through these common issues that you may or may not have thought about to begin with. You can walk out of that room with consensus, with a shared vision, as well as a roadmap that’s customized for your success.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

IBM is snapping up yet another business analytics player. After purchasing OpenPages last week, Big Blue is now laying down $1.7 billion in an all-cash deal to acquire Netezza.

Netezza provides high-performance analytics in a data warehousing appliance that claims to handle complex analytic queries 10 to 100 times faster than traditional systems. Netezza appliances puts analytics into the hands of business users in sales, marketing, product development, human resources and other departments that need to actionable insights to drive decision-making.

With its latest business analytics acquisition, Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software and Systems, says the company is bringing analytics to the masses.

“We continue to evolve our capabilities for systems integration, bringing together optimized hardware and software, in response to increasing demand for technology that delivers true business value,” Mills says. “Netezza is a perfect example of this approach.”

Big Blue’s long haul
Netezza fits in with IBM’s maturing business analytics strategy. Big Blue has long put an emphasis on data analysis and business intelligence (BI) as key drivers of IT infrastructure needs. The company has demonstrated a clear understanding that data analysis and BI can also be easily applied to business issues.

IBM’s relationship database, DB2, also fits into the big picture. Over the years, IBM has built a strong family of database-driven products around DB2. Essentially, IBM has successfully worked to tie the data equation together with the needs of enterprises and the strength of their IT departments.

While DB2 reaches into the past and supports the data needs of legacy and distributed systems and applications, new architectures around in-memory and optimized platforms for persistence-driven tasks are in vogue. While Neteeza's strengths are in analytics, this architecture has other uses, ones we'll be seeing more of.

Fast-forward to the Netezza acquisition. The $1.7 billion grab shows that IBM is well aware that big data sets don’t lend themselves to traditional architecture for crunching data. IBM, along with its competitors, have been developing or acquiring new architectures that focus more on in-memory solutions.

Rather than moving the entire database or large caches around on disk or tape, then, new architectures have emerged where the data and logic reside closer together—and the data is accessed from high-performing persistence.

For example, with Netezza appliances, NYSE Euronext has slashed the time it takes to load and extract massive amounts of historical data so it can run analytic queries more securely and efficiently, while reducing run times from hours to seconds. Virgin Media, a UK provider of TV, broadband, phone and mobile services with millions of subscribers, uses Netezza across its product marketing, revenue assurance and credit services departments to proactively plan, forecast, and respond to the effect of pricing and tariff changes enabling them to quickly respond with competitive offerings.

Business analytics consolidation
With the Netezza acquisition, the business analytics market is seeing consolidation as major players begin preparing to tap into a growing big data opportunity. Much the same as the BI market saw consolidation a few years ago—IBM acquired Cognos, Oracle bought Hyperion, and SAP snapped up Business Objects—vendors are now seeing big data analytics as an area that should be embedded into the total infrastructure of solutions. That requires a different architecture.

The competition is heating up. EMC purchased Greenplum, an enabler of big data clouds and self-service analytics, in July. Both companies are planning to sell the hardware and software together in appliances. The vendors tune and optimize the hardware and software to offer the benefits of big data crunching, taking advantage of in memory architecture and high performance hardware.

Expect to see more consolidation, although there aren’t too many players left in the Netezza space. Acquisition candidates include data management and analysis software company Aster Data Systems and Teradata with its enterprise analytics technologies, among others. [Disclosure: Aster Data is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Meanwhile, Oracle this week at OpenWorld is pushing against the market with its new Exadata product. The battle is on. My take is that these purchases are for more than the engines that drive analytics—they are for the engines that drive SaaS, cloud, mobile, web and what we might call the more modern work loads ... data intensive, high-scaling, fast-changing and services-oriented.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd September 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

My immediate reaction when I hear any important news is to immediately write a relevant article. In this case, circumstances meant that I have been unable to. In this case, I am glad that I didn’t, firstly because I have had time to reflect on the implications of this acquisition and, secondly, in light of Bob Evans’ piece in Information Week (thanks for the reference Bob) suggesting that Oracle may yet come in with a higher bid. This article is therefore written on the assumption that that doesn’t happen.

My immediate reaction on hearing the news was that IBM has negotiated a much better deal than Microsoft did when it bought DATAllegro. $1.78bn compared to $275m but around 100 times as many customers and a system that runs on IBM platforms (x series) as opposed to one that didn’t run on either Windows or SQL Server. Anyway, that’s an aside.

Most commentators will write about how Netezza TwinFin fits into IBM’s workload optimised systems strategy but I want to drill a little deeper and discuss the synergies, opportunities and issues that this acquisition raises, especially those that may be less obvious (i.e. I am not going to discuss synergies between warehousing and data integration or data quality, these being obvious).

The biggest issue will be strategic: positioning Netezza versus the IBM Smart Analytics System. This shouldn’t be too difficult. I imagine that the latter will be positioned as the company’s general-purpose enterprise data warehouse and the former for specific analytic functions, data marts and edge environments.

The other two issues will arise around Netezza’s lesser known capabilities: Netezza Mantra on the one hand, and its data mining/advanced analytics arm that it gained when it acquired NuTech technologies on the other. The expertise in the latter group will no doubt be used to augment what IBM already has in this area, with respect both to its own capabilities and those of SPSS, so I don’t see this as much of a problem either.

However, Mantra may be more tricky as it is a direct competitor to Guardium, which IBM acquired earlier this year. While Guardium is a much bigger beast within the database activity monitoring (DAM) world, Netezza has a rather different spin on this particular market: notably that simply monitoring activity is one thing but that what you really want to do is to be able to perform predictive analytics against monitored data so that you can recognise patterns of potential threatening behaviour. This, of course, requires storing historic data and then performing analytics against that information, which is precisely why Mantra runs on the Netezza platform. The market has not yet really woken up to this possibility yet but I believe that it should do so, and will do so in due course. Ultimately, what this may mean is that the front capabilities of Guardium and Mantra may get merged with both running on TwinFin at the back-end.

Which brings me onto the first opportunity that IBM/Netezza brings, which is with respect to Tivoli SIEM (security information and event management). I have been arguing for some time that SIEM products are largely built on antiquated architectures: they are processing large volumes of events but don’t generally use event processing to recognise patterns of events in real-time, and they typically store historic data for forensic purposes in file systems or merchant databases, which are not best suited to doing serious fraud analysis. Again, this is partly because relatively few companies are doing that sort of analysis but, similarly, I expect it to become a growing requirement. So, there is an opportunity for Tivoli to embed Netezza as its database (as opposed to the file system it currently uses) at the back-end and, as an aside to the subject of this article, either InfoSphere Streams or WebSphere Business Events (previously AptSoft) at the front-end.

There is also direct synergy between Netezza and these event processing products in capital markets (especially hedge funds, which like to be able to combine analysis of historic data with current stock tick information) and other environments, including the government sector.

The one other significant advantage that Netezza brings to the table is Netezza Spatial. Historically, this market has been dominated by Oracle, but Netezza offers a real competitor to Oracle in this area and, as this is an area that IBM has never been particularly strong in, this adds significantly to its portfolio. Which brings me onto Oracle itself.

In an article such as this I usually comment on winners and losers but in the case of the latter I will confine myself to Oracle. I see this acquisition as a big threat to Oracle, which is why Bob Evans’ suggestion of a competitive bid is plausible. Assuming the IBM acquisition goes ahead, this is going to be very difficult to compete with: Netezza already takes business away from Oracle and with IBM’s branding behind it can take significantly more. Note that, just as there is an almost fully automated facility for migrating from Oracle to DB2, there is also a similar capability offered by Netezza. The only possible fly in the ointment will be if the Netezza sales team concentrate too much on selling into the IBM user base as opposed to competitive and Greenfield implementations: IBM will need to get its incentive structure right.

Finally, I should comment on Netezza’s partners. Most of these should not be affected by this and, indeed, many can expect extended sales opportunities. However, Composite Software is a special case. Composite Software has a solution for data virtualisation (query federation) that has been specifically developed for Netezza appliances (it takes advantage of specific Netezza features). I rate this company as the leading vendor in its field and while IBM has its own technology in this area it has languished somewhat compared to Composite over the last few years. If I was Composite I would extend its Netezza specific offering to cover DB2 (which it already supports) and I think it could do very well out of this acquisition and it offers a real opportunity for the company. Indeed, I can see it becoming an IBM acquisition target in its own right.

Of course, all of this discussion will be blown out of the water if Bob Evans is right. Do I think he is? I have no idea: who can fathom the mind of a man who wants to race the America’s Cup using wing-sailed catamarans? Assuming Bob is wrong there is a lot going for this acquisition and that’s precisely why he might just be right.