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What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, and data centres?
Thursday 26 November 2009, 12:36 PM
Cloud computing guzzles juice: official
This story is is spot on: although network vendors make noises about reducing power consumption, in reality the nature of both their products and their locations in the datacentre mean that existing switches and routers aren't going to be thrown out in a hurry.
So there's not a lot of pressure on vendors to make their kit more energy-efficient.
And while I'm here, it should be noted that centralising everything - desktops etc - doesn't always make things more efficient. Not only is there a cost in money and energy associated with moving hardware and processes into the centre, it doesn't follow that the natural assumption that desktops will be replaced by thin clients and fat servers holds true.
In practice, they're far more likely to end up with laptops, which aren't thin from an energy consumption standpoint. And then, because the laptops will be either on standby or away from the office fir some of the time, you'll need to run up the aircon because your office space isn't being heated by a couple of hundred watts per desktop.
Free lunch? Don't think so.
So there's not a lot of pressure on vendors to make their kit more energy-efficient.
And while I'm here, it should be noted that centralising everything - desktops etc - doesn't always make things more efficient. Not only is there a cost in money and energy associated with moving hardware and processes into the centre, it doesn't follow that the natural assumption that desktops will be replaced by thin clients and fat servers holds true.
In practice, they're far more likely to end up with laptops, which aren't thin from an energy consumption standpoint. And then, because the laptops will be either on standby or away from the office fir some of the time, you'll need to run up the aircon because your office space isn't being heated by a couple of hundred watts per desktop.
Free lunch? Don't think so.
Thursday 19 November 2009, 2:24 AM
'Cloud vendors unprofessional', says analyst
An analyst has launched a broadside at cloud computing vendors, accusing them of being immature, and offering few real protection for their data.
Camille Mendler, VP of research at Yankee Group, was speaking at NetEvents AsiaPac press summit, said that she had analysed over 50 contracts, and most included clauses that limited the vendor's liability to a far greater extent than their headline marketing would suggest.
For example, one cloud vendor offers a 10,000 percent SLA: if the service fails, you get a credit that's 1,000 times longer than the period of failure. But in the small print is a clause that limits the cloud vendor's liability to two months. Similarly, a typical contract denies any responsibility for any damages that a customer may suffer.
Mendler also pointed out that it's unclear how the law should apply to data in the cloud. Issues involved include privacy, jurisdiction, and data protection - there's typically no responsibility for backup, which is down to the customer. In addition, standards lag: no-one is offering services to ISO9000 levels.
She also said that not all cloud vendors were unprofessional and singled out IBM as an example of good quality services and contracts.
Camille Mendler, VP of research at Yankee Group, was speaking at NetEvents AsiaPac press summit, said that she had analysed over 50 contracts, and most included clauses that limited the vendor's liability to a far greater extent than their headline marketing would suggest.
For example, one cloud vendor offers a 10,000 percent SLA: if the service fails, you get a credit that's 1,000 times longer than the period of failure. But in the small print is a clause that limits the cloud vendor's liability to two months. Similarly, a typical contract denies any responsibility for any damages that a customer may suffer.
Mendler also pointed out that it's unclear how the law should apply to data in the cloud. Issues involved include privacy, jurisdiction, and data protection - there's typically no responsibility for backup, which is down to the customer. In addition, standards lag: no-one is offering services to ISO9000 levels.
She also said that not all cloud vendors were unprofessional and singled out IBM as an example of good quality services and contracts.
Wednesday 11 November 2009, 2:02 PM
A perspective on business analytics
Am in the middle of some research into storage, and the latest technologies that help to ensure that storage doesn't exist as an island or silo. No, don't switch off! It gets interesting later...
I participated in a panel discussion yesterday with IBM chief scientist Jeff Jonas, from Big Blue's Entity Analytics Group. Jonas is clearly no stranger to self-promotion, so I'm a little loathe to give him more publicity but I'm forced to admit that I've never heard the problem of business analytics explained so lucidly.
If you're not a CEO, business analytics or BI can appear -- well -- a bit dull. There's no shiny box to look at, no complex new technology that does miraculous things with piles of bits that have never been done before. There's nothing sexy about BI. Or is there?
Maybe it's because the problem appears more organisational than technological. There's lots of information scattered around the enterprise but how do you get to it?
Even if you can, how do you know what's important until it's in the context of something else? That's the gist of the message that Jonas has been pushing for the last 20 years or so.
The problem according to Jonas is that, even though computers get faster, organisations get dumber. That's because they can make sense of only a limited volume of information. But data is growing faster than the speed of data assimilation, posits Jonas, so the volume of data you can make sense of becomes a smaller proportion of the whole over time.
And it leads to business amnesia.
An example he gave was that one huge retailer found via BI that two of every 1,000 employees hired had been convicted for theft from the same store. Another example: your bank has suffered a fraud involving an outsider and an insider. The outsider is caught, convicted and gaoled, but you don't know which of your 25,000 employees is the insider. Then an employee moves to the outsider's address. Bingo!
The key here is that you didn't know that an employee's address was important until it was put into the right context. That's what business analytics does.
What's key is to assemble all the data you can, because context is all. And while I'm told there's a lot of very smart algorithmic work being done by Jonas's inventions both prior to and during his tenure at IBM, underlying business analytics is a need for all corporate data to be accessible, not in silos around the organisation. Which takes me back to storage.
I'm convinced of the need for data access: as a writer, siloed data has always been a huge barrier to well-researched journalism. Not to mention deliberately hidden data - but that's another story. Yet so many organisations seem still to be struggling with providing universal access to information (assuming correct authentication), with the finger of blame often pointed at data storage in departments and branch offices that doesn't hook up either physically or logically outside its creation point.
It highlights the need to look at both ends of the problem -- the storage and the way that the information that storage contains is used.
Is your organisation well joined up?
I participated in a panel discussion yesterday with IBM chief scientist Jeff Jonas, from Big Blue's Entity Analytics Group. Jonas is clearly no stranger to self-promotion, so I'm a little loathe to give him more publicity but I'm forced to admit that I've never heard the problem of business analytics explained so lucidly.
If you're not a CEO, business analytics or BI can appear -- well -- a bit dull. There's no shiny box to look at, no complex new technology that does miraculous things with piles of bits that have never been done before. There's nothing sexy about BI. Or is there?
Maybe it's because the problem appears more organisational than technological. There's lots of information scattered around the enterprise but how do you get to it?
Even if you can, how do you know what's important until it's in the context of something else? That's the gist of the message that Jonas has been pushing for the last 20 years or so.
The problem according to Jonas is that, even though computers get faster, organisations get dumber. That's because they can make sense of only a limited volume of information. But data is growing faster than the speed of data assimilation, posits Jonas, so the volume of data you can make sense of becomes a smaller proportion of the whole over time.
And it leads to business amnesia.
An example he gave was that one huge retailer found via BI that two of every 1,000 employees hired had been convicted for theft from the same store. Another example: your bank has suffered a fraud involving an outsider and an insider. The outsider is caught, convicted and gaoled, but you don't know which of your 25,000 employees is the insider. Then an employee moves to the outsider's address. Bingo!
The key here is that you didn't know that an employee's address was important until it was put into the right context. That's what business analytics does.
What's key is to assemble all the data you can, because context is all. And while I'm told there's a lot of very smart algorithmic work being done by Jonas's inventions both prior to and during his tenure at IBM, underlying business analytics is a need for all corporate data to be accessible, not in silos around the organisation. Which takes me back to storage.
I'm convinced of the need for data access: as a writer, siloed data has always been a huge barrier to well-researched journalism. Not to mention deliberately hidden data - but that's another story. Yet so many organisations seem still to be struggling with providing universal access to information (assuming correct authentication), with the finger of blame often pointed at data storage in departments and branch offices that doesn't hook up either physically or logically outside its creation point.
It highlights the need to look at both ends of the problem -- the storage and the way that the information that storage contains is used.
Is your organisation well joined up?
Friday 6 November 2009, 12:30 PM
V-Blocks - do they mean you're V-Locked in?
V-Blocks: it's a new form of packaging for servers, switches and storage for your datacentre, and it looks like the future.
EMC and Cisco have announced that they'll be selling aggregated systems that simply slot into your datacentre. Or 'private cloud', in today's shiny new, updated nomenclature.
Inside the black box will go all the complexity you currently have to manage separately, and the glue to bind them together comes from VMware. It seems like a unique concept, for while Sun tried selling a datacentre in a box and got some traction, this is a different kettle of fish, on a different scale (sorry).
Only HP, with its just-launched Converged Infrastructure concept is anywhere close to this, it seems. The aims of both are similar: to virtualise the hardware and provide a single view of the infrastructure that takes care of the messy details of what VM runs where, what's connected to what, and how. All you need to concern yourself with is the energy bill, security, and general management.
This is the new battleground. Other players are fighting back, including Dell, whose deal with Juniper Networks will allow its resurgent services division to sell combined packages. And IBM has a cloud of products, but it's unclear as yet how well they fit into this new paradigm.
Of course, what this means is that, if you're not in the box, you're locked out. If you're buying, do you care? It's somewhat analogous to the blade server chassis market. There's little commonality and so much vendor lock-in there too, but it's not an issue for most enterprises. And this is a much bigger play which, if successful, promises to bring riches to the pockets of vendors inside the tent.
Will those outside might spend some time getting wet, and find themselves searching for a V-Brolly?
EMC and Cisco have announced that they'll be selling aggregated systems that simply slot into your datacentre. Or 'private cloud', in today's shiny new, updated nomenclature.
Inside the black box will go all the complexity you currently have to manage separately, and the glue to bind them together comes from VMware. It seems like a unique concept, for while Sun tried selling a datacentre in a box and got some traction, this is a different kettle of fish, on a different scale (sorry).
Only HP, with its just-launched Converged Infrastructure concept is anywhere close to this, it seems. The aims of both are similar: to virtualise the hardware and provide a single view of the infrastructure that takes care of the messy details of what VM runs where, what's connected to what, and how. All you need to concern yourself with is the energy bill, security, and general management.
This is the new battleground. Other players are fighting back, including Dell, whose deal with Juniper Networks will allow its resurgent services division to sell combined packages. And IBM has a cloud of products, but it's unclear as yet how well they fit into this new paradigm.
Of course, what this means is that, if you're not in the box, you're locked out. If you're buying, do you care? It's somewhat analogous to the blade server chassis market. There's little commonality and so much vendor lock-in there too, but it's not an issue for most enterprises. And this is a much bigger play which, if successful, promises to bring riches to the pockets of vendors inside the tent.
Will those outside might spend some time getting wet, and find themselves searching for a V-Brolly?
Thursday 5 November 2009, 11:17 AM
Email archiving - who needs it?
Is email archiving a big problem for SMEs? I spoke recently to Softek, a UK-based disti billing itself as 'highly technical value add distributor of IT security, email archiving and storage solutions'. Naturally enough, it has a view and a product to shift -- I wonder if you'll be totally convinced though.
So we talked about the company's new status as a distributor for PineApp email archiving appliances: boxes that suck in your Exchange (or GroupWise et al) email files after a given period, and delete them after the retention period required for legal compliance has passed. The company makes a series of them, ranging from one said to be suitable for 50 users, right up to 1,000 users.
Softek technical director Mike Bienvenu reckons that the main reason for the existence of appliances such as this, which are aimed at SMEs rather than big enterprises, users are looking for storage management rather than ways of staying legal with respect to email retention.
And that's why, he claims, the PineApp boxes are the only ones of their kind that provide stubbing - the ability to provide a stub for emails that have been archived off, which means the email program -- usually (sadly) Exchange -- sees the email as there. A call for a particular email results in it being pulled off the archive server. Apparently the boxes do deduping too.
I asked why an SME wouldn't just buy more storage rather than go for complex and expensive archiving system. It's not as if they're dealing with massive amounts of data flooding in from all over the globe. The argument for the technology is that compliance means that retaining data for a particular period of time -- up to seven year, for example -- makes this simpler to implement, and that technical issues involving Exchange's storage limitations and the retention of duplicate emails becomes expensive. Bienvenu also said that customers ask for archiving and want to ban PSTs off their network.
I'll confess the story sounded reasonable but not entirely convincing, unless the company's business process involves the generation of terabytes of email data.
Is specialised email archiving technology overkill for an SME?
So we talked about the company's new status as a distributor for PineApp email archiving appliances: boxes that suck in your Exchange (or GroupWise et al) email files after a given period, and delete them after the retention period required for legal compliance has passed. The company makes a series of them, ranging from one said to be suitable for 50 users, right up to 1,000 users.
Softek technical director Mike Bienvenu reckons that the main reason for the existence of appliances such as this, which are aimed at SMEs rather than big enterprises, users are looking for storage management rather than ways of staying legal with respect to email retention.
And that's why, he claims, the PineApp boxes are the only ones of their kind that provide stubbing - the ability to provide a stub for emails that have been archived off, which means the email program -- usually (sadly) Exchange -- sees the email as there. A call for a particular email results in it being pulled off the archive server. Apparently the boxes do deduping too.
I asked why an SME wouldn't just buy more storage rather than go for complex and expensive archiving system. It's not as if they're dealing with massive amounts of data flooding in from all over the globe. The argument for the technology is that compliance means that retaining data for a particular period of time -- up to seven year, for example -- makes this simpler to implement, and that technical issues involving Exchange's storage limitations and the retention of duplicate emails becomes expensive. Bienvenu also said that customers ask for archiving and want to ban PSTs off their network.
I'll confess the story sounded reasonable but not entirely convincing, unless the company's business process involves the generation of terabytes of email data.
Is specialised email archiving technology overkill for an SME?
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