IT Infrastructure

Clouds Rolling In…

Question:  There has been much twitter in the technology press and from the big vendors about how cloud computing is the next transformational technology.  Is there really anything to the hype?

Every day seems to bring yet another deluge of cloud-related press releases, articles, analyst opinion, and, somewhere among the confusion, some honest-to-goodness useful information.  While there is always some hyperbole with any new technology direction, there is more to the concept of cloud computing than vapor (pardon the inevitable pun).

Once you strip away the fluff, cloud computing represents the next step along the continuum in the evolution of utility computing.  It promises to have a substantial impact in the way that organizations provide IT services in the future to consumers and the entries alike.  From the consultant’s perspective, cloud computing, at a minimum, represents another option in terms of providing a flexible level of service more closely aligned with your exact requirements.  In the Service Provider Model (SPM), service levels are defined based on business requirements and IT delivery capabilities.  On the “demand” side, attributes such as availability, recoverability, and performance form the basis for the service definitions.   From the “delivery” side, IT is responsible for determining the most efficient means of providing a given service level. A key attribute for both demand and delivery is, of course, the per-unit cost at each level of service.

Cloud computing opens up additional delivery options for organizations in planning and providing IT services.  The advantages promised by cloud computing - the ability to quantify operational costs of infrastructure, dynamic resource allocation and improved flexibility, must be weighed against potential risks, such as the availability and control of data, performance impact on applications, potential for vendor lock-in in developing a services strategy.

Incorporating cloud computing into an IT strategy impacts a wide range of IT functions, and an expertise in the areas of data center consolidation, virtualization, security, and data management and protection can provide a unique perspective to determining the right approach to planning and implementing cloud services. If  you are feeling lost in all the hype, look for a vendor independent provider of IT services, to assist you in determining the appropriate IT services strategy for your organization.

Over the coming months, we’ll have more to say on this topic, but for those seeking a decent primer on the subject sans the hype,  a good place to start might be the UC Berkeley paper, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf).  While it has sparked some debate, it frames the subject and its key components quite well.

About the Author

Jim Damoulakis, CTO of GlassHouse Technologies,

Mapping Application Disaster Recovery to Business Requirements

Question: Now that my organization has acquired space at a  remote co-location data center and we’ve installed hardware, where do we need to consider in setting up recovery for our critical business applications?

While it would be impossible in this forum to go into all the possible strategies that you could employ for application recovery, it will describe the areas that you should consider when developing a recovery solution for your company.

Before thinking about any technology, disaster recovery is really more about business risk management.  As such it is important to start by meeting with the business owners of each application to identify the recovery requirements such recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), end user workload, and whatever other applications or services are required by the application. In short, understand the main parameters of your recovery solution from the business perspective first. Keep in mind that the business owners may not be familiar with the technological underpinnings of the application, so involve the application support staff to ensure a full understanding of the recovery requirements so that the managers can make reasonable decisions based on what is achievable with the current technology and architectures.

From here, design your recovery solution while considering the following:

• Server power - How much processing power will be needed by the recovered application at the DR site? Will the DR site support production only or will development activities also be occurring there?
• Replication - How much data has to be available at the DR site, how fresh will it need to be, and how will it get to the DR site?
• Network - How much network capacity will be needed to support data replication and end user access to capacity and what protocols should the network support?
• End user access - How will the users of the application access it while running at the recovery site?
• Application installation and code management - How do you ensure that the latest version of the application is available at the DR site?
• Application recovery process - What will be the step by step process for recovering the application? Who will execute the recovery process?
• Change control - How do you ensure that changes to the production version of the application are reflected in the DR environment?
• Testing - How will you test the resources at the DR site and the recovery process?

In designing your recovery solution, think of it as an on-going resource that must be managed with the same attention as your production environment. That’s because it might someday be your production environment.

John McWilliams, JH McWilliams & Associates, Business Continuity Consultants

Determining the Real Business Value of IT

Question:  What are some methodologies that can be used to help CIOs and other C-level executives define the business value of IT, particularly when all budgets are under increased scrutiny?

This is an excellent question.  IT managers need to be able to capture the real business value of IT so it can be demonstrated to C-level executives in support of enterprise purchases of and continued investment in IT services.  In the past, typically new technology implementations and large strategic business transformation projects were what got business executives’ attentions - partially because they are both at the highest risk of failure and offer the greatest opportunity for reward.  However, nowadays most IT executives are being forced to focus on squeezing the most efficiency out of their existing bread and butter project and operational budgets, particularly since enterprise appetites for high risk large scale projects are down.

The good news is that IT operational efficiency projects are now relatively easy to quantify by applying the standard bag of tricks, such as IRR, ROI, TCO and payback period tools. The ability to capture detailed business information in real time using business intelligence tools and LEAN manufacturing approaches can be and is being applied to measuring the value of the IT tools themselves.  This has given both business and IT management unprecedented insight into the value of a given IT process improvement tool or project.  Not only can these tools do a good job of capturing improved business productivity and efficiency, but they translate them into terms that executives can readily understand - how the tools directly affect their bottom and top lines.

For an example of the success of this approach look no further than the massive switch to virtualized IT services and all those data center consolidation projects that have all been justified by demonstrated real cost savings in both reduced capital expenditures and continued on-going operational cost savings.  The green data center movement is not capturing management’s imagination because it is cool, but because it is a terrific way to save lots of money in operational costs - in some cases as much as 30%.  The continued move toward more outsourced IT services is another way for companies to translate slippery IT budgets into more easily quantifiable bottom line expenses.  By using these tools management can gain a good understanding of how their IT dollars are actually being spent and how effective they are.  The logical next steps of improving the quality of IT expenditures are then that much easier to visualize and plan.

One last note that is often overlooked is that these metrics are all well and good at the enterprise level, but ultimately detailed metrics on human productivity remains extremely hard to measure.  It is what I call the “coffee factor”, the lost productivity due to people getting a cup of coffee because a system is slow or they are distracted by the poor user interface.  I predict that better tools for capturing this will remain elusive, but it will not be for lack of trying.

So what do you think?

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.  IT infrastructure consulting services.

Welcome to Ask the IT Consultant

Question:  What is the Ask the IT Consultant Blog all about? How can I benefit from knowledge and expertise of this high powered network of IT consultants?

The Ask the IT Consultant is officially open for business.  Welcome all to the Ask the IT Consultant Blog sponsored by the Boston SIM (Society for Information Management) Consultants’ Roundtable.  This blog is a shared effort by a number of senior IT consultants from large and small consultancies in the Boston Metropolitan area.  While we come from diverse backgrounds, with a wide range of IT skills, the members of the Boston SIM consultants’ Roundtable all share a passion for appropriate technology and exceptional service delivery.

Ask the IT Consultant will take the form of a question or number of questions posed by the readership.  The responses will be written by members of the Boston SIM Consultants’ Roundtable, who will take turns contributing content on current trends in IT systems, services and infrastructure.  As just a taste of what we can offer, our group includes members who have deep expertise in creating SharePoint solutions for mid-sized companies, the ability to create customized backend infrastructures, and who can simplify the complexities of storage and virtualization solutions.

Whatever the theme of the week, the objective will be to deliver information that is relevant to Tech Target’s constituency of IT practitioners, CIO’s, IT managers and leaders, as well as the IT community in general.  The topics will range from the hottest technologies, such as cloud computing, building green data centers, virtualization, and the best Open Source software, to how to squeeze the most out of your IT dollars by using outsourced resources, more efficient project management and better systems integration.

So now it is your turn readers.  Fire away by responding to this post with comments or dropping our editor an email at  bfcohen at luthcomputer.com.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.  IT infrastructure consulting services.