IT Asset management

Sun Microsystems provides storage, hard drive wiping services

Last week I chatted with Michelle Dennedy, Chief Privacy Officer for Sun Microsystems Inc., about a new data erasure service the company is offering as part of Sun’s recently announced Datacenter Services suite that could help avoid serious data loss or data breaches.

“When people move their storage and server arrays from location A to B, these systems are loaded with sensitive customer data, and if one asset falls of the truck, they would be out millions of dollars in data and in a lot of trouble,” Dennedy said. “Also, when someone comes in to repair systems they have access to all of the data on those systems,” so erasing the data is a smart move. 

For example, I recently read this article about a private contractor who downloaded sensitive data from a U.K. government system onto a memory stick, and then lost it. And another story, also from the U.K, reported that a computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 National Health Service patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up, ironically, in case the records got lost.

While Sun didn’t divulge the specific customers or incidents that inspired this new service, I imagine they where similar to those reported above. Dennedy said Sun’s new data erasure service was created to prevent vulnerabilities when repairs are being done by a third  party or when systems are being re-deployed to a new site. “You should know that if you lose a piece of equipment, you are losing only that silicon and not the data that was on it,” Dennedy said.

Another time to erase data is when a system is decommissioned and disposed of; many companies don’t think about erasing the data before ditching the old hardware, and that data could end up in the wrong hands, according to Dennedy. “It isn’t that they don’t care, but there is some ignorance about the massive amounts of data contained by the people getting rid of the equipment,” she said.

“Our technicians will administer software based erasure service for storage and servers, and will hand over a certificate to say, this is no longer an information asset,” she said. Sun is offering the service to non-Sun servers and storage as well.

Of course, users can erase data in their own systems using hard drive erasing software (a simple Google search yields over 480,000 results) and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other companies offering this service, along with a certification, as well.

It is unfortunate that we live in a time when there are so many criminals waiting in the wings to steal data; the market for stolen data is about $276 million, according to Symantec Corp. Knowing this, taking every precaution to secure customer data with services like those from Sun and other companies is very necessary today.

Eight reasons data center managers should thank Wall Street

Earlier this week I spoke with Rob Gardos, the CEO of the New York-based IT automation company GridApp Systems, about his paper “Eight Reasons Data Center Managers should thank Wall Street for the Financial Meltdown.”

As a reporter, I am keenly aware that when it comes to spinning crap into silk, product vendors are pros. So I was pretty skeptical when I saw the title of his paper.

So I asked Gardos to explain why in the world data center managers should thank anyone for the economic cesspool in which they now exist.

For starters, companies have had to reduce their head count because of the economy, so they have half the IT staff to do the same amount of work, he said.

And this is good?

Well, no, but data centers can’t have servers failing left and right and unorganized systems when there are fewer people to manage the issues. “This meltdown has accelerated the path to something dramatically more efficient,” Gardos said. “People are coming up with a new paradigm and are finding ways to improve their systems, because they have to. People are looking at how to minimize costs and how to cut down on tasks that don’t add value to the organization.”

Now that it is time to tighten ship, Gardos said data centers are doing things that will result in long-term benefits:

1.  Reducing costs, energy consumption and waste. Businesses have to find ways to minimize energy costs in the data center, reduce overspending on compliance efforts and automate time-consuming tasks.

2. Core data center priorities. IT professionals have seen the true centrality of product and project performance to company competitiveness. The downturn is to thank for the newfound clarity and redefined priorities.

3. Frugality. Businesses are forced to check line items and cut frivolous spending. This nuisance is a blessing in disguise and will improve spending for years to come.
4. Innovation. IT decision makers and managers have put their heads together to improve efficiency, productivity and competitiveness. This trial-by-fire brainstorming cbreathe new life into companies.

5. Cultivating talent. This includes talent. There is a surplus of once untouchable and highly qualified IT professionals swimming around. IT managers can beef up their staff for less.

6. Green IT. Ideas for operational savings have actually provoked businesses to engage in greening techniques. Many companies will emerge with lowered costs and a greener data center.

7. Competitiveness. Businesses are learning to do more with less, and those habits will continue after the crisis and improve competitiveness in times of prosperity.

8. Long-term benefits. Things are tight now but will the downturn actually spur budget increases in the post-short term for projects that have been placed on the backburner? Lessons learned may actually induce additional spending on virtualization, automation and other cost-savings initiatives.

Of course, it should be noted here that GridApp provides data center automation equipment and would probably love to see data centers using its tools, but Gardos made an effort to remain vendor neutral during our discussion.

“It is clear that infrastructure management and automation will drive efficiency forward – -things like [IT automation software company] BladeLogic make a lot of sense when there are fewer employees to do the work,” Gardos said. “Companies have to change their processes to do more with fewer people, and get more value out of the people the company has.”

He made some good points , and I wonder how many companies now lay off employees only to find themselves buying expensive software to automate the tasks their staff once performed. Seems likely that the data center automation market could ultimately benefit from these hard economic times.

Data Center efficiency tips and tricks from Data Center Decisions

The overarching theme of the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago last week was energy; how much data centers use, how much they pay for it, and how much they could be saving. 

The keynote addresses on both days of the conference, October 24 & 24, covered data center efficiency at length, with plenty of tips and resources to help data centers cut back on power consumption, though it appears that not many people are taking the necessary measures to reduce consumption. Because of this, government plans to step in and mandate power saving measures to prevent future climate change.

As awful as this sounds, government intervention is a necessary measure at this point, because facility spending has increased tremendously over the past two years with no end in sight, and with all of this additional compute capacity, the outlook for the environment is grim.

The energy required to power and cool a single server emits four tons of greenhouse gases, so by 2012, data centers worldwide will exceed greenhouse gas emissions of the airline industry, according to Ken Brill, President and Executive Director for the Uptime Institute, who gave a keynote address called “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency” on October 24 based on the McKinsey / Uptime Institute report.

So, why has data center power consumption spun out of control? In addition to the increasing demands from Web 2.0, 80% of today’s compute demand is performed on distributed systems with only 5% to 20% utilization rates, whereas before 1980, mainframes were used, and at much higher utilization rates, Brill said.

The way to reverse the trend sounds easy enough; use virtualization to consolidate systems and increase server utilization rates, and also kill comatose servers.

Simple as these steps sound, it can be difficult to do when you don’t keep track of servers to know their utilization rates, Brill said. In this case, implementing a formal de-commissioning program using ITIL to document, bill back and audit the systems is a first step. 

“If we want to become energy efficient we have to become better engineers,” Brill said.

Other measures that can make a major impact are correctly setting the cooling unit set point, shutting off humidification and de-humidification functions, implementing hot aisle/cold aisle containment, turning off unneeded cooling units, and if possible, increasing eco-friendly water side cooling, Brill said.

Data centers that are adding hardware should make an effort to buy efficient power supplies and hardware, which all the major vendors offer, and rightsize memory to avoid using excess power, Brill said

If your asking yourself who in IT has enough extra time to do all of these things, Brill had a suggestion for that, too; appoint an “Energy Czar” - someone who cares about the environment and wasting power - to make sure the data center facilities and operations are as efficient as possible.

Of course, the Energy Czar could also get a bonus here and there for lowering the company power bills, which most certainly will happen when even some of the above measures are implemented.

Companies can also use efficiency software tools or hire outside consultants to help increase energy efficiency, and there are plenty of choices today.

Gartner lists 10 most disruptive technologies of 2009

Gartner, Inc. analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2009 during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held in Orlando through October 16.

Some of the technologies listed were the obvious, like virtualization and cloud computing, and Gartner predicts that servers will evolve beyond the blade server stage that exists today.

Gartner’s definition of a strategic technology is one that could have a significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. The analysts looked at factors like high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major financial investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

Gartner’s the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:

Virtualization. In addition to server virtualization, virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly as a way to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication). This can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information.

Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing providers deliver computing capabilities “as a service” to external companies and the services are delivered in a highly scalable and elastic fashion using Internet technologies and techniques.

Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

Servers — Beyond Blades. Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs.

The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is needed, so companies don’t have to pay for all resource types to upgrade capacity. It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles.

The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

Enterprise Mashups.Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications.

Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking (Facebook), social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent due to increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry.

Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance. BI is directed toward business managers and workers who are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

A few of these technologies were also on Gartner’s list for 2008, including Green IT, Unified Communications, WOA, Mashup and Social Software. Other technologies Gartner expected to be significant for businesses in 2008 were Business Process Modeling, Metadata Management, Virtualization 2.0, Computing Fabric, and Real World Web.

Unisys updates server with six-core Intel Xeon, enhances services

Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. announced its new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server using Intel Xeon six-core processors (Dunnington), which Intel also announced today; along with new business assurance services and software in the Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite.

Unisys’ new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server is based on the new six-core Intel Xeon processor 7400 series. It has 16 sockets providing up to 96 processor cores. According to Unisys, the 7600R is designed for database and online transaction processing environments, large-scale consolidation and virtualization initiatives and business intelligence deployments with Microsoft SQL Server.

Model 7600R can support consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, six-core Xeon processor configuration – with 24 total processor cores – which Unisys claims is better than a commodity server farm of 64 dual-socket, single-core Xeon processor servers with 128 total processor cores, while using less disk and providing better response times.

The new server also supports VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Hyper-V, and supports dynamic partitioning so users can add more processor, memory and I/O resources on the fly without disrupting system operations. Unisys plans to introduce secure partitioning in the first half of 2009, which provides partitioning capabilities at the processor core level.

Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from $26,430 to $135,000. Unisys will exhibit the ES7000 Model 7600R at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, Sept. 15-18.

Unisys business services
Unisys also announced new Business Assurance Services that help companies evaluate the cost and benefits of disaster recovery products, reduce the time it takes to deploy the best ones and reduce operational costs by improving resource utilization.

“We are vendor-agnostic and will implement whichever technology is best for the client. It could be a Unisys product, or it could be from another vendor,” said Jody Little, vice president of solutions and services at Unisys.

The Unisys Business Assurance Services, using discovery processes and tools developed with support from Unisys partner GlassHouse Technologies, include the following:

• Unisys Disaster Recovery Architecture Service, which provides a methodology to build application and data disaster recovery capabilities.
• Unisys Backup Modernization Service, which helps clients select new technologies and services to support backup environments at both core and remote sites.
• Unisys Data Protection for Backup Service, which helps clients improve backup and restore operations for business information, reducing costs by improving utilization of assets. Unisys experts also make vendor-independent recommendations and create a prioritized action plan

Unisys has also added new management software components to its Infrastructure Management Suite, which automates and orchestrates management of a real-time IT infrastructure. More information can be found on the Unisys website.

Zimory testing data center resource trading marketplace

Zimory, a spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the research and development unit of Deutsche Telekom AG in Berlin, Germany, is testing a global trading platform to exchange data center resources on-demand via the Internet.

The Zimory Marketplace is basically a data center resource trading platform where users can buy and sell server resources and Virtual Machines (VMs). The company claims to be the first to introduce and operate an international trading platform to exchange data center resources.

The marketplace sounds like a great idea for data centers that experience workload surges  and need extra capacity on-demand, and data centers with underutilized servers can sell or rent their extra capacity to re-coup some power costs.

Zimory software

The Zimory software stack has three levels of operation:

• Zimory Host is the basic entity of a Zimory infrastructure. It is installed on each server which then becomes a part of a Zimory network of computing resources.
• Zimory Manager allows the user to oversee and manage an unlimited number of physical and virtual servers with Zimory Host installed and is available in a Zimory network. Zimory Manager ships with a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI).
• Zimory Marketplace is the hub of the Zimory network and collects information about all available server resources and their status.

Servers having Zimory Host or Zimory Manager installed reside behind the Firewall within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of a data center, while Zimory Marketplace is located outside of the DMZ. All three of them interact with each other via standard HTTP.

Installing and using Zimory

To create a network of Zimory-enabled servers, the data center administrator downloads and burns the freely available Zimory Live CD image to boot each of the servers which is supposed to advertise their resources within the Zimory infrastructure. The administrator could also use a network bootable live image (also freely available) from Zimory. Both approaches will automatically turn a virtual server into a Zimory-enabled server. The installation process is almost identical for Zimory Manager.

Inside of Zimory Manager, the administrator can configure the available data center resources for direct online outsourcing and trading on Zimory Marketplace, and define limites to the available resources, as well as a pricing scheme (flat fee or pay-per-use).

For instance, the administrator can specify a particular group of Zimory-enabled servers or just parts of such a server for sale to third parties on Zimory Marketplace. Another option would be to rent remaining resources of a server with, say, less than 10% utilization.

Zimory in action

Before a workload peak occurs, systems in Zimory are running fine and the additional systems for load balancing are stored as VMs in Zimory Manager.

When an expected or unexpected load peak occurs, the IT administrator clicks on to Zimory Marketplace through Zimory Manager and searches for appropriate server resources. After finding those resources, she starts the VMs for load-balancing from within Zimory Manager.

The software applications contained in the newly deployed VMs will connect to the load-balancer of the core systems and start to take over parts of the workload. After the peak is finished the system will shut down the VMs automatically.

Of course, this can also be automated. An administrator can pre-define the thresholds for when the load is to be taken over by servers on the Zimory Marketplace.

The company plans to start beta testing soon and invites interested sellers, and purchasers, of virtualised capacity to register their interest on the Zimory website.

Symantec data center guru talks about riding herd on IT assets and the challenge of chargeback

I recently spoke with Kenneth Gonzalez, leader of Symantec’s Data Center Transformation Services team about how data center managers can get rogue business units to give up their crappy old servers and how to make data center costs explicit to internal end users. This is an excerpt of that conversation.

In a recent data center paper you produced, you talk about decommissioning legacy servers to optimize data centers. So how do you get rid of them? Experts estimate that up to 30% of the servers in a given data center aren’t doing any work. It seems like business units like to hang onto these things, putting them under desks, in the Test-Dev lab., or in closets.

Ken Gonzalez: Asset management is a huge challenge for IT. It ends up being a real manual exercise because organizations grow by accretion. Going back to find what you have is so overwhelming, very few organizations ever start. The scope is too huge. It requires rigor and operating practices a lot of organizations aren’t willing to take on with a vengeance.

This is an asset management problem. IT needs to know where the assets are going when they unplug them. Are they being sent to an organization to responsibly dispose of the equipment? IT managers that don’t track this could be cutting their own throats. You should be able to bring in a more space saving, energy efficient asset in its place. The IT team needs to be responsible for having positive control over the assets under its charge.

In order to get people to change behavior, it often boils down to money, showing users how much it costs to deliver an IT service. Some folks, like The Uptime Institute and Vernon Turner at IDC have recommended chargeback. Does that work in these situations?

Gonzalez: Chargeback is one model, but a lot of organizations are against trying it. Many organizations don’t know how to price it. Applications aren’t one size fits all. Some applications don’t do a whole lot, but use a lot of resources. Organizations are reticent about coming up with a cost model.

The notion of a service catalogue is pretty popular — to be able to charge what it costs to deliver a service. The intent of the service catalogue would be to clearly communicate to your customer, what services you can provide and the most effective way for you to deliver them. You produce a standard profile of the services you offer. If there is something a customer needs that doesn’t fit the standard catalogue, you have to go through someone to see what resources the project will take. You expose the detail to the customer and there is a forecasting and capacity planning benefit that comes with that approach.

If the demand for power and computing resources continues to outstrip IT’s ability to provide capacity in a cost effective way, are companies going to turn to cloud computing and other outsourced options?

Gonzalez: I think that is an important component that private organizations are going to have to confront at some point. Some services are going to have to move into the cloud, either software as a service (SaaS) or infrastructure as a service. Whether or not a company moves an application into the cloud will primarily revolve around the criticality of the services and the security of the data, how long it would take to recover it if something happened. The issues that need to be worked through now are business issues. Dealing with the technical issues is putting the cart before the horse.

Right now we’re just getting an initial level of awareness. You could call it “Utility Computing Part 2.”

Do you have a data center question or comment for Ken? Leave a comment.