A Wall Street infrastructure & operations day

I recently had an opportunity to spend a day in three separate meetings with infrastructure & operations professionals from three of the top six financial service firms in the country, and discuss topics ranging from long-term business and infrastructure strategy to specific likes and dislikes regarding their Tier-1 vendors and their challengers. The day’s meetings were neither classic consulting nor classic briefings, but rather a free-form discussion, guided only loosely by an agenda and, despite possible Federal regulations to the contrary, completely devoid of PowerPoint presentations. As in the past, these in-depth meetings provided a wealth of food for thought, interesting and sometimes contradictory indicators from the three groups. There was a lot of material to ponder, but I’ll try and summarize some of the high-level takeaways in this post.

Servers and Vendors

These companies between them own in the neighborhood of 180,000 servers, and probably purchase 30,000 - 50,000 servers per year in various cycles of procurements. In short, these are heavyweight users. One thing that struck me in the course of the conversations was the Machiavellian view of their Tier-1 server vendors. Viewed as key partners, at the same time the majority of this group of users devoted a substantial amount of time to keeping their key vendors at arm’s length through aggressive vendor management techniques like deliberate splitting of procurements between competitors. They understand their suppliers' margins and cost structures well, and are committed to driving hardware supplier margins to “as close to zero as we can,” in the words of one participant.

Yesterday, I participated in one of the regular content planning sessions for us analysts on Forrester’s IT Infrastructure & Operation’s Research team. Similar to investment managers and their portfolio of stocks or bonds, we spent time making buy/hold/sell decisions on what we will research more, continue to research, or stop researching. Among the many criteria we use to make these decisions, like client readership, inquiries, or consulting, the strategic relevancy to IT is an important factor to consider. And there was some heated debate around research themes we may phase out down the road…

Enter the discussion on IT asset disposition – or the process of reselling, donating, or recycling end-of-life IT equipment. While every organization eventually has to dispose of its end-of-life IT equipment, it’s long been an afterthought. And the data backs this up. Forrester finds that 80% of organizations globally use their OEM, third parties or a combination of the two for IT asset disposition. But when asked how important IT asset disposition is relative to other IT asset management processes, it’s far and away the least important. As an indicator of this, I recently surveyed over 300 European IT professionals where 77% of respondents ranked IT asset disposition “less important” or “least important.”

This begs the question, is disposing of end-of-life IT equipment really strategic?

Events are, and have been for quite some time, the fundamental elements of IT infrastructure real-time monitoring. Any status changed, threshold crossed in device usage, or step performed in a process generates an event that needs to be reported, analyzed, and acted upon by IT operations.

Historically, the lower layers of IT infrastructure (i.e., network components and hardware platforms) have been regarded as the most prone to hardware and software failures and have therefore been the object of all attention and of most management software investments. In reality, today’s failures are much more likely to be coming from the application and the management of platform and application updates than from the hardware platforms. The increased infrastructure complexity has resulted in a multiplication of events reported on IT management consoles.

Over the years, several solutions have been developed to extract the truth from the clutter of event messages. Network management pioneered solutions such as rule engines and codebook. The idea was to determine, among a group of related events, the original straw that broke the camel’s back. We then moved on to more sophisticated statistical and pattern analysis: Using historical data we could determine what was normal at any given time for a group of parameters. This not only reduces the number of events, it eliminates false alerts and provides a predictive analysis based on parameters’ value evolution in time.

The next step, which has been used in industrial process control and in business activities and is now finding its way into IT management solutions, is complex event processing (CEP). 

Over the past several months, I've been receiving a lot of questions about replication for continuity and recovery. One thing I've noticed, however, is that there is a lot of confusion around replication and its uses. To combat this, my colleague Stephanie Balaouras and I recently put out a research report called "The Past, Present, And Future Of Replication" where we outlined the different types of replication and their use cases. In addition to that, I thought it would be good to get some of the misconceptions about replication cleared up:

Myth: Replication is the same as high availability
Reality: Replication can help to enable high availability and disaster recovery, but it is not a solution in and of itself. In the case of an outage, simply having another copy of the data at an alternate site isn't going to help if you don't have a failover strategy or solution. Some host-based replication products come with integrated failover and failback capabilities. 

Myth: Replication is too expensive
Reality: It's true that traditionally array-based replication has been expensive due to the fact that it requires like-to-like storage and additional licensing fees. However, two factors have mitigated this expense: 1) several storage vendors are no longer charging an extra licensing fee for replication; and 2) there are several alternatives to array-based replication that allow you to use heterogeneous storage and come at a significantly lower acquisition cost. Replication products fall into one of four categories (roughly from most to least expensive):