How Do We Measure High Availability?

Over the past 2 months, I've seen an increase in the number of end user inquiries regarding high availability and almost more importantly, how to measure high availability (HA). HA means something different depending on whom you're talking with so it's worth a quick definition. I define HA as:

Focused on the technology and processes to prevent application/service outages at the primary site or in a specific IT system domain.

This is in contrast to disaster recovery or IT service continuity (ITSC) which is about preventing or responding to outages of the entire site.

Why so many inquiries about HA recently? I believe that due to our increasing reliance on IT as well as the 24X7 operating environment that companies of all sizes and industries are becoming more and more sensitive to application and system downtime. The interest in measurement is driven by the need to continuously improve upon IT services and justify IT investments to senior management, especially now.

So where to start? First, focus on the entire IT service, not just the individual infrastructure components. Availability is the result of the aggregation of all the availability factors of all architectural components supporting the IT service. Most components (networks, servers, storage, operating systems etc.) spec to 99.95% or 4.4 hours of downtime per year (based on 24X7).  However, the combined service or IT system availability would fall below the 99.95% availability. Given the increasing reliability of all the components, most IT organizations do measure availability at 99.9% or above.

However, 99.9% availability is misleading, and it's misleading how some IT organizations report it. Is this for unplanned downtime or does it include planned downtime? Raw availability includes unplanned and planned downtime while adjusted availability includes only unplanned. Organizations often keep track of both. Also, when did the outages/disruptions to the services occur? Consider the difference between:

• 1 PM to 5 PM M-F and
• Weekly outages of 30 minto 60 min at 4 AM local time or on the weekend

In many cases, timing and duration are more important than total downtime/outage. Is the 99.9% availability based on 24 X 7 hours of operations or business hours? If you were down 4 minutes last month, was it during business hours or over the weekend?

It's not as widely adopted as say incident management, but there is an ITIL availability management process. In ITIL v3, the suggested key performance indicators for availability management are:

• Availability of IT services compared to agreed upon service-level agreements
• Duration of disruptions to IT services
• Number of disruptions to IT services
• Number of infrastructure components with availability monitoring

Developing and agreeing upon the SLAs is going to be the toughest part but I think these KPIs are good starting point toward metrics that matter to the business. And while your organization is unlikely to spend huge sums of money on propietary fault-tolerant systems or high-end clustering solutions, there are cost-effective solutions that will provide a rapid restart of IT systems or leverage virtualization technologies. The HA discussion is no longer and all or nothing discussing, it's a discussion about providing a range of offerings that provide the required level of availability at a cost justified by the risk and cost of downtime.

Automating and measuring HA and ITSC will be a major focus of my research over the next several quarters. I'm very interested to hear from companies how they're approaching this today. What's working, what's not working?

By Stephanie Balaouras

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What Do Green IT, The Economic Crisis, And Best Selling Author, Thomas Friedman, All Have In Common? Poor Accounting.

Consider the following questions posed by Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, and more recently, Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America:

“Was it an accident that Citibank, Iceland’s banks, and the ice banks of Antarctica all melted at the same time?”

“Was it an accident that Bear Sterns and the polar bears both faced extinction at the same time?”

In Friedman’s eyes, no, the recent economic and environmental woes are not accidental or coincidental. He explains that what the “great recession represents, if that what we can call this economic moment, is that both the market and Mother Nature hit wall at same time.” How? Because, according to Friedman, we’ve been using the same accounting system in both worlds that has massively under-priced risk, privatized gains, and socialized losses:

• In the financial world, credit default swaps were sold without having adequate collateral behind them, gains were privatized to the financial institutions that sold them, and losses were socialized onto tax payers when the credits actually defaulted.


• In nature, we’ve under-priced the risk of rising CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, privatized the gains from emitting carbon to the institutions that emitted them, and socialized the losses by “charging them all on our kids Visa cards” (i.e. negatively impacting the world for generations to come).

Check out Friedman’s recent interview on his upcoming revision to “Hot, Flat And Crowded” with environmental news and commentary hub, Grist.org:

What should IT leadership takeaway from this?

In short, connect Friedman’s notion of a poor accounting system — that has caused financial and environment woes — to how you account for your own IT.

In a time when wringing out every unnecessary cost counts more than ever, the majority of us are still guilty of not accounting for IT’s true cost of ownership. According to Forrester’s findings, only 4% of North American and European firms pay for the energy-related operating expenses of IT, not to mention the energy-related carbon emissions. And as a result, opportunities for cost- and carbon-thrifty behavior are being overlooked. While the financial benefits might flow to someone else’s bottom-line (e.g. facilities, real estate), your overall organization will profit.

Viewing your IT through a “green” lens can help expose many of these hidden costs — financial and environment — that IT incurs but are paid for by someone else. IT leadership should take advantage of the challenging economic environment to employ guerrilla-style cost-savings tactics today that will lay the groundwork for a culture of responsibility to eliminate unnecessary spend into the future.

To help IT leadership get off on the right foot, my recent research — No Capex, No Problem: Eight "Guerrilla" Tactics To Reduce Facilities Costs Without Capital Investment — highlights a number of low-cost tactics to reduce the financial and environmental impacts of operating IT. Here is a sampling of a few of these tactics:

• Power down idle but energy-drawing PCs and monitors. The problem: In short, idle computing wastes money. This is when PCs and monitors are drawing energy but no useful work is being performed, such as nights, weekends, holidays, and workday breaks. Assuming a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday, five days a week, an unmanaged PC will spend just more than 75% of its time in this idle, energy-wasting state. And the energy costs add up. Consider an organization with 2,500 desktop PCs, each drawing 89 watts, and 2,500 monitors, each drawing 30 watts. With zero power management, Forrester estimates that this will cost approximately $246,537 per year. But by instituting PC power management policies, such as putting monitors into standby after 15 minutes and PCs into hibernate after 45 minutes, this organization can save $177,357 per year. Washington Mutual, General Electric, and Dell boast savings of $3 million, $2.5 million, and $1.8 million per year, respectively, by simply turning off their PCs when not in use.


• Enforce duplex printing. The associated costs of printing — including equipment, ink, copying, printing, faxing, postage, storage, disposal, and recycling — have been estimated to be as high as 31 times the cost of the paper itself. And despite the introduction of technologies to encourage the "paperless" office, demand for office copy and printing paper has increased. For example, it's estimated that the introduction of email into the office environment has increased paper consumption by 40%.


• Optimize temperature and humidity in the data center. According to the industry consortium The Green Grid, only 30% of a typical data center's energy consumption goes to powering its IT equipment, with the lion's share going to chillers (33%), computer room air conditioners (CRAC) (9%), and humidifiers (3%). And in many cases, these environmental systems are not optimized. Cooling is a prime example, with most data centers being too cold — operating cold aisles at 65° to 68°F (18° to 20°C) — even though manufacturers of IT equipment have set the allowable high-end temperature at 80.6°F (27°C).

By Doug Washburn
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European Outlook for 2009 - Ethernet Services & Unified Communications

I recently published two documents on the outlook for Ethernet services and unified communications in Europe for 2009. I wanted to take this opportunity to call out several important takeaways from these documents:

The adoption of carrier Ethernet services in Europe will accelerate rapidly in 2009, driven by the low cost per bit, simplicity, and flexibility of these services. Service provider MPLS traffic and revenues will also grow in 2009, but will be outpaced by Ethernet traffic and revenue growth. Most providers' infrastructure will continue to offer legacy Ethernet services delivered over SDH/SONET networks while demand persists, but these legacy services will eventually be entirely replaced by VPLS-based services.

What does this mean for I&O professionals? Our clients tell us that they are moving to VPLS-based E-LAN services because any-to-any Ethernet networks are easy to configure and manage and the costs are lower than equivalent MPLS VPNs. They also don’t need any additional expertise in the complexities of IP routing like autonomous systems, border gateway protocols, and open shortest path first. All they need is Ethernet expertise -- which they need anyway in order to LAN. VPLS technology also enables users to deploy hub-and-spoke networks today and then to migrate them to any-to-any topologies when it suits them. You should look at service providers that:

• Can meet your plans to use VPLS-based services.

• Can support your SDH point-to-point circuits requirements.

• Offer hybrid networks or have firm plans for them.

For more detailed information on this topic, read The Recession Will Accelerate European Ethernet Services Adoption!

With the recession upon us, IT spending forecasts for Europe have been revised down significantly. To minimize cash outlay, and to leverage service providers' and systems integrators' professional services expertise, we suggest that firms take a fresh look at rapidly maturing managed and hosted UC services. However, Forrester recommends that companies always start by quantifying the potential savings from UC with a business case, and then as a second step consider the use of managed and hosted UC services to reduce capital expenditure (capex) and to simplify UC deployments.

UC is a core enabling technology to help enterprises reduce costs, improve productivity, transform business processes, and innovate -- all of which will improve competitiveness. Although some firms are delaying UC projects or slowing down rollout, many believe that UC is key to their future success and are sticking with their plans. Forrester suggests that as part of their review of 2009 plans, infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams should:

• Ensure that their firm makes UC part of its strategic IT plans.

• Consider buying UC as a managed service.

• Look at buying UC as a hosted service.

• Don't wait until OCS can do everything.

For more detailed information on this topic, read The 2009 Outlook For Unified Communications In Europe!

By Phil Sayer

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Planning to Upgrade Your IVR? Consider the Choices Between Premise Based and Network Based Solutions.

According to the recent Forrester Enterprise And SMB Networks And Telecommunications Survey, North America And Europe, Q1 2009, 32% of the 279 network and telecommunications managers surveyed indicated they planned to upgrade their IVR in the next 12 months. Before a decision is made, companies need to consider their options for upgrading their IVR and compare the differences between premise based and network based voice portals. Voice portals are standard based platforms that support multiple speech or touch tone applications. Forrester’s survey indicates 22% of companies plan to add speech applications this year to improve automation of customer transactions and provide better customer service.

Look For the Solution That Best Fits Your Business

Network based services provide a means to support advanced applications from a carrier’s network. The benefits of network based services are flexible OPEX pricing and faster time to deploy new services. Forrester’s Wave on network based IVR/voice portals provides an in-depth look at major vendors offering these services and insight into their value added solutions. Premise based solutions also support advanced VXML speech applications on native-SIP platforms. These standards-based platforms support innovative multimodal applications and provide Web service for integration with third-party cloud services. Organizations that want greater control over their application find premise based solutions better suited for their business. Forrester’s Wave on premise based IVR/voice portals has a new line up leading vendors in this area.

By Elizabeth Herrell

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Your Thoughts: How Mature Are Cloud Computing Services?

Enterprise IT infrastructure & operations professionals have many cloud computing technologies to choose from today, and new solutions seem to appear all the time. What are all these technologies? How do you categorize them? Which are mature and which need a lot of work?

Forrester is kicking off a TechRadar on the topic and wants your input. A Forrester TechRadar attempts to provide clarity about the types of technologies in a given category and plot their maturity today and the pace at which it is improving, as well as the level of business value this type of technology will bring to enterprise IT.

Forrester defines cloud computing as: a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via the Internet in a pay-per-use and self-service way. As a starting point, we have excluded Software as a Service (as Liz Herbert did a great TechRadar on SaaS already) and have carved up the rest of the cloud services into the technology categories below. Do we have them right? Are we missing any? If you have experience with any of the products in these categories (or others we didn’t mention) we want to hear your thoughts about them. How ready do you think these services are for enterprise consumption? Are they maturing quickly or is this area a wait and see?

Drop us a comment below or contact me directly at jstaten@forrester.com or on Twitter at Staten7. And thanks for your contributions to Forrester research.

Cloud computing technologies to be included in this report are:

Technology category	Subcategory	Examples (not exhaustive)
1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms		Amazon Web Services EC2, The Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid
2. Software Platform-as-a-Service		Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Force.com
3. Cloud Infrastructure Services		Infrastructure IT services delivered from the cloud
	3a. Storage-as-a-Service	Nirvanix, Amazon S3
	3b. Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service	SunGard Virtual Server Replication
	3c. Backup-as-a-Service	Iron Mountain LiveVault, i365 Evault, IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services
4. Cloud Application Services		Application services delivered from the cloud
	4a. Database-as-a-Service	Google BigTable, Amazon SimpleDB, MS SQL Data Services
	4b. Cloud billing services	Google Payment, Amazon DevPay, Zuora Zcommerce
	4c. Integration-as-a-Service	Amazon Simple Queuing Service, Boomi, CastIron, Informatica, Linxster, Online MQ, OpSource Connect, Pervasive
	4d. Business Process Management-as-a-Service	Appian Anywhere, Intensil, Skemma
5. Cloud Management Software		Appistry, CloudSwitch, Elastra, RightScale
6. Cloud Labs		Citrix C3 Lab, Electric Cloud, SkyTap, Surgient Cloud
7. Desktop-as-a-Service		Desktone, MokaFive, Simtone, ThinkGrid

By James Staten

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Green Storage Has Limited ROI, But Supports Overall Efficiency

I care deeply about the environment, certainly more than I care personally about money, so it pains me to say that in most cases, making storage decisions based on power expenditure alone is not rational behavior. The world is driven by economics, and the stark reality is that the cost of power is only a drop in the bucket compared to the amount organizations spend on acquiring and managing their enterprise storage systems. Maybe someday a consumption tax or cap and trade system will tip the balance towards more responsible consumption of non-renewable resources, but in the meantime, the pricing of power (especially in the US) doesn’t give much economic incentive for good behavior. In fact, according to a report Forrester published recently, the amount of money typically spent on electricity to power and cool a TB of storage is only about 1% of the cost of buying that TB of storage (or about 4% of the annualized cost of buying that storage given that you only have to buy the TB once every 3-5 years but you power it every year). So, unfortunately for the environment, power cost itself doesn’t provide a very strong incentive for storage efficiency.

Fortunately though, the things that enterprises can do to reduce their power consumption costs are often the exact same things they can do to reduce the capital and operating expenses of their overall storage environment. Focusing on improving utilization (measured as the quantity of data written divided by the quantity of storage on hand) and increased usage of dense drives are the most straightforward and effective ways to reduce hardware acquisition costs as well as power consumption. There are many ways to achieve these objectives such as thin provisioning, reporting and reclamation to improve utilization, and tiering or wide striping to enable more use of dense drives. Whatever the motivation — economic, altruistic, or a combination of both — organizations that put significant focus on their utilization and dense drive ratios are likely to spend less money and be greener at the same time. And that’s good for everybody.

By Andrew Reichman

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IBM's CloudBurst Is A Credible Step Forward

About six months ago in this blog I accused IBM of “cloud-washing” its solutions and services when it launched its Project Blue Cloud marketing campaign. Its aim with this effort was to lure customer conversations about cloud computing in its direction so it could learn what enterprises wanted from this new technology. IBM has had some legitimate cloud deployments and proofs of concept since then, but just this week announced the first product fruits of that labor.

Under the banner of IBM Smart Business Services the company announced a hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that can be accessed multitenant, like a public cloud and CloudBurst, an IaaS in a box based on BladeCenter. All the elements of an IaaS implementation – the self-service portal, automated workload deployment and distribution, virtualization software, servers, networking, and storage are pre-packaged and tested and can be implemented in a single effort. While some degree of customization is inevitable, you can’t get up and running with an IBM internal cloud much easier than this. By the way, HP has a similar offering called Blade System Matrix.

What’s missing from these solutions today, however, is the capability that justifies IBM’s name for the product – the ability to extend this internal cloud to a hosted or public cloud resource when needed; a technique known as cloud bursting. Few enterprises can justify an internal cloud composed of thousands of servers, so when your developers need that kind of capacity, the best answer is to bridge the internal cloud to a public or hosted cloud offering. IBM will initially provide bursting to its own cloud service but plans to extend this capability to its service provider partners.

Forrester thinks enterprise interest in solutions that cloud burst is a safe assumption but a bit ahead of its time, as most enterprises aren’t yet in a position to easily leverage these cloud options.  This is why IBM’s strategy of focusing on internal cloud first is a smart one.

By James Staten

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Configuresoft Nicely Fills an EMC Gap

EMC continues to tease the market with its management software ambitions, taking another step this week to build on its portfolio. On May 27, EMC announced its intent to acquire Configuresoft, a vendor of server configuration and change management (CCM) software. Forrester views this as a positive development for both companies but we eagerly await more.

While EMC must still make additional developmental moves to graduate into the “anchor” class of management vendors, its M&A activity has proven it is a formidable player in configuration and change management across a number of technology domains. Obviously, EMC has strength in storage, but it has also become a key vendor in the network domain with its Smarts (2005) and Voyence (2007) acquisitions, and its purchase of nLayers (2006) gives it some of the best visibility into the application domain. Servers have been a notable gap even though some good “skunk works” monitoring technology was developed within its Smarts team. Server CCM was one big domain missing from the portfolio.

This acquisition does not come as much of a surprise. The two vendors inked an OEM agreement in 2008 that resulted in EMC’s Server Configuration Manager and Configuration Analytics Manager, a re-branding of Configuresoft’s technologies. By following through with full acquisition, the bond becomes stronger and any vendor risk is much lower. The near-term actual fulfillment of the technology itself should be little changed, however. Over the next several months, EMC must continue to consolidate its many parts into a cohesive CCM strategy and integrated product family. The current tools are each very strong, but the collective suite is still fragmented.

One hopeful step in the direction of consolidation is the CMDB that EMC gained with its Infra (2008) acquisition. Many questions remain about how this CMDB strategy will play out, but EMC has the right parts to assemble into what is potentially one of the strongest CCM families in the industry. Early indications suggest the EMC people charged with this evolution are on the right philosophical track toward building a properly federated configuration management system (CMS). We implore EMC’s leadership to give them the power to execute on fulfilling this vision. This includes the freedom to build federation to third party tools, an absolute necessity to lead in the CMS market.

This consolidated CCM is notable, as the configuration and change management processes collectively form the basic core of every function performed in IT. If you do not master these, all other processes will suffer. Conversely, excellent configuration information is a catalyst toward IT excellence that must be fortified with strong analytics and change controls.

Configuresoft includes some very impressive policy analysis capabilities, a much-needed but often overlooked use case for the configuration information delivered by such products. This is one of the more promising outcomes of combining the Configuresoft, Voyence, and internally developed EMC configuration policy analysis products. It also presents a challenge to EMC, as each of these brings good but disjointed features that need to be reconciled. Will the final policy analysis engine be Configuresoft’s, Voyence’s, or something completely different, maybe a hybrid of all of these? This is a big question that does note necessarily have an easy answer.

Finally, the biggest question of them all is how EMC will parlay this CCM power into a broader, integrated management strategy. We believe the technology acquired with Smarts is a powerful asset that has not been leveraged to its potential within the EMC family. EMC missed a grand opportunity to extend more aggressively into the server and application domains for monitoring and root cause analysis (RCA). It is not too late to revisit this direction. Demand is still extremely high for application RCA. We know such RCA is far from easy, but EMC has many of the right parts to compete well if it gives this market the right attention.

To achieve this, EMC must develop or acquire performance management capabilities in the various domains, including applications. This has been a glaring hole in the EMC portfolio for years and its competitors (especially CA) have been capitalizing on this weakness. It must also present a forceful IT process automation (ITPA) capability to assemble the many CCM pieces involved. Configuresoft and Voyence are great components to this story and Infra has some decent ITPA elements, but it needs better ITPA linkages and flow automation along the lines of Opalis and the run book automation technologies acquired and developed by BMC, CA, and HP.

Forrester applauds the Configuresoft acquisition, as well as the others made by EMC’s resource management software group (RMSG). It is clear that EMC is building a truly powerful CCM story. We hope the company will get more aggressive at building atop this strong foundation. 2009 is proving to be an opportune time for M&A and EMC has some of the better potential to be a major player in IT management software. It must now prove to a skeptical market that it can execute with enough vigor to overtake the competition.

By Glenn O'Donnell

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Free Webinar On Server Virtualization

In my conversations with organizations implementing server virtualization, I've found that there seems to be a gap opening between the number of virtual machines firms are willing to run on a server, and the maximum number that could still reasonably fit on there. It looks like this will be aggravated by newer servers that can run twice as many virtual machines, along with more mature virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere that will support up to a TB of physical RAM. How long will it be before IT is expected to support 50 or 75 VMs per server?

If you want to learn more about this topic, please join my complimentary Webinar, "Forrester’s Top Three Recommendations For Implementing Server Virtualization" on June 11th at 11AM EST. You can register for the session by visiting:

www.forrester.com/virtualizationwebinar

By Galen Schreck

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Optimizing The Branch Part 2: Forrester's Take on Branch Office Consolidation

In the first IT Infrastructure & Operations video podcast, I discuss trends in branch office consolidation as presented at Forrester's recent IT Forum US event, with a lovely backdrop of the Las Vegas strip. Read the accompanying report here.

By Chris Silva

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