Spending Alive And Well In The Network?

I'm in the process of reviewing data from the IT Plans and Priorities panel survey which I've mentioned before on the blog. In fact, the last post on the survey  was an invite I passed along to our readership and I hope that, as I churn through the data from the survey, I'll be reviewing some of your inputs.

One of the early findings that I'll be writing and publishing formal research on is the fact that, while some areas such as devices (computing clients and mobile devices) may see longer refresh cycles in light of the economy, and certainly when faced with actual budget cuts in 2009, areas such as networking are likely to remain relatively static with some small increases in spending. I attribute the latter to the continued build-out of services such as Wi-Fi networking. Formerly a convenience or "nice to have" element of the network, Wi-Fi is increasingly critical to connect mobile devices and mobile users to applications that house ever more critical, role-specific data.

Vendors in this space, for their part, have been doing quite a bit of marketing around the criticality of the WLAN; perhaps my earlier post bemoaning the state of Wi-Fi marketing was a bit premature.

Since that time, we've seen quite a bit of activity, including:

• HP and Colubris teams hit the road with a solid story just 45 days out from their merger.
• Meru begin marketing a fundamental level of control on the WLAN, required for it to replace wired.
• Proxim announcing today they've received orders for over 1k 802.11n APs

So, it's clear that the marketing is alive and well in WLAN and, in light of our recently collected data, we're likely to see some fruit borne from these initiatives. In some cases, this seems to already be the case, at least with some vendors. I see this as good news that IT Operations is also reaping the benefits of IT transitioning to BT, as evidenced by spending continuing to take place, even on newer networking technologies.

By Chris Silva

Check out Chris' research

Is The ‘Green’ In Green IT Dead? No, Because It Was Never Really Alive.

In a number of recent client interactions with both enterprise IT end users and vendors, the question of “Is the ‘green’ in Green IT dead?” has come up. Primarily driven by the current economic climate, IT end users want to understand how relevant the environmental benefits of Green IT should be to their strategic planning; likewise, vendors want to know how palatable green messaging of their products and services is to their customers.

First and foremost, technology is not green and never will be. The design, manufacture, operation and disposal of IT equipment generates tremendous upfront and ongoing environmental impact (read more about this in my “Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?” research). A recent – and very primetime – example of this is the 60 Minutes "The Electronic Wasteland" segment. David Berlind from InformationWeek offers a great follow on to this in his “An E-Waste Story That'll Make You Want To Quit Tech” story.

Secondly, the ecological benefits of Green IT take a backseat to the business benefits – namely cost reduction. In other words, IT leadership’s driving motivation for Green IT is financial, not environmental. This shouldn’t be a surprise. At the end of the day, corporations – even those with the greenest of intentions – make decisions to effectively manage risk, costs and revenues to deliver profits which ultimately drive shareholder value.

While corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability is on the rise, these practices are being employed to ultimately achieve an economic goal. And a green strategy can be an effective means to this financial end. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Doing Good: Business And The Sustainability Challenge” identifies a positive correlation between green efforts and financial performance: “companies that rated their [green] efforts most highly over this time period [the past three years] saw annual profit increases of 16% and share price growth of 45%, whereas those that ranked themselves worst reported growth of 7% and 12% respectively.”

The key takeaway is that Green IT is no different. Because corporate IT operates within the realm of the corporation, financial obligations come first. While Forrester’s own research from April 2008 shows that “doing the right thing for the environment” is a top driver for IT professionals pursuing Green IT, these motivations must also deliver tangible business value – from reducing IT’s energy-related operating expenses to mitigating data center out-of-space or out-of-power concerns. So when setting Green IT strategy – especially in volatile economic times – I suggest IT leadership take a similar approach to Google’s Commitment to Sustainable Computing which explains: “Sustainability is good for the environment, but it makes good business sense too… It is this economic advantage that makes our efforts truly sustainable.”

By Doug Washburn

Check out Doug's research

Addressing Virtualization's Achilles Heel

The benefits of virtualization are quite obvious but when you start to really increase the density of virtual machines in order to maximize utilization suddenly it ain't such a simple proposition. The latest CPUs from AMD and Intel are more than up to the task of running 10-20 or more applications at a time. Most servers run out of memory and I/O bandwidth well before processing power. Recent announcements from the leading server vendors have been made to address the memory side by packing more DIMMs onto a single motherboard (including blade server boards), but you can only add so many Ethernet cards and Fibre Channel HBAs. Oh yeah, and then there's the switch ports to go with them (blade systems help a lot here).

If you are part of the elite group of infrastructure and operations managers who are pushing the VM density envelope, then 10GbE may be your better option. Most VMs individually don't consume the full bandwidth of a single GbE NIC but we are quickly seeing that the standard network configuration of ESX is 6 NICs and 2 FC ports per VM. The NICs are for console, vm kernel, and vm network and you need two of each, for redundancy, for a total of 6.  And each of these NIC connections requires a separate data center uplink cable. On top of this, the more VMs you add the more bandwidth is consumed which requires...more ports and that means a lot of connections. And even if each connection only consumes 10% of that 1 GbE of bandwidth each, you're running out of I/O very quickly. Plus every VM is sharing a limited set of physical NICs - heaven forbid you might actually want to do quality of service or give any of these VMs their own physical NIC, as is often the case.

10GbE can address the NIC sharing scenario and Ethernet storage solutions such as iSCSI and the forthcoming Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) - yes, I know Cisco says it's ready today - can save you tremendously on HBA costs. The need for more true physical connections is more of an issue.

The NIC vendors are addressing this scenario with SR-IOV (single-root I/O virtualization) technology that splits 10GbE NICs granulary and dynamically so you can set quality of service parameters for the virtual NICs that share these pipes. But it's a virtual solution; if you still need physical NICs you're out of luck.

To address this, HP has released Flex-10 Virtual Connect modules for its c-Class blade systems. These 10GbE switch modules (and this technology in implemented on its 10GbE NICs in the BL495c blade too) can physically split a single 10GbE connection into 4 physically discrete connections with tunable bandwidth (100Mbps increments up to 10Gbps per connection).
With Flex-10 modules and BL495c blades each physical server gets 8 "physical" NICs (up to 24 with an expansion cards), which fan out to 384 "physical" connections coming out of a full bank of switch modules. You of course can blow out this number with virtual NICs per VM as not every VM will need its own physical NICs. And each of these connections can replace a FC port in an Ethernet storage configuration. If you want to pack a ton of VMs into a tiny package without sacrificing I/O performance this is an intriguing way to go. Even if you don't use Flex-10 for storage, the density benefits here are worth considering.

As we stated in our report on 10GbE futures, earlier this year, the move to 10 is a pricey upgrade today but more easily justified in IT infrastructure consolidation moves since so much more consolidation can be achieved. Blade servers and even VMware constantly face similar price justification challenges but are winning more and more customers through this same cost analysis. You'll have to include the switch upgrades in your analysis but if you can achieve 2x or greater consolidation in doing so, the investment may be well worth it.

By James Staten

Check out James' research

 

Egenera's Strategy Shift Is A Good Thing

Earlier this week, The Boston Globe reported that Egenera laid off short of 100 employees under the guise of the weakening economy, but there is more to this story. The reduction also reflects a shift in strategy to increase its focus on PAN Manager, its virtualization management software. Originally tied to its unique BladeFrame hardware products, PAN Manager was freed earlier this year and is currently distributed by Fujitsu-Siemens and Dell. As is often the case for hardware companies, Egenera's crown jewels are in this software and PAN Manager is one of the most mature, feature rich and enterprise tested of the virtualization software managers on the market. It has been hardening in investment banks, health care companies and other demanding environments for more than 5 years and supports Xen and VMware and runs on traditional rack or blade servers.

Since software is sold more effectively via the indirect channel (through distributors, OEMs, VARs and resellers) Egenera is able to downshift its more costly direct sales efforts by focusing on software sales going forward.

The company said it certainly isn't abandoning its hardware, as it will continue to fully support and enhance BladeFrame going forward.

The irony here is that the Egenera BladeFrame design is quite prescient. Modern blade systems used in best practice with networked storage, look and act a lot like the Egenera BladeFrame. And with the addition of advanced blade management software like HP Virtual Connect and Virtual Machine Manager and IBM Open Fabric Manager plus Virtualization Manager, these systems are moving towards the level of enterprise RAS capabilities that Egenera has provided for years. It might behoove a smaller blade system competitor to pick up the BladeFrame system from Egenera to better position itself against HP and IBM.

While certainly the economy has some connection to Egenera's cost cutting moves, the underlying strategic change is more telling of the company's leadership, new direction and focus on PAN Manager, which stands a good chance of being a hardware and hypervisor independent virtualization manager worthy of enterprise IT Ops' attention

By James Staten

Check out James' research

Can Force.com Help Consolidate Your Web Tier?

At Dreamforce today, here in San Francisco, Salesforce.com announced a significant, and seemingly long overdue, enhancement to its SaaS offering. They announced Facebook and Force.com for Amazon Web Services that are pre-integrations between their platform and these two other platforms. This new capability lets enterprise customers of their CRM solution (or any other AppExchange or Force.com) provide a public front-end to their instance of these services, directly from these services.  The big deal with these additions is that they let you tie third party applications directly into your Force.com applications. In the case of the AWS integration, if you have applications or services built in Java, the LAMP stack or native C code, you can integrate them with your Force.com apps.

There is no Salesforce.com log-in required and there is no separate web tier integration you have to host and manage. For example, if a manufacturer used Salesforce.com to maintain its price list and order entry, it could simply build a public storefront in VisualForce and this storefront would be served up directly from Force.com. Previously, if you wanted to leverage Salesforce.com data on your web site you had to code integrations between the Salesforce.com application in question and your web apps; and of course carry the expense of hosting, sizing, and optimizing this infrastructure for performance.

We certainly don't see enterprises migrating their entire web presence to Force.com because of this, but directly providing this capability from the cloud will let enterprises eliminate a portion of their web infrastructure and free their developers from having to maintain and troubleshoot the integration code that made this possible before.

In today's recessionary climate, anything that helps streamline IT operations and eliminates costs is a good thing.

There are caveats to this, of course. You have to build these web front-ends in Apex or VisualForce, Salesforce.com's proprietary language and UI builder, respectively, and clients will have to understand the security, process and workflow implications of this change. But if you already have skills in their tools today – which is probably the case if you are part of their installed base – then the transition should pay dividends.

By James Staten

Check out James' research