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):

I recently recorded a podcast with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the global pharmaceutical company, and their success story of implementing a PC power management initiative that is expected to cut energy costs by ~$1 million per year. While these savings alone should impress any IT executive – especially IT infrastructure and operations professionals who manage PCs – what I found so unique about their story came through my conversation with Matt Bartow, business analyst in GSK’s research and development IT organization, who led this initiative. In particular, GSK is a great example of how “empowering” staff to innovate can industrialize IT operations leading to significant cost savings and green IT benefits.

GSK’s success with PC power management is an outcome of the inspired management style advocated in Forrester’s upcoming book, Empowered. By proactively calling on their employees to spur innovation, GSK tapped into one of their greatest inventive resources – staff, like Matt Bartow, who Forrester would consider a highly empowered and resourceful operative (HERO). But as Empowered explains, HEROes can’t succeed without support from management. By initiating the innovation challenge, GSK’s IT leadership not only identified HEROes in their organization but sourced innovative ideas at the same time. From there, the use of social media technology – in this case, using a wiki-type website with voting capabilities – made it simple for GSK staff to participate while giving them a “say” in the selection process.

So how exactly did PC power management become an IT priority at GSK?

As green IT plans persist through 2010, I'm starting to receive questions from IT infrastructure and operations professionals — particularly data center managers — about the use of cleaner energy sources (e.g. wind, solar, fuel cells, hydro) to power their data center facilities. So when Google recently announced its purchase of 114 megawatts of wind power capacity for the next 20 years from a wind farm in Iowa, I got excited, hopeful of a credible example I could refer to.

But as it turns out, Google will not be using this wind energy to power its data centers. . . yet. Despite Google stating that the wind capacity is enough to power several data centers, their Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Hoelzle, explains that, "We cannot use this energy directly, so we're reselling it back to the grid in the regional spot market." I confirmed this in electronic conversations with two other industry insiders, Martin LaMonica (CNET News) and Lora Kolodny (GreenTech), who also covered the announcement.

And it's unfortunate since Google's $600 million data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa could likely benefit from the greener, and possibly cheaper, wind energy. But Iowa is a large state and it's likely that distribution of the wind energy is an issue since the Council Bluffs data center appears to be well over a 100 miles away from their wind farms several counties away.

Recently I published a business service management (BSM) case study on AMERICAN SYSTEMS. If you're interested in BSM, I highly recommend reading through this report. Although there are many known business alignment success stories, AMERICAN SYSTEMS takes business alignment a step further by aligning IT elements in a way that truly supports its business goals. AMERICAN SYSTEMS sought to improve the delivery and quality of its services to the business, something they were able to accomplish by introducing ITIL and COBIT standards and deploying integrated data center management software. In all, they were able to gain situational awareness, preempt and respond to issues more efficiently, and better protect information assets.

I've outlined a few key highlights from this report below:

First off, AMERICAN SYSTEMS is a government IT innovator that provides engineering, technical, and managed services to government customers. In order to meet the needs of their clients' constant demand for new and better services, they decided to shift from a reactive to a proactive way of managing and operating.

When they set out to make changes they outlined several goals: