Since I started on the topic of consolidation and virtualization, here’s my take on server virtualization and the 8 things you should be aware of: (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Service Management’
8 things you should know about Server Virtualization
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010IT costs accounting
Saturday, December 5th, 2009So often, I have heard skeptics who would criticize and cynically discard away the concept of measuring, accounting, and charging for IT services within an organization. “Why would you want to do that?“, “what good does that do?” or “there is no value in charging users for IT services“.
Businesses in today’s environment is very different from the past. The markets which businesses operates in are shrinking as they become more competitive, barriers to entry are often getting lower, and in order to grow, many businesses need to go beyond their current market to reach outside their current borders or geography. Selling a product or service to a customer in Singapore will be no more different than selling to a customer in Russia. Whatever it takes, businesses can never confine themselves into a small boundary within a geography or region or market segment. Likewise, consumers and buyers of products and services are no longer confined to a single vendor or supplier. They have ample choices. Advancement of sourcing avenues globally, proliferation of technology and Internet allows consumers and buyers to easily seek, source, compare and purchase from alternative suppliers within several mouse-clicks.
Therefore, the traditional IT function within an organization is no longer just the bunch of backend soldiers managing your email and accounting system. The IT function is slowly transforming and morphing into a business enabling function, providing critical platforms to put the business online, enabling marketing and direct selling of products online, closely coupling the use of IT to complement traditional products (such as IP-enabling products to provide remote monitoring services, data backups, control and management services, analytics services, etc.) and all this means that the traditional IT budget, which used to be a small part of the overall corporate budget, is going up. In the past decade or so, most businesses’ IT expenditures have gone up significantly, but many are still without adequate tools, processes and policies in place to address the accounting and allocating of IT costs.
Data Centre Asset Planning
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009A recent Quocirca Insight report which was derived from 301 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers shows what we have already experiencing in most data centres: Crisis point as data centres runs into space and power constraints through years of uncontrolled growth, expansion and contraction.
Some salient points from the report:
- While the server sprawl continues, as much as 87% of IT budgets aren’t growing in real terms to alleviate the pressure.
- 28% of respondents does not know the exact number of servers they have, 22% said it could take up to a day to find a server that had gone down, another 20% will take longer than a day, and 11% of data centres will run out of space within a year, while 14% have already hit a power supply limit.
- Lack of communications and human factors contribute to the crisis, e.g. IT and facility managers aren’t talking enough.
- Power-saving approaches such as virtualization and automation, exists in abundance but they require up-front investment before the savings can be realised. Justification is challenging where data centres aren’t charging for their costs.
- Good asset planning tools can help data centre managers to manage the complex environments in their facility, but not all have access to such tools.
IT Shared Services & Modeling Chargebacks
Saturday, November 7th, 2009In most organization, the IT function is almost always a key enabler for an effective and efficient running of the business. With the recent credit crunch and economic downturn, many a times, IT departments find themselves in a dilemma. On one hand, they are faced with the need to refresh EOL technologies, expand capacity to support the business or add new assets for new application services required by the business. But on the other hand, they are often forced to cut budgets, headcount freeze, reduction in force, faced with restraint in funding and capital investment for any refresh or expansion. This dilemma pushes IT leaders to begin taking a closer look at the technology services that they are providing to their business units (i.e. internal customers) and evaluating where it makes sense to convert these as Shared Services with chargeback of the costs to the business units.
IT Shared Services refers to the provision of IT services by an IT organization where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key is the idea of ’sharing’ within an organization or group. Hence, the concept of IT Shared Services is similar to collaboration. IT Shared Services is different from the diametrically opposite model of Outsourcing which is where an external third party is paid to provide a service that was previously internal to the buying organization, typically leading to redundancies and re-organization. One purpose of Shared Services is the convergence and streamlining of an organization’s functions to ensure that they deliver to the organization the services required of them as effectively and efficiently as possible. This concept is applicable not just for the IT services, but can also involve the centralizing of back office functions such as HR, Finance, and middle or front offices.
Virtualization – why you cannot ignore Storage?
Friday, October 30th, 2009There are many ways to optimize the data center. But as with all things good, it is necessary to take each step in moderation. Consolidation and virtualization is one way to achieve higher utilization of IT assets. But shrinking the IT assets by more than 30% overnight will create a sudden over-capacity at the physical facility layer. The way to achieve a sustainable overall efficiency in the data center is through finding the right balance between optimization the physical facility and IT consolidation & virtualization.
Virtualization technology coupled with the right management tool is a powerful method to help reduce the total number of IT assets by consolidating multiple workloads into each IT asset, hence, maximizing its utilization, reducing the complexity and management of disparate s
erver hardware and OS platforms. Nonetheless, server virtualization is only one component in a truly virtualized enterprise infrastructure. The other critical component is storage virtualization. Both of these works in tandem – one addresses the compute side of the equation, while the other addresses the data side of it.
The 2009 Data Center Purchasing Survey Report
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Between June and September of 2009, SearchDataCenter.com conducted the Data Center Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. For this 2009 survey, they had a total of 920 respondents, identifying themselves as IT managers, IT administrators, data center facility managers and IT executives. Respondents were primarily U.S.-based (43%), but the survey also included participants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More than half of respondents’ organizations employ more than 1,000 workers, and more than 25% of the companies have more than 10,000 employees.
Compared with last summer, data center budget growth screeched to a halt this year. In 2008, 30% of IT shops said they were increasing budget 5% to 10%, and 26% said they planned to increase budget more than 10%. Less than 15% of respondents were decreasing budget at all.
Virtualization in the real world
Friday, September 25th, 2009One of the benefits of virtualization technology is to enable rapid provisioning of a new operating system virtual environment. With this ease and rapid speed which new virtual environment can be provisioned, it brings about a new challenge. Organizations may find themselves moving from a physical server sprawl to a virtual server sprawl.
A study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) showed that only 30% of companies are completely satisfied with their deployments of virtualization technology. This is partly due to the rise in complexity and challenges in managing and maintaining control over their IT environment.
Monitoring Operational health in a Virtualized Environment
Thursday, September 24th, 2009Virtualization technologies are becoming more advanced today and their adoption are growing. Increasingly, IT services are being delivered using virtualization technologies to derive higher cost efficiency and optimization. In the past, x86 compute hardware were designed to run a single operating system and a single application workload. As IT begins to realize that their compute assets are under-utilized and there are beginning to have so many of these under-utilized compute assets in their data center, they begin to explore using virtualization technologies to run multiple independent operating systems images (or virtual machines or VM) on each physical compute hardware. This allows sharing of resources on a single physical compute hardware with multiple environment. Not only that, you could have different virtual machines running different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical compute hardware.
Transforming IT through Infrastructure Consolidation
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009I have just published an article on the definition of Infrastructure Consolidation, business drivers, key success factors, inhibitors, and recommended approach in such a project. The way I view such a transformation is to holistically address not just the technology aspect, but the processes, people as well as the organizational barriers or politics too.
Read more about this article here.
Asia Pacific’s IT spend
Friday, September 18th, 2009A recent report from Forrester, which surveyed 774 senior IT executives at enterprises with more than 500 employees across ANZ, Japan, South Korea, India, China, Singapore and Vietnam, shows that generally IT spend in Asia Pacific region is down during this economic downturn, even in the economies witnessing growth. The research focused on trends in current IT spend and cost cutting measures.
The findings shows that almost half of the respondents said their 2009 IT budgets will be down, and only 15% of the respondents expects an increase in their IT budgets. Even in China and India, both of which are expected to register strong economic growth this year, many enterprises are decreasing their IT spend. In this two emerging markets, only those organizations that businesses rely primarily on the local or Asian markets continue to see IT budget growth, while those that have higher exposure to the Western markets will see decrease in their IT budgets.
a brief history of ITIL
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009I have observed in quite a few publications and remarks that refers to ITIL as a “standard“.
In actual fact, IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is not really a standard, but rather an approach to IT service management. The United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) defines ITIL as “the key to managing IT services“.
