Yes, I know. Most people give up on their resolutions – somewhere around 10 percent actually achieve their goals. But this year is different! Let’s not be most people.

I’d like to know what resolutions you have – IT related – for 2009.

One of our resolutions, as listed above, is to help organizations Get IT fit. Keep IT fit. As a capacity management software company, we thrive at helping IT organizations consistently meet IT service levels, minimize infrastructure costs and decrease risks.

What aspects of virtualization, cloud computing or ITIL version 3 are you looking at for 2009? How will you manage your environment moving forward? How are your peers supporting BSM initiatives, implementing a consolidation strategy, or supporting IT chargeback?

I’m giving myself four months to put you on the path toward getting IT fit and keeping IT fit, culminating at the TeamQuest Technology Summit (TTS) in Savannah, Georgia.

Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll learn:

• IT Service Optimization

• Managing the performance of virtualized servers

• Green IT strategies

• Performance analysis and capacity modeling how-to discussions

• Capacity management case studies

• Demonstrating the business value of IT

• Doing more with less

Stay tuned as we work on our resolution to help you Get IT fit. Keep IT fit.

Post your IT resolutions and let us know what you’re changing or going to do in 2009. Let’s talk about it at TTS. It’s less than 140 days away.

Craig

We apologize for this change, but please update your bookmarks to show this blog’s new URL - www.teamquest.com/blog.

The change will occur over the weekend.

Thanks for reading.

Craig

Modern spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc are marvelous tools. In addition to their natural utility as business reporting tools they can also be a great extension to performance and capacity management tools.

In his presentation, “Pivot Tables/Charts - Magic Beans without Living in a Fairy Tale,” John S. Van Wagenen of Caterpillar Corporation gave a useful demonstration of how the PivotTables feature in Excel (OpenOffice.org Calc calls it DataPilot) can be used to dice and slice time series performance data, such as the data collected by TeamQuest Manager, and present it just they way management wants it.

We provide a similar and modest version of this capability in the “Chart Paging” feature of TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer, where lots of data can be “paged” by any identifier in the data such as server, virtual machine, LPAR, zone, workload, etc.

I find it interesting, but not surprising, that several session speakers at CMG this year mention spreadsheet applications as their favorite management communication tool for performance and capacity reports. Being firmly entrenched in the business world, what better place to plug in technical data than spreadsheet applications in the quest to connect IT with the Business.

BTW, TeamQuest Model and TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and Reporter let you take the data you’re looking at over to Excel with the click of a button.

Paul Strong of eBay Research Labs gave a very interesting talk on “The Shape of Infrastructure to Come” where he presented the infrastructure powering the eBay website that we all know.

He also gave his views on cloud computing, which seems to be the buzzword du jour, a companion to “virtualization.” Behind the website is actually a trading cloud developed by eBay for eBay. The three major services used by the website are the auction service, the payment service (now PayPal), and the search service. The eBay programmers develop these major services using APIs of the eBay trading cloud. The cloud is an abstraction of the physical IT resources that collectively form the cloud.

But it was not always so. Around the year 2000 (after some high profile outages of the website) eBay realized that to cope with their exponential growth they had to make a radical change to the IT infrastructure, particularly the core component: the auction items database.

They decided to break down their large, vertically scaled vendor hardware, “virtualize” the database, and spread it across horizontally scaled commodity hardware. The three big services drawing power from the cloud were updated to also scale horizontally and now use metadata to make calls for the “real” data.

The concept of a “virtual database” is very powerful. When we introduced TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and Reporter, we decided to do the same thing as eBay, although for different reasons. I call our database a federated performance and capacity database.

This new database is an aggregation of metadata representing the actual data stored in hundreds, maybe thousands of TeamQuest Manager databases in your environment. As with the eBay web services, Analyzer and Reporter use metadata to request data from the “real” Manager databases.

Strong pointed out that although the scaling problem at eBay was now addressed, new challenges surfaced. With horizontally scaled, modular systems with lots of sharing of IT resources and millions of relationships and interdependencies, finding the point of failure or congestion is a much more complex and time-consuming task than before. Assuring good performance has also become more challenging.

This confirms our position at TeamQuest that no matter how much you virtualize your data center and introduce layers of abstraction, there will always be collections of physical IT resources out on the floor that will require proper instrumentation and tools for performance and capacity management.

Finally, and perhaps most interesting, Strong made the prediction that cloud computing will lower the barriers to entrepreneurship. With easy access any time to just the right amount of computing resources you need without the need for your own data center, we will see more creative and innovative ideas comes to life.

Pascal

PS. Fun trivia: in the early stages of development of TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and Reporter, their code names were Cirrus and Stratus

Statistical methods (average, mean, standard deviation, etc.) are the bread and butter of performance analysts and capacity planners. Not a day goes by without having to study a graph or a set of measurement data. According to Ray Wicks of IBM, we continuously process such data and draw conclusions about the meaning. The processing is often numeric and there is both a conceptual and sensual component at work here. 

The conceptual component is what we have been taught about how numbers work, such as the average is equal to the sum divided by the number of observations. 

The sensual component is the result of the evolution of our visual cortex. For example, we perceive circular-shaped objects with the shadow on the underside as raised bumps, not dimples, because our visual system is used to light coming from the sky and projecting the shadow on the underside of objects. 

Not surprisingly, the conceptual and visual components influence each other so that what we think and see are not independent. In other words, we can influence the conclusion of the data by how we present the data. Consider these two separate graphs:

Our visual system tells us that the two are different. We reflexively draw the conclusion that there is not much variability in the data in the first graph compared to the second. But conceptually, and upon closer inspection, we realize that we are looking at the same data at different scales. (BTW, both TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and Reporter let you control the scaling of your graphs.) 

We can be tricked by statistics without the help of our visual system. Consider the fact that the average age of orchestra conductors is 73 compared to 68.5 for the rest of us. Are those guys healthier? Perhaps living a major part of your life waving your hands in the air is good for your health. The pitfall here is that the average is based on the population of orchestra conductors, and that population consists mostly of white, healthy males above the age of 65. The other population contains people of all ages, all walks of life, men and women.

Thus if you are an orchestra conductor and make it beyond 65 years of age, chances are that you’ll make it to 73, but not thanks to all those hours you’ve spent waving your hands in the air. The two averages are based on two very different populations, and thus not comparable. 

At TeamQuest we have long understood the treachery of simple averages. That’s why we use weighted averages, for the appropriate data, when aggregating the data in our performance database. 

Pascal

In his CMG 2008 Sunday workshop, “How High Will It Fly“, Dr Neil Gunther showed how relatively simple mathematical models fed with appropriate measurement data can be used to predict the scalability of a computing system. Unlike physical systems such as airplanes and bridges, computing systems don’t lose their wings or break apart when the load on the system exceeds the material strength.

Instead, a computing system’s performance starts to degrade; workload throughput levels off (less work is completed) and workload response times increase to infinity (work takes longer to complete, or may never complete!). 

One of the important and basic tasks for a performance analyst and capacity planner is to determine these critical limits – to understand the capability of the system so that it can be fully exploited without adverse effects. This is not a trivial task. And to make matters worse, today’s popular computing systems such as UNIX and Windows servers are multiprocessing systems.

In a single processing system the capability of that single processing unit directly affects the throughput and response time of the workload running on the system. A faster or more capable processing unit will yield improved results.

In contrast, in a multiprocessing system, to utilize the full capability of the system, the workload must be divided and coordinated between the multiple processing units.

For instance, several users may be updating the same table in a database. Although to the user, the update occurs immediately, the system coordinates the work so that only one user at a time is allowed to update the data. The other users have to wait their turn. This coordination work is plain and simple overhead; it’s time spent arranging work instead of completing work. This fact is a major reason why it is difficult to determine the critical limits of multiprocessing systems. Adding additional and faster processing units may not necessarily yield better results.

Gene Amdahl, one of the pioneers in this area, actually advocated for the use of single processing unit systems even though his famous law is most often quoted in papers on multiprocessing systems, according to Dr. Gunther. Perhaps he saw how much work lay ahead!

It is interesting that IBM seems to be producing systems with faster and faster processing units, whereas Sun Microsystems is producing systems with massively multithreaded processing units. Apparently two different strategies at work out in the market.

So determining how high it will fly is not trivial.

But there is hope! Software vendors such as TeamQuest, offer products to help performance analysts and capacity planners explore the limits of their increasingly more complex and powerful computing systems. TeamQuest Model was recently updated to fully understand the behavior of multiprocessing systems (CPUs, Cores per CPU, and Threads per Core.) And where simple models only give you the boundaries of the limits of the system, TeamQuest Model also provides the components of response that contribute to the overall response time of a workload.

Pascal

Thinking of implementing a CMDB?  Maybe you should wait.  According to Gartner, only 3-5% of organizations have a fully operational CMDB. From what I heard, even the vendors are struggling.  No one has a mature, comprehensive offering.  I did learn that there were two components of a CMDB, the database and the dependency mapping tool; and that there were a number of vendors in various positions in the marketplace. 

The Gartner presentation team, Ronni Colville and Patricia Adams, emphasized that you need to understand the business problem you are trying to solve before you even think about building a CMDB. You should have people and processes in place and be operational before you think about buying a tool or tools.

They also stressed that you need to set the correct expectations on implementation as it could take 18 months to two years or more to fully implement. From listening to Ronni and Patricia, it seems to me that CMDB and related tools are in their infancy, that much up-front thought needs to be done and a lot of internal discussions must happen before even thinking about building a CMDB. Considering all that, it might be better to focus on process and delay tool selection until they have matured further.    

At this point most conference attendees are suffering from data overload. I am no exception. It will take me weeks to go back over my notes and think about everything that was said. 

Gartner has out done themselves this year in the quality and applicability of the content. From my perspective, they deserve a standing ovation!

This is my last post of the conference. Hope you have found my posts interesting. For more details regarding these sessions, contact your Gartner representative. 

Thanks for listening! 

Ron

My final day at the Gartner Data Center conference included a panel discussion on incenting Green activities, observing the frenetic growth of mobile computing, and side conversations on Green IT. Do you need to increase the efficiency of your data center?

Speak

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) explained their program of paying customers for reducing power consumption. For laptops, they incent the manufacturers to sell more efficient devices. PG&E also provides free engineering services to customers that want to build new or renovate existing data centers. Once the work is completed and in operation, PG&E writes customers a check to subside the cost of the energy efficient devices. This article suggests we look outside the data center.

I commend PG&E. What are you doing? There are a number of power management techniques that can be employed to reduce energy consumption. Besides turning off PCs at night, you could reverse the monitor background where applications permit. Black backgrounds use 25 percent less energy than white. Read  this white paper for more information.

See

Most of the attendees are well connected. I see many of them on their smart phones, keeping in touch with their offices and customers. It just reinforces Gartner’s prediction that mobile computing is continuing to grow as one of the top initiatives facing data center operations management. Do you believe it? Perhaps we’ll need to monitor performance and capacity on mobile devices. Considering how my wife uses hers; that could be a challenge!

Hear

I can’t believe all the talk about Green initiatives. Considering the state of the economy, I would have guessed this initiative would have fallen by the wayside. I’ve overheard and been party to a lot of conversations and sharing ideas. It is probably the most discussed topic I have heard over these three days. It’s refreshing to see how many people are so dedicated to working together on work that helps both their company and the environment.

More later

Ron

It was a very informative afternoon beginning with a discussion on the transition from Event Management to Business Service Management by Debra Curtis. This was followed up with a cloud computing presentation. But the most interesting discussion - in my opinion - was from Milind Govekar as he talked about performance management and capacity planning in a virtualized environment. 

Milind’s discussion was a very good presentation covering all aspects of Capacity Management – Monitoring, Historical Analysis, Capacity Planning and Tuning. He presented the business drivers for the work and explained the need to mature from Component Capacity planning to Service and ultimately Business Capacity Planning. It was reassuring to see TeamQuest was considered one of the major vendors providing the tools needed to support the space. He discussed the different aspects of the capacity planning role and urged attendees to make the role a priority as a large percentage of attendees had no formal capacity planning role. Listening to him, I heard everything we have been saying in our ITSO whitepapers, webinars, podcasts and white board series. It’s clear that they see things the same as we do!

Debra Curtis discussed how Infrastructure and Operations management needs to mature, keeping the component level view yet consolidating it into IT service views then on to Business service views. She discussed the current state of vendors and some new players and showed how other ITIL frameworks such as performance management feed information to the Event Correlation Analysis (ECA) and BSM tools.

She predicts that these new processes and tools will result in automatically determining what “normal” thresholds should be and be intelligent enough to alert only when operations and performance stray from those norms. Several times she stressed that tools alone cannot make you successful. Processes are important as well. I felt she reaffirmed our commitment to offer tools and our ITSO processes together to make our customers successful.

I listened to IBM discuss their current state in offering cloud computing. It is clear that they have thought this through and the complexities are far more than normal outsourcing arrangements. It appeared that they are very aggressive in this space. Only time will tell if cloud computing really will be the future of IT. 

More to come tomorrow 

Ron

The second day of the Gartner Data Center Conference has been informative. Besides the sessions, I have had some wonderful networking sessions. It appears that capacity planning/capacity management is becoming much more of a hot topic these days.

Not only is Gartner seeing more inquiries, many of the people I have spoken with in different IT operational areas are talking about the necessity of doing more formal capacity planning work. They all agree that the days of throwing hardware at capacity problems are behind us. Instead of over provisioning and continual firefighting efforts, we need to do a better job of planning for the future and spending more time tuning applications and services.

It is very satisfying to see that more and more people are beginning to see the value of the work we evangelize in TeamQuest IT Service Optimization.

Disruption in the Data Center

In the first keynote, Gartner analyst Carl Claunch discussed the “Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center.” They are in no particular order, according to Carl.

• Virtualization in storage

• Cloud computing

• Servers: Beyond the blade

• PC virtualization

• Enterprise Mash-ups

• Specialized systems

• Social Software and networking

• Unified communications

• Value of pods and zones

• Green IT

Additional Highlights from Claunch 

Carl gave us a lot of information, covering all the considerations, both pluses and minuses. I’ll cover a few items just to keep things brief. Gartner sees blade servers morphing into computing fabric where memory, I/O and processor are not restricted for use by a particular motherboard and can be redeployed at will. He states that the problem with blades is that when you outgrow one, that particular piece of technology is useless to you, becoming orphaned. You paid for the capacity and processing capabilities but can no longer take advantage of them. By taking technology to the next step by building computing fabrics, you have the ability to redeploy the component parts dynamically so that you continue to gain value from the asset.

Carl discussed enterprise mash-ups, pointing out how valuable they can be to organizations. A common deployment that we see frequently is linking an internet application to one of the mapping services to help your customers find their way to your place of business. Carl points out that this technology can be important in quickly building robust applications for use internally or externally. It can also help you attract and retain the new generation of digital workers. The challenge will be in managing the technology. Pieces of the application come from a variety or web sites which are outside your control so monitoring and measuring service performance becomes much more critical…and complex.

Sidenote
My last comment for this entry is about Don McMillan, an ex IEEE engineer and now a renown comedian. He gave the second keynote of the day. If you get the chance to see him, I highly recommend it. He had most of the crowd in tears. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much. 

More to come. 

Ron

The afternoon sessions were as enlightening as this morning. John Phelps had a great presentation on Green IT. He started out with the statement that companies were not doing Green IT for environmental reasons, but for cost savings and the environment benefited from the work. My colleague agrees. He went extensively into the topic, including pointing out reasons why Green IT is more than power and cooling savings. He finished discussing using alternate energy sources and predicted future trends in the space. McKinsley Quarterly published an article on this subject too.

The last presentation of the day was Cameron Haight’s “Managing the Virtual Server Environment.” Cameron covered the gamut of management considerations – too many to cover in this blog. He states that virtualization has changed the operations landscape probably more radically than at any other time in IT history, pointing out the benefits of virtual environments and the detractions. Server sprawl is the number one issue for people implementing virtualization and Haight covered options and considerations to control it.

He covered the need for chargeback and the difficulties in implementing and sustaining it. If you have time, watch this chargeback video and tell me what you think.

Cameron closed with staffing considerations, saying benefits will vary widely depending on complexity and individual configurations. He pointed out that 55% of those polled said there was no change in Server per IT Staffing ratios after implementing virtualization. He presumed some of the reasons are that although some admin tasks were greatly reduced, such as provisioning, the complexity of the environment drove greatly elongated root cause analysis times, resulting in no staffing ratio benefits.

 Tomorrow is another day and more reports will be forthcoming. 

Until tomorrow. 

Ron