This survey was taken at the 2009 TeamQuest Technology Summit, April 28-29. We asked attendees to choose their highest priority for 2009. And the winner… Overwhelmingly, it’s virtualization. Is that a surprise? Well, no, but I have two questions. Why is cloud computing so low with a paltry 7 percent and when will processes such as ITIL finally get their comeuppance?

 

Virtualization – 68%
Virtualization has been the teacher’s pet for the last couple of years. The news articles, analysts and businesses continue to sing its praises. We’ve branched out though. Instead of focusing on server virtualization, we’ve moved to desktop and application virtualization. What’s next? How else are you exploiting virtualization capabilities? Will virtualization continue to be the class favorite?

ITIL – 14%
Ahhh yes. The processes that work well for IT, but have yet to translate to or get buy-in from the business side. ITIL is a tricky one for me. I see its value. ITIL isn’t easy. ITIL can demand a cultural shift and buy-in from IT staff. ITIL has several processes with just as many starting points. What are you to do?

With the mantra “do more with less” being trumpeted about companies and IT staff, one would think more businesses would welcome some sort of process to improve the delivery of services. Those of you who have had success incorporating an ITIL process or two should share your secrets with other readers. How do you get buy in from the business side?

Green IT – 11%
It’s good to see Green computing working its way up as a priority, but there’s more we in IT can do. I’m talking more than server consolidation. Ron Potter has a few ideas for data center and systems management professionals.

Cloud Computing – 7%
Cloud computing has captured the interest of the IT world in much the same way as virtual servers. It’s a great conversation piece, but its priority seems to be pretty low. Why is that? Is it due to security reasons? Are organizations concerned with someone else being in control?

Craig

In a poll of IT professionals at the TeamQuest Technology Summit, 85 percent said they were either reactive or more inclined to be reactive in their IT environment.

Maybe it’s the nature of the beast. IT is under demand to produce “more with less” and deliver always-on services. Marketing has a great idea and wants to run a campaign. Are we sitting at the table when marketing pitches a resource-taxing promotion on the company’s infrastructure? Do we allow ourselves enough time to test? Are we given enough time to plan for the campaign?

Some say you can’t sell prevention. But you can sell success. By proving that IT must be part of the strategic leadership on revenue-generating items, the company should have fewer hiccups, decreased headaches and more opportunities to capture revenue.

We’re all after the same thing – success for the company and happy customers. IT, by being ready (i.e., proactive), can help improve a company’s chances by using proper processes to improve revenue-generating and customer-facing opportunities.

For those of you who have had success at being proactive, how do you do it? What needs to happen to move toward being more proactive? Is it better software, processes, or people? Is it a combination?

We want to hear from you.

Craig

Steve Henning briefed the TTS audience on the partnership between his company Integrien Corp and TeamQuest. Integrien offers advanced analytics as a solution to over-alerting by monitoring software. Typically, firms receive hundreds of alerts. One example he gave was of a company which received hundreds every hour. In such a climate, alerts eventually get completely ignored.

Integrien proved its value at one large customer by conducting an analysis of historical data and then laying out what its system would have advised concerning the IT emergency that had been experienced in that period. During that emergency, hundreds of alerts from its existing monitoring system had failed to zero in on the real issues. With Integrien, a handful of alerts highlighted the exact problems and would have warned IT up to three hours in advance of the actual crash.

Integrien has chosen to tightly integrate its software with TeamQuest in order to offer the best of capacity planning alongside intelligent and predictive alerts. Integrien is in the midst of rolling out its solution along with TeamQuest in a large financial institution.

Craig

At the TeamQuest Technology Summit, John Miecielica of Metavante gave an informative talk on how to combine performance management and capacity planning with monitoring. He explained how much easier it used to be to do performance testing when you only had one server attached to its own storage with a defined set of users. Nowadays with�virtualization, it’s a lot tougher as multiple users and apps are sharing a common infrastructure.

He gave an interesting example of an application that was suddenly exhibiting performance issues, yet had no change in traffic patterns and was running the same workloads. The application and infrastructure staff insisted no changes had been made.�Performance monitoring indicated a change in IO and how it was serviced, yet the SAN team said there had been no microcode changes, new apps or major changes in storage subsystem.�The issue had been caused by another team that had loaded an application on a shared server.

They had been very happy with the success of their implementation and had no idea of the consequences.

Yet a heavily virtualized environment makes such events inevitable. It takes tools like TeamQuest to provide enough visibility to detect and prevent similar occurrences.

Craig