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 envirnment makes such events inevitable. It takes tools like TeamQuest to provide enough visibility to detect and prevent similar occurrences.

Craig

The afternoon sessions at TTS were very informative.  Rey Rios gave a great session on ITSO and ITIL.  He discussed the differences, and similarities, between ITIL V2, V3 and ITSO.  Then he explained how TeamQuest products supported the frameworks and best practices.

Mark Manness and Scott Johnson followed Rey.  They discussed the upcoming changes to the VMWare agent and TeamQuest Model as it relates to modeling VMWare platforms and guests.  It was very informative and all are awaiting the releases.

Leonid Grinshpan of Oracle discussed multi-tiered application sizing.  It was great presentation.  Not only did he give us insight into modeling Oracle, he discussed step-by-step processes on how to build prototyping models without and system data, how to validate them and apply what-if scenarios.  I thought he did a great job of showing us how we can prototype new applications before they are built.

TTS seems to get better every year and this year is no exception.

Until the next time…

Ron

Jacques Lehoullier, senior architect for product selcetion at ING Canada (soon to be known as Intact Financial Corporation) gave a breakout session on how to expand AIX capacity from a fixed physical base. He laid out the fact that rapid growth led to increased hardware costs, higher logistical costs and delays due to floor space, electrical and cooling issues. The data center had literally ran out of space.

The company investigated virtualization as a solution, but worried about the risks due to having many applications running on one physical server. It upgraded from two IBM P595 servers of 64 CPUs each to four P590+ with 16 CPUs each in a virtual environment consisting of four CPU pools.

IT at the company consulted with Gartner Group which recommended TeamQuest. This helped the company simplify reporting — from as much as a month to gather the performance and capacity data down to seconds — and enabled the company to decommission several old servers despite adding 100 more logical partitions.  

Craig.

I’m here for the 8^th annual TeamQuest Technology Summit (TTS).  Despite the economy there has been a good turnout with everyone in a good mood.  It’s hard to be otherwise here in Savannah, Georgia.  Blue skies and light sea breezes make for a wonderful, relaxed environment to discuss Capacity Management topics. 

The conference kicked off with a welcome by President and CEO Jerred Ruble. He brought people up to date on TeamQuest happenings since the last meeting. He also awarded the IT Service Optimization Award to Law School Admission Council (LSAC). 

Bruce Bachman, LSAC CIO, was here to accept the award.  It was well-deserved as LSAC made huge strides in improving services over the past several years. Congratulations to Bruce, Jerry Goldman, Technical Services leader, and all the people at LSAC who worked so hard to make their success a reality!!

Some LSAC highlights:

• Used ITIL/ITSO best practices to manage risks
• Beat Recovery Time Objective goal by 12 hours
• Beat Recovery Point Objective by 3.5 hours
• Project finished ahead of time and under budget

JP Garbani of Forrester had a great presentation.  He spoke on strategies to improve IT efficiency.  He covered some history as to how we got here from a Capacity Management perspective.  He then discussed how technology complexity has increased and covered how this complexity impacts the business.  He stressed the point that we can no longer afford to be reactive as too many staff productivity and customer revenue dollars are lost during outages.  He closed by saying we need to have predictive processes to minimize outages, reducing costs and improving customer service; something very important and timely in these trying economic times.  It was refreshing to hear him tout some of the very same ITSO principles we have been advocating over the years.

Well, I’m off to the next session. 

Until the next time…

Ron

We’ve identified 5 reasons why you should attend this year’s TeamQuest Technology Summit in Savannah, Georgia, April 28 – 29.

Your Data Center is Sprawling with Virtual Machines

Managing virtual machines can be a mess. The virtual machines need to meet service levels. You need to be able to handle upgrades and maintenance and you also need to accurately predict application performance running on virtual servers.Attend one of the sessions below for more on managing virtual machines.

• Planning and Monitoring of Desktop Virtualization on VMware ESX
• Modeling VMware Systems
• Enhanced VMware Data Collection

You’re concerned about the health of IT Operations

Even though Wall Street, the economy and business operations are sick, it doesn’t mean the sickness has to spread to IT operations. Processes such as IT Service Optimization (ITSO), initiatives to align IT with business goals, and service level management can help IT operations run efficiently in today’s economic environment. Find out how you can keep IT fit.Plan to attend one of these sessions: 

• TeamQuest Model: Your Systems Health Practitioner
• Diagnostic Calisthenics
• Stay Out of the IT ER Using Automated Alarming adn Preventative Processes

Cost of attending an event is a deal breaker

This year, more than ever, companies are tightening their belts. This action is similar to over-provisioning hardware. You still need to learn, network and bring back new ideas to help the company move forward. You still need to do your due diligence to discover if new hardware is needed. TTS sessions are free. The only costs to you are air and hotel. After TTS, we offer training courses are offered at $300 per day!

Valuable training offered after TTS

Got a systems management headache? Take two days of training classes for quick relief. Following TTS, April 30 and May 1, you can train with TeamQuest Performance Software – hands on. The offered classes include:

• Administrator Training
• Introduction to TeamQuest Model
• Analyst Training
• TeamQuest Model Training

Registration for classes is part of the TTS registration process. Get training information here. Training courses are a low $300 investment in the health and management of your IT infrastructure. 

Need to increase productivity and cut costs

TTS sessions can show you how to boost response time and reduce down time by keeping your systems tuned and ready. Learn how to increase efficiency while at the same time dodging costly outages and slowdowns. Know which users or business entities are responsible for using IT resources, by accurately allocating IT resource consumption to the right people or organizations.

Register for TTS today before it’s too late!I hope to see you in Savannah, Georgia.

Craig

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

At this past TeamQuest Technology Summit in Tucson, AZ, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Robert Erhardt, Chief Technology Officer for the San Diego Zoo. Robert was one of the keynote speakers and delivered a fascinating presentation on the business of zoos. If there was ever a poster child for best practices, Robert is that person. 

We spoke for over an hour about the zoo and its challenges around the world. I only remember one comment that was specific to a particular technology – weather resistant information kiosks.  

The rest of the time we talked about the BUSINESS challenges the zoo faced. We discussed the considerable number of animals for which they care that can no longer be found in the wild and the steps they are taking to increase the numbers to be able to reintroduce them to their former habitat.  It was a discussion in business terms, not technology.  He spoke of business solutions where IT played a role, but again at a high level – such as a data repository of animal care information where zoos, veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators around the world can learn from each other on the caring for endangered and exotic species.

Robert really impressed me.  We are bombarded with media promoting the integration of business and IT but we usually see little of it in our day-to-day lives. Robert is already there and more. Robert has a passion for the animals his organization protects and is an integral part of the business that is needed to sustain the ongoing work. He knows the business as well or better than the people he serves and uses that knowledge to develop innovative solutions, both high and low tech. From a best practice perspective, who can ask for any more than that?   

If you share Robert’s passion for animals, please consider going to http://www.sandiegozoo.org/ and make a donation to support their cause. TeamQuest has.

Ron