Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave: A Disservice to Innovation?

Note: Read this blog more as a wakeup call to vendors than as a criticism of Industry Analysts. By inadvertently playing into analysts’ narrow definition of products and categories, vendors can become distracted from their real goal – pursuing meaningful, valuable, and unique innovation. 

Prologue
Industry analysts have an important job in the technology industry: To help customers better understand trends, technologies, and vendors, so they can make better, more confident purchasing decisions. And for vendors, analysts are helpful by providing market research, trend analysis and evaluation of products and technologies.

But in my experience, analysts also have a fine line to walk when they make vendor evaluations. Since analysts take money from both vendors and customers, they put themselves in potential conflict-of-interest positions, if not also risking bias.  This is made worse by lack of transparency in their evaluation methodologies.

The most popular – and influential – evaluation tools analysts offer are periodic product analyses and ratings. The well-known Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) and Forrester Wave are at the top of the list, with others such as KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass. These reports are pervasive, with Wikipedia listing 66 different Gartner MQs – with many more unlisted.

Unintended consequence: Category myopia

A closer look at how the MQs, Waves, and other evaluation are constructed reveals massive spreadsheets that vendors are asked to complete. They largely focus on product feature comparisons, and to a lesser degree, company operations. I’ve personally helped complete countless numbers of these – and it’s often a multi-person, multi-week vendor effort.

But the spreadsheet questionnaires have an unintended consequence: They inadvertently treat each vendor product/category as a fungible, semi-generic solution to meet a limited set of problems.  Further, they often track technology categories that can quickly become outdated, even as analysts struggle to update them.

The result is that vendors are compelled to play the analyst’s game... not their own.   The unintended myopia – the forced “thinking-inside-the-box” – manifests itself this way:

• Vendors end up spending time, R&D resources, and marketing expense to chase feature boxes that will yield them high evaluation scores.  This inadvertent “keeping up with the Jones’ ” for feature parity does an injustice to innovation they would otherwise pursue.  It is the rare visionary vendor that’s able to say “screw the features the analysts want, we want to innovate in a different direction”.  And, unfortunately, those same vendors might be penalized in the next vendor evaluation for not “checking the boxes” even though they may have a breakthrough approach to the market.
• Customers may also be misled by these evaluations, often narrowly viewing the product sector through the narrow lens presented by the analysts.  While some customers will benefit by an apples-to-apples comparison of features, many may miss appreciating the variation in vendor options, approaches, and overall direction/strategy – things not generally reflected in simple checkbox evaluations. 

True innovators are penalized
A great set of podcasts by Christopher Lochhead focus on “legendary marketers” and innovators who re-think their products, market strategies, and ultimately create new concepts and categories.  But in the world of  standard analyst categories, innovators of new categories are penalized, because (a) they are not being considered for a MQ or wave, or (b) receive poorer ratings on the standard category ratings... even if they offer a truly revolutionary approach to solving a technology problem.


Now, to play my own devil’s advocate, I recognize the need for analysts to create some level of standardized evaluation criteria – the industry needs this. However, analyst criteria can be mistakenly held as the end-all and be-all, rather than as general guidance.  Further, most analysts fail to go the extra mile to fully explain the differentiations between vendors and products.

Note to Vendors: Analysts assess the Finite Game, not the Infinite Game
In his excellent new book The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek outlines the notion of great companies focusing on the “infinite game” – one where there is vision, constant reinvention and constant shifting of the playing field... and even shifting the definition of what it means to succeed.  This is in contrast to playing the “finite game” where the rules are defined, there is a limited set of metrics, and a singular clear goal to win.

The current mindset which is rewarded by MQs and Waves is that of the Finite Game... where vendors are encouraged play to their competition, innovate with the “check-the-box” mentality, and where customers might errantly treat vendor solutions as generic and fungible.

My candid vendor advice is this: Yes, we need to play the analyst’s game. There is absolutely a service to our customers using this approach. But proceed with caution and intelligence – There may not be not a need to “check all the boxes”, nor necessarily should you. Balance that effort against your own vision, direction and approach to differentiation. And ensure that if you opt for a powerful direction, albeit one that could weaken your evaluation, emphasize your believe/vision with the analysts.  Remember: There are lots of billion-dollar firms that aren’t leadership quadrant companies.

My advice if you’re a customer: Don’t blindly choose to put the top 3 vendors of a leadership quadrant on your short-list.  Look more deeply, and have your own set of criteria developed when selecting a vendor.   All-too-often, a vendor might have a solid offering in a given category, but ultimately fail to demonstrate the strategy and direction that will carry your company forward a few years in the future.

Coda: A note to analysts: 
I have the greatest respect for you – and for the incredible knowledge you have and advice you give.  (Even some of my own best friends are Analysts).  But please emphasize that your evaluations are standardized.  Go the extra mile to really understand and communicate

• how vendors differentiate their products
• where vendor visions lead and/or diverge
• adjacent categories to the vendors’ own (or categories that overlap)
• how the vendor’s products are either “pure-play” in the category, or how it expands the category definition. 

I look forward to your comments/feedback

IT Industry Analysts - Falling Into the Bond Rating Agency Trap?

One of the leading causes of our recent economic melt-down was that "independent" credit rating agencies had a conflict-of-interest with the firms they were supposed to be watching.The very firms tasked with objectively gauging risk were also being paid by the firms they were evaluating...And in the end, the big losers weren't either of them... it was the public.

Well, beware that some of the same could be happening in the IT space.

I'll change the names to protect the innocent -- but let's say that I recently attended a day-long IT analyst event, one where all of the senior analysts trot-out their recent research. And to be honest, most of it was of very high quality.

But in one session which focused on an up-and-coming trend in IT, the analyst only cited the major IT vendors (think: HP, CSCO, IBM, Dell etc.) as the leading innovators and players in the space. It was complete Bunk. Of the four "leading" vendors mentioned, only one of them had any significant innovation in the space. Two others so coated their offerings with "marketecture" that real innovation was tough to discern.  And the final crime was that 2-3 smaller vendors I know who actually pioneered the space weren't mentioned at all. And they're the ones providing *real* products with real value today.

Yes, the analyst had a responsibility to his customers (IT end-users) to watch the big players in the industry. And to be sure, the big vendors dominate most market spaces. But the analyst also has a responsibility to truly master his market space and to report-back on the true leaders, innovators, and visionaries. Instead, I believe he unwittingly fell prey to the big vendors that pay much of his firm's bills in order to stay in the analyst's limelight. The failing here is industry-wide, and the IT consumers of the analyst's information are the real losers. Innovation isn't recognized, and therefore value isn't really transferred. And nearly all large industry analysts are guilty of this at some level.

In contrast, another friend of mine is a technology industry analyst with a major international financial institution. When he interviews me on my industry, company and product, he's clear that his reports are not commissioned by vendors, nor even by his bank's clients. There cannot be so much as a hint of conflict-of-interest in his work. Think about it.

---

Major IT Industry analysts have been my friends for years. I've worked for IT vendors small and large, and IT analysts have been (and mostly still are) great sounding boards for new ideas, helped identify market opportunities, and have added lots of marketing value if/when they approve of your product. And IT analysts add value on the IT consumer side too -  by identifying trends, pointing-out leading vendors, and recommending best-practices.

But sometimes these folks fundamentally fail at what they're "paid" to do. My advice: Always get a second opinion.

Emergence of Fabric as an IT Management Enabler

Last week I attended Gartner's annual Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Four days packed with presentations and networking (of the social kind). Lots of talk about cloud computing, IT operations, virtualization and more.

Surprisingly a number of sessions directly referenced compute Fabrics -- including "The Future of Server Platforms" (Andy Butler), "Blade Servers and Fabrics - Evolution or Revolution" (Jeff Hewitt), and "Integrated Infrastructure Strengths and Challenges" (Paquet, Dawson, Haight, Zaffros). All very substantive analyses of what fabrics _are_... but very little discussion of why they're _important_. In fact, Compute fabrics might just be the next big thing after OS virtualization.

Think of it this way: Fabric Computing is the componentization and abstraction of infrastructure (such as CPU, Memory, Network and Storage). These components can then be logically re-configured as-needed. This is very much analogous to how OS virtualization componentizes and abstracts OS and application software stacks.

However, the focus by most fabric-related vendors thus far is simply on the most fundamental level of fabric computing, which is simply virtualizing I/O and using a converged network. This is the same initial level of sophistication when the industry believed that OS visualization was only about the hypervisor. Rather, we need to take a longer view of fabric computing and think about higher-level value we create by manipulating the infrastructure similar to how we manipulate VMs. A number of heady thinkers supporting the concept of Infrastructure 2.0 are already beginning to crack some of these revolutionary issues.

Enter: Fabric as an Enabler

If we think of "fabric computing" as abstraction and orchestration of IT components, then there is a logical progression of what gets abstracted, and then, what services can be constructed via logically manipulating the pieces:

1. Virtualizing I/O and converging the transport

This is just the first step, not the destination. Virtualizing I/O means no more stateful NICs and HBAs on the server; rather, the I/O presents itself to the OS as any number of configurable devices/ports, and I/O + data flow over a single physical wire. Transport can be Ethernet, FCoE, Infiniband, or others. In this manner, the network connectivity state of the physical server can be simplified and changed nearly instantaneously.

2. Virtual networking

The next step is to define in software the converged network, its switching, and even network devices such as load balancers. The result is a "wire-once" physical network topology, but with an infinitely reconfigurable logical topology. This permits physically flatter networks. Provisioning of the network, VLANs, IP load balancing, etc. can all be simplified and accomplished via software as well.

3. Unified (or Converged) Computing

Now things get interesting: Now that we can manipulate the server's I/O state and its network connections, we can couple that with creating software-based profiles of complete server configurations -- literally defining the server, its I/O, networking, storage connections, and even what software boots on it. (Software being either a virtual host, or a traditional native OS). Having defined the entire server profile in software, we can even define the entire environment's profile.

Defining servers and environments in software allows us to provide (1) High Availability: With a hardware failure, we can simply re-provision a server configuration to another server in seconds -- whether or not that server was running a VM host, or a native OS. (2) Disaster Recovery: we can re-constitute an environment of server profiles, including all of their networking, ports, addresses, etc., even if that environment hosts VMs and native OS's.

 4. Unified Management

To achieve the ultimate in an agile IT environment, there's one remaining step: To orchestrate the management of infrastructure with the management of workloads. I think of this as an ideal Infrastructure-as-a-Service -- physical infrastructure that adapts to the needs of workloads, scaling up/out as conditions warrant, and providing workload-agnostic HA and DR.  From an IT agility perspective, we would now be able to abstract nearly all components of a modern data center, and logically combine them on-the-fly as business demands require.

Getting back to the Gartner conference, I now realize one very big missing link -- while Gartner has been promoting their Real-Time Infrastructure (RTI) model now for some time, they have yet to link it to the coming revolution that will be enabled by fabric computing.  Maybe we'll see some hint of this next year.

Postcards from SDForum's Developer's Conference

SDForum hosted another wide-ranging, star-studded conference Friday. The topic was posted as "Shaping the new age of application development" but - from the start - had overtones of SaaS, cloud computing, and new business models.

The day opened with James Staten of Forrester Research - giving his usual riveting, insightful view on clouds, cloud adoption and directions. I think he also was able to add some sobriety to the hype, pointing out that Infrastructure-as-a-Service was the technology most likely approach to mature first. He expects to see "cloud hype" to die-out around 2010.

James was followed by a panel hosted by Chris Yeh, focusing on new software business models. Pretty lively discussion about how packaged software is moving to subscription, how SaaS is re-making how software is consumed, and how simple financial models will help shape how products/services are packaged and priced. Frankly, the internet is changing all types of business models... e.g. a question from the audience focused on traditional advertising business models, where "classifieds" were advertising in a newspaper where "news" was the content. But with the advent of Craigs List, "classifieds" *is* the content. Hmm.

Now a shift: a panel on Mobile development - Panelists from Nokia, Sun's Java division, iPhone developers, etc. One really interesting insight: think of the phone application market as "verticals" and "horizontals". While there are a few million phones that are "vertical", i.e. Blackberry, iPhone, etc., there are a few *billion* phones globally that are more basic, but where there is a more massive market to write to. The horizontal market for mobile dwarfs that market that we think of as the "advanced" iPhone market!

After lunch, we got a really cool and riveting presentation from Clara Shih from Salesforce.com on "Understanding the Facebook Era" Her premise: Facebook is CRM for individuals. Ergo, there is a natural connection between Facebook and SalesForce.com... (Faceconnector) Also, there is the need for "online identity" and Facebook is making a play for owning that 'credentials' space (Facebook Connect). But with online identity, there is the potential for massive online data mining and demographic research.

My own panel was moderated by Chris Preimsberger of eWeek - focusing on cloud infrastructure. Hamid Pirahesh of IBM led-off with a really elegant 4-quadrant perspective of Traditional vs. Cloud models, and internal vs. external models. Lots of good conversation about why "cloud" infrastructure differs from traditional infrastructure.

Finally - the VC panel... Accel, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Hummer Winblad, and Benchmark. First question off-the-block: "Where are you seeing the growth?" Answers: (a) small-budget items that can be purchased in bite-sized pieces, (b) IT infrastructure equipment that saves money, (c) data analytics, cloud and cleantech. Mostly pretty bullish on the startup market, apparently lots of series-A and B happening now. And lots of really good advice for wannabe startups on how the VC process works.

Gartner on Green Data Center Recommendations

Gartner Research just issued a very telling release on taking a holistic view of energy-efficient data centers, rather than a narrow point-technology view. Gartner compared the data center to a "living organism" in terms of how it needs to be treated as a dynamic mechanism. (BTW, I owe a head nod to Dave O's GreenM3 blog for coining the term "the living data center")

Said Rakesh Kumar, a research vice president at Gartner,

“If ‘greening’ the data centre is the goal, power efficiency is the starting point but not sufficient on its own... Green’ requires an end-to-end, integrated view of the data centre, including the building, energy efficiency, waste management, asset management, capacity management, technology architecture, support services, energy sources and operations.”

“Data centre managers need to think differently about their data centres. Tomorrow’s data centre is moving from being static to becoming a living organism, where modelling and measuring tools will become one of the major elements of its management,” said Mr Kumar. “It will be dynamic and address a variety of technical, financial and environmental demands, and modular to respond quickly to demands for floor space. In addition, it will need to have some degree of flexibility, to run workloads where energy is cheapest and above all be highly-available, with 99.999 per cent availability.”

I like this analysis because it implies a dynamic "utility computing" style data center where workloads can be moved, servers can be repurposed, and capacity is always matched to demand. This is the ideal approach to ensuring constant efficiency.

The release also had six recommendations; Here's the one I like the most:

6. Manage the server efficiencies. Move away from the ‘always on’ mentality and look at powering equipment down

To me, it sounds like technologies like Active Power management are finally getting traction; and, it seems that power management is being validated -- especially in environments with very highly cyclical workloads. (most recently endorsed in a 451 Group report, as well by a host of vendors).

Especially with the economy in a spin, and margins being tightened, look for more ideas for increasing the $ efficiency of data center assets.

IT Analysts opening their Kimono

There was a time when IT industry analysts would only provide information, opinion or data for a price. But it seems that in today's web 2.o world, they are exposing more of their thoughts in the form of blogs and other "free" information. I suspect that this is happening due to downward pressure on price (full subscriptions to analysts and reports for a year can be tens of thousands of dollars), plus the realization of the need to "market" their expertise and insights to a broader audience.

Here are some of my favorite, complementary, data center-related analyst info you can subscribe to:

Forrester: Great set of analysts and topics here. Check out their entire Blog Listings page to find the right IT industry slice for your taste.

Gartner: Gartner has a "blog network" page where it appears they've asked most of their analysts to do individual blogs, many of which are on various IT topics and technologies. And just so you don't think there isn't any overlap between analyst coverage, they also have a *very* complete blog and video covering Cloud Computing and Cisco's possible intentions, too.

IDC: I just discovered the "IDC Exchange" (which I wrote about earlier last week). They recently did a *very* nice multiple installment piece on cloud computing you have to check out. They've also recentely completed an analysis piece on Cisco and their possible cloud computing intentions.

Redmonk: I've known James Governor since my days at Sun. He runs a multi-topic blog called Monkchips which is insightful with a tinge of wry wit from across the Pond (It's also #3 on the list of Top Analyst Blogs). Michael Cote, another Redmonker, also has a quality blog (People over Process) on IT operations issues and more (BTW, Michael's Blog is #8 on the list)

Saugatuck Technology: I've been following their reports on SOA and related technologies, but they've been branching out. While not a Blog, they email out a very nice complementary summary of each of their extended reports in the form of "Research Alerts"

Awesome Blog/Report on Cloud Computing by IDC

Those quant guys at IDC have been at it again. This time, they've posted a really fine report/overview on cloud computing on their "IDC Exchange" Blog page, authored by Frank Gens. It was initially posted in September, but it looks like they've been adding report bits (and great graphics) to it for a while.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll roll out a number of posts on cloud services and cloud computing. While these posts can be read standalone, they can also be viewed as parts of a single, coherent IDC overview of this emerging model and market opportunity. We’ll use this post to create a “virtual table of contents”, adding links to these cloud-related posts as they’re published, allowing you to see how different elements of our cloud outlook fit together, and to easily navigate among them.

Here's the Table of Contents:

• Defining “Cloud Services” and “Cloud Computing”
• What’s Driving the Cloud Computing Era? An IT Market View
• Framing the Cloud Opportunity for IT Suppliers
• The Transformative Interplay Between Cloud and Traditional IT Offerings
• IT Cloud Services User Survey, pt. 1: Crossing the Chasm
• IT Cloud Services User Survey, pt.2: Top Benefits & Challenges
• IT Cloud Services User Survey, pt.3: What Users Want From Cloud Services Providers
• IT Cloud Services Forecast - 2008, 2012: A Key Driver of New Growth

BTW, if you want a chuckle, click on the "listen now" button to hear a machine-generated voice read the pages for you. Listen closely to the fact that the computer never takes a breath. :)

Postcards from SDForum - Cloud Computing and Beyond

I attended most of today's SDForum "Cloud computing and Beyond: The Web Grows Up (Finally)" in Santa Clara. Somewhere around 200 professionals from Silicon Valley showed to hear -- and to debate -- the relative maturity and merits of the thing we're calling the cloud.

The day was lead-off by James Staten, a friend and former colleague, and now with Forrester Research, who gave a fantastic keynote of "Is cloud computing the next revolution?" Just getting to a definition of terms, and mapping the taxonomy of this emerging market is tricky. But he's tracking this fast-maturing market rather closely. Both web-based services and Software-as-a-Service are becoming the norm; but the industry is also calling the lower-level services (PaaS, IaaS) cloud too. So be careful of terms when you enter into a cloud debate.

Another morning keynote (which I unfortunately missed most of) was delivered by Lew Tucker, Sun Microsystems' new CTO of Cloud Computing (and also a friend and former colleague). He's quite a visionary, and went so far as to suggest that computing resources of tomorrow will be brokered/arbitraged based on specializations, costs, etc.

One particularly lively panel was hosted by Chris Primesberger of E-Week, with panelists from Salesforce.com, Intacct, SAP, RingCentral and Google. There was some light discussion about cloud differentiation, interaction, and standard approaches to describing cloud SLAs. Most generally agreed that there would in fact be 3rd-party businesses brokering between providers at some point. The other enlightening discussion focused on capacity planning for the cloud -- what if a user scaled from ten to ten-thousand servers in a few days or weeks? Could services like Amazon handle this? In a consistent - and impressive - way, the panelists agreed that these sorts of scale issues were "a drop in the bucket" when you consider the vastness of what these large service provide on a daily basis.

In what drew the most spontaneous applause was a question asked to the panel (but probably directed to Rajen Sheth of Google) by a member of the audience. Essentially, how could we *not* assume there would be service lock-in, when Force.com had one platform model, and Google App Engine had another? (a good point elucidated by James Urquhart some time ago). The Google response focused on "providing the best possible service for customers" but was clearly a dodge. (BTW, the author herein suggests that SaaS and PaaS models will follow the same proprietary/fragmentary model as did Linux and Unix).

In an afternoon panel led by David Brown of AMR research, the main question addressed was whether (or to what degree) cloud computing was disruptive. The panel consisted of hardware, software and services vendors from Elastra, Egenera, Joyent and Nirvanix. The panel agreed that there were different types of disruption, depending on where you sit. From an infrastructure management perspective, internal cloud architectures can be disruptive to IT Ops, since it changes how resources are applied and shared, and the fundamentals of capacity planning. Cloud architectures can also be disruptive to traditional forms of hosting and outsourcing, due to their pay-as-you-go approach.

I will say that Jason Hoffman, Founder of Joyent, stood out in the panel clearly as a visionary in this field. Keep an eye on this guy. His take on disruption was that if "cloud" means Infrastructure-as-a-Service, then it's really just another form of hosting, and not very disruptive. But if how "clouds" are applied to support business needs using policy (i.e. to dynamically communicate SLAs, Geographic compute locations, costs, replication, failover,etc.) then they become very disruptive. IT administration would shift from scripting and fire-fighting, to policy-development and policy modification.

Finally, I will point out that many more folks showed-up who would use clouds and/or broker cloud services than who would actually *make* the clouds (IaaS) in the first place, again attesting to the point I made earlier this week that it's a lot harder to do, and only really sophisticated vendors will be taking that on.

Postcards from the Hosting Transformation Summit

Right across the street from VMworld was Tier 1's Hosting Transformation Summit. Roughly 400 folks -- mostly from Managed Service Providers (MSPs) -- attended to get the lowdown on where that industry is going. It's changing fast, given some of the recent "cloudy" offerings from Amazon, Mosso, OpSource and others. And part of the driver was the technology offered from VMware itself.

But First: The industry, and its growth, is compelling. Managed services hosting is growing in the U.S. at about 30%/y, and it will be a $10 billion industry by the end of 2008. While about 20% of that amount is represented by 13 of the largest firms, the remainder of the market is represented by hundreds if not thousands of smaller entities.

Dan Golding of Tier 1 pointed out that the categories called "web hosting" and "managed hosting" are colliding, given that so many apps are being delivered over http. He also pointed out that small/medium businesses are expectted to outsource even more of their own IT, as operating it themselves becomes more complex and expensive... also good for MSPs. In particular he noted that CRM, HR, Accounting, fileservers, utility storage, email and project management were expected to be the top managed SaaS applications.

Next, John Zanni, Microsoft's GM of worldwide hosting, gave a talk called "cloud computing - is virtualization enough?" Having seen Paul Maritz' VMworld keynote hours before, I couldn' t help but compare the two. Zanni's a really smart guy -- but vision-wise, his talk was a let-down. While he absolutely identified the same requirements of the "cloud" (which were surprisingly in-agreement with VMware's) Microsoft's vision was elementary in comparison to VMware, referencing Microsoft party-lines and products - and was weak on vision. Granted, the audience was not as heavily-laden with technologists as the VMware conference, but the vision that was sketched-out just didn't seem too fully-baked. One interesting side-note: John explicitly mentioned Microsoft management tools that would someday manage 3rd-party VMs such as VMware. Hmmm....

On day 2, Antonio Piraino (also of Tier 1) gave a really great talk on "virtualization and cloud computing" -- the guy really gets it, with respect to the MSP industry. His message to MSPs was pretty clear: Cloud is coming, and you (the MSP) will need to learn about it and get on board. The definition of "cloud" he gave to MSPs was

• Server-based managed hosting
• Virtualized offerings
• Multi-O/S & DB support
• Automated scalablity
• Easy ordering of services
• On-demand provisioning
• Cross-service integration
• Bill-for-use
  
• SLAs were managed / managed-for

It's clear that the smaller MSPs out there will be jumping on the Utility Computing, Cloud, PaaS and SaaS bandwagon soon. That should begin to give folks like Mosso, Flexiscale, IronScale, OpSource etc. some competition. But i'm sure we're going to see the concept of abstracted-away hardware grow in popularity with frightening velocity.

Postcards from VMworld 2008 (with a twist)

I'm a bit late in reporting-back on day #1 of VMworld in Las Vegas. Word-on-the-floor is that there are over 14,000 attendees here. Definitely indicative of the hunger the industry has for this technology.

Rather than re-hash all of what CEO Paul Maritz had to say, I'd like to point out why VMware's vision is both on-the-mark -and- already available from sources other than VMware.... and showcase one such available product

Paul outlined 3 areas of vision:

• Virtual Data Center O/S (VDC-OS)
• vCloud (providing the ability to build internal/external clouds and federation between clouds)
• vClient (providing end-client independence for services emanating from clouds

He emphasized, with a demo, how an "internal cloud" could reach-out to an off-premises (external) cloud for resources, say during peaking demand -- or perhaps as a failover scenario. The demo has 3 points to make: (a) the ability to provide "elastic" capacity, (b) the ability to provide self-healing in the form of replacing failed capacity, and (c) the fact that it was driven by policies based on SLAs. It was a demo of a non-commercially-available product, but it drew great applause from the audience.

Whenever the "big guys" show-off a concept/roadmap, you can be sure that there are already smaller guys who are paving the way for them; this is no different. Cassatt, for one, has been showing-off this type of demo (down to a similar GUI) for many months now. With a few key differences:

• The product is shipping today
  
• We don't require that there are "warm" hosts pre-provisioned as standby resources
• We don't require that VMware is everytwere; in fact, we can already show the same demo but using Xen/Citrix (and soon, with other VM players)
• We don't even require that Virtualization is used at all; our approach works with physical HW and O/Ss too (including x86, SPARC, Linux distros, Solaris, and others)
  
  

For those attending the keynote, perhaps the GUI above looks familiar; except it's Cassatt's Active Response 5.1

In the center is a chart indicating upper- and lower- SLA thresholds (SLAs can be arbitrarily defined and composed). If the upper SLA is breached, Active Response finds bare-metal resources in the "free pool" (again, defined how you like) and then automatically provisions those resources with whatever SW policy determined (read: either a physical server or a virtual server). The application "tier" grows automatically. If/when the lower threshold is breached, an instance on the "tier" is retired. This approach provides real-life SLA management, capacity-on-demand (elastic behavior), failover/availability, and many other nice-to-have properties -- automatically. And Today.

This set of properties were also discussed across the street today at Tier-1 Research Hosting Summit at the Mirage. Many MSPs in the audience wanted to know "how do I get some of that?" when discussion came to utility computing and cloud infrastructures. I'll post on that next :)

Postcards from the SF Datacenter Dynamics meeting

This was an awesome (and pretty intense) 1-day show in San Francisco this past Friday, covering all of the current IT operations and energy efficiency topics. It was one of a number of local/international shows run by the same Brits who also publish ZeroDowntime. And, it was one of their largest - they claim it drew ~ 800 folks, almost all of whom were directly involved in operating end-user datacenters. I definitely recommend attending one in your area.

I had great conversations with some of the authorities, and attended a handful of sessions that included the US DOE, a panel on datacenter econometrics, an end-user panel regarding datacenter automation, and some vendor presentations regarding upcoming technologies.

US DOE
This was definitely the most newsworthy session (see my previous blog entry). The DOE has been piloting their DataCenter assessment tool, "DC-Pro" lately - and their primary assistant, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL), gave a walk-through of the tool, plus a roadmap of the overall goals and roll-out plans from now through 2011. I've now spoken with Bill Tschudi of LBNL a number of times; he's optimistic that the DOE will hit its goals for the tool, and for thousands of data center operators to make use of it in the next year or so.

IT Econometrics panel
Early in the morning there was also a decent panel covering topics of "green data center econometrics", essentially diving into a number of cost topics frequently overlooked in analyses. On the panel was Jon Haas of Intel, Mark Honeck of Quimonda (big DRAM manufacturer), and Winston Bumpus representing the Green Grid. Everyone agreed to "measure first", the same mantra that came out of the Uptime Institute earlier this year... in other words, measure power, temperatures, airflows and economics first, so to establish a baseline and a quantifiable goal for improvement. The other conclusion i'm happy they reached was to pursue projects that can get done quickly and show real benefits - pursue tactical initatives first.

Lastly (and by virtue of who was on the panel) came an interesting conclusion having to do with server-based power consumption: Memory is a *huge* power hog, made even worse by the move toward virtualization which typically requires a large memory upgrade for consolidating servers. One finding was that not all memory is created equal, and not all configurations consume equal power (16 1Gb SIMMs can consume four times as much power as 2 8Gb SIMMs)

On Datacenter Automation
This was a fantastic session given jointly by Cisco and OSIsoft. Cisco's primary speaker was in charge of their global lab compute capacity, and is trying to consolidate something like 200 separate labs around the globe. He clearly understood the organization differences between Facilities & IT operations, and the need to fill the gap - otherwise no useful efficiencies could be realized. Further, he predicted (if not asked to require) that IT automation systems (that govern compute, power and cooling resources) ultimately be integrated with building automation systems. In fact, he went a step further and posited that he'd like to see automation systems that interact globally. That means, he'd like to be able to dynamically push (compute) load to locations where capacity was economical -- a "follow-the-moon" strategy. This is counter to the traditional example whereby one pushes cooling to where the hot spots are; rather, push compute loads to where the cooling (and floorspace) is. This form of automation is right up my alley :) I'm happy to see other industry leaders as proponents.

I also had a chance to speak at length with Paul Marcoux, Cisco's VP of green engineering. (An interesting proposal from him here). He very much believes that the US will face carbon emissions capping/trading in the next few years... after it's incepted by the EC and others. Ergo, Cisco is taking the lead in comprehensive sustainability initiatives. And if you look at the number of sustainability organizations they're taking the lead in, you have to believe it.

Exhibitors
Aside from the sponsor/exhibitors, there were very few vendors at the show, and lots of time to interact & network with local peers -- something that's invaluable, and that I heard that time and again from attendees who've been in the past. What was also great what that most (but not all) of their pitches were truly education, with a minority being "commercials" for product.

Summary
This is a great show for data center managers to attend; it's only one day out of your schedule, and because it visits 7 US cities, minimal travel is usually involved. They've also got an international perspective because they visit 20 other cities around the globe.

Postcards from Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2008 (Day 2)

Today's presentations were almost entirely about virtualization with generous servings of analysis of cloud computing.

Thomas Bittman
Thomas Bittman opened with a keynote on Gartner's predictions on cloud computing, and the likely march the industry will take over the next 5+ years toward this eventuality.

Gartner's predictions are that there will be many varieties of cloud computing, from the AWS-style of raw hardware, up through various types of service providers of platforms, services, and even component services that will be wired-together by other types of providers.

Bittman even went so far as to suggest that service "brokers" could emerge. For example, you've established an SLA with a cloud computing service provider, and for whatever reason, that SLA isn't met (maybe AWS has another glitch). Instantaneously, your broker finds another compatible cloud and "fails-over" instantly to that provider.

Gartner's sense was that there will likely be a few "mega" providers (AWS, Salesforce, Google, MSFT, others) and then hundreds/thousands of smaller mid-market and specialty providers... not unlike the evolution of the hardware market today. And on that note, they also predicted that the hardware providers (like Dell) will probably get into the hardware-as-a-service market shortly as well. That should be interesting to watch.


Cameron Haight
Next, Cameron Haight spoke about emerging "virtualization standards."

He made the very reasonable assumption that users will want to manage multiple VM technologies using a single tool. (And, with a straw-poll, the audience conclusively agreed).

A few of the initiatives already underway include:

* DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) is already working on draft specifications for interesting standards... not for VMs, but for properaties that would aid in management -- such as a Virtual system profile (i.e. for re-creating a set of VMs), and a resource allocation capability profile (i.e. for monitoring managing VM hardware resources like CPU, memory, network ports, storage, etc.

* also an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is underway. This isn't a standard for VM files. Rather, this would tag VMs with metadata to ID them, say for packaging/distribution. For example, it would help characterize what's "inside" a VM before powering it on. My suspicion is that this could be the foundation for a "common" type of SW container, and a common approach to monitoring/managing such VMs. But I also suspect that the vendors will either (a) fight this tooth-and-nail, or (b) adopt it, but "extend" it to suit their needs...

Cameron also ran a few interesting audience polls during his session. Follows are some notes I took, but I believe he'll probably publish them in a forthcoming research note:

Q: What VMware products are you currently using?
71% VirtualCenter
36% Update manager
31% Site recovery manager
23% Lab manager

Q: What do you think is most important for VMware to focus on?
30% optimization of VM performance
18% VM sprawl
16% Maintanance/patching
12% Accounting/chargeback
11% Root-cause analysis

Yep, these pass my sanity check. It should be quite interesting to see what VMware's next moves will be.

Postcards from Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2008

Here I am in Orlando at the Gartner IT conference. The day's been insightful and validating, if you happen to be in the Real-Time Infrastructure (RTI) business.

Andy Kyte
The opening keynote was from Andy Kyte, Gartner VP and Fellow. He's a dynamic speaker, and focussed mostly on IT Modernization and strategy. He was careful to define strategy/strategic planning -- and accused just about every IT management organization of buying "puppies". That is, most orgs buy products because cute "here-and-now" reasons, without realizing that they're really signing-up to a 15-year-long relationship with a dirty, hairy, high-maintenance and expensive pet. His point was validated when he pointed-out all of the point-products that organizations have purchased that essentially only add to cost & complexity, rather than reduce it. He posited that more products have to be purchased with a long-term (7+ years) strategic vision, and that short-term economic validation was often to blame for the morass that IT finds itself within.

Donna Scott
Next was Donna Scott, speaking about IT Ops management trends -- and later on in the day, speaking about IT modernization and RTI. She led-off with a list of projects that enable business growth ... and that projects that don't enable business growth should be canceled.

But most interesting was her coverage of the "cloud" which she (and Thomas Bittman, next) predicted would be where IT is evolving. She suggested that IT ops will evolve into an "insourced hosting" model - where IT departments will be building "internal cloud-computing" style infrastructures to support business owners. We here at Cassatt salute you, since that's what we enable :)

What was also cool about Donna's presentations were her many polls from the audience (probably 1,000 plus). Her first question was "what grade would you give leading IT management providers" 70% of them (CA, BMC, HP and IBM) got a "C" or worse. Her conclusion was that they still don' t manage complexity (they may monitor it, though), they still support the point-solution mentality, and most focus on single homogeneous platforms.

Finally, and most validating, Donna listed the chief properties/components of a Real-time infrastructure system... which she feels is practically on the market. Her list:

• IT services provisioning
• IT services automation (starting & stopping applications as-needed)
• Process automation & change management
• Dynamic Virtualization management
• Services optimization
• Performance management, capacity management.
  

Personally, it sounds like a pretty familiar list. She outlined what RTI could enable; the list was also pretty familiar:

• Service virtualization management
• J2EE management
• Oracle RAC management
• Disaster Recovery - sharing & re-configuring assets
• Managing a shared test environment
• "loosely-coupled" HA - replacing failed nodes
• Dynamic Repurposing nodes
• Dynamic capacity on demand / capacity expansion

Thomas Bittman
Thomas gave a great talk on "Virtualization changes virtually everything"... and essentially outlined the path the industry will likely take towards cloud computing. He essentially pointed out where "automation" is going wrong today... that "automation" tools are focusing on components, rather than on service levels. Until that happens, IT will continue down its complexity path.

Then he hit on a concept that will IMHO be the next big thing: The Meta-O/S. Think of it as an O/S for the data center -- the O/S that enables RTI. For example, what if you started with VirtualCenter, made it work with any VM technology (Xen, MSFT, etc.), made it manage physical/native resources as well, and finally abstracted away the rest of your physical infrastructure? Then, what if it could be told to optimize resources for application service levels , and/or to minimize power or capital or some combination at all times?

We're probably closer to this vision than you think - and the more industry is comfortable with sharing resources, and more dissatisfied with vendor point-solutions, the more it will be accepting of this meta-O/S concept.

I sometimes use this analogy:
What if you walked into a data center and were told to manage it - - 10,000 servers, 100 different HW models, 5,000 applications, various O/S flavors and revs, multiple networks, etc. etc. Well, you *wouldn't* tell me that you'd hire 200 sysadmins, buy multitple software management tools and analysis packages, set up complicated CMDBs and change-management boards, and buy a bunch of pagers for after-hours fire-drills. But that's how it's done today.

Rather (given a clean slate) you'd say "I'd get a computer to figure-out how and when to run applications, and to govern what software was paired with what hardware when. It would prioritize resources, and continually optimize overall operating costs. That's the rational approach. and that's what the Meta-O/S will do.

More IT efficiency metrics: McKinsey & Co. data center study

Last week at the Uptime Institute symposium on IT Energy Efficiency, Will Forest of McKinsey & Co. rolled-out a major study they've done, "Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency". BTW, to my surprise, this report was even picked-up by the New York Times.

True-to-form, the report is chock-full of really great data. Also true-to-form, it has lots of words... and it has (ahem) yes, yet a new IT efficiency metric.

Getting a bit of negativity out of the way first, I can't say that there was anything "revolutionary" in the report, at least in terms of revolutionary recommendations. However, the recommendations were much more detailed/actionable than what I've seen come out of other such reports. And, building on the seminal 2007 EPA report to congress on server and data center energy efficiency, this report definitely has indisputable analysis that data centers are inefficient and energy hogs... and where those inefficiencies lie.

Next, a few high-points from the report:

• 40% of equipment (on average) is in Development/Test, vs. Production
• Data Center greenhouse emissions will surpass that or airlines by 2020
• Server utilization is still low; up to 30% of servers are "dead"; average cooling utilization is only 50%
• The move from mainframes to client/server & multi-tier has exacerbated the problem by creating multiple silos of poor efficiency & utilization -- and encouraging sloppy design

The sources of the crisis suggested by McKinsey include

1. poor application design
2. poor power & cooling design
3. poor capacity management
4. poor application of efficient design & technology
5. lack of Sr. executive oversight of operations & TCO

Now, it wouldn't be a high-end consultant's report if it didn't include a new metric. McKinsey's is called the Corporate Average Data center Efficiency (CADE) = (Facility Efficiency) x (Asset Efficiency).
- Facility Efficiency is defined as (Facility Energy Efficiency) * (Facility Utilization)
- Asset Efficiency is defined as (IT Energy Efficiency) * (IT utilization)

McKinsey also suggested differing types of initiatives (facility-based and IT-based) and the level-of-impact they would have. Aside from the hypothetical nature of this, I *really* like this chart, because it can begin to help IT & facilities professionals rank where to start. I also like it because it explicitly recommends power management solutions.


Anyway, this all makes perfect sense, except for two (pragmatic) issues
(1) The industry can't even agree on what units to use for "efficiency" -- in fact, few can even agree on what "useful work" output of a data center even is.
(2) Just when it looked like there was going to be a simplified efficiency metric (i.e. the PUE, or the Power Usage Effectiveness put forth by The Uptime Institute and Green Grid) now there's another one.

Then, add-in the fact that McKinsey wants to instill a 5-level rating system, with 5 CADE "tiers" (ranging from 0-5%, 5-10%, 10-20%, 20-40% and > 40% efficient) . Nice, if you can just agree on units. Oh - - and that's in addition to a rating system already put forward by the Green Grid, and ranking systems being proposed by the Department of Energy's DC-Pro tool, and the EPA Energy Star program that will (in the future) rank data centers.

Net-net: I'm not dinging McKinsey's desire to throw something unique into the ring. It has merit (I suppose).

In the end, maybe determining the best metric to follow is to take Dr. Ruth's suggestion: Do whatever works for you.

Postcards from day #3, Uptime Institute's Green Enterprise Computing Symposium

Today is the last day at the Uptime Institute's 2008 Symposium, and while it had an abbreviated schedule, it might have been the most information-rich day of all.

Early morning:
We opened with 4 perspectives on public-sector data center work:

On Products:
Andrew Fanara (of the EPA Energy Star program) gave an overview of their progress toward an Energy Star spec for computer servers for Tier-I/Tier-II data center use. The first version of the spec has already gone out for review/comment; the 2nd draft is dues mid-June; the 2nd stakeholder meeting is set for July 7 in the Seattle area; the final version of the spec is targeted by the end of CY2008. Andrew expects the spec to focus on 5 areas:
1) Net AC/DC power efficiency
2) Standardized reporting/polling
3) Power and temperature reporting
4) Idle power levels
5) Power management and virtualization “hooks”

On Buildings & data centers:
Michael Zats (of the EPA buildings division) then went on to describe the Energy Star Labeled Buildings program, and plans to extend the ratings system to data centers. There are currently 1,700 partners leveraging the energy star for buildings program, representing 11 billion square feet of commercial/industrial space. Over 70,000 buildings are currently measured/tracked, and 4,000 buildings have the Energy Star lable (representing the top 20% of the population). Michael is not spinning up a similar program for data centers, and asked the audience for volunteers – EPA needs at least 125 data centers to populate their comparison data base (with 12 months of data) to begin the process… and if you’re interested, materials can be found on the Energy Star Site ; additional inquiries can be made at energystardatacenters@icfi.com

On Data Center Technology:
Paul Scheihing of the US DOE reviewed their Save Energy Now program and their DC-Pro data center assessment too plans. Their goal is to drive a 25% reduction in energy intensity for data centers. They are/will be providing Tools, training, information, standards and assessment tools to the public. But what’s really great about this initiative (far ahead of any private-sector initiative, as far as I can tell) is that it’s got these multiple resources. The tool not only helps you rank the overall efficiency of your data center against others (confidentially, of course) but will provide tons of input/ideas as to where to look for savings and efficiencies. (I actually grabbed Mike Zats outside the hall, and he spoke highly of the DOE’s tool, almost to the point where it was too sophisticated). Paul also made mention of DOE’s sponsoring some technology demonstration projects, but I have yet to see how/when/where these will be presented.

On other public sector work
Ray Pfeifer of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Energy Efficient Data Center Project then gave an overview of their initiatives, with a goal in CA of a 15% reduction in industrial sector consumption. (Cassatt, I might add, is an active member of this project).

Late Morning:

There was then an insightful panel covering external work being done by ASHRAE, SPEC/SPECpower, and the Green Grid – and then, somewhat of a treat: Tosh Shimizo, GM of IT and new business with Tokyo Electric Power Co. gave an overview of his company’s data center facilities and level of power grid reliability. They provide 64GW of power to Tokyo, and have only 3 mins of downtime/year… far better than what is found in the US, the UK, or France.

The second treat was Will Forest of McKinsey & Co. presenting a fantastic data center efficiency report to the group. It’s chock-full of great charts and analyses In short, it focused on improving Power Capacity planning, power efficiency, and asset management. Organizationally, he also advocated the “one throat to choke” approach to making the CIO accountable for the TCO of the entire data center (assets + facility). McKinsey’s recommendation was CADE (Combined Average Data center efficiency) essentially Facility efficiency x Asset efficiency. Deeper-down, facility efficiency is composed of facility energy efficiency * facility utilization, and asset efficiency is composed of IT energy efficiency * IT utilization. Simple…. But I suspect there will be disagreement on units…

Finally, for me, Christina Page, Yahoo!’s director of climate and energy strategy gave a lunchtime presentation on curbing carbon emissions, and what Yahoo! is doing to become carbon-neutral. The big takeaway: not all kilowatts are created equally – be careful *where* you use them (is the source coal? Nuclear? Wind? US? India?) and *when* you use them (peak? Off-peak?). These factors are as important as the net kW that you consume.

Thanks for reading. Now it’s back to the airport…

… and don’t forget the theme: measure, measure, measure.

Postcards from day #2, Uptime Institute's Green Enterprise Computing Symposium

Here I am on Day #2 of what is otherwise an intense immersion into data center management war stories, best practices, studies and standards.

The morning
I do have to note the slow start today bsy ome vendor-sponsored Keynotes. It opened with Mark Thiele, VMware's Director of Business Operations, giving IMHO a distinctly plain-vanilla overview of virtualization's benefits. Yawn. But things picked up with Henry Wong of Intel (and a frequenter of meetings such as this, the Green Grid, and others) giving a somewhat more interesting retrospective -- he had found a presentation given to this group in 2006 called "picking the golden nuggets", 5 suggestions he made to the group a few years ago:

1. Vitualize/consolidate
2. Use power-saving features
3. Turn-off comatose servers
4. Eliminate bloatware
5. Improve site infrastructure energy efficiency

On one hand, it's clear that this is "timeless" information; kudos to Henry. But on the other hand, I ask where have we come in 2 years? Not so far. There's lots of inertia in the system... But he also gave a really interesting perspective on "energy-proportional computing" - whereby you have a completely linear relationship between power consumed, and computing output. A similar proposal was put forward by Google engineers some time ago. But maybe Intel can make it happen.

The third, and most interesting am keynote was from Dave Anderson, IBM's Green Architect. He advocated a completely holistic approach to managing power and energy efficiency in data centers, and predicted that Cloud Computing is ultimately where IT is evolving to. Resources will be dynamically allocated -- with data centers compared to orchestras, where "ensembles" of similar equipment being purposed and re-purposed for like tasks. This is the only way we'll reap breakthrough IT efficiency. Kinda sounds familiar...

Next was a panel on "The business case for IT energy efficiency" moderated by Jon Koomey (of Stanford U as well as Lawrence Berkeley Labs) and Debra Grove, and including Andrew Fanara of the EPA/Energy Star program, and representatives from Allstate Insurance, Yahoo! and HSBC. Talk was wide-ranging, and included the (highly likely) legislation that could help cap/trade carbon emissions, and closing the social division between IT ops and Facilities. And I believe that all agreed that "green" ultimately has to result in $$ savings, not just goodwill.

Afternoon
Following lunch, I gave a talk on "Is it bad to turn off servers - and other myths hurting energy-efficient operation of your data center". Long title, short message: "Conventional wisdom" in data centers is confining our thinking, and limiting breakthrough efficiencies. If we look to combine efficient equipment with efficient operation of that equipment, then we can move beyond incremental efficiency increases.

I then attended an insightful presentation on Energy Star computer power supplies by Chris Calwell of Ecos, and a SPECpower overview by Klaus Lange of SPEC. These guys are the ones doing the heavy-lifting for our benefit. SPECpower had been initiated back in 2006, and is an elegant approach to rating compute load vs. power consumption. It's so easy to run that you can even do it at home -- even though vendors are expected to provide customers with a series of data for their own products. Finally we have a generally-accepted way to benchmark server power consumption under load! Similarly, studies are being done on power supplies for Tier I servers by Ecos (on behalf of Energy Star) for a forthcoming Energy Star ratings. It became clear that many power supplies are likely over-sized -- and, at low loads, are (1) terribly inefficient, and (2) have a seriously-degraded power factor. But there are products out there with superior (90-95%) performance at nearly all power levels.

Evening
We closed today with a reception as well as a series of Uptime Institute Green IT awards for a number of innovative projects - which I believe will be posted to the Uptime Institute Awards site shortly.

Oh - and a somewhat retold refrain heard from a number of participants today: "what are we doing when we get back to the office? measure, measure, measure..."

Postcards from Day #1, Uptime Institute's Green Enterprise Computing Symposium

Well, here we are in Orlando at the Uptime Institute's 2008 symposium on Green Enterprise computing. By Ken Brill's (the Institute's executive director) keynote estimates, we have 442 participants from 13 countries, and roughly a 50:50 split between technology providers and data center management.

Morning Keynote:
Ken Brill and Pitt Turner both gave pretty compelling keynotes -- first, by challenging the participants to providing a 50% energy reduction for data centers in the next 36 months. The possibility of this was driven home by the fact that Amazon Web Services can already deliver a CPU-Instance/Hour for $0.10. Could the rest of us? But more on all of this later.

Ken pointed out that at the current rate, there will be 15 million servers running by 2010, with that number doubling every 5 years or so. And what was really riveting was that the largest 1/3 of membership's data centers is growing at 27% CAGR; and even the average data center growth for membership was 12% CAGR. Clearly there is a massive construction (and energy use) boom in data centers in the U.S. This spells crisis.

Next, he focused on the excalating power/OpEx costs of operating a $2.5k server -- with much data taken from Jon Koomey's excellent studies. In a Tier II data center, that server's OpEx costs for power topped $5k; in a Tier III data center, OpEx costs were $7.7k, and in a Tier IV environment, power OpEx costs were a whopping $8.4k... all with power costs far outstripping the capital costs.

And so, Ken's request to the group: the only way to obtain a breakthrough 50% improvement on data center power consumption was to look at IT Operations, as driven from top-line management... rather than to pursue it from incremental facilities-based improvements.

Morning sessions
Ironically, two of the first three sessions of the morning - one on DC power, the other on power & cooling - focused on infrastructure improvements. And this, in my opinion, set the somewhat sobering theme for the day: while the participants would *like* to get to breakthrough energy strategies, the vendors are mostly stuck in pursing only incremental improvements. (Example: why would a leading power/cooling vendor focus on talking about hot/cold aisle containment, when they could have included forward-thinking adaptive management technologies that place cooling where it's needed while encouraging compute workload management?)

Next I attended a reasonably interesting roundtable panel titled "What can IT executives to Right Now to Increase Energy Efficiency?" co-chaired by Will Forest and Matt Stansberry. It became clear pretty early that the issue-at-hand wasn't one directly of technology. Rather, it was social: IT is incentivized on Uptime and on service delivery... not on power/energy cost. So, the concept of chargebacks, cost-transparency, and the "shining a flashlight" on cost are some of the places to begin to change behavior.

Afternoon Sessions
There were a number of other interesting breakout sessions including mine, chaired by Jon Koomey titled "Enabling Power Features to save 30+ percent". Jon kept this pretty focused, and we had a lively session with representives from HP, Microsoft, IBM, Visa and me from Cassatt. In the end, I think the room agreed that power-management and server hibernation features could indeed be leveraged to save significant power, but had to be implemented wisely, with potential tradeoffs between efficiency and high-availability. But, in a number of cases, this approach was highly warranted.

Other fun diversions today:

• Chatting-it up with the very insightful bloggers Dave O'Hara of the Green Data Center Blog and Debra Grove of Grove Consulting (also with an excellent overview of the day in her blog)
  
• Taking a tour of Rackable Systems' ICE Cube Data Center container
• Sharing a drink (or two or three) with Kevin Heslin of Mission Critical Magazine

More Data Center Energy Efficiency Surveys

Back in January, I posted a blog with data from a survey Cassatt conducted with hundreds of IT professionals about energy efficiency. I also posted a follow-up blog citing a number of other surveys.

So, in keeping with the theme, I've found a few more resonating surveys and pieces of data.

First: Ken Brill of The Uptime Institute just published a survey on "Data Center Capacity and Energy Efficiency" indicating some amazing factoids about "the invisible crisis" that's looming:

• 42% claimed their data centers would run out of power in 12-24 months
• 23% claimed their data centers would run out of power in 24-60 months
• 39% claimed their data centers would run out of cooling in 12-14 months
• 21% claimed their data centers would run out of cooling in 24-60 months

Next: Paul McGuckin of Gartner Research just published the 2007 Data Center Conferenct Poll Results for Power and Cooling Issues. The first of many findings tables tells quite a story:

Other high-points from Gartner:

• Power capacity has overtaken cooling capacity as the #1 facility problem in their current data center. Gartner attributes this to the high-density equipment being purchased and rolled out.
• Companies must do some sort of facility-related action to deal with this problem (including expansion, upgrade, and even relocation). Only 10% said they would take no action.

Net-net: It would appear that many data centers have ~ 2 years or less of runway left. Given that most new data center projects take a year or more to fund and build, it would seem that 2008/9 are the years that the industry will really begin to make some changes.

Postcards from IT Financial Management Association Meeting

I am writing this on my way back from a speaking engagement at the IT Financial Management Association’s meeting in Austin TX where I discussed some new metrics and perspectives for measuring costs in shared IT infrastructures from Cassatt's perspective.

The ITFMA is an undiscovered gem-of-a-conference *if* you’re on the finance side of the house supporting IT. Heavy on the analysis, discussion and interaction, and light on the vendor pitches (unless you’re IBM). With between 200-300 attendees, this could be one of the last ‘hard-core’ conferences for IT (financial) professionals. In my talk, only a handful of folks in the audience described themselves as technical – all others were in the controllers/CFO office. And this was substantiated by looking at the attendees list.

The 4 day conference was broken down into four tracks: IT financial management for controllers/CFOs, IT asset management, IT performance management and benchmarking, and Government IT financial management.

For the first time it was clear to me how technology was only part of the challenge for enterprises – managing the business, cost-accounting, asset-management, compliance, etc. is just as much of a burden. To that end, there were a number of recurring themes that kept re-surfacing, even for the one day I was present:

• ITIL and ITSM (IT Service Management): process is a big deal, especially to the bean counters. While most think ITIL handles technical processes like config. Management, it’s just as applicable to service and financial management.
• CBDBs – especially as they related to asset tracking and working capital
• Chargebacks – lots of conversation about these, but I bet only ½ to 1/3 of attendee companies actually do this
• True costs of IT – a major recurring theme. How cost is computed, allocated, and controlled.
• Change management – many agreed that change management is the largest cost sink-hole around. Controlling and tracking changes – especially unplanned changes – is the largest headache IT financial managers face

To the last point, a book called “The Visible OPs” (available via the IT Process Institute) was heralded as a great way to look at IT financial operations through the eyes of ITIL.

From a speaker perspective, there was a really healthy ratio of "end user" war stories: Steve Rossi, the CFO from the state of North Carolina; Arlan Holmes, the deputy CIO from the state of Missouri; Daniel Elvera, the director of IT Finance from First Data; Patricia Harceg, AVP from Wachovia; and dozens more.

The next ITFMA meeting is June 2-6 in Riverside CA - with another down-n-dirty agenda including more on ITIL and chargebacks.

Postcards from IDC's Green IT Forum

I just got back from the 1-day Green IT Forum IDC held in NY last week. I have to say it was pretty-well attended by the IT director/VP types from NY financial firms and the like.

Matt Eastwood and Vernon Turner opened the day with a refreshingly broad definition of "Green IT" -- rather than harping on the usual myopic chats about power and cooling. Rather, their definition includes Energy, materials, recycling, etc., and the intersection of Corporate Social Responsibility, economics and technology. They have a very comprehensive framework to encompass a holistic approach to an organization's "greenness". It involves 9 areas:

• Power & cooling
• Flexible employment
• Economic development
• Reverse logistics
• Diversity
• Philanthropy
• Supply-chain ethics
• Community/NGO involvement
• Carbon trading

What's great is that they are not confining the conversation to the data center perspective; rather, they are looking at how IT technology can impact work - telecommuting, telepresence, etc., as well as many of the traditional IT efficiency approaches. (BTW, in a former life, I helped Sun Microsystems launch their OpenWork practice of flexible/remote work - which is credited with saving the company scads of energy, office space, and employee time).

Steve Sams (IBM's VP of global technology services & facility services) also gave an insightful talk of how they've been approaching the efficiency/economics issue over the years. Part of the problem, he observed, was that 77% of Data Center ops people *don't* pay their own electric bills... so where was their economic incentive to improve? This of course implied that the financial relationships of IT need to change to properly incent/reward the people consuming the energy and generating the waste.

Most sobering -- to me anyway -- was the talk given by Vijay Sankaran (director of infrastructure operations) at Ford. This guy had the 'open kimono' delivery, admitting to the fact that they (like all large enterprises) have thousands of Intel, AIX, HP, Sun etc. etc. servers around the globe, and that he's facing a multi-stage multi-year effort to trim and simplify. Admittedly, he said, there is no point-solution that will help; rather it was a matter of standardizing on fewer platforms, consolidating data centers, and implementing strong process control. And only then will they achieve the types of efficiencies where they can call themselves "green".

I have to say that I was somewhat unimpressed by the VMware break-out presentation, which sounded like every other VMware presentation I've attended. (But it was amusing to hear an audience member ask about pricing pressures caused by a number of other virtualization entrants -- and to hear the VMware rep essentially capitulate to the fact that prices for VMs will come down.) And, although I had high expectations for a presentation from Wachovia, I was also pretty unimpressed by their talk as well.

Closing the day, however, there was a reasonably interesting panel made up of representatives from Credit Suisse, Wm Wrigley Jr. Co., Citigroup and Pepco Holdings. These folks reinforced Matt & Vernon's opening points -- each of them was taking a significantly holistic approach to environmentalism and corporate social responsibility, and IT efficiency was only a part of the imperative.