The Dilbert Life Series – A Bad Manager’s Priorities

As usual the normal disclaimer applies: don’t take yourself to seriously. Relax

Where great managers can make a serious difference in many ways to both the success of a company and to the personal achievements of their employees the opposite also happens. Many types of managers exist. Dealing with or even controlling them, depending on whether you live above or under them is well documented. The aim of that is to get the best out of the resources and people available. The better the managers, the better this will work out. Perfection is not of this world and you won’t have the best possible manager for every possible position. That’s a given, just like they won’t have the best possible employee or consultant for every job or project. So there is no need to get emotional about it or expect perfection before calling something good. There is however one type, the bad manager, that should not be controlled. They should be dealt with in only one way which is termination. If that’s not possible you need to get as far away from them as possible. Mind you the latter is only an option if you’re a subordinate employee. If, as a boss you run away from bad subordinate manager than you really need to reconsider your career choices.

Me, Myself and I

A bad manager will never choose you over his or her own priorities, nor will they put the organizations needs first. The first is by definition. Don’t take it personal. The company does not exist for your needs. The second is more problematic as the organization’s needs are priority one. Let’s take a look their priorities in order of declining importance as determined by experience.

1.  Me, myself and I. This is normal and it applies to everyone. But there is more to this than just plain self-interest. People who are given or rise to power, have a strong tendency to put their own needs and interests above those of others. Your manager’s ambitions & agenda (professional, personal and financial) will always take precedence of any need you might have. They need to fill their treasury and the pressure to “live up to expectations” of their overlords is on.
2. Reputation. Managers need to be seen & act as very reliable, trustworthy persons who can get results. With some luck they are. But we all know about “perception is reality”. This is true until you hit the ground after jumping of the 36 floor because you pretend you can fly. Whether a bad manager actually delivers anything is irrelevant as long as the perception is there. Office politics are part of the game and they don’t take prisoners. Your boss is going to be more prone to protect his or her reputation than to protect yours. That’s why managers get pissed off about even only a perceived loss of reputation. In the dog eat dog world they’ll even ruin your reputation if and when needed as they can’t be seen as the root cause of problems. They’ll blatantly steal your work and take credit for all that goes well in the same way. You’re an expendable asset and you should never forget it.
3. Their superiors. This is both hierarchical and functional. It’s not only the fact that a lot of people feel the need to please others for whatever reason. It is also just self-interest (promotions, ego) and self-preservation. So realize that your managers will almost always choose to follow their bosses or the peers they fear or need in order to gain a stronger or more favorable position with them. Yes, they will do so even if it is bad for the company or organization. This holds a warning: if you’re a functional superior to your managers than you’re a threat and they might try to get rid of you.
4. Customers. You can forget about being more important than the needs of the customers. Whether these are external or internal customers is irrelevant. Your managers job is to serve the need of the customers. Your managers will not get ahead if he doesn’t serve their needs.
5. The team. Yes the team, the assets are more important than you. As long as managers can have the team do what needs to be done, they have a way of serving the above priorities, which are more important. In that respect the ability of a manager to keep the team running is paramount. They’ll feed the teams just enough to keep them alive, hopeful enough to carry on and will challenges them to keep them sharp. Keep ‘m mean, lean & hungry.
6. You. Sure you have some skills they needs. If not they might keep you around just to add another FTE to the head count in order to proof the importance or the weight of their jobs. So he won’t kick you most of the time and will even throw you a bone every now and then. Good doggy. But you know that saying “People are our biggest asset?” It’s a lie, especially to them.

How to deal with this?

The above is always true in a lesser way for all individuals and as such also for managers. The big difference is that the balance has totally shifted to the dark side with really bad ones. In essence you have a couple of options. Grow a pair of balls and make sure you have some power as well, play the same game and get them terminated. If your upper management is worth their pay they might be way ahead of you and that will bet the end of it for you. If it has to come from the bottom realize that this is not easy. Terminating a manager from lower in the hierarchy always upsets the powers that be. To them such an event is highly disconcerting and visions of guillotines, tar, feathers and pitch forks pop up. Another option is to take evasive maneuvers. You could do so by moving laterally or vertically in the organization out of harm’s way. Last but not least. Leave. Yes, that might not be fair on you and what you already accomplished at the company but life is not fair and is certainly too precious to put up with the above. In the end you must know your opponent and know yourself. Perhaps you can live with them and there are various ways of dealing with various types of managers, who all have their weaknesses and strengths. It’s a personal decision, but a real bad manager, that’s something you really can do without and shouldn’t tolerate ever, for your own health and well-being.

Key Take Aways From MMS2013

Introduction

I’ve parked myself at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas awaiting the start of my long haul home to Europe. The new terminal is inspiring me to share as I reflect on the past week and on what’s happening at work.

ICT in the 21st Century

A lot is going on and moving in ICT and even more is coming our way. In the Microsoft sphere we got the official heads up at MMS2013 that new features would be publicly discussed at TechEd 2013 (USA or Europe). So you might want to attend that one. I for one think that’s great. We need that information to verify we’re still are on the right track and fine tune our course. Especially in those areas where we can get quick wins with sometimes significant cost savings & benefits.  I could start telling you about all the great sessions and products at MMS2013 whilst quacking like a duck “cloud, cloud, …, cloud, cloud, cloud, … cloud”. But I will not. You can watch it all here.  I will reflect on the key take away.

Cheaper & Faster

Cheaper AND faster are the new mantra or’ “fast is the new cheap”. Cheaper makes everyone happy especially when quality remains high. Faster is sometimes a bit more of a challenge to sell. “New features, already?”  you say. Yes. The nature of our economies and industry is being transformed by the cloud and commoditization. It brings a lot of benefits, especially in a high speed, low drag world.

Fast is actually faster. For many years now any strategy & execution plan that took more than a couple of years was doomed. You get bypassed and your big investments will never live up to their potential. So, apart from the necessary larger and more long term investments, we evolve more and more towards a perpetual improvements & rapid adoption model. Innovation and the subsequent commoditization of it is pushing this. That’s not bad. By making constant smaller (easier to fund) investments that deliver fast results we get to a more adaptable, agile environment for lesser costs. It’s not that all long term, large scale projects are going away but the ratio is shifting. In smart countries this is already being done for building hospitals and other infrastructure that evolves fast. It’s not unique to ICT. Massive projects taking too long and too much funding lead to out of date solutions at the time of delivery at huge costs. Use this approach where needed but forget about it for the other projects. Cloud will be an important tool in all this, not the goal.

A Word of Warning

Fast and cheap shouldn’t translate into mediocre crap at dump pricing that will bite us. It should also keep in mind the ecosystem and don’t act like a shock & awe offensive leaving everything in it’s track in disarray. It needs to fit into a plan with clear goals an knowing where it fits in and helps.  It’s about balance. That’s the art. Knowing what, where, when and with/for who to do it. Not easy. Now let’s hope some of my managers read this blog. It might help them. As the question beckons an answer: who is it that will lead us in this new era? Well not one single person, far from it. It’s a team effort and to lead a team takes competence and some character.

It takes competence and personality

Competence and personality, combined with  applying both these (skills and  drive) diligently in a sustained fashion. That requires a lot of effort, even when no one is watching you, or perhaps better stated, especially then. Do what needs to be done where and when needed. Not because it could get you promoted or more money. That’s the character part. That’s what drives us to learn by participating in our ICT communities, presenting, attending conferences and networking. But also in those hours spend reading, studying and working in the lab alone or with a buddy. That’s what will make us able to handle the though and bad situations you’ll encounter and overcome them. It’s your resourcefulness that will make you seek and find opportunity in adverse conditions. People like the team members amongst whom I have the distinct pleasure of working. You can’t find such synergy if it’s only about personal gain and getting ahead. There is both a broad and deep skill set needed by all involved and doesn’t come easy nor can it be bought. It has to be acquired through work and experience. The transformation of the ICT landscape is uncharted domain for all but a few of us so it’s going to ask a lot of effort, often outside of our comfort zone.

Sure there are cynics who laugh at this and can’t imagine why someone would do all that without personal and immediate reward. Those are the ones we don’t need and who won’t be there at crunch time. Only after the facts they seek the spotlight to poach the glory if things went well or to condemn those that failed whilst trying. Well, the last so called leader who did that doesn’t work with us anymore. Enough said.

A reality Check On Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Introduction

Another blog post in “The Dilbert Life Series®” for those who are not taking everything personal. Every time business types start talking about business continuity, for some reason, call it experience or cynicism, my bull shit & assumption sensors go into high alert mode. They tend to spend a certain (sometimes considerable) amount of money on connectivity, storage, CPUs at a remote site, 2000 pages of documentation and think that covers just about anything they’ll need. They’ll then ask you when the automatic or 5 minute failover to the secondary site will be up and running. That’s when the time has come to subdue all those inflated expectations and reduce the expectation gap between business and IT as much as possible. It should never have come to that in the first place. But in this matter business people & analysts alike, often read (or are fed) some marchitecture docs with a bunch of sales brochures which make it al sound very easy and quickly accomplished. They sometimes think that the good old IT department is saying “no” again just because they are negative people who aren’t team players and lack the necessary “can do attitude” in world where their technology castle is falling down. Well, sorry to bust the bubble, but that’s not it. The world isn’t quite that black and white. You see the techies have to make it work and they’re the ones who have to deal with the real. Combine the above with a weak and rather incompetent IT manager bending over to the business (i.e. promising them heaven on earth) to stay in there good grace and it becomes a certainty they’re going to get a rude awakening. Not that the realities are all that bad. Far from it, but the expectations can be so high and unrealistic that disappointment is unavoidable.

The typical flow of things

The business is under pressure from peers, top management, government & regulators to pay attention to disaster recovery. This, inevitably leads to an interest in business continuity. Why, well we’re in a 24/7 economy and your consumer right to buy a new coffee table on line at 03:00 AM on a Sunday night is worth some effort.  So if we can do it for furniture we should certainly have it for more critical services. The business will hear about possible (technology) solutions and would like to see them implemented. Why wouldn’t they? It all sounds effective and logical. So why aren’t we all running of and doing it? Is it because IT is a bunch of lazy geeks playing FPS games online rather than working for their mythically high salaries? How hard can it be? It’s all over the press that IT is a commodity, easy, fast, dynamic and consumer driven so “we” the consumers want our business continuity now! But hey it costs money, time, a considerable and sustained effort and we have to deal with the less than optimal legacy applications (90% of what you’re running right now).

Realities & 24/7 standby personnel

The acronyms & buzz words the business comes up with after attending some tech briefing by Vendors Y & Z (those are a bit like infomercials but without the limited value those might have ) can be quite entertaining. You could say these people at least pay attention to the consumerized business types. Well actually they don’t, but they do smell money and lots of it. Technically they are not lying. In a perfect world things might work like that … sort of, some times and maybe even when you need it. But it will really work well and reliable. Sure that’s not the vendors fault. He can’t help  that the cool “jump of a cliff” boots he sold you got you killed. Yes they are designed to jump of a cliff but anything above 1 meter without other precautions and technologies might cause bodily harm or even death. But gravity and its effects in combination with the complexity of your businesses are beyond the scope of their product solutions and are entirely your responsibility. Will you be able to cover all those aspects?

Also don’t forget the people factor. Do you have the right people & skill sets at your disposal 24/7 for that time when disaster strikes? Remember that could be on a hot summer night in a weekend when they are enjoying a few glasses of wine at a BBQ party and not at 10:15 AM on a Tuesday morning.

So what terminology flies around?

They hear about asynchronous or even synchronous replication of storage of applications. Sure it can work within a data center, depending on how well it is designed and setup. It can even work between data centers, especially for applications like Exchange 2010. But let’s face it, the technical limitations and the lack of support for this in many of the legacy applications will hinder this considerably.

They hear of things like stretched clusters and synchronous storage replication. Sure they’ll sell you all kinds of licensed features to make this works at the storage level with a lot of small print. Sometimes even at the cost of losing functionality that makes the storage interesting in the first place. At the network level anything below layer 3 probably suffers from too much optimism. Sure stretched subnets seem nice but … how reliable are these solutions in real live?

Consider the latency and less reliable connectivity.You can and will lose the link once in a while. With active-active or active-passive data centers that depend on each other both become single points of failure. And then there are all the scenarios where only one part of the entire technology stack that makes everything work fails. What if the application clustering survives but not the network, the storage or the database? You’re toast any way. Even worse, what if you get into a split brain scenario and have two sides writing data. Recover from that one my friend, there’s no merge process for that, only data recovery. What about live migration or live motion (state, storage, shared nothing) across data centers to avoid an impending disaster? That’s a pipe dream at the moment people. How long can you afford for this to take even if your link is 99.999% reliable? Chances are that in a crisis things need to happen vast to avoid disaster and guess what even in the same data center, during normal routine operations, we’re leveraging <1ms latency 10Gbps pipes for this. Are we going to get solutions that are affordable and robust? Yes, and I think the hypervisor vendors will help push the entire industry forward when I see what is happening in that space but we’re not in Walhalla yet.

Our client server application has high availability capabilities

There are those “robust and highly available application architectures” (ahum) that only hold true if nothing ever goes wrong or happens to the rest of the universe. “Disasters” such as the server hosting the license dongle that is rebooted for patching. Or, heaven forbid, your TCP/IP connection dropped some packages due to high volume traffic. No we can’t do QoS on the individual application level and even if we could it wouldn’t help. If your line of business software can’t handle a WAN link without serious performance impact or errors due to a dropped packet, it was probably written and tested on  <1ms latency networks against a database with only one active connection. It wasn’t designed, it was merely written. It’s not because software runs on an OS that can be made highly available and uses a database that can be clustered that this application has any high availability, let alone business continuity capabilities. Why would that application be happy switching over to another link. A link that is possibly further away and running on less resources and quite possibly against less capable storage? For your apps to works acceptably in such scenarios you would already have to redesign them.

You must also realize that a lot of acquired and home written software has IP addresses in configuration files instead of DNS names. Some even have IP addresses in code.  Some abuse local host files to deal with hard coded DNS names … There are tons of very bad practices out there running in production. And you want business continuity for that? Not just disaster recovery  to be clear but business continuity, preferably without dropping one beat. Done any real software and infrastructure engineering in your life time have you? Keeping a business running often looks like a a MacGyver series. Lots creativity, ingenuity, super glue, wire, duct tape and Swiss army knife or multi tool. This is still true today, it doesn’t sound cool to admit to it, but it needs to be said.

We can make this work with the right methodologies and strict processes

Next time you think that, go to the top floor and jump of, adhering to the flight methodologies and strict processes that rule aerodynamics. After the loud thud due to you hitting the deck, you’ll be nothing more than a pool of human waste. You cannot fly. On top of unrealistic scenarios things change so fast that documentation and procedures are very often out of date as soon as they are written.

Next time some “consultants” drop in selling you products & processes with fancy acronyms proclaiming rigorous adherence to these will safe the day consider the following. They make a bold assumption given the fact they don’t know even 10% of the apps and processes in your company. Even bolder because they ignore the fact that what they discover in interviews often barely scratches the surface. People can only tell you what they actually know or dare tell you. On top of that any discovery they do with tools is rather incomplete. If the job consist of merely pushing processes and methodologies around without reality checks you could be in for a big surprise. You need the holistic approach here, otherwise it’s make believe. It’s a bit like paratrooper training for night drops over enemy strong holds, to attack those and bring ‘m down. Only the training is done in a heated class room during meetings and on a computer. They do not ever put on all their gear, let alone jump out of an aircraft in the dead of night, regroup, hump all that gear to the rally points and engage the enemy in a training exercise. Well people, you’ll never be able to pull of business continuity in real life either if you don’t design and test properly and keep doing that. It’s fantasy land. Even in the best of circumstances no plan survives it first contact with the enemy and basically you would be doing the equivalent of a trooper firing his rifle for the very first time at night during a real engagement. That’s assuming you didn’t break your neck during the drop, got lost and managed to load the darn thing in the first place.

You’re a pain in the proverbial ass to work with

Am I being to negative? No, I’m being realistic. I know reality is a very unwelcome guest in fantasy land as it tends to disturb the feel good factor. Those pesky details are not just silly technological “manual labor” issues people. They’ll kill your shiny plans, waste tremendous amounts of money and time.

We can have mission critical applications protected and provide both disaster recovery and business continuity. For that the entire solution stack need to be designed for this. While possible, this makes things expensive and often only a dream for custom written and a lot of the shelf software. If you need business continuity, the applications need to be designed and written for it. If not, all the money and creativity in the world cannot guarantee you anything. In fact they are even at best ugly and very expensive hacks to cheap and not highly available software that poses as “mission critical”.

Conclusion

Seriously people, business continuity can be a very costly and complex subject. You’ll need to think this through. When making assumptions realize that you cannot go forward without confirming them. We operate by the mantra “assumptions are the mother of al fuckups” which is nothing more than the age old “Trust but verify” in action. There are many things you can do for disaster recovery and business continuity. Do them with insight, know what you are getting into and maybe forget about doing it without one second of interruption for your entire business.

Let’s say disaster strikes and the primary data center is destroyed. If you can restart and get running again with only a limited amount of work and productivity lost, you’re doing very well. Being down for only a couple of hours or days or even a week, will make you one of the top performers. Really! Try to get there first before thinking about continuous availability via disaster avoidance and automatic autonomous failovers.

One approach to achieve this is what I call “Pandora’s Box”. If a company wants to have business continuity for its entire stack of operations you’ll have to leave that box closed and replicate it entirely to another site. When you’re hit with a major long lasting disaster you eat the down time and loss of a certain delta, fire up the entire box in another location. That way you can avoid trying to micro manage it’s content. You’ll fail at that anyway. For short term disasters you have to eat the downtime. Deciding when to fail over is a hard decision. Also don’t forget about the process in reverse order. That’s another part of the ball game.

It’s sad to see that more money is spend consulting & advisers daydreaming than on realistic planning and mitigation. If you want to know why this is allowed to happen there’s always my series on The do’s and don’ts when engaging consultants Part I and Part II. FYI, the last guru I saw brought into a shop was “convinced” he could open Pandora’s Box and remain in control. He has left the building by now and it wasn’t a pretty sight, but that’s another story.

Yahoo’s “Physically Together” is Management Failure

I’m awaiting boarding at SEATAC and browsing the news. I suggest you read “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More and consider the quote below.

“… Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home  …”

If I was working for Yahoo I’d be jumping the ship. That mentality just doesn’t compute. If anything I have seen the working conditions become worse and worse in offices over the past decade. All the new open/flex work office plans with the continuous interrupts, office chit chat & gossip, noise and countless never ending meetings (I guess partially to escape the louse desk experience) are probably very good for the bottom line but all the rest of it seems to be working out a lot less well.

Granted, part of that is because of bad execution. It works if you can and will adopt that culture. But more often than not they just transplant the old ways into the new office environment with disastrous results. But the savings are there; so they don’t really mind. Just like they don’t mind outsourcing or consultants. Those don’t come into the office either but they do help reduce head count and CAPEX, whatever helps the excel sheet look better. Speed and quality can often suffer as well in these cases but then the response is to have better governance and processes , not to drag them all into the landscape office meadow.

And as far as speed and quality … I’ll be crystal clear, I’m not buying that for one second. If I had not been responding to alerts (we have no on call) on weekends the company would no longer exist. It would have lost it’s entire infrastructure a couple of times with little or no hope of recovery. If they force me to be at the office between 08:30 and 17:30 every day they would not get that commitment and I would work a lot less hours. The same goes for my team. We expect a lot and we give a lot. Checks and balances. How are you supposed to build a top notch team on mediocre management practices is beyond me. We put in the effort because that’s what we give back to our employers in return for a lot of flexibility and freedom on how we organize ourselves and the team.

Some middle management that wants hot bodies in the seats to respond to every question they have is very worrying to me and those people have no sense of real priorities. Perhaps of self importance, yes, but not priorities Look organize yourself any way you need to to deliver what ever it is but the above quote executed across the board is sad in it’s simplification and denial of realities.

But go ahead. Sacrifice your agility and flexibility to be able to keep operations going during snow storms, flu pandemics and go on wasting time and resources commuting during peak traffic hours. The trick to making all of this work is to make it part of the normal way of working. The ration of type of flex and telework might change during such times but that’s it. Any organization who cannot see this, act on it and leverage the new possibilities technology offers us is a victim of management failure. These across the board decisions are a clear sign of that and make me list Yahoo on the “Unsuitable Employers” list. As their speed and quality may very well suffer from this decision.

Are you perhaps saying your employees are goofing of at home and are under performing? Well if physical presence is the only way to make sure they are doing a good job you’re really in trouble. You have many other and more serious problems I think and good luck to you if you think pulling then back into the office will fix this. Probably this is really the issue. They’ve lost insight in who does what and why. End states are not defined, lack of accountability, … or otherwise put: management failure.

Or are you a serious professional who can’t stand the idea of your senior engineer sitting in his pajamas writing code or building a cluster at 10:00 or 22:00 hours? You think he needs to be in khakis and shirt? If it’s the pajama image you could consider hiring super models as engineers, the idea will become a lot more pleasant,  I guarantee it . Or are you worried about the odd working hours and the impact on the well being of your employees? Changes are they’ll do that anyway or even more when having to be in the office. They can’t get the real work done when having to sit in that sub optimal cube all day and dealing with all the senseless interrupts.

What if people don’t flee you because of this policy but just zone out. They show up for whatever mandatory time they need to. When shuffled like cattle into their cubicles and or pastures (open landscape offices) they’ll put on their noise cancellation headsets, run of to meetings (anything to escape the chaos and interrupt hell the modern office environment has become. Their talent, engagement, motivation and zeal will go to what they love to do and those organizations will end up as mediocre players putting in the bear minimum. Well played. Look, today we’re expected to be able to work from anywhere at any time and indeed technology has enabled this for a significant amount of people. A lot of us do that and we’re very flexible about it as we commit to our jobs and working lives in ever more flexible ways. Now on top of that they expect us to show up on the clock and proof attendance in a rather than creating a win-win situation?

On top of that they do this in a time where managers claim that talent will flee companies that do not allow BYOD or other consumer IT.  Really, but having old school office organizations wont? Flexibility works both ways. Employees can be very efficient and committed. But any manager looking to extract every last ounce of profit or plays power games because they can’t deal with end state management will loose more then they will ever gain. A BYOD device policy cannot attract and retain the best of the best. Trust me, those fine employees will figure out very fast that they’ll choose flex time, telecommuting, better pay and extra paid holidays over that stupid iPad or iPhone. Consumerization of ICT means they don’t need your technology and devices. They’ll buy their own and use it for their own advancement and interest and you’ll be left in your holding the short end of the stick. You shouldn’t care that your  employees make you money while stepping on a cross trainer at home or even from their bath tub.

I really don’t buy into the fact that this is all complicating the creation of products or the delivery of services. It also doesn’t ruin any long term supportability. People will go where they think they are best off.  So what is this move? A need to reduce head count and trying to achieve this by people calling it quit voluntarily? So basically you’re even unable to fix performance issues with your feedback/planning and evaluation system? Oh boy. So what if your best quit and the worst show up at the office? Yahoo’s in a pretty bad state it seems.

Is it a power play and about limiting options for people to see how obedient they are? If all the “our employees are our biggest and most important resource” is true some things would be really different. For one your employees would tell you to stop considering and treating them a resource to move around at will. After all this is not an national crisis and this is not the military at war. In a real war for talent employees would interview you whether to see if you’re even worth working for. Most companies don’t like the power to shift to the employees to far. They have seen this for short periods of time in certain professions and they still haven’t recovered from that shock to their system. They’d rather have less of it, not more. It’s all way to complicated for them to handle and manage. It also costs them more.

Are Data Tsunamis Inevitable Or Man Made Disasters?

What happens when people who have no real knowledge and context about how to handle data, infrastructure or applications insist on being in charge and need to be seen as taking strong decisive actions without ever being held responsible? It leads to real bad, often silly decisions with a bunch of unintended consequences. Storage vendors love this. More iron to sell. And yes, all this is predictable. When I’m able and allowed to poke around in storage and the data stored I often come to the following conclusion: there’s a bulk amount of data that is stored in an economical unsound fashion. Storage vendors & software vendors love this, as there are now data life cycle management tools & appliances to be sold.

The backlash of all this is? Cost cutting, which then leads to the data that has valid needs to be stored and protected not getting the resources it should. Why? Well who’s going to take responsibility to push the delete button to remove the other data? As we get ever better technology to store, transport and protect data we manage to do more with less money and personnel. But as is often the case, no good deed goes unpunished. Way to often these savings or efficiencies flow straight into the bottomless pit caused by that age old “horror vacui” principle in action in the world of data storage.

You get situations like this: “Can I have 60TB of storage?  It’s okay, I discussed this with your colleague last year, he said you’d have 60TB available at this time frame”

What is the use case? How do you need it? What applications or services will consume this storage? Do you really need this to be on a SAN or can we dump this in cost effective Windows Server Storage Spaces with ReFS? What are the economics involved around this data? Is it worth doing? What projects is this assigned to? Who’s the PM? Where is the functional analysis. Will this work? Has there been a POC? Was that POC sound? Was there a pilot? What the RTO? The RPO? Does it need to be replicated off site? What IOPS is required? How will it be accessed? What security is needed? Any encryption required? Any laws affecting the above? All you get is a lot of vacant blank stares and lot’s of “just get it done”. How can it be that with so many analysts and managers of all sorts running around to meeting after meeting, all in order to get companies running like a well oiled slick mean machine, we end up with this question at the desk of an operational systems administrator as a result? Basically what are you asking for? Why are you asking this and did you think this through?

Consider the following. What if you asked for 30 billion gallons of water at our desk and we say “sure” and just sent it to you. We did what you asked. Perhaps you meant bottled drinking water but below is what you’ll end up with. And yes it completely up to specifications, limited as they are.

The last words heard while drowning will be “Who ordered this? You can bet no one will be responsible, especially not when the bill arrives and when the resulting mess needs to be cleaned up. Data in the cloud will not solve this. Like the hosting business, who serve up massive amount of idle servers, the cloud will host massive amounts of idle data as in both situations it’s providing the service that generates revenue, not the real use of that service by you or it’s economic value to you.

Attending The Converged Infrastructure Think Tank At Dell Technology Camp 2013

I’m travelling to Amsterdam tomorrow to contribute in a “Think Thank on Converged Infrastructure” during the Dell Technology Camp 2013. The topic of this technology camp is the Evolution of the Data Center, hence the think tank on the converged infrastructure.

If you have any views on this subject, questions, or perhaps even “angsts” share them via twitter and we’ll see if we can discuss these. Don’t be shy! I’m pretty much a practical guys and for me any technology, no matter how much fun I have with them, is a means to an end. That means I think that a converged infrastructure can work for both the SMB/SME & large Enterprises if you do it right and at a good & affordable price level. Right sizing without getting stuck in that size, whilst not overpaying for future proofing is important. Long term in IT is a crap shoot .

The biggest risks here is that the vendors don’t get what doing it right means & what is affordable. From the Microsoft community we’ve been discussing concepts like a Cluster in Box as a building block and other features that Windows Server 2012 enables for us. So far we’ve seen very low interest from the big vendors. From SMB to SME, we sometimes feel that OEMs look more at each other than at their customers needs and pursue agendas that fit only the bigger environments & pockets. Some partners look way to hard at their bottom line to be considered trusted advisors; They’ve lost the “VA” in Value Added Reseller. Serve your customers needs and you’ll have a business. Ignore us and you’ won’t ever have to deal with or worry about us again .

On the other side I see the bigger players struggle with processes, methodologies and separation of roles that only hinder progress and prevent agile and dynamic IT.

We’ll see what the other attendees have to say, as I’m very interested in that. Looking at what other industries & roles think and do – and why – can be very educational. Vendors & Partners have a very different view on the matters than end customers have and the good ones know how to match both worlds to everyone’s benefit & satisfaction.

Follow the action on twitter via  #DellTechCamp, via live streams on http://www.fittotweet.com/events/techcamplive/ or https://www.etouches.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=53104&.

The Zombie ISV®

The Zombie ISV® is the type that should have been extinct based on the current state of technology. Let me give you an idea what that current state of technology means in our neck of the woods. Last week our team started deploying some DELL R720  PowerEdge servers to replace the last W2K8R2 Hyper-V cluster in the company with a Windows Server 2012 one. The older hardware will be recycled. Some will live on as test servers, backup media servers. All running Windows Server 2012 of course. One of them will become our physical (SAN) LUN to VHDX converter server so we can move our large LUNS (2T-15TB) to vhdx. Later this year 10Gbps networking, RDMA Mellanox cards and ODX will provide for fast vhdx movement to their new virtual hosts. Work in progress, but it should give you an idea about what we’re working with.

It may surprise you but even we have 2 Windows Server 2003 physical servers left. One is a DELL NX1950 Storage server that has been serving local workspace to a team that does image parsing (12TB). That one is >6 years old and is slated for retirement. We don’t need this concept anymore. We can build anything we want for such purposes using Windows Server 2012 Storage spaces and if required leverage the in box iSCSI target. To build it we can just draw disk bays, disk, servers from the retired hardware shelf, no sweat. We have plenty of spare parts and it works just fine. If it’s cost efficient and an effective solution, we roll that way.

The other one is a server for the financial software sold by a company (the Zombie ISV®) that does not believe in virtualization. It’s running code that’s over a 12 years old (legacy java run times and even that was a success because it used to be JInitiator until a a few years ago). There is no life cycle planning what so ever and when after 5 years the hardware needed replacing we got nothing but silence form the vendor. After months of asking for a meeting on the what and how (OS upgrade, x64, virtualization) and being ignored we just took a decommissioned server that had two years of warranty left and transplanted the disks. Even if the warranty runs out on that one we have some of the same model in the spare parts cabinet.

The workload itself runs just fine virtualized but they don’t support that. Luckily for the people that have to do it in their environment they run zero change of that Zombie ISV® ever noticing that a server is virtualized anyway. They also don’t get the concept of a dedicated service account in windows. So they end up with the database or BI services running under their remote support credentials that expire and get disabled by the helpdesk. Sigh. They don’t see the need to proactively support operating systems above Windows XP or browsers after IE 6.0. We did a lot of hacks to keep that system working and came to despise the total lack of technological expertise and professionalism of the vendor. Their “consultants” that’s don grasp x64 bit, or they download installers for 4 hours during a paid day of consulting … sickening to the stomach. Meetings with the account managers (they seem to travel in packs) is a lot of vacant bank stares and apathy. They don’t have answers, they don’t look for answers, they simply don’t care. The idea was to replace the package, but it was not to be. But in the end we settled for throwing all responsibility for it so they’ll find a place to host it and our bookkeepers can access over a secure remote connection. At least we have gotten rid of this security risk in our environment.

That people, is the miserable state of some ISVs in the 21st century. But it’s not just them. It’s a testimonial to the degree in which companies get tied up and locked in to mediocre solutions and technology debt. In the infrastructure world (storage, networking, servers, virtualization) people who know what they’re doing do not allow this to happen. As more and more decisions on software and applications are made by business & analyst types we are seeing an increase in technology debt and lack of any life cycle management. So where we have seen infrastructure get more and more bang for the buck we’ve also seen the software & services cost explode and on top of that incur technology debt, expenses and risks on the business. That’s pretty bad. I see a growing divide in a lot of companies between ever more efficient and cost effective infrastructure (combined with cloud solutions) and the slowness of getting custom software into production combined with issues concerning supportability and upgradeability. All this at ever increasing costs and FTEs. That’s not supposed to happen but it is, despite the high investments in * analysts, business consultants, architects, * coaches, project managers, IT managers etc. in the era of the cloud. This is regression.  It all sounds like the result of the feel good EQ approach to business without results but hey, no one feels left behind . I believe a mate of mine calls this the race to the bottom. No wonder some companies that I know have done away with all this and just let business units organize themselves organically. They either fail and disappear of thrive and prosper, but a no time to they fall in to the trap of over organized pseudo flat structure (i.e. pass the hot potato and no responsibility) that still manages to create ever more managerial positions (flat?) whilst realizing ever less results. We’ve seen the financial and housing market charades collapse. Guess what’s next? There won’t be a bail out for you or me, beware of that.

Personal Best of MMS 2012 Series “Why We Fail–An Architect’s Journey to the Private Cloud”

Introduction

The speaker (Alex Jauch) addresses cloud terminology confusion and points out that yet everyone wants it. So the pressure is on to deliver cloud.

But as an architect you can’t build with such vague notions of what it is. That just doesn’t work. 78% of enterprise IT Shops will deploy a private cloud by 2014 (Gartner) 62% of all IT Projects fail. For the record, building a private cloud is not an easy project.

For one, what are you building? What is it, way to may definitions. NIST seems to be one of the better definitions around. Specific, direct and actionable. We can work with that. I suggest you visit the NIST site for more information on:

• Deployment Models:Private Cloud, Hybrid, Public.
• Service models SAAS, PAAS, IAAS
• The Essential Characteristics
  The Common Characteristics

Why We Fail

What happens:

• Install Hyper-V
• Deploy System Center
• Build a solution

The essential element of cloud is that  “The cloud is a customer centric business model, not technology”.It’s approached to much as a technology problem and that’s why we fail.

The architect should not allow this to happen so he is to blame. The architectural practice is to marry business needs and wants to technology as a solution. This really hits home but there are more people involved and than there is the entire business / IT alignment fiasco as you can read in my blog The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse? , but the bucks ends with the architect..

How do we add value to the business? Commodities do not add value, they are necessities. So we need to decide what business we are in. Meeting standards is not a goal. Enabling business is the goal. So they think you’re doing a great job empowering them. After all they are paying for it.

The Take Away

Traditional IT needs to evolve (fast) to customer centric IT.  End user departments define the goals. Our operational proficiency used to be our pride but what does it mean to the customer? Problems that do not affect the business don’t matter. So talk to customers to find out about what they want and need. They don’t care about your skill set or certifications. You’ll need t extract the need from their wants.

The ability to take pain points away from customers. Small & medium sized projects do very well at this. But in a lot of companies they don’t promote you for those “smaller” projects. So the business also has to evolve.

I’d like to add that Old style IT is also promoted by  a lot of misguided security officers and business lawyers. Strict rules as a guidance and instrument are their instruments and no those are also not always in the business best interest.

This relates to IT Portfolio Management: Strategic, High Potential, Key Operational & Support. We need to realize that whatever we work on might be strategic or high potential will move to key operational and support. They all need different approaches and types of management. So choose your methodologies wisely. Don’t just pick one and force that square peg in the round hole. This is my advice to both business and IT. I’ve seen business decisions change support level products turned into high cost  high maintenance because due to bad decisions. So we might not have to be our brothers keeper towards the business but than again do we really need those bridging functions and those guys or gals need to be at the top of their game as I stated in The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

So keep things a simple and as effective as possible. Do it fast, ride and repeat. You’ll learn a lot and improve along the way. So here comes the build or buy decision and the link to the NetApp plug by the speaker. This is very dependent on the situation of the organization at hand. So the fast track has it’s place here. Is speed of delivery of key importance or absolute flexibility and adaptability? So it will depend. Yes the consultants answer. But being a real consultant is a very respectable job. I can’t hell it that the word has become meaningless due to missuses and inflationary titles for temps for hire.  The System Center stack and how NetApp improves and leverages all this is briefly discussed. He ties the fast track into the discussion of portfolio management and working in a customer centric way.

Conclusion

Why are we doing what we do? Think about it. There is a nice book on this subject  “Why we fail? by Alex Jauch.

The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

We still have a serious problem in ICT. Even in this second decade of the 21st century. While the entire industry has been buzzing with IT-Business alignment for many, many years now, I often notice that we have not gotten very far. For one the divide between business & IT is an artificial disconnect. This artifact does exist, but we’ve created it, and all we need to do is stop doing that. No one is giving this much attention to the struggling relations of business with the HRM or the finance departments.

In contradiction of what we might expect, while this artifact is detrimental to the success & profitability of IT, it is not taken seriously enough. Sure the business absolutely needs to define what they need. But in an ever more rapidly changing technology world they do not have the knowledge needed to do that. So we need bridge builders, people with the skills to translate technology used in IT into competitive solutions and highly efficient & profitable systems. It takes a special breed & some serious skills to act on opportunities and see them materialize with the help of IT solutions. It also takes a whole lot of common sense. The latter often seems to be lacking. Why does this happen?

This is not just about business and not just about technology. It’s something in between. As a result it’s often seen as not that critical and this leads to staffing these functions with the wrong skillsets. At best they are populated by people who want to get into the IT sector but don’t like technology that much. This is enforced by all those campaigns to make IT more sexy and attractive to the new generations who associate IT with nerds. It’s beyond me why we’d want to attract people who think so superficially but hey, that’s just me. But aren’t we building our own future nightmare this way? At worst it is used to get people in better pay grades. The functions might very well mandate better pay due to its complexity and the required skill set but this only holds true if you get the right people in those functions. Whatever the reason, this is a major pain point. Why?

The neglect of these bridging functions lets people without the necessary skillsets take responsibility for decisions they are incapable of making. Their knowledge of the technical matters is not up to that task and business wise they’re often in the same boat. So now we have a bunch of people who have way too little understanding of what IT and business is and what they themselves should achieve in that bridging role. Oh great, so fundamentally critical decisions are being made by the unqualified. People who lack skills, experience and context will fall back to methodologies & theories. They use them as cook books. Unfortunately reading and using a cookbook doesn’t make any one a chef. And these are the roles where we need chefs’ people. In reality there is a giant gap between reality and all the theories, methodologies & real or perceived knowledge on how IT can be better aligned with the business and be run more successfully and profitably.

I can only conclude that allowing this to happen means that the functions that are supposed to be bridge that cap is not taken seriously enough. For all the lip service to these efforts it cannot be for lack of acknowledgement of the pain points. But the solution often seems more of what doesn’t work, thereby eroding any credibility of the bridging functions. This is costing us dearly and it will only get worse if we don’t stop this madness. There is of cause the fact that projects become more and more expensive with all the * architects, * analysts & * officers. On top of that the complexity keeps rising and we don’t seem to be very good at managing that. Ask any engineer what the worst enemy in any project is and you’ll get uncontrolled and unmanageable complexity as an answer. But even worse, you are faced with the fact that best people in the business, bridge and technical positions eventually leave. Tired & worn out by the environment that doesn’t value them as they don’t understand their true contribution and skill set.

This means that even today IT retreats into its technical areas of expertise and the business doesn’t learn what IT is & can do. If we don’t get better at bridging that gap we are doomed to keep failing at ever higher costs and you’ll lose ever more valuable employees. The only difference will be we’ll have more parties than IT and business to point our fingers at as the ones to blame.

Full Steam Ahead With Windows 8 & Hyper-V in 2012

Some History

There have been a good number of people who’ve always used, some a lot more and some others a lot less, a bit of Microsoft bashing to gain some extra credibility or try to position other products as superior. Sometimes this addressed, at least, some real challenges and issues with Microsoft products. A lot of the time it doesn’t. I have always found this ridiculous. In the early years of this century I was told to get out of the Microsoft stack and into the LAMP stack to make sure I still had a job in a few years’ time. My reaction was to buy Inside SQL Server 2000 among other technology books . The paradox is that in some cases, like some storage integrators, is that the ones doing the bashing are forgetting that their customers are often heavily invested in the Microsoft stack.

I Still Have A Job

As you might have realized already, I still have a job today. I’m very busy, building more and better environments based on Microsoft technologies. Microsoft does not get everything right. Who does? Sometimes it takes more than a few tries, sometimes they fail. But they also succeed in a lot of their endeavors.They are capable to learn, adapt and provide outstanding results with a very good support system to boot (I would dare say that you get out of that what you put into it). Given the size and nature of the company, combined with IT evolving at the speed of light, that’s not an easy task.

Today that ability translates into the upcoming release of Windows 8. Things like Hyper-V 3.0, the new storage and networking features, the improvements to clustering and the file system are the current state an evolution. A path along Windows 2000 over Windows 2003(R2), to  the milestone Windows 2008 which was improved with Windows 2008 R2. Now, Windows 8 being the next generation improves vastly on that very good and solid foundation. With Windows 8 we’ll take the next step forward in building highly scalable, highly available, feature rich a very functional solutions in a very cost effective manner. On top of that we can do more now than ever before, with less complexity and with affordable  standard hardware. If you have a bigger budget, great, Windows 8 will deliver even more and better bang for the buck if and when your hardware vendors get on the band wagon.

Windows 8 & Storage

One of the things the Windows BUILD Conference achieved is that it wanted me to buy hardware that I couldn’t get yet. Just try asking DELL or HP for RDMA support on 10Gbps and you get a bit of a vacant blank stare.

Another thing is that it made me look at our storage roadmap again. One of the few sectors in IT that are still very expensive is storage. Some of the storage vendors might start to feel a bit like a major network gear vendor. You know the one that has also seen the effects of serious competition by high quality but lower cost kit. Just think about what Storage Pools/Spaces will do for affordable, easy to use and rich storage solutions. Both with standard over the shelf available (read affordable) hardware and with modern SANs that leverage the Windows 8 features there is value. Heath my warning storage vendors. You’re struggling in the SMB market due to complexity, cost and way to much overhead and expensive services. Well it’s only going to get worse. You’ll have to come with better proposals or you’ll end up being high end / niche market players in the future. Let’s face it, if I can buy a super micro chassis with the disks of my choosing I can build my own storage solution for cheap and use Windows 8 to achieve my storage needs. Perhaps is 80/20 but hey, that’s great. It’s not that much better with more expensive solutions (vendor disks are ridiculously over priced) and the support process is sometimes a drain on your workforce’s time and motivation. And yes you paid for that. Compare this with being able to buy some spare parts on the cheap and having it all available of the shelf with the vendors. No more calls, no more bureaucratic mess for return parts, nor more IT illiterate operators to work through before you reach support that can be sub standard as well. Once you reach a certain level of hardware quality there is not that much difference any more except for price and service. Granted, some vendors are better at this then others. The really big ones often struggle getting this right.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that all stuff breaks. SLAs are fine for lawyers and for management. CYA is part of doing business. But for the IT Pro in the field you need reliable people, gear and services.  On top of that you have to design for failure. You know things will break. So it should be a cheap, easy and fast as possible to fix while your design and architecture should cope with the effects of a failure. That’s what IT Pros need and that what’s keeps things running (not that SLA paper in the mailbox of your manager).

Show the Windows customers a bit more love than you have done in the past. Some in the storage industry tend to like to look down on the Windows OS. But guess what, it is your largest customer base. Unless you want to end up in the same niche as a very expensive personal trainer for Hollywood stars (tip: there’s not a huge job market there) you’d better adjust to new realities. A lot of them are doing that already , some of them aren’t. To those: get over it and leverage the features in Windows 8. You’ll be able to sell to a more varied public and at the high end you’ll have even better solutions to offer. Today I notice way to many storage integrators who haven’t even looked at Windows 8. It’s about time they started … really, like today. I mean how do you want to sell me storage today if you can’t answer my queries on Windows 8 & System Center 2012 support and integration? To me this is huge! I want to know about ODX, RDMA, SMI-S and yes I want you to be able to answer me how your storage deals with CSVs. You should know about the consumption of persistent ISCSI-3 reservations and a rock solid hardware VSS provider. If you can do that it creates the warm fuzzy feeling a customers need to make that leap of faith.

When I look at the network improvements in Windows 8. Things like RDMA, SMB 2.2; File Transfer Offload and what that means for file sharing and data intensive environments I’m pretty impressed. Then there is Hyper-V 3.0 and it many improvements. Only a fool would deny that it is a very good, affordable & rich hypervisor with a bright future as far as hypervisors go (they are not the goal, just a means to an end). Live Storage Migration, an extensible virtual switch, monitoring of the virtual switch, Network Virtualization, Hyper-V Replica, … it’s just too much to mention here. But hop on over to Windows 8 Hyper-V Feature Glossary by Aidan Finn. He’s got a nice list up of the new features relevant to the Hyper-V crowd. Again, we see improvements for all business sizes, from SMB to enterprise, including the ISPs and Cloud providers. Windows 8 is breaking down barriers that would interdict it’s use in various environments and scenarios. Objections based on missing features, scalability, performance or security in multi tenancy environments are being wiped of the map. If you want to see some musing on this subject just look at Group Video Interview: What is your favorite Hyper-V feature in Windows 8?.

2012 & Beyond

Hyper-V is growing. It’s already won a lot of hearts and minds of many smaller Microsoft shops but it’s also growing in the enterprise. The hybrid world is here when you look at the numbers, even if it’s not yet the case in your neck of the woods. Why? Cost versus features. Good enough is good enough. Especially when that good is rather great. On top of that the integration is top notch and it won’t cost you a fortune and save you a lot of plumbing hassle.

Basically everyone can benefit from all this. You’ll get more and better at a lesser or at least a more affordable cost. Even if you don’t use any Microsoft technologies you’ll benefit from the increased competition. So everyone can be happy.