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.

The Private Cloud A Profitable Future Proofing Tactic?

The Current Situation

I’m reading up on the private cloud concept as Microsoft envisions we’ll be able to build ‘m with the suite of System Center 2012 products. The definition of private cloud is something that’s very flexible. But whether we’re talking about the private, hybrid or public cloud there is a point of disagreement between some on the fact that there are people that don’t see self-service (via a portal, with or without an approval process) as a required element to define a *cloud. I have to agree with Aidan Finn on this one. It’s a requirement. I know you could stretch the concept and that you could build  a private cloud to help IT serve it customers but the idea is that customers can and will do it themselves.

The more I look into system center 2012 and it’s advertised ability to provide private clouds the more I like it. Whilst the current generation has some really nice features I have found it lacking in many areas, especially when you start to cross security boundaries and still integrate the various members of the System Center suite. So the advancements there are very welcome. But there is a danger lurking in the shadows of it all. Complexity combined with the amount of products needed. In this business things need to go fast without sacrificing or compromising on any other thing. If you can’t do that, there is an issue. The answer to these issues is not always to go to the public cloud a hundred percent.

While the entire concept might seem very clear us techies (i.e. still lots of confusion to be found) and the entire business crowd is talking about cloud as if it’s a magic potion that will cure all IT related issues (i.e. they are beyond confused, they are lost) there are still a lot of questions. Even when you have the business grasping the concept (which is great) and have an IT team that’s all eager and wiling to implement it (which is fabulous) things are still not that clear on how to start building and/or using one.

In reality some businesses haven’t even stepped into the virtual era yet or only partially at best. Some people are a bit stuck in the past and still want to buy servers and applications with THEIR money that THEY own and is ONLY for them.  Don’t fight that to much The economics of virtualization are so good (not just financially but also in both flexibility & capabilities) that you can sell it to top management rather easily, no matter what. After that approval just sell the business units servers (that are virtual machines), deliver whatever SLA they want to pay for and be done with it. So that problem is easily solved.

But that’s not a cloud yet. Now that I’m thinking of it, perhaps getting businesses to adopt the concept will be the  hardest. You might not think so by reading about private clouds in the media but I have encountered a lot of skepticism and downright hostility towards the concept. No, it’s not just by some weary IT Pros who are afraid to lose their jobs. Sometimes the show stoppers are the business and users that won’t have any of it. They don’t want to order apps or servers on line, they want then delivered for them. I even see this with the younger workforce when the corporate culture is not very helpful. What ‘s up here? Responsibility. People are avoiding it and it shows in their behavior. As long as they want to take responsibility things go well. If not, technical fear masked as “complexity” or issues like “that’s not our job” suddenly appear.

There is more, a lot of people seems at their limit of what they can handle in information overload at every extra effort is too much.  Sometimes it’s because of laziness or perhaps even stupidity? Perhaps it’s a side effect of what Nicolas Carr writes about the: the internet is making us dumber and dumber as a species. But then again, we only have to look at history to learn that, perhaps, we’ve never been that smart. Sure we have achieved amazing things but that doesn’t mean we don’t act incredibly stupid as individuals or as a group. So perhaps things haven’t changed that much. It’s a bit like the “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” sort of thing. But on the other hand things are often too complex. When things are easy and become an aid in their work people adopt technology fast and happily.

Sometimes the scale of the business is not of that nature that it’s worthwhile top deploy a cloud. The effort and cost versus the use and benefits are totally out of sync.

That’s all nice and well you tell me, but what’s are technologists to advice to their customers?

Fire & Maneuver

The answer is in the sub title. You can’t stand still and do nothing. It will get you killed (business is warfare with gloves on and some other niceties). Now that’s all good to know but how do we keep moving forward and scoring? There will always be obstacles, risks, fears etc. but we can’t get immobilized by them or we come to a standstill, which means falling behind. The answer is quite simple. Keep moving forward.  But how? Do what you need to do. Here’s my approach. Build a private cloud. Use it to optimize IT and to be ready to make use of * clouds at every opportunity. And to put your mind at ease you can do this without spending vast amounts of money that gets wasted. Just provide some scale up and scale out capacity & capability. The capability is free if you do it right. The capacity will cost you some money. But that’s your buffer to keep things moving smoothly. Done right your CAPEX will be less than not doing this. How can this be?

Private Clouds enable Hybrid Clouds

The thing that I like most about the private cloud is that it enables the use of hybrid cloud computing. On the whole and in the long run hybrid clouds might be a transition to public cloud but as I’ve written before, there are scenarios where the hybrid approach will remain. This might not be the case for the majority of businesses but still I foresee a more permanent role for hybrid clouds for a longer time that most trendy publications seem to indicate. I have no crystal ball but if hybrid cloud computing does remain a long term approach to server computing needs we night well see more and better tools to manage this in the years to come. Cloud vendors who enable and facilitate this approach will have a competitive advantage. The only thing you need to keep I mind that private or cloud computing should not bee seen as replacements or alternatives for the public cloud. They don’t have the elasticity, scale and economics of a public cloud. They are however complementary. As such they enable and facilitate the management and consumption of IT services that have to remain on premises for whatever reason.

Selling The Public Cloud

Where private cloud might help businesses who are cloud shy warm up to the concept, I think the hybrid cloud in combination with integrated and easy management will help them make the jump to using public cloud services faster. That’s the reason this concept will get the care and attention of cloud vendors. It’s a stepping stone for the consumption of their core business (cloud computing) that they are selling to businesses.

What’s in it for the business that builds one?

But why would a business I advise buy into this? Well a private cloud (even if used without the self-service component) is Dynamic Systems Initiative (SDI) / Dynamic Data Center on steroids. And as such it delivers efficiency gains and savings right now even if you never go hybrid or public. I’m an avid supported of this concept but it was not easy to achieve for several reasons, one of them being that the technologies used missed some capabilities we need. And guess what, the tools being delivered for the private could can/could fill those voids. By the way, I was in the room at IT Forum 2004 when Bill Gates came to explain the concept and launch that initiative. The demo back then was deploying hundreds of physical PCs. Times have changed indeed! But back to selling the private cloud. Building a private cloud means you’ll be running a topnotch infrastructure ready for anything. Future proofing your designs at no extra cost and with immediate benefits is to good to ignore for any manager/CTO/CIO. The economics are just too good. If you do it for the right reason that is, meaning you can’t serve all your needs in the public cloud as of yet. So go build that private cloud and don’t get discouraged by the fact that it won’t be a definition example of the concept, as long as it delivers real value to the business you’ll be just fine. It doesn’t guarantee your business survival but it will not be for your lack of trying. The inertia some businesses in a very competitive world are displaying makes them look like rabbits trapped in the beams of the car lights. Not to mention government administrations. We no longer seem to have the stability or rather slowness of change needed to function effectively. Perhaps this has always been the case. I don’t know. We’ve never before in history had such a long period of peace & prosperity for such a broad section of the population. So how to maintain this long term is new challenge by itself.

Danger Ahead!

As mentioned above, if there is one thing that can ruin this party it’s is complexity. I’m more convinced of this than ever before. I’ve been talking to some really smart people in the industry over the weekend and everyone seems to agree on that one. So if I can offer some advice to any provider of tools to build a private cloud.  Minimize complexity and the amount of tools needed to get it set up and working. Make sure that if you need multiple building blocks and tools the integration of them is top notch and second to none. Provide clear guidance and make sure it is really as easy to set up, maintain and adapt as it should be. If not businesses are going to get a bloody nose and IT Pros will choose other solutions to get things done.

A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool

Aidan Finn started this cool blog post visually explaining how cool Hyper-V engineers are. This prompted a funny a response by Marcel van den Berg concerning the technology used. Well those blog post inspired me to demonstrate an issue popping up in certain ICT projects to our business audience with the help of some visual aids. That public might not always be IT savvy, but I think we can show them what goes wrong in the ICT world every now and then. Especially if experience, context and realism are missing in a team. For this purpose I’ll use technology everyone knows from TV, the movies & the news. That way even the technically uninitiated (management) will get the drift.

So what goes wrong with a certain percentage of IT implementations today?  Well they tend to look like this:

Over the top deployments, using every option & technology known to man that become unmanageable to the “ridiculous” level and end up reducing operational capabilities and reliability. These projects cost vast amounts of money and are very costly in time / billable hours.

Look, we have a lot of features at our disposal. That’s great, as this gives us options to build the best solution, in a cost effective way, for the business need that needs to be addressed. But we don’t have to use everything everywhere just because we can. Look at the monster setup above. All pretty neat tools & option in itself but it just won’t work this way. Do note that this is not just a simple case of overkill. That would be more like a tank where a rifle suffices. This is using the entire content of the  toolbox when only few tools are needed.

Constructions like this only result in final prove that TCO stands for “Totally Cost Oblivious” and ROI for ‘”Running On Instinct”. These configurations are, more often than not, bought & configured by wannabe “’professionals” who do so to in vain attempt to get some instant credibility. The “Hey, it sure does look impressive”  approach so to speak. These people can’t hack it anyway and often look like this guy.

He’s got the gear, he’s got the tools. But there is just no way poor  “bubba” can figure out what’s wrong. Really he can’t.

Now a good engineer (like the one below) knows how to use the correct technology where and when needed in a professional manner. He or she does so in the most cost & result effective way.

And it’s not only implementations where things go wrong, stuff also breaks.  That’s were a secondary (a.k.a  a backup) comes in. We all know that, no matter how charmed the lives we lead are, inevitably, luck runs out at times. Yes Murphy is out there and bad things happen to the best of us. So tell me, when that luck runs out, who do you want to come take care of business and save you?  Bubba or the guy above? In ICT that’s exactly the same question you need to answer to address the challenges your business faces. Great solutions are, even in this era of commoditization, seldom bought of the shelf as a one size fits all package, they are custom built to specs for the job at hand.

I’m Attending The E2E Virtualization Conference

Well I’ve just finished doing the paperwork for attending the Experts 2 Experts conference in London http://www.pubforum.info/pubforum/E2E2011London.aspx. It runs from 18th to 20th November 2011. I’m looking forward to this one as I’m going to meet up with a lot of people from my on line network and have a change to discuss our virtualization experiences and share information in real life, face to face.

It’s good to get to attend vendor independent events and exchange information, enrich and extend our networks. I already know several people from my twitter/blogging network will be attending and I’m happy to meet up with you if you’re there. Just let me know via e-mail, the feedback option on this blog or via twitter (@workinghardinit). Well, I’ll see you there!

Consumerization of IT Discussions at BriForum 2011 London

At BriForum 2001 In London I also attended a lot of talks on BYOD and the consumerization of IT. The connection with BriForum is where VDI and user virtualization fit in to facilitate this. Now talk about this subject has been going on for about 5 years now and has been brought up at many TechEd sessions for example.

If that concept works, I say bring it on. Really. I mean it holds so many promises of a better world for everyone involved that we’d be nuts not to try it. I like the concept, but will it work, is it possible? If so where, when and to what extent. Anyway it’s all good stuff until that seems to require lawyers and contracts. Ouch! We’re not too good at dealing with that and I have to say that from my experience contracts are legal documents and are very useful in that arena but it won’t stop people from doing what they can where and when they can. They don’t think about using Hotmail or drop box of being “illegal” or against policy. They just use it. Look at any other corporate security and fair use policy. They are full of holes like a giant Swiss cheese. The ones demanding the policies are the ones doing most of the drilling.

But legalities aside, will it work on a very large scale in most places? Not right now I think. The dependency of the business on the current infrastructure is so big it can’t be replaced yet. So you need a transition and that means adding stuff & new possibilities and facilitating them. So initially it will only add complexity for the service desk. All the talk of not being able to retain the best and brightest might be true but the same goes for the IT personnel. You might retain a better MBA with your iPad & iPhone but you could very well lose some support personnel that go “BOINK” trying to assist a workforce with hundreds of devices and apps. Are devices and toys to be considered as benefits or as a true work instruments? Perhaps it attracts opportunistic gadget freaks instead of the best personnel. Do car policies help attract the best personnel in this day and age? I mean everyone offers it so it’s a level playing field. Perhaps not offering BYOD but providing really valuable environments works better. Flex work, telecommuting, better wages, interesting job content is still a lot better I think. The best people figure out fast that there is more and better to be had in remuneration than a device and your own app preferences.

Sure I know an iPad might attract a college graduate but they already have such high expectations (culture of entitlement) that perhaps this is not the best path to go. Corporate life is not like what you see on TV. They might as well learn that early. It’s not about a group of gorgeous young people acting important and professional whilst doing nothing, drinking rivers of macchiato form Starbucks and having affairs with the equally gorgeous colleagues. To complete the dream illusion they get paid generously for all that and at the end of the year receive a bonus to make a down payment on that city loft. Wake up! And be fair we’re talking top drawer human resources here and there in lies another issue as you’ll need to offer it to everyone in the company because, when you hear the lawyer talking, it opens you up to legal action due to discrimination if you don’t. Where is the differentiator than?

Now I’m not against it the concept. On the contrary I would love to see it work. But I’m afraid it’s not such a good proposition as it is made out to be when done in a structured way and on a large (read companywide) scale. Is it a perk or business value? I don’t have an iPad or an iPhone but I do use my tools and some devices out of corporate control to get my job done, so basically I’m there dudes. The main issue I still need to resolve is get employers to pay for expensive shiny toys I need to get my job done faster and better. The reason I don’t have them because I’m too cheap to buy them myself (so I don’t see the value to get my job done better?). But when the boss pays, well hello iPad! But I’d better not force my hand. I think my boss would say could luck at your next job if I ever told ‘m I takes an iPhone to retain me. But a CEO doesn’t have that problem. He gets a “right away sir” for an answer.

Is this for everyone? I’m not so sure. In the long term perhaps. Today no. I have generation-Y and millennial “kids” in my social circles and guess who’s asked to help them with all the tools, toys and gadgets? Right. They are indeed consumers! If you define digital natives as mere consumers than they fit the bill but I would suggest that the designation “digital natives” implies they can deal with all tech they use themselves at all times. In the end, when all self-service and tech support for their toys fail who do you think the problems ends up? Right. Ever dealt with a gadget junkie that is forced to go “cold turkey” in the blink of an eye? Face it, every helpdesk has to deal with recovering baby pictures, wedding movies, getting routers to work, helping with capturing a movie stream & configuring smartphones … consumers need support and that support has to be paid. Who does it and who pays is a different matter. Aren’t we just shifting it? What about contracts to make clear how does what, where and when? Have you ever work in a service desk in ICT for internal IT? Really? Where is all the “enabling of the business” when you’re waving with a contract as a user ends up at the service desk with a broken BYO device or application that was repaired but did not fix the issue and now they need help to get to the data stored in that obscure application you’ve never seen? And when it’s your manger are you going to put the contract in his or her face? What about the secretary that can make your life hell or heaven depending on how by the book they play? Sounds familiar? Same old, same old. One thing is for sure that cute, charming red head who’s very gadget minded and processes your requests for attending conferences doesn’t have a problem now and never will. No this is not sexist, it’s reality and you can always change the metaphor to reflect your own preferences, you’re totally free to do so In essence what I’m saying here with freedom comes responsibility and ownership.

Then there are the practicalities who buys it and how does it get paid. You need have that figured out and organized. How do you deal with the legalities and auditing of licenses? Lawyer heaven   Where are the tools to really manage devices and applications al those different vendors well?

Just some brainstorming and playing devil’s advocate here. Who wants this for work? Geeks. Who wants this a perks? Employees. Who wants this as a business? People selling solutions to manage and facilitate this. What does the business want?  The fact is consumerization of IT is already a reality. It just happens. It will be interesting to see how we all deal with it, why those choices are made and what their effects are. Feel free to chime in via the comments.

The Dilbert® Life Series: The Carbon Copy, Blind Carbon Copy e-mail Pandemic

Disclaimer: The Dilbert® Life series is a string of post on corporate culture from hell and dysfunctional organizations running wild. This can be quite shocking and sobering. A sense of humor will help when reading this. If you need to live in a sugar coated world were all is well and bliss and think all you do is close to godliness, stop reading right now and forget about the blog entries. It’s going to be dark. Pitch black at times actually, with a twist of humor, if you can laugh at yourself.

Have you ever worked in an office where no one ever takes responsibility and all communication is CC’d and BCC’d to an absurd number of people? There are corporate “cultures” that act very different from our own style. Size often has nothing to do with it. But this habit is just another symptom and indication of blatant management failure.

These are organizations where no one feels like they can make decisions or take actions without involving half of the company in some form of meeting or committee. CYA (Cover Your Ass) in action. One of the symptoms is the fact that just about anyone who has (or thinks they have) some important or urgent information sends all mail with some managers in CC or even BCC. Often the middle management acts the same way and before you know it more CC & BCC recipients are involved making the entire mail flow a mess and proving without any doubt that you’re in kinder garden. Decisions are postponed or never made. No one is going to take responsibility for a decision, that much is for sure. So when a decision is finally made it often by the wrong person, too late and probably not the best one. Basically you have a management structure where no one knows who’s responsible and is utterly dysfunctional

This is also a symptom of another issue: managers without authority. Yes, they are not very good at their area of expertise; they can’t delegate or organize and lack real people skills. These are often found in middle management where they can be used by the upper level. After all there needs to be someone between the hammer (management) and the anvil (employees). You see authority does not come from your rank or pay grade. It comes from what you know and can do and the support you get from other well respected managers or leaders. If you need to CC all your bosses and all bosses of the people you’re mailing that indicates that you’re a whining kid that can’t hack it. And no, simply not using CC or BCC anymore won’t solve that problem. I thought I’d mention this as they tend to think and act rather simplistic. We have a saying: “You salute the rank, not the man. You respect the man, not the rank.”

Anyway, the mail process is as most people in the mail are not involved, don’t care, don’t need and shouldn’t care and hopefully don’t want to care. Once it got so out of control I added some more people to the CC list and wrote sarcastically at the top of the mail body that we really should make an effort to senselessly involve as many people as we possibly could. Not very nice, I know. Shouldn’t do that, I know. Some got the message, some didn’t. Another solution is to ignore the mail. Really if so many people, including a bunch of managers above and way above me are in the CC list I would not have the arrogance to assume I have anything to say in the matter and thus I await their proposals or decisions.

The best employee a manager can have is Vanilla Ice. Really “…If there was a problem yo I’ll solve it …”, that’s what a good manager needs and wants. You see your boss has better things to do than micro manage the details of your incompetence. You know your end state, so all you need to do is figure out what you need and how you’ll achieve it. Results, that’s what your boss really needs, not details and moaning about how hard middle management is. I know shit flows down and gripes flow up but try to maintain a balance or you’ll find yourself holding a pink slip or being promoted to where you can do the least damage and annoy the least amount of people. I secretly think some people have that as a cunning plan .

But if you’re stuck with a couple of micro managers, do not despair. You can work around them, unless they surround you. In the latter case, break out and run! They deal with urgent and very pseudo important problems that are actually just details which are benign in nature and are not negatively affected by all that overzealous attention. So the trick is to keep it that way. You have to treat them like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed ‘m shit. As long as they don’t know any better and keep getting their “data” fix they are lovable. Whatever you do, don’t give ‘m real information or show them the real problems. Micromanagers really can’t handle them. Ambitious ones that get into the light and get gourmet food can become very dangerous. Both to themselves and the organization. Now you do need ‘m to keep ‘m involved and they need to sign and approve work and proposals. So give ‘m finished work, solutions that are ready to go. Forget about involving them in the details or the decision making process, they’ll just get lost. And guess what, this is like a good boss should work and act so we have a win-win situation for the entire company!

Now you know how to help prevent that e-mail becomes a burden instead of a useful tool. No CC or BCC unless really needed. Go practice it.

Technical Projects, Planning, Skills, Motivation & Psychopaths

When planning a technical project complexity adds ups very fast. Take a virtualization project for example; a lot more things than just the hyper visor installation are coming into play. You’ll need to asses a lot of needs and desires about SANs (snapshots, redundancy, replication, FC, iSCSI, FCoE), network (VLAN, 1/10 Gbps Ethernet, redundancy), disaster recovery/business continuity, hyper visors and there capabilities, management of it all and security. That is a lot of stakes and agendas to take into consideration. And then you haven’t even talked to the business managers, the application owners and developers. Now this isn’t limited to virtualization, but this is just a nice example on how so many stakes come together in one project.

One of the major mistakes, that is made again and again even up until this day in the second decade in the 21^st century is the fact that entire important or even critical IT systems are being put into place with a plan that can be paraphrased as follows “We’ll just set it up and sort of see how it evolves and just wing it from there”. I have been forced to do this quite often. This creates many problems some of which I will address below.

The single worst problem is that you create a vacuum. That can be storage space, bandwidth, ample resources for a huge amount of virtual machines or a mixture of all this. The results however are always the same and is one of two possibilities. Either they really don’t want and need it so it will never be used. You can also achieve this by keeping it hidden so they can’t use it. The other option is the most natural one. In nature there is a thing called a “horror vacui”. That means that a vacuum unless protected cannot exist, it has to be filled. Empty LUNSs with data, hyper visor hosts with guest, networks with bandwidth and backup capacity with even more terabytes. You might think the second option is better than the first one as at least the infrastructure is getting used. Unfortunately the reality is that this is creating a very expensive mess to run, support & troubleshoot. The legacy this creates is not a valuable inheritance but a bank breaking, efficiency and effectiveness ruining debt. Stop doing that right now, you are killing your business. You see technology debt is about more than just old hardware and software. It’s about what you build with it or what grows organically with it. Is that a fertile land that sustains the business or a cancer that is killing it?

The way to prevent this is planning done by competent, involved people with experience and context. No plan is perfect, but a plan gives you a framework to achieve the desired result. Even great people make mistakes but they have the skills and attitude to fix them or work around them.

What are some other problems? Wasting money. Take for example a completely oversized server farm. That thing will consume so much money over a three year period in energy and idle capacity that the amount would be sufficient to replace it with new right sized hardware (more bang for the buck, better energy efficiencies in three years) I don’t know about you but those are very disconcerting numbers.

You can also be wasting money and time. And those who know me I loath wasting time. What if the SAN solution you bought doesn’t perform as planned or isn’t the right fit? There goes 500.000 € or you find yourself in the CEO office explaining why you need an extra 400.000 € to get what is really needed. Oh oh! Do you have money and time to do it all over again or will you be living with that expensive mistake until the current solution is end of life? Do you have to wait until the CFO and CEO have recovered enough from the shock to allow a new attempt? Or perhaps you bought a SAN solution that is enough to run NASA’s workload and you’ve invested 4.000.000 € in a rather expensive data room heater.

Getting a virtualization project wrong can wreak havoc on a business and create a sizable financial hemorrhage. You can say that that’s not your problem but I beg to differ. If the project goes south that means you’ll have to find another job. The IT world where I live is rather small so you might even have to switch to another field as you’ll be forever known as the guy that sunk company X with his little “plan”.

The reverse, being rewarded for your hard work and success is not a given. In the end they pay you for getting the job done so results are expected, and to Joe Average manager all ICT is a PC with a software packet to install. So for all you eager beavers who think that with this kind of responsibility and risk management comes big reward when you get it right I suggest you think again. I have witnessed quite the opposite personally. Even when you’re running multiple enterprise SAN’s, networks, infrastructures like SQL Server, Exchange clusters, Hyper-V clusters, geo clusters, load balancers and providing 2^nd and 3^rd line support for those and taking 24/7 responsibility for the environment the only thing some managers care about is why the PC they never ordered with the software they never ordered can’t be installed tomorrow. “What kind of a chicken shit outfit are you running here” is what they’ll think when you can’t do that. They’ve read the glossy brochure that IT is a commodity and they expect it cheap and always on, much like electricity. In the end some (incompetent) managers act like ungrateful psychopaths. They’ll just abuse you less when you get it right. Don’t expect anything else. Often it’s the ones that are not capable to integrate things they can’t do or don’t understand into their business. They can not value anything that’s beyond their comprehension so they’ll never recognize it. To them, people are, for all practical purposes, resources that are identical, “Full Time Equivalents”. So don’t buy into the hype that there is a skills shortage from that lot and they can’t fill job openings. The volume in which they often waste talent and flush motivation down the drain is shockingly high and indicates that there is no shortage at all or that they can’t recognize skills when they find it and they’ll hire anyone. Surely they didn’t make a mistake so it must be a skills shortage. So you still want to be some hot shot technical architect? Or does a job that only produces open opinions and optional advice on paper sound more attractive. Per hour worked you’ll earn more, run less risk and have a lot less stress. My advice? Don’t switch fields if you enjoy what you’re doing, switch jobs. The best career advice I ever got was “don’t work with or for assholes”.

Well if you don’t agree with your bosses and you dare go against them you’re surely playing with your job, you could get fired! So? Does living in fear of being fired make good employees? Does not being strong and confident enough to tell your managers they are doing certain things totally wrong or that they are mistaken make for good advisors? The worst thing a boss can have are a bunch of “yes men” around him or her. That boss should be smarter than that. It doesn’t work. Having trust in the abilities and loyalty of your employees does not mean you need to agree on everything. As a boss you’ll make the final decisions, yes, but you’d better listen very carefully to your advisors and staff or you might as well have hired some monkeys. You can train them to say yes all the time, all it takes are some bananas. As an employee, don’t let yourself be treated like a monkey and if they fire you for throwing the banana back, good for you!

So you’d better love technology and building solutions because that means you are intrinsically motivated to go the extra miles. When you are, select a small group of people with the same attitude. You’ll be able to drag the devil himself out of hell with such a team at relatively very low cost. Whatever you, do don’t think you can externally motivate or coerce people into achieving this. Charles “Chargin’ Charlie” Beckwith knew that all along when he said “I’d rather go down the river with seven studs than with a hundred shitheads”. And guess what, he wasn’t taught this in some course, by getting a title or by being told this by a manager. He learned it himself by working with the best. These people will keep learning and growing on their own. They don’t need to be told what to do, how to train, what to use, they don’t need nannies & micro management. They need an end state and they’ll get it for you. Frankly that kind of skillset and ability scares the shit out of some bosses as they micro manage actions & items instead of doing their jobs. You can’t use force, treats or authority to make people achievers. In the end you can cut a diamond, but you cannot create it. Trust me. Putting that amount of pressure on someone that isn’t a diamond only turns them into a heap of crushed remains of what used to be a human being or FTE in your typical HR speak.

“Mate you’re not a conformist” my friend said … you’d better believe I’m not

Why I’m No Fan Of Virtual Tape Libraries

After implementing a couple of SAN’s with backup solutions I have come to dislike Virtual Tape Libraries. This is definitely technology that, for us, has never delivered the promised benefits. To add insult to injury it is overly expensive and only good to practice hardware babysitting. When discussing this I’ve been told that I want things to cheap and that I should have more FTE to handle all the work. That’s swell but the business and the people with the budgets are telling me exactly the opposite. That explains why in the brochures it’s all about reduced cost with empty usage of acronyms like CAPEX and OPEX. But when that doesn’t really materialize the message to the IT Pros is to get more personnel and cash. In the best case (compared to calling you a whining kid) they‘ll offer to replace the current solution with the latest of the greatest that has, wonder oh wonder, reduced CAPEX & OPEX. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

So one thing I’m not planning to buy, ever again, is a Virtual Tape Library (VLS). Those things have a shelf life of about 2 years max. After that they turn into auto disintegrating pieces of crap you’ll spend babysitting for the rest of the serviceable live. This means regularly upgrading the firmware to get your LUN(s) back, if you get them back that is. This means convincing tech support to come up with a better solution than restarting from scratch when they acknowledge that their OS never cleans up its own log files and thus one day just kicks the bucket. Luckily they did go the extra mile on that one after we insisted and got a workaround without losing al backups. Babysitting also means that replacing the battery kits of all shelves becomes a new hobby. You become so good at it that you have better and faster way of doing it than the junior engineers they send who happily exclaim “so this is what it looks like”. The latter is not a confidence builder. The disks fail at a rate of 1 to 2 per week until you replaced almost all of them. Those things need to be brought down to fix just about anything. That means shutting down the disk shelf’s as well and cutting the power, not just a reboot so yes you need to be in the data center.

There is no RAID 6, no hot spares (global or otherwise). The disks cost an arm and a leg and have specialized hardware to make sure all runs fine and well. But in they are plain7.200 rpm cheap 500 GB SATA disks that cost way too much. The need for special firmware I can understand but the high cost I cannot. The amount of money you pay in support costs and in licensing the storage volume is more than enough to make a decent profit. Swapping disks and battery kits isn’t hard and we do it ourselves as waiting for a support engineer takes more time. We have spares at hand. We buy those when we by the solution. We’ve grown wise that way. We buy a couple units of all failure prone items at the outset of any storage project. Having only RAID 5 means that one disk failure puts you virtual tapes at a very high risk so you need to replace it as soon as possible. Once they shipped us a wrong disk, our VTL went down the drain due to incorrect firmware on disk. They demanded to know how it got in there. Well Mr. Vendor, you put it in yourself a as a replacement for a failed disk. In the first year it often happened they didn’t have more than 1 spare disk to ship. If anyone else has a VLS in your area you’re bound to hit that limit have to wait longer for parts. They must have upped the spare parts budget to have some more on hand just for us as we now get a steady supply in .

When you look at the complete picture the cost of storage per GB on a VLS is a much as on 1^st tier SAN storage. That one doesn’t fly well. At least the SAN has decent redundancy and is luckily a 100 fold more robust and reliable. Why buy a VLS when you can have a premier tier SAN for the same cost, the VLS functionality? No sir that also never lived up to its promises. It has come to the point that the VTL, due to the underlying issues with the device, are more error prone than our Physical Tape Library. That’s just sad. Anyway, we never got the benefits we expected form those VTL. For disk based backup I don’t want a Virtual Tape Library System anymore. It just isn’t worth the cost and hassle.

Look you can buy 100 TB of SATA storage, put it in couple of super micro disk bays, add a 10Gbps Ethernet to your backup network and you’re good to go. Hey that even gives you RAID 6, the ability to add hot spares etc. You buy some spare disks, controllers, NICS, and perhaps even just build two of these setups. That would give you redundant backup to two times 100 TB for under 60.000 €. A VLS with 100TB, support and licensing will put you back the 5 fold of that. Extending that capacity costs an arm and a leg and you’re babysitting it anyway so why bleed money while doing that?

Does this sound crazy? Is this blasphemy? The dirty little secret they don’t like you to know is that’s how cloud players are doing it. First tier storage is always top notch, but if you talk about backing up several hundreds of terabytes of data, the backup solutions by the big vendors are prohibitively expensive. This industry looks a lot like a mafia racketeering business. Well if you don’t buy it you’ll get into trouble, you’ll lose your data. You won’t’ be able to handle it otherwise. Accidents do happen. The guys selling it even dress like mobsters in their suits. But won’t you miss out on cool things like deduplication? If your backup software supports it you can still have that. The licensing cost for this isn’t that bad a deal when compared to VLS storage costs. And do realize instead of 2*100 TB you could make due to 2* 25 TB Hey that price even dropped even more.

When it comes to provisioning storage our strategy is to buy as much of your storage needs during the acquisition phase. That’s the only time deals can be made. The amount of discounts you’ll get will make you wonder what the markup in this market actually. It must be huge. And storage can’t cost as much as you think to build as they would like us to believe. Last time the storage sales guy even told us they were not making any money on the deal. Amazing how companies giving away their products have very good profit margins, highly paid employees with sales bonuses and 40.000 € cars If one vendor or reseller ever tells you that things will get cheaper with time, they are lying. They are actually saying their profit margins will increase during the life cycle of you storage solution. Look, all 1^st tier storage is going to be expensive. The best you can hope for is to get a good quality product that performs as promised and doesn’t let you down. We’ve been fortunate in that respect to our SAN solutions but when it comes to backup solutions I’m not pleased with the state of that industry. Backups are extremely important live savers, but for some reason the technology and products remain very buggy, error prone, labor intensive and become very expensive when the data volumes and backup requirements rise.