Big Data and Analytics as Game Changing Technology

If you ever doubted that big data was going to become important, there should be no doubt anymore. Recent headlines from the past couple of weeks of the government capturing and analyzing massive amounts of daily phone call data should convince you.

That this report was shortly followed by more reports of the government tapping the big online data websites like Google, Yahoo, and such for even more data should alert you to three things:

1—There is a massive amount of data out there that can be collected and analyzed.

2—Companies are amassing incredible volumes of data in the normal course of serving people who readily and knowingly give their data to these organizations. (This blogger is one of those tens of million .)

3—The tools and capabilities are mature enough for someone to sort through that data and connect the dots to deliver meaningful insights.

Particularly with regard to the last point this blogger thought the industry was still five years away from generating meaningful results from that amount of data coming in at that velocity. Sure, marketers have been sorting and correlating large amounts of data for years, but it was mostly structured data and not at nearly this much. BTW, your blogger has been writing about big data for some time.

If the news reports weren’t enough it became clear at IBM Edge 2013, wrapping up is Las Vegas this week, that big data analytics is happening and companies and familiar companies are succeeding at it now. It also is clear that there is sufficient commercial off-the-shelf computing power from companies like IBM and others and analytics tools from a growing number of vendors to sort through massive amounts of data and make sense of it fast.

An interesting point came up in one of the many discussions at Edge 2013 touching on big data. Every person’s data footprint is as unique as a fingerprint or other bio-metrics. We all visit different websites and interact with social media and use our credit and debit cards in highly individual ways. Again, marketers have sensed this at some level for years, but they haven’t yet really honed it down to the actual individual on a mass scale, although there is no technical reason one couldn’t. You now can, in effect, market to a demographic of one.

A related conference is coming up Oct. 21-25 in Orlando, Fl., called Enterprise Systems 2013.  It will combine the System z and the Power System Technical University along with a new executive-focused Enterprise Systems event. It will include new announcements, peeks into trends and directions, over 500 expert technical sessions across 10 tracks, and a comprehensive solution center. This blogger has already put it on his calendar.

There was much more interesting information at Edge 2013, such as using data analytics and cognitive computing to protect IT systems.  Perimeter defense, anti-virus, and ID management are no longer sufficient. Stay tuned.

Where Have All the Enterprise IT Hardware Vendors Gone?

Remember that song asking where all the flowers had gone? In a few years you might be asking the same of many of today’s enterprise hardware vendors.  The answer is important as you plan your data center 3-5 years out.  Where will you get your servers from and at what cost? Will you even need servers in your data center?  And what will they look like, maybe massive collections of ARM processors?

As reported in The Register (Amazon cloud threatens the entire IT ecosystem): Amazon’s cloud poses a major threat to most of the traditional IT ecosystem, a team of 25 Morgan Stanley analysts write in a report, Amazon Web Services: Making Waves in the IT Pond, that was released recently. The Morgan Stanley researchers cite Brocade, NetApp, QLogic, EMC and VMware as facing the greatest challenges from the growth of AWS. The threat takes the form of AWS’s exceeding low cost per virtual machine instance.

Beyond the price threat, the vendors are scrambling to respond to the challenges of cloud, mobile, and big data/analytics. Even Intel, the leading chip maker, just introduced the 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor family to address these challenges.  The new chip promises optimized experiences personalized for end-users’ specific needs and offers double the battery life and breakthrough graphics targeted to new low cost devices such as mobile tablets and all-in-one systems.

The Wall Street Journal online covered related ground from a different perspective when it wrote: PC makers unveiled a range of unconventional devices on the eve of Asia’s biggest computer trade show as they seek to revive (the) flagging industry and stay relevant amid stiff competition. Driven by the cloud and the explosion of mobile devices in a variety of forms the enterprise IT industry doesn’t seem to know what the next device should even be.

Readers once chastised this blogger for suggesting that their next PC might be a mobile phone. Then came smartphones, quickly followed by tablets. Today PC sales are dropping fast, according to IDC.

The next rev of your data center may be based on ARM processors (tiny, stingy with power, cheap, cool, and remarkably fast), essentially mobile phone chips. They could be ganged together in large quantities to deliver mainframe-like power, scalability, and reliability at a fraction of the cost.

IBM has shifted its focus and is targeting cloud computing, mobile, and big data/analytics, even directing its acquisitions toward these areas as witnessed by yesterday’s SoftLayer acquisition. HP, Oracle, most of the other vendors are pursuing variations of the same strategy.  Oracle, for example, acquired Tekelec, a smart device signaling company.

But as the Morgan Stanley analysts noted, it really is Amazon using its cloud scale to savage the traditional enterprise IT vendor hardware strategies and it is no secret why:

• No upfront investment
• Pay for Only What You Use (with a caveat or two)
• Price Transparency
• Faster Time to Market
• Near-infinite Scalability and Global Reach

And the more AWS grows, the more its prices drop due to the efficiency of cloud scaling.  It is not clear how the enterprise IT vendors will respond.

What will your management say when they get a whiff of AWS pricing. An extra large, high memory SQL Server database instance lists for $0.74 per hour (check the fine print). What does your Oracle database cost you per hour running on your on-premise enterprise server? That’s what the traditional enterprise IT vendors are facing.

Can Flash Replace Hard Disk for Enterprise Storage?

Earlier this month IBM announced a strategic initiative, the IBM FlashSystem, to drive Flash technology deeper into the enterprise. The IBM FlashSystem is a line of all-Flash storage appliances based on technology IBM acquired from Texas Memory Systems.

IBM’s intent over time is to replace hard disk drive (HDD) for enterprise storage with flash. Flash can speed the response of servers and storage systems to data requests from milliseconds to microseconds – an order of magnitude improvement. And because it is all electronic—nothing mechanical involved—and being delivered cost-efficiently at even petabyte scale, it can remake data center economics, especially for transaction-intensive and IOPS-intensive situations.

For example, the IBM FlashSystem 820 is the size of a pizza box but 20x faster than spinning hard drives and can store up to 24 TB of data. The entry-level IBM FlashSystem, with an approximate street price for an entry 820 (10 TB usable RAID 5) runs about $150K (or $15 per gigabyte).  At the high end, you can assemble a 1 PB FlashSystem that fits in one rack and delivers 22 million IOs per second (IOPS). You would need 630 racks of high capacity hard disk drives or 315 racks of performance optimized disk to generate an equal amount of IOPS.

For decades storage economics has been driven by the falling cost per unit of storage, and storage users have benefited from a remarkable ride down the cost curve thanks to Moore’s law. The cost per gigabyte for hard disk drive (HDD) has dropped steadily, year after year. You now can buy a slow, USB-connected 1TB consumer-grade disk drive for under $89!

With low cost per gigabyte storage, storage managers could buy cheap gigabytes, which enabled backup to disk and long-term disk archiving. Yes, tape is even cheaper on a cost per gigabyte basis but it is slow and cumbersome and prone to failure. Today HDD rules.

Silicon-based memory, however, has been riding the Moore’s Law cost slope too. In the last decade memory has emerged as a new storage media through memory-based storage in the form of RAM, DRAM, cache, flash, and solid state disk (SSD) technology. Prohibitively expensive to use for mass storage initially, the magic of Moore’s law combined with other technical advances and mass market efficiencies have made flash something to think about seriously for enterprise production storage.

The IBM FlashSystem changes data center economics. One cloud provider reported deploying 5TB in 3.5 inches of rack space compared to deploying 1300 hard disks to achieve 400k IOPS and it did so at one-tenth the cost.  Overall, Wikibon reports an all Flash approach will lower total system costs by 30%; that’s $4.9m for all flash compared to $7.1m for hard disk.  Specifically, it reduced software license costs 38%, required 17% few servers, and lowered environmental costs by 74% and operational support costs by 35%.  At the same time it boosted storage utilization by 50% while reducing maintenance and simplifying management with corresponding labor savings. Combine flash with compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning and the economics look even better.

For data center managers, this runs counter to everything they learned about the cost of storage. Traditional storage economics starts with the cost of hard disk storage being substantially less than the cost of SSD or Flash on a $/GB basis. Organizations could justify SSD, only by using it in small amounts to tap its sizeable cost/IOPS advantage for IOPS-intensive workloads.

Any HDD price/performance advantage is coming to an end. As reported in PC World, Steve Mills, IBM Senior Vice President noted:  Right now, generic hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. An enterprise hard drive will cost about $4 per gigabyte, and a high-performance hard drive will run about $6 per gigabyte. If an organization stripes its data across more disks for better performance, the cost goes up to about $10 per gigabyte. In some cases, where performance is critical, hard-drive costs can skyrocket to $30 or $50 per gigabyte.

From a full systems perspective (TCO for storage) Flash looks increasingly competitive. Said Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, Systems Storage, IBM Systems & Technology Group: “The economics and performance of Flash are at a point where the technology can have a revolutionary impact on enterprises, especially for transaction-intensive applications.” But this actually goes beyond just transactions. Also look at big data analytics workloads, technical computing, and any other IOPS-intensive work.

Almost every major enterprise storage vendor—EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, Oracle/Sun—is adding SSD to their storage offerings. It is time to start rethinking your view of storage economics when flash can replace HDD and deliver better performance, utilization, and reliability even while reducing server software licensing costs and energy bills.

IT Chaos Means Opportunity for the CIO

Hurricanes, hybrid superstorms, earthquake-tsunami combinations, extreme heat, heavy snow in April are just a few signs of chaos. For IT professionals specifically, chaos today comes from the proliferation of smartphones and BYOD or the deluge of data under the banner of big data. A sudden shift to the deployment of massive numbers of ARM processors or extreme virtualization might trigger platform chaos.  A shortage of sufficient energy can lead to another form of chaos. Think of it this way: chaos has become the new normal.

Big consulting firms have latched onto the idea of chaos. Deloitte looks to enterprise data management to create order out of chaos. At Capgemini, the need of organizations to increasingly deal with unstructured processes that ordinary Business Process Management (BPM) solutions were not designed to cope with can be enough to lead to chaos. Their solution: developing case management around a BPM solution – preferably in conjunction with an Enterprise Content Management system – solves many of the problems

Eric Berridge, co-founder of Bluewolf Group, a leading consulting firm specializing in Salesforce.com implementations, put it best when he wrote in a recent blog that CIOs must learn to harness chaos for a very simple reason: business is becoming more chaotic. Globalization and technology, which have turned commerce on its head over the past 20 years, promise an even more dizzying rate of change in the next decade.

Berridge’s solution draws on the superhero metaphor. The CIO has to become Captain Chaos, the one able to overcome a seemingly insurmountable level of disarray to deliver the right value at the right time. And you do that my following a few straightforward tips:

First, don’t build stuff you don’t absolutely have to build. You want your organization to travel as light as possible. If you build systems you are stuck with them. Instead, you want to be able to change systems as fast as the business changes in response to whatever chaos is swirling at the moment. That means you need to aim for an agile IT infrastructure, probably one that can take tap a variety of cloud services and turn them on and off as needed.

Then, recognize the consumerization of IT and the chaos it has sparked.  This is not something to be resisted but embraced and facilitated in ways that give you and your organization the measure of control you need. Figure out how to take advantage of the consumerization of IT through responsive policies, elastic infrastructure, and flexible security capabilities.

Next, encourage the organization’s R&D and product development groups to also adopt agile methods and approaches to innovation, especially through social media and other forms of collaboration. Even encourage them to go a step further by reaching out to customers to participate.  Your role as CIO at this point is to facilitate interaction among the parties who can create successful innovation.

Finally, layer on enough just-in-time governance to enable the organization to manage the collaboration and interactivity. The goal is to rein in chaos and put it to work. To do that you need to help set priorities, define objectives, execute plans, and enforce flexible and agile policies—all the things that any successful business needs to do but do so in the context of a chaotic world that is changing in ways you and top management can’t predict.

As CIO this puts big demands on you too. To start, you have to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening with the world at large, in business and with technology. That means you need to figuratively identify and place sensors and monitors that can tip you off as things change. You also can’t master every technology. Instead you need to identify an ever-changing stable of technology masters you can call on as needed and familiarize yourself with the vast amount of resources available in the cloud.

In the end, these last two points—a stable of technology masters you can call upon and deep familiarity with cloud resources—will enable you to deliver the most value to your organization despite the chaos of the moment. At that point you truly become Captain Chaos, the one your organization counts on to deal with ever changing chaos.

Lessons from IBM Eagle TCO Analyses

A company running an obsolete z890 mainframe with what amounted to 0.88 processors (332 MIPS) planned a migration to a distributed system consisted of 36 distributed UNIX servers. The production workload consisted of applications, database, testing, development, security, and more.  Five years later, the company was running the same in the 36-server, multi-core (41x more cores than the z890) distributed environment except that its 4-year TCO went from $4.9 million to $17.9 million based on an IBM Eagle study.  The lesson, the Eagle team notes: cores drive platform costs in distributed systems.

Then there is the case of a 3500 MIPS mainframe shop that budgeted $10 million for a 1-year migration to a distributed environment. Eighteen months into the project, now six months behind schedule, the company had spent $25 million and only managed to offload 350 MIPS. In addition, it had to increase staff to cover the  over-run, implement steps to replace mainframe automation, had to acquire additional distributed capacity over the initial prediction (to support only 10% of total MIPS offloaded), and had to extend the period of running the old and the new systems in parallel at even more cost due to the schedule overrun. Not surprisingly, the executive sponsor is gone.

If the goal of a migration to the distributed environment is cost savings, the IBM Eagle team has concluded after 3 years of doing such analyses, most migrations are a failure. Read the Eagle FAQ here.

The Eagle TCO team was formed in 2007 and since then reports completing over 300 user studies.  Often its studies are used to determine the best platform among IBM’s various choices for a given set of workloads, usually as part of a Fit for Purpose. In other cases, the Eagle analysis is aimed at enabling a System z shop to avoid a migration to a distributed platform. The Eagle team, in fact, is platform agnostic until it completes its quantitative analysis, when the resulting numbers generally make the decisions clear.

Along the way, the Eagle team has learned a few lessons.  For example:  re-hosting projects tend to be larger than anticipated. The typical one-year projection will likely turn into a two- or three-year project.

The Eagle team also offers the following tips, which can help existing shops that aren’t necessarily looking to migrate but just want to minimize costs:

• Update hardware and software; new systems generally are more cost-efficient. For example one bank upgraded from z/OS 1.6 to 1.8 and reduced each LPAR’s MIPS by 5% (monthly software cost savings paid for the upgrade almost immediately)
• Schedule workloads to take advantage of sub-capacity software pricing for platforms that offer it, which may produce free workloads
• Consolidate workloads on Linux, which invariably saves money, especially when consolidating many Linux virtual servers on a mainframe IFL. (A recent debate raged on LinkedIn focused on how many virtual instances can run on an IFL with some suggesting a max of 20. The official IBM figure:  you can consolidate up to 60 distributed cores or more on a single System z core; a single System z core = an IFL.)
• Changing the database can impact capacity requirements and therefore costs, resulting in lower hardware and software costs
• Consider the  IBM mainframe Solution Edition program, which is the best mainframe deal going, enabling you to acquire a new mainframe for workloads you’ve never run on a mainframe for a deeply discounted package price including hardware, software, middleware, and 3 years of maintenance.

 BottomlineIT generally is skeptical of TCO analyses from vendors. To be useful the analysis needs to include full context, technical details (components, release levels, and prices), and specific quantified benchmark results.  In addition, there are soft costs that must be considered.  Eagle analyses generally do that.

In the end, the lowest acquisition cost or even the lowest TCO isn’t necessarily the best platform choice for a given situation or workload. Determining the right platform requires both quantifiable analysis and judgment.

Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) Come of Age

Every organization deploying applications to the cloud will want CMP, advises Gartner in its Cloud Management Platforms, 2013 report.

In a different Gartner report, titled Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, the researchers note: As enterprises deploy private clouds, interest in managing them is rising. Innovative CMP vendors—what Gartner dubs Cool Vendors—can help manage infrastructure resources to deliver service quality, security, and availability for workloads running in cloud environments.

“The benefits become obvious as enterprises start to deploy serious business workloads in the cloud, and these benefits all address bottom line concerns,” says Steven Henning, CMO, ServiceMesh.  The benefits revolve around grabbing new market opportunities fast and accelerating the introduction of new business capabilities that bring in customers and revenue.  ServiceMesh is one of the four cool CMP vendors named in Gartner’s report along with Cloupia, Eucalyptus, and Nimbula.

For DevOps to really hum, particularly when working at the speed of the cloud, it must work with IT to provision policies and governance across the software development lifecycle to create a common application platform and resources that support any language, streamline the entire application lifecycle, and generate market-ready applications faster than competitors. That’s why you want CMP technology.

CMP helps IT too. Often IT overhead and infrastructure management inhibit the allocation of developer resources and slow the organization’s ability to drive innovation at the speed of market demand. But by provisioning applications across the application lifecycle with pre-configured IT production-like containers for the application code, both IT and developers bypass the bottlenecks that occur at each phase of the software development lifecycle and speed delivery of applications to the cloud.

As 451 Research notes: Working where application development meets IT operations, DevOps teams moving to the cloud need tools to design application architecture, deploy it into production, and prevent unauthorized configuration drift.

451 Research was particularly impressed with ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform. Designed as an enterprise-class CMP, Agility embodies ServiceMesh’s conviction that platforms and applications drive business value, not infrastructure. Accordingly, the company believes that cloud governance has to be both application-centric, for today’s needs, and extensible, for the needs of tomorrow. Not surprisingly, the company is a major advocate of collaboration between application development teams and IT operations teams.

The 451 researchers observed that Agility Platform’s existing policies, event correlation capabilities, and application context awareness can all be harnessed to advance automated configuration management. It also plays nicely with the in-place CMDB, Puppet Master Server, and any other third-party tools.  In short, it is designed to address exactly the needs of enterprise DevOps.

Gartner, too, liked Agility Platform:  It identifies ServiceMesh’s strengths as a strong policy engine and lifecycle management. Furthermore, it is differentiated by connectors to third party providers and integration with other management systems. Finally Agility Platform provides policy-driven management, governance, security, and lifecycle management capabilities for private or hybrid cloud initiatives;  enabling IT organizations to manage all phases of the cloud computing lifecycle including the plan, build, and run stages by leveraging its policy-based framework. In addition, ServiceMesh’s cloud-native architecture can expand automatically through horizontal scaling to handle increasing system demands, according to Gartner.

But as Gartner noted, there are three others among its cool vendors in cloud management:

Cloupia offers its Unified Infrastructure Controller (UIC) as its cloud management platform (CMP). The UIC is software that enables the management of both private and public cloud services. It supports a self-service interface, workflow engine, and an orchestrator for virtual machine (VM) and physical infrastructure provisioning, Gartner reports.

Eucalyptus is a little different by providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities through an open-source software-based infrastructure for implementing on-premises clouds on existing infrastructure. The company’s strategy, according to Gartner, is to remain an IaaS platform, continue to advance its functionality, and build out a partner ecosystem to offer a more complete cloud solution.

Nimbula offers Director 2.0, which provides capabilities to build, manage, scale, and secure cloud environments across on-premises pools of virtualized IT resources as well as resources in public clouds, such as Amazon’s EC2. Like most of the others it uses the representational state transfer (REST) API to interface with cloud resources—both on premise and in public clouds—and it provides automation to manage the allocation of those resources, similar to ServiceMesh’s policy-based automation engine.

No vendor provides a complete CMP solution yet although ServiceMesh comes close. Still, you may need additional tools or may have to integrate multiple CMP approaches. But the CMP market is evolving fast; if you wait six months, each product will be better. Just don’t wait too long or you may miss fleeting opportunities. Tools like these enable DevOps to move that fast.

Mainframe Workload Economics

IBM never claims that every workload is suitable for the zEnterprise. The company prefers to talk about platform issues in terms of fit-for-purpose or tuned-to-the-task. With the advent of hybrid computing, the low cost z114, and now the expected low cost version of the zEC12 later this year, however, you could make a case for any workload that benefits from the reliability, security, and efficiency of the zEnterprise mainframe is fair game.

John Shedletsky, VP, IBM Competitive Project Office, did not try to make that case. To the contrary, earlier this week he presented the business case for five workloads that are optimum economically and technically on the zEnterprise.  They are:  transaction processing, critical data workloads, batch processing, co-located business analytics, and consolidation-on-one-platform. None of these should be a surprise; possibly with the exception of analytics and consolidated platform they represent traditional mainframe workloads.  BottomlineIT covered Shedletsky’s mainframe cost/workload analysis last year here.

This comes at a time when IBM has started making a lot of noise about new and different workloads on the zEnterprise. Doug Balog, head of IBM System z mainframe group, for example, was quoted widely in the press earlier this month talking about bringing mobile computing workloads to the z. Says Balog in Midsize Insider: “I see there’s a trend in the market we haven’t directly connected to z yet, and that’s this mobile-social platform.”

Actually, this isn’t even all that new either. BottomlineIT’s sister blog, DancingDinosaur, was writing about organizations using SOA to connect CICS apps running on the z to users with mobile devices a few years ago here.

What Shedletsky really demonstrated this week was the cost-efficiency of the zEC12.  In one example he compared a single workload, app production/dev/test running on a 16x, 32-way HP Superdome and an 8x, 48-way Superdome with a zEC12 41-way. The zEC12 delivered the best price/performance by far, $111 million (5yr TCA) for the zEC12 vs. $176 million (5yr TCA) for the two Superdomes.

When running Linux on z workloads with the zEC12 compared to 3 Oracle database workloads (Oracle Enterprise Edition, Oracle RAC, 4 server nodes per cluster) supporting 18K transactions/sec.  running on 12 HP DL580 servers (192 cores) the HP system priced out at $13.2 million (3yr TCA) compared to a zEC12 running 3 Oracle RAC clusters (4 nodes per cluster, each as a Linux guest) with 27 IFLs that priced out at $5.7 million (3yr TCA). The zEC12 came in at less than half the cost.

With analytics such a hot topic these days Shedletsky also presented a comparison of the zEnterprise Analytics System 9700 (zEC12, DB2 v10, z/OS, 1 general processor, 1 zIIP) and an IDAA with a current Teradata machine. The result: the Teradata cost $330K/queries per hour compared to $10K/queries per hour.  Workload time for the Teradata was 1,591 seconds for 9.05 queries per hour compared to 60.98 seconds and 236 queries per hour on the zEC12. The Teradata total cost was $2.9 million compared to $2.3 million for the zEC12.

None of these are what you would consider new workloads, and Shedletsky has yet to apply his cost analysis to mobile or social business workloads. However, the results shouldn’t be much different. Mobile applications, particularly mobile banking and other mobile transaction-oriented applications, will play right into the zEC12 strengths, especially when they are accessing CICS on the back end.

While transaction processing, critical data workloads, batch processing, co-located business analytics, and consolidation-on-one-platform remain the sweet spot for the zEC12, Balog can continue to make his case for mobile and social business on the z. Maybe in the next set of Shedletsky comparative analyses we’ll see some of those workloads come up.

For social business the use cases aren’t quite clear yet. One use case that is emerging, however, is social business big data analytics. Now you can apply the zEC12 to the analytics processing part at least and the efficiencies should be similar.

Five Questions That Set the Stage for Cloud Deployment

Cloud computing clearly is gaining traction but leaving CIOs a little confused about the role of IT in any cloud strategy. Yet, a September study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), found that organizations are embracing the cloud at a 15% faster rate than previously forecast.

Of course, you expect members of a leading technology group like ODCA to be early adopters. But what if your client isn’t an early adopter? Deloitte offers a cloud readiness survey to identify inhibitors to cloud adoption here. Capgemini also has a cloud readiness approach here.

Even after management understands what it wants to achieve with cloud computing, the organization still may not be ready. Whatever their interest in cloud computing IDC identifies five questions you should ask them that sets the stage for any cloud deployment.

The questions below are intended to help you guide your organization to what is required of it to effectively leverage cloud computing.  Notice how its relationship with IT plays a central role, as it should. BottomlineIT expects cloud options to become just another part of the standard IT capabilities set and will be used to a different extent by almost every organization

1.   To What Extent Are IT Resources Used to Support Company Objectives? This gets to the issue of whether IT is an integral part of the company’s strategic thinking. IDC found that almost 60% of midsize firms agree strongly that advanced technology is an important competitive tool when used as a strategic resource. If IT is integral then cloud computing can become a competitive differentiator. The cloud also represents an attractive option for companies that view technology as a way to save money.  Although the immediate benefit of cloud technology will be tactical cost and deployment advantages, longer term the strategic implications of cloud capabilities will be even more valuable.

2.   How Physically Complicated Is the Company? The number of company locations supported by the current IT infrastructure will be important to consider in any cloud computing implementation. On average, midsize firms have 6.4 locations, with IT staff typically based at headquarters. This can complicate general maintenance and installation of new software and upgrades. With cloud-based software all users run the latest version of hosted applications, simplifying support for multiple locations. In effect, the more locations you have and the more diverse your IT environment, the more the cloud can do for you in coordinating and managing application deployment.

3.  What Is the Company’s Pace of Organizational Evolution? How Much Change Is Under Way? The cloud can provide access across the organization to a central set of rationalized technology offerings. While these are easier to manage than multiple legacy approaches, the real benefits come from improvements in worker cooperation and collaboration. And don’t overlook future M&A activities. The integration of IT resources is not among the top concerns in an acquisition until a deal is completed. But then its impact can emerge in very unpleasant ways. For firms undergoing major change cloud engagements today can set the stage for improved organizational flexibility tomorrow.  Cloud technology, similarly can facilitate change, allowing midsize companies to add or test new applications or processes without having to expand their IT infrastructure. It also can make enterprise applications available to midmarket companies in an affordable way.

4.   How Are Mobile Workers Supported, and Could They Benefit from Access to Cloud-Based Resources? Enhancing worker productivity is a key reason for expanding technology investment and providing access to advanced networking capabilities via the cloud to achieve anytime, anyplace resource access. From an ROI perspective, the mobile worker case for cloud computing can be intuitively compelling, especially if it improves the sales close rate or speeds on-boarding new customers. IDC suggests that even a 5% improvement could translate into an effective financial justification for cloud computing investment.

5.   What External Forces Are Encouraging/Discouraging Cloud Computing Adoption?  A changing competitive landscape as well as the regulatory environment can provide strong incentives or disincentives for the adoption of cloud computing. Note that external forces will continue to be in a state of flux as cloud computing becomes more widespread. If external forces are discouraging cloud adoption, plan to revisit those attitudes regularly because the increasing adoption and evolution of cloud computing changes attitudes fast.

There also are 3 reasons NOT to adopt cloud computing now: security/compliance, latency, availability. A subsequent post will elaborate on these.

Winning the Coming Talent War Mainframe Style

The next frontier in the ongoing talent war, according to McKinsey, will be deep analytics, a critical weapon required to probe big data in the competition underpinning new waves of productivity, growth, and innovation. Are you ready to compete and win in this technical talent war?

Similarly, Information Week contends that data expertise is called for to take advantage of data mining, text mining, forecasting, and machine learning techniques. As it turns out the mainframe is ideally is ideally positioned to win if you can attract the right talent.

Finding, hiring, and keeping good talent within the technology realm is the number one concern cited by 41% of senior executives, hiring managers, and team leaders responding to the latest Harris Allied Tech Hiring and Retention Survey. Retention of existing talent was the next biggest concern, cited by 19.1%.

This past fall, CA published the results of its latest mainframe survey that came to similar conclusions. It found three major trends on the current and future role of the mainframe:

1. The mainframe is playing an increasingly strategic role in managing the evolving needs of the enterprise
2. The mainframe as an enabler of innovation as big data and cloud computing transform the face of enterprise IT
3. Demand for tech talent with cross-disciplinary skills to fill critical mainframe workforce needs in this new view of enterprise IT

Among the respondents to the CA survey, 76% of global respondents believe their organizations will face a shortage of mainframe skills in the future, yet almost all respondents, 98%, felt their organizations were moderately or highly prepared to ensure the continuity of their mainframe workforce. In contrast, only 8% indicated having great difficulty finding qualified mainframe talent while 61% reported having some difficulty in doing so.

The Harris survey was conducted in September and October 2012. Its message is clear: Don’t be fooled by the national unemployment figures, currently hovering above 8%.  “In the technology space in particular, concerns over the ability to attract game-changing talent has become institutional and are keeping all levels of management awake at night,” notes Harris Allied Managing Director Kathy Harris.

The reason, as suggested in recent IBM studies, is that success with critical new technologies around big data, analytics, cloud computing, social business, virtualization, and mobile increasingly are giving top performing organizations their competitive advantage. The lingering recession, however, has taken its toll; unless your data center has been charged to proactively keep up, it probably is saddled with 5-year old skills at best; 10-year old skills more likely.

The Harris study picked up on this. When asking respondents the primary reason they thought people left their organization, 20% said people left for more exciting job opportunities or the chance to get their hands on some hot new technology.

Some companies recognize the problem and belatedly are trying to get back into the tech talent race. As Harris found when asking about what companies are doing to attract this kind of top talent 38% said they now were offering great opportunities for career growth. Others, 28%, were offering opportunities for professional development to recruit top tech pros. A fewer number, 24.5%, were offering competitive compensation packages while fewer still, 9%, offering competitive benefits packages.

To retain the top tech talent they already had 33.6% were offering opportunities for professional development, the single most important strategy they leveraged to retain employees. Others, 24.5%, offered opportunities for career advancement while 23.6% offered competitive salaries. Still a few hoped a telecommuting option or competitive bonuses would do the trick.

Clearly mainframe shops, like IT in general, are facing a transition as Linux, Java, SOA, cloud computing, analytics, big data, mobile, and social play increasing roles in the organization and the mainframe gains the capabilities to play in all these arenas. Advanced mainframe skills like CICS are great but it’s just a start. You also need Rest, Hadoop, and a slew of mobile, cloud, and data management skill sets.  At the same time, hybrid systems and expert integrated systems like IBM PureSystems and zEnterprise/zBX give shops the ability to tap a broader array of tech talent while baking in much of the expertise required.

The Use Case and Business Case for SSD

PwC is bullish on mobile, projecting a 35% CAGR through 2015, driven in large part by solid state disk (SSD) technology.  The PwC researchers now see it extending beyond mobile to other types of computing.

Deloitte takes SSD enthusiasm even further: By the end of 2012, SSD will likely store data in 90% of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, MP3 players), up from just 20% in 2006, the consulting firm predicts. More surprising, Deloitte expects up to 15% of laptops and netbooks to rely on SSDs, four times more than in 2010. Even in the data center, SSDs could rise to 10%.

The growing penetration of SSD into enterprise data centers presents a  challenge to enterprise data center trying to identify the best use cases figure out how it fits into their storage strategy. Even with the price-performance improvements, however, SSD remains significantly more expensive than hard disk drive (HDD) storage on a cost-per-gigabyte basis.  Any adoption of SSD will require building a compelling business case for SSD.

“The increasing use of flash in enterprise solutions, explosive growth of mobile client devices, and lower SSD pricing is creating a perfect storm for increased SSD shipments and revenue over our forecast,” according to IDC’s 2012 market report.  The researchers expect SSD shipments to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 51.5% from 2010 to 2015.

The initial enterprise use cases revolve around workloads that require extremely low latency and workloads that demand fast performance or high I/O throughput.  It also can be useful in data centers scrambling to reduce energy consumption or are cramped for rack space. A small amount of SSD can replace a large amount of HDD in a rack.

For example, Penn State turned to SSD to speed up nightly backup. Its solution: a flash array from Texas Memory Systems (acquired by IBM) instead of increasing the number of HDD spindles. It paid off in a 6x improvement in nightly backup performance with two 1U flash arrays replacing 200 15k disks and reducing power consumption by 90% in the process.

With SSD prices dropping below $1 per gigabyte that still leaves SSD considerably more expensive than HDD on a cost/gigabyte basis.  Cost/gigabyte, however, is not the only cost metric important to enterprise data centers.

SSD has at least two cost metrics it brings to the party that you can use to build the business case for SSD:  dramatically lower cost in terms of I/O performance. This is particularly apparent when you look the I/O cost per second (IOPS).  SSD also requires considerably less data center energy and space.

The way you boost IOPS performance with HDD is to aggregate hundreds, or more likely, thousands of the fastest spinning HDDs to boost IOPS performance. Even at the low HDD cost/gigabyte, the cost adds up.

Also, few data centers these days have cheap rack space to spare so more rack space will need to be found, adding to the data center real estate cost. Finally, all those spinning disks consume electricity, raising energy costs so add to the cost of HDD the cost of data center space and energy. On a cost/IOPS basis of a few thousand HDDs, which is what it would take to generate a comparable level of IOPS to a just a few SSDs, the HDD approach is no IOPS bargain. SSD storage, by the way, uses 90% or less energy than HDD. Figured on a cost/IOPS basis, SSD energy consumption is negligible. This is the foundation of your business case.

This is not to say that SSD has no drawbacks. SSD life expectancy can be a concern. In short, SSDs can wear out.

The SSD industry has come up with several solutions to the wear out problem. The most widely adopted is load-leveling. Through load-leveling, writes are distributed across the cells to minimize wear of any cell. Through load-leveling organizations can effectively stretch the useful life of SSD by years.

It is unlikely that enterprise data centers will completely replace HDD storage with SSD. In the meantime, polish your business case for SSD. You’ll want it sooner or later.