IT Q3 Report Card: Financial Crisis Impacting IT Decision-Making

How is IT in general holding up in this volatile environment, and what are the prospects of various sectors going forward? That's what everyone wants to know, and about which few people are willing to go out on a limb and make predictions.

OK, so we've endured about 60 days of the zig-zagging U.S. macroeconomy, and now we have a number of quarterly financial reports to view as early evidence about how bad the damage may be. How is IT in general holding up in this volatile environment, and what are the prospects of various sectors going forward? That's what everyone wants to know, and about which few people are willing to go out on a limb and make predictions.

eWeek Article

Adjusting your budget in a volatile economy

CIO Jeff Rowley hashed over his 2009 IT budget with his business partners more than he ever has before. In his case, the business is the hurting state of Ohio, facing a 2009 budget deficit of between $733 million to more than $1 billion. Rowley is CIO of the state's Department of Natural Resources, overseeing an annual IT budget that hovers around $9 million.

His charge is to support his department's initiatives more efficiently and spend less doing it. Ohio's departments have already taken two across-the-board cost cuts, Rowley said, but budget talks have taken a different turn from past years.

SearchCIO article

Cutting power bill isn’t best result of data center efficiency

It might seem illogical, but the best savings from being efficient in your data center can’t necessarily be seen on the power bill.

That was one of the main points Ken Brill, founder and executive director of The Uptime Institute, hammered home in his presentation at Data Center Decisions last week. His keynote, entitled “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency,” tied everything back to the most important thing: the almighty dollar.

So where does the big savings come from? It comes from being able to hold off on building a new, expensive data center, the price tag on which can easily exceed $100 million if you’re talking about a big facility.

IT Knowledge Exchange article

Virtualizing your data protection - it ain't no cakewalk and takes a lot more than grabbing another copy of back-u-up 6.0

A colleague (Jeff Byrne) and I recently did a webcast over on InfoStor about storage issues surrounding server virtualization. On the tail end of that session, we received a number of questions about data protection in virtual environments. That in and of itself isn't necessarily news - optimal virtual server backup is without a doubt confusing and somewhat frustrating. But the fact that there are always questions around protection, and that there are no clear answers applicable across every situation, is leading me to shift my perspective a bit.

ComputerWorld article

Down To Business: The Death Of The CIO (And Other Cautionary Tales)

Remember the stock market experts who wrote books years ago predicting the Dow would surpass 30,000, 36,000, 40,000 in no time? Better for them that you don't remember. As a customer reviewer on Amazon.com recently remarked about one of those blowhards: "At least I'm reassured that this guy's probably now living in a cardboard box under an overpass, and sleeping in a polyester leisure suit that he ripped off from the Salvation Army."

If you're going to venture over the top with your predictions, it pays to stay within the same ZIP code of reality. Ask Nicholas Carr, whose "IT Doesn't Matter" article in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review took on the less muscular title Does IT Matter? when he expanded it for a book. Carr's still taken seriously as an author and keynote speaker because he's been willing to temper his controversial positions on a variety of technology subjects--from cloud computing to the digital enterprise--when evidence has suggested the underlying issues aren't so black and white

Information Week article

Traditional disaster recovery test models outgrow usefulness

Most CIOs at enterprise-level companies are in on the dirty little secret of disaster recovery (DR) testing: The traditional DR test method is outgrowing its usefulness. The complexity of today's environments makes true simulation of recovery from a disaster quite difficult.

CIOs aren't abandoning the method -- there are as yet few alternatives -- but analysts say they would be wise to incrementally increase the scope of testing and look to tools to monitor software configuration changes to increase effectiveness.

SearchCIO article

Gotcha! How virtualization savings can vanish

As a consultant at Accenture, Jay Corn has seen IT organizations plan a virtualization deployment to drive down server operating costs - and then realize that they would achieve zero cost savings.

Here's the problem: If you host your servers at a colocation facility, chances are the service provider - not you - will get all of the benefits. The problem lies in the pricing models. "They still look it as one server image and they don't care if it's virtual or physical - they charge the same for it. That's definitely a big gotcha," he says.

ComputerWorld article

Google Apps Outages Officially a Part of Our Lives

Google's Gmail suffers an outage, while the search engine's Start Page suffers a bug, disconnecting users from their content. The blips cast another pall over SAAS, cloud computing and Web services at large. We might be able to depend on SAAS, but we must take additional measures to make sure all of the data we transact via desktops and computers is made redundant.

Update: There is a harried Google Apps adviser named Mark whose life I don't envy. Once, sometimes twice a month it seems, he gets to try to sooth angry users of Google Apps, the search engine's Web-based applications that enable collaboration via e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet documents.

eWeek article

Capacity planning and the cloud

One of the problems that cloud computing is trying to solve is the issue of dealing with capacity planning for companies and the services that they offer. Current datacenters for individual companies, and where relevant, for entire websites, are designed to cope with a particular peak load.

The problem with this model is that it means that a large number of machines may sit relatively idle while waiting for the traffic spike that causes them to be used. Meanwhile, these machines are sucking power, wasting management cycles, and ultimately iterating over their own lifespan waiting to be used. Altogether, it's a waste of time and resources on a whole number of levels.

ComputerWorld Article

Thinking outside the case: running naked servers

When it comes to data center metrics the one most often talked about is square footage. Nobody ever announces that they've built a facility with Y-tons of cooling, or Z-Megawatts. The first metric quoted is X-square feet. Talk to any data center manager however and they'll tell you that floor space is completely irrelevant these days. It only matters to the real estate people. All that matters to the rest of us is power and cooling - Watts per square foot. How much space you have available is nowhere near as important as what you can actually do with it.
If you look at your data center with a fresh eye, where is the waste really happening?

Serverspecs article

Cloud computing is stupidity says GNU guru Richard Stallman

Mark Fricker at RPM Technologies brought this article to our attention. Great insight by Richard Stallman.

I just ran across an article in the Guardian (UK) in which GNU creator (and founder of the Free Software Foundation) Richard Stallman minces no words about the cloud computing phenomenon, calling it a trap. TechRepublic bloggers have written skeptically about the concept, especially where it concerns privacy and security issues, and others have reported on particular cloud initiatives such as those of Google and Amazon.

Stallman's comments to the Guardian go beyond merely skeptical, however: It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign.

Tech Republic article