October 17th, 2009

Of snow, rocks, a book, and another partisan attack on IBM

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Defenestration, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Sun

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Attack, Oracle 11gR2, Mainframes, Servers, Security, Hardware, Paul Murphy

Merry Christmas!

I’ll be out of town later this week so I’m writing this on Wednesday - between staring out the window at gently falling snow and contemplating the tragic reality that if the present solar minimum leads to massive crop failures around the world next summer, Gore et al won’t be among the two billion or so facing starvation as a result of policies they advocate - policies favoring the conversion of food to SUV fuel, the doubling of fertilizer prices, and the near elimination of critical pesticides and herbicides.

Speaking up for IBM.

Here’s a bit from an article by Information Week’s senior editor Bob Evans about a justice department decision to go after IBM on anti-trust charges:

I was going to say that it’s almost incomprehensible that Justice is preparing to once again mount a vague, circumspect, and generally unsubstantiated attack on one of the most creative, innovative and valuable companies in the world, but that would be unfair. Because there’s no “almost” about it - to anyone outside of the Justice Dept.’s giant-shoe red-nose horn-honking clownish view of the world, this grandstanding effort to attack IBM and teach the company its proper place is completely and 100% incomprehensible.

If it weren’t so pathetically and potentially misguided, it would almost be funny. But it’s not -no, not by a long shot.

Perhaps I’m out of phase on this, and perhaps all of us should sleep more comfortably knowing that our Attorney General’s trust-busting warriors are out there protecting all of us from IBM’s devious schemes to dominate -yes, to monopolize -the mainframe market.

While I think that IBM regularly resorts to non market means (e.g. the courts, the press, financial markets, and politics) to go after competitors they can’t beat in the marketplace and that this often amounts to legal but dishonorable conduct, the reality is that Evans is right here. For the U.S. Justice Department to after IBM on its mainframe business is unfair, unreasonable, and utterly perverse because that monopoly is not sustained by anything IBM does - on the contrary, from the Future Systems project to PowerLinux, IBM has repeatedly and honorably invested real money and corporate goodwill in trying to break customers out of that ghetto - but by the insistence and loyalties of a customer base that’s forty years out of date and absolutely refuses to advance.

The bottom line on this is simple: if the customer demands the right to buy mainframes at dollars to the value penny, then the customer’s bosses should fire him but IBM’s executives owe it to their shareholders to take the money and run - and if Holder wants to prosecute somebody on this, he could perhaps be reminded that most data processing managers are middle aged white guys who pay taxes and vote Republican.

That Sun TPC/C thing

The single best report I’ve seen so far from the Oracle OpenWorld techfest is by Ben Rockwood. Here’s what he says about Sun’s TPC/C benchmark result:

Larry drove the point about synergies between Oracle and Sun home in 2 ways. The first was talking about the previously released Sun/Oracle ExaData v2 product (pictured above). The second was to show that Sun’s technology today, pre-acquisition, is the best platform available for Oracle even against IBM’s monster POWER 595 system which consumes 76 standard racks. Sun’s solution that beat it consumes only 9 racks, is fault tolerant, based on SPARC (Niagara), got 25% more throughput, gets 16 times better response times, and obviously uses a hell of a lot less power to boot.

I had a conversation with the PAE guys there and got a lot of great details on the configuration and how they made it work. Here are some highlights…

So the Sun system that beat out the 595 was based on T5440 (UltraSPARC T2) systems connected to the new F5100 Flash Array. In order to make all this work in a fault tolerant way COMSTAR was used and throughout the process required absolutely no modification! Apparently the biggest “problem” they ran into some some minor tweeking in the mpt and sd drivers because they weren’t designed to hand the extreme number of IOPS coming from the flash arrays. More shockingly, when they got the TPC-C number that beat IBM the CPU’s were 50% idle! And, if you can believe it, during the whole time Sun was working on this benchmark of all the flash modules involved, only a single one failed! Just one!

Ok, it’s not ROCK (which technologies by the way, are up for resurrection!) but beating IBM with a production ready, off the shelf system, providing nearly instantaneous response at 50% CPU sure rocks.

Oh, and the most interesting thing at OpenWorld for non Sun users? Oracle 11gR2 has a flash memory extension of the SGA - add:

db_flash_cache_file = /lfdata/lffile_raw
db_flash_cache_size = much more than ram (e.g. 128GB)

to your setup file, mount an F20 Flash Accelerator card in a PCIe slot, and those nasty OLTP transactions that access some enormous working set suddenly go a lot faster. This is dumb in a Solaris/ZFS environment, but brilliant everywhere else because it makes the system’s biggest bottleneck disappear for peanuts.

Blackbelt IT?

And, speaking of opportunities for failure .. things are a little slow right now, so I’m about to dive into the long delayed business of rewriting the infamous Unix Guide to Defenestration series as a single book.

Since it really has two messages and two audiences: a strategic one aimed at senior executives telling them that IT should be delivered by IT professionals but run by user management; and a tactical one describing how Unix can be combined with smart displays to provide the efficiencies of centralized processing with the business value of fully decentralized control; pulling this together is going to be a neat trick - and one that probably requires a new title.

I’m wondering about “Blackbelt IT”, but if anyone has a better suggestion (and no copyright aspirations), I’d sure be happy to hear it.

October 3rd, 2009

Net Neutrality vs. "do no evil"

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Government

Tags: Bandwidth, Internet Service Provider, Net Neutrality, Internet, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Government, Paul Murphy

The various net neutrality proposals now in process in the U.S. Congress are intended to establish government oversight on all public networks in the United States in the stated interest of ensuring that carriers neither charge extra for, nor artificially retard or accelerate, packets based on origin or content.

On the surface the worst this is going to do is obsolete the priority packet forwarding terms found in many contracts - particularly for people with direct backbone connections, people forwarding broadcast signals, and people still using frame relay type technologies.

Look a bit deeper, however, and you find a lot of people expressing serious concerns - consider, for example, these bits from a Human Events article by Ross Kaminsky:

The idea of ‘Net Neutrality’ is to prevent Internet Service Providers (’ISP’s) from being able to slow down particular internet traffic or charge more for it, even if that traffic is compromising internet service for the rest of their network’s customers. One definition of Net Neutrality is ‘the principle that data packets on the Internet should be moved impartially, without regard to content, destination or source.’

…

So, for example, an ISP will not be allowed to slow down ‘peer-to-peer’ file transfers even if they are disproportionately degrading Internet service for others. Much like our income tax system, it is reported that 10% of internet users consume 80% of bandwidth. And much like our tax system, there are those who want others to foot the bill for their costs. If ISPs can’t have policies which address the fact that bandwidth is limited and that bandwidth hogs need to be restrained so the rest of their customers can maintain adequate service, that puts them in an extremely difficult situation.

Imagine you are a private builder of toll roads who invests a billion dollars in a highway. Then the government tells you that it’s unfair for you to charge 18-wheel tractor-trailers a higher toll than you charge passenger cars despite the fact that the big trucks are responsible for the large majority of your maintenance and repair budget. What would your choices then be? Probably some combination of stopping construction of further roads, raising the prices for everyone (because the government says everyone has to pay the same price), or trying to find legally uncertain ways to game the system. The same choices will apply to ISPs under Net Neutrality.

…

As Dylan Tweney noted in an article at Wired magazine entitled FCC Position May Spell the End of Unlimited Internet, AT&T has repeatedly stumbled in its ability to provide 3G wireless capacity, thanks to the unexpected popularity of the iPhone. Those difficulties lend credence to AT&T’s (and Apple’s) reluctance to allow apps like Skype and Slingplayer unfettered access to the 3G network: If the network can barely keep up with ordinary demand, just imagine what would happen if we were all live-streaming the Emmy Awards over our iPhones at the same time.”

While both the pro- and anti-Net Neutrality sides claim to be on the side of innovation, in the words of Heritage’s Gattuso, “I’m stumped to think of any government regulation which has increased rather than decreased creativity and innovation. This scheme is not made necessary by a lack of competition. It’s made to replace consumer choice with a government rule as to how traffic is to be managed. At the very least, we’ll have a slower, less efficient Internet. The government rules will be a first-come, first-served basis, but I doubt that’s the model the market would come to on its own; it’s not the model that works in most sectors of the economy.”

So why the push for ‘Net Neutrality’? Most of the support from the private sector is from large internet content companies which used to be truly capitalist and essentially libertarian in behavior, companies like Amazon, eBay, and particularly Google. As they add more high-bandwidth content, such as movies and music, they want to prevent ISPs from being able to charge them for using such a high percentage of available bandwidth. Instead, under the guise of ‘neutrality’, they’re trying to use government to prevent the owners of Internet infrastructure from being able to rationally set prices for the use of that infrastructure. In other words, they are trying to steal the ISPs property rights. Is it any wonder that almost all of Google’s political contributions go to Democrats?

One thing I think most of the people commenting on this issue have missed is that the American network infrastructure is currently under built in reaction to the excesses of the 90s - and therefore that these regulations, by killing the incentives for new investment, will eventually raise short term carrier profitability while essentially capping efforts to deliver high bandwidth content via the internet at or below present levels.

In the long run , therefore, the bottom line on net neutrality is is that it’s far from neutral in being good news for traditional media but bad news for internet users and worse news for long term American competitiveness in the world.

September 5th, 2009

For your safety and convenience

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Government

Tags: Employer, E-mail, Marketing Research, Online Communications, Marketing, Paul Murphy

Or, rather more truthfully: “We tape all calls: to protect ourselves, discipline our employees, provide marketing data, and just because we can.”

It’s not just calls, of course, that get this treatment: more and more employers have people who’re sufficiently net savvy to check your on-line history before even talking to you. Ask yourself, for example, how likely a PC “journalist” whose email postings are peppered with references to stupid mactards and other juvenalia is to achieve credibility with potential employers searching for promotable professionals.

The genie isn’t just out of the bottle on this - the Obama Whitehouse has smashed the bottle: just in the last two months they’ve been caught using public funds to make an enemies list, reacted by morphing it into a public policy snitch program and have now issued now a major contract RFQ on data mining public sites like twitter and facebook along with Whitehouse and other Democrat site web traffic and email to identify policy opponents.

So what’s the bottom line? Pretty much what it’s always been with respect to private opinion and the press: if you might later be embarrassed, fired, or just harassed, if something you say or write becomes public, don’t say or write it.

More specifically, if you use a public network resource like a social site, discussion group, or somebody’s free email account: keep your words clean and professional because it’s not your safety and convenience potential employers reviewing this stuff are looking to protect or advance -and it’s not just employers and corrupt politicians either: next time you offend somebody or just get caught as collateral damage in somebody else’s courtroom drama, you can bet that the other guy’s lawyers are going to be reviewing what you’ve said and how you said it.

August 29th, 2009

Vindications: ah, the week that was

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Government

Tags: SCO Group Inc., IBM Corp., Paul, System, Linux, Open Source, Mainframes, UNIX, Operating Systems, Servers

I’ve been having a great week: no rain, the arguments the rocks I’m working with put up have nothing to do with IT, and lots of gratifying news floating in.

I didn’t notice at the time, but apparently away back in July the London Stock Exchange got some serious press attention for cleaning its executive stables and following that by tossing the infamous TradEelect system to the wolves.

Regular readers will of course remember my comment on Microsoft’s use of the TradElect contract with LSE to hype its technologies over Linux: basically that the decision had nothing to do with Linux, that the subsequent trading shutdowns reflected bad management more than poor technology, and that the people involved should be tossed out along with the software.

All kind of obvious really, but of course this generated a certain amount of off topic fury from the wintel committed - for example, deadwood1 had this to say:

Problem had nothing to do with .net or TradElect

You should do some research before you leap gleefully at any attempt to blame MS technology. The failure was due to LSE attempting to do an upgrade themselves that they screwed up. It had nothing to do with .NET not performing or a failure of the application. You lose credibility when you let your personal prejudices overshadow your journalistic integrity.

Then this week SCO finally got its chance to face Novell in court - and since that whole issue is both an absolute no brainer and the key to either forcing a settlement on IBM or eventually getting the actual claim into court, people like “Wolf_z”, who wrote the comment excerpted below in response to my my comment on the Novell issue are going to be leaving their expertise on the law off their resumes:

You (conveniently) overlook a few things.

5. Paul has some inexplicable need for SCO to win, perhaps he owns SCO stock. happy SCO had no case, never did have a case, and chose the wrong tiger to poke with a stick.

7. SCO isn’t a threat now, and in reality never was. If there’s anything left of SCO once they are forced into chapter 7 (which shouldn’t take too much longer) IBM’s counterstrike will leave SCO a smoking crater.

Given all this, I feel very comfortable making the following predictions:

1. The judgement against SCO will stand, the appeals court will find Judge Kimball decided correctly.

2. SCO will enter chapter 7 involuntarily before the end of the year.

3. It’s my understanding liquidation of SCO won’t stop IBM’s countersuits, so the smoking crater might be filled in with salt. happy IBM probably *will* choose to continue in the face of SCO’s liquidation. IBM will want to make very sure no one else is stupid enough to repeat SCO’s mistake in the future.

And, of course, lots of people, including one Guy Smiley, vent their expertise on threading models and Intel’s halfway house approach to hyper-threading with stuff like this:

Your’e hilarious Murph…

So 1 HBA is bad because you get no parallelism, but 2 NICs is bad because you get bus contention. Riiiiight.

Your problem, Murph, is that you assume what you’re trying to prove. Instead of analyzing anything objectively, you just look for the quickest way to reach the conclusion that Windows sucks. The result is that your arguments contradict each other, ignore the facts, and generally don’t make any logical sense.

So what did AMD do this week? Announce a “new” form of multi threading for its “Bulldozer” x86 cores that’s learned from Sun, optimized for Unix (including Linux), but has backwards compatibility features to support the Windows model.

But, of course, the number one subject on which I have received hate mail (due, I think, to an organized campaign by some data processing people) has long been my position that running Linux on a mainframe IFL rarely makes sense for both cost and performance reasons. So what happened last week? IBM cut its IFL and related pricing by up to 40% - and the redoubtable Timothy Morgan, a man whose editors have not, I believe, been threatened with the loss of IBM’s ad dollars, wrote a remarkable article for the register in which he looks at the cost of the IFL approach.

For this article he postulates that it’s possible to see just how many Intel Nehalem chips IBM thinks each IFL can replace by costing out the IBM approach and then seeing how many x86 Nehalems that same money would buy - an approach that lets him report the numbers without being even the least tiny bit critical of IBM.

The entire article is well worth reading - here’s a longish extract encapsulating the key bit I’m interested in here:

When you do the math, that works out to $323,204 for a five-processor Linux machine with no memory, no disk, and no systems software, including z/VM or Linux. Because there is a big disparity between the cost of Linux on the mainframe and Linux on x64 boxes - excuse me, I forgot to speak perfectly GNUbie there: the disparity is between Linux support costs, since Linux is not an operating system and even if it were, it is free - let’s add Linux to this barebones mainframe.

Given the discounts that Novell has cooked up and its 80 per cent market share on the mainframe, let’s slap some SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 on the System z BC box. It costs $10,200 per engine, with discounts for a one-year standard support contract for SLES 11 on mainframes, so that adds another $51,000. (At list price, this would cost $75,000.)

If customers want to pre-pay for five years of support, they can get a support contract for $37,499, or $7,499 per engine per year. That’s a big price drop, so let’s be generous and do the comparison over five years. The bare System z machine with Linux and five years of support costs $510,699.

Let’s now look at how many Xeon 5500 boxes with Linux and support that gets you, not including memory, disk, or hypervisor costs, as fairly as we can, given the lack of information about mainframe pricing. We’ll take IBM’s own System x servers, and use the System x3550 M2 rack server, the cheapest of IBM’s Nehalem EP boxes. With two of Intel’s four-core, top-end Xeon X5570 processors, the x3550 M2 costs $6,681. Main memory for this x64 box costs $109 per GB, and there is no way IBM is not charging a lot more for main memory on mainframes.

Now, toss on SLES 11, which is priced per machine, not per processor core, on x64 machinery. It costs $799 per box per year, or $3,995 per box for five years of support. So that comes to $10,676 for a bare-bones x64 Linux image.

What these system prices imply is that a fully-engined System z BC with five 3.2 GHz engines should be able to support the same number of Linux images as 48 of those System x3550 M2 rack servers, which have a total of 384 Nehalem cores running at 2.93 GHz.

As in, “Ya - you know, like he said” - pricing parity means either that any performance discrepancies between the 16Ghz delivered by the five IFL engines and the 1,125GHz delivered by the x86 boxes are purely imaginary, or that the mainframe approach is a trifle over-priced.

But hey, what am I doing about it? Nothing - I’m going out to argue with another couple rocks.

June 13th, 2009

Murphy collezioni

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Linux

Tags: Airplane, Calgary, Corporate Governance, Linux, Networking, Business Operations, Corporate Law, Operating Systems, Software, Paul Murphy

Huh?

I spent last Saturday at the Wildrose Alliance (think Republican) annual meeting in Calgary. More than 300 people in one room almost all of whom agree with me on most issues. Wow! - I mean, seriously, how often do you think that happens?

Anyway, at one point (apparently apropos of an egg salad sandwich) a guy I’ve never seen before tells me he “digs Linux”. “Digs”? Say again? Anyway, I think there’s a bottom line lesson here: this world is getting way too small and too interconnected.

Interesting weather too: 30cm of snow in the Cypress hills, heavy snow and hail in Calgary -obviously global warming, as I think Ed Morrisey said somewhere, now really is something you can shovel.

The 21st Czar

This week was marked by a need to spend a little bit of time reviewing the mandates various national network control authorities have. In both Canada and most of Europe undisclosed police access to just about everything networkish is taken for granted, but the formal centralization of political power to hunt for and shutdown offending network operators or users is something few countries have undertaken - in fact, here’s a list of of the ones I found with internet security czars with that kind of mandate:

Communist China
Vietnam
Iran
North Korea
Cuba
Venezuela
The United States of America

Bringing down airplanes

Absent “black box” information - and one of the many things I don’t understand is why those are kept on board airplanes instead of having live telemetry recorded at an airline operated central site - the recent Air France crash now seems likely to go down to the unhappy coincidence of one too many natural factors.

On the other hand, I wonder whether airplanes will soon need much better internal electronic shielding to prevent the insane from bringing them down by frying the (non optical) pump controllers all fly by wire aircraft depend on.

Notice that I’m not suggesting this happened, only that the technology both in airplanes and at Radio Shack has evolved to make this possible.

Model based management

A couple of phrases from junk I was scanning earlier - things that had people “executing well against our model” in a context of “intensified mandates” and the desperate need to “implement the most agile BI strategies” - reminded me of a comment I’d seen, by “Jeremy”, on watts up with that:

The photo is priceless. This to me summarizes the complete lack of scientific approach to everything these days. Everyone sits round a PC and blindly believes whatever nonsense it spews out.

No first principles. No cause and effect. No understanding of physics. mathematics or even statistics. Just run any number of widely available computer modeling programs, fit the historical data and hey presto another science breakthrough.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so very pathetically sad.

(FYI: the article spoofed climate modeling by reproducing a press release from 2006 - proudly celebrating predictions that proved entirely wrong - but how many times have you seen otherwise smart people impressed with some “corporate cockpit” BI display where, in reality, the second letter should be an “S”?)

Fun with the drupal

I’m not sure I want to say that I, uh, “dig” Solaris and open source, but I did have an interesting demonstration of the power of the two come out of Saturday’s meetings. This particular agency has spent well into seven figures on a custom consumer information site that another agency now runs for it on a mainframe IFL. Response, of course, is pretty poor but the big issues she complained about are things that reflect the differences in thought processes and priorities between editors and data processing managers - and the thing that struck me during the conversation was that drupal will do most of what she wants out of the box - and the CCK (content construction kit) should make implementing the rest pretty easy.

So I did a very basic drupal demo (not, please understand, that I understand Drupal - in fact, it’s often so backwards to my thinking that it takes a very frustrating time to see the retroactively obvious) - downloaded and installed a clean 6.12, gave it a private database and apache virtual server address, added the modules she needed, added some time and date information others think she needs, copied and restructured some sample content from her site, and turned her loose - all in just under three hours and fully justified in terms of amusement value when she reported that her home access to the demo running on my ancient Sun 150 via Shaw cable was significantly faster than her access to the z9 IFL at the office.

Out of which an abberant thought: there are lots of editorial professionals out there facing daily frustration because the people who built their website tools simply don’t think like them (and, admittedly the notion that editors think is a bit overboard, but go with me on this, ok?) - and could therefore improve their own lives, along with system reliability and flexibility, simply by replacing all that eons evolved home grown stuff in favor of open source products like Drupal and Apache on Solaris or Linux.

And one more thing

From newsmax:

La. House Backs 15-Cent Charge on Internet Access

BATON ROUGE, La. — A 15-cent monthly surcharge should be levied on Internet access across Louisiana to fight online criminal activity, the House voted 81-9 Thursday, over the opposition of Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Rep. Mack “Bodi” White, R-Denham Springs, said he sponsored the bill for Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, to raise money to finance a division in Caldwell’s office that investigates Internet crimes, particularly online sex crimes against children.

The measure would raise $2.4 million a year for Caldwell’s department, according to a financial analysis.

“I don’t think that 15 cents per month is too much to ask for our children’s protection,” said Rep. Simone Champagne, D-Jeanerette.

So, quick question: if you just use your iphone -or cableco VoIP phone- for phone calls, do you pay the tax?

June 6th, 2009

Discussing Corruption

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: E-voting, Enterprise Policy, General, Government

Tags: Job, Information Technology, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Paul Murphy

As a consultant I’ve been asked for kickbacks a couple of times, but the overwhelming majority of the corruption I encounter among IT people is simple venality: agreeing with the guy you report to (or the people who control the local IT market) on something you know is against the interests of the organization paying both of you.

Even the simple stuff, however, quickly devolves into shades of grey when you look at actual cases. Thus the classic Nurenburg defense: following orders; seems perfectly adequate to cover contra-indicated actions taken as a regular part of your job, but the corollary about obeying those orders only when you don’t know they’re morally and legally wrong can kick in very quickly.

What, for example, should a fairly junior sysadmin, personally a Linux user, do when ordered to replace the OS and applications on twenty racks of Wintel servers with Red Hat equivalents if he knows that the order results from the boss’s amorous adventures with a Red Hat Consulting representative?

Look at a few real situations like this -and particularly the claims and counterclaims about nearly everybody else’s venality that go with a long term project collapsing into a blizzard of legal filings- and I guarantee you that you’ll soon be longing for the clarity you get with things like the traditional freezer full of cash or Holder’s use of his office to quash ACORN and voter intimidation prosecutions.

One example I’ve been thinking about recently is subtle, but carries a moral I thought worth sharing - it’s about a decent guy who simply didn’t know what he was getting into.

This guy (and like all my imaginary stories I’ve changed all the facts here except for the facts) has something over thirty years of “progressively more senior” IT experience that started as a COBOL programmer right out of college. In his penultimate job he was in charge of a fairly decent sized IT group babysitting a couple of z9s, the usual business applications clusters, and the thousands of pieces of wintel and PC networking junk that bigger organizations seem to accumulate.

But then he became a consultant, a senior “rent a manager” kind of guy who would (or so he was told) pop into a company or government group for a month or two at a time to straighten things out or keep them on track while they replaced some dearly departed. As he told me at the time, he wasn’t getting along that well with his wife, his kids have teenagers, and the freedom he saw in the lifestyle had appeal.

Four assignments and nearly a year later he found himself between rocks and hard places. On the positive side he’d found hotel living rather less fun than expected and was working at strengthening his bonds to home and family, but when he talked about the job every second word was about some moral dilemma or other.

What had really happened, of course, was that it had taken him three clients to wake up to the obvious: his employers didn’t see his job as providing services to clients, they saw his job as providing services to them through the sale of their products and services to those clients.

It was the third assignment that did it - his employers asked him to introduce and sell as the permanent IT manager an individual he believes had engaged in serious fraud a couple of jobs back and had since been traded around from one job to another by people whose primary concern has been to leverage loyalty to the same large hardware and services vendor he usually bought from for their own benefit.

According to him, he did the job; with success if no enthusiasm; got a couple of weeks off at the end, and then went to his fourth assignment with his eyes opened to the real nature of his employer’s expectations and a deep personal commitment to sending out resumes.

Since then he’s been benched for several months - with no new assignments, no job offers, and a pretty direct hint from the guy he reports to that employers who turn down his resume for interviews aren’t going to buy him as a high priced trouble shooter either.

Now he’s unhappy and unproductive, both unable to work in his field and unwilling to step out of it - but the moral of the story is, I think, quite clear: he should have terminated the relationship as soon as he understood it, because getting along by going along with moral corruption is a metastatic process: like a cancer, you either cut it out on detection, or it eventually kills you.

May 23rd, 2009

Cooling future cost inflation

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Deploying Sun Rays, Disaster avoidance, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Sun

Tags: Processor, Data Center, Information Technology, Consolidation, Utilization, Server, Inflation, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware

Servers using Intel’s latest processors and the motherboards that go with them are among the most efficient, in terms of work done per unit of power consumed at full utilization, yet produced by the x86 industry.

Unfortunately a lot of that efficiency results from scale, and thus from workload consolidation and high system utilization - to quote Sun’s bmseer:

SPECpower_ssj results shows that servers (even those with the industry’s best power-management) running at low-utilization levels use many times more watts per unit-of-work than systems running at higher utilization levels. Datacenters can realize the biggest energy savings by running fewer servers at higher utilization levels (50% utilization or above).

Sun’s results on the 8GB (or 0.5GB/core) configuration show that running at 10% utilization requires 4.4 times more power per unit of work than running at 50% utilization.

4.4 times = (581 performance-to-power @ 50% utilization /133 performance-to-power @ 10% utilization)

Most SPECpower_ssj2008 are published on small-memory configurations that are much smaller than typical customer deployments. Sun is the only vendor to publish multiple results to clearly show effect of memory configuration.

A more normal-sized memory configuration of 32GB (or 2GB/core) uses 30% more watts than a tiny 8GB (or 0.5GB/core) configuration at 100% load. At active-idle the wattage difference is also 30%. Some competitors use additional configuration differences such as non-redundant fans, non-redundant power supplies, and single slow disk to further reduce the wattages and significantly improve SPECpower_ssj scores.

He’s complaining about competitors misleading customers, but the more important thing here is the extent to which utilization rates affect power efficiency - that 32GB, 16 core, Netra 4250 burns 225 watts doing nothing but making heat you also have to pay to remove -and that minimum only goes up by about 71 watts (31%) as you add workload until you max out the machine.

Now given the weathermen’s commitment to more than doubling American power costs over the next eighteen months, the obvious conclusions you should be reaching from these numbers include:

1. this may be the best argument yet for using OS ghosting in system consolidation and virtualization because, particularly for the Windows enterprise, this approach offers the lowest risk route to high utilization and thus lower power input requirements per unit of work done; and,

2. it’s also the best argument yet, particularly for the Windows enterprise, for replacing as many small servers as possible with virtualized instances running on much larger data center servers - because the limitations of Wintel software mean this is the only way to take advantage of the power savings available from larger, multi-core, gear.

Since these directions are consistent with what a large part of the industry wants to do for other reasons (mostly having to do with the consolidation of a different kind of power) the new energy taxes will, I expect, simply but radically accellerate an existing trend.

There are, however, several big negatives to doing this:

• First, services to users usually decline with consolidation - and usage flexibility, often the key to corporate operating success, usually flatlines just as soon as the data center gains enough control to become the tail wagging the corporate dog;

  Saving power dollars at the expense of business flexibility may, in other words, illustrate the adage about being penny wise and pound foolish.

• Second, data center consolidation within the client-server architecture does not address processor duplication - taking workload away from the desktop and giving it to servers doesn’t significantly reduce desktop operating costs. Consolidated client-server is therefore architecturally similar to the mainframe systems people hated in the 70s - just without the simplicity and reliability that came with IBM’s terminals.

  In other words, it’s not wrong to reduce server room power use, but the big opportunities for savings aren’t in the data center, they’re on the desktops - in fact if data center management measured system wide CPU utilization they’d quickly realize that every successful move to increase data center utilization through consolidatation actually reduces system wide processor utilization.

• Third, the long term IT staffing change is minimal in terms of head count but devastating in terms of skills availability and business continuity risk.

  Two things seem to happen:

  1. First, companies undertaking consolidation usually seek savings in help desk and related services but don’t realize them in the longer term as the absence of desktop change combines with increased communications complexity and user complaints to quickly drive those costs back up; and,

  2. Second, the increased IT focus on data center operations means that fewer people run more of the business critical systems, and, more importantly, that those survivors are increasingly cut off from the business.

  Thus what happens is that consolidation reduces the rate of externally driven systems change in organizational IT services without reducing the external presure for change. As a result business management works to find ways around real or perceived IT roadblocks and eventually, of course, IT management has to respond to the presure by doing something -but then discovers that there’s nobody left on the bench to do it, and, worse, that the people kept on for their fine work in the data center don’t speak user.

So is there a better idea? Something that responds effectively to exploding power costs while not incurring these negatives?

There is: and it’s the opposite of what most people will be doing: instead of consolidating everything to the data center, get rid of the data center. Move your processors and IT staff into user spaces, replace as many 80+ watt desktop computers with 4 watt desktop displays as you can, and use Unix, not ghosting, to run as many applications as you need on each box.

The downside to this approach is that it’s hard to carry out and unpopular with your peers, but the upside bottom line is that there are huge advantages for your employer in doing it - starting, not with the cost savings you’ll achieve, but with having IT actually work with and serve the people who make the money, not the people who spend it.

May 9th, 2009

NCIS: Episode #140: Breakout

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Deploying Sun Rays, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, ~ Special Series ~

Tags: FAA, Phone, PC, Server, Hacker, NCIS, McGee, Abby, Gibbs, Ziva

As regular readers know my favorite TV series is NCIS - but I wasn’t terribly impressed with the recent two part “Legend” episode designed to test market a spinoff NCIS - OSP (Office of Special Projects), apparently to be set in Los Angeles.

What I liked least about it was the bare faced product placement for Microsoft’s table top computing - really just an iPhone like gesture interface for large screens. In the lead up to this, McGee describes the OSP as having “cool toys”, and in the actual program the whole gesture computing thing plays about the same role the Pentagon’s 300 page daily targeting orders did in Vietnam: not even usable as toilet paper.

Of course whining about the technological illiteracy and financial mores of the TV entertainment industry is worse than than pointless - so in my continuing quest for humility, I thought it would be fun to produce sketches for my own NCIS script - one intended to set things right….

But first, a little external context setting - The introduction from a May 7/09 report by CNET’s Elinor Mills

Report: Hackers broke into FAA air traffic control systems

Hackers have broken into the air traffic control mission-support systems of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration several times in recent years, according to an Inspector General report sent to the FAA this week.

In February, hackers compromised an FAA public-facing computer and used it to gain access to personally identifiable information, such as Social Security numbers, on 48,000 current and former FAA employees, the report said.

Last year, hackers took control of FAA critical network servers and could have shut them down, which would have seriously disrupted the agency’s mission-support network, the report said. Hackers took over FAA computers in Alaska, becoming “insiders,” according to the report dated Monday.

Then, taking advantage of interconnected networks, hackers later stole an administrator’s password in Oklahoma, installed “malicious codes” with the stolen password and compromised the FAA domain controller in the Western Pacific Region, giving them the access to more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, passwords, and other data used to control a portion of the mission-support network, the report said.

They use Wintel - and their security failed, gee, ya know, go figure.

So:

NCIS: Episode 140: Breakout

SCENE 1

(NCIS Headquarters, bullpen; Tony, seated, is on the phone, McGee is standing with Abby in animated conversation, Gibbs enters from stairway above accompanied by a low thirties, marginally overweight, 5′6″ brunette).

Abby: Gibbs, Gibbs, have you heard from Ziva?

Gibbs: “No, Listen up, Ruth O’Brien is TDY DIA investigative services. With us.

Tony: (hanging up, turning, standing up) “Where’s Gibbs? - oh, sorry Boss, Dead woman in our parking lot. South doors.

Gibbs, “Grab your gear, lets go; Abby tell Ducky”

Scene 2

Dr. Mallard squatting near face down corpse of late 20s woman wearing conservative office clothes, lying on grass beside a walkway, in plain view from the sidewalk but hidden from the parking lot by a large tree and from ground floor windows by bushes.

Tony is making sketches, McGee taking photos, Ruth is walking away toward the parking area, Gibbs stands beside Ducky. Jimmy is standing looking down at the back of the dead woman’s head.

Ducky: “Let’s turn her over”

(Jimmy helps - she has an NCIS badge on her shirt.)

Ducky “Margaret Anders, a civilian, worked for us - NCIS internal audit.”

Gibbs: “What killed her, and when?”

Ducky: I’ll know more later, but I’d say this poor girl suffered a severe blow to the back of the head - this contusion here (pointing where part of her scalp has been ripped away) - and then the killer put something around her neck - see the wide red mark all round (pointing) and strangled her. Took terrific strength to use something that wide - he may have, (Ducky rolls the body back over, lifts shirt from the bottom, we see bruising) yes, I think she was unconscious from the blow and he stood on her back to pull the noose tight while she died.

As to when, I’d say not more than twenty minutes ago; perhaps she had a 9:30 appointment in the building.

Ruth: (entering from the walkway) “Gibbs, no security coverage, that tree (pointing) blocks the camera for just this bit of the walkway.

Tony: I’m sorry, who are you again?

Ruth: “Ruth, Mr. Dinozzo; my name is Ruth, I’m filling in for Ziva.

Gibbs: “What can you tell me about the weapon?

Ducky: “Over an inch wide, maybe a belt - there might be trace, I’ll know more when I get her home.

Gibbs: “Quickly Ducky - Tony, show Ruth the truck; McGee bring Abby, two minutes. (Gibbs follows walkway toward the building door; Tony, McGee and Ruth leave walking on the grass alongside the building, Palmer and Mallard stay with the body, Ducky watches Gibbs go, looks perplexed).

Scene 3

(in the parking garage, beside NCIS truck).

Abby and McGee arrive, join Tony and Ruth seen talking as we approach.

Tony: “Abby, meet Ruth, a nice jewish airforce Captain from Ireland - or maybe Idaho- she’s sitting Ziva, temporary detached, to us, from defense intelligence. Worked with Gibbs before.

Abby: “hi, anybody know what this is about?

Gibbs (entering from behind the truck) “it’s about our dead woman, she was coming to see me, said she wanted to turn herself in.”

Tony: “For?”

Gibbs: “Don’t know - but there’s something you need to know - and nobody else, clear?

(Tony, McGee, Abby, all looking at Ruth, who says nothing) “Yes boss, nobody else

Gibbs: It’s not over. somebody in NCIS is leaking information. Rivkin knew what we were doing before we did it - and not from Ziva. Last week an op none of you knew about went wrong - it was a test, Fornell set it up and a Chinese ship that should have gone north went west. Not coincidence.

Abby: “sooo, Ruth?”

Gibbs: “Yes, DIA outside review, I asked for Ruth - because it could have been one of us, maybe you Tony, or McGee.

Ruth: “The test was double blind. It’s not Gibbs either.”

Abby: “Of course not Gibbs, and not me - or Tony, or McGee - and not Ducky”

Gibbs: “Need to know, no slips: Ducky doesn’t have need to know. Nobody else. Clear?

This is guy is smart, he covers his tracks, thinks things through -but Margaret surprised him, this time he had no time, had to improvise, and he’s probably NCIS, one of us.

McGee, her office, find what she wanted to tell me - Ruth, Tony where she lived; Abby, Ducky might have weapon’s trace, he thinks a belt might have been used.

Scene 4

Ducky, doing autopsy, “a healthy young woman, took care of yourself didn’t you, my dear - I’m sorry I have to excise your skin like this, (cutting red skin from her neck) but it may help find who killed you - Mr. Palmer, did you know that “red neck” was used for over a hundred years to mean hard working farmers and only became a pejorative when a fellow named Joe Starobin, writing for the American Communist paper The Sunday Worker in 1947, used it in a memorable denunciation of FBI agent Robert Lamphere at the trial - for espionage- of one Mr. Eisler - yes, babyfaced, hardlipped, and the owner of a viciously flushing redneck, is how he described him - it just goes to show you how the press misconstructs the public’s image of who the good guys are.

Ducky: (Shakes head, finishes cutting in silence, turns body over, and triumphantly peels off the whole loop): “to Abby please, Mr. Palmer.”

(Palmer leaves with the skin in a jar, visibly relieved)

Ducky: “and now my dear, lets see what stuck where he struck”

Scene 5:

Bullpen

Gibbs: Tony?

Tony “got it boss, living above her means; place is neat, clean, clothes too expensive for her salary, Accounting student from Brigham Young, articling in NCIS internal audit, would have made CPA next year. No known boyfriend but takes the pill, and her bed got used.

Parents have been notified; mother’s here tomorrow, father’s a marine lieutenant Colonel doing his up and out working logistics support on Guam -that’s her connection here- he’ll get compassionate and be here day after tomorrow.

Ruth: “No outstanding debt, paid her student loans off last year, deposits, salary plus a regular $4,000 in cash every month since she started here; told the bank she sells cosmetics part time - nothing to support that - and no backtrack on the money. Rent is paid by post dated check - no negatives.

Gibbs: (to Tony) “Find him. (turns) McGee?

McGee: “Working on it boss, so far - her PC has software on it that’s not supposed to be there, patches external phone calls into our internal network. Looks like cell to skype - that’s a telephone thing for PCs, lets you make video calls. We block it at the firewall, but an internal origin is invisible. (His phone rings) Debug Logs are off, so don’t think we can trace where her calls went, but desktop logging was running on the server and it (phone rings) shows Skype running last at 3:12PM. Yesterday. Sorry, looks at phone, Abby’s got something (picks up phone); Hi Abbs?

McGee: Listens: “Way to go Abbs!, (hangs up, looks at Gibbs) Abby says there were 182 desktops running at the time of that last skype call, from server logs. We keep a month of boot records, and should be able to narrow the list by dropping those not running when her skype program was active over that period.

Vance (on walkway, above): “Gibbs, you catch your parking lot killer yet?”

Gibbs: “Working on it”

Vance “Ziva still in Israel?” (looks meaningfully at Gibbs, walks away)

(The PC on Ziva’s desk suddenly beeps, screen flashes)

Tony: (looks at Gibbs, nods) On it, boss

Ruth (pointing at PC), “How’s it doing that, I didn’t turn it on?”

Gibbs: McGee?

McGee: Remote on, it’s mainly used at night: the server turns it on to backup the harddisk, turns it off to save power. It’s beeping now for priority IM: hey, it’s from Director Vance - says “Charles Sonderstrom”.

Why send that? he was just here, oh oh, wait, that’s not his PC address, it’s not from him, I’ll go check the server logs to see if I can find out where it came from.

Gibbs: Go. Tony, Ruth?

Tony: On it boss

Ruth: (sitting down at Ziva’s desk and pushing the PC to the edge before picking up the phone) “You guys really have to use this stuff? I haven’t, not since 95 or something; McGee could you show me how to get the browser and email working on this?

McGee: “The group servers are in the basement, I have to go - but here, let me show you (hunches down so he can reach her keyboard) office login is

Tony: “Ziva whined and qvetched about it all the time too; you guys at DIA, use Macs the way Mossad does?

Ruth: (Paying attention to McGee, and thus distracted) “I don’t know what we use, Jerry calls them displays or something, from Sun or some name like that, I think.

McGee: (Standing up) “ok? I’ll go over it in more detail with you later, gotta go, the boss wants answers - Abby, then downstairs (Leaves)

Scene 6

Gibbs and Tony are in what looks like a US Army motor pool assembly and maintenance facility. A lieutenant too old for the job stands off to one side. Gibbs is talking to a technical Sargent whose chest tag says “Sonderstrom”.

Gibbs: “What were you doing in the naval yard at 8:30 this morning?

Charles: “Reporting to orders sir, or trying to - electronic work order this morning, yesterday’s datum, report to Lt. Commander Taggart on USS Monmouth instanter. Lt. Ferguson (pointing) has the order, he wasn’t in yet when I saw it, left it for him, burnt feet getting there before 10:30. Not in the yard at 8:30, got there about 10, sir.

But Commander Taggart wasn’t there sir, and his XO denied the order, - sent me back here.

Ferguson: “That’s right sir, this (waving a work order) was time stamped here at 8:52AM, today. I got in about 9 - found it on my desk.

Gibbs: “So what time did you get to the yard?

Charles: “I checked in at the gate sir, just after 10, I think. In both directions sir, I left the yard about forty minutes later. They’ll have the records, sir.

Gibbs: (to Ferguson) “This has yesterday’s action date - how could it not get to you until this morning?

Ferguson: “I don’t know sir, our system usually works well - and I know Sargent Sonderstrom was here yesterday, he was working on armor attachment for that two four (pointing at 6 wheel, 5 ton truck).

Gibbs: “Sargent, how well did you know Margaret Anders?

Charles: “Marge? What’s she got to do with this?

Gibbs: “how well did you know her?

Charles: “She’s a neighbor at home, in my classes at Clark Fork JS, haven’t seen her since joining up - more than five years now.

Gibbs: “So you didn’t go to see her at the yard?

Charles: “At the yard sir? What’s she doing there?

Tony: “Some one killed her, bashed her brains out in the parking lot

Charles: “Oh my god. (pause) Marge?. (Looks around vaguely, sits)

Gibbs: “Sargent: you went from the gate to the Monmouth, directly, is that right?

Charles: (somewhat weakly): “ah, no sir, I got a bit lost, parked at the wrong end, and went toward the towers at first, then got a ride most of the way back to the Monmouth with a lifter.

Gibbs: “Did you get his name?

Charles: “No Sir, big man, black; old hand with the machine. Why was Marge there?

Gibbs: “She worked for us. We’ll probably need to speak to you again - Mr. Ferguson, get Tony with your tech people: see if work orders with later dates came through the queue before this one - and check the alibi - cameras, gate MPs, find that driver. Find someone who saw him here this morning.

Tony “On it, boss.”

Scene 7

Things are quiet, McGee is helping Ruth learn to use her PC - they’re at Ziva’s desk.

McGee: “Then you just login here

Ruth: “What, Again? we already logged in - twice, I think.

McGee: (patience obviously fading a bit) “that was for the network, and the email server, this is the maps server

Ruth: “And I can’t keep my office docs open while doing this?

McGee: “No no, normally you can, this maps server is the exception, because once you log in it uses the office graphics interface to put labels and handles on the maps so you can manipulate them and if you’ve got docs open when it grabs it, something’s likely to crash and burn, so just close them first, ok?

Ruth: (sighs) “ok (phone rings, she picks it up): “O’Brien?”, “oh, hi Jerry” (listens) I’ll ask you to talk to Special Agent McGee - he speaks your language. (Looks at McGee) “This is is Jerry Malins, runs our systems, he has an idea about tracing those skype calls to a desktop. (holds out phone)

McGee: (horrifed)” You mean you talked about a security matter to a help desk guy?

Ruth (hand over phone): “help Desk? we don’t have anything like that, Jerry does everything, and he’s cleared for everything.

McGee: “So he’s head of IT for you guys?

Ruth: “Not all of DIA, no, he reports to somebody in Fort Bragg - just for us.

McGee: “That’s what? about five people?

Ruth: “About 400 I think

McGee: “One guy, 400 people, sure, and you don’t know how to use this stuff, what do you guys do, share an abacus? (Takes the phone) McGee: (Listens)

In the background Gibbs and Tony come in.

McGee: “Yes, IOS (listens) isn’t the default 36 hours? I’m sure no one would have changed it - should work, great idea! I’m on it, right now, Thanks! (hands phone back).

Ruth: “Good news?

McGee: “Maybe, skype uses its own port and the main switch downstairs will have built up a routing table for it - if I can dump that and see expiry times it’ll show exactly which PC the signals were routed to. (starts off toward the elevators)

Ruth: “McGee: I asked, Jerry said they’re Sun Rays - single signon, and everything works, not (leaning back in the chair to swing her feet onto the desk) like this shh (we know what she’s saying, but her feet hit the PC and we don’t hear the word over the sound of the thing crashing to the floor.)

Gibbs (from behind her): I think we’ve all wanted to do that a few times.

End of part one: Fade to “TBC” -and a teaser for next season:

Scene 8

The basement conference room - beside the NCIS truck.

Present are Tony, Ruth, Abby, Gibbs, and McGee

Gibbs: McGee?

McGee: “It’s Director Vance’s office. The times match up only for redirection to his laptop.

Tony: “Sonderstrom’s orders were dated yesterday, but came to the workflow machine this morning - after the murder - but nobody knows how.

Gibbs: “Could he have sent them himself, to explain his presence here?

Tony: “The Monmouth confirms his story, the gate times check out, the lift operator gets off at 11, confirmed the story by phone, will come in tomorrow. Not coincidence, but maybe somebody trailing a red herring for us?

Gibbs: Abby?

Abby: “there’s no usable weapon’s trace on the skin - just some polyethylene. If a belt was used, it got wrapped in plastic first. Ducky thinks the blow to her head came from something heavy, metal, and rectangular - like a very heavy buckle on a belt used as a whip - or a gun butt, probably wrapped in plastic too.

…

March 28th, 2009

A recommendation on leasing new equipment

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Linux, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Lease, Hedge, Leasing, Inflation, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Finance, Paul Murphy

You’d think that investing in new equipment just when we might very well be entering the second great depression would be suicidal - but I think getting other people to invest in new gear on our behalf may well be the right thing for many of us to do.

Specifically, it’s time to look at your capital spending plans for the next year or two and ask which bits of it you could sensibly acquire on a leased basis today or tomorrow.

The reasons for doing this are compounded from the following:

1. leasing provides a great hedge against inflation - and if you don’t think inflation is about to become a big issue, consider this graph from a PowerLine discussion of the federal deficit.

   All that cash has to come from somewhere, and simply printing a few trillion American dollars is going to appeal to the weathermen setting up this disaster.

   The inflation hedge here is that if you take a five year lease on new gear now and are still in business in 2012, you’ll be paying today’s rates in 2012 dollars - and every time inflation lets you raise your prices, your real infrastructure costs will go down.

2. Some of that cash will, however, come from greatly increased taxes - and, in most countries, payments against a carefully structured lease are deductible from income.

   The tax hedge here is simple: better to spend money on infrastructure you can use than on bureaucrats whose net effect on you is negative.

3. Most new equipment is more efficient, particularly with respect to power and space use, than old equipment and usually comes with significant warranty coverage. The leased gear should, in other words, directly reduce existing infrastructure maintenance and support costs.

   The “Moore’s hedge” here is that technology has been getting better - but Intel’s Nahelem plays catch-up with AMD and if IBM’s takeover of Sun turns out to be real that puts SPARC out of business, and so the marginal gains available from buying next year’s product will likely be considerably less than those available from buying this year’s products.

One of the less obvious ideas in this compound is that the new gear you lease should be grossly over specified for your current needs, be obtained on a long term lease, and use a technology likely to survive years of neglect - because, if the recession deepens and extends into depression, you will not be able to afford the staff needed to keep things current - and even if it doesn’t, you’ll still find yourself competing with the government for IT staff: pitting whatever you can offer against a secure, inflation proof, government benefits package.

Specifically what to lease is a different issue - as usual, I’d suggest taking a close look at Sun’s stuff because their gear, from modular data center down to the single T5200 box, is likely to continue working whether or not IBM gets to destroy the company.

The negative on this strategy is that you’re throwing away some residual value in what you have and trapping yourself into hardware/software configuration that works today and is configured for tomorrow, but will force you to live with hopelessly obsolete gear in the last year, or years, of the lease. The operative word here, however, is “live” because the real bottom line is that if things go further downhill, then early and effective implementation of this strategy could save your company significant downstream monies - and if a miracle happens? Well, you can always buy out your leases just as you would any other financial hedge.

---

A personal note:

Starting Monday I’ll be taking a break on blogging - and plan to file commentaries only on Saturdays until September. Why? Well, did you look at that graph above…?

February 23rd, 2009

What BearingPoint's Chapter 11 filing means to you and me

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Government

Tags: Medical Record, BearingPoint Inc., Government, Paul Murphy

A long time ago I worked for KPMG Consulting - and because I still have friends with what’s left of the firm, the bankruptcy filing by its successor wasn’t a great surprise.

BearingPoint’s problem was always that it was structured and controlled by people whose goal was to make money - not people whose goal was to do consulting. As a result I’ll offer two cheerless predictions:

1. that their current re-organization plan will trigger an exodus by both the better qualified and the better connected - leaving the MBAs and nickel and dime merchants to sell their own dubious services to the once burned, and twice shy, survivors among the customer base; and,
2. that the survivors will claim expertise on government medical information processing and position themselves as the go to guys on the tens of billions now going into medical records nationalization in the U.S.

So what’s it mean to you and me? if you work for one of the surviving big consultancies it’s one less competitor; if you work for an affected client, your chances of having your voice heard over the salesman’s pitch from above just got a bit better; and, of course, there’s exactly no practical chance that the medical records thing will ever produce anything that works, so all the people involved are really just going on the dole.

What it doesn’t mean is the saddest thing of all: if you think this might be an opportunity to bring some serious talent back into line management, you’ll find the pickings slim indeed - because their management’s supposed bottom line focus fostered promotion on sales, not service.