Forrester Research

July 1st, 2009

How do we measure high availability?

Posted by Stephanie Balaouras @ 8:40 am

Categories: Business continuity

Tags: Availability, Information Technology, High Availability, Downtime, High Availability Discussion, Strategy, Management, Phil LeClare

Over the past 2 months, I’ve seen an increase in the number of end user inquiries regarding high availability and almost more importantly, how to measure high availability (HA). HA means something different depending on whom you’re talking with so it’s worth a quick definition. I define HA as:

Focused on the technology and processes to prevent application/service outages at the primary site or in a specific IT system domain.

This is in contrast to disaster recovery or IT service continuity (ITSC) which is about preventing or responding to outages of the entire site.

Why so many inquiries about HA recently? I believe that due to our increasing reliance on IT as well as the 24X7 operating environment that companies of all sizes and industries are becoming more and more sensitive to application and system downtime. The interest in measurement is driven by the need to continuously improve upon IT services and justify IT investments to senior management, especially now.

So where to start? First, focus on the entire IT service, not just the individual infrastructure components. Availability is the result of the aggregation of all the availability factors of all architectural components supporting the IT service. Most components (networks, servers, storage, operating systems etc.) spec to 99.95% or 4.4 hours of downtime per year (based on 24X7). However, the combined service or IT system availability would fall below the 99.95% availability. Given the increasing reliability of all the components, most IT organizations do measure availability at 99.9% or above.

However, 99.9% availability is misleading, and it’s misleading how some IT organizations report it. Is this for unplanned downtime or does it include planned downtime? Raw availability includes unplanned and planned downtime while adjusted availability includes only unplanned. Organizations often keep track of both. Also, when did the outages/disruptions to the services occur? Consider the difference between:

• 1 PM to 5 PM M-F; and
• Weekly outages of 30 min to 60 min at 4 AM local time or on the weekend

In many cases, timing and duration are more important than total downtime/outage. Is the 99.9% availability based on 24 X 7 hours of operations or business hours? If you were down 4 minutes last month, was it during business hours or over the weekend?

It’s not as widely adopted as say incident management, but there is an ITIL availability management process. In ITIL v3, the suggested key performance indicators for availability management are:

• Availability of IT services compared to agreed upon service-level agreements
• Duration of disruptions to IT services
• Number of disruptions to IT services
• Number of infrastructure components with availability monitoring

Developing and agreeing upon the SLAs is going to be the toughest part but I think these KPIs are good starting point toward metrics that matter to the business. And while your organization is unlikely to spend huge sums of money on propietary fault-tolerant systems or high-end clustering solutions, there are cost-effective solutions that will provide a rapid restart of IT systems or leverage virtualization technologies. The HA discussion is no longer and all or nothing discussing, it’s a discussion about providing a range of offerings that provide the required level of availability at a cost justified by the risk and cost of downtime.

Automating and measuring HA and ITSC will be a major focus of my research over the next several quarters. I’m very interested to hear from companies how they’re approaching this today. What’s working, what’s not working?

June 25th, 2009

What do Green IT, the economic crisis, and best selling author, Thomas Friedman, have in common? Poor accounting

Posted by Doug Washburn @ 2:02 pm

Categories: Green IT

Tags: Accounting, Friedman's Inc., Financial, PC, Information Technology, Environment, Green IT, Economic Crisis, Printing, Strategy

Consider the following questions posed by Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, and more recently, Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America:

“Was it an accident that Citibank, Iceland’s banks, and the ice banks of Antarctica all melted at the same time?”

“Was it an accident that Bear Sterns and the polar bears both faced extinction at the same time?”

In Friedman’s eyes, no, the recent economic and environmental woes are not accidental or coincidental. He explains that what the “great recession represents, if that what we can call this economic moment, is that both the market and Mother Nature hit wall at same time.” How? Because, according to Friedman, we’ve been using the same accounting system in both worlds that has massively under-priced risk, privatized gains, and socialized losses:

• In the financial world, credit default swaps were sold without having adequate collateral behind them, gains were privatized to the financial institutions that sold them, and losses were socialized onto tax payers when the credits actually defaulted.
• In nature, we’ve under-priced the risk of rising CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, privatized the gains from emitting carbon to the institutions that emitted them, and socialized the losses by “charging them all on our kids Visa cards” (i.e. negatively impacting the world for generations to come).

Check out Friedman’s recent interview on his upcoming revision to “Hot, Flat And Crowded” with environmental news and commentary hub, Grist.org:

What should IT leadership takeaway from this?

In short, connect Friedman’s notion of a poor accounting system — that has caused financial and environment woes — to how you account for your own IT.

In a time when wringing out every unnecessary cost counts more than ever, the majority of us are still guilty of not accounting for IT’s true cost of ownership. According to Forrester’s findings, only 4% of North American and European firms pay for the energy-related operating expenses of IT, not to mention the energy-related carbon emissions. And as a result, opportunities for cost- and carbon-thrifty behavior are being overlooked. While the financial benefits might flow to someone else’s bottom-line (e.g. facilities, real estate), your overall organization will profit.

Viewing your IT through a “green” lens can help expose many of these hidden costs — financial and environment — that IT incurs but are paid for by someone else. IT leadership should take advantage of the challenging economic environment to employ guerrilla-style cost-savings tactics today that will lay the groundwork for a culture of responsibility to eliminate unnecessary spend into the future.

To help IT leadership get off on the right foot, my recent research — No Capex, No Problem: Eight “Guerrilla” Tactics To Reduce Facilities Costs Without Capital Investment — highlights a number of low-cost tactics to reduce the financial and environmental impacts of operating IT. Here is a sampling of a few of these tactics:

• Power down idle but energy-drawing PCs and monitors. The problem: In short, idle computing wastes money. This is when PCs and monitors are drawing energy but no useful work is being performed, such as nights, weekends, holidays, and workday breaks. Assuming a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday, five days a week, an unmanaged PC will spend just more than 75% of its time in this idle, energy-wasting state. And the energy costs add up. Consider an organization with 2,500 desktop PCs, each drawing 89 watts, and 2,500 monitors, each drawing 30 watts. With zero power management, Forrester estimates that this will cost approximately $246,537 per year. But by instituting PC power management policies, such as putting monitors into standby after 15 minutes and PCs into hibernate after 45 minutes, this organization can save $177,357 per year. Washington Mutual, General Electric, and Dell boast savings of $3 million, $2.5 million, and $1.8 million per year, respectively, by simply turning off their PCs when not in use.
• Enforce duplex printing. The associated costs of printing — including equipment, ink, copying, printing, faxing, postage, storage, disposal, and recycling — have been estimated to be as high as 31 times the cost of the paper itself. And despite the introduction of technologies to encourage the “paperless” office, demand for office copy and printing paper has increased. For example, it’s estimated that the introduction of email into the office environment has increased paper consumption by 40%.
• Optimize temperature and humidity in the data center. According to the industry consortium The Green Grid, only 30% of a typical data center’s energy consumption goes to powering its IT equipment, with the lion’s share going to chillers (33%), computer room air conditioners (CRAC) (9%), and humidifiers (3%). And in many cases, these environmental systems are not optimized. Cooling is a prime example, with most data centers being too cold — operating cold aisles at 65° to 68°F (18° to 20°C) — even though manufacturers of IT equipment have set the allowable high-end temperature at 80.6°F (27°C).

June 22nd, 2009

Calculating the fully loaded costs of corporate email: It's bigger than you think

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 1:09 pm

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Cost, E-mail, Online Communications, Phil LeClare

Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email on-premises or in the cloud), we have had dozens of discussions with our clients accompanied by detailed cost analyses of the true cost of running email on-premises versus running it in the cloud.

While the cloud-based cost of email is pretty transparent (many providers, including Microsoft and Google, publish their per-user per-month costs), the cost of running email on-premises is often a big mystery to everyone, including most CIOs. The big challenge is that the costs are spread throughout the budget: some in the hardware budget, some in the software budget, some in the storage budget, some in the cost of capital budget, some in the staffing budgets, and so on.

After dozens of these discussions and after a survey of 53 information & knowledge management professionals to ask about the cost of email, it is abundantly clear that few firms know their true cost of running email on-premises. And this matters if you’re considering a move to cloud-based email.

But it an accurate calculation of on-premises email also matters if you are contemplating upgrading your email to a more current version that might support cheaper storage, higher automation, or reduced email database size due to eliminating redundant copies of attachments. You can compare your current costs against the fully loaded costs of the new system with its higher efficiencies.

So we spent four months building and vetting a detailed cost model to help our clients and the industry at large understand how to calculate their cost of running email on-premises. Here’s a clue: It’s more than you think.

Read the rest of this entry »

June 18th, 2009

Your Thoughts: How mature are cloud computing services?

Posted by James Staten @ 8:11 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Amazon.com Inc., Forrester Research Inc., Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Phil LeClare

Enterprise IT infrastructure & operations professionals have many cloud computing technologies to choose from today, and new solutions seem to appear all the time. What are all these technologies? How do you categorize them? Which are mature and which need a lot of work?

Forrester is kicking off a TechRadar on the topic and wants your input. A Forrester TechRadar attempts to provide clarity about the types of technologies in a given category and plot their maturity today and the pace at which it is improving, as well as the level of business value this type of technology will bring to enterprise IT.

Forrester defines cloud computing as: a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via the Internet in a pay-per-use and self-service way. As a starting point, we have excluded Software as a Service (as Liz Herbert did a great TechRadar on SaaS already) and have carved up the rest of the cloud services into the technology categories below. Do we have them right? Are we missing any? If you have experience with any of the products in these categories (or others we didn’t mention) we want to hear your thoughts about them. How ready do you think these services are for enterprise consumption? Are they maturing quickly or is this area a wait and see?

Drop us a comment below or contact me directly at jstaten@forrester.com or on Twitter at Staten7. And thanks for your contributions to Forrester research.

Cloud computing technologies to be included in this report are:

June 16th, 2009

Green storage has limited ROI, but supports overall efficiency

Posted by Andrew Reichman @ 4:42 pm

Categories: Green IT, Storage

Tags: ROI, Storage, Hardware, Phil LeClare

I care deeply about the environment, certainly more than I care personally about money, so it pains me to say that in most cases, making storage decisions based on power expenditure alone is not rational behavior. The world is driven by economics, and the stark reality is that the cost of power represents a drop in the bucket compared to the amount organizations spend on acquiring and managing their enterprise storage systems. Maybe some day a consumption tax or cap and trade system will tip the balance towards more responsible consumption of non-renewable resources, but in the meantime, the pricing of power (especially in the US) doesn’t give much economic incentive for good behavior. In fact, according to a report Forrester published recently, the amount of money typically spent on electricity to power and cool a TB of storage is only about 1% of the cost of buying that TB of storage (or about 4% of the annualized cost of buying that storage given that you only have to buy the TB once every 3-5 years but you power it every year). So, unfortunately for the environment, power cost itself doesn’t provide a very strong incentive for storage efficiency.

Fortunately though, the things that enterprises can do to reduce their power consumption costs are often the exact same things they can do to reduce the capital and operating expenses of their overall storage environment.  Focusing on improving utilization (measured as the quantity of data written divided by the quantity of storage on hand) and increased usage of dense drives are the most straightforward and effective ways to reduce hardware acquisition costs as well as power consumption.  There are many ways to achieve these objectives such as thin provisioning, reporting and reclamation to improve utilization and tiering or wide striping to enable more use of dense drives.  Whatever the motivation, economic, altruistic or a combination of both, organizations that put significant focus on their utilization and dense drive ratios are likely to spend less money and be greener at the same time.  And that’s good for everybody.

June 16th, 2009

IBM's CloudBurst is a credible step forward

Posted by James Staten @ 11:05 am

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: IBM Corp., Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Utility Computing, Portals, Storage Management, Blade Servers, Servers, Hardware, Internet

About six months ago, I accused IBM of “cloud-washing” its solutions and services when it launched its Project Blue Cloud marketing campaign. Its aim with this effort was to lure customer conversations about cloud computing in its direction so it could learn what enterprises wanted from this new technology. IBM has had some legitimate cloud deployments and proofs of concept since then, but just this week announced the first product fruits of that labor.

Under the banner of IBM Smart Business Services the company announced a hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that can be accessed multitenant, like a public cloud and CloudBurst, an IaaS in a box based on BladeCenter. All the elements of an IaaS implementation – the self-service portal, automated workload deployment and distribution, virtualization software, servers, networking, and storage are pre-packaged and tested and can be implemented in a single effort. While some degree of customization is inevitable, you can’t get up and running with an IBM internal cloud much easier than this. By the way, HP has a similar offering called Blade System Matrix.

What’s missing from these solutions today, however, is the capability that justifies IBM’s name for the product – the ability to extend this internal cloud to a hosted or public cloud resource when needed; a technique known as cloud bursting. Few enterprises can justify an internal cloud composed of thousands of servers, so when your developers need that kind of capacity, the best answer is to bridge the internal cloud to a public or hosted cloud offering. IBM will initially provide bursting to its own cloud service but plans to extend this capability to its service provider partners.

Forrester thinks enterprise interest in solutions that cloud burst is a safe assumption but a bit ahead of its time, as most enterprises aren’t yet in a position to easily leverage these cloud options.  This is why IBM’s strategy of focusing on internal cloud first is a smart one.

May 29th, 2009

Google Wave: Surfing the future of collaboration

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 10:04 am

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Google Inc., Groupware, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Software, Phil LeClare

Google is a remarkable company. Need proof? Just consider how reliant we are on Google Maps to find our way around the world. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because Google empowered a couple of brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, to open up the developer APIs to the mapping engine.

These same two brothers announced yesterday at Google I/O developer conference a new technology for communication and collaboration. This new collaboration engine unites email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis into a single hosted onversation. Check out the demo here and the announcement here.

These conversations or “Waves” take place inside Safari, Firefox, or Chrome and look like email on steroids. (Lars said that they took the 40-year old model of email and redesigned it for today’s Web-based world.) But it’s way more than that. With Google Wave, Google has:

• Opened a new path to reinvent how we collaborate. You have to see it to understand, but why would you need four products when one Wave will do? It’s a new conversational metaphor that will also easily support document-based collaboration.
• Put the code base into open source to attract investment. Google will attract the best and brightest developers and development with this move.
• Published developer APIs to allow others to embed “conversations” anywhere. In a hope to replicate the success of Google Maps, these APIs will make Google’s hosted conversations a convenient way for anybody to offer these features to customers, members, employees, etc.
• Re-asserted its interest in hosting the world’s conversations. Google will host these conversations. And that means Google will be curator of more and more of the world’s converations. An awesome reponsibility for sure, and one that regulators should pay attention to. Buut someone has to do it. Why not a company with a founding culture of “do no evil?”

Now this will happen only slowly. The product will go into official beta later this year and be evolving for the next 2 or 3 years. But the path is clear, and the implications are coming into focus. For Information & Knowlege Management Professionals and for the industry, this is what it means.

• What it means (WIM) #1: Don’t get too stuck on installed email clients — they can’t evolve fast enough. Notes and Outlook are fabulous tools. But they are installed software sold under a perpetual license model. And that means they can only evolve as fast as you are willing to buy licenses and deal with installation and change management. And that’s too slow to keep up.
• WIM #2: Google Apps Premier Edition is worth keeping a close eye on. It’s a guarantee that Google Wave will appear in the Google Apps sometime soon, so keep an eye on what it might mean if you want to switch providers.
• WIM #3: Microsoft will have yet another innovation hill to climb (and it will). Redmond will have to digest this advance, but it will shortly ramp up its own conversation-oriented online engine. It will have to make this kind of conversational advance part of its BPOS strategy at some point.
• WIM #4: IBM’s approach to collaboration is looking pretty visionary. Lotus has been quietly reinventing itself over the past few years, and if you haven’t looked at Notes or Sametime lately, you need to. And with lead architect Allistair Rennie now at the vision helm, these products with their REST-ful APIs, redesigned interfaces, and Web-centric design metaphors are looking good.

Friend and colleague Jeremiah Owyang brings a nice Web 2.0 angle into this analysis. It’s about combining real-time, social, asynch, and multi-media/multi-device into one place.

May 26th, 2009

Microsoft Office still owns the desktop, future of StarOffice unclear

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Desktop, Oracle Corp., Microsoft Office, Microsoft Corp., OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, OpenOffice, Office Suites, Software, Phil LeClare

Since the Oracle acquisition of Sun, there’s been no official word yet on the road map for Star Office. Oracle says it’s vision is to deliver an integrated system from applications to disk, ostensibly a commitment to an OpenOffice.org productivity suite. Yet, that’s not a foregone conclusion. Star Office was just part of the package Oracle got in its acquisition of Sun. Its relative value is to give Oracle a starting point to compete with Microsoft Office, but more likely Star Office’s journey with Oracle will take one of two paths:

1. An independent productivity tools foundation. Upon the acquisition announcement, Open Office.org leaders begged for the emancipation of Star Office, saying a spin-off would be more in spirit with the open source community. The view is that Oracle makes billions of dollars licensing proprietary software and its control of Star Office is out of sync with OpenOffice.org’s mission. Oracle’s retention of Sun’s OpenOffice.org assets puts at risk the use of the OpenOffice.org name and the ability to reissue the code under a different license. There is a real possibility that Oracle will jettison Star Office and let OpenOffice.org invest in its further development, a la Mozilla’s efforts with Firefox.
2. Integration with Oracle CRM and enterprise apps. Oracle has the opportunity to address some of the glaring deficiencies of Star Office –- like macro support and mail merge –- that keep it from competing with Microsoft Office. It also could integrate its Star Office with its CRM and database applications. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison would love to take on Microsoft, and his company has tried to develop alternatives to Office in the past (Oracle Office division from the early 1990s). But the likelihood that Oracle can turn Star Office 9 into the Microsoft Office killer that Sun couldn’t is hard to fathom. More likely, its useful capabilities would be culled and integrated with Oracle apps rather than a stand-alone alternative to Microsoft Office.

 A third outcome might be that Oracle abandons Star Office, or lets it die a slow death. The OpenOffice productivity suites market feels crowded now that IBM’s Lotus Symphony released version 1.2 to join Star Office 9 and OO3. To date, none of the alternatives to Microsoft Office –- OpenOffice or SaaS –- have made any significant inroads against Microsoft’s desktop dominance, currently supported by more than 80% of enterprises (see figure). Combined, the alternatives make up about 8% of the market and Star Office is only about 3%. It will be an uphill battle to displace Microsoft Office with such a fragmented group of Open Office alternatives, and it may prove a battle not worth fighting for Oracle given Sun’s host of other assets.

May 20th, 2009

Are big boxes better for server virtualization?

Posted by Galen Schreck @ 9:47 am

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: Memory, CPU, Intel Xeon, Server Virtualization, Virtualization, Servers, Processors, Hardware, Semiconductors, Components

From time to time, someone will ask me if it makes sense to purchase a large (32+ CPU) server as a big virtualization host running a VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix hypervisor.

In a word, I think the answer is “no”.

Here are a few reasons why:

• First, very few virtualization users that I’m aware of have selected anything larger than 4-socket systems. Massive servers with 32 processors simply cost too much on a per-VM basis, and since you end up dividing them up into smaller virtual machines, there’s not much benefit to go with a massive system. Most hypervisors don’t support more than four virtual processors per virtual machine (including VMware — you have to purchase the top-of-the-line Enterprise Plus to get 8-way virtual SMP).
• Second, many of the HA features in large SMP systems can be provided by clustering or live migration capabilities in software.
• Third, having all that capacity in one box used to make it easier to reallocate resources between partitions — but live migration across physical boxes makes that unnecessary as well.
• Lastly, some vendors have claimed that virtual environments built on big servers are easier to manage, since there are fewer physical endpoints to worry about. I think this is an older argument that dates back to when people purchased a Sun E10K to run a large number of websites. Ultimately, more automated management tools made it possible to run large numbers of scale-out servers at a similar cost.

Even among modular servers, there is some debate as to how big of a box you need. The recent release of the Intel Xeon 5500 allows you to manage a lot more memory with fewer physical CPUs. In order to provide the maximum amount of memory to their VMs, many companies purchased more processors than they needed — simply so they could get enough RAM. Systems were still mostly memory bound, so with the release of the new Xeon 5500 that can address more DIMMS, we think that some firms will temporarily swing back towards systems with fewer CPUs. Plus, the CPUs have gotten much faster — recent demonstrations by Intel are showing the new Xeon 5500-based servers running twice the workload of their prior models.

May 15th, 2009

Optimizing the branch: Mobilizing IT

Posted by Chris Silva @ 5:17 pm

Categories: Networking

Tags: Branch Office, Information Technology, Carrier, 3G, WiMAX, Wireless LANs, Wireless And Mobility, Wi-Fi, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics

Writing on technologies for the branch office often times places me across the domains of mobility and non-mobile network infrastructure. Increasingly, in client inquiry calls, the question of “how do I optimize my branch office infrastructure” comes up and takes many forms. I’ll attempt to address the most common of these branch office optimization scenarios in a series of posts. This being the first of such posts, I’ll tackle one of the more basic optimization questions; connectivity for the small branch office.