Enterprise Initiatives

Back when Jaws was still considered a scary movie, the mainframe dominated the hardware marketplace. Well, Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, the mainframe or at least the mainframe mentality, is coming back.

Virtualization is as hot of a topic as BPM and SOA these days. Companies are saving millions of dollars by consolidating hundreds or even thousands of individual servers onto small clusters of servers serving up virtual machines. Other drivers for this technology are reductions in energy, emissions, and floor space, improved manageability, and easier disaster recovery strategies.

The Butler group published an article called, "The King is Dead - Long Live the Mainframe". If you have the time, this article is a great read. Here is a quote from the article:

We believe the wider adoption of the mainframe beyond these markets will be influenced by developments in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm, and the impact that the advancements in the capabilities of x86 server virtualisation is having in the market.

One of the many reasons for the decline in mainframe usage over the years is the lack of products that are available for the mainframe platform. This is changing as Linux can now be the OS of choice on the mainframe. The article continues with this quote:

Another argument against mainframes has been the lack of commercially available software developed on the platform, which at best tends to be ported to the system at a later date, or not at all in some cases. This has created the ‘inhouse’ or customised solutions that have become associated with many mainframe implementations. However, since IBM announced support for Linux on its Z series this has become less of an issue.

But even if companies are not considering mainframes as a platform for virtualizing their enterprise, one can't help but see the resemblance of today's virtual infrastructure with the mainframe infrastructure of the days gone by.

As I continue to research the virtualization movement, I keep stumbling across articles that point to various issues and challenges with virtualization. These range from security to inadequate monitoring and managing tools. When companies like VMWare and Open Source solutions like Xen resolve these issues, won't these solutions closely resemble the mainframe? If you think about it, the virtual server concept is basically the same thing as LPARs. The architecture behind the mainframes of yesterday are starting to look very similar to the architecture behind virtualization today.

IBM is using this opportunity to revitalize its mainframe sales. Most of their sales in recent years can be attributed to the fact that companies cannot afford the cost to migrate off of the years of legacy built on top of mainframe technology. Now, IBM can leverage the new mainframes running Linux as a solution to virtualization and Green IT initiatives. And by the way, the are eating their own dog food too.

IBM saves $250 million consolidating Linux servers on to mainframes

Virtualization is another hot topic in IT today. It allows you to run multiple virtual or logical representations of physical machines, side by side on the same physical server. Many companies are putting strategies in place to consolidate servers and to reduce the cost of hardware, maintenance, power, and floor space. At my work we have a cluster of physical machines using VMWare that have allowed us to run 115 virtual servers on it. There is room for more and we will continue to move to that platform. Virtualization makes a lot of sense in the eyes of the system administrator.

So why is a software guy like me so excited about it? To me, it is much more then a way to control costs. It also allows us to be more agile, to react to capacity issues faster, deploy easier, and create faster applications. Allow me to expand on each one of these points. The following statements assume that you have a cluster of boxes with available capacity to add additional virtual machines.

Agile - How long does the procurement process take in your company? I have seen companies' server procurement cycles take from two weeks to six months. The norm in my world is about a month. A virtual machine can be created in 15-20 minutes without having to purchase anything.

React to capacity issues - On Friday at 10pm, your web site generates a ton of unexpected traffic which causes your servers to exceed their capacity and fail. Your systems administrator logs on from home and quickly adds five more virtual machines using a snapshot of an existing production virtual machine. In under an hour he has the system back up and running.

Deploy easier - Your application can be configured as a virtual appliance. This allows you to create a virtual machine that consists of the operating system and application software for all the tiers of your application and bundle it as a single file. Microsoft is leveraging this approach as a way to allow people to try out the latest version of Outlook without having to install hardware and software. Think about being able to deploy your multiple tier environment as a single file. Take that snap shot and deploy it at your DR site and you have knocked a huge chunk of time off your implementation phase.

Create faster applications - This is the topic that gave me the urge to write this post. Think about this architectural strategy for your web sites. Put all of your web servers, application servers, and database servers on virtual machines and create your virtual appliance. Since all of these virtual machines are on the same physical server, you could actually leverage the PCI bus instead of the Gigabit Ethernet. The PCI Bus is over 400 times faster then Gigabit Ethernet which should give you incredible response times for your application. What's even cooler, is that you can have your virtual web servers "sitting" outside the firewall in the DMZ while your application servers and database server is "sitting" inside the firewall. You read that right! Even though these virtual machines are physically installed on the same server, you can configure them to logically be located in different areas.

Think of all the possibilities. We all know the power of distributed systems. Distributed systems allow you to perform parallel processing across multiple nodes to achieve more work in shorter intervals. The downside of distributed systems is the cost of the physical servers and the management of software across the nodes. Enter virtualization. You can install several virtual machines at minimal cost and easily manage the software by updating one virtual machine and taking a snapshot. Then apply the snapshot to the other virtual machines.

To take that concept one step further, you can leverage this distributed model to create multiple virtual machines to act as an application server farm. If you are implementing an SOA and have an ESB in place, you can configure the ESB to load balance your services across these virtual machines to maximize your throughput.

The possibilities are endless. The point is that virtualization is more then just a great solution for consolidation and server management. Virtualization should be included as part of your application architecture strategy.

So many exciting changes are happening in the world of IT today. Look at all the hot topics from around the net that we read about each day:

• Virtualization
• Web 2.0
• SOA
• BPM
• Saas
• Outsourcing
• Open Source
  
• Mobile Computing
• Event Driven Architectures
• Mashups
• Collective Intelligence
• Super fast chip technology
  

What does this all mean to the future of IT? Most of these technologies (if done right) will impact the workplace in a variety of ways. Some of these technologies will enable people to be fully functional from remote locations (Mobile Computing, Web 2.0, Mashups, Collective Intelligence). Some of these technologies will eliminate human processes both in the business (BPM, SOA, Event Driven Architectures) and IT (Virtualization, Outsourcing, SaaS). Others will make us less dependent on the big vendors (Open Source, Virtualization). Then there are the advancements in chip technology and memory which can really rock our world. Can you say diskless PCs?

So as I read article after article, day after day, I begin to wonder what this all means to the working people in IT. I can be pessimistic about the future of IT and paint a picture that looks like this:

• Mass virtualization - elimination of many systems administration and networking jobs
• Mass Outsourcing - Most of development farmed out due to cost effectiveness of remote development (both onshore and offshore)
• Less internal development - Reduction of development jobs due to effective end user tools (BPM, Mashups, Web 2.0), external development (Outsourcing, SaaS), and improved collaboration and automation (Collective Intelligence, Event Driven Architectures, SOA)
  

Or I could take an optimistic view of the future of IT:

• Business Alignment - business heavily relies on IT for automating and streamlining business processes (BPM, SOA, Event Driven Architectures)
  
• Enterprise architecture - Architecture becomes key differentiator and enabler
  
• Rapid development, less maintenance - Tools (Mashups, Web 2.0) and architecture provide a platform to rapidly deploy. IT delivers loosely couple services, not proprietary monolithic applications, which reduces maintenance and allows for more new development.
• Cost effective computing - Business looks to IT as a partner and an enabler instead of a cost center. IT makes the business efficient (Mobile Computing, fast chip technology, collective intelligence) while being cost effective (SaaS, Virtualization, Out Sourcing, Open Source, BPM, etc.).

My belief is that it will come down to the IT leadership, mainly the CIO. The CIO needs to measure and promote the value of the IT department as we move through these dramatic changes in technology over the next few years. He or she must be a trusted business partner to the CEO, CFO, and COO. IT should be proactive and start implementing these technologies (where it makes sense) to enable the business, as opposed to waiting for the business to tell IT to implement these technologies to reduce costs and headcount.

So what is your view of the future of IT? Is it pessimistic or optimistic? If it is pessimistic, what are you doing to change it?

In part 1 of this series I asked the question, "Are you running IT like it's your business?" Then I highlighted five barriers for preventing IT leaders from being able to transform their IT shop into a well oiled, cost effective machine?

• Resistance to change
• Lack of resources (time, money, and human capital)
  
• Lack of tools
• Lack of metrics
• Lack of process

In part 2 I will focus on Lack of Resources.

What are some of the most common phrases you hear when attempting to promote change within your organization? The top one I hear is "I don't have time", followed by "I don't have money", followed by "I need more resources". These are the biggest cop outs in the world. The reason why nobody has time, money, or resources is because they don't put any initiatives in place that allow them to do anything other then put fires out.

At some point you should reach a threshold of pain and realize that there must be a better way. Everybody is working 50-60 hours, all the projects are late, production support continues to increase, and the users are screaming. Everybody is working hard, but nobody is working smart.

If this sounds like your shop, you might want to take a step back and put a plan together to stop the madness. If you owned your own trucking business and you spent most of your time repairing your fleet of trucks you would probably be out of business. So why do so many IT shops spend countless hours every day in repair mode? It's time to make time, time to spend your shareholders' dollars effectively, and time to maximize your precious resources.

Let's start with time. Where are you spending your time? Do you have any metrics that allows you to proactively manage and control your projects or your production support? In many shops, the main cause of all these issues is lack of a sound project prioritization process coupled with a lack of a resource allocation model. If projects get accepted at will, priorities change like the seasons, and you have no data to show that your resources are over allocated, you will become a reactive culture. If you are not practicing Portfolio Management, you should make that a priority (view this article I wrote on Portfolio Management). If you have no visibility into how much time you are spending in production support, what categories of issues you are encountering, and how long it takes to fix issues then you should make change management a priority. If you are meeting with the business to discuss the next wave of new projects and do not have a clear picture of your resource capacity, you need to start practicing human resource planning.

Next is money. Obviously, if you are spending too much time keeping the lights on then you are wasting money. But are you wasting money on infrastructure? Are you still pouring millions of dollars into big name vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and HP? Are you paying huge amounts of money for "Gold Support"? You need to start evaluating Open Source alternatives. If you believe in the myths of Open Source, it's time you start doing your homework and read about these 50 Open Source success stories. Oh, and that Gold Support you are paying for each and every product...there are many Open Source Support Providers who can support a variety of open source products at a fraction of the cost. What is better is that these folks earn their stripes supporting customers and are actually extremely interested in helping you resolve your issues. This is their core competency. I wonder how much effort Big Blue would put forth to help a small $100M company resolve its problems. The days of saying, "Nobody every lost their job buying Microsoft and IBM" are long gone. If that is all you are buying you are definitely not seeing the big picture and your CEO might start giving you that look.

Are you still buying rack after rack of servers to support your test, development, staging, and production environments? Have you embraced Virtualization Software like VMWare yet?

And what about human capital? We already talked about spending too much time keeping the lights on and spending too much time maintaining rack after rack of servers. But what about development and testing? Do you have an architecture that allows rapid deployment and reusability? Have you separated your business rules from your applications? If your business rules are embedded in your applications then you are creating additional work to maintain and test your applications thus increasing your chances of creating defects.

Let's say you are a retailer with 1000 stores and you have a business rule for defining what a high volume store is. You have several different systems that use this business rule (billing, inventory, eCommerce site, financials, etc.). Now you want to change the definition of a high volume store. You now have to make that change in each of these systems and implement all of the systems at the same time. This simple change has turned into a project. Wouldn't it be better to go to one place, make the change, test it in one place, and roll? You don't need to practice agile methodologies to be agile. You just need to be smart! My recommendation is invest in your architecture. Create a business rule layer that sits between your applications and your presentation layer. I would go one step further and create a service layer to orchestrate your business rules and allow other applications and/or customers to access your business rules.

Well, I have rambled a lot longer then I usually do so I will pause until part 3 which focuses on Lack of Tools. I will add a conclusion after part 5 that tells you how to prioritize these initiatives and how to get started.