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DOWNTIME The future of networks
IT AND NETWORKING DEPARTMENTS ARE EVOLVING STRATEGIES AND TECHNOLOGIES TO ADDRESS CHANGING DEMAND
20-26 May 2014 | ComputerWeekly.com
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DEMONSTRATING THE TRUE VALUE
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THE WEEK IN IT
Healthcare ITNHS to scrap £356m Choose and Book outpatient appointment systemNHS England is to scrap its £356m Choose and Book outpatient appointment booking system, despite it being regarded as one of the few successes of the failed £12.7bn National Programme for IT. The system, introduced in 2005, is to be replaced by an e-Referrals system within five years, according to the latest report on waiting times for elective care by the Public Accounts Committee.
Enterprise softwareOpera house migrates to Google AppsGlyndebourne opera house in East Sussex has migrated more than 200 employees to Google Apps for applications such as mail, business workflow and storage. The 1,200-seat opera house had found that its Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Exchange software was no longer cop-ing with the demands of its growing and increasingly mobile workforce.
Banking ITHSBC enhances customer experience with free Wi-Fi in 650 UK branchesHSBC is the latest bank to offer Wi-Fi to customers, introducing the free service in 650 branches through a deal with BT. Carl Howard, head of digital at HSBC in the UK, said: “We’ve been listening to our customers about how we can make bank-ing easier for them, and they tell us they like the idea of mobile banking.”
Public sector ITGovernment advises public sector to get ready for SME procurementThe government is warning the wider pub-lic sector to be ready for changes in leg-islation that will make it easier for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to serve government. The changes, sched-uled to come into effect later this year, will help the government achieve its goal of spending 25% of cen-tral government expendi-ture on SMEs by 2015.
IT managementFemale CIOs expect bigger budgets than male counterparts, says GartnerFemale CIOs expect a greater increase in their IT budget than their male counterparts, according to Gartner. The research company’s survey of 2,339 CIOs found women expect a 2.5% budget increase in 2014, compared with an average 0.2% increase expected by men in the same position.
IT staffMoD unconcerned by CIO Mike Stone’s conflict of interest as Serco employeeThe Ministry of Defence (MoD) has put in place provisions to avoid a conflict of interest after appointing Mike Stone as CIO. Stone will also remain an employee of government contractor Serco, which supplies a number of services to the MoD. The department said it has ensured a conflict of interest will not occur.
COMMONWEALTH GAMES TICKET SYSTEM DROPS BATONCommonwealth Games organisers took down its official ticket sales site due to problems caused by the website’s inability to cope with massive demand. Glasgow 2014 organisers instructed Ticketmaster to take the website offline until problems were resolved. Problems began on 12 May when 100,000 extra tickets went on sale. Customers took to social media to air their griev-ances when it took some of them as long as 24 hours to secure tickets.
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WEB GIANTS OFFER VALUABLE LESSONS
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HOW TO USE NoSQL DATABASES TO
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DEMONSTRATING THE TRUE VALUE
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THE WEEK IN IT
access the latest it news via rss feed
IT outsourcingGovernment should use influence to cut outsourcer executive pay, says think tankThe government should use its influence to encourage outsourcing service provid-ers to reduce payouts to senior execu-tives, according to think tank the High Pay Centre. IT outsourcing service providers such as Atos and Capita receive large chunks of the government’s £80bn total spend on outsourced services, including IT.
Broadband communicationsASA orders BT to remove misleading broadband speed checkerThe Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ordered BT to remove the broadband checker tool from its website until it can provide accurate informa-tion, following a customer complaint. The online tool advised a customer they would receive superfast fibre-optic BT Infinity at a speed of 23-33MB, but the customer questioned the quote’s accuracy.
Data securitySecond Orange data breach highlights need for encryption, say expertsThe theft of 1.3 million French customer records from mobile operator Orange underlines the need for organisations to encrypt data. This is the second time the French branch of the company has been hit by a data breach. Orange has not admitted the data was not encrypted, but a warning that it may be used for phishing purposes indicates the data was stored in clear text.
Digital servicesHMRC wants tax returns to be as easy as online bankingHM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is look-ing at online banking for inspiration as it digitises its services. The government department is looking to overhaul its services to be digital and online first. Last year, the department received a £200m investment from government to digitise its transactions for two million people.
Financial ITPayment systems providers will face increasing competition with PSR inputIncreased competition in the financial transactions sector has moved a step closer with the appointment of Hannah Nixon, previously a senior partner at Ofgem, as managing director of the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR). The new regulator, announced last month, will oversee the pay-ments sector and introduce more competi-tion once it becomes operational next April.
IT outsourcingWipro to manage replacement of legacy applications for gas distributor XoserveUK gas distribution company Xoserve has outsourced its legacy application replace-ment project to Indian IT services supplier Wipro in a seven-year deal. The project is aimed at readying the company and its IT for the use of smart meters in the UK, by replacing 20-year-old systems known as the UK Link suite. n
ORGANISATIONS’ PLANS FOR IT OUTSOURCING IN 2014
Source: Whiteline Research survey of 1,300 large European businesses
Plan to outsource more IT in 2014 compared with 2013
Plan to outsource the same amount
Plan to outsource less IT in 2014 compared with 2013
Don’t currently outsource IT
42%
36%
10%
12%
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ANALYSIS
Disruptive technologies such as the internet of things are making unprecedented demands on the scale of some organisations’ IT architectures. Cliff Saran reports
How to scale up your infrastructure to the size of an internet company’s
Organisations should emulate the best practices of web companies Face-book, Google and eBay to support
scalable IT. Trends such as the internet of things and the integration of web and tradi-tional business processes mean CIOs must increasingly deliver the scalabilty that was once only possible for the internet giants.
In Gartner’s report, Capacity and perfor-mance management form the basis of web-scale IT, analyst Ian Head noted that prac-tices rarely seen outside the web-scale community will soon become more preva-lent. He wrote: “As digital business require-ments become more ubiquitous, the drivers for this will be from the business.”
Business driversBusinesses are starting to re-invest in IT. A recent Gartner CEO survey found senior executives have an appetite to invest in and use technology to gain a competitive edge.
Gartner fellow Mark Raskino said: “Business leaders tell us they recognise the need to invest in e-commerce, mobile, cloud, social and other major technology catego-ries, and the capabilities they enable. That can’t be done with existing IT budgets alone.”
Web firms such as Amazon have pioneered the use of technology to run their businesses differently. With the CEO’s renewed enthusi-asm for exploiting technology to gain a competitive edge, now is the perfect time for CIOs to look at how Amazon et al manage their IT architectures and plan capacity.
Managing web scaleGartner describes the big companies’ IT architecture as “web-scale” and, although most businesses cannot boast the millions of customers of Amazon or eBay, the flex-ibility of their IT architectures can be applied in many organisations.
Ebay uses Ansible, a distributed systems management tool, to make changes across hundreds of servers
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Gartner recommends
IT develop real-time
system administration
Microsoft funds
university datacentre and
cloud energy efficiency research
Many of the tools web companies use they developed in-house, such as Netflix’s Hystrix, a cloud performance library. These tools are often available as open source.
As an example of what the big web busi-nesses do to keep their systems running, engineers from the eBay platform as a service (PaaS) team wrote a blog. They said that – while it is not too difficult or time-con-suming to make changes on one, two, or even a dozen servers – making changes to hundreds or thousands of servers becomes a serious task. The auction site uses Ansible, a distributed systems management tool, to make changes across hundreds of servers in a consistent manner to reduce errors.
The eBay engineers said: “Ansible can be used as a configuration management, soft-ware deployment, and do-anything-you-want kind of a tool. It employs a plug-and-play concept, where existing modules have already been written for many functions.
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which an engineer described how his com-pany approached adding usernames to the social media site: “During the two weeks prior to launch, we began what we call a ‘dark launch’ of all the functionality on the back end. Essentially, a subset of user queries are routed to help us test, by mak-ing ‘silent’ queries to the code that, on launch night, will have to absorb the traffic. This exposes pain points and areas of infrastructure that need attention prior to the actual launch.”
In effect, “dark launching” allows the engineering team to stress-test parts of Facebook while simulating the launch of new functionality to real users.
Gartner’s research found the web giants approach IT differently from most. Their approach to infrastructure, management and capacity planning has not only built the foundation on which they have established themselves as consumer brand leaders, but it has also shown the IT industry how to build for web-scale businesses. n
“There are modules for connecting to hosts with a shell, for AWS automation, for net-working, for user management.”
Importance of analyticsGartner said web businesses also use deep analytics to facilitate proactive, real-time and near-real-time capacity planning.
Commenting on web-scale computing, one Computer Weekly reader agreed that ready web-scale services and elastic provisioning of resources will necessitate many changes.
“The importance of applying analytics to real-time monitoring and performance data cannot be overstated. Hard-coded thresholds simply won’t do the job in an economically feasible manner. Figuring out what ‘normal’ looks like – and giving the analytics hints about what ‘normal’ is expected to be – will create challenges of their own,” they said.
Traditional off-the-shelf capacity planning tools are not suited to web-scale applica-tions. Gartner’s Head said: “By 2016, the availability of capacity and performance management skills for horizontally scaled architectures will be a major constraint or risk to growth for 80% of major businesses.
“To take advantage of web-scale IT, approaches to capacity and performance management, IT architects must embrace stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling architectures.”
Testing web scaleOne of Gartner’s recommendations came from a five-year-old post on Facebook, in
“During the two weeks prior to launch, we began what we call a ‘Dark launch’ of all the functionality on the back enD”gartner report
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR WEB-SCALE ITn Use stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling infrastructure architectures to deliver web-scale IT capacity management;n Categorise and standardise workloads to balance the capacity of the IT infrastructure across services;n Make application product teams respon-sible for application self-instrumentation (such as identifying scaling triggers) and analytics that empower near-real-time horizontal resource re-allocation;n Use demand-shaping techniques – such as canary, limited and dark launches – to limit the unexpected capacity and perfor-mance impacts of releases;n Develop skills in the use of advanced analytics tools and techniques, directed at gaining a deep understanding of application performance demands and constraints.
Source: Gartner’s report Capacity and performance management form the basis of web-scale IT
ANALYSIS
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Oracle bends its operating system to virtualisation, but analysts warn that the Sparc platform’s days are limited. Cliff Saran and Archana Venkatraman report
Oracle shoots for private cloud with Solaris 11.2 – but will Unix survive?
Oracle has released a beta version of its Solaris 11.2 operating system (OS) – but does Solaris and the Sparc
server platform have a future?Oracle said it had built the OS as a modern
cloud platform to support virtualisation, application-driven software-defined net-working (SDN) technology and OpenStack.
“By engineering the operating system, the virtualisation, SDN and OpenStack together, Oracle Solaris 11.2 provides a complete cloud solution,” said John Fowler, executive vice-president of systems at Oracle.
“It’s a complete platform for simple, efficient, secure, compliant and open enter-prise cloud deployments that can help customers accelerate their businesses and capitalise on the potential of cloud comput-ing while reducing cost.”
The Unix OS offers integration with Oracle Database, Java and Oracle Applications.
The latest version of Solaris and the evolu-tion of Sparc servers running Solaris is a result of Oracle’s research and development (R&D) investment since it acquired Sun Microsystems four years ago.
Ellison: “Traditional high-end server product lines are
in steep decline”
Oracle pushes Exadata
servers aggressively against IBM
PureSystems
Businesses face Oracle
applications support
timebomb
“having an integrateD solution is becoming more the expectation for enterprise customers looking to builD a private clouD”al gillen, iDc
“Last year, we invested $5bn in R&D across Oracle products and services and a large part of it was dedicated to the server and operat-ing systems sectors,” said Oracle vice-presi-dent of hardware sales, Gavin Dimmock.
Oracle’s strategy with the most recent Solaris OS is to enable enterprises to consoli-date their IT infrastructure, adopt private cloud technology more easily and move to a hybrid IT environment.
“We own software, hardware, chipsets and the Solaris operating systems to help enter-prises build their cloud infrastructure easily and quickly,” Dimmock said.
Last year, Forrester research director Richard Fichera noted: “It is obvious that Oracle has delivered on its commitments regarding Sparc and is continuing its invest-ments in Sparc CPU and system design as well as its Solaris OS technology.
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“Our Engineered Systems business is growing because customers want us to integrate the hardware and software and make it work together, so they don’t have to.”
But it remains to be seen whether Solaris and Oracle software running on Sparc hard-ware is a viable alternative to Linux-based x86 servers in the datacentre.
Gartner urges cautionAnalyst company Gartner was wary of Oracle’s long-term commitment to the Sparc platform and Solaris OS. In a research paper, Best Practices for Deploying Oracle Solaris and Sparc, Gartner analysts George Weiss, Andrew Butler and Errol Rasit warned that Unix systems – such as Sparce/Solaris – were not a viable long-term alternative to x86 servers.
They did not believe Oracle had the appe-tite to continue investing in the Sparc server technology platform if server hardware revenues continued to slide.
In regard to how existing Sparc/Solaris users should carry forward their investment in the Oracle hardware architecture, the analysts said: “Gartner would respond that tactical upgrades are acceptable, but clients should avoid wide expansion into other applications and workloads.”
Oracle Solaris 11.2 Beta can be downloaded via the Oracle Technology Network. n
“The latest evolution of Sparc technology, the Sparc T5 and the soon-to-be-announced M5, continue the evolution and design prac-tices set forth by Oracle’s Rick Hetherington in 2010 – in the incremental evolution of a common set of Sparc cores, differentiation by variation of core count, threads and cache as opposed to fundamental architecture, and a reliable, multi-year performance progression of cores and system scalability.”
Integration benefitsOracle is pushing Solaris 11.2 as an inte-grated system, geared to running Oracle software, the so-called “Red Stack” on Oracle Sparc servers and appliances such as Exadata. Some reports claim Sparc servers running Solaris can be more cost-effective than similarly configured x86 systems, after Oracle software licensing is added.
“Having an integrated solution is becoming more of the expectation for enterprise customers looking to build a private cloud,” said Al Gillen, vice-president for servers and system software at IDC. “With Oracle Solaris 11.2, Oracle offers an enterprise-ready solu-tion that includes OpenStack based manage-ment, and makes enterprise cloud deploy-ments easier and more affordable.”
In its latest server shipment report, IDC reported that Oracle had aggressively priced Sparc servers against IBM Power servers. Oracle also has lower-end models compared to IBM with two socket Sparc servers, offer-ing a more compelling system, compared with IBM’s Power-based Unix systems.
In its third-quarter sales results, Oracle reported an 8% growth in revenues for its hardware systems products, which include the Sparc servers that support the Solaris OS, its Engineered Systems and Oracle Exadata database machine. Its revenues from hard-
ware were up, at $725m.
At the time, chief executive Larry Ellison
said: “Oracle’s Engineered Server Systems, including Exadata and Sparc SuperClusters, achieved over a 30% constant currency growth rate in the quarter while, throughout the industry, traditional high-end server product lines are in steep decline.
› Implications of Oracle’s Rimini licensing row› Read CW’s special report on Oracle
› The Power of x86 and Linux
ANALYSIS
Oracle has launched an operating system for
the future, but analysts urge caution over the
prospects for the Unix
hardware on which it runs
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CASE STUDY
Cloud-based video system has reduced the BBC’s on-demand content processing time from hours to just minutes. Archana Venkatraman reports
Cloud services allow BBC IT team to move programmes swiftly to iPlayer
The BBC’s IT team has transferred its video-on-demand service iPlayer to the cloud using a system called
Video Factory. The broadcaster has achieved scalability, reliability and elasticity with the system and has cut the processing time to make a video available on iPlayer from up to 10 hours down to under 30 minutes.
BBC’s iPlayer is the UK’s biggest audio and video on-demand service, receiving about seven million requests per day.
The team adds approximately 500 hours of unique content to iPlayer every week, making it available immediately after the broadcast for at least seven days, and in some cases up to 30 or 45 days.
The content is made available for users to stream or download on more than 1,000 devices, including connected TVs, mobile devices, PCs, Android and iOS systems, cable boxes and smart TVs. It has an installed base of 20 million apps.
In the beginningWhen BBC iPlayer was launched in 2007 it was ground-breaking, but seven years later, as demand grew and users’ expectations became higher, its infrastructure had aged and needed replacing.
“Our old system was monolithic, slow and couldn’t cope with spikes. It had mixed ownership with third-party suppliers,” says Phil Cluff, the team lead at BBC Media Services in a video recorded at last year’s AWS re:Invent conference.
“We wanted to bring it all together to allow us to make changes quickly, have complete ownership and react to the changing industry by having new, responsive delivery techniques,” says Cluff.
“We also wanted a highly elastic transcode system and wanted it to be reliable and scalable, with full ownership.”
The team’s requirements were answered by cloud, which allowed them to process media at a scale that was previously not possible or constrained by lack of infrastructure availability.
To improve the BBC iPlayer service and make it ready for the next decade, the IT team designed and built Video Factory, a video transcoder, on a public cloud platform.
“It is a scalable, elastic, message-driven cloud architecture that will last for the next 10 years,” says Cluff. “It is the result of a year of development by 18 engineers.”
Soon after the first AWS re:Invent developer conference in 2012, the team rolled out the first set of components in actual production for Video Factory. But why use public cloud computing services?
iPlayer content is available to stream on more than 1,000 devices, including TVs, PCs and smartphones
BBC
BBC launches
redesigned iPlayer service
Interview: Dan Taylor,
head of BBC iPlayer
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flexible in creating content for new devices,” says Kalkanis.
However, there is a word of caution to users of AWS in media services. “One thing you should know is that Amazon S3 isn’t immediately consistent, but it will become consistent once you build your individual components,” says Cluff.
The team added monitoring tools to the cloud-based media-processing system to manage and evaluate how the individual components of Video Factory behave and perform. “The monitoring framework we built is called iSpy – it saves us a lot of time diagnosing failures and very rarely do we have to look at logs,” says Cluff.
Other pieces of technology within the Video Factory architecture include Apache
Camel, Splunk’s web-interface software and Java applications running on Tomcat.
Because of cloud’s agility and responsive-ness, the BBC’s IT team can easily improve quality, increase the amount of high- definition (HD) content, and make live pro-grammes available much more quickly.
For instance, the broadcaster has about 20 regional news programmes that go on air every night across the UK, which have to be mounted on iPlayer as soon as possible.
“In the previous infrastructure it could take nine or 10 hours before all those transcodes were available for public use,” says Cluff. “We wanted a system where all those transcodes could happen in parallel and be delivered at the same time and, now, with the new cloud-based system, we take 20 to 30 minutes to deliver those news programmes.”
The team is now looking to develop Audio Factory, which will be based on the same cloud principles. n
Getting ahead in the cloudMany people rely on iPlayer to catch up on their favourite programmes. “We get complaints when programmes take too long to become available. Live programmes are particularly challenging for us because we have to do all the online processing after the broadcast completes. This is even more challenging when many live programmes all air at the same time,” says Marina Kalkanis, head of BBC’s core services.
When the IT team analysed users’ media requests for a typical week, they identified peaks and lulls that made the usage pattern ideal for using elastic cloud computing services. So the team decided to move live processing on to the cloud.
The Video Factory architecture was built using Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Amazon Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).
“We were one of the early adopters of Electric Transcoder and we are very happy with the service,” says Cluff.
The simple live workflow of Video Factory involves the team capturing live broadcasts and sending these to cloud-based storage (Amazon S3) to be transcoded.
Once transcoded, the media either goes back to the cloud storage to be packaged on demand when a request from the internet comes in, or is used in BBC’s other distribution services.
But the whole system is automated on the cloud. “We never actually touch the video itself, we use only Amazon S3 API calls,” says Cluff. The team finds the system quick and has not reported any performance issues to date.
“The only failure we get in the new system is when someone puts in a dodgy video clip – that’s how reliable it is,” he says.
The other advantage of using cloud services is that the BBC does not have a
fixed amount of storage, so it does not have to limit the hours of content it can process or worry about its high-definition (HD) content.
“And because it is easier to add in new services our system is much more
› CIO interview: Daniel Heaf, BBC Worldwide› BBC Trust blocks free iPlayer plans› BFI to launch version of the iPlayer
about 20 regional news programmes aireD each night can now appear on iplayer within 30 minutes
CASE STUDY
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INTERVIEW
IT support at South Bank University goes beyond the corporate realm
August is the busiest time for universities,
when, following the issuing of A-level
results, students hunt for course places. David Swayne, CIO at London South Bank University, is responsible for ensuring the university’s IT copes with the peaks experienced during this time.
He also manages other systems, including audio-visual equipment in lecture theatres, video conferencing and telephony, plus devices required in engineering and nursing. “The IT we support goes way beyond most corporates,” he says. “We train a large proportion of London nurses and people with X-ray equipment. My team supports this.”
He is also responsible for administration systems, such as those holding student data.
“The IT we support is very diverse and there is an expectation it will all be available 24/7.” But Swayne says his organisation is not funded for this.
Swayne has been with the university since August 2012. “I was keen to join at this time because I wanted to see the whole academic year cycle,” he says. “I wanted to understand how the systems and services coped with the clearing process in universities.”
There is a peak in demand on the system in January and May around assignment times, and another at exam time when students’ marks are entered. During these times the IT systems need to cope with increased use. To reduce downtime in these periods, the university uses a software as a service (SaaS) monitoring tool from NetEvidence, which provides a high-level view of IT services.
IT initiativesBring your own device (BYOD) is a major initiative for universities. At South Bank,
Swayne is updating the wireless provision to support 30,000 devices.
“One of our busiest days in terms of access is the day before the first term starts,” he says. “With students paying £9,000 a year, they expect certain services, such as Wi-Fi. They may have used technology far better than they get at university.”
He has had to take this into account while developing an IT strategy for the university. For instance, the nature of communications is changing, so providing an email service may no longer be sufficient to meet the communication requirements of students.
“Increasingly, students will use social collaboration and communicate through video and instant messaging,” says Swayne.
South Bank is also investing in virtualising user profiles. Swayne plans to deploy a software jukebox using Appsense to provide application virtualisation. He says this will allow anyone at the university to use any PC, without manually installing software.
Education analyticsSouth Bank has developed a virtual learning environment called Noodle, which uses an IBM portal to join up learning and teaching. Swayne hopes the portal will help students track their academic progress.
David Swayne, CIO at London South Bank University, tells Cliff Saran the IT he supports is diverse, and even includes X-ray equipment for medical students
CIO Interview:
Lance Fisher, CIO, SThree
The digital CIO: The CIO is dead. Long live
the CIO
CW500 interview
Swayne: “The IT we support goes
way beyond most corporates”
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EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE
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HOW TO USE NoSQL DATABASES TO
HONE YOUR EDGE
DEMONSTRATING THE TRUE VALUE
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The university collects data on students’ engagement alongside their qualifications. Swayne says such data can be used to predict students’ performance.
“We will beef up analytics to identify students who are not doing as well as other students,” he says. “We can track whether students attend lectures, whether they use the portal and the virtual learning environment. But once we have correlated the data, it is often too late and the students may be thinking of leaving.”
Swayne hopes to make more data available to enable students to get the most out of the money they have invested.
“We will be able to offer traffic lights, and tell students that people with a similar pattern obtained a 2.2, but you should be able to obtain a 2.1,” he says.
The dashboard approach could be taken further, he says: “We are considering using gamification principles to engage students with rewards. We need to design the interactions and interventions that have the most effect.”
Student clearingFrom observing the clearing process, Swayne realised it was not possible to spot problems easily.
“We establish a call centre specifically for clearing, which takes a month’s worth of phone calls in one day,” he says. “Use of the systems and services is intense, and
clearing is an important event for university. We deal with a substantial intake of stu-dents through clearing.”
Traditional system administration tools can tell administrators whether a server is running, or if the network has problems, but Swayne wanted a way combine individual metrics to create a service view.
In 2013, he ran a pilot of a new SaaS monitoring tool – Highlight from NetEvidence – on the clearing system.
We found that the clearing service was consuming more memory and disk space than we had anticipated. After amending this, we avoided outages and kept the service running at full capacity.”
The NetEvidence product is used to monitor live services. It combines these into a high-level view of real business services, such as the clearing process at South Bank.
“We combined the applications used in clearing with the network components, and performed tests on internal and external web pages to tell whether the service was running well,” says Swayne.
For instance, when disk usage went up Swayne was able to intervene and add more storage on the server. He says anyone can look at Highlight’s colour-coded Service Tiles to check there are no issues with a given digital service.
“The colour codes ensure we focus on the right things and there is a wealth of technical detail,” he says. n
INTERVIEW
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EDITOR’S COMMENT
Web-scale IT shows what technology is capable of achieving
Looking at web companies such as Amazon, eBay or Facebook, it is hard not to be impressed by the scale of the operations they have achieved.
Few organisations can boast the size of their customer base. The speed with which they have gone from zero to world domination has to be admired.
At the heart of these organisation is IT. This is not the products IT decision-makers buy off the shelf from a preferred supplier. Web-scale IT – the level of per-formance and scalability the IT architecture web busi-nesses achieve every day – goes beyond the capabilities of most large IT providers.
While the industry has done very well in finding exist-ing business problems and building so-called solutions, it has been wholly inadequate at addressing the future problems people haven’t thought about yet.
And by doing business in ways no-one had previously considered, these web giants soar above those whose business models are limited by traditional thinking.
Unlike Nicholas Carr’s controversial Harvard Business Review essay – which questioned the relevancy of IT in business – we can learn from Amazon et al and accept that technology can make a difference.
In fact, the way some organisations do IT is revolu-tionising the industry, to the extent that some of their innovations – such as MapReduce, the NoSQL technol-ogy originally invented by Google – is now accepted as a way of solving certain IT problems.
E-commerce, social media and smart data place demands on businesses that relational databases can-not support at speed or reasonable cost. In this week’s issue, Computer Weekly looks at how NoSQL is revolu-tionising data access.
The Gartner report, Capacity and performance manage-ment form the basis of web-scale IT – covered on page 4 – describes how eBay, Facebook and NetFlix achieve web scale computing using home-grown and open source tools. While many of the IT operations of these web giants are unfamiliar to most in mainstream IT, they give us an insight into how such organisations drive the business through their pioneering efforts. n
Cliff SaranManaging editor (technology)
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a local gateway for cloud storage. With all this choice, is it really necessary to maintain local storage resources?
Ultimately, the decision comes down to balancing risk management against opera-tional and capital expenditure. Organisations will continue to invest in desktops or laptops (even with bring your own device projects) and many prefer to retain physical owner-ship of sensitive data, such as personnel and finance records.
From an operational point of view, depend-ing on a cloud provider means having a highly resilient network connection, probably through a number of suppliers with guaran-teed service levels. That means a shift in budget allocations.
Moving data to the cloud also means a shift in skills, focusing on issues such as security, application design and resilience, as well as platform as a service offerings.
So, will we see an overnight shift from in-house IT resources to wholesale use of the cloud? No, but there will be a gradual transi-tion as organisations become comfortable with the cloud and re-skill; and as assets depreciate and come up for renewal.
The storage industry will be slimmed down in five years’ time and a shadow of its former self a decade from now. Small array suppliers will struggle to create new fea-tures and functionality to keep customers using their hardware, rather than putting their data into the cloud. n
OPINION
Chris Evans asks why the organisation with mid-range storage demands would set up its own infrastructure from scratch as cloud suppliers approach maturity
Cloud storage dominance will not happen overnight, but happen it will
While a few big players dominate the top end of the storage array market, at the lower end we see
many companies offering low-cost external storage arrays at competitive prices.
But where is the real competition for these companies? Is it between each of the big six or with cloud storage?
SolidFire CEO Dave Wright says competi-tion for these suppliers would come primarily from cloud storage, rather than array suppli-ers of low-end to mid-range storage.
Wright questions why anyone that required a small to medium IT infrastructure would bother to deploy it themselves. Why get involved in the expense of building datacen-tres, hardware and software maintenance, and operational management?
It is no longer necessary to build your own infrastructure from scratch. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, HP Cloud and a host of other service providers now have mature, advanced systems to host infrastructure (virtual serv-ers), storage (block stores and object stores) and applications (such as databases).
AWS recently released Cloud WorkSpaces desktop as a service. And there are many service offerings that use cloud providers, such as Nasuni or Microsoft’s StorSimple, as
Cloud storage creeps
up the enterprise
agenda
Computer Weekly Buyer’s Guide to cloud
storage
Chris Evans is an independent storage consultant with Brookend
“the storage inDustry will be slimmeD Down in five years’ time anD a shaDow of its former self a DecaDe from now”
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BUYER’S GUIDE
Users today take the network for granted. But behind the scenes, IT and networking departments are working feverishly to evolve strategies and deploy technologies that can satisfy the appetite for more apps, bandwidth and services – cheaper and faster. To accommodate an application-centric perspective, the concerted shift to
software-defined networking (SDN) entails realigning the network architecture conceptually into three distinct layers that are accessible through open application programming interfaces (APIs):n The infrastructure layer, which consists of the network elements and devices that provide packet switching and forwarding;n The Control Layer centralises control functionality and supervises the network forwarding behaviour through an open interface;n The Application Layer, where the business applications are accessed via the SDN communications services.
The SDN architecture has three key attributes: logically centralised intelligence; programmability; and abstraction, where the business applications on the SDN are abstracted from the underlying network technologies.
THIN
KSTO
CK
Enterprise Networks
– Where do IT pros see
challenges?
SDN security issues:
How secure is the SDN stack?
More speed and bandwidth: the road ahead for networksIT and networking departments are evolving new strategies and technologies to address demand for apps, bandwidth and services. Bernt Ostergaard reports
BUYER’S GUIDEAlternative networks part 1 of 3
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Cloud computing realignmentEmbracing the hybrid cloud entails more than just scaled-up server virtualisation. The key to performance improvements and cost reduction involves consolidation and virtualisation, along with changes in management and governance, risk and compliance procedures.
Consolidation entails reducing the number of datacentres and physical servers. It means integrating multiple IT components, such as servers, networking and storage. By combining these components into a single virtual entity, IT can pool and share its collective resources. By centralising the management of those resources, significant cost savings can be achieved.
Recent announcements from legacy IT suppliers, such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, demonstrate their support for the hybrid cloud. While building out their own clouds, they are also offering most of their software on public clouds, notably Amazon Web Services.
A new directionThe shift to alternative networks in the local area network (LAN) affects the whole Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, from the network layer to the application layer. The traditional OSI layers can be software controlled on bare metal servers. The wide area network (WAN) connection going through a virtual Layer 2 switch filters and forwards traffic only at the data link layer using switches such as Juniper’s MX or HP’s 2920 series.
The next step is a Virtual Layer 3-4 router for Layer 3 routing, typically by partitioning sets of ports into separate virtual LANs and routing between them. The newer series of virtual router products from Cisco, Juniper and other networks can add load balancers, network firewalls, application firewalls, SSL VPN, IPSec VPN, intrusion prevention, content switching, compression and caching. It is not just servers that are being virtualised. Applications, hardware resources and everything in between can reside in virtual containers to reduce costs and increase flexibility. Providers, such as Embrane and Brocade, focus on creating agile networks through the virtualisation of Layer 3-7 network services.
Application performance in highly scalable clusters may require front-end intelligence. This highlights the importance of application-delivery controllers (ADCs). These can also provide compression, caching, connection multiplexing, traffic shaping, application layer security, SSL offload and content switching, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, advanced routing strategies and server performance monitoring. The focus on applications has redefined the corporate IT service delivery and implementation cycle (DevOps). This encompasses processes from development through quality assessment to staging and operations. This means network planners can build a more intelligent test environment, add more automation into the network and enable a private cloud offering.
DevOps also encompasses processes designed to facilitate the collaboration between app development and IT operations, to bring the portfolio of IT technology and applications forward. To get decision makers involved, IT planners want to combine the business process framework with application and information frameworks. This has led corporate IT to adopt tools, such as Oracle AIA and IBM Maximo, to facilitate integration.
THE ALTERNATIVE NETWORKS AGENDA
n Reduced capital expenditure and operating expense through lower equipment costs and reduced power consumption.
n Faster deployment of new applications and network services.n Improved return on investment from new applications services.n Provision of greater network flexibility to scale up and down, and evolve new services.n Creation of better access to trial new applications and services at lower risk.n Two central strategic concepts guiding developments in both LAN and WAN are cloud
computing and software-defined networking.
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Commercial network virtualisationTo realise their own performance and cost requirements, telcos and infrastructure providers are implementing network function virtualisation (NFV) to address:n The increasing variety of proprietary hardware appliances;n The complexity of integrating and deploying these appliances in a network;n The still shorter hardware lifecycles as innovation accelerates.
This is achieved by evolving standard IT virtualisation technology to consolidate multiple network equipment types onto industry-standard high-volume servers, switches and storage. Network functions are implemented in software that can run on a range of industry-standard bare-metal server hardware, which can be instantiated in various locations in the network as required. This technology promises significant benefits for network operators and their customers by virtualising and consolidating network functions that traditionally have been implemented in dedicated hardware. NFV is thus highly complementary to SDN, being mutually beneficial but not dependent on each other.
By using cloud technologies, network operators expect to achieve greater agility and accelerate new service deployments while driving down operating expense and capital expenditure costs. Over-the-top-services, such as Facebook; e-commerce suppliers such as Amazon; and telcos such as BT and Verizon, are all going down this path. This threatens the proprietary business models of companies such as Citrix, Microsoft, F5 Networks, Red Hat, Sourcefire, Canonical, Embrane, Juniper, Brocade, Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks, Extreme Networks and NoviFlow.
However, it is good news for the dominant X86 server manufacturers, notably HP, Dell and Lenovo. Dell is using specialised compute pods to provide acceleration for SDN to facilitate NFV, such as a high-density Z9500 switch. It also has an OpenStack fabric controller to simplify NFV deployments. With its active infrastructure, Dell offers IT services with a workload-optimised, automated and integrated infrastructure, unified management (Active Systems Manager) and pre-integrated solutions (Active Systems).
Networking equipment suppliers have responded with their own hardware platforms, notably Cisco, by launching a series of software and platform releases that emphasise new degrees of openness (for example, OpFlex to replace Open Flow). These network hardware providers are able to offer not only their own underlying hardware, but also their own global intercloud network infrastructure. After the SDN-NFV consolidation of high-cost dedicated single-purpose hardware appliances, service providers see the creation of software as a service (SaaS) SDN-NFV clouds emerging in 2015-16, leading to virtual service providers offering seamless capacity and scalability by 2020.
Buyers bewareMarket and technology indicators point in the same direction: consolidation, convergence and virtualisation with SDN in a hybrid cloud environment – in the WAN and the LAN. Network performance will improve with lower operating expenditure. But right now standards are still fluid, and suppliers are jockeying for position, creating dead ends and lock-ins to first-generation, end-to-end systems.
Migrating systems and apps to virtual servers in the cloud or between cloud providers is still tricky, requiring snapshotting data/apps from the old server and reloading them to the
new server while restarting the apps. To minimise cost and downtime, extra tools, such as Vision Solutions Double-Take Move, are often needed. Decision-makers must weigh investing now (and expect to pay a premium) to get the performance, against waiting, but factor in capital expenditure investments
in migration tools and more mature software platforms in a few years when the technology passes the hype phase and stabilises more. Now is the right time to establish the integrated business-IT DevOps organisation to lead the development and implementation process with a phased SDN-cloud migration, adapted to the existing asset depreciation cycle. n
› IP networks “inherently less secure”› Haulage firm Palletline overhauls network
› Is passive optical networking good for firms?
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Under the banner of big data marches a mass of terminology and acronyms. NoSQL is among them, attracting growing interest from businesses struggling to cope with steeply rising volumes and new types of data.
E-commerce, social media and smart devices place data demands on businesses that relational database systems cannot support at speed and reasonable cost. Although NoSQL technologies promise a solution, the term groups together a range of approaches to data management, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses depending on the prob-lem corporate IT professionals are trying to solve.
THIN
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Market data firm
eXelate opts for Aerospike
in-memory store
Marketing company
applies SQL to MongoDB to
uncover social media trends
Using NoSQL databases to gain competitive advantageBusinesses struggling with a sharp rise in data can use NoSQL technologies to cut costs and hike performance to hone a competitive edge, says Lindsay Clark
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New applications in the field of NoSQL are characterised by polyglot persistence, says Matthew Aslett, research director for data platforms and analytics at The 451 Group. This concept is credited to Martin Fowler, software researcher and independent consultant at ThoughtWorks. Fowler designed a web application using NoSQL databases Riak, Neo4j, MongoDB and Cassandra, as well as an RDBMS, for distinct datasets. Such a mish-mash of technologies may be anathema to IT managers who like to see standardisation, optimisation and clarity in support, but they might have to get used to it, says Aslett.
“You are using each technology for a very focused purpose,” he says. “If you look from enterprise IT, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You get an application with four or five databases under it, all of which depend on each other, with different support relationships and only one person knows how it is stitched together.
“Organisations are now making strategic choices, looking at which NoSQL database is useful for which purpose, which ones the developers like to use and trying to reduce that set. It is accepting the inevitable and planning for it, rather than trying to hold back the tide.”
This is the case with experienced NoSQL users, such as global distribution system Amadeus, which distributes flight inventory from 700 airlines to thousands of travel agents and internet booking engines worldwide. It uses both NoSQL database Couchbase and relational database Oracle to manage flight inventory and booking systems, while it is also piloting NoSQL MongoDB for document storage (see below).
Dietmar Fauser, vice-president of architecture and infrastructure at Amadeus R&D, says: “You need to understand your problem and pick the technology that fits it best.”
Water management company i2O uses CassandraThe Cassandra column-store NoSQL database benefited water management business i2O by prioritising availability over consistency of data. Data is stored together in columns, rather than the rows used in relational databases. The distributed nature of the database means creating very wide columns but does not harm performance. The business also uses Elasticsearch as a NoSQL database, to store irregular documents for IT auditing, and contin-ues to invest in relational database PostgreSQL.
I2O helps water companies and businesses with significant water needs to reduce leaks and over-supply. Intelligent hardware, such as valves and pressure meters, is linked to cloud-based learning algorithms to ensure its customers give the right volumes of water to consumers when it is needed.
Software and IT director Mike Williams says the system needs to cope with large volumes of times series data from devices in the water network.
The company chose Cassandra because it was inherently capable of managing very wide rows in a distributed database. “When we started experi-menting with Cassandra, we found it was so much more scalable and effective on that type of data, even though we did not get our design perfect first time,” says Williams. “We can get a lot more in the column-oriented view with no performance hit in retrieving that volume of data.”
Cassandra makes it easier to add new nodes than with other database systems because it was built to be distributed, says Williams. “It’s a dod-dle. I worked with databases for a large part of my career and clustered relational databases were never as easy as this.”
“if you put three experienceD sQl engineers in the room anD ask them to map some Data, they will probably come up with pretty much the same pattern. with nosQl, it’s a blank sheet”paul barry,
temetra
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Stored in cloud-based systemTemetra is another utility firm that collects gas and water meter data and stores it in a cloud-based system. It selected the NoSQL database Riak, from Basho, for its “key value” qualities, which allow it to store large volumes of unstructured data.
Since 2010, the Irish company has expanded in the UK and has experienced a twenty-fold increase in the number of meters it manages, while the data collected has jumped from 300 pieces of data per meter per year to about 35,000, when data is read every 15 minutes.
The company had been using relational database PostgreSQL, but the rapidly growing data volume hit performance. Software engineer and Temetra founder Paul Barry opted to move to Riak after experimenting with Cassandra.
He says the move to NoSQL requires new thinking from IT management: “We are still learning a lot about it. If you put three experienced SQL engineers in the room and ask them to map some data, they will probably come up with pretty much the same pattern. With NoSQL, it’s a blank sheet. Our first case was not perfect. It was reliable and it stored the data, but it was not the best way to accommodate all uses. We have since changed the way we store data. You have to be a bit nimble with NoSQL, to accommodate changing your mind.”
Temetra continues to use legacy SQL systems for transaction data and NoSQL search technology Solr, but Riak is underpinning the company’s rapid expansion, says Barry.
“I sleep at night. We know we’re getting another million meters in six months and I know we can provision that,” he says.
NoSQL databases may require IT managers to step outside their comfort zone. The tech-nologies are varied and lack standard tools, skills and approaches to data mapping. But, used for the right problem, they can help businesses improve data performance in markets where that brings a competitive advantage.
Case study: GDS get to grips with global data growthAmadeus is among the world’s largest travel global distribution systems, enabling con-sumers and travel agents to access flights from 700 airlines, as well as hotel rooms and parking spaces. The system was once used only by travel agents, but the birth of the online travel site means its flight database is accessed three or four million times a sec-ond. Growing mobile travel search and booking could see this rise to 20 or 30 million times per second, says Dietmar Fauser, vice-president of architecture and infrastructure at Amadeus R&D.
The Amadeus R&D department moved away from mainframes to Unix (and later Linux) and relational databases from Oracle in the early 2000s. But with the extra demands of online traffic, it needed to find a new way to offer access to inventory data.
Amadeus had previously split the read part of its database – the part that gives users views of flight availability – out of the Oracle database, duplicated it and sent it into a distributed in-memory environment, based on open-source Memcached, a key-value NoSQL data cache. This produced a two-orders-of-magnitude performance improvement over relational data-base, but it needed to be refined.
The problem was that Memcached has no persistency, so if a node fails, it cannot be brought back. Users either need to code persistency themselves, or use the code already available in the Couchbase database to create it, says Fauser. So Amadeus opted for
Couchbase, a similar NoSQL database, says Fauser.NoSQL databases generally trade off performance against
consistency, accepting “eventual consistency”, as opposed to the strict rules of relational databases. Amadeus continues to use Oracle to resolve transactions, which is made consistent with NoSQL read data in about a second.
Meanwhile, Amadeus is also piloting MongoDB, a document-based NoSQL database, for an e-ticketing database and revenue accounting system. “We accept divergent technology if we believe it fits our needs,” says Fauser. n
› Guide to NoSQL databases: Big data needs› Hadoop and NoSQL Integration Strategies› Why your NoSQL system thirsts for SSDs
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BUSINESS VALUE OF IT
Ultimately, IT only has value if it offers value to the business. But demonstrating that value to business leaders – to have meaningful conversations about what IT actually achieves – has historically been a dark art, often based on the purchase price of products such as servers or storage and plenty of intelligent guesswork.
Today, with increasing pressure on IT budgets to do more with less, such an archaic method simply will not do.
“The recession has put pressure on spending in many companies, and this continues in spite of optimistic noises currently coming from the UK government. It is important that what money is available is spent wisely,” says Chris Harding, director for interoperability at IT standards body The Open Group.
Steve Carter, principal analyst in KPMG’s CIO advisory team, says annual IT spend in some industries is as much as 10% of total operating costs, and the CIO is accustomed to IT budgets coming under focus from the business. “This scrutiny is increasing due to several factors, including weak growth and disruptive technologies such as cloud,” he says.
What’s more, with the focus on virtualising datacentres to drive efficiency from IT resources, the outdated approach of buying a new server for each new business application, and using the price tag as the basis for quantifying value, becomes redundant.
Virtualised IT resources are part of a holistic pool to be used on demand, further blurring the efficiency and cost attributed to each part of the organisation. But if IT cannot properly
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Cloud ERP software
introduces business benefits,
culture shock
Digital reality: When
IT meets the business
Understanding the real value of IT and proving it
By using a model that shows the real cost and business value of IT services, CIOs can deliver improvements in planning and governance. Lisa Kelly reports
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demonstrate its value, it risks being bypassed, says Bob Tarzey, director at analyst Quocirca. “Unless IT can prove it is providing cost-effective and relevant business support, it will lose the sponsorship of various lines of business and become irrelevant,” he says.
Measuring cost and valueEffective engagement between IT and the business is vital for the survival of the IT function. IT leaders need to be able to analyse the value of IT operations related to their financial costs.
“It is important to measure not only the services that are used, but also the business results that come from their use,” says Open Group’s Harding.
This is particularly the case for organisations wishing to adopt an internal pay-as-you-go (or chargeback) model associated with a private cloud environment, to give an accurate assessment of where resources are directed and to help better plan for future service provision.
“Focusing on business value will focus IT management; better business conversations will follow as a result,” says Tarzey.
Being able to demonstrate where resources should be directed is also central to having productive conversations with the business about future innovation. Understanding IT and cost data can help with the planning of future services and drive further efficiencies by preventing unnecessary IT investment.
“The real issue here is how business processes can be flexibly and affordably supported where costs can be shown to be high, and how much virtualisation and cloud will reduce costs, and so on. With the use of flexible IT resources, processes and business ventures can be pushed harder without the need for huge upfront investments in IT infrastructure,” says Tarzey.
Future planningTools are now emerging that allow IT managers to combine operational information with day-to-day running costs, helping them to build an accurate picture of the true costs of IT to better plan for the future.
KPMG’s Carter says IT leaders are beginning to build a more agile IT organisation that is able to manage forward supply: “This internal capability gives the CIO greater control over their business.”
IT leaders are becoming more interested in disciplines designed to help them manage IT more as a business than simply an engineering capability. By looking at tools to help gain insight into the true costs of IT, they improve the level of transparency of IT costs,
and can more effectively underpin any IT-enabled business agenda, he says.
“A service-based approach to cost management enables the CIO to manage business demand, because of the transparency of costs,” says Carter.
A service-based approach to cost management can also be the basis for demonstrating the true productivity and business contribution of IT, which is particularly relevant in a virtualised environment.
Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum, says cloud computing and virtualisation of IT services has pushed the IT department into a transition. “It is important to find a model where IT can conduct a conversation with the business by demonstrating how much IT services are consumed, especially if IT wants to support chargeback,” says Illsley.
“focusing on business value will focus it management; better business conversations will follow”bob tarzey, Quocirca
› Unlocking the value of big data› The Economic Value of Data
› Extract value from disruptive technologies
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Having the right model to show the real cost of IT services in a virtualised environment allows for better business planning and governance. “Organisations can have central governance and create a strategy for IT expenditure if they can see where the money is being spent,” says Illsley.
“Just like any other valuable and effective resource, they can understand the value of IT. There is no way of valuing IT if it is just a thing at the side of the organisation. All parts of an organisation need IT – how it is used from a support function through to mainstream business activity needs to be analysed so better decisions can be made.”
Deploying software that facilitates a service-based approach to cost management should be explored in tandem with the transformation of the datacentre through cloud and virtualisation.
“IT leaders can look at the costs and go back to the people in the business and say, ‘This service is costing this much – do you want to keep it as an IT priority?’ and future planning can improve,” says Illsley.
Chargeback opportunitiesMany organisations are interested in discovering the true value of IT to instigate some kind of consumption measurement or chargeback facility.
“Organisations are getting serious about measuring IT consumption with money changing hands,” says William Fellows, analyst at 451 Research. “A CIO with the necessary financial tools can create an invoice for IT that can be charged to lines of business.”
He says the trend towards remodelling IT departments to think more like businesses will continue as they seek to turn them selves from cost centres into service delivery organisations that focus on delivering value to the business. Although this evolution does not guarantee the survival of the IT department, Fellows says it makes it look a lot healthier in the eyes of the CxO and IT can return to innovating for the business.
93% of cios believe better collaboration with business units to improve unDerstanDing of their goals anD how they Deliver value is necessary for Delivering value
DEMONSTRATING BUSINESS VALUE
The majority of CIOs believe the IT department can increase the value it delivers to the organisation by improving cost measurement, according to a recent survey by the Service Desk Institute. Some 82% of respondents said improved reporting of activities and metrics from IT, enabling the business to gain a clear understanding of IT’s output and results, was significantly important towards achieving this goal.
The study showed that 93% of CIOs believe better collaboration with business units to improve understanding of their goals and how they deliver value is necessary for delivering real value. Some 69% want clearer communication from executives about business plans and objectives. The Demonstrating business value report also found that only a quarter of CIOs (27%) said senior executives view IT as contributing to strategic business goals such as growth or diversification, while 30% view it as a necessary trading expense that needs to be tightly controlled. Some 43% view IT only as a means to increase efficiency.
Half of IT teams either have no formal reporting mechanism for IT performance (17%) or focus on metrics such as downtime (33%) rather than anything strategic. Nearly all respondents (98%) said IT can play a bigger role in supporting the goals of the business as a whole.
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However, different business sectors are addressing the cultural shift from the cost of IT to the value of IT at varying rates.
“The higher education sector in the UK is really beginning to understand the value of IT and reach out and talk to students. Banking is beginning to realise the value of online services and customer retention, and retail knows the value of online shopping,” says Illsley. “Other sectors are beginning to come to terms with the value of IT, but they do not fully under stand its significance.”
There is a propensity for some elements to be very blinkered and not look beyond given boundaries. The risk of this blinkered approach is being unprepared for the agility and change demanded in a fast-paced world, where successful businesses are the ones that can accurately predict where to devote resources.
“If there is evidence that IT resources are tied to an uncompetitive part of the business, then it can open the door to a discussion about getting a different model or finding other opportunities. These conversations are not always easy and are unlikely to happen overnight, but they need to happen,” says Illsley.
Ultimately, all organisations should aim to make IT a transparent cost, to move towards providing IT as a service that can better support the business and deliver tangible benefits.
“To some extent technology has to tread water while organisations catch up and understand how they should best use IT services and structure the IT department to operate in this new world,” says Illsley.
“The internal datacentre is going through a transformation and there is a need for new ways of asking questions about IT value so the business can grab the information and IT can help how the business innovates and operates and move forward,” he says. “The challenge is finding the best way to get the information you have within the datacentre out to the business – you need to visualise it to get the message across.”
Focus on business goalsGetting that message across is important to the forward-thinking CIO. “The CIO of the future is one who is collaborative and knows how he or she can help the business progress. To do that effectively, it is essential to realise and appreciate the value of IT to the organisation and find the tools to change the recognition from cost to value,” says Ovum’s Illsley.
If the CIO gets it right, there are significant gains for the business, as IT and cost data help with mitigating the risk of planning of future services in a dynamic new world.
“There are many exciting things happening in IT, particularly in the new areas of cloud computing, social media, mobility, big data and the internet of things. These are leading to innovative business models,” says Open Group’s Harding.
“Keeping track of use of IT services and understanding how they contribute to business results provides the best basis for planning of future services. Innovation usually involves risk. Understanding the underlying factors and models helps keep the risk to a minimum,” he says. n
“it is essential to realise anD appreciate the value of it to the organisation anD finD the tools to change the recognition from cost to value”roy illsley, ovum
› CW500 in the city: IT innovation in financial services› Tech startups inspiring retail IT innovations
› Technology, innovation and change: the IT department’s view
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cars can be taught. The modified Lexus RX350h is covered in laser, camera and radar systems, which means it can record new routes.
But that means it has to be driven along a new route several
times before it has enough data to self-drive the
route. So no hope of scrapping driving lessons any time soon.
CIO musingsNot one to mix his
metaphors, a CIO speaking at a recent event
described working on the company’s previous website as like
putting lipstick on a bulldog. It’s all about doing work on the front end without worrying about the back end. Nothing was said of the dog’s back end. n
Self-driving cars not for the adventurousGoogle’s self-driving cars may be ideal for those who rarely stray from well-worn routes, but useless to anyone with a spirit of adventure.
While the vehicles can take passengers on any pre-programmed route, they are unable to go anywhere new, according to Wired.
The car navigates using data the Google Self-Driving Car Project has already compiled about every road it travels.
Providing all this data means the driving software has to deal only with cars, pedestrians, cyclists, construction, and any other new obstacles.
The good news, though, is that the
WRITING NOVELS IS SUCH A DOS
Game of Thrones writer George RR Martin has revealed that, while writing his fantasy novels about characters inhabiting an ugly, medieval and primitive world, he himself inhabits an ugly, medieval and primitive world – namely that of DOS, the antediluvian operating system he uses to write his work. Appearing on the US chat show Conan last week, Martin said he opted to use DOS over modern operating systems, because he did not want his writing to be automatically amended by spell-checking software. Downtime reckons that even Game of Thrones characters would be using XP by now.
Read more on the
Downtime blog
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