5 ways to increase the appreciation of IT in the enterprise

- Ilan Hertz, VP of Marketing at SysAid Technologies, says:

Since the beginning of information technology (IT) time, IT departments and the professionals that staff them have been notoriously at odds with, well, the rest of the company. CMOs and CIOs have had different agendas and conflicting interests, technologists and business professionals have vastly different ways of thinking, as well as communicating, and end users of company hardware, software and mobile assets have felt technologically challenged at best, and mocked and frustrated at worst.  

In fact, the phenomena and stereotypical misconception of IT professionals, as well as the generalized dismissal of the business professional’s ability to think in technical terms, or even use a computer efficiently, has been so widespread that even Saturday Night Live, the American late night sketch comedy and variety show, had a regular satirical sketch called “Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy” which featured an archetypal IT support guy who would deride anyone who asked for assistance, with “typical” catchphrases like “MOVE”, which commanded people to just get out of their desk chair so he could take over and do it himself, as well as a sarcastic, “YOU’RE WELCOME” once the problem was solved.

Getting into the psychology of different personality types based on brain function goes beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that though there may be differences, each professional brings to the table something of tremendous value. As we move deeper into an era of a technology dependent business environment, it becomes increasingly important that the divide between IT professionals and business professionals be bridged.

So how can we make a change for the better? Here are 5 Ways to help increase mutual understanding and appreciation, if not affection, between IT and business pros.

Attitude is everything

Though it is hard for technologists to understand how business people think and vice-versa, having an attitude of gratitude for what the other brings to the table is a huge start toward crossing the chasm that has long separated the two. To accomplish this, both departments need to work closely to understand each other’s needs. Assigning a specific IT person to a particular group of marketing people is a good start. This person should represent the marketing needs in the IT department and explain its importance in an enterprise level.

Technology

Ironically, there is indeed a technological solution to help alleviate many of the frustrations that stem from perceived lack of service or attention to detail from the IT department. With a good service desk software platform in place, IT Departments can prioritize tickets, thereby creating organization and a massive reduction of redundancies. Processes can be automated to increase workflow speed, end users can take advantage of self-service options like FAQ pages and articles to get the answers they need quickly and easily. Finally, tickets, assets and IT tasks can all be managed and controlled in one place.

Adopt ITIL-Certified processes

The company should encourage all employees, regardless of function, to understand them though seminars, webinars, white papers or through company manual distribution.  

Establish relationships

Enterprises can encourage collaboration and cooperation through team building exercises and bonding opportunities like company lunches, coffee klatches, happy hour or sport activities. All of these are great ways to create the sense of a community of “us”, rather than a divisive environment fraught with “us” verses “them”.

Use social media

Use Social Media to gauge issues that end users are facing within the enterprise, but also as a social help desk and digital meet-up. Sometimes a simple how-to question can be answered quickly and easily by one’s peers, and colleagues can offer up anecdotes or tips and tricks based on their own experience.  IT Departments can also utilize these platforms to answer questions, share and proactively address common questions, issues and end-user functionality of programs, software and hardware, and mobile assets.  

365 Command

- Chad Mosman, founder of MessageOps, says:

365 Command by MessageOps replaces the command line interface of Windows® PowerShell with a rich, easy-to-use interface that allows even a novice Office 365 administrator to run detailed reports and perform administrative actions with ease. 

365 Command makes quick point-and-click work of changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage and reporting. Once logged in, the 365 Command administrator dashboard automatically populates all Office 365 account data, allowing for quick set up with no user effort required. 

Key features include creating shared mailboxes, mapping datacenter locations, changing access permissions, setting passwords, and report generation. Data can be downloaded in Microsoft Excel or CSV format to easily share with others in the organization. 

With its recent update, 365 Command adds a slew of new features such as upgraded mailbox mapping, compliance reports, and better alerting for admins. The update also allows for easier management of deleted user accounts, group membership and creating new user accounts. Reporting for shared mailbox size, license summary, unused services, and the amount of user licenses have also been added. Since its release in February 2013, 365 Command has gained more than 1,500 customers and manages 700,000+ mailboxes.

Champion Solutions Group (MessageOps parent company) was awarded the Solutions Integrator of the Year award by Microsoft; and at the WPC took home the East Region Partner award, Greater Southeast Cloud Practice Partner of the Year award, and the SMB East Region General Manager of the Year award. 

New Offering Makes Data Center Remote Management Faster, More Flexible

- Rick Stevenson, CEO, Opengear, says:

Managing remote data centers, colocation facilities, and network exchange points can often leave network administrators at their wits' end – and that's before the network connection goes down. The last thing administrators need to worry about is the reliability of their connection, but unfortunately many of them find themselves spending far too much time ensuring a connection or scrambling to re-connect a downed network.

A new product aims to fix this state of affairs. The Opengear IM7200, a brand-new product family introduced at Cisco Live on June 25, provides administrators with a powerful and reliable out-of-band system that should ease many of their worries about network failures. It allows for secure remote management of all rack infrastructure from anywhere in the world, via a single pane of glass.

            

The IM7200 is the first out-of-band infrastructure management system to combine 4G LTE and fiber, providing a degree of flexibility and speed that is unmatched in today's market. The IM7200 allows for the secure remote management of network, server, and power infrastructure in high-density computing environments, ensuring that businesses can keep critical systems running smoothly even in the event of network outages or impairment.

            

The integration of 4G LTE gives the IM7200 unparalleled speed and responsiveness, allowing network outages to be diagnosed and troubleshot within seconds of the incident via Opengear's integrated Auto-Response system.

            

And the IM7200's incorporation of dual SFP fiber and/or gigabit Ethernet interfaces gives the IM7200 the ability to operate on a fiber-based management network, reducing the points of failure associated with fiber media converters or top-of-rack management switch solutions. The fiber interface also reduces total cost of ownership, and improves reliability.

            

Other features include advanced console management; a state-of-the-art platform driven by a 1 GHz ARM processor that's twice as fast as that of any competing product; software configurable serial ports and integrated hardware that eliminates the need for costly additional appliances; and centralized management for easy enterprise-wide deployments.

            

Opengear has been in the remote infrastructure management business for nearly a decade, and we truly believe that the IM7200 represents a major advance in helping companies maintain business continuity – whether the network is running or not.

            

Learn more about the Opengear IM7200 here.

Essential tooling for IT Shops - Change and Release Management

Serena Software announced last month their new change and release management capabilities for its Orchestrated IT solution set. The newly enhanced solutions provide essential tooling for IT shops that are embracing the DevOps movement, as well as those that are simply looking to increase their change and release cadence.

DevOps has become a primary driver for IT organizations that are delivering Revenue Applications (RevApps), software applications that directly transact customer activity and bring in considerable revenue to the enterprise. The speed and frequency with which RevApps get enhanced directly impacts how quickly the business can respond to customer requests, competitive moves and changing market conditions.

Serena’s response is a series of enhancements that provide developers with self-service provisioning of environments (to go with previously available self-service application deployment), more cloud and virtualized infrastructure deployment targets, improved resource management and demand planning, as well as other enhancements that significantly reduce development and operations hassles.

The new capabilities available in version 4.5 of Serena’s Orchestrated IT solutions include:

Self-Service Provisioning of Environments

• A new on-demand self-service portal enables developers and QA teams to immediately spin up, and later tear down, the environments they need for application development and testing.
• Developer self-service capabilities free IT operations staff from manual provisioning so they can focus on IT infrastructure and performance improvements for the business.

Release Automation Targets Now include Windows Azure and VMware ESX/ESXi

• Target deployment environments now include cloud platforms Windows Azure, and Amazon EC2, along with leading virtualized environments VMware ESX/ ESXi.
• Serena Release Automation now includes advanced load-balancing and failover  capabilities simplifying enterprise adoption.
• Serena Release Automation is now localized into Japanese.

Hassle-Free Capturing Of Change Request Actuals

• Development managers can now easily capture the costs of specific tasks and easily link them to approved change requests. Low-impact capture and roll-up of the time spent on change request activities allows accurate assessment of the resources utilized by a project.
• Business change requests can be easily tracked from planning through to development.

 “DevOps allows IT to become truly agile,” commented Greg Hughes, president and CEO of Serena Software. “Serena’s enhanced change and release management capabilities allow Dev to exploit more self-service functions and Ops to release at the rapid cadence required of today’s Revenue Applications.”

“Revenue Applications play a critical role in the success of business today.  This is true in traditional, as well as newer market segments,” said Rich Ptak, managing partner and cofounder of Ptak/Noel. “Serena’s latest release of its Orchestrated IT solutions goes right to the heart of DevOps.  By streamlining change and release management it helps businesses keep these important apps current and operating to deliver exceptional customer experience.”

The new Serena 4.5 Orchestrated IT solutions will be generally available now. Pricing starts at $12,500 for 250 users.

Data Center Remote Management Gets the 4G LTE Treatment

- Rick Stevenson, CEO of Opengear, says:

3G cellular networking has been integrated into out-of-band management systems for some time now. But until recently, no one had successfully integrated 4G LTE support into remote management gateways. When it comes to remote management, 4G LTE would represent no small improvement: latency can be up to 20 times lower in networks that use 4G than those that rely on its predecessor.

As our customers' networks have spread across the globe via data centers, edge networks and public and private clouds, speed has become paramount (and in high demand). Add to that 4G LTE’s ability to increase overall network capacity and efficiency for carriers and the value of the technology really comes into focus. But so far, industry hasn't been able to take advantage of the increased speed and capabilities promised by integrated 4G LTE for remote management.

We’re hoping to change that, however, thanks to some hard work by our Opengear development team. I'm proud to announce that we have succeeded in incorporating 4G LTE into our out-of-band management solutions, and we are now offering built-in 4G LTE support for our ACM5500 line of remote management gateways. It's true that 4G LTE has made its way to the marketplace as a (less reliable) plug-in solution, but as far as I know Opengear is the first in the industry to fully integrate 4G LTE into a remote management gateway.

The increased speed promised by 4G LTE comes without sacrificing any of the other features that make the ACM 5500 line such a standout in the field. The product offers secure in-band and out-of-band access that enables remote configuration, monitoring and repair of all types of IT and networking equipment. It allows faults to be repaired remotely or automatically, reducing the need for expensive on-site technical visits and minimizing network downtime.

Incorporating 4G LTE also increases the reliability of our products, extending their reach to areas where 4G networks may be the only ones available. And when 4G networks are unavailable, our management gateways are capable of falling back to 3G and even 2G networks to ensure continuity.

Furthermore, just as the 3G version did, our 4G LTE management gateway allows users to access devices at all sites that are behind firewalls, or sites where the primary network connection is impaired.

Perhaps most crucially, Opengear's 4G LTE gateways accommodate 4G LTE network bands worldwide, enabling enterprise to link up infrastructure across the globe seamlessly and efficiently.

Our engineers worked long and hard to bring this technology to fruition. We're very pleased to be able to bring it to market, as we believe this represents a major advance for remote management gateways.

Cloud-based ITSM Platform With Critical Social IT, Global Localization Support and Key Infrastructure Improvements

- Kevin J. Smith, Vice President and General Manager of FrontRange’s Cloud Business Unit

There is no denying that the advent of social media applications has fundamentally changed the way people communicate and collaborate in both their personal and professional lives. As social media applications have grown, enterprises and the IT industry have leveraged its collaborative power to more efficiently help people, both inside and outside the data center, obtain fast and accurate service and knowledge. By helping users help each other in a managed framework supporting both real-time and archival knowledge, socially enabled support inevitably leads to enhanced IT productivity and efficiency as well as more satisfied end users. 

To foster collaboration, improve productivity and better handle service management tasks as a team, FrontRange recently announced HEAT Cloud 2012.3, which introduces a powerful new process known as Social Service Management.  By bringing social collaboration concepts together with service management best practices, Social Service Management transcends traditional Social IT by dramatically improving communications between service desks, team members, and customers. Through the use of real-time feeds and activity streams containing important updates, service desks analysts and customers are notified in real-time about key issues and updates to help improve service desk efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. This team approach provides peer-to-peer support with access to shared knowledge to dramatically improve productivity and provide the most cost-effective service delivery process.

Jarod Green, Research Analyst with Gartner, Inc, adds, “It is vital that modern social media concepts be adopted within IT service management processes in order for teams to stay informed and collaborate efficiently. By merging social collaboration and service management functions, customers and their support teams can stay up to date in terms of knowledge, alerts and notifications without using a separate system of record.  This is a key capability customers should look for in any ITSM solution."

Also included in HEAT Cloud 2012.3 is extended support for international markets by offering service desk client functions in French and self-service in Spanish. The new release also features a new robust data import wizard that greatly simplifies data import from other systems.

Monitoring and Managing the Data Center

- Chuck Spears, President of Liebert North America, Emerson Network Power (www.EmersonNetworkPower.com), says:

Monitoring a Hot Topic for Data Center Managers

Data center managers are valuing visibility into their IT network and infrastructure more than ever according to a recent survey from the Data Center Users Group (DCUG), sponsored by Emerson Network Power. According to the survey of this association of data center, IT and facility managers, 56 percent of respondents listed adequate monitoring and data center management capabilities as their top data center concern. This is the highest percentage for the monitoring/management response in the history of the DCUG survey, which is now seven years running. In fact, in the five most recent DCUG surveys—all conducted over the past three years—no other concern topped that 56 percent mark. DCUG survey top three concerns 2013:

• 56 percent: Adequate monitoring and data center management capabilities 
• 52 percent: Availability 
• 45 percent: Energy efficiency 

Today’s data center is an incredibly complex environment and increasingly critical to the success of most businesses. Organizations are consolidating and virtualizing servers and putting a premium on flexibility and scalability for their IT systems, which requires a higher level of visibility into the data center infrastructure. In fact, 89 percent of those surveyed said they had implemented some server consolidation or virtualization in the last 18 months and 87 percent expect to start another such project within the year.

Ongoing consolidation/virtualization boosts density by more than 10 percent

The trend toward consolidation and virtualization is likely the cause of a sharp increase in average power density in the facilities of those surveyed. The average reported power density was 7.89 kW per rack, compared to just 6.0 kW per rack a year ago, and DCUG members do not see that trend slowing, as respondents predicted densities of 12.17 kW per rack in just two years.

Now the challenge is to maintain or improve availability in this dense computing environment, while also reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Unfortunately, organizations are struggling to effectively and efficiently manage complex data centers because typical monitoring and management tools are fragmented. Consequently, data centers do not have access to the detailed, holistic data they need to understand the relationships and dependencies between assets. Nor do these tools provide real-time data that shows how assets are functioning.

DCIM adoption increasing to aid management and monitoring

In response, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) has emerged as a discipline for managing critical infrastructure. DCIM centralizes the collection of infrastructure data to deliver a single source of truth for planning and management.

The foundation for DCIM requires establishing an instrumentation platform to enable monitoring and control of physical assets. Power and cooling systems should have integrated instrumentation and these systems can be supplemented with additional sensors and controls to enable a centralized and comprehensive view of infrastructure systems.

At the UPS level, monitoring provides continuous visibility into capacity, voltages, battery status and service events, at the branch circuit, power distribution unit and within the rack.

Installing a network of temperature sensors across the data center can be a valuable supplement to the supply and return air temperature data supplied by cooling units. By sensing temperatures at multiple locations, the airflow and cooling capacity can be more precisely controlled, resulting in more efficiency.

Communication is crucial to improving data center operations

Communication with a management system or with other devices is provided through interfaces that deliver Ethernet connectivity and SMNP and telnet communications, as well as integration with building management systems through Modbus and BACnet. When infrastructure data is consolidated into a central management platform, real-time operating data for systems across the data center can drive improvements in performance, including:

Improved availability: The ability to receive immediate notification of a failure, or an event that could ultimately lead to a failure, allows faster, more effective response to system problems. Taken a step further, data from the monitoring system can be used to analyze equipment operating trends and develop more effective preventive maintenance programs. Finally, the visibility and dynamic control of data center infrastructure provided by the monitoring can help prevent failures created by changing operating conditions.

Increased efficiency. Monitoring power at the facility, row, rack and device level provides the ability to more efficiently load power supplies and dynamically manage cooling. Greater visibility into infrastructure efficiency can drive informed decisions around the balance between efficiency and availability, allowing data center staff to focus on more strategic IT issues.

Managed capacity. Effective demand forecasting and capacity planning has become critical to effective data center management. Data center infrastructure monitoring can help identify and quantify patterns impacting data center capacity.

DCIM technologies are evolving rapidly. Next-generation systems will begin to provide a unified view of data center operations that integrates data from IT and infrastructure systems. As this is accomplished, a truly holistic data center can be achieved.

Organizations Turning to Information Governance to Reduce Complexity in the Data Center

- Danny Milrad, director of product marketing at Symantec Corp. (www.symantec.com), says:

Juggling four oranges is hard. And juggling four oranges, two bowling pins, a chainsaw and a live snake is even harder. The more complex a task, the more difficult it can be. And IT today is becoming more and more complex, according to a recent survey conducted by Symantec on the state of the data center. And this complexity is having significant effects on the business.

Increasing Data Center Complexity, and Its Effects

IT staff were asked to rate the complexity of different areas of the data center, on a scale of 1 to 10, and every area rated at least 6.56. Security was the highest rating, at 7.06, and other complex aspects of IT were infrastructure, disaster recovery, storage and compliance. As for what is driving this complexity, the survey revealed several current trends in IT that are having a large impact. The largest cause cited by respondents was an increasing number of business-critical applications. Considering all the new technologies being integrated into today’s businesses, this is not surprising. Mobility is another significant driver of data center complexity, as IT works to support smartphones and tablets; this was identified by 44 percent of respondents. 

Other responses were virtualization (43 percent) and public cloud deployment (41 percent).

As a result of these factors, businesses have found themselves facing several challenges. Foremost among these are rising costs, according to nearly half of businesses surveyed. They also reported reduced agility, longer lead times for storage provisioning, and security breaches and downtime. The costs of downtime alone are an average of $5.1 million per year, with 16 data center outages occurring within the last year.

Businesses Are Combating this Complexity

Organizations are not standing idly by and allowing this complexity to overwhelm them, however. They are fighting back, working to increase efforts in training, standardization, centralization and virtualization. To accomplish these goals, they are also increasing their budgets. This only combats part of the problem, however. The majority of businesses – nine in ten – are considering information governance programs, to address the enormous increase in data businesses are creating and storing. This will also improve their ability to respond to legal issues. They are also hoping an information governance program will improve their security (according to three-quarters of organizations), while two-thirds also hope to keep information management and storage costs lower.

Best Practices for Reducing Complexity

In order to help today’s organizations minimize the effects of complexity, Symantec developed the following recommendation.

•  Institute an information governance program, with support from senior management.
• Reduce the current glut of backup solutions, often operating in silos, by adopting more comprehensive tools. 
• Take steps to gain better visibility into current IT assets. This should include understanding how they are used, and by whom. Developing a culture of responsibility can lead to more efficient use of resource. 
• Consider implementing appliances to keep the backup/recovery process as simple and user-friendly as possible. 
• As part of your information governance plan, integrate deduplication into the data center, to rein in backup costs.

While a certain amount of complexity is inevitable in IT today as new technologies come online, it’s time for businesses to begin planning ways to streamline their infrastructure and processes. An intelligent information governance plan combined with the right tools can help IT juggle its priorities and remain productive in today’s complex world.

The Softer Side of Agile: Leading Collaborative Teams to Success

- Nancy Y. Nee, Executive Director of Project Management & Business Analysis Programs with ESI International (http://www.esi-intl.com/), says:

The Agile Manifesto places customer collaboration over contract negotiation with a keen focus on a highly skilled, motivated team in constant interaction with the product and the customer at every phase of the project. As a result of this collaborative, customer-centric view, Agile requires more than the technical expertise needed to gather requirements, and develop and test new product lines. It requires soft skills, leadership competencies and an understanding of how to apply those skills in a more malleable, people-focused setting. As practitioners know, collaboration brings a set of challenges. With the Agile approach, project managers are called upon to team up with customers in a constant stakeholder dialogue.

Constant customer collaboration provides great opportunities to measure project success by gauging the level of customer satisfaction throughout each life cycle of the project. It creates the framework for faster time-to-market and a more nimble process to deliver successful project outcomes. When it comes to successful agile project delivery, collaboration also is key for the integrated project team.

What Makes Good, Effective Collaboration?

To begin to understand, we should first take a look at the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto. These principles, which are the building blocks of Agile, identify three areas that lend themselves to successful collaboration. These principles are as follows:

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Projects need to be built around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Based on the above three principles, successful collaboration among the team relies heavily on three key factors:

• Feedback
• Communication
• Motivation

Feedback 
How does feedback work in a team environment? What is the most successful way to deliver it on an Agile project? Remember that feedback during the iterative development work of an Agile project must increase awareness and insight as well as foster innovation, yielding positive alternatives. Having the business as part of the core Agile project team creates the environment for continuous feedback and an opportunity to take positive risks in doing things differently, which is the very nature of why the project is being done in an Agile setting. Within the iteration work, it is essential to provide feedback that:

• Contains a clear purpose
• Is specific and descriptive
• Offers positive alternatives

For all members of the Agile project team, it is important to identify what to start, stop and continue doing when it comes to iteration work. This is where effective feedback is most often used. You can easily integrate these practices into your daily stand up meetings to prepare for the day’s work.

Communication

What makes effective communication? When it comes to communication, it is important to deliver information in a manner that is understood by the receiver, which means that we need to get past the receiver’s filters and ensure that the individual understood the intended message. To get past those filters, we, as the sender of this message, have a responsibility to understand how our receiver takes in information. Does he communicate in a direct manner? Is she considerate in her messaging? Understanding your receiver’s communication style will help you provide feedback that enables effective dialogue.

Motivation
When you combine productive feedback with effective communication, the foundation for motivation has been established. Motivation is built on encouragement, partnership and compromise without making concessions that damage trust. Working together to ensure that barriers, impediments and unrealistic expectations do not derail the creative impulses of the team brings about team unity. When the Agile PM delegates to team members the authority and responsibility to complete features to which they’ve committed, the Agile PM has created an environment of trust, partnership and self-directedness. By creating this environment, the team can discover their patterns of working,

The soft side of Agile is just as important as the technical side of Agile. Both sets of skills are required and dependent upon each other for success in the Agile environment. Given what you just read, ask yourself, how soft is your Agile team?

_________________________________________

About the Author

Nancy Nee, PMP, CBAP, CSM, Executive Director, Project Management & Business Analysis Programs, ESI International, guides clients in the development and implementation of learning programs customized to their specific needs. Her solutions reflect the insight of almost two decades of PM and BA experience in healthcare, information technology, financial services and energy. www.esi-intl.com  

© 2012 Reprinted with permission from ESI International.

Checklists: A Data Center’s Step Towards Success

- Ken Koty, sales engineer for PDU Cables (http://www.pducables.com/) and former data center facilities manager for Thomsen Reuters, says:

Looking for something to read that is both entertaining and enlightening, how about “The Checklist Manifesto” by Dr. Atul Gawande. 

A book about checklists might not sound too enthralling, but Dr. Gawande manages to introduce enough interesting stories and case history around the use of checklists to hold your attention.  More importantly a tremendous case is made for checklists and the value they bring to those who employ them in various ways, from builders and engineers, to pilots, doctors, and even David Lee Roth while on tour. 

Checklists provide two main benefits, first by recognizing the fallibility of human memory and attention, especially when it comes to mundane, routine tasks that are easily overlooked under the strain of pressure and events.  The second benefit of checklists is reminding us of the minimum steps to perform a task, providing the opportunity for verification while instilling a higher level of discipline in the process.  

Checklists and the Data Center

Uptime in a data center may not always be a life or death proposition, but there is no doubt that there is a cost when systems fail.  No matter how well trained and experienced, there are too many opportunities for people to make mistakes if they have to rely on memory alone.  Using checklists helps to ensure that routine tasks are performed correctly, completely and efficiently. 

Having a checklist helps to eliminate unforeseen surprises and delays when new equipment is ready to be installed. Here is a checklist for installing new power whips.

Checklist for Power Whips Installations

1. Research to find out the total additional load required from the new equipment being installed.

2. Check how additional equipment load will affect the data center utility service, UPS systems and diesel generators existing load.

3. Does the PDU/RPP have enough excess capacity to add new circuits?

4. Are closest PDU/RPP being used to minimize power whip lengths, longer whips cost more money and if excessively long can cause voltage drop.

5. If server is dual corded is there ample capacity in PDU/RPP for a fail over.

6. Check the load of each phase in the PDU/RPP to ensure a proper balance.

7. What effect will new equipment have on existing cooling system?

8. Do the receptacles match the plug on the equipment being installed?

9. Be sure the circuit breaker is the correct amperage for conductors and receptacle on the whip. 

10. Pre-test each new circuit breaker.

11. Check each receptacle for proper voltage, phase-to-phase and phase-to-ground.  

12. If three-phase, check for proper rotation per manufactures specification.

13. Verify that each whip is properly labeled on each end, and that the label information is entered into the PDU/RPP directory.

14. Have perforated tiles installed in the cold isle.

15. Make sure floor grommets are installed and ready for power and communication cables/leads to feed new server cabinet. 

In the data center, checklists help ensure routine tasks are completed on-time and as specified, even if performed by multiple people together or separately.  Consider checklists a step towards date center uptime success.  

DCIM Solution to Control Data Center Sprawl

- Maurice Donegan, director of product management for Emerson Network Power’s Avocent business (www.emersonnetworkpower.com), says:

Virtual sprawl results when different applications are added to handle various business processes, causing the automated solutions –put in place to manage demand in virtual environments – to populate virtual instances in an undisciplined way. Consequences include unbalanced power consumption and resource utilization.  

Emerson Network Power has introduced version 650 of its Aperture™ Suite with advanced software for data center planning, management and performance optimization. Key features respond to customer needs to manage and track virtual sprawl impact on the data center, gain dashboard analysis view on data center efficiency and manage integrated monitoring on data center devices.

While earlier versions of the Aperture Suite helped managers better understand the amount of resource consumption and where it occurs across the data center floor, the new version takes the next step of giving them insight into what is driving that consumption. By integrating with popular virtual management systems (VMware and Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager), now virtual processes can be mapped to their physical hosts to prevent infrastructure overloading and to identify underutilized resources. Armed with this knowledge, the data center manager can advise staff where to shift resources across the data center to more safely provide the infrastructure support they require.

In addition to helping control virtual sprawl, the Aperture Suite now offers high-level dashboards that deliver more actionable data center performance metrics. With the new dashboards, data center personnel can quickly see if efficiency numbers are being met, whether assets are performing correctly, which assets might be aging out and more – and can easily report this information to management.

In short, the latest Aperture Suite release enables data center managers to see more discreetly across the data center, evaluate all options and optimize resources to safely and efficiently to support demand. It also provides a wealth of performance data in a form that can readily be used to support management decisions.

Defining Orchestrated IT

- David Hurwitz, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Serena Software (www.serena.com), says:

There’s a new elephant in the room when it comes to DevOps, Orchestrated IT. Serena defines Orchestrated IT as IT management systems that tie together existing tools into a process-driven human workflow. Orchestrated IT streamlines processes to deliver applications faster, improve IT service performance and lower overall IT costs.

Enterprise IT organizations that are forward-leaning and stocked with an abundance of tools need Orchestrated IT to improve the performance of the end-to-end IT supply chain, without throwing out what is working. Serena has arrived as a strategic advisor to CIOs, first with process orchestration within Dev, and now extending this success to Ops and the IT front office, including the CIO and the CIO’s lieutenants. The positive industry response to Orchestrated IT parallels the strong results our customers are already enjoying.

Maximizing the value of Orchestrated IT often involves deploying new functional tools where none currently exists or upgrading from cumbersome or expensive legacy tools, though this is optional. Orchestrated IT spans Dev and Ops, offering particular benefit to the burgeoning DevOps function. Serena’s vision and solutions now also extend into IT front office functions such as service catalog, demand management and IT management dashboarding.

Yesterday, Serena proudly premiered Doug Serena, CIO, a realistic web-video miniseries that follows a savvy CIO as he reaps the benefits of Orchestrated IT to deliver massive economic advantage to his company. The first webisode of Doug Serena, CIO can be viewed at Serena.com/DougSerenaCIO, with all new webisodes to follow weekly through March and into April. Viewers can also follow Doug’s tweets at @DougSerenaCIO.

Additions to Serena’s Orchestrated IT solution set include Serena Demand Manager, Serena Requirements Manager and the Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard. Major new releases of Serena Service Manager, Serena Release Manager, Serena Request Center, Serena Development Manager and the Serena Business Manager platform further strengthen Serena’s solution set.

The new Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard brings actionable intelligence to the head of Dev, the head of Ops and to their boss, the CIO. The Orchestrated IT Dashboard provides almost two dozen pre-defined metrics like cycle times, queue sizes, wait times and SLA performance. Super simple configuration makes it easy to draw even more metrics from Serena and non-Serena IT management tools, focusing on Key Performance Indicators and traceability metrics.

The new Serena Demand Manager provides a breakthrough facility for deftly prioritizing all IT work, presenting alternative portfolio scenarios and optimizing resources to fulfill any type of IT demand. Serena Demand Manager’s pragmatic and highly intuitive interface represents fresh innovation in a stale IT governance market that has been hijacked by heavyweight PPM systems.

Serena Demand Manager offers:

• An orchestrated approval process to dramatically streamline prioritization, scoring and resource estimation of all IT requests;
• Executive views to help assess the real effort and costs for all demand, as well as determine the optimal portfolio of IT projects;
• Automated time capture to help increase IT productivity and improve the accuracy of IT costs.

Recently awarded Pink Elephant’s IT Service Management (ITSM) Innovation of the year award, Serena Service Manager is the only ITSM offering on the market today that leverages a process-based approach to tackling the current challenges around flexibility, visibility and usability inherent in legacy ITSM solutions. The new Serena Service Manager 3, packs innovative features that further strengthen DevOps, foster greater collaboration around issue resolution and aid service level management.

Serena Service Manager 3 offers:

• Integrated ITSM and Release Management resulting in fewer failed changes;
• Service Level Agreements tracking to help identify at-risk targets and speed corrective action;
• Innovative application version comparison to enable fail-proof ITSM upgrades.

Serena Requirements Manager debuts as an integrated suite and provides enterprise IT organizations comprehensive capabilities to define and manage requirements, from initial prototype to production release, reducing rework, accelerating development and ensuring complete requirements traceability.

Serena Requirements Manager offers:

• Out-of-the-box dashboard metrics and best-practice KPIs for higher quality requirements;
• Requirements collaboration capabilities for business stakeholders, enabling accelerated review cycles;
• Orchestrated processes for prototype and requirements specification reviews to ensure continuous alignment between IT and the business.

The “industry first solution” for application release management, Serena Release Manager 2.0 strikes another industry first with its orchestration with Serena Service Manager. Being the only release management offering on the market today that leverages a process-based approach, it also is unique in providing one window to automate and control the release processes and deployments for mainframe and distributed platforms. The new Serena Release Manager solution is the bridge between Dev and Ops and leverages integrations with Serena Service Manager to achieve true DevOps collaboration.

Serena Release Manager 2 offers:

• Release Calendar shared with Serena Service Manager for scheduling operational and development changes into a common calendar and improving synergies between Dev and Ops;
• Integration with Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard to present release management KPIs and provide efficient reporting;
• Improved release environment visibility arming Dev and Ops with the ability to track and manage release packages at the environment level.

Serena Orchestrated IT Dashboard, Serena Service Manager 3 and Serena Release Manager 2 are available now. Serena Demand Manager and Serena Requirements Manager will be available in Spring 2012. Pricing for Serena's Orchestrated IT solutions starts at $12,500 for 250 users.

About David Hurwitz, SVP of Worldwide Marketing at Serena
David Hurwitz leads Serena's marketing initiatives, including product marketing, communications, campaigns, sales readiness and field marketing. Mr. Hurwitz has a quarter century of experience in the enterprise software industry, the last decade of which as a marketing leader.

Prior to Serena, Mr. Hurwitz served as Vice President of Corporate Messaging and Solutions Marketing at CA, Inc. He joined CA via its 2005 acquisition of Niku Corporation, where he was Chief Marketing Officer. Under his marketing leadership, Niku's Clarity product became the leading enterprise-class PPM system in IT shops and product development organizations around the world. Earlier Mr. Hurwitz founded and ran Product Lifecycle Management pioneer ConsenSys Software Corporation. He began his software career by creating several MANMAN products as an engineer at legendary Silicon Valley company ASK Computer Systems.

Mr. Hurwitz holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Data Center Efficiency: It’s Time We Noticed The Elephant In The Room

- Liam Newcombe, CTO of Romonet (www.romonet.com), says:

At the moment, regulators across the world are struggling to find ways to measure how energy efficient a data center is by measuring how the ‘useful work’ it delivers compares with the energy consumed. The idea being that data centers can then be given a ‘score’ which says how energy efficient they are – or are not – and the regulators can then influence the market.

Whilst I agree that data centers need to become more energy efficient, I think that in the quest to find one, all-encompassing energy efficiency metric, we’re being side tracked from the main issue and ignoring the big opportunity. For me, the elephant in the room is that data center environments have traditionally been designed, developed and managed as if their workload is static – and that is what we should be concentrating on first before we start imposing a metric.

To explain this, let’s draw a comparison between how a desktop PC or laptop uses power and how a data center uses energy. In recent years, chip vendors have worked hard to make laptops and PCs smarter in the way they use power – laptops and tablets in particular need a long battery life otherwise they won’t sell. This means that if you’re doing something quite complex on your PC – like editing a video or watching a movie – the PC draws more power than if you’re just browsing the web or working on a word document – and in standby mode, a PC hardly uses any power at all. Unfortunately, data centers don’t work like this.

Let’s say we have a corporate data center which hosts a customer contact platform with a web presence and a few thousand call center operators. On a Monday morning, it might be handling 50,000 calls and 100,000 web users every hour. It might be using a lot of power – but it’s doing a lot of work. However, if we return and measure energy consumption at 4am on a Sunday when there are no phone customers and only a few web users – it will be drawing almost the same amount of power.

To use an analogy, if a data center was a car we would not be able to turn the engine off and it would use almost the same amount of fuel idling on your driveway as if it were carrying five people, speeding along the motorway at 70 MPH. To continue the analogy, if you were concerned about your car’s fuel consumption – which you really should be – you’d probably ask why you couldn’t turn the engine off and why your car needed all that fuel when it was stationary. You wouldn’t ask the garage to tweak the engine to make it run more efficiently at 70 MPH – but this is the equivalent approach our regulators are taking in searching for a metric to measure how efficiently data centers run at maximum load.

For me, it is less important how efficiently a data center operates when working hard on a Monday morning. I am far more concerned that we understand how inefficient it is when it’s doing nothing – and that we then minimize this inefficiency. However, to date, the data center industry has a poor record of coming together to address this challenge.

Whilst some companies have recognized this issue and started making more energy efficient servers, much of the equipment in a data center still draws close to full power all of the time. There’s no one single piece of equipment that’s going to solve this issue and no one vendor or department that is solely responsible – there’s no magic bullet. To address this issue we need a paradigm shift in the way that we as an industry think about the design and deployment of data centers. From the mechanical engineering to writing our software, we need to ask: “how much power, data center capacity and cost will this waste to do nothing?” And as we ensure every device is tuned to manage its energy consumption at a lower load, we’re also going to see data centers becoming cheaper to run and more efficient at full load.

But to spur the industry into action, we need to create an informed market. We need to make the issue of waste energy and cost clear to the business. Every finance chief needs to know how much energy each data center service is using when it’s working at full capacity as opposed to when it’s idling for them to be able to make a decision which service is worth the cost – and which isn’t. Only then can they make an informed choice about which data center services they are happy to spend the money on, which ones they might want to spend less on and which can be turned off altogether. And it’s only when this happens that the market will start to change.