This week, July 26-30, 2010, I am in Washington DC for the annual [2010 System Storage Technical University]. As with last year, we have joined forces with the System x team. Since we are in Washington DC this time, IBM added a "Federal Track" to focus on government challenges and solutions. So, basically, offering attendees the option to attend three conferences for one low price.

This conference was previously called the "Symposium", but IBM changed the name to "Technical University" to emphasize the technical nature of the conference. No marketing puffery like "Journey to the Private Cloud" here! Instead, this is bona fide technical training, qualifying attendees to count this towards their Continuing Professional Education (CPE).

(Note to my readers:The blogosphere is like a playground. In the center are four-year-olds throwing sand into each other's faces, while mature adults sit on benches watching the action, and only jumping in as needed. For example, fellow blogger Chuck Hollis (EMC) got sand in his face for promising to resign if EMC ever offered a tacky storage guarantee, and then [failed to follow through on his promise] when it happened.

Several of my readers asked me to respond to another EMC blogger's latest [fistful of sand]. A few months ago, fellow blogger Barry Burke (EMC) committed to [stick to facts] in posts on his Storage Anarchist blog. That didn't last long! BarryB apparently has fallen in line with EMC's over-promise-then-under-deliver approach. Unfortunately, I will be busy covering the conference and IBM's robust portfolio of offerings, so won't have time to address BarryB's stinking pile of rumor and hearsay until next week or later. I am sorry to disappoint.)

This conference is designed to help IT professionals make their business and IT infrastructure more dynamic and, in the process, help reduce costs, mitigate risks, and improve service. This technical conference event is geared to IT and Business Managers, Data Center Managers, Project Managers, System Programmers, Server and Storage Administrators, Database Administrators, Business Continuity and Capacity Planners, IBM Business Partners and other IT Professionals. This week will offer over 300 different sessions and hands-on labs, certification exams, and a Solutions Center.

For those who want a quick stroll through memory lane, here are my posts from past events:

• 2007 Storage Symposium: [Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5]
• 2009 Storage Symposium: [ Day 1-Keynote, Day 2-Breakout, Day 2-Server Virtualization, Day 3-Extraordinary Networks, Day 3-XIV, Day 4-SVC, Day 4-Linux, Day 5-Meet the Experts]

In keeping up with IBM's leadership in Social Media, IBM Systems Lab Services and Training team running this event have their own [Facebook Fan Page] and [blog]. IBM Technical University has a Twitter account [@ibmtechconfs], and hashtag #ibmtechu. You can also follow me on Twitter [@az990tony].

technorati tags: IBM, Technical University, Federal, System Storage, System x, Washington DC, CPE, EMC, Facebook, Twitter

Tags:  #ibmtechu ibm system+storage washington+dc twitter cpe #storage emc facebook system+x federal technical+university #ibmstorage

Continuing my coverage of the Data Center 2010 conference, Monday I attended four keynote sessions.

Opening Remarks

The first keynote speaker started out with an [English proverb]: Turbulent waters make for skillful mariners. He covered the state of the global economy and how CIOs should address the challenge. We are on the flat end of an "L-shaped" recovery in the United States. GDP growth is expected to be only 4.7 percent Latin America, 2.3 percent in North America, 1.5 percent Europe. Top growth areas include 8.0 percent India and 8.6 percent China, with an average of 4.7 growth for the entire Asia Pacific region.

On the technical side, the top technologies that CIOs are pursuing for 2011 are Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Mobility, and Business Intelligence/Analytics. He asked the audience if the "Stack Wars" for integrated systems are hurting or helping innovation in these areas.

Move over "conflict diamonds", companies now need to worry about [conflict minerals].

He proposed an alternative approach called Fabric-Based Infrastructure. In this new model, a shared pool of servers is connected to a shared pool of storage over an any-to-any network. In this approach, IT staff spend all of their time just stocking up the vending machine, allowing end-users to get the resources they need.

Crucial Trends You Need to Watch

The second speaker covered ten trends to watch, but these were not limited to just technology trends.

1. Virtualization is just beginning - even though IBM has had server virtualization since 1967 and storage virtualization since 1974, the speaker felt that adoption of virtualization is still in its infancy. Ten years ago, average CPU utilization for x86 servers of was only 5-7 percent. Thanks to server virtualization like VMware and Hyper-V, companies have increased this to 25 percent, but many projects to virtualized have stalled.
2. Big Data is the elephant in the room - storage growth is expected to grow 800 percent over the next 5 years.
3. Green IT - Datacenters consume 40 to 100 times more energy than the offices they support. Six months ago, Energy Star had announced [standards for datacenters] and energy efficiency initiatives.
4. Unified Communications - Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies, collaboration with email and instant messages, and focus on Mobile smartphones and other devices combines many overlapping areas of communication.
5. Staff retention and retraining - According to US Labor statistics, the average worker will have 10 to 14 different jobs by the time they reach 38 years of age. People need to broaden their scope and not be so vertically focused on specific areas.
6. Social Networks and Web 2.0 - the keynote speaker feels this is happening, and companies that try to restrict usage at work are fighting an uphill battle. Better to get ready for it and adopt appropriate policies.
7. Legacy Migrations - companies are stuck on old technology like Microsoft Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6, and older levels of Office applications. Time is running out, but migration to later releases or alternatives like Red Hat Linux with Firefox browser are not trivial tasks.
8. Compute Density - Moore's Law that says compute capability will double every 18 months is still going strong. We are now getting more cores per socket, forcing applications to re-write for parallel processing, or use virtualization technologies.
9. Cloud Computing - every session this week will mention Cloud Computing.
10. Converged Fabrics - some new approaches are taking shape for datacenter design. Fabric-based infrastructure would benefit from converging SAN and LAN fabrics to allow pools of servers to communicate freely to pools of storage.

He sprinkled fun factoids about our world to keep things entertaining.

• 50 percent of today's 21-year-olds have produced content for the web. 70 percent of four-year-olds have used a computer. The average teenager writes 2,282 text messages on their cell phone per month.
• This year, Google averaged 31 billion searches per month, compared 2.6 billion searches per month in 2007.
• More video has been uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than the three major US networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) have aired since 1948.
• Wikipedia averages 4300 new articles per day, and now has over 13 million articles.
• This year, Facebook reached 500 million users. If it were a country, it would be ranked third. Twitter would be ranked 7th, with 69% of their growth being from people 32-50 years old.
• In 1997, a GB of flash memory cost nearly $8000 to manufacture, today it is only $1.25 instead.
• The computer in today's cell phone is million times cheaper, and thousand times more powerful, than a single computer installed at MIT back in 1965. In 25 years, the compute capacity of today's cell phones could fit inside a blood cell. See [interview of Ray Kurzweil] on the Singularity for more details.

The Virtualization Scenario: 2010 to 2015

The third keynote covered virtualization. While server virtualization has helped reduce server costs, as well as power and cooling energy consumption, it has had a negative effect on other areas. Companies that have adopted server virtualization have discovered increased costs for storage, software and test/development efforts.

The result is a gap between expectations and reality. Many virtualization projects have stalled because there is a lack of long-term planning. The analysts recommend deploying virtualization in stages, tackle the first third, so called "low hanging fruit", then proceed with the next third, and then wait and evaluate results before completing the last third, most difficult applications.

Virtualization of storage and desktop clients are completely different projects than server virtualization and should be handled accordingly.

Cloud Computing: Riding the Storm Out

The fourth keynote focus on the pros and cons of Cloud Computing. First they start by defining the five key attributes of Cloud: self-service, scalable elasticity, shared pool of resources, metered and paid per use, over open standard networking technologies.

In addition to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS classifications, the keynote speaker mentioned a fourth one: Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), such as processing Payroll or printing invoices.

While the debate rages over the benefits between private and public cloud approaches, the keynote speaker brings up the opportunites for hybrid and community clouds. In fact, he felt there is a business model for a "cloud broker" that acts as the go-between companies and cloud service providers.

A poll of the audience found the top concerns inhibiting cloud adoption were security, privacy, regulatory compliance and immaturity. Some 66 percent indicated they plan to spend more on private cloud in 2011, and 20 percent plan to spend more on public cloud options. He suggested six focus areas:

• Test and Development
• Prototyping / Proof-of-Concept efforts
• Web Application serving
• SaaS like email and business analytics
• Department-level applications
• Select workloads that lend themselves to parallelization

The session wrapped up with some stunning results reported by companies. Server provisioning accomplished in 3-5 minutes instead of 7-12 weeks. Reduced cost of email by 70 percent. Four-hour batch jobs now completed in 20 minutes. 50 percent increase in compute capacity with flat IT budget. With these kind of results, the speaker suggests that CIOs should at least start experimenting with cloud technologies and start to profile their workloads and IT services to develop a strategy.

That was just Monday morning, this is going to be an interesting week!

technorati tags: IBM, GDP, Cloud Computing, virtualization, mobility, BI, CIO, Big Data, Green IT, Google, Twitter, Facebook, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS

Tags:  big+data ibm mobility paas bpaas green+it facebook bi google virtualization saas iaas gdp twitter cloud+computing cio

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Tuesday afternoon we had a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session to discuss social media. I was the moderator. We had two independent bloggers on the panel: [Jon Toigo] and [Steve Foskett]. We had several IBM social media experts, including Jack Arnold, Scott Drummond, Mary Hall, Nick Harris, and Rich Swain. Also joining us was Alex Hollingworth, social media expert from Emulex.

At the opening session, Deon Newman suggest we re-tweet him, isn't that plagiarism? What is your take on this?

The important thing is to give credit where it is due. Avoid screen scraping others and passing it off as your own. When you re-tweet someone, you give them credit for their original tweet. You are basically saying, "I could not have said it better myself!" With blogs, you can do the same by linking to other blog posts.

I am active in social media, but am having trouble getting the older colleagues in the IT department to participate. I want them to write down all the knowledge in their heads.

The best way to get employees to do anything new or different is to show them how it benefits them. For example, if the elders are tired of answering the same questions over and over, have them start an internal wiki, blog or knowledgebase to capture the answers to frequent questions. This will save them time, so they can see value for themselves. I suggest looking at IBM Lotus Connections which provides collaboration tools inside your firewall, accessible only to internal employees of the company.

How do we differentiate facts from opinions in our social media writings?

You can always be explicit, for example IMHO stands for "In my humble opinion". I find that blogs are 99 percent opinion, and 1 percent fact, so it is easier to point out the facts linking or citing sources, and let the rest of your writing be considered opinion.

I would like to find people on Linkedin to establish business relationships with the storage administrators, decision makers and influencers within the companies I want to sell to, how do I best do that?

Nobody likes cold calls. If you upgrade to a "Pro" account on LinkedIn, you can send 15 to 25 "Inmail" emails through their system to introduce yourself. Otherwise, consider finding someone in your network that knows them, and arrange for them to provide the mutual introduction for you.

How do I find people to follow related to the topics I am interested in, like storage?

There are tools like [Tweetadder] to help you find people to follow. Or, just search on certain hashtags, and add people you find that use them.

I am concerned about privacy? What can I do to protect my privacy?

Decide up front which topics are off-limits in your blog or other social media. For services like Facebook, check your privacy settings every 30 days. Several people have opted to create a special "Facebook Page" that represents their professional brand, so that the rest of Facebook can be used for friends and family.

I want to start a new blog, which service should I use?

Services like Blogger, Blogspt and TypePad are generally easy to set up. Wordpress is more advanced, but can be more complicated to set up.

I don't care for writing a blog, how can I set up a video blog, or vlog?

Consider creating a channel on YouTube. Another popular site is Vimeo. A "Pro" account of Vimeo provides added features.

I am new to Twitter, what tools should I look into?

I suggest you look at HootSuite. This lets you post to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can schedule when a tweet will be posted, so you can right them in advance and schedule them for a certain date and time. Also, if you have a blog, you can have Hootsuite send out tweets automatically with the titles and link to each blog post.

How much effort should we put in to Social Media?

As much or as little as you want. Don't force yourself to spend more time than you want. Typically, people spend 1-2 hours per day. Cut down how much you spend watching television to make up the difference. Set up "Google Alerts" that can send you emails when certain phrases appear anywhere. There are also social bookmarking tools like Instapaper, Delicious or Diigo that can save bookmarks in the cloud for things that you want to read, but don't have time to read now.

Which social media would be the best to get chicks.

Writing a technical blog with good quality content. Girls want to be with you. Guys want to be you.

How can I use social media to provide feedback about specific products?

IBM now has a [Reviews and Ratings] for its IBM System Storage products. Consider writing a review today!

Thanks to all of the panel for their help with this!

technorati tags: IBM, IBMedge, BOF, Social Media, Twitter, Linked, Facebook

Tags:  facebook social+media bof linked twitter ibmedge ibm

This week I am at the Data Center Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. There are some 1700 people registered this year for this conferece, representing a variety of industries like Public sector, Services, Finance, Healthcare and Manufacturing. A survey of the attendees found:

• 55 percent are at this conference for the first time.
• 18 percent once before, like me
• 15 percent two or three times before
• 12 percent four or more times before

Plans for 2010 IT budgets were split evenly, one third planning to spend more, one third planning to spend about the same, and the final third looking to cut their IT budgets even further than in 2009. The biggest challenges were Power/Cooling/Floorspace issues, aligning IT with Business goals, and modernizing applications. The top three areas of IT spend will be for Data Center facilities, modernizing infrastructure, and storage.

There are six keynote sessions scheduled, and 66 breakout sessions for the week. A "Hot Topic" was added on "Why the marketplace prefers one-stop shopping" which plays to the strengths of IT supermarkets like IBM, encourages HP to acquire EDS and 3Com, and forces specialty shops like Cisco and EMC to form alliances.

Day 2 began with a series of keynote sessions. Normally when I see "IO" or "I/O", I immediately think of input/output, but here "I&O" refers to Infrastructure and Operations.

Business Sensitivity Analysis leads to better I&O Solutions

The analyst gave examples from Alan Greenspan's biography to emphasize his point that what this financial meltdown has caused is a decline in trust. Nobody trusts anyone else. This is true between people, companies, and entire countries. While the GDP declined 2 percent in 2009 worldwide, it is expected to grow 2 percent in 2010, with some emerging markets expected to grow faster, such as India (7 percent) and China (10 percent). Industries like Healthcare, Utilities and Public sector are expected to lead the IT spend by 2011.

While IT spend is expected to grow only 1 to 5 percent in 2010, there is a significant shift from Capital Expenditures (CapEx) to Operational Expenses (OpEx). Five years ago, OpEx used to represent only 64 percent of IT budget in 2004, but today represents 76 percent and growing. Many companies are keeping their aging IT hardware longer in service, beyond traditional depreciation schedules. The analyst estimated over 1 million servers were kept longer than planned in 2009, and another 2 million will be kept longer in 2010.

An example of hardware kept too long was the November 17 delay of 2000 some flights in the United States, caused by a failed router card in Utah that was part of the air traffic control system. Modernizing this system is estimated to cost $40 billion US dollars.

Top 10 priorities for the CIO were Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Business Intelligence (BI), Networking, Web 2.0, ERP applications, Security, Data Management, Mobile, and Collaboration. There is a growth in context-aware computing, connecting operational technologies with sensors and monitors to feed back into IT, with an opportunity for pattern-based strategy. Borrowing a concept from the military, "OpTempo" allows a CIO to speed up or slow down various projects as needed. By seeking out patterns, developing models to understand those patterns, and then adapting the business to fit those patterns, a strategy can be developed to address new opportunities.

Infrastructure and Operations: Charting the course for the coming decade

This analyst felt that strategies should not just be focused looking forward, but also look left and right, what IBM calls "adjacent spaces". He covered a variety of hot topics:

• 65 percent of energy running x86 servers is doing nothing. The average x86 running only 7 to 12 percent CPU utilization.
• Virtualization of servers, networks and storage are transforming IT to become on big logical system image, which plays well with Green IT initiatives. He joked that this is what IBM offered 20 years ago with Mainframe "Single System Image" sysplexes, and that we have come around full circle.
• One area of virtualization are desktop images (VDI). This goes back to the benefits of green-screen 3270 terminals of the mainframe era, eliminating the headaches of managing thousands of PCs, and instead having thin clients rely heavily on centralized services.
• The deluge in data continues, as more convenient access drives demand for more data. The anlyst estimates storage capacity will increase 650 percent over the next five years, with over 80 percent of this unstructured data. Automated storage tiering, ala Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM) from the mainframe era, is once again popular, along with new technologies like thin provisioning and data deduplication.
• IT is also being asked to do complex resource tracking, such as power consumption. In the past IT and Facilities were separate budgets, but that is beginning to change.
• The fastest growing social nework was Twitter, with 1382 percent growth in 2009, of which 69 percent of new users that joined this year were 39 to 51 years old. By comparison, Facebook only grew by 249 percent. Social media is a big factor both inside and outside a company, and management should be aware of what Tweets, Blogs, and others in the collective are saying about you and your company.
• The average 18 to 25 year old sends out 4000 text messages per month. In 24 hours, more text messages are sent out than people on the planet (6.7 billion). Unified Communications is also getting attention. This is the idea that all forms of communication, from email to texts to voice over IP (VoIP), can be managed centrally.
• Smart phones and other mobile devices are changing the way people view laptops. Many business tasks can be handled by these smaller devices.
• It costs more in energy to run an x86 server for three years than it costs to buy it. The idea of blade servers and componentization can help address that.
• Mashups and Portals are an unrecognized opportunity. An example of a Mashup is mapping a list of real estate listings to Google Maps so that you can see all the listings arranged geographically.
• Lastly, Cloud Computing will change the way people deliver IT services. Amusingly, the conference was playing "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell, which has the [lyrics about clouds]

Unlike other conferences that clump all the keynotes at the beginning, this one spreads the "Keynote" sessions out across several days, so I will cover the rest over separate posts.

technorati tags: lsc28, operations, gdc09, infrastructure, cloud+computing, twitter, facebook

Tags:  infrastructure lsc28 gdc09 operations cloud+computing facebook twitter