Blog Posts From The Data Stack Tagged With business_continuity

At TDWI: Finding a middle way between Hadoop and relational data warehousing

tim.allen@intel.com — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:23:37 GMT

If you’re thinking big data analytics will solve all your BI challenges, you may be looking at it wrong…

I realized this when I was in Chicago the first week of May, attending The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) conference, where the theme was “Preparing for the Practical Realities of Big Data.”

There are high expectations around big data at the moment. Many people in marketing, product development, and analytics teams can’t wait to get their hands on big data intelligence to better understand and target audiences.

However, TDWI isn’t their show. At TDWI, the focus instead is on traditional database administrators, data analysts, and data scientists, and it’s a very technical conference firmly based on OLAP and OLTP analytics and hands-on issues of data warehousing.

With this in mind, I attended the keynote address by Ken Rudin, director of Analytics at Facebook—a leader in cool, cutting-edge big data processing and analysis addressing a conference of (what some would consider) old-school DBAs. The message from Rudin, who has held senior leadership positions at Zynga, Salesforce.com, and Oracle, was fascinating: Don’t get caught in the tyranny of either/or when it comes to data analysis—businesses need both traditional relational database processing and Hadoop*-based big data analysis.

@krudin said that Facebook started out relying almost solely on Hadoop and big data when the social media giant first launched, but now is increasingly incorporating OLAP and OLTP processes into its analytics. Hadoop is best at exploring huge data sets—putting all the data into one system to discover patterns. Traditional relational data analytics is best at business, looking at focused data to derive metrics and more actionable, granular analysis. Both are valuable technologies: which one is best depends on what kind of impact you are looking for.

So the question is not, how do you get from old-school to cutting edge as soon as possible. Rather, ask which technology is right to generate impact out of data.

This was a conclusion that appealed to many at TDWI, as several people I spoke to registered a bit of skepticism about the value of Hadoop as an engine for analytics. For them, the main attraction of Hadoop is its potential to act as a backend data storage mechanism, where unstructured data can be warehoused.

Then the question becomes: What’s the best way to integrate data stored in Hadoop into a traditional OLAP or OLTP infrastructure for processing? The answer is just around the corner.

At the SAP booth, I presented a discussion of the newly released joint solution from SAP and Intel that has optimized Intel^® Distribution of Apache Hadoop* software for the SAP HANA* in-memory database. Using SAP Smart Data Access* (watch for availability in coming weeks), this big data solution is able to leverage all types of data for processing in analytical applications.

And since it’s built on Intel^® architecture, and leverages the full power of Intel^® Xeon^® E7 processors, HANA has hardware-enhanced performance and security built in, with solid-state drives and cache acceleration for blazing speed and stability. Watch this interview from TDWI to learn more about SAP HANA and how the database helps address big data challenges.

If you’re looking for the technology to get the most impact out of analytics, look no further.

Follow Tim and Twitter @TimIntel and the SAP analytics team at @SAPAnalytics.

Additionally, @TDWI has some very interesting DW feeds.

SAP and Intel Showcase Big Data Solutions at Sapphire 2013

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:22:08 GMT

Intel and SAP have worked closely together for years. But, our co-engineering has reached a new level of integration with the recent launch of our Big Data solution based on the SAP HANA^® platform and Intel^® Distribution for Apache™ Hadoop^® software. The joint solution will be demo’d at SAP Sapphire 2013, SAP’s flagship conference in Orlando, held May 14 – 16.

Stop by the Intel booth #3215 and experience our Big Data solution.

The Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop running on SAP HANA represents more than a typical collaboration. It’s a great example of how co-engineering can result in a “more-than-the-sum-of-its parts” success that changes the game by vastly improving the speed and resilience of Big Data analytics.

HANA is SAP’s blindingly fast database platform that consolidates transactional and analytical workloads into a single, in-memory process. Combining OLAP and OLTP structures into a unified landscape eliminates traditional relational limitations that have restricted the development of real-time business applications, and in particular Big Data analytics.

Apache Hadoop is the industry’s open source standard for managing Big Data, but to ensure that Hadoop’s data-intensive workflows can provide real-time analytics on an enterprise scale requires a comprehensive computing platform with muscle and intelligence.

The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop is specifically optimized for the advanced features of SAP HANA and the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family. Intel’s version of Hadoop can leverage SAP HANA in-memory technologies to accelerate data analytics and also tap into extra performance and scalability that the Intel processor E7 family is optimized for. In turn, SAP HANA’s in-memory processes help eliminate the latencies found in Hadoop’s underlying file system to enable on-demand data analysis.

Through joint-engineering, SAP and Intel have delivered a breakthrough Big Data solution that can store and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in real time. The underlying platform has the performance to scale to continued exponential data growth and deliver rapid-fire insights to help boost business productivity and profits.

For more information go to: http://hadoop.intel.com/resources

How can enterprise IT keep up with the lines of business?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:18:37 GMT

We have tackled this fundamental question in The New CIO Agenda, a brochure aimed at helping you advance your cloud innovation strategies. Whether your business needs to transform the supply chain or go deeper into social media, cloud services are likely to be part of the solution. If you want to run as fast as the lines of business, capture opportunities from trends like big data and consumerization, or just keep the lights on as efficiently as possible, you need to transform your IT shop into an engine for service delivery.

The brochure, The New CIO Agenda tackles this challenge head-on by talking to some of the industry thought leaders. You will find insights from Intel’s CIO and other visionaries who are driving Intel’s cloud and technology strategies along with examples of companies that are leading their own cloud journeys.

Becoming an engine for service delivery doesn’t mean you need to do it all yourself—or that you immediately outsource everything to publicly hosted services. You start by building a plan which includes understanding the required services to run the business but also by looking for the services that are missing, but valued by the lines of business.

An essential step is to start by modernizing and standardizing your internal infrastructure, if you haven’t done so already. Chances are you’re well on your way to consolidating and virtualizing your server infrastructure—a key starting point for cloud computing. The next step in terms of infrastructure is to modernize and virtualize your storage architecture, migrating traditional scale-up storage platforms onto intelligent, distributed scale-out storage platforms. You’ll also want to unify your networks on 10/100 Gigabit Ethernet, and re-examine every layer of your security architecture. With these actions, you’re building a more secure, scalable foundation for cloud services and freeing up funds that can be used for innovative services.

In parallel, start developing a cloud services roadmap that spells out what services you’ll deploy and how. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to keep core competencies and sources of competitive advantage on secure private clouds, so you can innovate quickly in areas that are critical to the business. This approach also retains critical expertise in-house. On the flip side, commodity functions are good candidates for externally hosted SaaS solutions.

Whether you’re hosting services internally or externally, you’ll need to clearly define each service, translating business goals into specific requirements and mapping service-level agreements back to the business owners. Pay close attention to requirements around performance, monitoring, auditing, and compliance, and identify ways of measuring them.

With each new service, you build your ability to rapidly deploy additional services, expand existing services, adjust on the fly—and create strategic value. Because one thing we know as IT professionals: The lines of business will continue to surprise us.

For more about building your cloud innovation strategies, watch a video about The New CIO Agenda and download the brochure.
Download technical presentations from the April 2013 Intel Developers Forum, including my presentation for Session CLDS007.
Follow Intel CIO Kim S. Stevenson on Twitter.

Fullerton India Saves Up to 45 Percent on Operations Costs with a Faster, More Efficient Platform

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:29:58 GMT

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Fullerton India needed to meet the high demand for loan processing uptime and availability and cut the cost of operations and platform maintenance. It decided to migrate from a RISC-based platform to Intel® architecture powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7545. Higher storage capacity per server helped cut operations and hardware maintenance costs. Plus, the added processing power boosted the loan processing time, creating a competitive advantage by reducing the loan application time for customers. The new platform also delivers advanced reliability, availability and serviceability to support mission-critical applications like loan processing.

“Moving from RISC-based architecture to the Intel Xeon processor-based platform provided savings of up to 45 percent on operation costs, while offering easy availability of skill sets around the Intel platform," said Samir Khare, general manager and head of IT business solutions for Fullerton India. "The support environment and knowledge base available enhance the overall usage experience of the Intel platform and allow for easy maintainability.”

To learn more, download our new Fullerton India business success story. You can find more like this one on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

Data centers: What does it take to heat things up?

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:00:25 GMT

This post originally appeared in GreenBiz on December 26, 2012

Follow IntelDCM on Twitter

Keeping things cool has long been a mantra for data center operators, but new research suggests it may not be essential for everyone.

Data centers have historically operated at temperatures ranging between 64° and 68° Fahrenheit (or 17° to 20° Celsius), prompting them to spend approximately 44 percent of their total power budgets on cooling.

Originally, the varied mix of equipment and associated warranties dictated these relativelycool temperatures, and service level agreements (SLAs) often included explicit language about how much deviation was acceptable.

But while it's true temperature control can affect equipment reliability and appropriatemanagement and monitoring is needed for business continuity, new research supports the idea that higher temperatures are beneficial for most data centers.

So, how do you know when to raise the temperature, and by how much? Are there any changes recommended to reduce business risks?

Should every data center cut back on cooling?

When we ask, many data center managers can’t tell us why they set the thermostat at a particular temperature. It’s just the way it has been done for years.

But when well-known companies -- including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Korea Telecom andothers -- publicize their high temperature ambient (HTA) successes at 80°F and above, we all pay attention. And when research and on-the-ground examples support the efficacy of HTA data centers, suddenly we are all tempted to reduce our cooling costs by just pushing up the thermostat.

Before arbitrarily cutting back on cooling and letting the ambient temperature rise, however, as a data center manager, you’ll want to review your equipment warranties, SLAs and compliance requirements. For those responsible for data centers supporting legacy systems that require lower operating temperatures, or for those whose organizations are subject to extremely stringent compliance requirements, you’ll want to continue to take a very conservative approach.

HTA Best Practices

That said, today’s major vendors of data center equipment generally design and warrant systems and products for reliable operation at 40°C or 100°F. It makes economical sense to take advantage of the latest product specifications and warranties. This means considering simple as well as more involved changes:

Thermostat-only changes. Data centers potentially reduce cooling costs by 4 percent for every 1°C increase in operating temperature. (Cooling accounts for up to 44 percent of the power consumed in an un-optimized data center, which is the typical design being implemented in emerging economies.)
Retrofitting the data center. Besides raising ambient temperature, hot and cold air aisle separation drives up the savings, and replacing chillers with economizers (heat exchangers) can yield dramatic savings. In one of Intel’s data centers (with 900 production servers), retrofitting and raising the temperature to 33°C or 91.4°F has translated to a 67 percent annual power savings ($2.87 million in a 10MW data center).
Optimized data centers. Hot aisle containment, energy-efficient servers and a node-level power management solution capable of dynamic resource management (e.g., power capping servers, racks and rows; adjusting server performance and fan speeds) have been shown to dramatically drive up energy efficiency and support operation at the highest temperatures without increasing risk to the business. Real-world results show power utilization efficiencies can be increased so that IT power utilization improves from 50 percent to 81 percent of the total.

All things -- and temperatures -- in moderation

Your data center can take some steps to reap the cost benefits of HTA operation. Start with a plan to phase out, relocate or outsource any legacy system that is keeping your data center at the lower, more expensive operating temperatures. As soon as possible, bump up the temperature by one degree or two, to get on a path toward HTA.

However far along you are, an energy management solution may improve your visibility into energy use and thermal patterns within your data center. Among the foundations necessary for achieving power efficiency through HTA practices are real-time visibility and the abilities to log power and temperature data, and to analyze usage trends based on the logged data.

These same capabilities can also enable other energy management practices such as lowering carbon emissions, thus allowing you to expand a data center without exceeding power limits, and efficiently balancing services and workloads to avoid power spikes.

The cost and power savings achievable by adopting HTA as a model may well represent the new norm. The timing is perfect: Data centers currently consume 1.5 percent of all of the world’s power. Annual server energy costs exceed $27 billion. By 2014, these numbers are expected to double. Bumping up your data center’s ambient temperature directly reduces cooling costs and power consumption, and simultaneously reduces CO₂ emissions.

HTA makes business sense, and it makes sense for our planet. Get ready for the data center world to heat up!

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

China TravelSky and ICBC Credit Suisse Get Mission-Critical Performance and Cut Costs

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:39:30 GMT

The top-of-the-line Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family delivers record-breaking performance and scalability for mission-critical challenges. Here's how two companies are putting it to work:

China TravelSky Holding Company Optimizes Data Center, Boosts Aviation Tourism Business: China TravelSky needed more servers in each rack to improve data center utilization and ensure system stability and top performance. It also wanted to expand the power capacity of its servers for better energy efficiency. The solution was migrating from its RISC-based platform to Intel Xeon processor E7 family-based servers, which have helped it save up to 15 percent in power consumption, accommodate more servers to meet growing business demands, and improve data center utilization.
Private Cloud Enhances Business Vitality for ICBC Credit Suisse: ICBC Credit Suisse needed to optimize its computing resource allocation and shorten the cycle from development testing to normal business operation. It also wanted to improve its server utilization rate during non-trading hours and find a new IT resource management system to reduce the cost of managing physical servers. It built a virtualized enterprise private cloud platform with servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E7 family. Now its data center maximizes computing resources, improves IT management, saves energy, and cuts costs.

You can find more business success stories like these on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

Face the Big Data Challenge: Findout how others have put Intel's Distro of HADOOP to use

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:02:58 GMT

To make it easier to use the vast amounts of data being generated, collected, and stored every day—also known as big data—Intel recently announced Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop* software, built from the silicon up to deliver industry-leading performance and improved security features. Learn how two companies are already using it in these new business success stories:

NextBio Powers Genomic Data Analytics Breakthroughs with Intel® Technologies: Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software and Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family deliver scale and performance for life sciences computing.
Shanghai Ideal Gets Real-Time Video Surveillance Across Locations: Shanghai Ideal upgrades its regional Global Eye digital video monitoring system for real-time analytics and storage using Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Sensor Data: Where Big Data Gets Interesting

tim.allen@intel.com — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:06:08 GMT

Machines and human beings are generating some 2.5 exabytes of data each day, according to estimates from IBM. That’s 1 plus 18 zero’s worth of information daily, and it’s piling up so fast that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in just the last two years. Processing, storing and analyzing Big Data is driving some of the most compelling advances in technology. However, in terms of impact, Big Data is more talked about than felt in our everyday lives.

That’s about to change! Big Data from government, corporate and web sources has been available for years – information on weather, shopping patterns, Google searches, Facebook activity, and so on. Add sensor data to these analytics, and suddenly Big Data gets more interesting.

According to Harish Kotadia, in his article Big Data: The Coming Sensor Data Driven Productivity Revolution, we will begin to see big changes in industrial and business processes when we have pervasive real-time analytics of sensor data. “We are on the cusp of a major sensor data driven productivity revolution that will fundamentally change the way we do business, for the better!”

Sensor data comes from many sources – smart meters on your home utilities, traffic lights, GPS coordinates from your smartphone, TV viewing habits, security system readings, images from remote surveillance cameras, to name just a few. Information from the thousands of network-connected devices could potentially even add to this volume and variety.

Adding information from sensors injects a critical human dimension to Big Data analytics – and provides important predictive analysis for consumer behavior. Because if you’re looking for data on how people act and react in real-time situations, information from sensors is more accurate than surveys or interviews. Businesses can use this data to analyze, manage and build better products, and better understand customer behavior to differentiate and improve loyalty.

If sensor data is where Big Data gets interesting, it’s also where Big Data gets even more complex and demanding. Analyzing and storing the coming tidal wave of sensor data will require a new generation of Big Data technologies with the performance muscle to analyze masses of instantaneous sensor data and uncover insights into behavior and actions. Moving from today’s Big Data batch to real-time analytics is a natural evolution. And since this is people’s personal information we’re talking about here, Big Data platforms will require advanced defenses to protect privacy and maintain data security.

Adding sensor analysis to Big Data analytics has the potential to bring fundamental changes to how we live and do business. It will also push past the boundaries of much of today’s Big Data technology. If your organization plans to tap into the rich new insights derived from sensor analytics, it’s time to evaluate your platform and make sure you’re ready. Because a bigger, better Big Data is on the way.

Want to keep up with Big Data and enterprise computing news? Join me on Twitter. @TimIntel

Cloud Security Frameworks: Security by Design

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:30:06 GMT

Every company operates with some level of uncertainty and ambiguity. What separates the winners from the losers is how the company responds. For example, I once worked at a company where their (DBA) described them this way:

Think of company x as a ship floating on a large sea. The ship has no rudder and tends to get thrown around by the waves. Be assured, though, that wherever the ship lands, it is exactly where it needs to be.

As someone who believes in the value of planning, the vision of this helpless ship being tossed about is alarming. On the other hand, the company continues to thrive today—so perhaps the way it handled risk was acceptable.

Is Security Strategy, by Necessity, Random?

When I think about the state of many security programs, particularly from a systems engineering perspective, it's hard not to see a typical enterprise security strategy as eerily similar to the ship my DBA colleague described so many years ago.

What's particularly troubling to somebody like me, an admitted newbie to this topic, is that there seems to be broad consensus that security is, and is forever ordained to be, reactive in nature. (See my Information Week blog for more on this topic.)

Companies seem to spend their security dollars to prevent platform breaches ("I buy product X to protect my mobile devices, product Y for data center, and product Z for my networks") rather than it being part of a more holistic strategy. While this approach may have been acceptable (or perhaps excusable) when everything resided under one relatively friendly roof, it's not sustainable as you move your infrastructure, software, and data to locations outside your immediate control.

So what can you do?

Security by Design

Throughout 2012, I worked with Intel’s CISO, spent some time talking with a senior director at McAfee, and listened to some wisdom provided by the Ponemon Institute, LLC. The goal was to try to craft a security approach that changes the fundamental way an enterprise views and implements security.

As it turned out, the answer is deceptively simple and even somewhat intuitive. You just have to view and manage security like you do any other business investment. The challenge is to get your CEO, CFO, and CIO to view security using the same fundamental criteria.

So what is Security by Design?

As you might expect from someone with a systems engineering and enterprise architecture background, I believe Security by Design understands that security is first and foremost, a business issue. This is necessary to align the goals of your CEO and CFO (who control the budget).

The Security by Design framework is explained using three categories:

1. Current state of enterprise security

2. Security by design

3. Defense in depth

I can't detail the entire security framework in this blog. But I can provide the important elements you can use to start building your own strategy.

First, divide enterprise security into four topics:

1. Organizational

2. Controls

3. Approach to risk

4. Funding and cost efficiency

Make a brutally honest assessment of where corporate power lies, where security decisions are made (think many decision pockets), conflicting enterprise security goals, and hidden security expenditures.

Figure 1 shows the building blocks of security by design.

Figure 1. Security by Design Elements

The elements of this framework make a very nice picture. But in reality, few (if any) companies actually have all of them in place. If you're going to have any control over your security strategy, it's important to recognize that you need to formally document (and regularly reference) at least some of these elements. If you don't, you're like that ship without a rudder.

You also need to base your framework on four security investment rules which were based on a foundation provided by Intel’s CISO:

· Rule 1: Security solutions have no intrinsic value unless you can demonstrate savings or cost avoidance.

· Rule 2: You need more information than “Who did what to what (or whom), with what result?”

· Rule 3: Intelligent security investment requires a cohesive, defensive strategy to answer four simple questions:

1. Whose actions affected the asset?

2. What actions affected the asset?

3. Which assets were affected?

4. How was the asset affected?

· Rule 4: There can be only one individual/office responsible for end-to-end security investment; authority cannot be separated from responsibility.

(Learn more about an earlier version of these rules in a blog I wrote for Information Week.)

Organizational Impacts and Common Language

As you might expect, once you begin to approach security from a system strategy perspective, there must be a paradigm shift in your IT and business units as well as with individuals. These shifts include:

· Accountability

· Policy

· Control discipline

· Awareness

Finally, as your organization moves toward a defense in depth strategy, you must establish some common terms to describe security threats. While this might sound simplistic, it's important to remember that everyone in your organization must understand the threat in universally understood terms. The entire enterprise must speak about threats using the same vocabulary.

Figure 2 shows industry-standard terminology for common categories of threats.

Figure 2. Threat Categories

Finally, the defense in depth component of your security by design strategy requires setting goals at each defensive level (following the Intel security investment model we discussed in an earlier blog).

To learn more about Intel's security by design framework, contact your Intel field sales representative or reach me via Twitter.

Solid State Drives Ramp Up Performance for In-Memory Databases

tim.allen@intel.com — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:40:27 GMT

Data intensive computing takes muscle – and not just in the form of more powerful processors. Revving up performance for time-sensitive, transactional analytics, takes a more complete package, which includes in-system memory database software plus low latency storage solutions. Watch this video to learn how adding solid-state storage drives can greatly reduce process persistent data bottlenecks and speed database performance.

Not so long ago, enterprise-level relational databases consisted of two segments: a large server that ran the database software and a separate, usually detached storage environment with traditional disk drives. However, for time-sensitive processing, the latency lag that occurred as data passed between the two segments became a real drag on performance.

Today’s database environments have become much more complex, but they still suffer from latency whenever data-flows are processed to a spinning hard drive.

In the past couple of decades, processor efficiency and speeds have increased as much as 50,000 times. Over the same period, hard drive performance, based on the speed of a spinning cylinder, has improved only 30 to 40 percent. Rotating media storage becomes the real bottleneck if you’re looking to pump out real-time analytics.

One way to optimize transactional performance is by integrating in-memory database solutions, such as the Oracle TimesTen* In-Memory Database, a relational database that runs purely in system memory to increase both speed and reliability.

However, while the Oracle TimesTen database solution runs only on in-system memory, it still requires logging transactions to some form of persistent storage. If this happens to be standard rotating media, then you’re back to having a hard drive latency issue.

The answer: Add solid-state storage to your database environment. The above video demonstration shows how Intel^® Solid-State Drives (Intel^® SSD) can help organizations get the full value out of their Oracle TimesTen investments and better manage real-time data by removing storage bottlenecks that build up when your systems are dependent on standard hard disk drives.

Follow me on Twitter: @TimIntel

The 12 Days of Christmas in the Data Center

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:00:46 GMT

This post originally appeared in Data Center Knowledge on December 21st, 2012.

Jeffrey S. Klaus is the Director of Data Center Solutions at Intel Corporation, where he has managed various groups for more than 12 years. Klaus’s team is pioneering data center power and thermal management solutions, which are sold through an ecosystem of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software and hardware companies around the world.

Another year’s end, and we’re in the midst of another holiday season. Besides anticipating time off, family celebrations, and gift giving, every IT professional should be anticipating—and planning for—the challenges relating to data center energy management in 2013.

On the First Day of Data Center Christmas: IT Transformation

The data center has moved from a support business to a mission-critical resource. Next year, I could argue that the data center will become the most-critical resource. The elevation of the data center is being driven by demands for transaction speed and exploding numbers of devices and applications used for sales, service, operations, HR, and practically every functional area. Business users will continue to expect more from the data center. They want to improve their productivity with increasingly self-service capabilities, customization, on-demand services, and, above all, reliability that translates to highly available data center services.

Second Day: Organizational Disconnects

Historically, the various IT and facilities teams worked separately. Rarely did hardware, software, networking, and facilities teams come together, and if they did, they rarely understood each other. The 2013 outlook, with escalating energy costs and a continued sluggish global economy, calls for increasing focus on power optimization, and that means providing tools that not only work for all of the various teams, but encourage cooperation among the teams.

Third Day: Affordability of Servers and Storage Drives Up Demand

Dramatic server/storage price reductions over the last decade have led to mass migrations of tasks to online and automated platforms, thus driving up energy consumption in the data center. Power and cooling have become significant portions of the budget; some argue power has become the single biggest expense.

Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Days: Virtualization, Clouds, and Mobility Change Energy Profiles

Rapid change is nothing new in the data center, but 2013 will see several major technology trends gaining wide-scale acceptance. Virtualization is expanding from servers into desktop infrastructure, and users are demanding the flexibility and rapid provisioning that is only possible within a private or public cloud environment. Mobility adds another layer of complexity, as employees bring their own smart devices to work, thus driving up network traffic and server workloads with apps and anytime, anywhere access to data center resources. The data center is being bombarded with service requests, and large companies are already hitting the power restrictions of their facilities as well as the limits of some local utility companies to meet their needs.

Seventh Day: Natural Disaster Preparedness

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and this year’s hurricane season that included Sandy’s devastation of New York and surrounding states are vivid reminders that every data center should be continually refining its disaster plans. The 2013 challenge will be to ensure that disaster plans include prolonging operation with backup power supplies. Disaster recovery should be elevated to a data center best practice, supported by a management solution that offers on-the-fly server adjustments to minimize power draw.

Eighth Day: Battling Methodologies and Tools

Natural disasters are one of the driving forces fueling growth of co-location (colo) facilities. Since many colo companies position their services as insurance for any power outage situation, some are among the early adopters of intelligent energy management solutions. Others have developed their own power management tools, and these will increasingly impact off-the-shelf DCIM solutions.

Ninth Day: The Search for Holistic DCIM Solutions

The ongoing debates about energy management approaches are driving the demand for and evolution of holistic DCIM platforms. Data center teams should look for solutions based on real-time data collection versus less-accurate predictive models. With fine-grained thermal and power monitoring, a DCIM solution should enable a data collection that feeds into holistic analysis and ultimately control of energy behaviors.

Tenth Day: Budget-Restricted Technology Roll-Outs

Of course, even the best solution doesn’t automatically override the budget restrictions stemming from global economic uncertainty. Therefore, data center managers will likely aim for smaller-scale trials and proofs of concepts than originally planned. A phased-in deployment should still be designed to achieve the same results over the long term, with each phase essentially self-funding the next phase with the proven gains in energy efficiency.

Eleventh Day: Vendor Consolidation

DCIM will continue to mature and, along with economic pressures, the rapid rate of change may likely lead to vendor consolidation. This will include large vendors buying up smaller tool vendors, to accelerate the development of their platforms. Maturation ultimately benefits the customer, however, and so the challenge here will be to avoid investments in solutions that may get swallowed up by competitors.

Twelfth Day: Inability to Predict the Future

As the year comes to a close, we are left with many unknowns about the DCIM market and how energy management in the data center will look a year from now. How will the market size compare to the 2013-2014 predictions? What will it take to move the technology to the next level?

We will all be watching and analyzing market movements, but ultimately data center demand will drive the technology. And this demand is growing at a healthy pace. Slow economy or not, energy costs are not going to suddenly plummet. More likely, energy demand will drive up prices, and governments will continue to increase energy taxes. DCIM solutions that build in proactive, fine-grained energy management capabilities are the best—and perhaps only—way to keep the data center sufficiently supplied without breaking the budget.

Follow Intel DCM: https://twitter.com/IntelDCM

Cloud Security Frameworks: Big Data, Architecture and Colin Chapman

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:16:10 GMT

Please note: A version of this blog appeared on InformationeWeek.com in the Cloud Section as an Intel sponsored post

I have a passion for anything with wheels, wings and more recently, float planes. You might remember that if you’ve read any of the blog posts I wrote on enterprise cloud (or the white paper based on them). Now I’m going to use this passion to make a point about cloud security.

Who is Colin Chapman? And what can we Learn from Him?

Anthony Colin Chapman was a design engineer, inventor, and founder of Lotus Cars , a British manufacturer of sports and racing cars known for their exceptional handling and light weight. In a nutshell, Chapman’s design philosophy is “simplify, then add lightness.” In practical terms, this approach ensured his cars were fast— not only on the straights, but particularly in the corners. In fact, between 1962 and 1978, Team Lotus won seven Formula One Constructor titles, six Driver’s Championships, and the Indianapolis 500. Based on results, it seems Colin may have been onto something.

So what exactly does Colin Chapman’s philosophy on lightness and speed have to do with cloud security, big data, and IT architecture? To find out, let’s focus on your current state data architecture strategy.

Current State Data Architecture and Security

Let’s pick a data category that is (according to a white paper from the Ponemon Institute) a consistent source of security concern to enterprises worldwide: customer data.

If I were to audit your enterprise data architecture, how many instances of customers’ data records would I find? One? Three? Six ? M aybe more? Would you be surprised if I told you that as an IT auditor (before I worked for Intel), I would routinely find at least six distinct data records on the same customer in a typical U.S.-based company?

If you continued auditing these islands of customer data, comparing them at the record level, what do you think you might find? Would the information be consistent in content, use, and ownership? Chances of that happening are not very likely.

As an auditor, I generally found approximately 75 percent parity among these records. What about the status of the other 25 or so percent of the information? Would it reflect the nuances of whatever department owned and maintained the record? What would the value of these nuances be to a competitor, or to a bad guy who hacked the record? What would you suspect Colin Chapman might say about the impact on enterprise performance of the (debatably) needless weight of all this duplicate data?

With all this in mind, let’s move the discussion to big data and the cloud.

First, it’s important to frame big data as simply as possible (understanding that it means many things to many people). Basically, big data is about harnessing the power of analytics to mine useful business intelligence (BI) out of massive amounts of ostensibly non-related information. The amount of information is so massive that a typical enterprise data center doesn’t have the capacity to conduct this analysis inside its firewall.

If this definition is fairly accurate, then information about your customers would likely be of value to your BI effort.

Now the question becomes exactly which of the theoretical six customer data records would you use in the cloud as part of your big data strategy? Would you default to using the one record that reflects the greatest percentage of commonality among the six? Or would you simply continue to utilize all the records in the cloud?

Most companies— due to history, effort, potential organizational ownership confrontations, and related difficulties— would take the easiest route and place all six customer records in the cloud. (If your company has done something else, please let me know. I’d love to be proven wrong.)

Structural Security Implications

In Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War[ 1], the author speaks of five types of incendiary attacks. The first is to incinerate men, the second is to incinerate provisions, the third is to incinerate supply trains, the fourth is to incinerate armories, and the fifth is to incinerate formations. Let’s explore this premise using customer records.

Consider that each customer record represents a standalone formation of data provisions, all being exchanged via very long, and very exposed, supply lines. Where one record has its related security concerns, six records, containing fundamentally the same data (at least 75 percent), have more.

I suggested in an earlier blog that bad guys seem to be much more adept at taking advantage of structural security weaknesses than we are at defending them. So not only does the extra weight of these records impact performance (a la Colin Chapman), it also gives the bad guys a target-rich environment that’s easier to breach. Since continuing to move toward the cloud and big data is inevitable, what actions do we need to start— or should we already have in place— to prepare for what I call future state security?

In my next blog post, I’ll begin to define what a future state security framework (and its funding) should look like and offer suggestions on how roles and responsibilities must evolve as the boundaries of your organization expand.

Please join me as I explore the topic of cloud security across upcoming blogs. For now, and reserving the right to add or modify these topics as we move forward, here are the areas I'll address in the coming months:

1. Current State Security

2. Security as a Factor of Cost

3. Business Issues Surrounding Security

4. Evaluating New-World Security Model Investments

5. Security, Data Architecture and Big Data

6. Defense in Depth

As always, I’m interested in your feedback to learn how your organization is selecting data to include in your big data strategy. I’d also like to know if you’re planning on managing your data architecture differently than you did when it only existed inside your firewall. To join the conversation, please contact me through Twitter.

[1] Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, Translated by Ralph D. Sawyer, Fall River Press, 1994, p. 227.

Addressing New Challenges in the Evolving Data Center: The Atom S1200 Processor Family

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:03:37 GMT

Intel has long blazed a trail of innovation for data center computing, leading the transition from mainframes to x86 towers to rack-mount blade servers, and beyond.

Today, Intel again takes the lead with the introduction of the Intel® Atom™ S1200 processor family, the industry’s first sub-10 watt server system on-chip (SoC) that builds in enterprise-ready features such as 64-bit support, virtualization technologies, and error- code correction (ECC) support for higher reliability. The industrial-strength Intel Atom S1200 microprocessor is designed to power high-density microservers as well as a new generation of storage and communication equipment.

So why does the world need a SoC microserver?

It turns out that one size of server does not fit all needs in the enterprise data center. As the server industry continues to segment, Intel recognized the need for high-density, hyper-scale servers based on low-power processors that can deliver extremely energy-efficient performance within a highly dense-compute footprint. These characteristics are increasingly important for many data center workloads, but address the immediate compute needs of companies that offer dedicated hosting and private clouds, Big Data workloads, content delivery, and front-end servers for hosting web pages; yet still need to harness the horsepower of 64-bit computing.

Servers based Intel Atom S1200 processors also give data center managers a new tool for workflow management, allowing them to flex and scale hardware configurations to meet the needs of changing workloads. Because the new server is compatible with the most commonly used server OSs, applications and data center hardware, implementing the new server is straightforward, with no need for porting or tuning new software stacks. You can break up large and complex workloads, such as Hadoop algorithms, and run many small but highly parallel "chunks" of code for optimal efficiency and performance across a range of server nodes. And there’s no need to rewrite code for the new high-density server, because all the code that’s already running in your x86 datacenter will also operate on the Intel Atom S1200 processor-based platforms.

With more than twenty low-power server, networking and storage systems based on Intel Atom S1200 now in production, the processors provide a new milestone for optimizing performance with low-power, high density computing. Download today’s press release announcing the Intel Atom S1200 and learn more about Intel’s roadmap for power efficient, high-density computing.

Celebrating Innovation

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:10:22 GMT

Congratulations to Alinma Bank, Instituto G. Caporale, RI-Solution GmbH, Tata Consultancy Services, TOT Public Company Limited, Cerner Corporation, FIS-ASP, MøllerGruppen, RTT, FERNBACH, Gravic Inc, SAP AG, Temenos, and Kenya Women Finance Trust Deposit Taking Micro-finance Limited

I'm very proud to be part of the present company - nominees for the Mission Critical Innovation Awards (MCIA) --here on Monday night in Frankfurt. We're kicking off HP Discover 2012 with this prestigious awards ceremony. Before the ceremony started, I had the opportunity to speak to two notable nominees. A gentleman from Fernbach whose company is being recognized for bringing to market an end to end risk management solutions used by major banks in Europe, Asia and Africa based on HP Integrity Servers that are powered by the Intel Itanium processor. The second gentleman in our conversation is from the Kenya Women Finance Trust, a mostly non-profit organization that provides micro-loans to economically disadvantaged women in Kenya. It amazed me that two diametrically opposite industries both are mission critical and use technology by Intel and HP to provide innovative solutions to help solve problems.

Ric Lewis, Vice President and Interim General Manager of HP's Business Critical Systems Group kicked off the ceremony with a funny anecdote, but more importantly by expressing his excitement to be among such intellectual and inspiring people. Ric also introduced his co-host, Pauline Nist, Intel’s General Manager of Enterprise Software Strategy.

The first award was in the category of Mission Critical Data. It was a tough run, with five competitors, but it was Tata Consultancy who walked away with the award. Tata installed to two new Superdome 2 servers and upgraded three others and implemented Enterprise DB after Oracle announced ending support for the Itanium based products. Tata took a risk but knew that it had to be done to take the best care of their customers.

The second category, Data Center Modernization, honored customers who moved from legacy solutions, such as mainframe to a standard business critical solution. The American healthcare company, Cerner, was a finalist—they run over 20,000 servers in their data center. The winner, however, was FIS-ASP, who by updating their hardware with Integrity servers and high end Xeon based Proliant servers plus 3PAR storage, was able to reduce their SAP response time from one month to one day! Talk about a boon to customer service!

Innovations in hardware drive innovations in software…or is it the other way around? While this may be a chicken and egg thing, there is no doubt in my mind that new applications are popping up every day but truly mission critical, impactful are few and far between. And the winner is a provider of who upgraded their disaster recovery architecture to a disaster tolerant architecture, Gravis. They implemented HP’s NonStop servers to moving from high availability to continuous availability for its applications.

Pauline ended the ceremonies by announcing the Humanitarian/Environmental Impact Award. Interestingly, two companies walked away with the top award. Instituto G. Corporale and the Kenya Women’s Finance Trust, provide distinct but much needed solutions via technology. The Instituto G. Corporale is a public health institution in Italy that not only ensures food safety but also manages animal health and welfare. They play a big role
in disease management as well. KWFT, is not to be under shadowed. They do remarkable work in empowering women to start their own businesses and now have the infrastructure to efficiently manage and grow their intricate system of microloans. The judges commented that the KWT exemplified “…an amazing alignment of technology to meet local needs ….used state of the art to revolutionize micro-lending…”

Congratulations to all the winners and I couldn’t more proud to be in the same room with them and be a tiny part of their success!

Mission Critical Innovation Awards for 2012 - Who will win it ALL?

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 15:12:40 GMT

At Intel, we pride ourselves for creating technology that in some way, shape or form will enrich people’s lives. Our technology, however, only goes as far as our customers innovate and bring it to you. Before we close out 2012, we’d like take the opportunity to recognize and thank the true innovators who bring mission critical solutions to life.

In conjunction with HP and the annual HP Discover Europe Event in Frankfurt Dec 4-6^th, we proudly present he Mission Critical Innovation Awards on December 3^rd . This year, we are recognizing enterprises that implemented innovative mission critical solutions based on the HP systems powered by the Intel® Itanium and/or Intel® Xeon® processor E7 series in four categories:

Data Center Transformation
Mission Critical Data
Best New Application
Humanitarian/Environmental Impact

Will the Indian marvel Tata Consultancy walk away as the big winner in Mission critical data? Will local darlings such as Gravic, Inc and Temenos take the first prize in innovative application implementation? I know for sure I wouldn’t want to decide the Humanitarian Award winner- Kenya Women Finance Trust, a non-profit microfinance organization or Istituto G. Caporale (ICT) an Italian agency that promotes health services.

Our panel of four independent judges have decided and we will announce the winners in a gala ceremony at the historic five-star Steigenberger Frankfurter Hof on Monday, December 3^rdin Frankfurt.

I’ll be tweeting live from the event; you can follow @ITSandhya to get the latest and greatest news from the event. And be sure to visit Intel at Booth #101 at Discover EMEA.