UK

Award winning IT Manager Game launches the animation-light mode

ketevan.rogava@intel.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:45:21 GMT

We have recently released the animation-light mode of the IT Manager III: Unseen Forces for the improved performance, check it out here http://itmanager3.intel.com/en-gb/default.aspx?iid=ENGSHORT+unseenforces&. You will need to select the animation mode from the options menu once you log in the game.

We are planning quite a few updates to the game in 2010 so stay tuned!

And what I mean by award winning? Check this out http://www.bima.co.uk/bima-award/030F131702/bima-awards-2009/awards-winners/

Will keep you posted with all the news about the game.

Keti

Point, Shoot, Listen

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:38:19 GMT

It is difficult for me to imagine the daily challenges faced by people with visual impairments or dyslexia in a world predominantly designed for those without these difficulties. Today in the UK, Intel’s Digital Health Group has announced the launch of the Intel® Reader, a device designed to help transform the printed word into speech.

This mobile and handheld device is about the size of a paperback book and is designed to increase independence for people who have trouble reading standard print. In the UK alone, there are an estimated six million people with dyslexia and two million people with visual impairments such as partial sightedness or blindness, for whom reading printed words is difficult or impossible.

The Intel® Reader works by pointing it at a page of text, for example a book or a news paper, and taking a picture of it. The image is then converted into digital text and is read back aloud to the user. On its own, this is pretty cool but the device is a lot more flexible than that. It can also work in social settings – reading restaurant menus, grocery prices or the sports results, bringing independence and confidence to the user. If you had a lot of text to capture, a portable capture station is also available.

For the techies out there, some of the latest Intel technology is under the hood including an Intel® Atom™ processor, an Intel® Solid-State Drive and software developed on the Moblin Linux platform.

Both the British Dyslexia Association and the Royal National Institute of Blind People have announced their support of the Intel® Reader as an important advance in assistive technology.

More information on the Intel® and information on where to buy it are available at www.intel.co.uk/reader

What's in a name?

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:24:44 GMT

Any newcomer to the world of remote health will undoubtedly be challenged by the variety of different names and labels used to describe the technology. These include Telehealth, Telecare, Telemedicine, eHealth and Connected Health and depending on who you talk to, you will get different interpretations of these.

So here’s where I stand on these:

· eHealth (or Connected Health): Health services, information and education delivered or enhanced through the internet and related technologies. This is the broadest of the labels used and eHealth encompasses all of the methods listed below.

· Telecare: The continuous, automatic and remote monitoring of real-time emergencies and lifestyle changes over time in order to manage the risks associated with independent living. Social alarms such door sensors, smoke alarms, flood detectors and personal alarm pendants (PERS) all fall into this category.

· Telehealth: Using communications networks to provide, access, and manage any type of health information or service. This name is commonly used to describe remote chronic disease management, with solutions such as the Intel® Health Guide.

· Telemedicine: This is a type of Telehealth and is often used to describe the activity performed specifically by a doctor, who uses IT and the Internet for the diagnosis of a patient in another location. This term is often applied to a specialist providing a remote consultation or a second opinion to a doctor somewhere else in the country or the world.

To add to the confusion, the European Commission use the term Telemedicine to cover the delivery of and healthcare services at a distance, through the use of Information and Communication Technologies. Additionally, another term – Telehealthcare – is starting to emerge blurring the lines between Telehealth and Telecare. For all of these reasons, it is very important to understand where all parties in a discussion on these topics stand so that some of the confusion is eliminated.

In a recent customer meeting, the fall-out of all of these different labels became blatantly clear to me. This person was interested in deploying a Telehealth solution for the purposes of chronic disease management. Her challenge however, was that she didn’t have a budget line item for Telehealth (or any other tele- or e- activities), and that she was constantly getting frustrated with new labels being applied to solutions that effectively just improved existing service delivery activities. Her recommendation was that industry should stop using new labels to describe these technologies, and rather position them as enhancements to current care delivery, allowing for much easier procurement by healthcare providers.

An interesting argument indeed – but do you agree?

More information on remote health in the UK is available in this White Paper – Chronic Care at the Crossroads

BREAKING NEWS - 'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

craig.p.wallace@intel.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:37:45 GMT

Please enjoy this rather humorous video made by a YouTuber call 'ServerWhistleblower'. We don't know who you are but keep them coming!

'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

Your IT Galaxy Team.

Irrational decisions in healthcare

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:12:10 GMT

Peter Ubel author of Free Market Madness, was today’s second keynote speaker and challenged the idea that an empowered and education consumer is always a good thing.

Ubel started out by posing the question if the idea of a free market, where increased demand for a product or a service causes costs to fall and the quality levels increase, could be applied to the healthcare industry.

However, one of the challenges is that humans are typically flawed decision makers and prone to poor judgement. He illustrated this with an example of where patients, who were educated about the relatively low risk of developing a particular cancer, were less likely to choose to have the regular tests for early detection. He believes that this is also true of clinicians, who are also likely to make irrational decisions. If something is new, expensive and scarce then doctors will likely choose it as the belief is that it must be better than something already on the market. Could this be one of the reasons for the spiralling cost of healthcare delivery?

All of us, whether patients or doctors, make decisions based not just on available information, but also under the influence of unconscious factors, and this has implications for healthcare policy makers. He made four key points:

- You can’t expect the free market to solve everything as there are lots of unconscious factors influencing outcomes

- We must move beyond comprehension alone – education does not solve the issue

- Persuasion should be used appropriately with honest labelling and through social marketing

- Utilise financial incentives by taxing unhealthy foods and subsidizing healthy food or fitness centres

Ubel concluded by stating that all of this must be done by balancing freedom and well-being, and by helping markets to do what they do best and restrain them from what they do worst.

It was a whirlwind tour through some interesting research but certainly a topic worthy of further reading.

Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare Delivery

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:40:13 GMT

In this morning’s opening keynote at the Partners Connected Health Symposium, Dr Jason Hwang, co-author with Clayton Christensen of the Innovator’s Prescription spoke about the application of disruptive innovation on the healthcare industry.

Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors. This disruption allows new consumers to begin to use the technology whereas in the past it was inaccessible to them. This can be seen in the computing industry where the technology has moved from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs and to smart-phones, which has also moved the location of the technology from a central location to being accessible anywhere it is required. This decentralization through disruption leads to increased accessibility but it is important to note that companies often add functionality through innovation faster than consumer wants or needs the technology

In healthcare this same move to centralize everything, can be seen with the co-location of multiple services and technologies all under the same roof in a big hospital. The emerging trend however is to move this care provision from a central location out into the community and into the home. This also means that different people will be able to deliver the care such as nurses and empowered patients themselves, supported by new technologies.

This in-turn requires us to look at the dominant business model in healthcare where everything is centralized on the general hospital. This implies that many different types of technology and specialities in one location. The business model then has to support all of these resources but with the number of hand-offs that result, it can be prone to error and forces increased costs to maintain profitability.

Hwang asserted that hospitals are expensive conflations of three specific types of business models:

1) Solution shops – typically very dependent on people offering diagnostic and intuitive activities on a fee for service basis

2) Value-added process businesses – typically process dependent where a certain task is repeated enough times to where it becomes possible to accurately predict the outcome, for a fee.

3) Facilitated Networks – where users, both providers and patients, transact and interact with one another on a fee for membership basis.

As disruption occurs in the healthcare industry, Hwang believes that a number of changes will occur to these business models

- Specialist hospitals will emerge to address the solution shops model, bringing together a number of different specialties to reach a diagnosis sooner

- Treatment centers focused on a particular procedure, e.g. heart by-pass, where technicians can be involved in delivering the treatment, rather than doctors, as they have been specifically trained on parts of the procedure and repeat it on a daily basis

- Social networking through sites such as PatientsLikeMe, empowering individuals to do more for their own care delivery

Dr. Hwang concluded however, that each of these new propositions will require new value networks to gain traction in the market and for this to happen, having the right partners will be key to success.

Robonurse - a new member of the family?

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:37:28 GMT

As part of a futurist session today, at the Partners Connected Health Symposium, Tandy Tower from Microsoft Robotics, proposed an idea that assistive care robots could become common place in many homes within the next 3-5 years. These robots would be developed in response the ageing demographics that are evident across the world and to address the shortage of caregivers available to meet the needs of this section of the population.

These robotic nurses or home care assistants, would be able to help with medication reminders, allow medical peripherals to be connected, support video consultations with a clinician and deliver social interaction opportunities with other people in a network. Another idea proposed was that these robots could help with coaching and rehabilitation therapy for patients who have suffered a stroke.

Tower believes that this technology could be available for less than $5000 but I don’t believe that cost will be the main barrier to deployment and adoption. A bigger challenge, in my opinion, will be the acceptance of a robotic humanoid moving around your home and constantly checking up on your actions. Would you have a robonurse in your home?

Will healthcare reform succeed?

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:36:28 GMT

The second keynote this morning was from James Mongan, MD, CEO of Partners Healthcare.

Within a few months there will likely be a bill signed on healthcare reform but Mongan believes that it will not have realised everything that was set out to be achieved. He asserts that the work on reform will continue for a number of years afterwards.

Despite the fact that there are huge numbers of uninsured, most still receive the treatment they need. What doesn’t happen though is that treatment for chronic conditions is not delivered in a preventative manner.

One proposal in the reform legislation is to introduce an Individual Mandate but Mongan asserts that this appears to be a new tax with another name. There may be restrictions on who actually pays this mandate but it doesn’t address the core need for insurance reform.

But what about the issue of controlling healthcare costs? Barriers to cost include the way costs are reimbursed and the lack of integration of the provider systems. With most items that you buy, you benefit immediately, but with healthcare payments you benefit later

It is likely that any new legislation will blend taxes, employer payments and individual payments but the key issue is the fairness of financing – who pays and how much? In Mongan's opinion, it needs to be a balance between individual liberty and justice for all.

US Healthcare Reform Challenges

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:09:49 GMT

Over the next two days, I’ll be blogging from the 2009 Connected Health Symposium, run by Partners Healthcare Center for Connected Health, in Boston.

The opening keynote at this year’s symposium was delivered by Stuart Altman, Professor of National Health Policy at Brandeis University, who spoke on the topic of healthcare reform and some of the challenges it brings.

In 1971, US spending on healthcare delivery was $75 billion, or 7.5% of GDP but today this has reached $2.5 trillion or approximately 17% of GDP. Many people have tried to address this for years but 3 clear issues have emerged that need to be addressed:

1) Create a universal healthcare financing system

2) Develop programmes to reduce the rate of growth in healthcare spending

3) Improve the quality of care delivered

The current political discussions in the US try to address these issues and will likely reduce the overall federal spend but spend from other sectors may increase. These would include increased spending by states and increased payments for insurance by younger people.

Professor Altman then introduced what he called Altman’s Law: almost every powerful constituent group favours health reform but, if it is not their plan, they prefer the status quo. In the case of the current reform, the industry to see most negative impact will be the Insurance Companies – all other stakeholder groups will either get additional funding or stay the same, making it easier for the reform to succeed.

In conclusion he stated the need to change the payment and delivery system, through an appropriate but effective comparative effectiveness system that includes clinical and cost effectiveness components.

VM'09 -Death by powerpoint -help needed

iain.beckingham@intel.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:20:04 GMT

I'm currently on a plane to Munich for our annual training event for the team where we will no doubt have some powerpoint fest (personally I prefer October fest!). I shouldn't knock it as the training is excellent, very interactive and well received by the team. However, I think we'll have a sweepstake about the total number of slides. I'm guessing 8 sessions a day * 30 slides each for 4 days is approx 960 slides. Personally, I'd really like to see 10 slides max in a 45 minutes presentation and have people talk to the slides rather than repeat verbatim what's on them. What are people thinking when they do that? That I can't actually read.

Now I'm on my soapbox - well actually I'm still on the plane which is delayed because of the storms - my 2nd gripe is that people cram as much on to the slides as possible. In fact, I've done some analysis of this in the last 30 seconds. The higher up the company structure one goes, the less cluttered the slides are. When you get to CxO level, there's normally some nice pictures and graphics, only 3 bullet points consisting of 3 words and the message is articulated really well - the slides tell a story rather than being a story to read. Others try and get as many words in 8 point font onto the slide as possible. Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan when it's used correctly - it's almost a victim of it's own success.

I don't think Intel is alone in this, and judging by some of the presentations I saw at VM'09 I know it isn't. Perhaps the industry should adopt a 10 slide rule. If it can't be explained in 10 slides, then either it's far too technical for my brain or the audience will fall asleep. Any tips out there on how to make presentations more fun, stimulating, interesting etc. or got any interesting death by powerpoint stories. Any takers for the largest number of slides in a deck?

I mentioned that I went to VM'09 last week at Earls Court. It was good to get out of the office and talk to some customers as well as hear and see what other industry players are doing. One thing that did catch my eye (and not just mine) was the Microsoft Surface demonstration. This looked like one of those table top pub games from yester-year (ok - I'm showing my age here). Totally interactive - no keyboard/mouse - you can resize photos just by making your thumb and index finger closer together. I'm sure it won't be long until this is in a form factor that can hang on the wall. [Caption competition anyone?]

I also went along to some of the presentations - with virtualisation being the theme of the show, I obviously have to write something about it. Paul D'Cruz talked about how Cisco had implemented virtualisation by adopting a unified data centre in their IT group. We've done something similar at Intel, so I was interested in a different perspective. [the Intel whitepaper can be found here: http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3489 ]

On the storage side, Paul quoted a $70m cost avoidance over 4 years as a result of better utilisation of the storage. On the server side, there was a $20m cost avoidance with 75% of new servers being virtualised. The unified fabric saved $2m alone. The other topic Paul touched upon was standardising on x86 hardware - something that many IT Managers/CIO's are looking at in order to reduce costs.

Overall, an interesting show….now to write that keynote presentation in under 10 slides….

~iain

A quick and easy way to understand the storage industry.

david.j.byrne@intel.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:17:43 GMT

Did you know Storage Expo is on this week?

http://www.storage-expo.com

It's a great opportunity to see the key vendors and learn the new trends in storage. I will be looking for information on the following areas and trying to answer these questions:

1) Who is supplying Storage appliances that insert SSD's into the enterprise storage hierachy?

2) Which software vendors are supporting storage tiering?

3) What are my SSD competitors doing?

4) Is virtualisation opening up a SAN opportunity in small and medium business?

5) Who are the key channel players who can deliver storage solutions into SMB end users?

If you don't have time to attend you can follow me on Twitter as I try to solve these questions.

http://twitter.com/DavidIntelByrne

Or if you're going I'll see you there.

Care Plans in the Cloud

ivan.p.harrow@intel.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:27:06 GMT

Last week Adam Bosworth, one of the founders of Google Health and previously involved in many other successful ventures, launched his new company – keas. This is quite an interesting development as the goal of keas is to help you understand what your health data means and how you can use it to be as healthy as possible.

Keas works by getting you to complete a basic health questionnaire and to answer some questions about your family history and your wellness goals. It then assigns certain care plans to you, which, in theory, enable you to either manage your condition better or assist you in achieving your wellness goals. These care plans are designed by experts but do not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

What makes this proposition interesting is that you can upload your medical data to the system from other services, such as Google Health, or enter details of clinical tests that you may have undergone. Keas will then attempt to provide an interpretation for you and assist you in dealing with possible next steps. This is one of the first sites to pull all of these different elements together to offer you comprehensive advice and guidance.

It sounds simple but in fact this can be a challenging area from a regulatory and a privacy perspective. Many clinicians are reluctant for data to be stored outside their country (and sometimes even outside their offices!) despite the fact that many countries have implemented stringent data privacy regulations. Additionally, providing care plans that are useful, while not crossing the line of delivering medical advice could be quite a challenge.

Keas is backed by a strong management and advisory team, and it will be interesting to see how it delivers over the coming months.

Free cooling for your data centre ?

alan.priestley@intel.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:20:53 GMT

There is increased attention on the energy consumption of data centres and the amount of energy that is consumed in removing the heat generated by the IT equipment within a data centre. Upcoming legislation in the form of the UK governments Carbon Reduction Commitment will only serve to further increase the pressure on IT and facilities management to take a holistic view of their energy consumption.

One way to reduce DC energy consumption is to replace legacy server infrastructure with the latest generation power efficient servers ( more on that topic here & here). Earlier this week Intel CIO Diane Bryant took time out to talk to the press about the significant saving Intel's IT group has made by refreshing their server installed base and deploying servers based on Xeon 5500, this podcastfrom one of our financial analysts takes you thru the financial justification for maintaining a regular server refresh cycle and one of the many press reports on this topic is here

Server refresh is however only a part of the equation as the facilities infrastructure within the data centre also consumes power and there is a lot of debate within the industry as to whether it is possible run data centres at higher temperatures. Part of this discussion is centred around the use of external air for cooling ( free-air cooling ) as opposed to using air-conditioning units ( CRACs ) to force cool the air within the data centre.

There were reports recently that Microsoft have opened a new data centre in Dublin that uses free air cooling and also that Google's data centre in Belgium also utilises free -air cooling. BT have also been an advocate of the use of free-air cooling for some time..

For some time now the Green Grid have been evaluating the use of free-air cooling within data centres and have just made available a tool* that enables European data centre operators to easily assess the amount time they can operate their facilities with the use external air for cooling. The latest recommendations from ASHRAEas to the inlet temperatures for data centre IT equipment also facilitate the use of free-air cooling.

Intel's own IT group has also done work in this area and published a white paperthat discussed the results of running a test data centre in the Arizona desert using free-air cooling and minimal filtration on the incoming air. OK, so UK climate isn't quite as extreme as the Arizona desert ( yet ) but its still an interesting read an provides some good insight as to what the infrastructure within a DC can tolerate on the environmental front

One factor that has to be considered before taking the plunge and running your data centre with free-air cooling and at higher temperatures is that there is the risk that older IT equipment will actually consume more power as the fans within the servers will run faster and the electronics may consume more power. To counter this many OEMs are now starting to offer severs that can be safely used at extended temperatures so its worth discussing this with your equipment suppliers.

If you want more information on how to measure and improve the energy efficiency of your data centre The Green Grid are holding a Technical Forum in London on 20 October where experts from across the industry will discuss the work of the Green Grid, and the tools available to help assess your current infrastructure and plan improvements.

* The Green Grid on-line Free Air Cooling tool

Virtualisation as the foundation of the Cloud

alan.priestley@intel.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:35:50 GMT

VM 09 @ Earls Court this week brings together many of the key elements driving Cloud Computing with the software and hardwrae vendors discussing their offerings to enable IT to deploy and utilise Cloud based infrastructure.

One of the major tenets of Cloud architectures is the ability to seamlessly deploy workload anywhere within the cloud and to scale available compute resources based on workload demand. Virtualisation is the key element that enables cloud providers to deliver these capabilities to their customers and it is the availability of server hardware with in-built virtualisation support that is the underpinning of these developments.

One of the key considerations when developing virtualisation software ( the hypervisor ) is how to ensure that the guest ( i.e. virtualised ) workloads do not see that they have been virtualised, to do this it is essential that the impact of the hypervisor is minimised.

For some years now Intel has been working with the hypervisor vendors to implement hardware support for virtualisation within their processors. This support is aimed at making it easier for the hypervisor vendors to implement their code and to ensure that they are able to transparently virtualize the guest or hosted workloads.

Intel’s virtualisation technology has focused on 3 key areas – the processor, the I/O subsystem and the network interfaces.

· Processor enhancements – new instructions and protection model that enables the hypervisor to co-exist with unmodified guest operating systems and to host multiple operating systems on the same hardware. With successive generations of Intel processors new features have been added to the processor to help the hypervisor operate and to reduce its overhead.

· I/O subsystem – one of the limiters in early virtualisation implementations was the ability to ensure adequate I/O throughput and isolation between various workloads sharing the same physical I/O devices. Many new Intel Xeon processor based servers now have virtualisation support built into the chipsets.

· Network interfaces – another challenge with running multiple guest environments on the same server has been the need for them to share the same physical network interfaces and for the hypervisor to manage the separation and distribution of network traffic between the various guest virtual machines. This has been addressed with the latest network interface chips that provide hardware support to manage movement of network data directly between the LAN and virtual machines

It’s also worth noting that raw CPU performance plays a significant part in determining the number of workloads a virtualised server can host. For example if the hypervisor consumes ~10% of the available compute resource, reducing the hypervisor overhead by 10% would result in ~1% more CPU resource being available to the guest workloads, whereas increasing the CPU performance by 10% provides 10% more compute resource to the guest environments – which could equate to 1 or more addition virtual machines being hosted.

When all this is hardware support is put together with the software developments that the hypervisor vendors have been making in terms of tools to dynamically provision and move workload between various physical servers we can start to see how the underpinnings of cloud computing are being put in place.

For further reading there’s lots of good stuff in the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation tracks at the recent IDF, all the materials are here.

Massive Solid State Drive deployment at Intel.

david.j.byrne@intel.com — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:36:57 GMT

In my previous blog I enthused about the upgrade I had from a mechanical hard disk drive(HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD) in my corporate notebook PC. As you can see I am a very happy PC user! But I hear you ask, why would Intel consider such an expensive upgrade to a corporate PC?

Well helpfully our IT department has just published a paper to explain that decision You can find the full paper here:

http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3914

Firstly I am not unique within the company. Over 10,000 people have, or will soon, receive an SSD upgrade to their Corporate PC. Starting with the most mobile of the workforce, the sales and marketing teams, who spend much of their working lives travelling to and from their respective customers. This is being carried out as a mid-life upgrade, so as you can imagine there needs to be a good reason for this scale of investment.

The benefits fall into two categories. Soft benefits and hard benefits (Return on Investment). Firstly soft benefits, what do we mean by this term? Well this is the benefit to the end user, I covered my personal view on this in my last post, it’s the improved productivity the better battery life, the reliability. The benefits it’s hard to put a figure on. You know they exist but what are they worth to the company?

Then there are the hard benefits. These you can measure in terms of monetary values. So what were the hard benefits we measured for SSD deployment:

Drive failures reduced by 90%

Employee time lost due to drive failures reduced by 90%

Reduction in IT time spent dealing with drive failures of 96%

This all adds up to a pretty significant pay back on the investment we are making in this technology. So what is holding you back?

UK