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Managing the Changing IT Landscape: Business-Class Technology

 

In a recent blog post, I proposed the idea that business-class technology is not a luxury. When it comes to protecting sensitive company information and IP, as well as customer data, it’s critical to have the right technology in place. 

 

But what makes technology business-class? In my mind, these are the top 10 features and capabilities that address the needs of both users and IT.

 

  1. Durability – Can handle daily wear and tear over a PC refresh cycle of three to four years; reinforced hardware (screen, chassis)
  2. High performance –  Can manage multitasking and simultaneous app use
  3. Scalability –Ability to support new operating systems and apps during life cycle
  4. Security technologies – Protection for users and IT in a dynamic threat landscape
  5. Management tools – Ability for IT to manage all devices (tablets, phones, notebooks, desktops, etc.) regardless of operational state or location
  6. Identity protection – Ability to protect users online and safeguard corporate network access
  7. Data protection – Powerful encryption technologies to guard sensitive business data
  8. Antitheft capabilities – Ability to lock or wipe a device that is lost or stolen
  9. Appeal for users – Ease of use with an intuitive interface, a lightweight form factor, long battery life, and a sleek design
  10. Interoperability –Standards-based systems with Ethernet, USB, solid-state drives (SSDs), and strong Wi-Fi

 

What capabilities does your organization look for in business-class technology? Is anything missing from this list?

 

Chris
@chris_p_intel
#Consumerization #BusinessClass

Even a 10 year old little girl can prove this fact:  Caution.jpg

A 10-year-old girl thwarted an abduction attempt after asking a stranger for a code word that he did not know.

A man approached a 10 year old girl outside a public school and attempted to lure the girl into his vehicle.  The man told the girl her parents had sent him to pick her up.  But the girl and her parents had setup a shared secret code-word for anyone authorized to pick her up from school. 

The girl asked for the code word but the suspect got it wrong.  She told him it was incorrect and he drove away. 

 

I applaud the parents for a job well done in implementing a simple and effective security solution and to the little girl who deftly executed to it, likely without the need of understanding the grim impacts of failure. 

 

In the security and technology industry, we can learn volumes from this encounter.  First, a security savvy person is far more effective than a stack of technical security controls.  Second, complexity does not guarantee effectiveness.  In fact, simplicity can be more cost efficient and easier to implement. An elegant solution, is one which is accepted, applied, and delivers the preferred result.  

 

As security professionals, we have an opportunity to meet these requirements to deliver an optimal solution through a marriage of inherent human and technical considerations.  We must not forget, computer security is a combination of both.  The very best solutions enhance the user’s ability to be secure without being cumbersome.  Pure elegance.

Intel has implemented a new granular trust model to improve security throughout the enterprise. It’s designed to support key initiatives like IT consumerization and cloud computing. At the same time Intel wants to keep the user experience as seamless as possible. In this podcast we hear from Toby Kohlenberg, Intel IT Senior Information Security Technologist. He gives us an outline of the first version of the new security model, talks about the advantages of dynamic trust calculation, and discusses the challenges of balancing a complex security infrastructure while ensuring a great user

Managing the Changing IT Landscape: Touch-Enabled PCs in the Enterprise

 

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a blog on the emergence of enterprise app stores as a way for IT to gain better control. Today, I want to go one step further: I believe that enterprise app stores mark the beginning of touch-enabled PCs at work.

 

For consumers, app stores have become the de facto standard for delivering productivity tools, games, and content. As smart phones and other mobile devices become a part of everyday business, CIOs are realizing the power of app stores in the enterprise—both to achieve greater control and to deliver applications optimized for work streams.

 

Touch is next out of the gates

IT isn’t paring down these apps for mobile devices; on the contrary, it’s optimizing them for touch-based interfaces. And there’s no need for compromise. By building an app strategy that focuses on touch with the Windows* 8 operating system on an Intel®-based device, organizations can get the enterprise-grade solution they need while users get the devices and experiences they love.

 

Just the other day, I was dialing a colleague using my laptop’s softphone and thinking how much easier it would be to simply touch the numbers on-screen like I’m able to do on my phone. It’s a faster, smoother, and more natural interaction.

 

Where do you stand on touch-enabled PCs in the enterprise? Which business apps would you want to be touch-enabled first?

 

Chris
@chris_p_intel
#Consumerization #touchPCs #enterpriseappstore

I’d like to share a story around insights and innovation about how my team embraces Intel’s IT strategy to create unique business value through customer insights. Two and a half years ago when I joined Intel IT as General Manager of IT Solutions for Sales and Marketing, I sat through a presentation by one of my peers about Predictive and Advanced Analytics.  I was so impressed and excited that IT was investing in this core competency that I immediately raised my hand. I wanted to team up with this group and figure out how we could partner with corporate marketing to put this capability into practice. I knew from my days in marketing years ago that we relied almost exclusively on third-party experts to manage structured and unstructured data for us and stay on top of market and consumer technology trends. They were the sole keepers of that data, so we couldn’t even slice/dice it!  They, in effect, owned our data, which limited our ability to take advantage of timely insights and shifts in perceptions.

 

 

So in a few months I put in place the beginnings of an IT Business Analytics team under Ivan Harrow (Follow him on Twitter: @ivanh) and immediately partnered with a few sharp guys from our Enterprise Capabilities and Programs team.  We set up a face to face meeting with three of CMO Deborah Conrad’s top lieutenants to explore the possibilities.  I have to say, I think we took them by surprise.  I believe they came into this thinking it was another one of those IT meetings that they were attending as a favor to me and that nothing would materialize from it.   Instead, we were asking them to anticipate their business needs. We asked if they had a magic wand, what type of scenarios would be ideal to apply this practice of advanced/predictive analytics.   In this case, we appeared ahead of the business need. , At this meeting they were taken a bit off guard by this dialog with IT. On the spot, they couldn’t readily describe what we could start working on with them to fuel Intel’s transformation as a computing solutions company!

 

 

Afterwards we met with them to discuss specific areas in their business that could take advantage of the collective talent of the IT team we pulled together.  In the meantime, we started working on areas we identified for them that could help the marketing group see the power of this advanced business intelligence (BI) capability.

 

 

And then one day, our tenacity paid off.  We had worked diligently building relationships with the Social Media team and we worked even more closely with the researchers in the Insights & Market Research team. We demonstrated that we sought to understand their business challenges and help discover opportunities along with them. We earned their trust and showed we were more interested in delivering value to Intel than worrying about stepping on anyone’s toes. And the marketing teams were more than willing to share their data feeds with us, both internally and externally, so we could explore and deploy advanced analytics. Our IT BI solutions ended up exceeding their expectations.

 

 

Our IT representatives participated in a corporate-wide strategic discussion with marketing to prepare for an executive-level discussion and were invited to be part of the follow-up activities. Our market researchers saw the huge benefit in collaborating with IT to build out Intel’s vision around customer insights and, more importantly, take that vision and put a strategy around it for all of Intel. This new BI capability is now influencing the design of our Intel user experience (UX) framework. Now finally we are an integral part of corporate marketing and they more naturally reach out and partner with us.  We see the industry trend where CMOs are importing people from IT, consumer analytics and operations to fill emerging skill gaps, so we know our IT BI expertise is valued.

 

 

I am proud that our IT teams have been part of a transformation in marketing - where the analytics inform the “art.” Research support the premise that the CMO of the future is becoming a master of data, creating a data driven culture, automating and working with a sense of urgency to DEMAND that the analytics inform the “art.”

 

 

And the moral of the story is: ”CMO’s, please make friends with your IT department.”  I believe 2013 will be the year our CMO and CIO evolve from being functional peers to being “best friends.”  IT will keep building our ability to anticipate business needs and fuel the transformation of Intel through Insights and Innovation.

 

 

Please share your thoughts with me on Sales and Marketing IT solutions, particularly those focused on using advanced business analytics to gain new customer insights.

 

 

Follow me on Twitter: @Patricia__Perry

Managing the Changing IT Landscape: Business-Class Technology

 

When we think of business class, it’s usually associated with flying. It’s an upgrade from the usual: premium seats, a little extra leg room, and priority boarding. For a flight that’s a couple hours or longer, it’s clearly a luxury.

 

However, when it comes to technology in the enterprise, business class is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.

 

It’s far more than a little extra leg room

 

Business technology is how we make our living. Because we work to live, we care a lot about the technology we use. And the technology we use at home has a distinct impact on the technology experience (and flexibility) we expect at work.

 

With consumer technology, we might organize and secure photos, play games, and stay in touch via social networks, but with business-class technology, we are securing confidential corporate information and IP, managing customer and employee data, and collaborating with partners to help the organization succeed.

 

It’s critical to have the right technology in the workplace. I just read an article on mobihealthnews.com that discusses tablets in healthcare and echoes the sentiment, “A good consumer device is not always a good enterprise device.” It’s really about durability, security, and robust performance.

 

And once you’ve flown business class—or first class, for that matter—it’s hard to go back. I’m going to dive into this topic again soon, and I’d love to get your thoughts.

 

What technology makes a business-class device? How is it different than a consumer device?

 

Chris
@chris_p_intel
#Consumerization #BusinessClass

Lately I have read a lot of articles talking about renaming the CIO from Chief Information Officer to Chief Innovation Officer (or Integration, or Insight…).  Maybe I am a traditionalist, but I have always thought that Chief Information Officer nails the role.  It is all about the information.  How we connect, enrich, derive insights, provide capability, support the business rules, extend use cases or just generally provide capability into the hands of our companies that make us all better, faster or cheaper is core to the role.

  

That being said, I think innovation is a key capability that the CIO and CTO must support.  It helps us in ways that are not incremental improvements, but that accelerates, or even change, the goals of the organization.  In many cases, we spend too little effort specifically towards innovation.  I think this is mainly because, innovation is not easy.  There is no process that I have seen that outlines: Do this and innovation will occur.  Innovation depends things like culture and is unique to the organization and the problems that the organization faces.

 

Have you noticed that innovation in new organizations looks easier? While it might look easier, it’s not impossible to transform a large, established organization to be more innovative.  Within Intel IT, I run the Strategy, Architecture & Innovation Group.  I look at innovation as an inward-focused CTO.

 

From my perspective, innovation requires the resources, the culture and lastly and most importantly, the problems that need to be addressed through innovation.  This blog covers the first one and the other two will be covered in future blogs.

 

THE RESOURCES FOR INNOVATION

 

The first aspect of innovation is that of resources.  While many companies say they support innovation, how do they support it?  Do they actually allocate time to it or do they try to fit it in between the cracks?

 

Here within Intel IT, we look at innovation with several views.  First, we have a very small group that facilitates innovation very specifically. We call it IT Labs and they go through a traditional view of innovation and look at it a bit like a venture capital firm.  We perform research that leads to a proof of technology. That leads to proof of concepts (pilots in many cases) and then we transfer to engineering to implement.  We look at yields through each of these steps as a way to measure our investments.  We expect low yield in the research phase, 40-60% in the proof of technology, 60-80% in the proof of concept and 95% in the transformation step.  This helps us with the question, are we taking enough risk in what we are looking at to help the organization?

 

The second way we look at innovation is by leveraging our  IT Service Management framework.  We ask all of the leaders that manage our IT portfolios and services to look into what innovations can they come up with to help move the needle between keeping the lights on, and the work to grow and transform IT.  This innovation is much more focused and might have many incremental steps between the breakthroughs.

 

The last way we look at innovation is through cross-organization approaches.  We run several innovation harvesting events geared to specific areas.
One is what we call an Innovation Camp (iCamp for short) event.  We identify several key problems that we need to resolve and ask selected individuals from around IT (Operations Managers, Developers, Business Analysts, Engineers, Architects, etc.) to come together and work in teams to identify solutions to the issues.   This process has led to several breakthrough ideas within the organization that would not have been possible unless we had the cross-org teams assigned to working on the problem.  We also use a process similar to this to help harvest new IP for IT to help Intel on it's mission.

 

Innovation is not easy. You have to have multiple approaches to how you are going to innovate. I’d be interested to hear what you are doing around IT innovation.

 

Follow me on Twitter: @EdLGoldman

https://twitter.com/EdLGoldman

To increase our ability to maintain, manage, and protect PCs while decreasing management costs, in 2011 Intel IT completed deployment of Intel® vPro™ technology across the entire enterprise. We have evaluated the business value of four use cases based on Intel vPro technology that have been deployed at Intel.  In each case, we found that Intel vPro technology reduces management costs and decreases downtime – resulting in greater employee productivity.  Read the paper for more details 

Over the past few years, IT has really had to begin developing a new partnership with its users. With rapid changes in technology, and the needs as well as demands of employees, IT has had to create new flexibility and greater choice for workers. Intel IT has been at the forefront of this evolution with our bring-your-own program as well as other initiatives. In this podcast, Lisa Spelman, Director of Employee Computing Platforms at Intel IT, explains how IT has changed its relationship with our company employees, and how effective user centered IT helps drive business growth and productivity.

mHigh volume manufacturing facility, like the ones we have at Intel, requires some serious computing power to run all the automation systems we need to be at the top of the league table in the manufacturing world. Yet this computing power is not going to be of much use unless we have first class storage to go with that.

 

Historically storage systems have gone through many different device designs, interfaces and communication protocols. With the advancements in technology hard drives that we use in everyday life have become very cheap and affordable. Just recently a friend of mine told me of a special in US where he picked up an external 4TB drive for $140. On the other hand, hard drives used in the enterprise solution storage systems can cost anywhere between $250 to $1500 for a hard drive from 76GB to 2TB. These are just rough values, the point here is that there is significant difference in what you can buy for every-day life and use at home and what you get in an enterprise system. So why the big difference, what are we paying for?

 

Well, it is not a simple answer since there are so many different vendors providing high end storage, but here is what I know from our own experience in Intel IT. When we talk about enterprise storage we are not buying just bunch of disks. We are usually paying for a fairly sophisticated computing engine that controls our storage providing us with array of different functionalities. Anything from high availability, redundancy, optimized disk access, cloning, replication, caching for faster access, and so on… You name it. Usually one of the vendors will provide the solution. And in my experience, when you are trying to run a 24x7 operation you want your storage to be capable of number of different things that make your life easier. One of the design features of enterprise storage solution is to take away any storage related processing away from your servers and do it on the storage side so that your servers CPU cycles are not wasted on storage management. Currently what we used to refer to as “controllers” on the storage side have grown to a full blown servers dedicated just to manage disk access - front end and back end. With sophisticated software algorithms running on these “controllers” the possibilities of how we use storage are evolving constantly. And the best thing is that our servers that we use for processing information are none the wiser, it still sees the disks in the same way it did over 45 years ago when first hard drives went in to production.

 

This brings me to the point about different disk types and their price I mentioned above. A recent (well, couple years now, but still fairly new) feature available in enterprise storage, which I find very exciting, is about the use of different types of hard drives within one storage system. This is also known as Tiered Storage or Storage Tiering. The concept is fairly simple – different type hard disks (anything from SAS, SATA, Fibre to Solid State drives and even Flash memory) are used within same storage frame. The brains of operation, our above mentioned “controller” is moving the data between these different tiers of hard drives based on the workload. How are these moves achieved varies from vendor to vendor, from manual to fully automated storage tiering. Obviously the level of automation is something everyone needs to choose based on their requirement and also based on the budget. The storage tiering is all about using different type disks with different performance to achieve that enterprise solution at a fraction of a cost that we paid before when only single type of device was available inside single storage system. For example, in a storage system that uses storage tieirng you could find 3 types of disks – inexpensive SATA, a bit more expensive and better performance FC disks and SSD (or Flash memory) as the top tier (fast, but also expensive). Typical split would be SATA up to 50%, FC up to 40% and 10% SSD. Most of the data would just be sitting there and not being changed, so we move it to inexpensive disks (SATA) and all the data that is active and accessed more frequently is located on FC or SSD storage. Great performance and fairly smart use of resources. And exciting for me as an Intel employee is that a number of vendors (including the one we use) that provide these type solutions are using Intel SSD and Flash memory in their systems.

 

So some interesting new capabilities are out there and these should make our life a bit easier when are supporting a 24x7 operation that knows no downtime. How do we manage these systems on a day-to-day basis is something I will try and write about next time and also expand on some of the other features of enterprise storage. It would be nice to hear what other people are doing and whether your storage is doing all you want it to do…

I'd like to expand on "rjcarlet"'s blog "Cloning/Copying Systems to Reduce Build Times for a *NIX System.  and touch on a method I found to work well in Intel IT.

 

Network based cloning is not new, but I could not find any free solutions out there that allowed you to clone a server while its still up and running.  I wanted to share a proven method I've been using for years.  Once you have a server configured and built the way you like it and need it replicated you can perform the following replication all while the source server is still running!  No more worrying about cloning from an outdated system.  Your system can have all the latest security patches, configurations and applications.

 

I found that cloning for the purpose of replication has its benefits and drawbacks.  For one, if you're cloning, you can be sure that all the servers will be 100% identical and will behave the same.  However the flip side is that if you have a defect, you're carrying it over.  I have found that in this case the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

 

Things you'll need:

  1. A OpenSuse boot cd/USB disk for your destination server.
  2. An NFS or CIFS share to store build scripts on.
  3. A source and destination server.

 

Considerations:

  • If you're going to clone in a production environment, you may want to build over a dedicated network drop to avoid impacting your primary production LAN.
  • This method works best for replicating to identical hardware but does work for migrating to different hardware.  You will need to download the new drivers from the manufacturer and then use the new system as your gold build.


Caveats:

In the interest of time, I'll only detail the high level steps.  If I get enough reader interest I'll go into more detail in another blog.

 

linux cloning architecture.jpg

 

Steps:


  1. If your going to be using this solution often, I found that injecting a base startup script (see example startup script attached) in the OpenSuse iso to configure networking (IP, Gateway..) and to mount a NFS share works the best.  This way you can run your core scripts from an NFS/CIFS share rather than have to burn a new boot cd/USB disk every time you have a script revision.  Simply update the scripts on the share and your done.
  2. Configure the destinations server's logical drivers in its raid configuration and boot it off the OpenSuse iso.
  3. Set the IP address for the server.
  4. Dump the partition table using fdisk from the source server and import using fdisk on your destination server.  If you are migrating to different hardware you'll need to manually redo the partitioning using fdisk.
  5. Format the new partitions and mount under /mnt, /mnt/usr, /mnt/var/ and so on.
  6. Use rsync to copy the source server files over to the new /mnt partitions.  I found "rsync -Hiuvl " options to work the best.  Don't forget to exclude /proc, /dev, /var/run and any nfs directories you may have mounted on the source.
  7. Once the rsync is done you'll need to setup the master boot record using grub.
  8. Change the working directory  to /mnt/etc and modify the following: (Note: I've automated all of this so that I don't have to do any of this manually)
    1. /etc/HOSTNAME
    2. Modify the IP addresses /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg*
    3. Delete any udev records for the network cards under /etc/udev/rules.d
    4. Modify the etc/fstab if you are moving to different hardware to reflect the new partition device files .

 

That's basically it.

 

Additional components can be added to make the build process more streamline, but I found it actually makes it more complex when time comes to troubleshoot failures.  Example,  adding a TFTP boot server will allow you to circumvent the need for a boot iso.

 

Let me know what you think.

Managing the Changing IT Landscape: App Stores in the Enterprise

 

I’ve talked a bit about consumerization strategy in a recent blog post, and by default, a huge part of success involves change. As consumer trends continue to drive their way into the business world, change abounds. The latest? App stores in the enterprise.

 

Enter BYOA—or Bring Your Own App

 

Users are now upping the ante on Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) by downloading apps that may or may not be IT-approved. It’s known as Bring Your Own App (BYOA), and it’s here to stay. It’s also risky. According to some TechTarget data I saw yesterday, IT orgs are much less likely to trust business data and services built for consumer applications than they are to support BYOD hardware.

 

According to a recent Forbes article, “With nearly two million apps in the Apple and Google* app stores alone, it’s nearly impossible for businesses to ensure the security and appropriateness of every app that an employee might download on a corporate or employee-owned device". The good news? App stores are a huge opportunity for IT to gain greater control—whether it’s through software installations, role-based app delivery, licensing, or regulatory compliance.

 

I think we’re going to see more and more app stores cropping up as this gains traction. In fact, I recently learned about the Microsoft* Application Acceleration program, which builds on the rapidly increasing number of business- and industry-specific applications available on the Windows* 8 operating system.

 

Does your organization have an app store, or are you considering one? Do you think it will give IT greater control?


Chris
@chris_p_intel
#Consumerization #enterpriseappstore

What is the different between smart guy and genius? Take few secconds to think about it.....

 

Answer: The smart guy will avoid the trouble that only genius can get you out of. The key point of this blog surrounds being proactive, so let's consider the correlation. I’ll focus on being proactive in the infrastructures system domain, but the concept can be used everywhere.

 

In the daily life of a platforms engineer, you have two options:

  1. You can spend your time managing incidents for systems. This requires no upfront planning time but lots of time troubleshooting and recovering.
  2. You can avoid those systems incidents by being proactive. This requires more upfront planning but drastically reduces time spent recovering, not to mention the impact to the customer!

 

Some think they are maintaining their systems perfectly, and it may be true as they are very professional, that is their systems uptime is very high and they solve issues very fast. Actually by not being proactive, they are in higher risk (in addition to other advantages of being proactive they lose) and it is matter of time until their systems will be impacted and potentially cause customer issues.

 

So what does it mean to be proactive?  Being proactive is to minimize system issues before the systems breaks. Use the analogy of managing your car… the more you get it serviced proactively - change the oil, filters, tyre pressures, respond to warning lights on the dashboard, etc. - the less likely it is to break down  on you when you’re on a long journey. Ask yourself what if you manage your platforms in a similar way?

 

Why should you be proactive?

Being proactive increase the influence you have on top of incident. See in the next schema, more actions means more influence.

triangle.png

-          - Recovery time - Your systems are healthier and the probability for systems failure is much lower.

- -        - Proactive Time – time spend on been proactive is much lower than fixing issues

-          - Customer impact Time - Save money – of production downtime

 

Here are couple of domains where you can be proactive:

Capacity management – when managing an environment with hundreds of servers and many Terabytes of disk space, you might run out of something without notice and the impact might even be environment downtime. This is especially true when you build a new environment and start production. The production capacity is growing and consuming resources. Sometimes you can find one of the components in your environment completely full and extending it might take a while, so your systems will be down for that time. To avoid this, one needs to proactively  monitor system capacity, analyze trends correlated to the production capacity, and act accordingly. The key items need to be monitored are:

  • Disk space – when assigning disk space to any system, there is a limit. Many times disk space has high correlation with the production capacity (for example, databases, logfiles, etc.). Generate report every x days\weeks\month (depending on your environment change) and according to the production capacity change create the disk space trend for the different systems. With those trends try to forecast the needed disk space for the maximum production capacity, and if need extend the disks.
  • Resources (CPU, Memory, Disk performance, network) – when the production capacity is growing, the system performance might also growing, for many reasons (more users, more jobs, etc.). The same as in disk capacity, also here need to monitor the system performance and create trends correlated to the production capacity. If need extend memory, replace servers to stronger servers, extend network bandwidth, etc.

 

Alerting cleanup – For capacity management we talked about long term proactive maintenance. This one is more for day-to-day operations. This task is very simple but requires one time effort and maintenance. In this case you just need to make your system clean from any alerting. Clean means to take care and fix what is needed attention. You must do this regardless the severity of the alert or the amount of the alerts. If you get alerts that are not important and you do nothing with them, remove them. If you get many alerts and have no time to deal with them, which means do nothing with those alerts, remove them. Most important is not to ignore alerts due to time restriction or low severity. To do these proactive actions need to do the follow:

  • Go over ALL alerts and remove the un-necessary alerts. Yes, I means over all. I know it is a massive task but worth it.
  • Once you have only the needed alerts, go over all active alerts and fix them.  Clean all alerts without resolve the problem will not help, the issue will repeat, and you might have break systems.
  • Maintain this status. Monitor your alerts on daily base and take care for alert while they are in their low severity

 

We did the above in Intel IT and as I mentioned it didn’t change our up-time, but dramatically reduced our break-fix, as we could validate from our incident management metrics. As a result, we have more some spare time to be spent in a proactive management mode and our systems are much more reliable.

 

In my next blog I will discuss some of the methods used to be proactive, for example, proactively upgrading hardware to newer models to reduce failure rates and provide more processing power, while also reducing power load in our data centres.

Over the years I have used many different methods in trying to duplicate system builds, as well as cut down on build times especially in a catastrophic failure that requires a complete rebuild. Some of the main issues that arose around duplicating systems all depends on what the end results needs to be.

 

  • Do you want to have an exact copy or just need multiply systems with the same build and setup with slight configuration differences. The other aspect is to think about is how you want your system to look for each user as they login.
  • Do you want them to have the same look and feel? What about the same support directory structures?
  • Should all of the servers have the same functionality?

 

The answers to these questions may lead you to use 3rd party block based duplicating software, or to document steps to manually build the base system with scripted post build setups, or even to use bare metal restore processes.

 

In some aspect it really does not matter how you achieve your base build. The challenge is more around which is the easiest way to duplicate the build for the same type of functioning system. From what I have found, with builds that require large quantities of builds with 99% of the exact configurations it is best to use some sort of block copy that allows you to build large amounts of disks and just swap them out as the hardware goes bad. Of course this does not make the systems unique. This will still require a small script to configure the small amount of changes you need to make to allow the system on the network without conflicts. This method does have some shortcomings; as the base build changes the disks in overflow will be out date and will need to be redone. The biggest advantage to this method you don’t need to be technical for this type of process. This task can be done by basic technicians anywhere around the world to get the base system back on the network. Once it is on the network it can be reconfigured remotely.

 

One of my more interesting methods for deployment around the world was to build a *NIX system that each supporting site would own. I am a big believer in as much hands as possible during the initial build process for anyone to understand how the system work and how to support the system. Without any hands on how would one learn the system functionality? This also promotes refreshing some skills that may be lost due to infrequent use. I created a process for each site to perform their own builds with docs and scripts. This process helps promote learning and consistency across all systems created. An install would follow the doc on base build. Each builder would run into similar build issues which were documented along with how to resolve them. After the base build was completed, each builder would need to modify scripts to complete the build. Each of the scripts would range from driver installs to setting up profiles of different users. This would allow each site to configure the system the way their site operated but keep them consistent between locations. The scripts would help each builder understand what is being installed and what commands are used to build the system. They would also help support the system if any issues would arise.

 

With all the different products out there on the market and supplied by the OS vendor, there are many different ways to accomplish the same result.  As there are many methods out there, and not one is the answer to all needs, there are some main things to think about:  who is doing the builds, will they be supporting the systems, how many systems do you need to create and how often. Most importantly, document your process well to assist your supporting groups.

Managing the Changing IT Landscape: Ultrabook™ Devices for Business

 

So it’s come full circle. I recently posted a blog about finding the right tool for the job, and now I’m trying to find the Ultrabook™ device that will work best for me. I’m in the fortunate position of having access to some through my job—but the best approach I’ve found so far is talking to others who are using them. I’ve also been getting input from Intel IT, and they’ve been evaluating Ultrabook devices in the enterprise. 

 

These devices are getting a lot of press these days, and it’s no surprise. They deliver on a lightweight yet durable design that houses all the power you need for any task. PCMag.com recently rated the 10 best Ultrabook devices with a great overview of what’s out there and links to full reviews.

 

It’s all about how you work …

 

Truth be told, I tried a detachable tablet as my primary computing device and wasn’t satisfied. It was too small, and typing on the keyboard aggravated my tendonitis. Today, I’m using a Dell* tablet that I purchased as a complement to my corporate-issued laptop.

 

There are lots of options out there, but it’s really about figuring out what’s best for how you work. I like that the touch capabilities of the Windows* 8 operating system give me quick access to my social and family life, right alongside the business stuff. When I’m traveling, I can easily maneuver the tablet and still get to everything I need—from documents and e-mail to calendar management and entertainment. I’m also looking forward to trying some of the upcoming two-in-one Ultrabook convertibles to reduce the number of devices in my increasingly heavy travel bag.

 

Are you using an Ultrabook device, or do you plan to? Which models are you considering?

Not sure what an Ultrabook is? ... check out www.intel.com/ultrabookforbusiness

 

Chris
@chris_p_intel
#Consumerization #ultrabook #4biz

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