In our previous post, A Silent Revolution in the Information Technology Industry we observed that the cycle time to implement and deliver a business application has been steadily decreasing over the past fifty years from several years at the dawn of computing to a few weeks or faster today.

This acceleration of delivery by two or three orders of magnitude is a byproduct a rapidly evolving and maturing current IT infrastructure.

The acceleration comes from the use of pre-built components and our ability to schedule data, applications and compute engines separately, sourcing these resources to the places and methods of lowest cost. We also discovered that this phenomenon is not unique to IT.  Most mature industries have become service integrators taking advantage of pre-existing services. In the example of our previous blog entry,  it would be foolish a car insurance company wishing to build national coverage to start building a network of car repair shops.  Car insurance companies avail themselves of existing car repair shops, and it would be preposterous to think otherwise.

Yet when we think about IT for a large organization, we don't think twice about hundreds of millions of dollars spent in vertically integrated infrastructure, tens of thousands of square feet in huge data centers housing thousands of servers, many of them performing no more than file serving functions and most of the time woefully underutilized.

Under these circumstances it is no surprise that in spite of the proliferation of outsourced services in the past ten years or so, IT is still primarily a privilege for large organizations.  It could be argued that this state of affairs is a side effect of the large granularity of IT resources:  A 10-employee business may not be able to afford to purchase and maintain a collection of servers, each one dedicated to an application and the associated in house expertise.

Cloud computing is changing the dynamics of application integration and delivery very fast.  Service providers in the internet are beginning to offer fine grained services that obviate the need of a large up front capital investment by service consumers:  it is no longer necessary to purchase a complete server for data storage even if only a small fraction is used.  Storage can be rented fromthe cloud by the gigabyte per month.  Virtualization has made it possible for service providers to offer a fractional server for rent for much less than what an in house physical server would cost.

The benefit accrues not only to end user service consumers.  It is lowering the cost for new service provider entrants in the market addressing niches that were not profitable before.  The Mozy backup service and the Pi Corporation data presence services, recent acquisitions by EMC constitute examples of this new trend.

A consumer may pay just a few dollars a month for a cloud based storage service.  This is an example of an IT service scaled down to the consumer market.  Instantiating a service takes just a few mouse clicks and a credit card or a Pay Pal funds transfer.  Compare this process with the status quo of an "in-house" deployment:

The poor consumer is required to research trade publications and the Internet and identify a suitable backup product.  The consumer purchases the product from a software vendor and installs it in the target machine.  Once installed, the consumer is required to follow an onerous regime of regular backups.

Even when the backups are scheduled the user needs to be aware of a number of contingencies, such as ensuring the machines are up and running at the time of the scheduled backup, and if the backup is done to a network shared drive, to also ensure that the connection is in working order and that the target machine is up and running.

If the unthinkable happens and there is a problem with the primary drive, some consumers may not have the expertise to perform the repair and recovery and may need to hire a technician at significant cost.   Even with this hired expertise, horror of horrors, the consumer may find out in this dire moment that backups are missing or done improperly leading to partial or total data loss.

What is wrong with this picture?  First, the end user is being used as the point of integration for the IT process.  We have come to accept this situation in an IT context by sheer habit.  It would be unacceptable in any other context: would a customer hire a taxi that requires the customer to drive the vehicle?

In our next post we will use a constructive proof of how to build a consumer backup service using more primitive component services.

Using a similar approach, the lowered integration services will not only benefit the consumer end user, but also will create opportunities for service delivery in emerging markets.  The fine grained component resources that the cloud makes possible, will enable a new generation of service providers in these markets delivering services specifically tailored for these markets.  The potential economic benefit of this new paradigm is potentially enormous.

Earlier this month I was able to test out Absolute Software's Computrace service that utilizes Intel® Anti-Theft Technology.  You may have heard of Absolute Software's consumer service called LoJack for Laptops which enables you to track down a stolen laptop.  Computrace is the corporate version of that service that includes additional features for IT shops .  This month, Absolute announced a new version of Computrace that, as mentioned, uses the Anti-Theft technolgy found in new Intel® Centrino® 2 with vPro™ technology PCs from Lenovo.

According to Absolute, 88% of stolen laptops are never recovered.  For IT shops, this poses a couple of problems: loss of the asset and loss of the data.  With the Computrace service, you have a chance to address both of those.

When using Computrace, once a day your laptop will use the available internet connection to phone home to the Computrace servers on the internet.  Under normal circumstances, the laptop will receive an "all clear" signal from the servers and disconnect until the following day.  All this happens silently in the background without user intervention.

If the laptop is stolen or misplaced, the IT department can log into the Computrace website and mark that laptop as stolen.  The next time that laptop phones home, it is now informed that it is stolen and will execute a policy based sequence of actions.  One possible action is that it begins immediately wiping sensitive data from the hard drive.  It can also begin sending out packets that will allow Absolute Software to trace the location of the laptop and notify the authorities in the jurisdiction.

There are several layers of security available.  If a thief reformats the hard drive and installs a fresh copy of Windows, the Computrace software will automatically reinstall itself from the Computrace code embedded in the BIOS of the laptop.

You can also activate a "poison pill" that will prevent the laptop from booting at all.  This can be activated either when it phones home and receives a "stolen" signal, or you can set a threshold and if the laptop hasn't phoned home within a set number of days it will automatically lock up and prevent booting.  Once locked, the laptop is effectively useless.  You can't enter the BIOS and you can't boot to any device.  If the device is recovered, IT can produce an unlock code that will return the laptop to full functionality.

When paired with disk encryption, this is a powerful countermeasure to laptop theft.  If the data is protected by encryption and the notebook is unuseable because of the Intel Anti-theft technology, the laptop effectively has no value to anyone.  With the LoJack capability, a stolen laptop actually becomes a liability since it could be telling the local authorities where the stolen laptop is.

During my hands-on test, I repeated locked and unlocked the Lenovo T400 laptop using a variety of methods like reporting it stolen and having it phone home or entering too many incorrect passwords.  When it was locked, I received some simple text telling me that the laptop was locked and to contact my IT department.  Swapping hard drives wouldn't unlock it.  It was impossible to enter BIOS.  This brand new T400 laptop was completly unuseable.  And once I entered the IT unlock passcode, it sprang back to life as if nothing had happened.  I was hooked.  As this becomes widely adopted, I have to imagine that thieves will lose interest in stealing most corporate laptops.

You can start using this cool new technology today.  Lenovo is rolling out firmware upgrades for its T400, T500, X200, and X301 notebooks based on Intel Centrino 2 with vPro technology.  Absolute Software has the new Computrace service ready to go and it's a quick and painless installation.  As skeptical as I am, I was pleased with the results.

The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century led to the pervasive replacement of manual labor with steel-based machinery powered by coal technology. The visible icons of this revolution are Thomas Newcomen and James Watt with their improvements to the steam engine design.

One aspect that has received little attention is the role of the underlying industrial processes. Railway robber barons did not start from ground zero; they were able to build their empires without having to own coal or iron mines, or having deep knowledge about the extraction technologies. Different grades of steel with known properties became available to build locomotives and steam engines. Manufacturing became more efficient due to a number of standards. Standardized screw sizes in nuts and bolts made these parts interchangeable not only lowered the cost of building the railroad infrastructure, but also made possible the large scale production of firearms that the tycoons needed to defend their lairs.

A similar transformation is happening with the information technology industry. This transformation is being driven by the synergistic interaction of three technologies, virtualization, service orientation and grid computing. As in the industrial revolution, this trio of technologies allows an efficient division of labor. The payoff of this efficiency comes in reduced cost of the delivery of IT services and in their reach across market segments and across geographies. IT services will no longer be the exclusive privilege of large organizations that can afford a sizable in house IT organization; these services will be affordable to small businesses and even individual consumers, and not only in advanced economies but also in developing countries across the world.

There are three essential components to that drives an IT service: the application that defines the service, the data providing the user context, and the computing engines that power the application. Sixty years ago all the pieces were tightly integrated: software was custom built for a specific target machine, and data was essentially an appendage of the code. The industrial evolution analog would be a locomotive manufacturer having to mine the iron ore, doing materials research, making the different kinds of steel and even machining the bolts. This would be an expensive proposition. Since bolts would be unique, the user would be forced to purchase replacement bolts from the locomotive manufacturer. Industries in their initial stages tend to be vertically integrated in this manner, and their products are expensive, limiting their market reach.

An individual consumer can get connected to the world through e-mail in just 10 minutes through a Web mail provider. Fifteen years ago a similar user would have needed expertise to build a TCP/IP stack on top of Windows 3.1, and even with that expertise it would have taken a couple days to set up an ISP account and research and integrate the necessary components. Thirty years ago the user would have had to write a SMTP client or even purchase at least a PDP-11 computer and integrate a Unix stack. It would not have been that easy; it might have been necessary to start by compiling the source code and configuring it specifically for the target machine. A corporate or university research environment would have been necessary to start with a running system to run the compilation.

It is useful to draw an analogy with a mature industry to see this pattern at work. Let's look at the processes used by an automobile insurance company with national coverage to fix a fender bender for a client.

Unless the accident happened in a large city, the company may not even have a local office. The customer calls a toll-free number to file a claim. The insurance company assigns the case to a different company, a settlement company with local presence. An adjuster for the settlement company assesses the damage and refers the case to body shop to have the the repairs done. Meanwhile, the customer is given a temporary replacement vehicle from a car rental company while the repairs are made. We can trace the economic chain ten or twelve more steps until the point where raw materials are extracted. The insurance company can make a business, not because it has expertise in the myriad steps that it takes to deliver their automobile collision service, but because it can rely on a pre-existing infrastructure of services, each one with predictable time and cost. The level of predictability is such that the insurance company can come up with the cost of the insurance policy and reasonably predict what the profit margin will be.

About 6 months ago I got a laptop with a (non-Intel) solid state drive (SSD). While I loved the reliability and power savings, I was under-whelmed with the performance, especially when writing to the drive. Last month I upgraded to a new Intel SSD and the difference was amazing. With the introduction of Intel’s revolutionary SSD products, this technology is ready to take the IT world by storm and win over both the end-users and the IT department.

For end-users, the performance benefits are astonishing – it’s like putting a turbo charger on your PC. I’ve seen benchmarks that show Intel’s SSDs being up to 700% faster than 7200 RPM hard drives on certain tests. But for me, the only test that matters is the real world. For my test, I used a coworker’s standard IT supported laptop. It’s a 2 year old model with a corporate OS image and we defragmented the hard drive before beginning the test. We copied the hard drive image onto the SSD and made no other changes. We then booted the same laptop multiple times using both the SSD and HDD. The average boot time on the HDD was 3.5 minutes. With the SSD it was 45 seconds! Almost a 5X improvement in boot time!

Installing applications, opening applications, startup and shutdown were all amazingly faster. Even though the test is over, the coworker won’t give the SSD back. Users are going to love SSDs.

But SSDs aren’t just for users. IT is going to fall in love with SSDs as well.

Hard drives are usually the top failure mechanism in a laptop…and data recovery services for failed hard drives are expensive. Without any moving parts, SSDs bring unparalleled levels of reliability - Intel's SSD is rated to withstand a 1500G shock. So even if the users are leaving their laptops running while they are running to catch a plane, the SSD won't be damaged. When traditional HDDs fails, it’s usually without warning and catastrophic. By the time you know there is a problem it’s too late to do anything. SSDs generally “wear out” instead of “failing”. This “wear out” process is predictable and detectible…meaning you can plan to replace aging SSDs before they lose data. And the anticipated end-of-life of an SSD is a lot further out in time than most of us keep notebooks. The combination of increased reliability and the predictability of the failure is going to be a huge benefit to IT.

Not only are SSDs rugged, they are energy efficient. Intel’s SSDs use about 1/10^th the energy that a HDD uses. For laptop users, this delivers even longer battery life. But the power savings are so compelling that IT departments are beginning to use SSDs in their servers to bring down energy bills. In fact, Intel has a separate line of SSDs focused on the server market.

Most OEMs have begun offering Intel SSDs on their latest notebooks. During today’s economic times, stretching IT budgets is more important than ever. Other posts have discussed how Intel® vPro™ Technology can deliver significant Total Cost of Ownership savings by reducing desk side visits. Combining those savings with the savings from Intel SSD products can really help keep a lid on ongoing PC support costs. And the end-users have a great performing PC too. It’s pretty rare these days when both IT and the end-users can both be happy. We’re all witnessing one of those rare, Win-Win situations.

Just a quick note that we'll be covering the Intel technology roadmap at several upcoming IPIP events over the next two weeks.

Jesse Treger (my boss, and a walking encyclopedia of Intel technology) will be presenting at Tysons corner Oct 28 and Minneapolis Oct 30

I'll be presenting in Dallas Nov 6.

The presentation covers a wide variety of topics including process technology, architecture, servers, clients, VPro, virtualization, power management, Atom and even cloud computing. The theme of the presentation is to show the real value of technology in terms of benefits to IT, even when we get into the arcane details of the 45 nanometer manufacturing process.

Hope to see you there!

Rick

Have you seen that Mel Gibson movie What Women Want where supposedly Gibson’s character can read women’s minds and really know what they want? Well, we don’t pretend to be able to read your minds…but we do have some insights as to what IT professional want.

I know these things because I manage the Intel Premier IT Professional website where we post all sorts of IT best practice resources. And I track what pages our members go to, what white papers, videos, podcasts or presentations they download, what local seminars they attend, what comments they make on our postings. Our motivation for doing this is to be able to provide best practice resources on the topics of most interest to IT professionals.

So, for 2008…what would you guess are the most popular areas of the Intel Premier IT Professional web site? In typical TV late night host fashion, I give you the top 10 beginning with #11..read on to see why the top 10 starts at 11.

11 Competing on Analytics Chapter Two: What Makes an Analytical Competitor?

10 Business Value Index Demo

9 Gemini Division

8 Multi-core Architecture technology brief

7 Competing on Analytics Chapter One: The Nature of Analytical Competition (No longer available due to agreement with publisher; However Chapter 2 is still available which is why I've included it at #11 above.)

6 Intel Information Technology Performance Report

5 Intel Premier IT Professional web site web tour

4 IDC: Choosing the Right Hardware for Server Virtualization white paper

3 The Intel Premier IT magazine winter 2008 edition

2 The Intel Premier IT magazine summer 2008 edition

1 Intel product roadmap presentation

So what's surprising on this list? A couple of things: One is that the Intel Premier IT magazine was far and away the number one area on the web site if you combine the #2 and #3 items above. If you've seen the magazine, you know it's a quality product with 15-20 articles each issue covering the latest best practice learnings from Intel and industry leaders, case studies, a CIO profile, an Intel product roadmap and even some fun stuff. So maybe it shouldn't be surprising. The latest edition just hit the streets and so it doesn't even show up on this list yet. You can see the winter 2009 soft copy on the Intel Premier IT Professional website now.

The enormous popularity of the Competing on Analytics book excerpt is also surprising. We've published two chapters of the book and both of them have garnered significant views. I think it shows IT professionals find the concept of building competitive strategies around data-driven insights intriguing.

The other surprising item was the increased popularity in videos. Two videos and one flash demo cracked the top 10, and even beyond the top 10 overall viewership has soared. In fact, we had to recently quadruple our bandwidth to make sure our members have a good user experience downloading The latest postings in our Video archives include virtualization chalk talks, Intel CIOs addressing social media issues, a Sony Imageworks case study and some fun Intel® vPro^TM technology videos.

So, do any of the top 10 surprise you? They shouldn't because you told us - not only through your comments but through your activity. We'll continue to serve up this great content plus more. Thank you for contributing and we'll continue to listen!

You may recall Nicholas G Carr for his classic Harvard Business Review article about the commoditization of IT.

In his recent book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google quoted in Bill Snyder's CIO Magazine article he claims data centers will become obsolete with the adoption of cloud computing.

Looking beyond the hyperbole, my thought is that as the cloud is adopted in the industry, patterns of ownership for data centers will change. The situation won't be black and white, that is, either corporate owned data centers or everything in the cloud.

To the extent that corporate applications have a modular architecture, what we'll see is a gradual outsourcing of non-critical application components to cloud resources. Corporate owned data centers may become smaller, but servers that otherwise would have been there will be purchased by the outsourcing provider. This is consistent with of efficient markets. Coase argues that an optimizing process is at work where the size of an organization (or a data center in this case) is the result of finding the balance between competing tendencies ("transaction costs").

It is hard to believe that data centers will disappear. Companies may decide that their crown jewel applications and data are better run in house. However, to the extent that these applications are modular and federated, non-critical components or components not associated with LOB will be outsourced. Fewer servers will be needed to run the applications, leading to smaller data centers.

The servers needed to run the non-critical functions will not go away; the will be owned (or leased) by the outsourcing provider. These servers will run in a highly optimized, multi-tenant and virtualized environment. The overal effect is that resource usage is optimized over the whole ecosystem.

In this outsourced, multi-tenant environment, manageability and monitoring capabilities become paramount, including the conveyance of metadata across multiple logical levels and the ability to provide multiple logical views to support iron clad SLAs.

Virtualization as an essential ingredient to make the cloud work because it allows applications and their hosts to be scheduled independently. The article also brings issues of security and transparency standing in the way of the cloud. More than a fundamental roadblock, these issues are a function of industry maturity, and it is reasonable to expect that they will be eventually addressed once the outsourced resources become quantifiable with respect to the businesses served.

In my last blog, I briefly talked how small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) can contribute to the ‘Green IT' initiative that is gaining moment in the global market place. I had a couple questions sent to me to break down two topics: One, how is IT power being consumed by end users and secondly what type of impact can SMBs have as it relates to ‘Green IT'.

Think about how power is used in a business environment, yes there are the basic energy costs of lights in the building and the electricity for your heating and cooling system however there are also power needs for other workspaces in your building. If you walked into you company's breakroom/kitchen, you would probably be able to identify at least 3 items that use power (refrigerator, coffee pot, microwave, etc...).

Now think about your employees' work area. At someone's desk they can have several items that require power: a clock, a fan, a cell phone charger, maybe a singing Dilbert and likely a PC as well. When we think of that PC, there is a lot to consider. There are several studies publicly available that show how much power is being used by SMBs, and how important of an issue it is for their business. According to a 2007 Gallup survey (http://www.gallup.com/poll/tag/Americas.aspx), over 54% of small businesses rate rising energy costs as one of their top business concerns and 43% have already implemented energy saving strategies to control costs.

One of the top power consumption issues, one I have talked to many SMBs about, is the common practice of employees leaving their computers on 24 hours a day. US electricity costs of leaving PCs on (while unattended) reaches $1.7 billion a year. This equates to a lot of money taken directly away from the bottom line. Rakesh Kumar from Gartner states it in future looking terms for large business by saying, "By 2010, about half of the Forbes Global 2000 companies will spend more on energy than on hardware such as servers. Energy costs, now about 10% of the average IT budget, could rise to 50% in a matter of years." This type of energy cost for large businesses will have a similar effect on small businesses.

PC energy consumption has traditionally been a "hidden cost" receiving relatively little attention. Typically when we think power consumption, the large enterprise data centers with their rows and servers come to mind. But the reality is PC power consumption matters as well. Data presented by Gartner demonstrates that on a global basis, compared to servers, PC's actually generate more CO2 emissions as compared with Servers, including cooling. Gartner broke down power consumption in the IT space as follows:

• PCs & monitors (39%)

• Servers and storage (23%)

• Fixed-line telecommunications (15%)

• Mobile telecommunication (9%)

• LAN & office telecommunications (7%)

• Printers (6%)

Source Gartner Inc. "Tera-Architectures A Convergence of New Technologies" by Martin Reynolds July 26, 2007

Moreover, according to an EPA study (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revisions/downloads/computer/ComputerPowerMnmt.pdf) , up to 90% of PCs have power management disabled, so PCs left running often may remain at idle rather than going to lower power sleep state. Leaving an energy efficient PC running when not in use (night/weekends) is analogous to leaving a car running when it's not being driven.

Not surprising, the main areas that require focus are PCs and monitors. Servers have received a lot of attention because they are an obvious concentration of power consumption. They are power inefficient and offer the opportunity to remove significant amounts of visible costs (and usually, but somewhat more incidentally, CO2). However, the real area where the greatest overall effect can be made is at the desktop and with client devices. This is a harder challenge because of the behavioural issues (leaving systems on the entire day) that are involved in "fixing" the problem.

One approach that many small businesses could do to help conserve energy consumption is to focus on what you can do during non-business hours. For example, if you have PCs (Desktops or Mobile) and monitors that are not turned off on Friday night and run the entire weekend - well, there are 2+ days of wasted power with no business benefit. If you look at a small business environment where there are more than several desktops, notebooks, and servers () (as you've just said that servers shouldn't be the only focus wrt power consumption...), the energy saved by having all machines shut off for the weekend can make a real difference in energy costs. In addition, make sure you purchase Energy Star ^TM (a system-level specification including components such as processor, chipset, power supply, HDD, graphics controller and memory monitors and computers) products. These products are made up of energy efficient components that will help save power when in use.

So how can SMBs start becoming more Green? Start looking at where you are using energy throughout your company workspaces. If you are not using a piece of equipment on the weekends whether it is a microwave or a monitor make sure the power is turned off to it. I recommend you start by looking look at which PCs and servers are still on when you are leaving the office this Friday. This will give you a good idea of the initial impact your company could provide by reducing your power consumption. In addition, if you are already using a manage service provider (MSP) to manage your network, ask them if they have a power savings plan that you could implement.

I would be very interested to hear what other ‘Green IT' ideas are out there. As mentioned previously ‘Green IT' does not just effect large enterprises. Energy consumption is something that not only impacts the status of our current physical environment but it also directly affects the financial bottom line for today's small and medium sized businesses.