Last year Intel announced the ultra mobile PC using Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor N270 (1.60GHz) . I commented on its particular incarnation as the Purse PC. I was holding my breath waiting for this to come out. The designer PC is here. I first saw it in a major luxury retailer’s catalog and then in a magazine ad. It is designed by Vivienne Tam and is adorned with large pink and orange chrysanthemums.

Men, don’t stop reading here. It’s your chance to buy your significant other a piece of electronic equipment as a gift and get away with it!

I am still waiting for one by one of my favorite designers, something that is iridescent black with contrasting corners, or pinstripes, or white on white damask…or…retro. We need variety to create market mass and user identity differentiation. But I think the floral treatment is a good start. It is beautiful.

And...for the security minded, who the heck is going to steal this thing from you in an airport?

“Pardon me, I believe that is my Vivienne Tam PC you are carrying underneath your trenchcoat. I am sure it was just a mistake that you confused it with your black standard-sized notebook.”

The ideal theft-proofing will be the DIY design-your-own PC skin at the vendor website, using a host of design elements and color, spray paint effects, etc., all baked in of course. That screams: “This is not my Dad!” via remote control. You saw it here.

Next question: what are people putting on their purse PCs. I have to know! And what is the demographic? Click for some clues. The purse PC does have a matching carrying case, and couture dress, if you can afford it. But I notice that on another site someone complained that there was no mirror on it. Possible new graphics app: Mirrorware. Hmmm.

After spending the last 6 months researching emerging technologies around the IT Client platform, I have identified two must have technologies when considering your client refresh.  The first is Solid State Hard disks.  While the cost is a concern at initial glance, the benefit you receive from this technology is incredible.  We have seen benefits such as no more hard drive failures do to failures from moving parts.  Increased performance from faster machine startup and resume times.  Increased application responsiveness from quicker access on a SSD versus traditional platform.  Fragmented hard drives become an issue of the past and you can now save costs on 3rd party defrag tools and/or custom solutions you develop in house.  These are just some of the many benefits we have seen, for more in depth review check out our recently released whitepaper - http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-2524. But beyond all of these benefits are the ones you may need in the future.  As IT moves to more and more of a Virtualized Client environment, technologies like these help make adoption much easier.  When testing the Solid State Disks, we noticed that our Virtualized IT environment running in a traditional Type-2 Client Hypervisor actually ran 27% faster than the same virtual environment on a traditional platter based drive.  This brings me to the next technology, VT-d.  This is the next evolution in client support of virtualization.  While todays more common systems have VT-x, VT-d is now available on many newer systems today.  VT-s offers what we refer to as "direct pass through" interface for virtual machines to communicate with the system hardware.  What this means for you is that you can have a virtualized OS that can talk directly to certain parts of your systems hardware without having to go through a virtualization layer in a Host OS.  This will also enable better use of Type-1 Hypervisors or "Native Client" hypervisors that will allow side by side, on at the same time OS operation on a single platform.  Imagine being able to support a corporate and personal build on the same machine but keeping them isolated from each other.  This opens the door to a host of possibilities for future IT shops.  Not all of these technologies are ready to run full speed today, but with most shops carrying a 2-3 year refresh cycle, it is important to buy the right technologies at the right time so when you want to deploy these, you have systems that support them.  So make sure you check these two technologies out and get them into your client roadmap as soon as possible.

Most of the people participating in this part of the Intel Community are IT folks. We all share some common skills and backgrounds, and likely degrees in similar things like Information Systems.

We also share a commonality in the workplace - we work in a cost center. IT, in most cases, is not a money-maker for a company. Product divisions create things, sales and marketing divisions sell things, but IT just keeps it all up and running. Money doesn't flow through IT, it flows TO IT to pay for the networks, phones, servers, clients, software, websites, etc.

So when it comes time for cost-cutting, the cost centers are the first on the chopping block. So how do you keep your employees going when all around them budgets are being cut, headcount actions remain a possibility, and the economy around them pours through instability?

Now keep in mind we're not perfect - we don't always do things as consistently as we should, but we try.

Here are Heath's Five Suggestions for IT in 2009.

1. More consistent communications - get the CIO and the senior IT leaders in front of people talking about what's going on within the IT. Be open to listening to your internal blogs and forums environments where people tend to be more vocal, and actively participate in these "new" communication styles. Communication shifts, and we have to shift with it.

2. Regularly scheduled on-site social events. We've had a catered breakfast and two lunches this year for all of IT on site. We also did an "Amazing Race" competition that brought teams together from all parts of IT, complete with catered BBQ lunch, some exciting video game playing, and wacky relay races. Get people away from their desks and provide opportunities to socialize with their peers. I know people who work in a 3 aisle radius, but there are a ton of other people in IT that are just as cool and just as interesting - give me an opportunity to meet them.

3. Embed the fun at a department level. A number of departments have purchased video game systems and are setting up game time over the lunch hour for their teams. Right now I'm participating in one with my entire program team, and I got feedback from one of my employees that this has gone a long way in bringing fun into the workplace. You don't have to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a gaming system, so bring in a board game to your staff meeting, and instead of spending an hour on passdowns, spend an hour flying around Park Place* and Boardwalk* with your team.

4. Reset your expectations if necessary. The world is not the same as it was in the dot com boom. Companies are shifting their spending to research and innovation, and growth is slowing. You can't expect that people will maintain the same level of passion they had before if you aren't actively encouraging it and promoting it. If you're a manager, you can't keep raising the bar if people feel like they are beaten down by outside influences. Be realistic about what your team can achieve and set REAL stretch goals.

5. Focus on strengths, NOT areas of development. People in IT will always have something new to learn, but let them do that when they are ready for it. Focus on what they are good at and talk about those things. Get them into jobs that accentuate the positive and not punishment for the improvement areas. Yes - make sure people have the basic skills for the job and interact positively in the workplace, but if you've got someone who is superior at programming and not at public speaking - stop trying to put them in front of the customer and let them code to their heart's content!

Give it a shot and see what happens in your team! IT has a strategic place in the growth and development of any company - but you have to make it happen.

I welcome all feedback and comments about what your organizations are doing to keep the motivation and the passion in IT.

Yesterday, Intel released this announcement on the Digital Health "Intel Health Guide" product and it's clearance by the FDA. This looks to be a very exciting device that will go a long way in applying technology to provide a more personal, human healthcare experience while maintaining care quality.

Working in IT, I have not always had good visibility into the business of Intel. In IT, we talk about "customers" which refers to Intel employees using IT services, not Intel customers who buy and use Intel's products.

However, as a program/project manager in the IT Mergers and Acquisitions team, I am gaining unique insights into how Intel builds products by engaging with customers and understanding needs, not just short term but potentially very long term.

For example, Intel recently acquired a company called WebVMC. While working with the Digital Health and WebVMC folks on the IT integration of that acquisition, I've gained new insights into the direction Intel is going with its businesses around Digital Health.

I'm looking forward to future projects that will help me as an IT solutions provider truly understand the business aspects involved so that the solutions I build and deploy help meet those business objectives. Because at the end of the day, it's not about cool IT technology (as much as we might like it to be), it's about our customers and making a difference in their lives...and how especially true in the field of healthcare.

Great work, Digital Health team!

Just finished my green belt project analyzing how effective web analytics is in identifying applications no longer required by IT (and should be archived) . the project went well I had some interesting data to show for it and it def drove a decision.

I'd have to say that LSS gave me some new tools to use. The templates we use internally are ok but If I was outside I'd probably stop by http://lssacademy.com/downloads/ and check out their C&E and FMEA.

Some advice to others looking to start a GB project I'd like to mention a couple of general things I learned from setting up and running mine:

• Don't boil the ocean - Improve an existing process as your green belt project.

• Use Six Sigma tools to measure process output and identify where failures impact results (FMEA, C&E, etc).

• Apply Lean Thinking to a step that has a lot of failure.

• Measure improvement using Six Sigma tools (remesure your failure rate / speed / or what every you has as the cause of your failure).

Recently, a colleague and I spoke to a group of IT administrators in Washington, DC. We left our car in a self-park parking lot in which the attendants had everyone leave their keys in their car, in lieu of keeping them on a valet "key board". They seemed to be depending on reasonably honest customers (we were in a secure area past a government checkpoint) and their own memories to ensure no cars were "lost". We returned to find that the parking lot attendants had completely rearranged the vehicles. Since it was a rental car, it was hard to describe the car and therefore hard to find. (By this point you're probably thinking that I've posted to the wrong board or that Intel pays me by the word, but bear with me)

It took a rather lengthy iterative search, but we eventually found the car. As we walked, my colleague and I joked about this as "parking lot virtualization". Our vehicle was moved from one slot to another to better fulfill the changing needs of the parking environment over time. This struck a chord with us, having just been discussing some of the challenges with virtualization.

In the data center, most virtualization suites allow an administrator to manually move a workload from one host to another. This is a very powerful concept - instead of having to negotiate for a 3:00am Sunday morning maintenance window to do preventative hardware maintenance, we can move all of the workloads to another physical machine, perform maintenance during normal working hours, and eventually move the workload back to its original location. We can also migrate workloads from a less powerful machine to a newer machine for performance or in order to retire hardware.

Combining this capability with the ability to host multiple workloads on a single piece of hardware, the data center can quickly become very complex. Without a robust database to map workload to physical machine (and vice-versa) or an automated update mechanism to adjust these mappings after a move, we can easily lose track of our services. These mappings are needed in order to answer questions like "host/rack/row/room x went down - what services need to be restarted?"

My colleague noted that ITIL has mature, well-defined mechanisms to deal with many of these types of events. Change orders, maintenance escalations, and configuration databases were all designed with these business processes in mind, albeit at a much slower (and more manual) pace. It would defeat much of the benefit of virtualization if one had to get a signed piece of paper, email approval, or file a trouble ticket in order to offload a workload in response to a failed CPU fan. Instead, we should use policy to anticipate and enact these types of responses. The discipline and rigor of change management is critical within the virtualized data center, but it must be directly encapsulated by our tools in order to be effective. In essence, the CMDB needs to be dynamically updated in order to maintain fidelity to the Data Center's logical state at any given instant.

For those of you who have deployed virtual machines in large-scale production, what techniques have been most successful for managing the chaos of moving services and images? Are you using a glue layer for your legacy CMDB and other management tools, or are you finding it easier to throw them out and depend on the tools provided by your virtualization stack?

A few of our top security analysts & strategists got together to share with Podtech how Intel's own IT department tackles security challenges. Did you know that Intel's IT organization developed a "war gaming" program to model and predict bad guy behaviors? Do you have increased challenges around securing your network perimeter due to the integration of more mobile devices? Have you developed a way to actually measure the business value of IT's security efforts? I invite you to learn how Intel's IT organization addresses these security topics and more. Check out our first video introducing the series on security, then hop over to Managing the Effort to Measure Security blog by Matthew Rosenquist. More coming soon...