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Kevin McIsaac |
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Dr Kevin McIsaac is the IBRS advisor for virtualisation, desktop deployment, mobile devices & networks, servers & storage and data centre infrastructure. He has 25 years of IT experience and is a recognised expert in infrastructure, operations and vendor management. Dr McIsaac has 10 years experience as an IT Analyst researching, distilling and disseminating best practices in IT and regularly work with the CIOs and the IT management teams of leading Asia-Pacific organisations. Prior to IBRS, Dr McIsaac was Research Director Asia-Pacific Group for META Group and has held leadership positions at Computer Associates and Functional Software. Dr McIsaac is a highly sought after speaker who is regularly quoted in the global press.
Free/Busy Calendar
The next evolution of storage
The last 15 years was the era of the controller-based storage array.
As organisations built ever large storage networks the storage array
grew in both capacity and functionality. These devices are now
extremely powerful, but for many organisations they ...
The client hypervisor cometh
Client hypervisors have been available from start-up vendors for over a year, but this technology has largely gone unnoticed. The release this month of Citrix XenClient Express will quickly change this and raise the client
hypervisor into mainstream awareness.
The client hypervisor is a very interesting technology and much hype will be generated over it, however its business value is limited.
Nonetheless the client hypervisor will be quickly adopted by PC
vendors looking for the “next big thing” and it will
become common in new desktops/laptops over the next three years. IT
organisations should look at the client hypervisor to understand how
it can be used to lower desktop TCO or to create new business
capabilities in the desktop.
Last word: The problem with pilots!
Over the last 2 years I’ve been surprised to find a number of e-mail and file archive projects that had failed very badly. I say surprised because for most of my career I’ve worked on infrastructure implementations, and while they are complex and messy, they generally workout Ok in the end.
What is FCoE and why should I care?
With core Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced
Ethernet standards now ratified, and with major networking vendors
having rolled out FCoE products, IT executives should prepare
themselves for an onslaught of converged FC and IP networking product
marketing.
While
FCoE will be the dominant storage protocol in
the long-run, IT organisations must brush aside vendor’s
future/function technobabble and understand the benefits of a
converged network in the context of their environment. Only then can
the organisation define an adoption strategy that guides how and when
storage networking is migrated to FCoE.
What is an Exadata and is it in your future?
Oracle Exadata is an innovative approach to system design that makes
Oracle a leading vendor in our Integrated
Systems model and it is an
example of how IT infrastructure will evolve over the next 3-7 years.
Oracle’s
reinvention of storage as a cluster of commodity servers
(x64), using commodity storage (SAS/SATA), and a volume storage
operating system, is particularly noteworthy. This is a fundamental
departure from the last 20 years of storage design, and heralds a
major shakeup in the storage industry over the next five years.
Overcoming infrastructure inertia
Moving from today’s Layered
Component model to an Integrated Systems model of IT infrastructure
will bring many benefits such as lower operational costs and a more
agile infrastructure. However there will be many challenges in
undertaking this change, and at the top of the list is the IT
infrastructure inertia created by people’s resistance to change
and the scale of the investment in the existing technologies.
Rather
than focus on the technology IT executive need to work on the people
issues, (resistance to change, competency traps, fear of the unknown)
and the capital investment issues, that are typical in any major
program of change.
Oracle’s acquisition of Sun
Oracle’s vision is to become the leading IT Systems Vendor by
creating a complete IT stack of hardware, middleware and
applications. The objective is to reduce complexity, and to lower the
total cost of ownership, though integration and optimisation across
the entire stack.
Oracle
will retain Sun products that are both
complete this Systems Vendor vision and are aligned with its long
term business and technology strategies. The remaining Sun products
will either be parked, and the customer base transitioned to a
related Oracle product, or sold to a third party.
Storage deduplication: Tactical band-aid or strategic p...
Storage vendors promoted storage deduplication a technology that can
increase storage efficiency and reduce storage capital costs.
However, since some storage deduplication products have a high
capital cost, to ensure that an investment is recouped IT ...
Return of the systems vendor
HP’s acquisition of 3COM, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun
Microsystems and Cisco’s move into blade servers are all clear
signs that IT infrastructure is at the beginning of another major
structural change. These events herald a transition from today’s
Layered Components model, where best-of-breed components are
purchased from a number of specialist vendors and then integrated by
the IT organisation, to an Integrated Systems model where complete
systems are purchased from a single vendor, avoiding the need for the
IT organisation to act as a Systems Integrator.
IT
organisations should look at adopting the Integrated Systems model
when the costs and risks of acting as a System Integrator outweigh
the benefits of competition at the component level (commoditisation
and innovation).
Last Word: Desktop virtualisation? It's the application...
Desktop virtualisation is no longer the hottest topic in the media, however it still gets considerable interest from IT executives. As part of a series of roundtables that I am running on “The Evolution of the Desktop” I have just finished speaking to 28 IT executives on this topic. From these conversations it is clear there is still a strong interest in finding a better way to deliver the desktop that both reduces the TCO and increases agility. That is, simplifies remote access, enables business continuity and speeds up deploying new desktop applications.
Data centre power and cooling efficiency
Increasing your data centre efficiency is a journey that has clearly
defined steps. Organisations should focus on defining clear,
measurable objectives, planning and monitoring efficiently rather
than on the technology that vendors promote to deliver d ...
VMware seeds the cloud
vCloud Express is a new entry level Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS) offering based on self-service portals, credit card payments
and VMware’s enterprise class virtualisation products.
CIOs
should look at vCloud Express as a low
cost, low risk way to learn how to use public cloud infrastructure.
Since vCloud Express may be seen by some groups (dev/test, business
units) as a way to side-step the perceived bureaucracy of the IT
Organisation, CIOs should develop a strategy to embrace this use as a
way to retain control and ensure relevancy with dissatisfied
customers.
Is your data centre running out of capacity?
The data centre is an essential IT resource with a finite capacity. Due to the very long lead times and very high capital costs for expanding that capacity, IT organisations must be sure they have sufficient head room to accommodate near term growth and a plan enabling long term growth.
Organisations that run into their data centre’s capacity limits will have significant constraints placed on IT and on
business growth. Based on recent incidents at ANZ organisations this risk maybe much greater than you think.
Migrating physical servers to virtual machine...
Migrating physical servers to virtual machines is a one-off project
that requires deep specialised knowledge, and IT organisations should
engage a specialist third party to develop the migration plans and to
perform the physical to virtual migration. T ...
What is an "Infrastructure Cloud"
With infrastructure vendors
jumping on the cloud bandwagon, their sales and marketing teams are increasingly using the terms “Cloud”, “Cloud
Computing” and “Infrastructure Cloud”. From
discussions with clients we have observed these terms are not well understood and mean a wide range of different things to different people.
This confusion is driven by a war between vendors to establish a definition of these terms that best suits their specific products, technologies and architectures. Until “Cloud Computing” and “Infrastructure Cloud” become commonly defined, which we expect to take at least until the end of 2010; be careful to define what you mean, and seek to understand what others mean by these terms to avoid significant misunderstandings between staff, vendors and
partners.
What's driving archiving?
In our November 2008 survey we found many organisations are using archiving to manage their rapidly growing unstructured data. On further in-depth research we found that these archiving projects are mostly IT driven, focused on silos of data, and are larg ...
Trends in data centre infrastructure
Despite the challenging economic climate, the data centre is a hive of activity with many organisations taking a strong interest in consolidating the data centre and running it as a shared service. Savvy manager will take the current economic slowdown as ...
Archiving: How to avoid project failures
As discussed in “Backup is not Archive!” all IT organisations should evaluate deployment of an archival
platform. However, based on numerous client conversations and a recent survey, it is clear there are significant project risks in implementing archiving. One-quarter of archiving projects take more than two years to implement and nearly half of IT managers state that they would not recommend the archiving product they had selected!
Backup is not archive!
Many organisations do not distinguish between backup and archive and
assume their backup data is also their archival data. This makes the
backup environment overly complex and difficult to operate and
creates a very poor archival platform.
Organisatio ...
Virtual desktop reality falls well short of Vendors cla...
Virtual Desktops was one of the hottest infrastructure topics of 2008. However, tight IT budgets due to the economic downturn, and mounting evidence that Virtual Desktops are more expensive that well managed full desktops, will dampen enthusiasm for this ...
