http://itconsultant.boblandstrom.com

Thanks.

Bob

By Carrisa Baptiste- Mobile Devices Consultant, Advocate Networks, LLC

It has been years since I’ve used a paper telephone book, I use yellowpages.com. Several of my friends have received their diplomas from online educational institutions. Let’s not forget my eleven year old nephew who has a cellular phone and uses the internet to connect with other players using his Sony Play station.

Wow, how amazing the internet is and the fascinating opportunities it provides to our world!

Over the next few years, blackberries and other personal data devices will be the primary source for wireless connectivity verses the traditional cellular devices. In doing so, the demand for instant and constant connectivity to the internet will increase. It is essential that we start enlarging our infrastructure to allow for additional usage on the network.

My teenage cousin is a freshman in college and utilizes the social web sites such as myspace.com and facebook.com to stay in touch with her friends around the world. These sites allow us to put information about ourselves on there, which often times include videos, songs and pictures.

So what’s the point of all this? As most of us know, all this new business activity and Gen-Y social dependency on the web places increasingly arduous demands on our network. As this trend continues, the demands on the internet increases and we need to ensure that it is scaleable.

In a recent Web 2.0 forum, Jim Cicconi, VP of Legislative Affairs for AT&T predicted that the Internet could reach its physical capacity to carry all this traffic by as early as 2010. Furthermore, he predicts a 50-fold increase in broadband traffic by 2015.

In my work with our Customers, it’s clear that the trend in enterprise wireless devices is toward more and more bandwidth consumption. This is driven not only by proliferation of affordable wireless broadband services, but also by the increasingly common web-accessibility of enterprise applications. Let’s also not forget the 500 pound gorilla in this mix- video (and her 1,000 pound daddy- HD video).

I wasn’t one of the first to engage in on-line banking, on-line shopping, surfing and online-communicating. However, I cannot imagine life without them. Organizations invest large sums of money in order to provide products and services to their customers in a timely and efficient manner. The internet is a key piece of this element, not only allowing ease of use but often times a competitive advantage. Internet delivery of services to Customers is the great enabler of B2C sales in this decade.

All this is perhaps a long-winded way of agreeing with Mr. Cicconi that the risk of Internet capacity is a problem that is critical from a variety of perspectives. Mitigation of that risk largely comes from investment by the carriers profiting from the use of the web. While there’s a demonstrated temptation to legislate the path to this risk mitigation, let’s hope that this takes a course that enables unrestricted and open use by businesses and consumers while pragmatically profitable to the service providers.

Thanks go to Carrisa Baptiste of Advocate Networks, LLC for contributing this post.

Today IBM is announcing their entry into the Container Data Center space. Starting with their newly released iDataPlex high density server product, and riding the wake of Microsoft’s widely publicized embracing of Data Center Containers, the recipe was there for a product combining the two concepts.

iDataPlex is a water cooled system of very high density computing which is said to squeeze twice as many servers as conventional systems into the same amount of floor space while reducing power demand by as much as 40 percent. This is a solution in demand by a wide range of business applications, and tracks the trend of massive utility computing platforms in the implementation phases across the globe.

Now we also have the decision by IBM to configure 40 foot containers with iDataPlex infrastructure. The trend is now undeniable, with product releases over the past months

from Verari, Rackable, Sun, et. al.,… and the high profile deployments using these solutions.

I think that the Container Data Center concept holds a lot of potential for a number of reasons. This potential is reflected in the needs I’ve seen in the Clients we serve in our consulting firm.

Modularity is one dimension of this potential. Our Clients are often planning the construction of a data center facility to accommodate long term business growth. Data centers are expensive enough, let alone building excess capacity that is not participating in revenue generation. The application of Containers facilitates an option to grow incrementally, and could reduce a large amount of planning risk.

Real Estate is another dimension. The concept of Containers gives an out-of-the-box option to plan for land without the traditional data center building. This could have a significant favorable impact on the construction budget in some cases.

Another dimension is Disaster Recovery. The Container option may be an attractive fit for many enterprise DR scenarios. For many enterprises, DR is not an inherent service that exists from the moment the Business application lights up for users. Sadly, it is often a separately funded risk mitigation project well after the fact. A Container based solution may offer options that are favorable in terms of implementation time as well as for operational costs.

A few years ago, I was tasked with addressing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery options for Home Depot stores that were at risk for weather-related outages (ie, hurricanes in Florida and the US Gulf Coast). At that time, I collaborated with Intel, HP, Wolf Coach, and Cisco to create a straw-man design for a relocatable data center. That data center was, for that application, quite small in terms of quantity of equipment and compute capacity. I’m certainly not claiming to have birthed the Container Data Center concept, mind you, but rather adding the perspective of mobility and temporal deployments of “contained” data processing footprints.

The Container implementations in the news are largely for high profile data center projects, that would get press coverage whether using Containers or not. If you have an experience with Container Data Centers I’d greatly welcome the feedback.

Beginning several years ago, the Institute put together some very good work to give us guidance on the cost of data centers according to Tier classification. The cost model is based upon the premise (quite accurately so) that the cost of the MEP infrastructure is far and away the dominant driver in the cost of erecting an IT facility. The model simply separates the cost of the building and support space from the cost of the MEP infrastructure.

The benefit offered by the Institute’s work in this regard is the benchmark cost data for applying this model to your own project. The reference benchmarks are based upon a set of real-world contemporary data center construction projects, where the relevant component data is extracted, averaged, and provided for our use.

It’s the term, contemporary, in the earlier statement that makes this update of the white paper important. First, the data is updated using four additional new data center projects,… so the sample set is that much larger. This might seem insignificant, but besides having four more data points we also have four new recent data points.

Over the course of the past 12-18 months, there has been a sharp escalation in the cost of materials and components critical to the construction of data centers. The cost of steel and copper has increased world-wide, by over 50% during this time. There has also been a boom in construction of very large data centers globally, which is driving the cost of critical components like generators and chillers. Recent developments such as these are folded into the guidance given by the Institute’s model.

Not stopping with the data updates, the Institute has taken the opportunity to also include cost estimation data for “empty space” in their model. This is a pragmatic addition, given that a facility owner will want to include space in the new building that might not be specifically programmed, but is likely to be used for growth or operation of the raised floor.

Finally, the Institute offers another piece of pragmatic guidance, suggesting the level of “seed funding” necessary to accomplish the planning needed to arrive at an accurate budget estimate. This seed money is used for project planning, design/build contractors, and consulting necessary to bring the definition of the project into focus sufficient to confidently go to the Board for approval.

If you’re a participant (or a “joiner,” to use the vernacular of Charlene Li) of Social Networking Sites, chances are you use more than one. I’ll bet you may even use more than a couple of them. For some “joiners,” users have subscribed to multiple Sites because other users and acquaintances have sent them invitations to join networks that they are using. You’ve been “friended” by someone you know. For others, you may use multiple sites out of the necessity to adequately represent the multiple aspects of yourself. I call this the phenomena of “living in multiple skins.”

I have multiple skins. I have my professional skin for my life as an IT Consultant. This skin has a list of professional credentials, accomplishments, experiences relevant to the work I do as a Consultant. I’m also a professional artist, and that skin has a list of credentials and accomplishments as well,… but are completely different from my Consultant’s skin. It also has a portfolio of work that is important to include in the profile of that skin. I’m also a father, there’s another skin. I’m an investor, and I need a skin for that. I play and coach ice hockey, so there’s yet another skin.

I’ll bet you could describe yourself in a similar way, needing multiple profiles to adequately describe all the skins you may wear each day. This is a common problem that everyone shares, but remains unsolved by the Social Networking Sites out there today. Unless you’re satisfied by slicing off a single persona from your real-world life to project into the online world, you’re in the ranks of unsatisfied Social Networking Site users. I, for one, want to take all my skins with me for my cyber persona.

Now, before I’m taken too literally in these comments let me say that the problem is not as simple as developing a site that allows multiple profiles to be linked to a common user account. The Social Grid is very dynamic and needs to remain that way. If one of my skins is that of an authority on early 20^th century French films (It’s not, but to use an example), it’s not necessarily a great idea to mash that up with my IT Consultant’s profile on LinkedIn. The Social Networking Sites focusing on film, or should we say a focus as directly relevant as practical for that topic, is the right place for that profile. Similarly, if I’m a user of a dating site I probably want to make sure there’s a separation between that profile and my professional profile.

The Social Network architecture we need is one that leverages an intelligent interface to appropriately link our multiple skins together, much in the same way that the dynamics of our real-life personal interactions dictate the changing from one skin into the next. It’s an architecture that images the dynamics of relationships that exist in our multiple professional and personal lives.

Per my earlier posts on email technology’s fit for today’s business processes, I think this diagram presents a very clear argument on its own.

This question is difficult to answer without other background information.  I’ve seen specifications reference ASHRAE guidelines, Uptime Institute recommendations, and so on.  For me, TIA-942 (which is the basis for the international standard on data center design), is a good framework to lean upon.

TIA-942, Appendix G states the following for the capabilities of the raised floor area environmental air:

• 20 degrees C to 25 degrees C (68F to 77F)
  • Normal set point: 22 degrees C (72F)  +/- 1 degree C (2F)
• Relative Humidity: 40% to 55%
  • Normal set point: 45% RH +/- 5%

Now, all that may be easier said than done, of course.  The whole point of the cooling is to keep the equipment happy (operating in the prescribed temperature range).  Heat is generated by the equipment’s consumption of electricity, the level of utilization, and the density of the technology used in your data center (which may also vary by location on the raised floor, creating a non-uniform temperature pattern). 

This is also modulated by the power density capabilities of the data center’s MEP infrastructure.  If you have a relatively old facility, chances are that the power density capabilities of the facility are less than 50 Watts per Square Foot (W/SF).  If you have a modern facility, you may enjoy capacities of 85 W/SF, 100 W/SF, or even 150 W/SF (higher than that are somewhat rare these days).  A well designed MEP infrastructure has cooling capacity matched to power density capacity. 

Regardless of that though, it’s possible that you may use technologies that squeeze a very high amount of power consumption (and heat generation) into a small area.  Hot/Cold aisle arrangements may not be enough to cool those spots, and may cause consideration of supplemental cooling on the raised floor.  There are several in-row cooling technologies with which you can place a floor-standing cooling unit in-row with your equipment racks to deliver extra cooling capacity to selected areas.  One should be careful when using supplemental approaches though, that the redundancy of MEP infrastructure supporting your intended Tier Level is not obviated by such an implementation.

Do you have any experiences with specifying hot/cold aisle metrics that you’d like to share?

I am firmly in the camp that sees email as an outdated technology, and one for which the utility for current day business processes is waning at best.  I have seen commentary from the Web 2.0 community saying similar things, but I decided to send an unsolicited query out into cyberspace to see how broadly this position is held. 

A few weeks ago, I posted a question asking if email is an endangered species in the technology jungle.  I received a lot of responses.  While the number of responses is not large enough to represent a statistically authoritative sample set, I found the feedback very interesting.  In summary, here’s how it played out:

Group 1:  “Blasphemer!… Are you nuts?”

This group of people took the time (which I appreciate) to write back to tell me they could hardly believe I’d ask such a silly question.  Along with the responses came explanations for the position that email is great and is here to stay.  Among those reasons were the fact that you can use it to send attachments (email as a file transfer mechanism), everybody uses it (ubiquity), and it allows one to thoughtfully pause to recompose drafts before sending (I’ll tag this as temporally distant).  The group that thought I was crazy for asking the question accounted for over 40% of the responses.

Group 2:  “Yes it’s probably dead, but until the current generation of users die off we’re probably stuck with it”

This group agreed with the premise that email is at least broken, or has in some way become flawed in its usefulness for current day needs.  However, these people feel that we’re resigned to live with it for better or worse because of a mature critical mass of users that are dragging it along into the (near) future.  This group accounted for roughly 30% of the responses.

Group 3:  “Yah, you bet-cha it’s broken.”

These people seemed relieved to blow off steam to complain about the numerous ills of email.  Among them are the high degree of overhead and infrastructure resources (costs) that are associated with the simple task of sending a message, the delivery mechanism for rapid proliferation of malware, the lack of temporal immediacy, poorly suited to facilitate collaboration, and of course the great white elephant- Spam.

On the Spam subject, some users volunteered some very interesting quantitative data.  Ian Eiloart, who manages the email system at University of Sussex, said that 95% of incoming email is rejected as Spam.  Of the remaining 5%, approximately 5% of that accepted email is also Spam. 

Dennis Stevenson (http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/cio/original-thinking/archives/whats-in-my-inbox-21285) shared some interesting personal research and says that while he still uses email out of necessity, he’s shifted much of his communication to other Web 2.0 technologies that are more appropriate for exchange with users with whom he has some type of working relationship.

By the way, the Group 3 responses represented approximately 20% of my informal study.

Group 4:  No strong opinion one way or another.

The last group of respondents did not have a strong opinion on whether email is a broken or dieing technology.  I greatly appreciate these people taking the time to respond to my question, and they offered their perspective on the ways they use email for their daily jobs and personal correspondence.

So, what is there to say about all this?  First of all, it came as a surprise to me that so many of the users who replied to my query strongly feel that email serves them well.  I wouldn’t have guessed this, which again shows the value in asking dumb questions.  I also have to say that I do recognize the value statements that group of users has raised.  Yes indeed, we use email for all those things (sending messages, including file attachments, documenting (richly) dialogue, and so on.  It’s also true that it’s unavoidable in business today.  Everyone uses it, and pretty much has to.  In fact, email communication is likely the most widely used written medium in business.  My point is though, that this comes at a cost.

In my opinion, the utility of email (“Utility” in this case meaning, fit for purpose) is not well suited for business communication processes today.  Yes, it’s a mechanism that is a component of many (maybe most) business communications processes, but that doesn’t mean it’s well suited for those purposes.  When I say this, most of what I’m thinking about is the temporal immediacy of the conversational dialogue, and the opportunity to facilitate collaboration between business colleagues.  Email isn’t a communication technology that is immediate, and the degree of overhead, redundancy, and delay associated with the technology does not bode well for collaborative processes. 

For the other knocks against email, it’s difficult to separate the features of the technology itself (it’s architecture, standards, operational aspects) from the way we use email.  For example, one can say that email is a very expensive way to send a message or transfer a file.  There’s a whole lot of overhead in sending an email message in terms of the protocol and format of the message itself as well as demands on the enterprise infrastructure to process, store, deliver, and archive messages.  Some of those costs though, have to do with the way we choose to use and operate email services.  When someone copies me on a message in which they’ve said “thank you” to a co-worker for example (one of my email pet peeves), there is lots of data overhead associated with this nine-character message (the message header, the 50k legal disclaimer that gets tacked to the nine-character message, the storage it will occupy forever on several hard disks on our servers, et. al.), not to mention that there’s probably very little business value in me knowing that Scott told Bill “thank you.”

I believe it’s true, as  Group 2 points out, that the presence of email in our business communications processes is likely here for a while, and will be transitioned by Web 2.0 (or Web 3.0?) technologies based on the momentum brought by younger users.  I think there’s an opportunity too, though, for this transition to be accelerated by increased availability of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.  If you’re keeping up with the trade literature, there are hints that this is a movement that is gaining momentum.

As always, I’ll greatly appreciate your views.

I lead into this discussion using the well known adage that says, “Which came first- The chicken or the egg?”  Granted, it’s a bit trite, but many a glass of wine has been tossed back over discussions about cause, effect, cause.

Recent developments in physics are re-confirming what has been told by ancient metaphysics for millennia.  One such point in this regard is the notion that we create our own reality by manipulating the energy around us.  While this is a notion that is deserving of focused discussions in its own right, I will leverage this notion as an analogy for a quick comment on the development of technology. 

Let’s take communication technology for example.  Many of us can remember the emergence of Email as an application, and as a communication technology.  It really wasn’t that long ago.  It could be said that Email was the killer app of the ARPANET (remember that name?), and when we talk about ARPANET we’re covering ground in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.  I believe it was 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email, and within just a couple of years Email accounted for more than 75% of traffic on ARPANET.  ‘Sound familiar?  It would seem that Email has been the cocaine that drove us to accelerated consumption of content and messaging which now consumes such a large part of our day.

For anyone reading this BLOG, it’s surely the case that for most everyone you know, Email is a fundamental part of daily life.  Not only does Business depend upon it, but we depend upon it for our personal lives as well.  With the fact that Email is securely rooted in our daily personal and professional lives, I will say too that I’m one of those people who are firmly in the camp that says Email is a technology that is struggling to be “Fit for Purpose” (to use an ITIL term) given the nature of contemporary communication processes.

So what does any of this have to do with chickens and eggs, or with creating our own realities?  To me, this is a good analogy to describe the fact that we create technologies that we need to facilitate our desired business behaviors.  That is, we are not addicted to increasing amounts and urgency of communication because Email and IM enabled it.  Rather, we need to communicate with more urgency, and collectively we’ve enabled the emergence of technologies that accommodate the state that our business behavior demands.

In a future post, I’ll share the results of my query of a number of users with the question of whether email is dead.  I was surprised by the feedback and perhaps you’ll find it interesting as well.

Cartoon credit: Joel Coughlin

 

Most of the enterprises that we encounter through the service of our practice have top-notch Information Security teams.  The basic existence of a security team in the organization is evidence that the CIO recognizes and appreciates the enormous risk exposure and potential loss to the business that can result from information security breaches, and has committed to managing it.  Indeed, because of the nature of security professionals in general, having such a team at all typically brings seriousness and diligence to this area of governance in the firm.  We have further seen that Information Security teams of the Clients that we’ve served are typically very well funded.  This again, reflects recognition of the importance of a strong security posture for good corporate governance, and a commitment on the part of executive management to invest in Information Security. 

Information Security implementations dedicate substantial resources toward protecting the network, systems, and data that serve the enterprise.  Organizations have traditionally created protection against breaches by creating security barriers such as access controls, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), firewalls, and cryptography.  It is alarmingly common, however, for the voice communications systems to be omitted from the security plan.  Beyond the core components of the PBX and Voice Mail platforms, modems and fax lines often serve as bastions of fraud and abuse (costs) as well as back-door access to the data network.  While much can be said about adequate inclusion of voice systems in the overall security policy, the increasing proliferation of VoIP deployments and IP Telephony in general, tend to amplify the risk to the overall security posture.

VoIP implementations drive changes beyond the fundamental replacement of voice processing platforms.  More so than perhaps any other technology one can think of, these changes have a broad impact on an organization’s security posture.  Let’s discuss a few of these at a high level.

At a very fundamental level, VoIP implementations change the characteristics of the data network.  We are all very familiar by now with the requirements of IP Telephony on network latency and jitter for acceptable quality of service (often measured as Mean Opinion Score, or MOS).  From a security perspective, this translates into not only performance metrics but also availability (one of the legs of the CIA triad for Information Security).  Said another way, the management of network performance is, in a sense, now a security issue.  In addition to issues of availability and performance, IP Telephony introduces a new family of protocols carried on the data network, as well as stateful session management through firewalls and perimeter boundaries. 

If you’re in the implementation stages of a VoIP deployment, then you know that organizational change of some kind is necessary in order to accommodate convergence of voice and data in an operational production environment.  If you’re in the consideration or planning stages of a VoIP implementation and think that the traditional Telecom and Data teams can continue to work and be managed with the same level of segregation and independence in the post-convergence environment, well may the force be with you.  Organizational changes that occur as a result of IP Telephony implementations are largely driven by Technical Operations concerns.  In the pre-convergence environment, a user can request a new phone to be installed, changes to number plans, even call routing and expect the request to be honored ad hoc.  In a post-convergence environment, this is a request to add a new endpoint to the network.   This is a production impact of a different color, and also now includes AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting) security components.

Of course there are also numerous technical security aspects introduced by VoIP implementations.  We’ve already touched upon the Availability component of the CIA triad.  There are also substantial issues to address with the Integrity and Confidentiality components.  These issues directly parallel the similar threat taxonomy with data traffic, including packet capture, eavesdropping, redirection, malicious modification, spoofing, and so on.  The difference though, is that with VoIP we’re dealing with conversations, person-to-person messages, recordings, and voice mail.  In fact, the implementation of IP Telephony creates an opportunity (necessity) for synchronization of the Security Policy with Technical Operations as well as Architecture and Engineering functions.

Given this backdrop of change to the technical environment, to the technical organization, and to governance policies due to this change of core technology, it is wise to consider conducting a VoIP Security Assessment as a part of the technology governance framework.  During the planning and implementation phases of an IP Telephony deployment, a VoIP Security Assessment is just as essential as a network readiness assessment.  Including voice security as a part of periodic security assessments is essential as well.

You’re probably seeing the same articles as I am in the trade journals that warn about VoIP Security concerns, but in the same breath say that things haven’t gotten all that bad just yet.  I would counter that this sentiment is somewhat relative.  Are VoIP Security incidents as numerous today as email incidents?  No, they’re not.  However, I’m here to tell you that they’re far from non-existent.

Just this past week, a long time Client of ours, and an international multi-billion dollar firm, called for help because of virus infection in their telephony system that was crippling there voice communications on a wide scale.  A VoIP Security plan would likely have mitigated the risk that was exploited in this case.  As a matter of fact, some industry sources are recommending at least annual VoIP Security Assessments, due to the frequency of change characteristic of voice communications platforms and their (now) intimate interconnection with core enterprise data.  VoIP Security Assessments should be grounded upon a comprehensive taxonomy of threats to the environment, including not only technical, operational, and compliance issues but also social threats because of the strong impact of human behavior on the security posture of voice systems.

If you care to weigh-in on this topic, I’d be grateful to learn about your experiences with VoIP Security, how you’re monitoring and managing, or any perspectives you’d care to share.