IT Leadership
Around this time, I usually pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. I am interested in the Data Center (around power, cooling, reliability and economics), IT Security (particularly Database and Mobile), Big Data and Storage (Particularly Solid State). So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers are likely to [...]
Yesterday Chris Leahy (my Technical Facilities Manager) and I were agonising over why we had low plenum pressure in our Data Center and why we were seeing symptoms of hot air trapped in the roof void. We looked at all the normal stuff: Leaks in the plenum space Badly sealed floor Cable access holes improperly [...]
Throughout my 20 plus year career in IT consulting, I have noticed that the most successful businesses often have something in common – they run their IT like a business and they treat IT like a key part of the business, and not like an add-on function. I have been in Qatar for only just [...]
The problem with computing is everyone wants to make it uniform – fit it into a neat box, categorise it as ‘all the same’, make it autonomic, self-managing and move on. In fact, IT is anything but uniform, so these simplistic approaches fall at the first hurdle. Smart CIOs understand applications need to be treated [...]
I wanted to share with you my latest news. A little over a year ago Steve Duplessie and I created ESG EMEA to help reach out and serve new European clients as well as provide local support for many of our ESG US based relationships. We have been immensely successful in building this business, working [...]
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]
My old CIO at BT, Al-noor Ramji had a most delightful and endearing way of describing just how unimportant and disconnected IT Infrastructure is from reality by describing us as “The toilet cleaner’s toilet cleaners”. Like other successful CIOs Al-noor had the ability to cut through the noise and explain things as they are. In [...]
My good friend and ESG colleague Terri McClure @esganalysttmac recently blogged about a thought leadership piece I had presented at an analyst call last week. She made a very good job of explaining it and so I thought that I would write a little more about it here: I call the concept the “Golden Triangle” and [...]
There is cloud and then there is cloud. Cloud with take it or leave it service levels or cloud with service availability that supports the UK’s emergency services (911, 999, 112). I know about this life or death service level because a few years back I actually ran the BT IT operational department that supported the [...]
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London. The panel was made up of: Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies Brian Peterson, VP International [...]
My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie over at Steve’s IT Rants just recently wrote about Enterprise customers consolidating vendors. At ESG we have been conducting a Spending Intentions Survey for years and one of the recent outputs is that 34% of enterprise IT operations have a stated corporate objective to “reduce the number of vendors we [...]
Have you been noticing how unimportant hardware has become? Having the biggest. fastest, most reliable piece of equipment in the data center doesn’t cut it anymore. A few weeks back I was talking to Dave Hitz, one of the founders of NetApp and author of How to Castrate a Bull. He explained the phenomena really [...]
For some time I have been working on and thinking about a Data Center Efficiency Maturity Model to help us poor operational folks work out just how well or badly we are doing on a scale of one to five. I have also been doing some thinking about a Continuous Migration Architecture (CMA) that recognizes [...]
I have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived. There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with [...]
I’ve been working on an idea with my old colleague Harqs Singh (@harqs) who is Head of Data Center Strategy at BT and a big cheese at The Green Grid. Well actually.. Harqs told me about the idea and I liked it so much I suggested we try and fill the gap for a Data Center [...]
I published a brief article last month about a set of test we were doing on a production data warehouse that was performing very poorly. Running the database on a Dell Server with 4 x 73GB SAS drives configured in RAID0 we got a respectable 575 IOs per second (IOPS) on a random write test. [...]
My good friend Jon Davis picked up an article by Rosabeth Moss Cantor on The Harvard Business Review that is so good that I wanted to write about it here. “Managers of the last century, gave speeches, then had their assistants send snail mail letters with the text, and maybe followed up by a phone call to see [...]
In spite of the huge popularity of social and professional networking sites, nearly two thirds of techies (62.5%) haven’t – as yet – used these channels to find an IT job, according to research carried out by The IT Job Board,www.theitjobboard.co.uk The research also uncovered that more than half of those surveyed (57.4%) don’t currently [...]
I got an email this afternoon, from a great friend of mine and fellow blogger Jonathan Davis of DNS Europe that I wanted to share with the readers of The Hot Aisle. Jonathan and I used to work together – twice actually – (Coopers & Lybrand and Message Central). I took him on as a [...]
Three quarters (76.1 percent) of IT professionals in the UK do not feel guilty about carrying out personal tasks while they are at work, according to a survey undertaken by The IT Job Board The figure compares to 75.9 percent in Belgium and 81.6 percent in The Netherlands. This is the first time the online [...]
I recently met with Mark Shirman, CEO and Founder of Glasshouse Technologies and had the opportunity to get another exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mark is uniquely placed to comment on the recent changes in the Data Center and Storage markets with particular emphasis on Green issues. For many years Glasshouse has been the leading independent [...]
Global research firm, Gartner Inc, has reported Cordys, a global leader in next generation Business Process Management, as the fastest growing of the leading BPMS vendors worldwide. According to a recent report issued by the research firm, Cordys grew 98.2% year on year in 2007 based on total software revenue. The Gartner report states that [...]
I met up with the Mike Klayko the CEO of Brocade last week in the restaurant of the St Regis Hotel in New York (famous for creating the best burgers, bar none, in the city) for an exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mr Klayko is an industry veteran with decades of experience starting at IBM, [...]
One of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]
My little brother is in the news again with an article in The Times. It seemed the most unlikely of joint-billings – the Star Warsdirector George Lucas and a modest Scots initiative to improve e-communication within schools. In what must rank as one of the most heady compliments ever given to an education system, the film [...]
