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The Economist recently tackled the trend around cloud computing and the issue of energy usage in datacentres. It's amazing to think that datacentres collectively now create more carbon emissions than Argentina or the Netherlands. The author of the article is slightly cynical about hardware makers who are hyping the issue and suggests that datacenter owners are burying their heads in the sand as far as their inherent inefficiency is concerned.

And rightly so, because the challenges within the datacentre go far deeper than simply the hardware and energy they use. We're likely to see a sea-change in the way datacentres are run. As the rate of growth in datacentre-usage keeps sky-rocketing, datacentres are not only going to have to learn to cope with growing energy consumption, but they're going to be challenged to optimise how services are run and maximise capacity. To that end, we've started thinking about how BSM can contribute to the datacentre environment.

The considerable disadvantage that datacentre administrators face, now (and particularly with the advent of technologies such as virtualisation) is that they don't know what applications use what servers. One huge problem that datacentres - and indeed the wider IT community faces - is that when it comes to the wide-scale management of software, companies fail to understand how software interrelates and crucially, the relationship between IT assets and the commercial value of the services they provide. Without the ability to understand this, datacentres have little chance of powering down components that are commercially not critical. They have even less chance of prioritising, from a business perspective, the usage of each component and correcting issues that arise.

Until datacentres develop to the point that they can understand the commercial value of services on both a macro and a granular level, they won't be able to control change within their systems, or pinpoint the impact of potential changes. They certainly won't be able to report to their customers that they are saving the planet.

Sean

There were a lot of acronyms and keywords being bandied about at Gartner ITxpo this year. A Google search on the minds of the attendees would have generated a lot of hits on SOA, Globalization, Sourcing, Enterprise [Web] 2.0, “Free” Software, SaaS, and Cloud Computing. Social Networking was also an interesting thread that passed through all the other topics that attendees were abuzz about.

A large majority of the exhibiting vendors of course tagged their displays, demonstrations, and 30 second pitches with these terms to ensure that they too garnered as much attention as possible. I had a number of discussions with existing Managed Objects customers as well as parties interested in BSM about these trends and how to incorporate them into a cohesive strategy.

The BSM approach to dealing with these varied (and sometimes opposing) technologies is to focus on the service as a whole vs. individual moving parts and silos. As a customer of the power company, I expect that a flip of a light switch produces a predictable outcome every time – the lights come on. If they don’t, I don’t expect to hear details from the power company about all the potential issues that they are looking into ranging from failures in relay stations, downed power lines, problems with grids in neighboring states, etc. I count on them knowing the scope and source of the problem very quickly and getting it resolved. Electricity is an essential service and that level of understanding of what’s going on in the various moving parts of the power business is crucial.

Translating this type of operational model to IT management is what produces an effective BSM strategy. With IT becoming more complex (SOA, Enterprise 2.0, open source) and diffuse (Globalized, xSourced, SaaS, Cloud Computing) simultaneously, it is crucial to provide the best-of-breed management solutions for SMEs in each of these areas. Stopping here, however, leads to the all too common trap of too many tools and not enough answers. The key ingredient is a federated system that combines KPIs from each of the specialized solutions and allows a business level view to be constructed from it, that is, a true Manager of Managers with customizable dashboards for all parties with a vested interest in service availability and performance.

Implementation of this BSM strategy requires access to data connectors that span multiple vendors’ management solutions, expansion opportunities for the next generation of platforms, and most importantly – an analysis engine that can handle the complexity of the combined data feeds and make it available to a flexible presentation layer for the users of the system.

Although there were many different solutions to these challenges presented at ITxpo, a successful BSM deployment should offer a simple and personalized iGoogle-like experience for managing and viewing content of underlying IT infrastructure and the applications that run on top of it, and that’s one thing that everyone agreed on.

-- Abbas

As the Internet titans struggle to find more cost effective methods of keeping their datacenters cool, while simultaneously lowering their impact on the environment, I can’t help but smile. No I’m not insensitive the impending crisis that is global warming – to the contrary, I am a big believer in thinking globally and acting locally. It’s just that those of us in the field of BSM have already been executing on this global-local philosophy for years:sweeping, expensive measures aren’t always the best remedy – sometimes you just need to improve how you use what you already have.

Several years ago I was asked to provide some consulting services to a customer, an unnamed manufacturer, with a plant in Canada that desperately needed a solution to a simple but a very expensive problem. The servers in the datacenter that hosted the technology controlling the operation of the assembly line had to maintain a temperature that did not vary above or below a (+/-) 5 degree Celsius. If it did the servers would automatically shut themselves down to prevent overheating. With a vehicle rolling off the production line every 27 seconds, any stoppages on the manufacturing line had a clear and measurable impact on revenue.

Some proposals called for grand schemes to overhaul the datacenter with sweeping and sophisticated new solutions…until I arrived and offered a simple answer: integrate the tools you already have to develop an early warning system to monitor the temperature in the datacenter.

The HVAC systems already installed in the datacenter had onboard SNMP servers, which allowed a periodic polling of the datacenter temperature at three different points. The outcome of this poll was correlated to the required mean temperature in the datacenter – and a severity level for the production floor then conveyed to the Center. For example, if the temperature varied more than 2 degrees Celsius either way, IT operations staff was automatically paged and the manager on duty received an email on his blackberry. In just a week after installing this very simple early warning system, the number of production line stops was reduced by over 90 percent.

This situation was perfect for a BSM solution which is designed to integrate and correlate IT and business data and visualize it in a way that is meaningful to the business. More importantly, it exemplifies what is often symptomatic of a larger problem: providing a way for IT to understand that given current course and speed, a crash will occur in X-number of minutes. Whether it’s global warming or cooling the datacenter, sometimes we already have the ends of a solution in our hands – we just need to tie them together.

-- Jonathan

The recent outage in Florida is reminiscent of the blackout that crippled the Northeast in August 2003. What’s more the effect is the same, cascading events. Ability to correlate early indicators in both cases could be considered root cause in each case in containing the events.

A NERC investigation of the 2003 blackout found that failure of the system monitoring and control functions over the electricity grid were contributing factors to the blackout. Such failures caused operators to either delay or altogether miss corrective measures for which the company managing that portion of the grid was responsible. The consequence? Events cascaded and rapidly spread across the region.

According to Reuters, reactors in Florida shut down following “an under-voltage event caused when two power lines between Miami and Daytona tripped following an equipment malfunction in a Miami substation.” In other words, as the Tampa Bay Tribune wrote “a malfunction at a single electrical substation caused a cascading blackout that shut down a nuclear plant” and “briefly cut power to about 3 million people in Florida."

Though not directly affected by the outage, one electrical provider saw the blackout in 2003 as a good reason to proactively upgrade its alarm management system. Control room operators teamed up with the IT department at Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and tapped technology vendor Managed Objects to consolidate both IT and grid management system resulting with a flexible and integrated central alarm system correlating information and pointing operators to corrective procedures. The IESO’s project is profiled in the March/April 2008 issue of Electric Energy T&D magazine – it both makes a good business case for BSM and makes for an interesting use-case Intelligent Energy System.

- Michele