The hard long battle IT department, maybe a way to win

GigaOm has a guest post on the problem of IT being in the back seat at so many companies.

Technology is king, so why are so many IT departments playing backseat roles?

by Bart Copeland, Guest Contributor

23 HOURS AGO

7 Comments

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photo: aceshot1/Shutterstock

SUMMARY:

As employees feel increasingly entitled to take tech into their own hands via BYOD, the cloud and SaaS, IT is finding itself sidelined. The answer is for IT to redefine itself. Welcome to IT as a Service.

Today’s IT departments face an identity crisis. Technology is an integral part of every single business process, and has come to dominate the lives of consumers who are routinely shopping online, downloading information, and browsing the Internet.

Yet ironically, in an era when technology rules, IT departments are losing ground fast:  The forces of cloud computing, social media, and information management are evolving rapidly, and business managers are discovering and adopting new technology before IT departments even have a chance to master it. Gartner Research predicts that by 2015, 35 percent of most companies’ technology-related expenditures will be managed outside the IT department’s budget.

In order to thrive and have an impact in today’s businesses, IT departments must stay relevant. They must become service-oriented organizations. That means deploying user-centric and agile solutions that meet the business needs of the organization and individual departments. That means delivering IT as a Service (ITaaS), and becoming a team of service-oriented experts.

You can go on and on with defensive strategies which is what most would do.  How about take the offensive?  IT sells it's services to the businesses now that it has competition from the cloud.  Selling is in offensive activity. The challenger sale book goes into the five ways.

The research revealed that sales reps fall into one of five profiles:

1. The Hard Worker
2. The Problem Solver
3. The Challenger
4. The Relationship Builder
5. The Lone Wolf

Each profile can turn in average performance, but only one consistently outperforms – the Challenger.

What does the Challenger do?

Challengers: What They Do Differently

While most reps focus on building customer relationships, the best focus on pushing customers' thinking, introducing new solutions to their problems and illuminating problems customers overlook.
Specifically, they:

• Teach
• Tailor
• Take Control

Given IT is the technology group it seems natural that users would expect them to teach and tailor.  This is probably why Big Data is so popular as it addresses these needs.

The rest of the cloud services are using the Challenger approach.  Competing against a Challenger is tough if you don't show you can teach and tailor better than they do.

Selling security, centralized management doesn't go as far as it used to.

Do you see who and what is behind the standards? If you did would you adopt them?

Standards are typically thought of as a good thing.  DCK just posted an AFCOM one on education, and it got me thinking do you really know the story behind a standard and if you did would it change the adoption of a standerd.  I've sat on many standard initiatives and gradually learned what is many times behind the scenes of something like an IEEE standard.

WHAT ARE STANDARDS?

Standards are published documents that establish specifications and procedures designed to maximize the reliability of the materials, products, methods, and/or services people use every day. Standards address a range of issues, including but not limited to various protocols to help maximize product functionality and compatibility, facilitate interoperability and support consumer safety and public health.

The top players in the standards are those who have most to gain by a new standard or who have most to lose. 

Working on standards can be time consuming, especially when part of the game is to slow down the development of a standard to allow more time for companies to adapt.

Ultimately there is a scorecard each company keeps how does this standard affect my products and my company.  Does it help us or hurt us.  Does this standard help our competitors more than us.

Chris Crosby gets into this subject as well with his post.  Chris puts in some great points.

Unfortunately, when evaluating data center providers, customers often have to navigate between what is real and a vendor’s standard- inspired puffery.

...

This pattern of devolution from industry standards places a greater burden on today’s data center customers. Failure to ask for, and receive, objective evidence of a provider’s adherence to the standards that underlie their performance claims places the customer in the position of having to make their decision based more on the sizzle rather than the steak. Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware) was the advice of the ancient Greek’s to wary prospective customers, in the world of data center standards compliance, it’s probably still good advice.

Heading to LV at end of Apr, no not Data Center World, IBM Impact - social, mobile, cloud conference

A lot of data center people will be heading to LV at the end of the month for Data Center World Spring.

I have some friends who will be in LV and asked if I could join them for an evening event so I was looking to be in LV.

Then I saw that IBM has conf exactly at the same time called IBM Impact on Mobile, Social, and Cloud.  Huh, facility management professionals or social, mobile, cloud professionals with Forest Whitaker, Tim O-Reilly, Michael Copeland (Wired), Rich KarlGaard (Forbes), and Matchbox Twenty.  Which one should I go to?  Power and Cooling stuff we have talked about for the past 5 years or social, mobile, cloud.  On Apr 29 - May 1 I'll be at the IBM event, maybe I'll chat with some of the data center folks who are all the way down at the Mandalay Bay.

Energy inefficiency forces an early retirement of '09 record holder super computer

There is lots of press around that the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory is being turned off.

First Petaflop Supercomputer, 'Roadrunner,' Decommissioned

PC Magazine 7 hours ago

Written by David Murphy

If you need to take a moment to think of a joke about a particular speedy bird and its coyote companion, we understand. Otherwise, it's time to raise a toast today to one of the computing world's heavyweights, the first supercomputer that ever managed to hit a ...

Former supercomputer king Roadrunner to shut down todayCNET - by Steven Musil

Roadrunner Supercomputer, Once World's Fastest, Decommissioned SundayHuffington Post

In Depth:World's top supercomputer from '09 is now obsolete, will be dismantled

The one I found most useful is the Arstechnica article where the energy efficiency is mentioned.

Petaflop machines aren't automatically obsolete—a petaflop is still speedy enough to crack the top 25 fastest supercomputers. Roadrunner is thus still capable of performing scientific work at mind-boggling speeds, but has been surpassed by competitors in terms of energy efficiency. For example, in the November 2012 ratings Roadrunner required 2,345 kilowatts to hit 1.042 petaflops and a world ranking of #22. The supercomputer at #21 required only 1,177 kilowatts, and #23 (clocked at 1.035 petaflops) required just 493 kilowatts.

Given the high power consumption it would seem most likely this is the actual power draw, not the additional power for the cooling system.  A pre-2009 super computer would most likely have over 50% for the cooling system, so this could easily be 3.5MW of power.

Supercomputers are regularly rated on its energy use.  And, the author highlights there is a need for a better performance per watt.

"Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable," Los Alamos wrote. "Future supercomputers will also need new solutions for handling and storing the vast amounts of data involved in such massive calculations."

What's up with Small Nuclear Reactors?

There are a fair amount of ex-nuclear sub staff who work in data centers.   It is possible the idea of a small nuclear plant could follow at some part far in the future.  MIT Review discusses the current state of small nuclear reactors.

Nuclear option:Babcock & Wilcox’s proposed power plant is based on two small modular nuclear reactors.

Small, modular nuclear reactor designs could be relatively cheap to build and safe to operate, and there’s plenty of corporate and government momentum behind a push to develop and license them. But will they be able to offer power cheap enough to compete with natural gas? And will they really help revive the moribund nuclear industry in the United States?

Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it would provide $452 million in grants to companies developing small modular reactors, provided the companies matched the funds (bringing the total to $900 million). In November it announced the first grant winner—Babcock & Wilcox, a maker of reactors for nuclear ships and submarines—and this month it requested applications for a second round of funding. The program funding is expected to be enough to certify two or three designs.

Natural gas is so cheap it is hard to imagine a small nuclear plant being deployed any time soon for a data center.

Even if small reactors can compete with conventional nuclear power, they still might not be able to compete with natural-gas power plants, especially in the United States, where natural gas is cheap (see “Safer Nuclear Power, at Half the Price”). Their success will depend on how much utilities think they need to hedge against a possible rise in natural-gas prices over the lifetime of a plant—and how much they believe they’ll be required to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

“At the end of the day, we’ll build the lowest-cost option for ratepayers,” Cryderman says. “If it’s too expensive, we won’t build it.” The challenge, he says, is predicting what the lowest-cost options will be over the decades new plants will operate.

One of these days natural gas will not be plentiful and nuclear is going to be one of those options that may make sense.