The Sageza Group: Strategic Snapshots

The world is getting smarter as it is more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent: we are living in a smarter planet. The data center of today is being called upon to deliver a dynamic and real-time IT infrastructure that can support business transformation as the smarter planet increases the scale, complexity, and diversity of workloads. Pervasive instrumentation will create vast amounts of data and drive new types of applications that require real-time data analysis and predictive intelligence.

November 2009

Integrated Systems Management The New Generation of IBM System x Servers

By Clay Ryder

The importance of systems management in the datacenter should not be underestimated. As deployment of all types and sizes of servers has continued unabated, IT organizations can no longer afford the manpower and resource expense of simply trusting that the vast server farm will operate efficiently without human intervention. While UNIX and mainframe operations have recognized this for some time, for many x86-based server installations, it is only recently that corporate realities have mandated the same degree of operational efficiency and efficacy for all IT servers.

April 2008

Improving Energy Efficiency through Application Infrastructure Virtualization: Introducing IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise

By Clay Ryder

While those “in the know” have always been aware of cooling and power distribution limitations, until recent years most organizations have not been affected by those physical limits. Facilities personnel used to address power and cooling needs without much notice, but the increasing demand from IT equipment has made the facilities a constraint to IT and business growth. Today, in many organizations’ data centers, power, cooling, and floor space have become significant inhibitors to growth while energy costs are consuming an increasingly high proportion of the overall operational budget. Concurrently, to help meet the rising demand for IT services, many organizations have made Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) the underpinning for their enterprise application strategy. Not surprisingly, IT administration has become the leading IT cost and as with energy consumption, is increasing at an alarming rate.

February 2008

The Value of PowerVM Workload Partitions: New Virtualization Options in IBM AIX v6.1

By Clay Ryder

Many organizations have embraced virtualization to improve IT utilization and reduce the expenses associated with equipment acquisition, installation, and operation. While traditional virtualization or partitioning schemes have improved IT resource utilization, reducing the number of physical servers has not reduced the number of server operating system (OS) images requiring administration and maintenance. If anything, virtualization has encouraged growth in the number of servers that support the application workloads in organizations. There is an opportunity for IT to reduce this administrative overhead to become more streamlined and cost-efficient while continuing to provide the levels of service on which organizations have become dependent.

August 2007

IBM Blade Storage Strategies: Diskless Blade Architecture

By Clay Ryder

Demands for increased efficiency in the datacenter have led systems vendors to develop a variety of more efficient and flexible servers. At the same time, consolidation initiatives combined with the growing demand for information of all types now has organizations facing the challenge of managing a rapidly growing data pool. This has become a very real concern for most organizations as they struggle to adopt industry best practices and comply with various regulatory initiatives. This challenge is further complicated by the varying workloads and historic server deployment practices that shaped the IT infrastructure within the datacenter.

June 2006

File System Archiving: Because Not All Data Is Equal in Value

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Data management has historically been the sole responsibility of information technology (IT) managers, but the importance of data to the success and survival of the business is now capturing the interest of business managers and executives as well. On the IT side, there are several issues that compel managers to examine their storage strategies. These include the need to lower overall IT costs, which can be affected by improving storage utilization; decreasing backup and recovery times; and simplifying management tasks to drive higher productivity of IT staff. Seeking answers for these issues has been the impetus behind the adoption of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies within enterprise and mid-range organizations, to make sure that the storage infrastructure is aligned to the relative importance of the data at any given point in its lifecycle.

May 2006

Processor Defined: Changing Markets or Changing Definitions?

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

As vendors roll out the many changes happening to processor technology, confusion is arising in the marketplace. Vendors exploit different advances in their chip and processor designs, depending on their products’ past architectural directions. For customers, trying to understand the difference between processors and the impact to their applications and infrastructure has become more complicated due to marketing obfuscation by the vendors in order to differentiate their products and architectures. By changing the classical definitions of computer terminology they risk confusing users who think in technical terms and aren’t aware of technical words being used differently. Users may find themselves comparing systems which they believe to be alike but are in fact very different because two vendors are using common words differently.

July 2005

A to z9 for System Integrators: Opportunities for Business Success

By Clay Ryder

Systems Integrators play a vital role in matching the capabilities of vendors with end customers by acquiring a level of customer knowledge that surpasses all but the largest direct vendor engagements. SIs act as customer advocates for multiple vendors, and can aggregate customer demands to garner vendor attention and resources. SIs can also reverse the process by identifying opportunities for vendors with the integrator’s customers. Systems vendors, such as IBM, derive a great deal of opportunity and business value from SIs through their geographic, business, or technological expertise and benefit their suppliers by delivering specialized knowledge of real-world customer needs across several demographics. In this paper, we examine the role of Systems Integrators in helping organizations benefit from their technology investments. We also examine the capabilities of IBM’s mainframe products, the System z9 and eServer zSeries, and reflect on how this platform provides opportunity not only for the end customer, but also for the Systems Integrators who play an invaluable role in delivering IT solutions in the marketplace.

July 2005

EMC Drives the High End to New Frontiers

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Storage is one of the fastest growing segments of the IT infrastructure. The data it houses and makes available is critical to business success. New products in the market provide superior capabilities that allow companies to better manage and control their information assets; however, it is difficult for most companies to take strategic advantage of those features. Often companies don’t fully understand their data and have not implemented an architecture that aligns it, classifies it, protects it, and enables the business to leverage it. EMC is now rising to these challenges on a couple of fronts. Along with a new Symmetrix DMX-3 for high-end storage needs which advances the capabilities of high-end storage, the company also has new EMC Consulting Services. These offerings provide customers with the tools to better understand their data and storage environment, such as classification and policy, or architecture and consolidation services. With the DMX-3 in combination with a strategic understanding of their corporate data, customers are better-positioned to take advantage of the resources they already have, add new ones for ongoing storage development, and strategically drive their businesses forward with superior information lifecycle capabilities.

March 2005

The Business Advantage of a Unified Backup and Archival Strategy

By Clay Ryder and Rob Kidd

Recent changes in the business and technology environment have ignited reexamination of enterprise data backup, extraction, and archiving. It has become clear that there is a compelling need for a strategic alignment of backup and archival processes within organizations. Traditional thinking and paradigms are evolving to more unified, yet granular approaches to data management that leverage Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) concepts. It is no longer sufficient to perform complete backups of production data without consideration for cost and operational efficiency, as this will only lead an organization to a competitive disadvantage relative to more progressively thinking organizations. Regulatory, competitive, and physical limitations have narrowed backup/recovery windows, and government compliance and corporate governance have placed new demands on archiving, such as more extensive archiving with expedient, precision-point data recovery requirements.

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February 2005

EMC Energizes iSCSI Deployment for Windows Servers

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Broad support of iSCSI by a major storage vendor means that it should no longer be viewed as a niche technology for specialized use. By offering support for iSCSI across its storage product families EMC is making iSCSI a real option for IT managers. In this paper we look at how iSCSI offerings from EMC provide customers with opportunities to move more of their Windows storage to a networked environment in a cost-effective manner.

January 2005

IBM eServer OpenPower 710: Entry-Level Price, Exceptional Flexibility

By Rob Kidd

The IBM eServer OpenPower 710 is the newest OpenPower family system, offering attractive performance and price/performance for the entry-level strategic Linux server market. The OpenPower 710 provides a range of hardware and software options for deployment flexibility. It joins the OpenPower720 as an entry-level offering, and with the availability of the IBM Advanced OpenPower Virtualization option, the OpenPower 710 is an ideal candidate for infrastructure and workload simplification. The turnkey OpenPower Consolidation Express solution utilizing the OpenPower 710 is well positioned for the SMB and volume markets, and features its enterprise class reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) along with high performance. This solution also utilizes simplified systems management with IBM’s Hardware Management Console (HMC) to streamline management tasks. The OpenPower 710 is a strategic option for IT shops with entry-level requirements as well as enterprise-class expectations.

January 2005

Mapping the Business Value of Data Backup and Archival Solutions

By Clay Ryder

Over the past year, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has become the concept du jour among storage vendors, their customers, and the greater IT industry. Much of ILM’s charm lies in the simplicity of the idea that since the value of information naturally declines over time, wise organizations make certain that information resides in tiered storage solutions whose costs and capabilities closely match its own. However, getting from the here of complex, even chaotic enterprise storage to the there of integrated ILM is hardly so simple. While the rote process of such a transition is difficult enough, organizations must contend with a wide range of disparate commercial ILM strategies and technologies. Even worse, vendors who lack a full range of appropriate solutions sometimes trumpet products that they claim can be leveraged, Swiss Army Knife-style, across a host of applications, business needs and time horizons. In this paper, we differentiate the roles of backup and archival processes and examine various technologies in the marketplace that seek to help organizations operate effective solutions for each of these two areas.

October 2004:

A to zSeries for System Integrators: Opportunities for Business Success

By Clay Ryder

Why are System Integrators important to the industry as a whole and to vendors in particular? While at one time it was the norm to buy a monolithic, vertically integrated, and custom-built computing solution, the reality of today is quite different. Although single-sourced custom-built solutions had their advantages including a team of proficient technological experts and a singular attention on the customer, as well as one point of contact for problem resolution, this approach was costly and left the customer having to accept the capabilities, no matter how good they were, of a single vendor. In this paper, we examine the role of Systems Integrators in helping organizations benefit from their technology investments. We also examine the capabilities of IBM’s eServer zSeries and reflect on how this platform provides opportunity not only for the end customer, but also for the Systems Integrators who play an invaluable role in delivering IT solutions in the marketplace.

August 2004:

POWERing eServer p5: Leveraging IBM's Innovative Standards for System Integration

By Charles King

IBM’s new eServer p5 systems offer a number of “firsts” that will positively affect IT customers and the market at large, and offer significant benefits to Systems Integrators. The eServer p5 along with recently announced eServer i5 systems are the first generation of commercially available solutions based on IBM’s new POWER5 processor and the latest iteration of the company’s venerable Power Architecture. However, the new features of the POWER5, including advanced virtualization, micropartitioning, and simultaneous multi-threading, are elements of the eServer p5 that provide a stylish bow around a well considered, notably flexible, highly scalable business computing package. Whether the customer is a small, medium, or large enterprise, the eServer p5 provides a depth and breadth of IT capabilities in a compact and cost-effective package that until recently was simply not available in the marketplace.

June 2004:

IBM and SUSE Drive Linux Enterprise Readiness for European Mid-Market

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Like many of their larger counterparts, mid-market businesses are experimenting with Linux and open source software due to their reputation for being lower cost than traditional alternatives. This is a low-risk option for many businesses, as evaluation copies are generally free, and there has always been extensive help available on the Internet for novices. However, despite overwhelmingly positive experiences with Linux, roadblocks remain before widespread corporate adoption advances and Linux becomes a strategic enterprise operating system. The operating system sits at the heart of a stack of software between the hardware and the applications. Integrated database, middleware, and network services are additional necessary components of the stack and are usually addressed piecemeal rather than in an integrated fashion. Now, however, companies such as SUSE, part of Novell, and IBM have developed and integrated these and other components of the stack to give Linux environments the capabilities necessary to give businesses the confidence needed to deploy Linux strategically within their organisations

March 2004:

Economical Disk-Based Recovery for the High-End: New Space Saving Pointer-Based Snapshots

By Charles King and Jim Balderston

Just a few years ago, recovery point objectives (RPO) were typically measured in days. Increasing reliance and pressure on IT-based business processes and the resulting explosion of information storage requirements have reduced that time to a single day or less. As a result, many organizations have found that tape is too slow as a primary recovery option. Given evolving RPO and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and disk capacity requirements for supporting point in time (PIT) solutions, customers have been forced to make tradeoffs between cost and rapid recovery. Space Saving Snapshots offer economical alternatives to full-volume copies and require less disk space while significantly improving the RTO and RPO of tape-based backup. When Space Saving Snapshots are used in conjunction with full-volume copies, the combined solution provides levels of flexibility and security that neither technology offers alone. In short, Space Saving Snapshots can notably enhance the availability and economics of replication technology.

March 2004:

IBM POWER as an Industry Standard: The Intersection of Collaboration and Innovation

Business evolves through alternating cycles of innovation and standardization. Those products and processes that are widely adopted or influential often become accepted as Industry Standard. While Industry Standard is a commonly used marketing slogan, its misuse has confused and diluted the term’s meaning. In IT, an Industry Standard can be proposed and/or accepted by technology standards organizations such as the W3C or the OPEN Group or arise because a business process has been legislated or regulated. A technology can also achieve De Facto Industry Standard status through wide acceptance by vendors, supply chains, and customers. This is a particularly slippery area since it is the market, and not the vendors who profit from its approval, that essentially grants De Facto Standard status. In addition, over the past decade, a third class of innovative Industry Standards has evolved largely unrecognized as such by the IT industry and end users, though most have enjoyed these technologies’ benefits. In this paper, we will discuss the origins and dynamics of industry standards and the evolution of new Innovative Standards as exemplified by IBM’s POWER processor architecture. We will also consider the business and technological benefits of the POWER architecture and its effect on the IT industry, vendors, and end users.

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February 2004:

NAS Gateways: The Evolution of New Datacenter Solutions

By Charles King and Clay Ryder

The business value of enterprise storage solutions rests on the notion that preserving and providing ready access to information such as intellectual property, product development data, and sales and marketing results can enhance or improve the way an organization operates. How businesses choose to execute their storage strategies can embrace a wide range of applications and hardware, but over time, optimal system flexibility and price/performance remain two essential qualities businesses look for in storage solutions.

November 2003:

EMC: Delivering Storage Solutions Tailored for Medium Size Enterprises

By Charles King and Jim Balderston

Medium-size enterprises have storage management requirements similar to those of larger companies but also have unique requirements because of their size. Storage management solutions for these businesses (companies with 100-1,000 employees) must be easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy on tight IT budgets. IT vendors must deliver solutions tailored to meet the special business and technology requirements of their mid-tier clients. EMC, best known for its large-enterprise storage offerings, has been active in developing and delivering hardware and software solutions designed for the mid-tier market. The company recently announced new software products that broaden and deepen its existing mid-tier product line, delivering enterprise-class storage solutions tailored for medium-size enterprises. In this paper, we examine the unique requirements of the mid-size enterprise and outline the attributes of the ideal mid-tier storage management solutions. Finally, we discuss EMC’s new software offerings, as well as the options and opportunities they offer mid-tier enterprises.

August 2003:

Consolidation, Expansion, or Both? Measuring IBM eServer iSeries Business Value for SMBs

By Clay Ryder

The causes and effects of heterogeneous computing environments are nearly cliché. Blessed by an excess of choices, deal-minded IT vendors, and continually evolving price/ performance metrics, enterprise customers took advantage of countless opportunities over the past half decade. The results, however, are not pretty, and as often as not look more like high-tech crazy quilts than ready-for-primetime computing infrastructures. Curiously, the inherent challenges of multi-vendor computing environments for large enterprises have been widely discussed, but they are no less profound for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

July 2003:

Penguin Dreams: Can Linux Help SMBs to Fly?

By Clay Ryder

The arrival of Linux in the late 1990s provides a notable example of how a disruptive technology emerges, evolves, and eventually finds its way into the mainstream. Linus Torvalds’ decision to open his initial source code for public input/alteration was a dramatic departure from the typical proprietary product development model, as was the quick and enthusiastic embrace of Linux by the software community. Within months, this enthusiasm gained the weight of religious fervor among many Linux adherents, who publicly imagined a happy future where Open Standards Linux solutions would eventually displace Microsoft’s and others’ iron-fisted control of the commercial software market. The truth, as usual, is a bit more complex.

June 2003:

IBM eServer zSeries: A Cost-Effective Resource for Enterprise Application Deployment and Integration

By Clay Ryder

Enterprise applications, while offering potentially the highest leverage of any IT resource, often remain under-utilized due to enterprises’ historic propensity for creating discrete vertical application solutions. The result has been ever-increasing numbers of systems deployed tactically to meet users’ critical needs, but without strategic consideration of the long-term IT overhead created and ultimately borne by the enterprise. IBM’s eServer zSeries products provide a unique platform to integrate, deploy, and host Enterprise Applications.

April 2003:

IBM zSeries: Powering On Demand Infrastructures for Dynamic Business Needs

By Charles King

IBM’s On Demand initiative has helped to codify the company’s ongoing provision of strategic and technological solutions for dynamic business processes and to define their end-to-end value across enterprise IT environments. But the fact is that many enterprises have been operating in an “on demand” manner for years, perhaps without being entirely cognizant of or prepared for this reality. IBM’s zSeries mainframe technologies are helping to power On Demand solutions that combine the benefits of today’s data centers with the promises of tomorrow’s.

March 2003:

Storage Selection Directly Impacts Business Continuity Implementation

By Charles King

EMC recently announced its new Symmetrix DMX series of high-end storage solutions to address the optimization challenges faced by high-end storage customers. This report examines EMC’s recent products in the context of satisfying organizations’ business continuity needs through flexible high-performance enterprise storage solutions.

November 2002

Mainframe Rehosting: Stretching the Bounds of Technology or Credulity?

by Charles King

Mainframe computing may be the world’s best known and, ironically, least understood technology. For the past three generations, stately ranks of refrigerator-sized mainframes have typified (often to the point of cliché) the power and potential of enterprise computing, but funny things tend to happen along the way to IT paradise. Many have predicted or presumed that mainframe computing is, at best, a moribund technology significantly out of step with current IT industry trends.

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