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Microsoft Infrastructure

Diaxion’s Microsoft Infrastructure service is dedicated to help enterprises increase their revenue, reduce costs, and utilise technology innovation in order to obtain a competitive advantage in the market. Regardless of the size of your business we will tailor an individual solution to suit your needs.

Maintaining the reliability, security, scalability and availability of your Microsoft Infrastructure is key to running your business–critical Microsoft applications. Diaxion’s Microsoft Infrastructure services enable you to fully capitalise and maximise the value of your Microsoft environment.

Diaxion’s Microsoft Certified consultants help design, plan, deploy and support the implementation of a Microsoft-based network or migrate your older Microsoft technology to the latest offerings. Diaxion provides services in planning, implementing and managing consolidation of your organisation’s Microsoft servers, applications and data.

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Understanding IT Governance – Part One

In this two part series, I will provide an insight into the ten key principles of IT Governance. Part one will cover the first five principles and part two will cover the remaining five.

Let’s get started!

It seems there are many definitions for IT Governance. I would like to start by describing the definition as I understand it from my experience.

Definition

A framework for the leadership, organisational structures and business processes, standards and compliance to these standards, which ensure that the organisation’s IT supports and enables the achievement of its strategies and objectives.
So what does that mean? I have produced a concise version of what I believe the above statement represents which is “enable your organisation to operate in unity with people, process and technology to achieve business and IT alignment.”

Key Principles 1-5

1. Create / design the mechanisms for IT Governance.

Most mechanisms are designed as a result of a problem such as not gaining sufficient Return On Investment (ROI) on hardware / software or duplication of activities across your IT organisation – this is a tactical way of doing things and limits IT organisations from focusing on implementing mechanisms in a more strategic manner. Creating mechanisms using a strategic approach will help meet the company’s objectives and goals.

As with the implementation of anything whether it be a process or a new service for example, gaining the support of senior management is imperative for success. In many cases, organisations won’t have specific IT Governance in place however it is possible to leverage existing mechanisms that are used in the business such as project review, base lining and cost recovery models. It is important that mechanisms that are built follow a constant improvement cycle to ensure they remain agile and don’t impede the operation of your IT organisation. It is considered beneficial to have the fewest number of effective mechanisms as possible.

2. Redesigning mechanisms for IT Governance

The redesign process for IT Governance structure in your organisation will often require that staff learn new roles and build new relationships with different parts of the business and IT. As learning takes a long time, the redesign process should only be completed on an infrequent basis. Some companies change governance to encourage a certain behaviour resulting from changes in strategy.

Transformation of the way an IT organisation operates can promote many other issues and can often take months to implement. Having said that, IT Governance can be used in the transformation process as a lever to encourage change within your organisation. An example of this might be changing how IT budgets are defined / managed from a single business unit to a holistic company perspective.

3. Get Senior Management involved

Firstly, it is essential that CIOs must be involved in IT Governance and also other senior managers to ensure its success. Participation in the committees, approval and performance reviews is a must.

The participation of senior managers facilitates improving the synergy across the organisation and also creates the awareness to the business that IT should be viewed in the context of the entire company and not just a support function.

However, senior managers are generally willing to be involved but more often than not, are unaware of what value they can add. In light of this, it’s the responsibility of the CIO / key stakeholders in IT Governance to communicate effectively using a Governance Arrangements Matrix. The Arrangements Matrix is similar to a Roles and Responsibilities matrix in that it describes who is empowered to make decisions about specific aspects of IT Projects.

4. Making Choices

Good governance can be compared with having good strategy – both require choices. As with most process, it is not possible to meet every goal but the process should be able to identify conflicting goals and have a sub process that brings these conflicts to the table for debate.

Ineffective governance that has conflicting goals is more common in organisations that have directives from different places. This results in confusion, complexity and mixed messages which can lead to staff ignoring policies and processes. In some cases this can be attributed to having a number of unmanageable goals resulting from poor strategic business choices and had nothing to do with the IT organisation. Staff that are responsible for delivering these goals can often become frustrated and inefficient.

5. How to handle exceptions

Exceptions to the rule are how most organisations learn. In particular IT architecture and infrastructure can receive requests for exceptions that are thoughtless with regards to meeting the true business needs. An example of an exception procedure is:-

The process is clearly defined and understood by all. Clear criteria and fast escalation encourage only business units with a strong case to pursue an exception.
The process has a few stages that quickly move the issue up to senior management. Thus, the process minimises the chance that architecture standards will delay project implementation.
Successful exceptions are adopted into the enterprise architecture, completing the organisational learning process.

Having a formal exception process provides benefit to the organisation by learning about technology. Exceptions can often relieve pressure build up as managers can become frustrated if they are told they cannot do something to help the business.

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Understanding IT Governance – Part Two

This is the final part of a two part series discussing the ten key principles of IT Governance. Part two will cover the last five principles of ten in total.

Key Principles 6-10

6. Provide the right incentives

One of the most common problems with incentives and reward systems is the misalignment with the behaviours the IT governance arrangements were designed to encourage. The most prevalent matter is around how the organisation can expect governance to work when the incentive and reward systems are driving a different behaviour. We believe this is bigger than IT governance, none the less it does contribute to the ineffectiveness when incentives are not aligned to organisational goals.

Avoiding financial disincentives to desirable behaviour is as important as offering financial incentives. For example, some organisations don’t charge for architectural assistance to encourage project teams to consult with architects. It’s one of the common problems with charge back when business units make their own decisions and don’t consult internal specialists to avoid paying for internal services.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of aligning incentives to governance arrangements, however if a well designed IT governance system is not effective, one of the first places to investigate is the incentives.

7. Assign ownerships and accountability for IT Governance

It’s the old chestnut of management commitment. Like any major organisational initiative, IT governance must have an owner and accountabilities. More often than not, the board is responsible for all governance, but sometimes will delegate an individual or group within an organisation to be accountable. By selecting the right person or group, the board should consider some issues:-

Firstly, IT governance cannot be designed in isolation from other key assets of the firm. For this reason, the individual or group must have a holistic view of the enterprise and good relationships and credibility with the business leaders in the organisation.

Secondly, IT governance cannot be implemented alone. It should be made clear by the executive team that all managers are expected to contribute in the same way they would to other governance such as financial or other key assets.

Thirdly, IT assets are becoming more and more important to the successful performance of most enterprises. The individual or group that owns IT governance must understand what the technology is and isn’t capable of. Technical details are not critical but an understanding for the two way connection between strategy and IT.

It is generally the board or CEO that holds a CIO accountable for the IT governance performance with some clear measures of success. It is the responsibility of the board or CEO to announce the CIO as being accountable for IT governance and this is essential for the success of IT governance. Without this, it is very hard for CIO to engage the senior management team in the process.

8. Design governance at multiple organisational levels

For large organisations that have multiple business units, it’s beneficial to consider designing IT governance at multiple levels. A good starting point for enterprise wide IT governance is driven by a small number of strategies and goals. These separate layers of IT governance exist in divisions, business units or geographies and should be part of a holistic level of IT governance. At the lower levels of an organisation there is a demand for synergy, whereas the need for autonomy between business units is greatest at the higher levels in an organisation.

As the lower levels of governance are more often than not influenced by mechanisms designed at the higher levels, it is recommended that enterprise wide IT governance is the starting point when designing governance. As starting at the higher level is sometimes not possible, starting at the business unit level can be more practical.

9. Provide transparency and education

It’s quite impossible to have too much transparency or education when it comes to IT governance. Transparency and education go hand in hand as the more education you have, the more transparency and vice versa. This can be facilitated using portals, intranets, workshop breakfasts and many other ways of marketing IT governance.

Portals should include tools and resources such as a glossary of IT terms and acronyms. Some portals provide templates for proposing IT investments complete with cost model calculators.

The less transparent the governance processes are, the less people follow them. The more special deals are made, the less confidence there is in the process and the more workarounds are used. The less confidence there is in the governance, the less willingness there is to play by rules designed to lead to increased firm-wide performance.

Communication and support of IT governance from the executive team is the most important role they play.

10. Implement common mechanisms across the six key assets

These six key assets are how enterprises accomplish their strategies and generate business value.

Human assets: people, skills, career paths, training, reporting, mentoring, competencies and so on
Financial assets: Cash, investments, liabilities, cash flow, receivables and so on
Physical assets: Buildings, plant, equipment, maintenance, security, utilisation and so on
IP assets: Intellectual property (IP), including product, services, and process know how formally patented, copyrighted or embedded in people and systems.
Information and IT assets: Data, information, knowledge about customers, processes performance, finance, information systems and so on
Relationship assets: Relationships within the enterprise as well as relationships, brand, and reputation with customers, suppliers, business units, regulators, competitors, channel partners and so on

For example, an organisation that decides to implement a single point of customer contact strategy must coordinate assets to deliver that uniform experience. Just having good customer loyalty (that is, relationship assets) without the products to sell (IP assets) will drain value. Not having well-trained people (human assets) to work with customers supported by good data and technology (information and IT assets) will drain value. Not having the right buildings and shop fronts to work from or in which to make the goods (physical assets) will drain value. Finally, not coordinating the investments needed (financial assets) will drain value.

Put this way, the coordination of the six assets seems blindingly obvious.

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Check out our IT Governance Practice’s services

vCIO

The vCIO program is a residency-based engagement that provides the Client with a skilled resource positioned on-site, on either a permanent basis or a part-time basis in order to manage the daily operation or execute the transformation of a roadmap developed by the organisation/Diaxion.

• Short / Medium term • Part time / Full time • Transformation leadership / Execution of Roadmap

IT OPERATIONS ASSESSMENT

The IT Operations Assessment is a pragmatic review/improvement exercise of IT operations at a company and/or technical silo level. Each of the following assessment areas can be encompassed in a holistic review or alternatively can be reviewed as a single component within your IT organisation.

• Skill set • Process / IT Governance • Toolset • People structure • Operation Transformation

This would typically include an audit of the aforementioned areas followed by the development of a strategy/roadmap that is practical in nature with real implementation steps for the organisation. This process can also be seen as a transformation program
assisting the organisation to move-up the levels of maturity within their IT operation.

IT INFRASTRUCTURE AUDIT

The IT Infrastructure audit encompasses a broad and narrow audit to assist in identifying the scope/areas within an IT organisation that require further analysis. Each of these assessment areas can be encompassed in a holistic audit or can be audited as a single component within your own IT organisation.

• Key services and applications review • High Level IT Architecture audit • Operation Transformation • Process maturity assessment • Process / procedure development / training / implementation • Run book creation / review.

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Data-Driven Approaches to Performance Management

Does your organisation have a true performance management methodology? For the majority of organisations the answer is simply “no” – performance management amounts to a variety of disparate, ad hoc and predominantly reactive processes. Examples of such approaches may include:

Server utilisation monitoring – perfmon statistics – CPU/memory/disk utilisation etc.
CMDB
User-feedback – “It seems slow”
Transaction response time monitoring (“stopwatch testing”)

Common limitations of these legacy approaches include:

Not data-driven
Reactive – bottlenecks are typically only identified after they cause performance problems
Don’t take into account shared systems – virtualisation/SAN/network
Obtaining more useful data requires significantly greater operational investment
Tools tend to be focus on individual infrastructure layers making it difficult to build processes that are useful across the entire enterprise infrastructure
Baseline performance benchmarking only useful for before/after analysis – cannot be used for accurate “what if” scenario planning

The largest challenge faced by infrastructure administrators in responding to performance problems is a lack of data. When users complain that “it’s slow” administrators lack the critical information needed to effectively respond – how did the application perform before the issue arose; what utilisation metrics correlated to the previous, acceptable, performance level; to what degree is performance now degraded; what has changed between then and now?

As a result, administrators tend to fall back on intuitive approaches to performance troubleshooting – looking for errant performance metrics, reviewing code release schedules and recent infrastructure changes, and frequently fall back on crude techniques such as increasing available computational resources in a hope to resolve performance bottlenecks. Such approaches are inefficient and are not cost effective, and do not scale to large, complex environments.

A new wave of tools is emerging that seek to resolve these problems. These tools are generally “cross domain”, referring to their ability to collect and analyse data from multiple infrastructure layers. Typically, the include the ability to determine whether performance variations are due to increased load, code changes, infrastructure changes, or impacted by performance of shared system components (ie, where an application’s performance is degraded due to increased load on a shared component such as a virtualisation farm).

An additional benefit of a data-driven performance management approach is the ability to “right-sizing” infrastructure – particularly in virtualised environments, resources are often over-allocated to individual servers and are therefore wasted. Once administrators fully understand the true performance and resource requirements of applications, these wasted resources can be reclaimed and reallocated.

In addition, they are capable of complex scenario modelling – this allows administrators to forecast the impacts associated with, for example, a successful web marketing campaign, the hiring of 100 new office staff, or the opening of a new branch office. As a result administrators can proactively identify future performance bottlenecks and IT infrastructure spending can be targeted to where they will deliver most benefit. Further, by understanding application utilisation trends and knowing where bottlenecks reside in their infrastructure, administrators are able to reesolve performance issues before their users even notice them.

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Implementation of ITIL

Implementing ITIL is considered difficult by most and quite daunting, however this depends on the level of maturity the organisation is seeking and what is generally recommended is a staged pathway to move to an optimised state. Smaller organisations should cherry pick the processes and components within those processes to avoid over complicating the implementation.

Implementations have been successful where they have had support / sponsorship from senior management, project managers, persons dedicated to performing the role of process owner and individual roles within ITIL. Other critical success factors include training and communication. Unfortunately, organisations that have implemented ITIL as a service management framework have often been unable to justify the operational costs with the so-called benefits the framework offers. For this, in most cases it has drifted by the side line and remnants of ITIL are present, but the lack of commitment and management drive has disappeared.

Most organisations have implemented:- Incident Management, Service Desk, Change Management, Release Management, Service Level Management and Configuration Management (Service Support).

Some organisations have implemented the entire framework, so Service Support and Service Delivery. These are v2 ITIL and not many organisations have upgraded to v3.

Considerations

Roles and Responsibilities (people holding two hat roles, the whole argument that you can only have one master unless the person is allowed a 50/50 split, depending on the commitments of their contribution to a particular process.
Cost / Benefit Analysis to be performed prior to implementation.
Exercise to determine costs before implementation and after to understand operational cost savings.
Engage all stakeholders and communicate effectively throughout the implementation to ensure success.
Engage existing suppliers in the implementation for the development of workable SLAs
Consider tools that will complement the process early in the planning phase
Understand what the ITIL organisation will look like 1/3/5 years down the track

On a side note, most organisations actually perform the processes that are described in the ITIL framework but are reluctant to implement because of the controversy of the so-called benefits. ITIL provides a common framework and terminology in which organisations can operate, but I guess the question I have is, as long as the organisation has standards, policies, and internally developed frameworks pertinent to their business model – why implement ITIL?

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Amazon Launches Glacier

Amazon officially launched its cloud service solution for long term archiving, Glacier, on 21st August 2012. Named Glacier as it is intended to be vast and slow moving, with an extremely low storage cost to match.

Data can be uploaded as a single file or as multiple files which are then stored in archives. There is no limit to the amount of data you can store but each archive is limited to 40 Terabytes. There are no up-front costs and you only pay for what you store. Glacier will cost just $0.01 per Gigabyte per month compared to Amazons other storage offering, S3, which can cost up to $0.13 per and Googles Cloud Storage at $0.10, both at per Gigabyte per month. In theory using Glacier one could store 10GB of data over 10 years for just $1.20 providing you don’t access it. Amazon also has plans to offer in the future the ability to seamlessly move data from Glacier to S3 based on data service policies.

Data retrieval is priced differently. Amazon allows you to retrieve 5% of your storage for free per month. Retrieve more than 5% and you will be charged around $0.12 per Gigabyte. Retrieval requests take between 3-5 hours before the data is available for download.

Like most cloud storage offerings Amazon Glacier stores data using AES-256 encryption. If encryption is required on data in flight to the cloud, businesses can encrypt using their own keys prior to uploading.

Glacier can support various use cases, including the archiving of enterprise information, media assets, scientific data, database backups and data required to be held for regulatory compliance.

Conclusion

Most archival solutions for business require expensive capital expenditure, ongoing operational, support and maintenance costs, requires trained staff to operate and maintain and often leads to wasted capacity due to over provisioning for redundancy and unexpected growth.

Analysing the cost implications of using Glacier against a typical in house archiving solution, Glacier is a very attractive offering. The real value is that Amazon are offering to store your data essentially forever at a small cost. Amazon are taking all the heavy lifting away, no more need for complex capacity planning, dealing with multiple vendors for archival hardware and software upgrades and support, specialised training and offsite storage costs.

Amazon guarantees Glacier with an uptime of 99.9%, but also with a data reliability of 99.999999999%, meaning if you stored a billion objects you can expect to lose one every 100 years.

If your data archival needs must meet regulatory compliance you need to assess if Glacier datacentres meet those requirements. Glacier data can be stored in the US, Ireland (EU) or Japan.

Glacier will meet the needs of businesses with high volumes of “cold” data that must be stored for unspecified amounts of time where performance and restore speed are not important, but at the same time having the ability of simple retrieval for data that was stored 1, 5 or 10 years ago.

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Citrix Receiver Gets a Little Fancy

You will begin to see a whole new look and feel for Citrix Receiver. Citrix has revamped the Receiver user experience to further enhance ease of use and access to applications and data. Users will also see an improved virtual workspace which beautifully organises their apps, data and desktops.

Version 3.3.0.17207 is feature rich and the updates include:

A new customisable workspace for the user
Integration with Citrix CloudGateway
Provide access to Citrix MDX technologies including a secure native email application
Integration with Citrix ShareFile
Richer HDX experience

Check it for yourself and see how it will make your end users even happier.

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The importance of regular health checks

We all know why it is important that you visit your local doctor for regular check-ups. They can find and diagnose any problems before they start, or identify problems early, when the probability of treating and curing any issues is significantly higher. Regular visits can increase your chances of living a longer and overall healthier life.

So why is your IT environment any different? Regular health checks of your infrastructure and supporting environment can identify any new or systemic issues within your environment before they start impacting end-users. Early detection usually results in a measured approach to remediation being taken, rather than the rushed ‘have to fix it now’ method. Like medical check-ups, there are common high-level areas that should be checked each time, including configuration, performance, capacity and currency of the environment.

Scheduling regular checks and reviews of your infrastructure is one way to ensure that the expenditure and ongoing investment in the solution results in “a longer and overall healthier life” for the environment.

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VNXe Performance Analysis

David Muegge over at http://muegge.com/blog has written an excellent article on performance analysis of the EMC VNXe storage array using PowerShell.

In its current iteration, the VNXe has reduced functional capability for monitoring and performance analysis when compared to the standard VNX. In addition, the way that the information is collected and stored differs from the VNX; all data collected is stored in a SQLite database. Using Unisphere Analyzer to access this information is currently not possible.

David has written a custom PowerShell module that contains a number of CmdLets for extracting and displaying data that is stored within this database. Detailed instructions for downloading and configuring the module are provided, including external dependencies. He then goes on to show some examples for using the code. Graphing of the collected information is outside of the scope of the module, though David does provide further information on generating these graphs using external tools.

Although considered an entry-level system, it is still important that performance information relating to any investment in your environment is made available. We highly recommend that you download and try out the tool within your VNXe environment. For consultants, this tool will make a valuable addition to your arsenal.

Further details can be found at http://muegge.com/blog/?p=172