Bruce Backa's thoughts on technology and life - Management

Cloud? What cloud?

Your DisplayName here! — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:43:06 GMT

The bad news is that for this post I have to admit to being over 40 (maybe even over 50…).

These days I’m often fascinated to see what 30-something MBAs in high tech marketing can come up with – and how much money they get to spend once they do. The latest, of course, is Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage. What is Cloud Computing? All your data and your applications are somewhere else and you connect to them over the common carrier (read: phone company) network. We did this 40 years ago. It was called mainframe computing.

This is an ideal scenario for smaller companies that don’t need much computing infrastructure and who cannot afford a systems maintenance staff. For the SOHO (small office, home office) market, this is a great thing. Over the years I've watched small businesses try to run their own infrastructure and it's not pretty.

But Cloud Computing isn't being marketed as a small business solution. The buzz is that this is the answer for everyone and everything.

However, for companies large enough to have or need an IT staff, there is little value here. What is the CIO going to do? Go to the CEO and say, “I quit. I just outsourced everything to the cloud. My job here is done.”

Let's look at a long-standing example. I’ve always been impressed by the success of Salesforce.com com who, by the way – when they talked to us a few years ago, did not encrypt the data you gave them and put it on a system you share with others. (Anyone read those stories about lost backup tapes...) I can’t see giving the life blood of my company to someone else to manage, nor having my staff rely on the vagaries of Verizon (or, in New Hampshire’s case, the literally bankrupt Fairpoint) as to whether they can do work today. Sorry.

This doesn't mean that we don't use web-based applications. We certainly do. But not for anything critical to our business.

A Job Offer You Should Refuse

Your DisplayName here! — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:07:28 GMT

Over the years a fair number of people have asked my opinion about the job offers they have received. I am happy to say that most of these offers were quite good. In fact, a couple of times I was jealous…

But if I were offered the job of most of the storage managers and CSOs (Chief Storage Officers) I meet, I would refuse. Not because being an infrastructure manager is a thankless job – which it is. Most jobs are characterized by more criticism than praise. The issue for me is that I won’t take a job where I am held responsible for delivering non-stop, high-quality service while, at the same time, I have no control over the consumption of the resources, and little or no insight about how they are being used.

What am I talking about?

Only a few of the storage mangers I meet have any policies describing the appropriate consumption of corporate storage resources. In fact, their users are free to do pretty much anything they please. The majority of these storage managers also lack a system management application that they can use to control the consumption of their storage, nor do they have anything that tells them how the existing resources are being consumed.

Even worse, a surprising number of these people are reluctant to set firm policies governing resource consumption. They live in fear of their end-users.

As an entrepreneur, I’m used to taking risks. But in a successful company, these are controlled risks. I never write blank checks. Why would I want to be responsible in a situation where any one of my users could create a service outage…? And where it’s even somewhat likely that a naïve user will do so by accident one day.

Doing a great job – in storage management or anything else – requires having the right tools for the job. A carpenter without a hammer and a saw is very limited in what he can do. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you don’t have the tools to succeed. Infrastructure management is hard enough even when you have what you need.

The Easiest Way to Save Money on Storage

Your DisplayName here! — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:18:23 GMT

In the world at large, there is a saying that goes: “Often, the old ways are the best ways.” When it comes to managing storage, this can be equally true.

While I don’t often admit it, I am old enough to have worked on and managed mainframes – in a world before networked storage existed. In those days users had limits on the amount of resources they could tie up, and most companies allocated the cost of the users’ consumption back to the department they worked for.

With the advent of PC networks and networked storage, most companies stopped charging users for resource consumption. What happens when you make a valuable resource free to the consumer..? Usage soars. Analysts such as Gartner Group tell us that 20 to 40 percent of what’s stored on most networks is junk – it has no value to the business at all. Why is it there? Because the resource has no limits and consumption is free.

NTP Software has one of the very few storage billing applications available today. Our informal statistics on the net result of going from free to a fair-cost model is that consumption is reduced 10 to 20 percent almost over night and that growth rates are cut in half. When consumers understand that there is a cost associated with their actions, they moderate their behavior.

And... you don’t even need to bill people. Simply publishing the list of the top 25 or top 100 users has a similar effect. For many people, how others perceive them – in this case as resource hogs – is as valuable as cash.

Some times the old ways really are the best ways – even in high-tech.

Keep your eye on the money

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:48:51 GMT

Most of today's talk about storage is 'techie talk'. Rarely do we hear about (human, customer) management issues. In a world of a thousand details, it's easy to lose track of the forest. Sometimes we have to remember to step back and look at the big picture.

In the world of storage, along with death and taxes, there are some givens: hardware prices go down, salaries go up. Only a few years ago the TCO for storage was 4 to 5 times its acquisiton cost. Today it is 6 to 7 times. Why? Hardware costs go down (acquisition) and salaries go up (TCO is really the cost of keeping what you've bought). How many people are talking about reducing the human costs of providing a first-class storage utility for your customers? Not many.

Today in North America there is a well established paradigm for managing the human costs of providing first class service to your customers - self-service. Give your customers what they want, when they want it, 24x7x365 by letting them serve themselves, getting what they need when they need it. Storage resources can be self-service too. The technology exists to let your users provision themselves (with the guidelines you have established), use work flow to get authorization for the expense and ask for appropriate exceptions to policy. Self-service storage is self-managing storage. Self-managing storage lets you and your team move on to deal with more important matters.

Who wouldn't want to provide their users with better service while lowering their operating costs? I sure would.

The value of allocating costs

Thu, 24 May 2007 14:14:04 GMT

Most IT departments supply resources – including their most costly resource, storage – at no charge to everyone. We all need to realize that under these circumstances the optimum strategy for each user is to consume as much storage as possible. Any time using or abusing storage can save the user even a minute’s time or help in any way, why wouldn’t they take advantage of a resource that comes at no cost to them whatsoever?

However, once storage has a fair price, then it becomes to the users’ advantage to treat it with the respect it deserves. The average result of moving from ‘free’ to fairly priced is clear: consumption drops about 20% in an instant, and the growth in demand is cut in half. How can this be? Gartner Group told us long ago that, on average, 20% to 40% of the stuff on most company’s networks is junk. Once there is cost for keeping junk around, most people get rid of it. Once you make the decision not to put junk on the network, your demand for additional storage decreases.

Many companies are reluctant to charge for storage. Sometimes it’s a matter of management will, other times their financial systems are not set up for cost allocation, or their finance department doesn’t have the resources to do the work. One thing most people don’t realize is that there is both hard billing and soft billing.

Hard billing is what you would assume it to be. The charges are real and someone has to pay, either with internal funds or in cash. As explained above, implementing hard billing is well worth the price.

However, soft billing – generating the bills, circulating them appropriately, but not requiring payment – can be equally effective. How? Human psychology. Humans are acutely sensitive to being watched. The mere fact that they know someone cares or someone is watching changes their behavior. Knowing that someone is watching the costs you generate is no different than knowing you will be watched in any other aspect of your life. You alter your behavior to ensure that people see you only when you are acting appropriately. Since there is no way to ‘hide’ from a billing system, storage users start acting appropriately all the time.

The bottom line: implementing a system that can generate bills for storage that are distributed to your users even thought payment is not required has nearly the same effect as actually collecting the money. Namely, consumption drops immediately, and the growth rate is cut substantially. Well worth the effort, wouldn’t you say?>>

Compliance? What compliance?

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:52:50 GMT

Last year Compliance was everyone's hot topic. It's a year later, the noise has died down, does this mean the problem is solved? Not hardly.

We spend most of our days talking to large companies about their storage issues and strategies. Over the course of time, the subject of Compliance generally comes up. What's been done over the last year? Not much. Want to know why? There are at least two reasons for what appears to be a lack of interest in addressing compliance issues - other than in the Banking community, of course.

The first and most important issue is the lack of organization in most people's data. The mere task of figuring out where all the stuff that's supposed to subject to compliance actually is becomes a daunting task in and of itself.

The second issue is what you might expect - cost. Once you find the data you need, you have to rearchitect your systems to bring your handling of the data into compliance. And this expense gives no value to the user community. It is pure cost. If you were in charge, where would you spend your time and money? Not here.

As time goes on and systems get rebuilt, companies will come closer and closer to being in compliance. But today the average company isn't even close.

Santayana's Rule

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:29:47 GMT

What was it he said? Ah, yes... “Those who refuse to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” Let's look at some history. IBM created a PC with a proprietary architecture. Others created an IBM-compatible PC that was an open platform. Which one is around today? Apple created a brilliant PC device with a closed architecture and a proprietary operating system. Microsoft created an open OS platform and actively recruited developers. Which one owns the market today?

It has been clear for years (going back to the heyday of IBM) that an open platform and the courting of third-party developers wins the market. In the end, the third parties taken together have more money, get to market quicker and have more ideas than any one company could possibly have, regardless of how rich they happen to be.

Network Appliance and EMC are battling tooth and nail to dominate the storage market. Why then do they both have closed platforms and shun third-party developers? (The one exception being the Centera folks, who seem to have the right perspective.) It certainly seems to me that neither EMC nor NetApp live in a world where Santayana's Rule fails to apply. My bet is that the first of these guys who figures out that if their hardware and infrastructure underly every third-party storage application, and they actually support ISVs, they will rule the Industry. What are they waiting for... someone else to create an open platform and take the market away from them? NIH (not invented here) never wins. It has been tested for years with the same result every time.

Our naked emperor - data security

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 17:12:44 GMT

We all probably remember the parable about the emperor who had no clothes, riding around naked while his whole kingdom pretended that he was wearing the most beautiful set of robes... Today we have about as much data security as he had clothes. Early last year Mastercard admitted that a backup tape, written in clear text, with about 2 million customer records was lost. Last month (December '05), Marriott revealed that a tape with a couple hundred thousand customer records is missing.

Who among us thinks that these are isolated, once in a life time events? Not me! My organization has lost tapes before. Humans make mistakes. You have to assume anything that gets handled by humans can be lost or damaged. And the more humans that handle it, the more likely it is to be lost or damaged.

It's time for the industry to get it. There is little possibility of real data security until all data is encrypted. Until then, we're all just pretending...

Built right, or built wrong?

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 19:21:56 GMT

As technology strategists, it is our job to select the right technologies that will accelerate our companies’ success in their chosen businesses. Often a single poor choice will cause our whole project to fail. Sometimes even whole companies fail over the technologies they chose to invest in. (Where is IBM in the PC and networking business now?)

Why, then, do so many companies use a second rate process over and over again to make their choices? Why does senior management encourage it to happen? It seems to me that the right way to make choices isn’t all that hard to find. And, by the way, this isn’t limited to picking technology; it applies to most decision making.

Let’s look at what generally happens. Most organizations build a matrix of features, recruit a few vendors, fill out the matrix, give a high weight to cost, and make their decision. Sound familiar? How well does this correlate to what most companies state as their mission? How many companies do you know whose mission statement is: “We want to be as good as we can be provided doesn’t cost too much”? Or, “Our commitment is to excellence, unless it’s expensive, in which case we might not do it at all”? Is this the way we really run our businesses? In some cases, I believe that it is.

Where I work, we run the business differently. We use a sequential process designed to produce the best possible solutions (and the best possible business) every time. Here are the steps:

Step 1: Does this problem really need to be solved? There is no lack of things for us to do. If the need isn’t compelling, then we shouldn’t work on it at all. But if we resolve to work on an issue, then it becomes policy. The problem will be addressed.

Step 2: Is this the most important thing for us to do next? Look at the government. The reason things are such a mess is that there is no rational order to the way things get addressed. Time and resources – not money – are our most precious possessions. If you allow them to be spent in the wrong order, you can get lots done and still fail.

Step 3: What is the best possible solution? Here is where everyone needs to bear down. Why is this the best possible solution? What alternatives did you consider? What values are you focusing on when you choose this one? Most people do a weak job here. Management doesn’t want to press too hard (and alienate their staff). Staff members are often reluctant to take clear cut positions and be right or be wrong. In our organization we simply force people to do this. It’s a necessary and required ingredient for success.

Step 4: Can we afford it? Which one of us comes to work intending to be mediocre? Who among us plans to be second rate? If you really have identified the best possible solution, why would you want to do anything else?

Everyone knows how to spend money. If you start with a budget you get a plan to spend it, not a solution, and guaranteed, not the best solution. If the way you handle cost is other than “Can we afford the best possible solution”, then, by design, you have committed to build a mediocre institution. Is this what you really want to do? Would the CEO give you a raise if you told him this was your plan?

World-class organizations are the best at what they do because they engineer mediocrity out of their institution. What does your company want to be?

When a process fails over and over, change it!

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:15:29 GMT

I'm just back from watching the Red Sox get spanked by the Yankees... Normally I don't rant, but today I have to. How many times do they have to play out the same script. Pedro starts coming apart. They go out to the mound. Pedro says something that must translate to: “I'm fine, I can handle it.” Everyone leaves; Pedro does worse; the Sox lose the game... It cost us a Series, a pitching coach, and yesterday's game.

What's that old definition of insanity: do something once and get a result. Do it again and get the same result. Do it a third time and nothing changes. Do it again, expecting a different result. That's insane. So is asking Pedro whether or not he should come out. We know how this works - every time!

I see the same behavior in business all the time. People - managers - want to believe the promise rather than deal with the reality. Don't by the promise! Deal based on what happens, not on what gets said.