Integrien blog | Integrien

Yet Another Problem for Banks: Website Unavailability

Bad debt. Bankruptcies. Bailouts.

As news of the turmoil sweeping the banking industry saturated the papers, airwaves and wires Sept. 22, Bank of America customers received even more frustrating news: For at least five hours last Monday, they were unable to access their accounts.

Think website problems such as this one are only minor? Think again. The banking industry thrives on trust. What kind of message is sent when one of the biggest banks in the country is unable to manage its own site effectively? Further, how much productivity was lost due to customers’ inabilities to transfer funds or perform other online banking tasks?

If you want proof of how important five hours of downtime can be to customers, check out Google Trends, the service that tracks online search patterns. According to Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, the phrases “bank of america” and “bank of america login” were in the top 10 search terms that day.

Worse, it appears no press releases were issued on the glitch that week. In BofA’s “press release” section of its website, there were only headlines of awards the company has won (Sept. 23) and charitable projects it has donated money to (Sept. 22, Sept. 18 AND Sept. 17). What about accountability?

With the current Wall Street “crisis” in play, Miller says, along with a rash of recent M&A—BofA’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch for one—several other financial services sites have experienced problems of late too.

It’s unclear what caused the troubles at BofA or the other affected firms. What is clear is that companies—especially financial services companies—need to have their critical applications running at peak availability at all times. As jittery investors watch to see how market consolidation and the economic downturn affect them, they shouldn’t have to be jittery because of technical problems.

When Will Virtualization Deliver on its Promises?

Virtualization, ComputerWorld says in a recent story, can accomplish many things for IT departments—from server consolidation to reduced energy expenditures. But finding the source of an application performance problem can be “something like a Where’s Waldo game.”

When a problem occurs, a number of questions are asked: Is the source of the performance problem virtual machine contention? If so, how do I determine the root cause? Is it a hardware issue? A database problem? The application itself? Or something else? That Waldo can be pretty sneaky.

Many IT professionals are realizing the mixed bag that virtualization delivers. Problems arise that some administrators don’t plan for, sometimes causing more money to be spent than expected after a virtualization implementation. Even storage can be a problem. According to AjaxWorld magazine, potential cost savings often are “altogether eliminated” because of the extra storage needed to fix the degradation common with traditional storage systems in virtual environments.

Meanwhile, virtualization adoption is skyrocketing. The promise of reduced IT expenditures and more centralization is driving many departments to implement virtual environments.

Which brings us to VMware. The company, ComputerWorld says, is coming out with new solutions next year to better combat a host of issues ranging from security and management to response times. VMware will also be making a big push into virtualization management, ComputerWorld says. Think centralized management.

But one thing they won’t have is automated, real-time analytics to help IT managers find potential issues in virtual environments--or the applications they support--before they become real problems. And it is clear that analytics solutions are the only way to make virtualization cost-effective from a management standpoint and deliver on its promises.

Of course, they could always call us. Given the overwhelming response to our solutions at VMworld, it is clear their customers will.

Cloud Computing Not Ready (Yet) for Prime Time

So-called cloud services need to be more robust before they’re ready for prime time. At least that’s the take of several cloud and IT management industry execs at the most recent Interop tradeshow.

The cloud, says InformationWeek in a Sept. 19 story, is in “need of a much stronger regime of management tools” before it becomes widely accepted by enterprises. InformationWeek says top cloud computing concerns include:

• How often the service is down
• Potential security holes
• Manageability issues such as authentication

Another concern is a lack of visibility into the infrastructure running the cloud and the very concept of “multitenancy,” in which a single instance of software serves multiple clients. With so many users running virtual applications that are completely independent of each other, these users may have no ability to control infrastructure issues, InformationWeek explains.

In other words, a single piece of bad code can take down everyone on the system. That, in our humble opinion, should definitely be a concern.

One expert, Michael Baum, chief corporate officer of IT vendor Splunk, dished up his complaints on Google’s App Engine: “I can’t even see if an application is slow until a user calls me,” Baum says. “There’s zero transparency.”

Other views on cloud computing were taken by Byte and Switch in a Sept. 18 story. The concept of cloud computing, Byte and Switch says, is confusing and is often lumped with virtualization and is perhaps even a hazier concept than “Enterprise 2.0” and other like buzzwords.

“It’s an evolving space,” says Peter Laird, managing architect for Oracle’s WebCenter product group. “(So) you may have different opinions about how valid they are.”

Another reason cloud computing isn’t ready for prime time? We can’t even agree on a definition for it.

Downtime is Costly, Whether You’re Google or Cuil

What do Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon have in common with smaller, lesser known companies such as Cuil and SiteMeter? They all have experienced some of the worst outages of 2008.

Website monitoring service Pingdom, in a new report, outlined some of the most severe service disruptions of the year. The findings prove what we’ve been saying for years: “No one is immune to downtime,” Pingdom says. “Not Google, not Microsoft, and not Apple.”

Most interestingly, Pingdom characterized the biggest 14 outages into categories such as software as a service (SaaS), cloud glitches, launch issues, data center problems, service interruptions and sabotage. Key points include:

• Websites are increasingly vulnerable to external influences. The more applications present, the more risk there is in them being affected.
• Cloud services can have serious infrastructure flaws.

However, cloud services are even more apt to cause problems than these categories show. Some of the outages, including problems with Gmail and Google Apps, were listed under other categories such as SaaS. It’s clear that cloud technology has a ways to go before its safe. We also believe Pingdom could have listed more than just 14. The launch of open source browser Firefox 3.0, a debacle we’ve written about before, is just one more that could’ve been added.

Pingdom’s conclusion is spot-on though: “By learning from the mistakes (or bad luck) of others and being well aware of what can go wrong, it’s possible to take a proactive approach and minimize the risk of future downtime, and when it happens, at least keep it short.”

Whether you’re Google—or a small competitor such as Cuil—outages can impact your bottom line. As IT management becomes more complex, proactive actions ought to be taken to ensure systems are running at optimum levels.

To the AeA, ITAA: Don’t Forget About America’s True Economic Engine

The two biggest technology lobbying groups in the country, the AeA and the Information Technology Association of America, are about to become a lot bigger: A merger is in the works.

For years, the big complaint with the business of technology lobbying has been that there was no unified voice. Too many lobbyists. And not enough clout. The merger, the organizations tout, will change that.

 

It seems some in government agree. Quoted in The Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog, former Undersecretary of Commerce Phil Bond said the number of groups representing tech companies “is confusing to policy makers and folks on the Hill.” 

Assuming the merger goes forward, we like the new focus. Some critical lobbying issues include:

• Removing barriers to government contracts
• Improving security
• Extending R&D tax credits
• Increasing the number of high-tech “H-1B” workers that can come into the United States
• Credits for tech companies that hire in rural areas instead of overseas (i.e. offshoring)

 

All of these things are good for the tech industry—and any company that buys technology for that matter. But is bigger always better? Another big complaint with the AeA and ITAA has been that the needs of their bigger members—the Microsofts of the world—have outshadowed the needs of their smaller members. Large companies often have different needs than smaller companies do. Issues such as venture capital, for instance, are a lot more important to a startup than to Microsoft.

 

We’d like to remind the AeA and ITAA that smaller companies are the true engine of the American economy. We like focus and clout. But don’t forget about us in the process.

Surprise! The CEO is Actually Listening to You

CEOs are “starting to get it.”

That’s the take of Forrester analyst Khalid Kark on chief executives and computer security, quoted by NetworkWorld.

According to a new Forrester study, IT security budgets are increasing nationwide. In a survey of nearly 1,300 security “decision makers,” 21 percent expect to boost their security spending next year, while only 6 percent expect to decrease those expenditures. Security spending this year, meanwhile, comprises 10 percent of IT budgets, an increase from 8 percent in 2007 – an impressive figure given the economic downturn.

This sizeable increase is sparked by the enormous amount of media attention over data breaches.

It’s also due to the fact that CEOs are finally paying attention to their IT folks, according to Kark. “I remember the time when I had to wait two weeks to get a meeting with the CIO, let alone the CEO,” Kark says.

Security is the most important thing in IT. Weak security, as we’ve seen headline after headline, can lead to catastrophe.

But smart analytics are also important. A lack of visibility into your IT operations causes your team members to be less effective – a fact that affects your company’s bottom line. And the inability to know what leads to problems causes you to be reactive instead of proactive – an inability that can actually lead to security problems.

So now that you have the attention of the big guy, it may be time to push for better IT infrastructure management.

Welcome to Virtualization, Red Hat

The concept of desktop virtualization has received another boost with the entrance of open source king Red Hat.

The company, which dominates the market for the Linux operating system – Microsoft’s No. 1 rival – announced last week the $107 million acquisition of Qumranet. The company’s solutions, such as a “virtual desktop infrastructure,” give Red Hat the ability to offer a comprehensive array of benefits including enterprise Linux with built-in virtualization.

Before the acquisition, Red Hat had been “more of a facilitator” in the virtualization industry, the New York Times says. Now, Red Hat will be competing head-to-head against VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Systems.

Mainframe virtualization has been around for decades. But desktop virtualization, which Qumranet focuses on, is a fairly new technology that has been bolstered recently by better security and other advances.

 Dana Gardner of ZDNet says the virtual desktop infrastructure market could be primed for a “large growth spurt.” It “simply solves too many problems while providing very little disruption for end users to be ignored.”

 We welcome this spurt. We also welcome Red Hat to the virtualization game.

How to Cut IT Costs While Increasing Productivity

What do you do as a senior IT professional when you’re told to reduce costs, ensure high availability of applications AND boost productivity?

That is exactly what IT departments are being told to do nationwide, regardless of company size. According to a recent survey by IT management company mValent, 50 percent of polled IT managers said they were “compelled” to reduce costs this year. About 35 percent wanted to improve staff productivity while 30 percent said they needed to speed up troubleshooting efforts around poor application performance.

With new complexities popping up everywhere on the IT landscape, these goals are getting tougher to meet manually. That is why the report recommends automating core applications such as configuration. With automation, the report says, “IT organizations can gain significantly more time and effort to focus on the development and deployment of applications designed to drive competitive advantage.”

Automation software can greatly reduce the cost of downtime and help organizations combat complexity, especially in virtualized environments. That equates to decreased overall costs and increased productivity.

However, 79 percent of businesses polled in a recent global survey by systems management company NetIQ have no formal means of managing their virtual machines. This is true despite the fact that organizations are aggressively adopting virtual environments. Of the 1,000 IT managers surveyed by NetIQ, 759 were deploying some form of virtualization.

Something’s got to give.

The Best Weapon for Killing Flies … and Managing Virtual Machines

If you had the choice between having more speed or more foresight, which would you choose?

Apparently, when swatting flies, the latter is better. According to a new study by Caltech aimed at better understanding neurophysiology, the best approach is not to aim at the insect but rather to aim where you think it may go. That’s because flies are almost supernaturally good at evasion and can plan escapes in milliseconds.

We believe foresight is also the best attribute for IT management, especially with complex systems such as virtualization in use today.

When your IT operations management solution better understands each virtual machine, your corporation will not only be able to operate more efficiently but also be able to prevent problems before they happen. Spending more on traditional monitoring doesn’t work, because that inundates IT departments with endless alerts. And simply hiring more IT people to carry out this reactive strategy isn’t a very good solution, either. Predictive IT analytic solutions however, only alert administrators to abnormal behaviors that are known roots of problems and automatically adapt to handle “moving” virtual machines.

The complexities of virtualization are often too much to bear for many IT departments. One of the pioneers of virtualization, VMware, understands this. That is why the company has partnered with us in the VMware Technology Alliance Partnership Program, a move announced Aug. 25. We look forward to providing VMware users with the most advanced IT analytics possible.

You’ll never be faster than a fly. Or the potential bugs that plague today’s IT systems, for that matter. The trick is to be smarter.