Adam Gifford: Add smart tools to get big gains

The interview wasn't going well. Two guys in suits in a meeting room at the SkyCity Convention Centre spitting jargon at me, with my pen running out of ink.

It's been a while since I've had a sit down with representatives of one of the major technology vendors - there are not many around any more - and I'd forgotten the incomprehensibility of so much of their marketing speak.

But the next room was full of people who'd taken a day out to learn about "HP converged infrastructure", so there had to be something there, if I could find the Rosetta stone.

Chuck Smith had come from Houston, Texas for this seminar. He manages business development for Hewlett Packard's infrastructure software and blades business.

Business development means selling, and blades are those thin, relatively inexpensive servers that have sent big expensive servers with exotic chips to join the dinosaurs.

In fact, if you want to draw a dinosaur, a blade will do it better. Weta Digital used 4352 HP blade servers to produce Avatar, each with two Intel quad-core processors running at 50w and 24Gb of memory - a total of 104,448Gb of memory.

Jeff Healey, HP New Zealand's country manager for enterprise storage, servers and networking, waxes eloquent about the cooling systems which allow such a concentration of computing power - the water fed through the racks, the chilling towers outside, the tanks on the roof which mean if there is a supply failure, enough water will continue flowing through by gravity to keep the system cool as it is shut down.

There is also the thermal logic technology built into the HP blades and chassis, which allows a higher level of processor and memory density than the competitors, and means Weta can happily run its servers at 26C without sacrificing efficiency rather than the 18C and lower most datacentres aim for.

Weta is the kind of site HP likes to hold up as an example, because it's high-profile, it tests the equipment to its limits, and it gives smaller customers a taste of what could be possible.

Away from Wellywood and the revenue flowing in from foreign productions, most firms are a lot more shy about spending money on technology, or have been over the past year.

That's fine, says Smith, but deferred spending isn't the same as saving.

The point about converged infrastructure is a lot of it is about using what you've already got more efficiently, by adding smarter management tools and a different system architecture.

Over the past decade or so IT organisations have developed by adding servers, storage and networking devices to keep pace with applications and the terabytes of data they generate.

That can mean expensive servers devoted to a single application and running at only a fraction of its capacity most of the time, but chewing up operational budget.

To counter that, organisations have been buying virtualisation technology, so they can run multiple servers on the same hardware. But that can just mean moving the bottlenecks, especially if servers were hardwired to storage.

HP says treat everything you've got as a single pool of assets that can be shared by many applications.

Everything becomes virtualised - computing, storage, networking, I/O, with applications, data and network connections separated from the underlying hardware.

That's what people are looking for in cloud computing, and Healey says converged infrastructure is part of the drive to get cloud economics into old-style IT organisations.

"The real focus of organisations this year is to drive costs out while retaining flexibility," Healey says.

"Chief executives are saying why can't they get their internal computing costs as cheap as cloud."

A lot of the reason is infrastructure costs, such as power consumption and keeping the lights on.

They also want to maintain privacy, security and service levels which most providers of cloud-based services cannot guarantee.

There are also issues with what happens if moving an application off to an external cloud doesn't work. How do you get your intellectual property back if the new service doesn't work?

Peter Macaulay from research house IDC confirms many New Zealand firms are starting to view their internal IT resources through a cloud lens, and looking for ways to change the way they do things without incurring major capital spending.

"The original version of cloud is the internet. The people started delivering real services over the internet - Amazon, Google etc."

The next step was tailoring some of that for internal use - for example, using Amazon's engine to power the bookselling part of another website.

"Going to the other extreme is the private cloud. internet servers serve up the application or solution to a company on a browser, so it's the ultimate thin client.

"The private cloud doesn't have to be operated by the organisation that owns the solution, it can be run by third party like, in New Zealand, IBM, gen-i, HP or Revera."

So expect some movement through the year, as organisations rethink the way they are doing their computing.