• Devices: These are the hardware and operating system combinations that host or store the execution environment.
• Applications: Applications execute on host environments (devices + OS) and transform data into information useful for the business.
• Data: Digital representation of information that is acted upon by applications.
• Networks: Enable collaboration and the sharing of information across multiple devices and/or applications.

We have been conducting polls of our customers and of IT professionals at technology trade shows for the past two years and the results are in: Pulling together all of the management pieces and processes is even more crucial in a virtualized environment.

So what does this mean for you? You will need to refine your incident and problem management processes with new technologies in order to reduce downtime and maintain end user performance. But of course even the most basic technologies are not well integrated even in today’s world.

I recently participated in a Gartner Conference and watched to my amazement a real-time electronic survey of the audience. To my disbelief, the audience, filled with 300+ people from Fortune 2000 companies provided real-time responses to the question:

What level of integration does your IT org have between event management and service desk applications?

• None: 10%
• Manual Phone call from IT ops to IT service desk staff member: 46%
• Manual click button on event manager to open trouble ticket: 20%
• Automated event management system automatically opens trouble ticket without requiring human oversight or approval: 24%

Unbelievable… still very few of the survey respondents have yet to formalize problem management systems with event management systems. For 56% of the audience the process is still manual!

Another interesting real-time survey question at the Gartner Conference was:

Who in your organization is responsible for critical problem processes and resolution?

• IT Service Desk 13%
• IT Operations 49%
• Process Team 12%
• Other 9%
• Responsibility not formalized 17%

Virtualization adoption and the speed with which things change in a virtualized environment require automation and will transform Incident and Problem Management. Clearly with this new technology we are required to re-think Organizational, Behavioral and Cultural Challenges required to take advantage of the opportunities that virtualization provides.

Incident and problem management processes and metrics must bridge organizational silos that have been the norm within IT. With virtualization, people have to work more closely together in the different silos than ever before. IT leaders need to break down the walls between the technology-centric silo mentalities.

Business Imperative Action Plan:

1. What can you do today? –Understand the impact of virtualization on incident and problem mgt. workload, provide technology training for helpdesk/service desk staff.
2. What can you do in the next 12 months?

Formalize problem management processes, metrics and personnel.
Invest in tools and processes for systems on virtualized servers.
Long term: On the Radar Screen!
Instill teamwork into all groups responsible for the virtualized environment service and support. Map components and configuration items directly to end user services.

Final Thoughts: Know the management pieces and ensure that they fit together. It’s great to buy new technology, but be demanding to ensure that your vendors show you have they will help to link all these pieces together - Change, Inventory, Incident, Problem, Server, Capacity, Performance, Configuration, Event, and Integrated Workflow.

Introduction

Virtualization is a word used by consumers and also by IT. But, do we all mean the same thing?

A very cool video from Cisco provided answers to “what is virtualization” from an  engineering perspective, data center perspective, IT perspective and the user perspective (virtual world).

Virtualization is about breaking the bonds between applications and server hardware, nodes and networks, applications and operating systems.

Why is this interesting? Virtualization holds the promise to transform the way we work, live, learn and play.

Why virtualize?

The real estate boom over the last 30 years has driven people to the suburbs. People didn’t mind commuting for an hour with lower gas prices. Today, we have a weak economy and gas prices are high. Something has to change.

Many are opting to stay at home. Businesses are trying out telecommuting, some (like Cisco) are even offering telepresence. This helps by reducing carbon footprint. Corporations are breaking free from physical requirements. The global workforce is also having an impact on the network. These changes are having a huge impact on the network.

We are on the cusp of transitioning from virtualization to VIRTUALIZATION.

“One to many….many to one.”

This is Cisco’s idea of virtualization.

Consider the different roles we play in life - one to many. Spouse, executive, friend, parent, gym rat. This would be “one to many”. This is exactly what virtualization does. It allows you to partition resources off that you can use on the fly.

Where do I start?

Virtualization starts with server and storage. But, it’s the network that touches everything - it spans the physical, the virtual, and the cloud. This provides the connectivity to all these resources. The network brings transparency to the picture. It allows you to better monitor performance and better implement security - great benefits!

Why do I need this?

At Cisco, we saw that we were only using 20% of our storage utilization. We wanted to virtualize our datacenters. When we did that, we were able to get 68% storage utilization. For each year that we were able to defer buildup, we saved $40 million.

From a business standpoint, virtualization helps you differentiate and work faster. Provisioning in minutes, improved productivity and competitive differentiation, using less power (environmental impact), and up the ante of business continuity. If VMWare fails? It’s OK. You can reprovision it on the fly.

Is it for everyone?

IT organizations tend to be siloed. You have the IT side and the Operations side. Each has responsibility. For virtualization to work, these walls have to come down. The concept of virtualization depends on shared resources.

Metcalfe’s Law of the Network Effect

Everytime you add a node to the network, you increase the value. This is what happens with virtualization. Every device you virtualize increases the power of each device. More control of environment and more efficiency.

This leads to…

Cloud computing.

Wow, show of hands from the audience when Marie asked “how many are using cloud computing?” and “how many are using your own clouds?” - not a lot of hands were raised. Interesting considering the coverage cloud computing has and the focus of it.

Cloud computing has three possibilities at Cisco:

• Flexible infrastructure (hosting)
• Abstract services (APIs)
• Application services (SaaS)

Automation is going to be key, and will need to integrate virtualization-aware elements.

Can you imagine if you wanted interoperability in the cloud? People haven’t even begun thinking about it.

Conclusion

As you virtualize, your role will change. You will think more about strategy. But keep in mind these “minefields” of virtualization:

• Insufficient planning
• Lack of standards
• Weak security

Security cannot be an afterthought. It has to be planned. We’ve seen new forms of malware, hypervisor attacks, and root kit infections.

As higher expectations from end users evolve, we’re becoming not server oriented, but SERVICE oriented.

Tips:

• Think holistically
• Consider IT culture - equipment and people

Solace provides sophisticated middleware functionality in hardware to monitor, filter, route, transform and secure very large volumes of events in real time and with minimal processing overhead.  Solace uses leading-edge FPGA, ASIC and network processor technology to increase throughput and lower latency of event processing. Applications such as fraud detection, algorithmic trading, compliance, insider trade monitoring, risk management and more can be tackled more effectively by separating the simple monitoring, filtering and normalization of raw events from the complex processing of select events. This event pre-processing takes the burden off CEP engines allowing individual engines to be much more effective. 

Dan Munz, project manager of the Collaboration Project commented on the unique work that the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) is doing to bring together government leaders. The Collaboration Project seeks to innovate across government not just down the silos and create a safe place for leaders to have discussions around innovation.

ScienceLogic: What is the National Academy of Public Administration?

Dan Munz: The Academy is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to tackling government’s most complex challenges. We were founded in 1967 by James Webb, the NASA administrator who took us to the moon – he saw that he could consult the National Academy of Sciences for expert technical advice, but had no counterpart in government for expert management advice. That’s been our mission ever since.

ScienceLogic: What is the Collaboration Project? How long has it been around?

Dan Munz: The Collaboration Project is the Academy’s response to two parallel trends we see in government. The first is the government’s need to transform the way it does business. There is a strong demand for change out there driven by a number of challenges that are forcing the government to rethink its mission and structure. Challenges include a public disconnected from government; a multi-sector workforce and increasing reliance on contractors; financial instability; and new types of security threats, just to name a few. More and more, the challenges facing government reach across the traditional boundaries of agency and mission. But government isn’t configured to work that way.

The second trend is the unprecedented opportunity collaborative technology offers to drive transformational change in government. Tools like blogs, wikis, and mashups are changing the way leaders think about problems. They’re focusing not on what they can do just within their offices or agencies, but what voices they need to pull together across government, non-profits, the general citizenry, and other stakeholders to solve these problems. The Collaboration Project’s goal is to encourage this type of thinking and empower leaders committed to use collaborative technology to:

• strengthen citizen civic engagement;
• enhance government transparency;
• improve service delivery and operational efficiency; and
• facilitate coordination and innovation within and between agencies.

ScienceLogic: Why focus on Web 2.0 in the government?

Dan Munz: The question of how web 2.0 will impact federal IT departments is a critical one. Our view is that “the era of big systems” is basically over. Things like disk space, bandwidth, and computing power are basically shifting from being assets to being commodities.

There’s also a shift in expectations. People both inside and outside government – especially Gen-X and Gen-Y – are incredibly frustrated by being able to use lightning-fast apps like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook that don’t even live on their hard drives while the government and other large organizations still operate clunky PCs, space-limited e-mail accounts, and sluggish e-mail servers.

So aside from the opportunity for transformative leadership, the idea of web 2.0 at a government level is very appealing in terms of getting the most out of the IT infrastructure we already have, rather than embarking on costly, large-scale projects in an era of diminishing budgets.

ScienceLogic: How do you build a sense of community at the Collaboration Project?

Dan Munz: Some community feel emerges naturally, from a sense that mass collaboration really is a tool for “doing government” in a whole new way.

The more formal community building mechanisms we have include our web page, where we share insights, news, case studies, and other content – The virtual space serves as an anchor for people, whether they’re experts or beginners, to learn about what we do.

Finally, we are conducting an ongoing series of in-person meetings, usually featuring a leader who has harnessed collaborative technology in what we think is a truly revolutionary new way.

ScienceLogic: How do you hear about cool new government Web 2.0 projects?

Dan Munz: That’s a key question, because part of our mission is to inspire action by finding leaders who have succeeded and highlight their accomplishments. We’ve done that with folks like Kip Hawley, TSA, Molly O’Neill, EPA, and Jim Walker, Alabama DHS.

We also feel that the Academy’s position as a “safe space” for leaders means that we’re a place people can turn to when they hear about an emerging trend or project and want some help making sense of it.

ScienceLogic: What are the most innovative uses of Web 2.0 technology you’ve seen in the government?

Dan Munz: It’s important to distinguish between agencies that are simply adjusting to the reality of web 2.0, and those that are “using” it. Getting a YouTube account for your agency, or putting some photos on Flickr, is a great first step, but we want to inspire leaders to really transform their normal ways of doing business. At the moment a few that come to mind are the EPA Puget Sound Mashup, ODNI’s Intellipedia, TSA IdeaFactory, the PTO Peer-to-Patent Project, and Virtual Alabama, to name a few.

The TSA launched the IdeaFactory in February 2008. TSA set up a collaboration platform with commenting, voting, etc. to form communities in a way to bring people to consensus and offer ways to improve the agency’s performance.

ScienceLogic: Do you see a difference between state and local versus federal adoption of Web 2.0?

Dan Munz: That’s a hard generalization to make – at all levels you see leaders who recognize the potential in this technology to bring new voices into the governance process.

ScienceLogic: What are the obstacles to Web 2.0 adoption by government agencies?

Dan Munz: The three main challenges that we see are in the areas of technology, culture, and policy/governance.

The technology issue is probably the simplest to solve – it’s important to choose a technology that fits the problem you’re trying to solve, but these technologies are usually inexpensive and almost never very complex.

The question of culture is harder, particularly given the way that baby boomers, gen-xers, and millenials are beginning to interact in the workforce. How do you gain acceptance and buy-in among groups that have very different comfort levels with collaborative tools and environments?

Finally, the most daunting challenge might be the questions of policy and governance, if only because those are the things that most commonly prevent leaders from even dipping a toe in the waters of collaboration. Most of the policies, regulations, and statutes governing the way government does business don’t anticipate things like wikis, blogs, or instant messaging. One of our most important missions is helping leaders who just want to get to action navigate these obstacles.

ScienceLogic: Is there any advice you can give to government employees getting started with Web 2.0? Or any places you would point them to for more info?

Dan Munz: It’s shameless plug time! I’d of course point them to our web page, collaborationproject.org, where, among other things, we’ve collected a case library of over 40 instances of collaborative technology being used in the government and non-profit sectors. The library is growing every day and is a sort of “database of record” for what is and isn’t working in terms of collaborative government. I think that would be a great place to start for anyone looking to get started but not really knowing the way.

In terms of advice, the best thing to say is that, once you’ve settled on a problem you want to solve and an audience you want to reach out to, just do it! We believe strongly that there are a lot of organizational and leadership issues that still need to be addressed regarding collaboration in government, but our biggest mantra is about getting leaders to action. The most successful projects we’ve seen are ones that try something daring and new, and discover the true power of what they’ve done as it catches on more and more widely.

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Sevcik and Wetzel have a consistently interesting column on Application Performance Management at NetworkWorld. This week, they unveiled the results of a benchmarking survey that tells them mid-sized enterprises have it harder when it comes to deploying such solutions.

We agree; it’s why we exist. Mid-sized enterprises have the same IT problems but not nearly the same amount of resources as the really big guys to throw against solving them.

VMWare’s acquisition of B-hive continues to generate buzz for performance management and virtualization. I love this quote from the CEO of Aternity, “The next big frontier is the ability to transform huge amounts of data into actionable business intelligence that correlates across platforms.” Um, we’re already doing this. What would be the purpose of collecting hundreds of millions of data points if you couldn’t actually present the data in a meaningful way? Maybe his comment was taken out of context and it’s more about the fact that it’s often difficult to get consistent and accurate info on virtualization resource utilization stats in particular. That we totally agree with. Another take on the B-hive acquisition: VMTN blog gives a quick overview of what it means for infrastructure groups and virtual environments.

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In development for more than 30 years, the research is beginning to bear fruit, and may soon spawn more powerful bombs, warheads that tear apart stone and concrete, mines that can be set to stun or kill, and grenades that can swat rockets or mortar rounds out of the sky like flies.

"You can get effects that are more precisely tailored to a particular target," says John Pike, director of Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org. "And you're able to get a greater effect out of a smaller munition."

Reactive materials are combinations of materials that are normally stable, but, when subjected to sudden shock -- such as striking a target -- release a large amount of energy. Depending on the composition and warhead design, the energy can be released as heat, a blast or a combination of the two. Unlike conventional explosives, RMs cannot be set off by fuses. Technically, they are classified as flammable solids, and they are less hazardous to transport and store than explosives.

While they're more energetic than explosives, RMs are not intended to be a substitute. Instead, they will replace warhead components normally made of metal.

An analysis of U.S. military procurement papers and defense contractor presentations, as well as interviews with companies working on the technology, suggests that a wave of munitions using reactive materials may be headed for a battlefield near you.

The material can dramatically magnify the yield of conventional bombs, and do away with the waste embodied by a bomb's inert metal skin. The U.S. Air Force's 5,000 BLU-122 bunker buster, for example, contains just 780 pounds of explosives; the other 80 percent is the bomb's thick steel casing. DARPA's Reactive Munition program (.doc) aims to replace that steel with RMs, to create a bomb with a blast four times as powerful. Alternatively, a new bomb could be half the size of existing weapons but twice as powerful.

Conventional warheads could also benefit from an RM makeover. For centuries, shells have blasted out steel shrapnel, small pieces of metal that cause damage with their high speed. Defense contractor Alliant Techsystems is developing a warhead called BattleAxe for the Air Force that uses fragments made of RM instead of metal. Those fragments will explode on impact, making the warhead far more effective against soft targets like trucks.

RM shrapnel is also being touted as the ideal way of shooting down incoming rockets and mortar bombs (.pdf).

A radar-guided defense pod can automatically engage incoming rockets or other threats using RM-based grenades. Weapons designers suggest that RMs can be five to ten times as effective as the existing inert shrapnel for this task. Moreover, RM shrapnel can be engineered to burn out at a set distance, so there is no hazard to nearby friendly forces.

Bullets can even be made of RM. The Navy's new electromagnetic railgun has been criticized because it can only fire solid slugs, not the usual explosive shells. However, documents reveal that tungsten-based RM rounds are being developed for the weapon. These will explode on impact, making the railgun effective against buildings, ships and vehicles.

Shaped charges are another application where RMs can increase the effectiveness of existing designs. In a shaped charge, a hollow metal cone is surrounded by explosive material, which is then detonated, forcing the blast through the small end of the cone.

"The action is analogous to stamping on an open toothpaste tube, ejecting the liquid contents," says Douglas Millard of British defense contractors QinetiQ.

Replace the metal liner with RM, and the explosive power of that jet will increase dramatically.

"Such reactions are highly exothermic and therefore lead to the release of large amounts of energy, which is in addition to the kinetic energy within the jet," Millard says. "An increase in the energy coupled into the target occurs and this results in the creation of greater damage to the target."

QinetiQ is marketing an RM-based shaped charge called Connex for oil-well perforation in the civil market. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is developing a demolition charge called Bam Bam that blasts a jet of RM deep into stone or concrete, producing massive damage

One version of the Bam Bam charge is intended for demolishing bridges and other structures. An alternative version blasts broader, shallower craters in roads or runways, making them useless.

RMs will also transform another mutation called the Explosively Formed Penetrator, a modified version of the shaped charge. Instead of producing a narrow, short-range jet, the Penetrator fires an aerodynamic slug of metal over a long distance. It's best known as a favored weapon of insurgents in Iraq. Again, replacing the metal with RM makes a much deadlier weapon -- after punching through armor, the slug releases energy like a grenade going off.

If you're a weapons designer, RMs also offer amazing flexibility. Alliant Techsystems is building a variable landmine (.pps) -- a so-called "dial-a-yield" weapon that can produce a range of different effects.

At the lowest setting, most of the output would be light -- a dazzling warning that would be impossible to miss. A higher setting would produce intense heat, creating a "discomfort zone" to drive off intruders. The third setting produces a nonlethal blast, like the concussion stun grenades used by Special Forces. If lethal force is called for, the mine could be set to produce either inert shrapnel or reactive shrapnel that explodes on impact.

RM munitions may face legal challenges. Under the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, the use of explosive projectiles with a weight of less than 400 grams is forbidden, as is using incendiary ammunition, like napalm, against personnel. But RMs are not technically explosive or incendiary, and although the effect on human targets might cause protests from some groups, they are likely to be accepted, human rights experts say.

"Like any weapon, it would have to go through a lengthy effectiveness and then legal review, " says Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. "If used in the open against military targets, it does not seem to have any obvious problems at first blush."

However, there may be technology issues too. Although the developers sound very upbeat in all their descriptions of RM munitions, producing material that will reliably release energy only when required is extremely challenging.

"The fact that they've been working on it so long and don't seem to have fielded anything yet suggests that there may be a problem with the technology," GlobalSecurity's Pike says.

Normally new weapons are fielded rapidly if there is a military demand -- assuming they work. So far, RMs have not made it into the field, and the technology may not be as mature as developers suggest.

But Pike also notes that there has been an unprecedented surge in munitions development over the last few years, with "all kinds of weird stuff" being developed.

So after decades of being kept very quiet, reactive materials may soon be making a lot of noise.

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Check out Danger Room for more on reactive materials.