Technology Lifecycle | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Microsoft Canadian Colleges Exec Briefing – Data Center Management

enterprise architecture, higher education, it governance, strategic planning No Responses »

Feb 022011

Rick Bakken, Senior Director, Data Center Evangelism, Microsoft Corporation

Delivering Infrastructure to the Cloud

Data Center Innovation – asked the question “Why are we building giant refrigerators for our data centers?” In the Chicago data center, there are two floors. Top floor is standard raised floor and the bottom floor is container based servers. Made a decision to run the data centers hotter. Microsoft buys 5% of the servers bought annually around the world.

Timeline – PC era, Portal era, Online App era, Web Services era, Cloud Computing era –>

opened first data center in 1989
launched microsoft.com in 1994-95
added Trustworthy Computing in 2002
added Security development lifecycle in 2004
Windows Live launched in 2008
Windows Azure cloud service launched in 2010

Microsoft runs on a huge global scale 24 x 7 with over 200 cloud services running today (2011). Microsoft has more than 10 and less than 100 data centers world wide. The Network Architecture is really the key to cloud based computing scalability. Geo-redundancy is a feature of this style of network architecture. This is a combination of few High Density data centers and large numbers of edge nodes. Microsoft Global Foundation Services works from layer 0 to 4 of the OSI model. They have some serious process and procedures to bring a low cost data center service to market. Microsoft is investing a huge amount of capital in the Global Network and particularly Dark Fibre.

Sustainability Evolution

Generation 1 – 1989 – 2005 – co-location with server based architecture – $25M per MW
Generation 2 – 2007 – density with rack based architecture – $17M per MW
Generation 3 – 2008 – containers and pods architecture
Generation 4 – 2010+ – modular with ITPAC (pre-assebmled components) architecture – $4 to 8M per MW
Generation 5 – ? – remove all moving parts from the data center servers
Generation 6 – ? – completely green data center – all components fully recyclable

Server Hardware Design Considerations

the data center is the server
performance/watt/dollar – PUE is no longer a useful measure need a new way to measure
drive change in the industry through strong partnerships
deliver value to online service partners through customized designs at the application layer
think about infrastructure refreshes using OpEx instead of CapEx

CTO “Journey to the Cloud’ 2008 to 2020

IT Workload Analysis – what is running where?
Virtualized Data Center – efficiency gains
Legacy Migration- cloud rehost, rewrite ancient code, reduce power
Cloud – on/off premise utility model
Data Sovereignty appliance - Azure Appliance refreshed on a OpEx cycle every 3 years

Gartner’s Emergent Architecture – Is this really a new approach?

enterprise architecture, it governance, itsm, strategic planning 11 Responses »

Aug 152009

On August 11th, Gartner announced a “new approach for enterprise architecture” that they labelled “Emergent Architecture”. I got a chance to read some responses from Todd Biske, Mike Rollings, and Dion Hinchcliffe. Thanks for the great insights and commentary.

In the press release, Bruce Robertson, Gartner Research VP states the two characteristics of “Emergent EA”:

“Architect the lines, not the boxes – which means managing the connections between the different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves.”
“It models all relationships as interactions via some set of interfaces, which can be informal and manual”

On characteristic 1. is if you only look at the connections between parts of the business, how can you look for opportunities to reduce complexity, increase efficiency and implement reusability? I believe enterprise architecture is about the whole organization and its environment, not just pieces of it. As an example, our EA practice encompasses IT Service Management (ITIL), Business Analysis (BA) and Program Management (PMO).

On characteristic 2. , again all this says to me is to take a “user experience” approach to describing the architecture. This is nothing new as far as I can tell … perhaps I am missing something?

Now to look at the 7 properties that differentiate “emergent architecture” from “traditional EA”. Read more...

Non-deterministic – “… decentralize decision making to enable innovation”. I don’t see this as anything new. We address this with our technology lifecycle and our technology governance models. We ensure our architecture has a place for innovation in the R&D phase of the technology lifecycle and in the Innovative area of our technology governance.
Autonomous actors – “… devolve control to constituients”. Being that we grew our EA practice out of IT and that I was a one person team, I never was able to “control all aspects of architecture”. Working collaboratively, within a technology governance framework allows autonomy based on funding, support and impact our practice influenced the architecture adopted by our community. Again, I do not see how this is different from our existing EA practice. Implementing data stewardship in our business areas is an example of autonomous acting within our EA.
Rule bound actors – “… define a minimal set of rules and enable choice”. What EA practice has not started with some set of guiding principles? Enabling choice is fundamental within an architecture as long as it respects the established guiding principles. I blogged on this here and here.

Adaptive Leadership in EA

enterprise architecture, higher education, itsm, leadership, management, strategic planning 1 Response »

Jul 142009

Andy Blumenthal wrote a great post “Adaptive Leaders Rule the Day“. In his post, Andy reviewed a Harvard Business Review July 2009 article “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” and commented on the article’s insights on adaptive leadership.

I really liked Andy’s quote “Leaders need a proverbial “toolkit” of successful behaviors to succeed and even more so be able to adapt and create innovative new tools to meet new unchartered situations.”

Andy listed some of the successful behaviours in the “toolkit”. I recommend you read the full article to get all of Andy’s insights.

Here is the list of successful behaviours:

“Foster adaptation”
Stabilize, then solve
Experiment
“Embrace disequilibrium”
Make people safe to question
Leverage diversity

Taking a similar approach to my previous post on Generative EA Principles, I will explore and share how Andy’s list of behaviours fit with our EA practice (and maybe yours). We have a long way to go to fully leverage the successful behaviours but having some clear names for what we have accomplished helps. Thanks Andy!

Foster adaptation: “leaders must develop ‘next practices’ while excelling at today’s best practices.” In 2005, we established the Strategic Practices groupin our IT Services department. This group role is responsible for the development, maturation and integration of a broad set of IT disciplines and methodologies across all areas of IT Services. These disciplines are intended to raise the level of rigor and reliability of all of our technical implementations while ensuring that IT investments are aligned with institutional strategy. The Strategic Practices group includes practices like enterprise architecture, business analysis, project management, business continuity, IT security, risk management and performance management. Think of these as our ‘next practices’. At the same time, we adopted the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework for standardizing, managing and measuring our core service delivery. So far we have implemented the Service Desk function, Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management and are building out Configuration, Capacity and Availability Management processes. These are today’s best practices. Read more...