Welcome to B & M Bulletin, produced specifically for users of IT technical services. In this issue:
• Review of Guide Share Europe 2008
• Tech View: What's lurking in your storage pool?
• 10 tips on storage virtualisation
• Real Skills. Real People - B & M Accounts Controller Vivienne Brown
• B & M ProTech
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Review of Guide Share Europe 2008
Following the Guide Share Europe event last month, B & M Sales Director Amanda Dunn reports that the economic climate is leading to an increase in IT consolidation projects - notably in the financial sector
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"...pressure to reduce IT costs..."
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On the 28th and 29th October, B & M attended the annual UK conference of the influential IBM user group, Guide Share Europe. The event, of which B & M was a sponsor, is billed as the country's premier event to address the challenges of delivering and maintaining solutions based on IBM architecture and open standards.
Despite the current business downturn, the conference was well attended with delegates representing most of the major retail banks, insurance companies and building societies. It is no secret that this sector in particular is under intense pressure to reduce, or at least to contain, IT costs. Open any newspaper and you will read about the current spate of acquisitions in the financial sector, leading to significant IT consolidation projects. The most notable were the announcements by Grupo Santander that it will add Alliance and Leicester and the savings business of Bradford & Bingley to its British portfolio, which already includes Abbey.
According to Peter Redshaw, an analyst at Gartner, "You can only make the huge savings if you can find cost reductions in every part of IT," he says. "This includes things such as software licensing, software maintenance, datacentres and communications." [source Computer Weekly October 2008]. The Lloyds TSB/HBoS merger is also expected to lead to significant consolidation of IT systems across these organisations. Experience shows that this type of consolidation activity leads to lower overall costs, greater operational efficiencies, and improved flexibility [source: Forrester 'IT Consolidation. Rationalizing Data Center Infrastructure Investments for Greatest Efficiency', April 2008]
There was ample opportunity at the conference for networking both with delegates from the financial sector, as well as other markets including services, utilities and retail. If GSE is anything to go by, it seems that the mainframe really is still alive and kicking.
For information about technical services and consulting for mainframe environments, contact sales@bmeurope.com
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Tech View: What's lurking in your storage pool?
B & M's Technical Manager, Paul Smith, looks at ways to implement a more robust storage strategy that supports disaster recovery
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Despite its importance, Disaster Recovery is an area that is often not given as much attention as it should. In particular, there is a raft of organisations which have not fully planned to protect their ability to process data and to store data reliably in the event of a disaster.
And in today's 24-hour, 365-day world even a blip in data processing needs quick - and ideally seamless - resolution. The foundation to a good disaster recovery strategy is of course to have the physical aspects of security already in place, with power, backup and access all covered. Once this is sorted, implementing RAID storage is a good next step. The type of RAID will depend on your requirements: RAID-5 (one parity drive) is efficient and resilient, but more recently RAID-6 (with two parity drives) has come to prominence as although individual RAID drives are effective, they can be costly and administratively complex if you have a large server farm.
One way to simplify things, whilst keeping an eye on costs and power efficiency, is to use Storage Area Networks (SANs) with Dynamic Array Expansion (DAE). In this model, each server is stripped of as much of its critical direct access storage as possible and the data is pushed out to a SAN data-island and divided up into logical units. SANs can be implemented using an existing fibre channel, or the newer Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI). Using DAE allows you to add on more storage at any time; and with the cost of storage per gigabyte falling at around 30% a year this can make good economic sense.
To fully exploit this model, an organisation needs to be able to bring servers on line quickly, either using Hot Standby partitions (real or virtual) or Blades, which work for almost any current hardware and software combinations.
To source scarce storage and disaster recovery skills for your project, contact sales@bmeurope.com
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10 tips on storage virtualisation
B & M's MD Jerry Smart suggests some aspects to think about when designing and implementing storage virtualisation
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- Consider the logistics of data retrieval from storage at the outset to enable disaster recovery
- Plan early to get appropriate skilled resource in place for the project
- Ensure data is appropriately categorised to support information lifecycles
- Pay attention to physical security, including fire detection and suppression
- Assess the potential benefits and total cost of ownership of different types of RAID drives
- Consider Storage Area Networks (SANs) with Dynamic Array Expansion
- Ensure you only use IT specialists with proven skills in the relevant area of storage
- Consider what technologies you will use to bring in additional servers swiftly when needed
- Consider network resilience/redundancy issues as well as server redundancy
- Ensure that multi-vendor products are compatible
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Real People, Real Skills
This month we find out about Vivienne Brown, B & M's new Accounts Controller
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Vivienne joined B & M in August 2008 as Accounts Controller.
She started her career in accounts as a financial analyst for a company of agricultural consultants and then as an accounts assistant for the South of England Agricultural Society. Vivienne then changed direction and spent many years in estate agency in the Mid-Sussex area.
Last year Vivienne decided to return to accountancy and obtain a formal qualification. She secured a position as Assistant Accountant with Sussex Enterprise and at the same time started studying her Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) qualifications through distance learning. In July 2008 she took and passed her AAT Bookkeeping Certificate.
Vivienne recently moved to the Tadley area to be closer to family and has just started her intermediate level AAT, studying two evenings a week at Basingstoke College. Her long-term goal is to obtain her AAT qualification over the next two years and then move on to CIMA.
In her spare time Vivienne enjoys long walks in the countryside with her Parsons Russell Terrier and accompanying her rugby-mad daughter to Twickenham and other local premiership games. She is also a keen skier, started modern jive classes last year and has just taken up clay pigeon shooting.
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B & M ProTech
Total project delivery
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B & M ProTech delivers technical projects tailored to meet each customer's ICT needs. We work closely with customers to agree whether the best solution is resources that are managed in-house, or to reduce risk by having B & M manage the project team on the customer's behalf via a professional project manager. Whichever form of management is appropriate, B & M ProTech delivers multi-disciplined teams with consistently high levels of technical knowledge and expertise who work to pre-agreed levels of service.
All technical projects are delivered in compliance with our best practice standards.
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