October 2007 Archives

Looking into the future I think I'm currently involved in two groups that pretty much reflect the crown jewels of the decision makers in IT at Penn State. (Granted there are a few more)

ITS ITANA was modeled by Kevin and Jeff after the national ITANA organization that stands for Information Technology Architects in Academia. The local group is charged with first getting to know each other in terms of their respective organizations and bringing to the table issues and suggestions to improve our collaboration and over time improve our efficiencies in ITS. I think the group is a great mix with no one having any preconceived notions! I think this is a huge plus!

It was interesting that Jeff Reel, Steve Kellogg, Scott Smith and I had already planned to meet but this fits in perfectly with ITANA since all four of us happen to be members. We met for the first time last Friday and it became apparent that even if we don't actually form a sub-committee as part of ITANA that we should continue to meet to discuss issues such as Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity along with just sharing ideas to become more informed and efficient. Not to mention diving deeper into how we may be able to better understand our respective groups and produce services or share spaces that make sense. An example being: Steve and I trading computer spaces for DR. Well at least Steve tried until he figured that the transformer would probably glow a bright red if I plugged my stuff in. Thanks to Jeff Wolfe and Vijay we did some more trading. Isn't that how it's supposed to work, doesn't Penn State sign all of our paychecks?

At any rate that's a perfect segue into talking about the future of our Data Centers at Penn State.

Kevin asked me along with Ian Salada (OPP) to co-chair an RFP committee to commission a study of ALL Penn State data center spaces (yes all). Without going into great detail you can imagine the scope and impact of this project.

IT organizations across Penn State were asked to fill out a survey at the beginning of the calendar year. The data received will be used to help the successful consulting firm gain knowledge about us and our current practices. With that said, it will be somewhat open ended for the consultant to make recommendations regarding future construction, business continuity, tactical and strategic planning to name a few.

I believe this project (along with subsequent activities) (and a LOT of money) will ultimately shape the way Penn State is seen worldwide as an institution positioned to take on the challenges of IT for generations to come.

I'm just happy to be associated with these groups!

I'm sitting in the airport (now on the plane), returning from SNW (Storage Networking World) with Ben Grissinger. No Steve it doesn't stand for Still Not Working!

At any rate we attended to be present when SNIA announced the new XAM (eXstensible Access Method) SDK and most importantly demonstrated the interoperability between HP, EMC and Sun storage. They also demonstrated it on top of their respective ILM platforms. HP's IAP (formerly called RISS), EMC's Centera and Sun's ST5800 (Honeycomb). All we saw worked smoothly!

At a breakfast yesterday the CTO of EMC Centera made several comments regarding this standard and was acknowledged by both HP and Sun that after this announcement they will be incorporating the XAM standard into their road maps and in the case of Sun into their OS. Without going into great detail regarding the XAM SDK we talked about how the community needs to be built. This seems to be the best attempt out there to allow interoperability as well as the ability to bring silo'd repositories under a single searchable storage platform. An analogy was made to that of NFS when it was first introduced. No one can dispute the uptake and mainstream of NFS. SNIA is asking that we do our part to get the word out regarding XAM and the rich features of it's SDK.

We have been talking extensively with all three vendors and how we could play a role in further development. Of course our interest would be the ability to bring several of our repository products under one searchable storage platform. Much of the functionality we're looking for is part of the ILM platform we ultimately choose. Having the ability to create and extend the metadata of fixed content objects will be huge for future initiatives and development. An example today of having thousands of .pdf files in a "repository" system that one can search but may not be able to figure out the version or have the attributes to determine what version of Acrobat the object was created. With XAM and an ILM solution we could ultimately be able to reach into the archive, save the original copy for any compliance reasons, then extract a copy and transform it to the latest version. Thus creating a path for our archived data to be literally preserved as well as being readable for the foreseeable future!

An ILM platform creates a system that is very robust, scalable and has the ability to take care of compliance issues as well as simplified life cycling of the actual hardware, now becoming agnostic to what storage medium offered over time. Once the data is ingested you will never have to touch it to move it from one storage platform to the other. Resulting in near zero down time seen by end users.

Yes, it's expensive but one must factor in the net worth it in respect to the preservation of institutional, intellectual and historical data over time and the inherent protections this system offers.

Let me know what you think?