BMC Purchase of Neptuny

Posted on 05/10/2010 by James Collings

Breaking news today is that BMC have purchased Neptuny for their Caplan software.  The has been hailed in press releases and by many commentators as a move by BMC into Capacity Management... but hey... hang on!  BMC purchased BGS back in 1998 for their Capacity Management software, did I just imagine that?  I'm sure that the old Best/1 product became Perform/Predict and most recently BMC Capacity Trending Advisor, BMC Performance Reporting, BMC Capacity Management Essentials, and BMC Performance Assurance.

In its day, Best/1 was one of the best capacity management tools you could buy (although, to be fair, the market for real capacity management tools has never been particularly swamped).  Now, only a decade (or so) later, BMC seem to have done it again.  So was Best/1 not as good as it was thought to be?  Maybe this is an admission from BMC that the world has moved on since the 90's?  There is no surprise there.  Cloud computing, virtualisation, Blades, Linux... all things have since been adopted with a passion by business.  So if Best/1 is no longer the "best one" (sic), then who's fault is that?  Surely the purchase of Neptuny by BMC is an admission that they have neglected their own Capacity Management tool and the rest of the world has overtaken them? 

And if that is the case, then what future Caplan?  Will BMC keep the required investment into R&D so that, this time, their tool maintains its position in the market?  Will they instead, squander the legacy they have purchased and find that yet again, the rest of the market will overtake them?

Consider the BMC/Neptuny situation in conjunction with the CA/Hyperformix purchase of only one week ago.  Hmmm.  There appears to be some consolidation going on in the Capacity Management marketplace.  So... what does the future hold for Teamquest and Metron?  Watch this space.

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Merging Orange and T-Mobile networks

Posted on 07/09/2010 by James Collings

The announcement in yesterday's press (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11199786)about the merger of the Orange and T-Mobile networks is potentially a "Game Changer" for the UK mobile phone industry.

Last year, Orange and T-Mobile announced a merger of their companies to form a new joint venture, named earlier this year as Everything Everywhere.  The apparent concept being that by being a customer of this company you would be able to access "everything" while you were "everywhere".  However, the marketing approach has always been to keep the two brands separate.  The only way that this could be achieved is through joining the two networks together so that customers get the best of both worlds.

The question I have though, is: How will Vodafone and O2 respond? 

Merging two networks together is not a simple case of plugging one cable into another and watching the traffic flow.  Each cell will have to be re-dimensioned to check that it can cope with the new, potentially combined demand.  If a particular location is served by both Orange and T-Mobile, how long will they continue to keep them as separate networks compared to providing a single network that just directs the CDR to one brand or the other?  For that matter, for how long will the two companies provide separate Billing and Customer Care environments?

Once the two networks are properly connected (not just the "inland roaming" that is currently being proposed) at what point will a single Billing environment be catering for both sets of customers? 

The solution to these questions are the domain of Capacity Management.  Existing systems are built to support around 15m-20m customers.  Supporting twice that number is not simply a case of putting twice as much equipment into the datacentre and hoping for the best.  Whether an application will scale to the necessary size is highly unlikely.  Load testing can be used to identify the maximum capability of an existing piece of infrastructure, but to work out how much infrastructure you need for a given amount of work, you need to build a model.

So, we know it is a big challenge that Orange and T-Mobile face.  In my experience the complete merger of all network and supporting systems will take 18months- 2years.  So how will Vodafone and O2 respond?  Well.  They have a 2 year window of opportunity.  After that, the teething problems will have been resolved and the EverythingEverywhere brands will have the biggest network with the best coverage and, if they don't mess up in the mean time, the largest customer base.

A challenge for all concerned.

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Measuring the Datacentre

Posted on 12/08/2010 by James Collings

The big push in Datacentre Capacity Management currently seems to be related to the power necessary to keep the infrastructure operational and to keep it cool.

Many suppliers are pushing their "Green IT" products and boasting about how little power is consumed.  While this is undoubtedly a good thing I wonder if it is leading people to forget the basic feature of a datacentre; Space.  If your Datacentre provision runs out of power you can purchase additional generating capacity from your provider, and hopefully upgrade your UPS so that you can still enact your BCP in the event of a failure.  If you run out of cooling capacity, you could even decide to run your datacentres a little "hot" for a while, or alternatively, spend money on buying more capacity.  Both of those upgrades (Power and Cooling) can be put in place in a relatively short period of time.  However, if you run out of space in your datacentre, then the only things you can do is to buy another datacentre, or build an extension.

Both of those actions take a considerable amount of time.

Blade computing has reduced the amount of space that is required for a "server", and virtualisation has reduced this even more.  But a blade enclosure still takes up space, and a virtual guest still relies on a physical host on which it can reside.  The issue of Space management is just as crucial as it ever was.

We are currently working with a client to try and revamp their datacentre reporting.  They have been trying to implement a single value that indicates the amount of space remaining in each of their datacentre suites in terms of “racks”.  The issue that they have experienced, is that the assumptions they have made regarding the amount of power and cooling that a rack requires has led to the following quirk: Some of the datacentre suites have a negative number of racks free.

How can this be?  A quick walk around the datacentre shows that there is plenty of free space, there aren’t racks piled up on to of each other.  Similarly there appears to be enough power to keep everything switched on, the UPSs aren’t beginning to whine and melt.  Neither are the operators beginning to “whine” or “melt” due to the tropical temperatures one might be expecting.  So why are the reports showing negative space free?  The maths behind the reports is valid, so all that remains is that there must be an error in the logic being used.

This will need further investigation.

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