Dear CIO/IT managers,

This CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

• NEW course: IT project outsourcing management
• Cutting costs without cutting deliverables!
  
• Is SAN the right solution for you?
  
• How to cut your datacenter cooling expense by 30%?
  
• Upcoming courses for CIO/IT managers

NEW course: IT project outsourcing management

There are so many things to do but you only have so few people! Therefore, IT outsourcing can be a big help if it can deliver what your organization needs on time and within budget. However, due to the complexity in IT projects, the latter is rarely true due to mis-communications and disputes. Fortunately, there are skills and processes that you can learn to prevent these issues. Personally I think the most important measures are: selecting the vendor that has proven track records in working with customers in an agile (responding to changes) and win-win partnership, frequent progress monitoring, quality assurance, change management and incentives.

To learn about these and many more, now you can take this IT project outsourcing management course at CPTTM. It is delivered by an experienced trainer from the Hong Kong Productivity Council.

Cutting costs without cutting deliverables!

Here is an excellent article on this topic. Here are my favorite points:

• Go with what's good enough. A company saves US$750,000 annually by switching from Microsoft Exchange to GMail. It's true that GMail lacks certain features of Exchange, but it is good enough for them. If OpenOffice is good enough for you, you may not need to upgrade to the latest version of MS Office.
• Automation. What if you could automate the shutdown of access points and IP phones? Then you could shut them all down at night and get a huge saving in electricity! What if you could automate an alarm on room temperatures lower than, say, 23 degrees?

Is SAN the right solution for you?

Everybody seems to think he needs a SAN. But is it really the most effective solution? In many cases the answer is no.

If you need to store peta bytes (1PB = 1000TB) of unstructured data (e.g., files, videos, images), then SAN is not really the right solution because a single disk controller can only manage that limited number of disks. What you need is a scaled out solution such as Ibrix (now part of HP) or the open source GlusterFS. With such a solution, you can keeping adding file servers to grow the storage pool in a linear manner (no single bottleneck).

If you need to provide storage to a few servers, you definitely should consider NAS. If a SAN and a NAS are using the same network infrastructure (e.g., a dedicated 10G or 1G Ethernet), then there will be a limited performance difference (NAS head translating file requests to block requests), but a NAS is a lot easier to administer and a lot cheaper. So, only if you are really sure that your performance bottleneck is the storage system and that you are willing to spend significant more  money upfront & subsequent administration effort to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the storage system, then it's the business case for SAN.

In real life, this case is very rare. For example, to host VMs, EMC exec recommends NAS. What about Oracle? The world's largest Oracle installation: Oracle's on demand hosting datacenter in Austin runs Oracle on NAS, because Oracle is usually CPU bound, not storage bound. Finally, what service is more disk intensive than Oracle?

How to cut your datacenter cooling expense by 30%?

Upcoming courses for CIO/IT managers

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also have two other newsletters: Network administrator newsletter and Software developer newsletter, your staff may like to subscribe.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong