VIDEO: Five Tips for a More Secure Mobile Workforce

A few months ago I wrote a post that provided five tips we use at Avnet for a more secure mobile workforce, since a growing number of our employees are working remotely at least part of the time.

I recently took an opportunity to film an installment of Tech Trends on this topic, and I’ve posted a link to that three-minute video below.

 

[http://bit.ly/YP93UW]

I firmly believe these five tips can help keep anyone secure at home or at work, no matter what industry you work in or how large your company is.

Are these five tips helpful?  Is there anything I missed?  Please let me know in the comments below.
- Steve

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How Avnet’s Award-winning Data Center Retrofit Saved $18 Million

A few weeks ago, I received good news that the retrofit of Avnet’s primary data center will be honored by the Uptime Institute with a Green Enterprise IT Award at their 2013 Symposium event to be held May 13-16 in Santa Clara, Calif.

It feels a bit odd to be recognized in 2013 for work that begin eight years ago, but in this case that’s exactly what happened.

Back in 2005, Avnet had grown tremendously after a number of significant acquisitions that more than doubled our revenues and geographic reach in just a few years. As a result, our then 17-year old data center was beginning to burst at the seams.

THE DATA CENTER REACHES A CROSSROADS

Our reports indicated that we were already using 70% of our available power supply at the time, and on track to quickly use up what was left. But initial quotes to overhaul the power infrastructure needed to give us additional headroom were

A generic Air-side Economizer diagram – Credit:EnergyStar

prohibitively expensive: about $7 million. In an industry that operates on thin margins, that investment was simply more than we could take on at the time.

So rather than investing in costly infrastructure expansion, we decided to make the data center as power efficient as it could be. Thus began a seven-year project designed to retrofit nearly every environmental system in the data center, implementing cutting-edge green technologies like an air-side economizer – the first of its kind on the West Coast to our knowledge – to reduce energy consumption.

We’ve also incorporated the latest virtualization technologies, server configurations and storage platforms to maximize our computing densities while minimizing our energy needs.

THE RESULTS

As a result of these efforts, the data center has been able to:

  • Stay well ahead of the rapidly expanding needs of our growing business — $14.25 billion in FY 2006 versus $25.7 billion in FY 2012
  • Save the company $18 million over the last five years
  • Accomplish all that while actually improving the data center efficiency by 10% overall

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

Brad Kenney, vice president of Infrastructure, and his team deserve a tremendous amount of credit for not only setting the course for Avnet eight years ago, but, more importantly, seeing it through this entire time.

Bruce Gorshe, Avnet’s Director of Data Center Operations, will be presenting our case study on this retrofit to the Uptime Symposium 2013 in a few weeks. Though I hesitate to say much more about it now I’d also encourage anyone interested to register HERE to attend the event yourself.

Congratulations to everyone at Avnet as well as our trusted partners, who have been a part of this journey the last eight years. This honor is well deserved and a long time coming for a job well done.

- Steve

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In-Memory Computing Explained: A Next-Gen Architecture Gains Momentum

 

While it may not have the same evocative imagery as “cloud computing” or the conceptual heft of “big data”, there’s a third computing trend gaining momentum in the enterprise space.  It’s called “in memory computing” and it has the potential to drive just as much change as any IT trend in the enterprise today.  Let me explain.

IN MEMORY = SOLID-STATE MEMORY

Like cloud computing and big data, the concept of in-memory computing (IMC) has been around a long time, waiting for the right market conditions to trigger widespread adoption. IMC relies on the same solid-state flash memory modules found in everything from USB thumb drives to iPads and smart phones in order to operate. 

The prices for this flash memory, known as DRAM and NAND in the industry, have dropped precipitously over the years as you can see in this graph developed by EE Times, making it feasible to purchase terabytes of it at a time. 

 

While flash memory will likely never compete with rotating media (conventional hard disc drives, or HDDs) for the lowest price-per-gigabyte, it has one advantage hard drives can’t touch: lower latency.

Latency measures the time it takes to retrieve and deliver a specific block of stored data.  Flash memory performs this task in about 83 nanoseconds.  Rotating media performs the same task in 13 milliseconds. Nanoseconds vs. milliseconds.  What’s the difference?  

Christian Paredes, in a blog post on Scoutapp.com, explains the difference masterfully below:

So while the difference may be less than the blink of an eye, scaled up over millions of transactions the difference in performance is massive.

OVERHAULING THE DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE

In-memory computing taps into this performance difference by flipping the usual data center architecture on its head.  In all of today’s data centers, including Avnet’s, data is stored on predominantly on hard drives due to their low cost and good reliability and performance.  That data is often backed up on tape drives, due to their extreme low cost. 

But hard drives are slow, and tape is even slower.  That’s an issue as the importance of speed is becoming just as important in the data center as reliability and price. 

In IMC solutions, company data is stored in solid-state memory modules where it can be accessed almost instantly due to low latencies.  Backup and disaster recovery then takes place on hard drives, and tape is phased out over time. 

Though the initial investment may be slightly higher than rotating media, the lack of moving parts in the solid-state flash memory promises to reduce maintenance costs over time.  It’s a fundamental shift and an evolution in the way data centers are architected. 

IMC & BIG DATA

As I discussed in a recent blog post, Big Data promises to help businesses manage and make sense of the exponential growth in information coming at them in real time.  But the bigger the data set being managed and the faster it changes, the more IMC architectures are needed to meet the minimum performance thresholds that Big Data applications demand.

As a transaction-driven company ourselves looking to roll out our own Big Data initiative this year, Avnet is increasingly embracing in-memory architectures to ensure that our infrastructure isn’t the bottleneck in an environment where every millisecond counts.

You can expect to hear more about Avnet’s own experiences with in-memory computing and architectures in the coming months.     

Like cloud computing and big data, it’s an old idea whose time has finally come. 

-          - Steve

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BYOD Article in Connect World

The editorial team at Connect World was kind enough to offer me an opportunity to contribute an article to their website, so naturally I took the opportunity to address a topic that’s been a frequent subject on this blog over the last year: BYOD and security.

I’ve posted a brief introduction below. Anyone interested in reading further is welcome to hit the jumper link at the bottom to see the full article.

Special thanks to the staff at Connect World for giving me the opportunity to contribute.

- Steve 

BYOD starts with security

By Steve Phillips, Avnet, Inc.
Connect World | April 8, 2013

The ‘Bring Your Own Device’ or BYOD movement, where employees use personal devices to access corporate data and networks, is a seismic shift that companies can’t ignore, especially those with significant knowledge-based workforces in North America.

Employees now have easy, affordable access to the latest technology from laptops to smartphones and tablets, and they want to use the devices they like best and are most familiar with at the office, whether or not the IT team approves.

As a result, organizations are finding that if they don’t embrace BYOD and establish a formal policy, their device landscape will quickly turn into the Wild West, with employees putting company data on personal devices and downloading all kinds of applications onto company systems….

Read Full Article

 

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VIDEO: The Myth of Process Automation: Why Software Isn’t Always the Answer

Tech Trends: Process Improvement v Process Automation

Click image to view video in a new tab

As cloud computing implementations and mobile applications continue to grow and dominate the spotlight in and out of the business press, it’s tempting to think of IT integration – both on- and off-premise – as a magical cure that solves all of a business’s process ills.  That’s a mistake in my opinion.

Earlier this year I wrote about the integration of Avnet’s process improvement team into our IT team, and the high expectations I had as a result of bringing those disciplines together.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Derinda Ehrlich, the head of our Global Operational Excellence team, to discuss the potential pitfalls of the rush to automation in our latest installment of Tech Trends.

In less than four minutes, we discuss the limitations automation alone may impose on the business and IT team, along with the increased efficiency and ROI that can result when process improvement methods are used in conjunction with the process automation effort.

I hope you find it a valuable use of your time whether you’re in IT, the process world, or the leader of a business or business unit.

-          Steve

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