Interesting Links for January 12th

Links that I have found interesting for January 12th:

• ClearSight Rolls Out Latency Monitoring Tool – A new latency monitoring product ClearSight Networks introduced today measures latency (in other words, data transmission delays) at the packet layer, watching and reporting on the movement of data across networks in real time. "This is as close to real-time latency monitoring as you can get," says Steve Wong, vice president of marketing, ClearSight Networks.
• Relaunching HP Infrastructure Software Blog – HP Infrastructure Management Software – Welcome to the restart of the HP Infrastructure Software blog.

  HP Infrastructure Software includes a wide variety of tools from element managers that provide granular control over every aspect of a server through enterprise managers that give business owners a way to manage business services.

  The new bloggers include Dennis Corning, Jon Haworth, and Peter Spielvogel, all part of the Operations Center marketing team, within HP’s Business Service Management group.

  We will address a variety of topics of interest for CIOs, IT Operations professionals, and the front-line personnel who keep corporate IT systems running. The goal is to discuss developments in this rapidly changing and increasing important area of IT.

• From IT to Business – let’s start with my definition of what IT-Business Alignment is: IT does what the business requires – not more, not less. That includes aspects like the ability to efficiently respond on new business requests, the ability to report on and enforce business controls (including all the GRC requirements), and the efficiency of IT itself in the sense of a streamlined, lean IT organization.

  There are, from my view, two main steps to go:

  1. Reorganize IT
  2. Implement a consistent control layer between Business and IT

  From my perspective, the lessons we’ve learned from outsourcing and outtasking are a good basis for IT reorganization. Strategy has to be in-house – that is the core part of the IT department. Other parts might be done inhouse as well, but organized in own “centers” with clearly defined SLAs. An IT organization which consists of a strategy/architecture department for guidelines, a GRC department which focuses on all relevant controls, and some decentralized IT knowledge

• IT organizations have to change – for economic reasons! – With other words: Siloed IT organizations aren’t acceptable from an economic perspective. The argument frequently is that business departments are the ones who have the budget for building or buying new applications – and they decide. But that works only because the overall costs of the non-integratable applications aren’t known.

  In these days, no organization can afford that type of IT anymore.

  The answer to this is obvious: Siloes have to be broken up. There have to be at least strong matrix organizations where strategists and architects provide mandatory guidelines for IT methodologies, infrastructures, and architectures.

• ARM Enabler for WebSphere Application Server – The ARM Enabler for WebSphere Application Server is a program to configure WebSphere Application Server to turn on its ARM instrumentation.

  Users must have ITCAMfRTT 6.1, ITCAMfRT 6.2 or ITCAMfTT 7.1 products installed in their WebSphere Application Server environment. After turn on the ARM instrumentation for the WebSphere Application Server, it will use the ARM libraries provided by aforementioned ITCAM products to generate ARM calls for the web applications running within it. Then the performance metrics data of the web applications and transactions could be collected by ITCAM products and reported to Management Server or Tivoli Enterprise Management Server for analyzing.