It is best practice to test any change in a development/ safe environment prior to implementation. The development environment should simulate the production environment so that the impact of the change can be accurately assessed. But how many IT organisations have a second development IT Organisation? They may have a…
My boss, when our team was building the architecture methods (see Enterprise Architecture), was involved with the UK Government’s development of ITIL. Because I became aware of both the ITIL documentation and the analysis that we used in developing architecture methods, I think that there’s a significant issue that’s…
I mentioned in my first Tideway blog ( Thoughts on Climate Change) that I’d measured 2.5% of server assets were still running, although as far as IT reporting was concerned, they’d already been decommissioned. At first sight this might not seem significant compared to the cost of finding them.…
Back in the early 90’s I was a consultant in a large systems integrator. Moore’s law and de facto and de jure standardisations were breaking proprietary systems’ stranglehold on customers, driving the ambitions of organsations to increase the scope of their IT across the value chain and to get economies of scale of technology ownership, while increasing the end-to-end automation of their enterprises to reduce business operational costs.
This weekend I was again enjoying the company of my nearly four year old nephew (the nearly being important at this age) when it struck me how in many ways the journey to our new release of Tideway Foundation has parallels to him growing up.
Whilst I…
Today Tideway releases TKU4, its fourth bi-monthly release of software fingerprints that allow organisations to identify and version leading enterprise software products running in their data centers.
Behind each TKU release is a dedicated team. My role as product manager is to work with customers to drive a…
Remarkably, there is no standard for describing what software, hardware and business applications you have, how it is deployed, what the dependencies are, how to tell whether something is working or not, or even how important it is.
We are going to change this. We are going to…
We’ve recently been struggling with issues caused by a OS patch, which is not that unusual.
To understand the problem you need a bit of history. Back in the early 1990’s Sun switched from BSD based SunOS to System V based Solaris (we’ll skip the marketing move of rebranding SunOS 4.1 as Solaris 1).
The ‘Chicken and Egg’ of IT asset auto-discovery…
In the world of IT asset auto-discovery we face a giant hurdle. That is the growing realisation that not knowing what we have is the first barrier to providing better IT. As any business leader can confirm though, barriers cost…
As we all know, the cost of servers has fallen dramatically over the last few years.
Simple economics tells us that when prices fall, demand rises. Sure enough, data centres around the world are now running out of space, power, cooling or all three. If you can cope…
