Data Analytics, or How Much Info for a Buck?

Bill Cole – Competitive Sales Specialist,Information Management, IBM

Leave only footprints; take only pictures.  Have you seen that slogan in a national park?  My wife (she’s now an ex) didn’t believe the signs that told us to leave everything exactly where it was.  She didn’t want to just enjoy the beauty.  She wanted to take some home with us.  The flashing light of the Park Ranger car told me we were in trouble for picking up a few rocks along the side of the road.  The nice man in the Smokey hat told me to put the rocks back.  The scenery is for consumption with your eyes, your camera, not for taking home.  I did as instructed, happy to be leaving with my wallet in one piece.

I’ve always produced data and then turned it into information by adding other bits of data together and adding some context.  My users guided me for a while and then I both guided and pushed them.  This seemed to be the natural order of things, sort of like factories and the folks who buy the goods from those factories.

The IT/BI/DA teams accumulate and store the data and then massage to build what are essentially standard reports.  Standard reports are good for standard thinking, of course.  If you know the answer you’re looking for, a standard report probably has it in there somewhere, like those old balance sheets and ledgers that I ran so long ago.  But there was nothing in those reports that would help think outside of the data on those reports.  In fact, there was so little insight in them that one of the plant managers actually asked me what good these reports were.  There’s really not a good response to that one.

Insights are gained when the lines of business can chase an idea through all sorts of non-standard iterations.  Almost like chasing one of those happy mistakes from science, like penicillin, or those ubiquitous not-very-sticky note sheets that we all stick all over everything so we can easily keep track of passwords, etc.  LOL, like you haven’t done that.

So how do we get to this idea-chasing sort of thing?  This place where the data analysts or, better still, the line of business user can see something interesting and start chasing it?  This is custom-developed solution, a virtual pair of bespoke shoes that were for your situation and only for your situation.  The person in the next cubicle needn’t look over your shoulder.  It would do them no good after all.  There’s a scene in the Maureen O’Hara/John Wayne move “The Quiet Man” in which John asks directions and the local says “Do you see that road over there?  Don’t take it, it’ll do you no good.”  Insights are like that.  You need to know not to walk down a road that will do you no good.

The trick, it seems to me, is having the right tools.  Let’s start with the database (you know I’m a practicing DBA and that means all discussions start with the database).  DB2 BLU is exactly the right repository for your decision-making data.  After all, it offers both row- and column-oriented models in a single database!  This means you’re getting performance no matter which way your data chooses to be represented.  Moreover, there are different kinds of compression to ensure you save space and improve performance.  What could be better?  And all for the price of an upgrade!  Easy.  No-brainer.

There’s a neat coda to this, too.  You’re not confined to the old solution of finding a server, building it and installing the software, then building the database.  Let’s talk choices, folks.  Lots of choices.  Maybe every choice.  On premise, just like we’ve always done, works.  Maybe your own cloud would be better.  Build your BI/DA system in a PureFlex or PureApp or PureData cloud hosted in your own data center.  There’s a simple solution with lots of benefits including workload management.  Set it and forget it and go on about your business.  Maybe DBaaS works better.  Virtualize the workload and database in an existing private cloud to make use of those “excess” mips.  (Parkinson’s Law says that any organization grows to fill all the space available.  I think the demand for mips grows to fill the available servers, thus negating the concept of “Excess mips.”)  There’s SoftLayer for either a public or private cloud.  Remember, they’ll go all the way to bare metal if that’s what you need.  Finally, maybe best, is DB2 BLU available in the cloud. I championed this a while back and it’s now reality.  A pre-configured database that IBM manages and maintains, including backups and upgrades.  Talk about easy!  Go ahead, get some sleep.  We’ve got this one.

One last thought about the tools.  InfoSphere Analytics Server will do the analysis for you and present your users with suggested insights right out of the box.  And it will help the folks find their own insights by helping them look, filter and massage the data in any way that suits them.  It’s a cool tool for those times when you need the freedom to find your own way through the forest of data.

Finally, I’ve always kept two Robert Frost poems on my wall.  Perhaps, “Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood” is the one for this post.  We in IT need to give the folks in the lines of business the right tools to chase down the new roads, new insights.  We’ll give the GPS for the roads less traveled by.  Good luck on your journeys of exploration!

The other poem is “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening,” of course.  We all have miles to go before we sleep, before our work is complete, and using the right tools makes those miles ever so much more productive.  Bundle up on those snowy evenings and enjoy the ride.

Follow Bill Cole on Twitter : @billcole_ibm

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DBaaS Explained, or Miracles in Minutes

Bill Cole – Competitive Sales Specialist,Information Management, IBM

Don’t you love installing databases?  I man the whole stack from the database software through the tools and applications.  Lots of real innovation there, eh?  How many times have you done this sort of thing?  My friend Don was sent to install some very complex software for a client.  The scope was one (count ‘em, one) environment.  So Don calls me the first day he’s there and says the project wants – and this is absolutely true – seventeen copies of the environment.  As an MIS guy, he was offended.  What in the world did they need with so many copies of the environment?  Turns out that every developer wanted his/her own copy.  Given that the install process for any single environment was two weeks and Don had three weeks, all those copies weren’t happening.  Don politely explained the situation, including the fact that the disk space available would barely accommodate a single installation.  Disappointment and relief.  Guess who experienced which emotion.

I’ve written on this topic before in relationship to patterns.  This time I’d like to talk about an old or new concept depending on who you ask: Database as a Service.  Frankly, the naming is unfortunate since the concept is about providing a complete environment for an application, not just the database.  Being a DBA, the database is the most important part, of course.  LOL.

During my tenure as a data center director, I thought of my infrastructure team as providing a service not only to the IT department but to the rest of the company as well.  The real trick there was getting my team – and the CIO – to understand that.  We’re IT after all.  Miracles are our stock in trade.  It’s what we did every day.  The application folks came to rely on our miracles, too.

As we built the data center – I had the luxury of starting from scratch – we agreed on the number of environments and their specific uses, etc..  This lasted for almost two weeks once we actually got started.  From the target of the three we had agreed to, my team was challenged to create and manage seven, each with their own rules, users, priorities, sources and schedules.  The application team didn’t think we could do it.  I created the processes and procedures.  And I participated in them, too.  Shared misery.  LOL.  The apps folks would challenge us to do something in a hurry and I’d quote a short turn-around and then beat it by 50% most of the time.  It both annoyed and amazed.

This was our own DBaaS but we should first define the term.  DBaaS is initiated by a user asking for an application environment to be provisioned.  Note it’s the full application environment including the database, application code, any web- or form-based pieces, plus the ancillary tools.  Crucially, the request includes three other critical pieces of information.  First is the sizing.  Is this a small, medium, large or massive environment?  We need to understand how the environment will be used.  Is this a sandbox or training or development or Production implementation?  Some other bits of information need to be collected as well.  Which department is getting billed for this?  After all, IT didn’t just collective decide to create this environment.  Perhaps we should add something about managing this collection.  Are we applying patches or updates?  What’s the life-span?  A few days or weeks or years?  SLA?  It’s not simply gimme a copy of Prod.  We need a complete description.

Note the assumptions we make in DBaaS.  First, we assume there’s a “golden” or benchmark source from which to create the environment.  If not, it’s a whole new installation and the price just went up.  Second, that we have server resources available, probably virtualized servers, too!  And that provisioning this new environment won’t step on any existing environments.  Third, that there’s disk space available.  Again, this is space that won’t step on performance of any other environment.  I add this caveat because I once had a CIO call me out of the blue and ask me about the rules for putting data on his expensive SAN.  It’s seems all those CYA documents and spreadsheets were killing the performance of critical production database.  I know of a clearly enunciated set of rules, please share them with me.  Finally, we need to ensure network connectivity and bandwidth.  Don’t forget this critical piece of the pie.  We can’t assume that there’s room in the pipe for an added load.

The pledge we in IT make is both timescale and accuracy.  We give the requestor a time for completion that may be tomorrow or, at worst, the following day.  I know that sounds wildly aggressive for some types of provisioning but we have to build our sources and processes so we can install them quickly on a variety of operating environments.

All of the above is where DB2, SoftLayer and PureSystems shine brightly.  DB2 can be provisioned quickly from copies in a number of ways from cold or warm backups.  PureSystems implements all the advantages of DB2 plus PureApps includes DBaaS tools.  And SoftLayer is really the gold standard for DBaaS.  Just take a look.

Finally, my wife works for a large application development organization masquerading as a bank.  She gets very frustrated with environment management and provisioning.  Fortunately, I understand both sides of that story so I sit and listen patiently while she tells me what the bloody minded idiots who manage their various dev/test/prod environments have done to make her life difficult today.  The thing that gets her maddest is that no one seems to know how to provision any new environments.  With dozens of infrastructure staff, they can’t because no one has really haven’t thought through the process.  So the dev teams just sit around waiting.  Losing precious time.  It’s really not a full service bank, I guess.  Don’t expect a miracle.

Follow Bill Cole on Twitter : @billcole_ibm