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January 2006 News

IT skills shortage increases
IT management as an utility
TCO for blades in question
Malware on the rise
2005 Announcements

IT skills shortage increases

The Home Office have published that it has issued nearly 23,000 work permits to overseas workers in 2005. This compares to 24,828 granted in 2004 against 2,300 granted in 1995.The continuing strategies of off-shoring and "dumbing" down of the IT sector is causing university students to search for other areas to focus their talents such as law and accounting. Interestingly there is an increase in demand for inexpensive IT personnel just at the time when the resource pool is very low. Some of the initiatives to create IT resources may end up being counter-productive as they could create expensive elite IT workers - just those that business wants to remove.

IT management as an utility

What will happen to the IT manager when computer capacity on demand becomes "de rigueur"? Will the buying and selling of processor time make them into timeshare salesmen? "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink have I got a deal for you my son. I've got this wonderful piece of a processor that is really top-notch, fast, reliable and cheap - special price for you my son if you buy it now with a commitment for two hours a week for 7 years. It's a steal. Nobody else knows about this capacity but when they do they will all want some." Mark my words this will come.

TCO for blades in question

Cost Breakdown for a blade rack (The analysis is for a single rack in a datacentre estimated at $170,000.)

	USD	%
Project Management	8500	5%
Power Equipment	30600	18%
Cooling Equipment	10200	6%
Engineering & installation	30600	18%
Electricity	34000	20%
Service	25500	15%
Racks	3400	2%
Space	25500	15%
System monitoring	1700	1%

Interestingly the cost of additional cooling capabilities is more expensive than additional floorspace with better air flow. The easiest way to save money is to reduce electricity usage.

Malware on the rise

Malware attacks have increased by over 50% during 2005 and trojan-based attacks have become so common that they were used for the majority of the exploits. The threat has shifted from mass attacks through worm mechanisms to sophisticated focused criminal schemes. The zombification of innocent computers is becoming increasingly difficult to defend against and identify when it has happened. CipherTrust have published that it found 170,000 new infected computers EVERY day.

2005 Announcements

IBM passes PC business to Lenovo, Palm Treo smartphone to use MS Windows mobile platform and Apple to use Intel chips for future Macs. Consolidation was also a trend, Seven bought Smartner email, iAnywhere solutions acquired Extended systems and Nokia to buy Intellisync. With Blackberry systems under a threat from RIM mobile email should become more interesting. And finally MS will offer Vista extensions for XP so this will extend XP until 2007 at least.

Snippets

Storage racks scale to 210TB. This will provide sufficient storage to make it nearly impossible to find anything!!!
Microsoft plan to speed up their development cycle from18 to 24 months. This sounds good until one considers that the 24 months tends towards 72 months so the six months doesn't really make much of a difference. I wonder if it will mean less but faster bugs!!
As the wireless capabilities evolve a new mutation may appear - the wireless MAN. This technology hero will bring us WiMax, HSDPA, mesh WiFi and even DVB-H. I wonder what destruction will accompany these new hyper-heroes?
Avian flu could have a major impact on global business especially when services are disrupted and people support will be required. Businesses must build this into their continuity plans.
Stratus has announced that it will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
UN has a $100 PC with flash memory, AMD 500MHz, screen and a hand crank power supply. But as Bill G will tell you the real costs are in the applications, support and training. Who is going to pay for that?
300GB holographic discs will be available during 2006. The read / write performance will be 10x the speed of a DVD. 8GB flash will also hit the streets.