Adventures in systems land

No, not the verb, the noun.

One of my early posts in this blog was “A. Seven - Q. Ways to measure progress ?”, a response to an entry on Brian Peacocks internal blog. Thursday last week I had the pleasure of doing the pitch behind the post, to the world-wide IBM Assistant Technical Staff Member(ATSM) community. Although “corny“, one of the phrases that is a staple in the presentation is “Make sure change is something that happens for you, not to you”.

It stuck in my mind. When I got off a flight from the UK on Tuesday night, actually early Wednesday morning, I decided that I needed to live up to that mantra.

And so it was after some frantic last minute activities yesterday, I’m pleased to announce that today I signed form to become a full IBM US employee as of today. Nothing much else changes, I’m still leading the marketing requirements, scenarios and related work on Systems Management. I’m pulling together a number of important threads for the p7 based server, and I lead/own the Power Systems Appliance strategy work. But as of today I do that as a full IBM Corporation employee and will be resigning from IBM United Kingdom, and at least for the foreseable future, no more assignments. Colour me really excited.

Make sure change is something that happens for YOU, not to you.

[Update: I've uploaded the slides after a couple of requests, you can view them online or download from slideshare.net here. ]

I just put my name on the attendees list for BarCampESM, it’s an excellent idea to get together in an informal attendee driven agenda. There is not date set yet for barcampESM so I really hope it will be when I can attend.

I have a lot to learn in this area, but hopefully will be able to make some useful contributions based on my background with the whole Grid services evolution and the work being done on the Server group management platform and interfaces.

[Update:] Here is a good description of Summer Camp for Systems Management, from William Hurley, one of the organizers/coordinators.

One of my first posts in this blog, was on the subject of complexity. James Governor of Redmonk weighed in today on complexity with a trackback post called “What SOA needs to learn from Ruby On Rails“.

I noted, that while our software, and often our systems were complex, that was because our customers are, not because we design them to be complex. Our customers run a vast array of machines, in widely different environments, supporting a broad range of applications. Of course, this is chicken and egg, and is a difficult tightrope for established solutions to walk. We could just remove most of the configuration options and in a generation or two the complexity would have gone, but what about the customers?

Forced into a straightjacket of “our way or the highway”, would you take the later?

It’s easy for the new kid, in this case Ruby on Rails to come out and offer little or no configuration options, side files etc. It doesn’t have to, it has never made a significant change it what or how it does things. The same isn’t true for the old-timers. Comparing SOA to Ruby, is like comparing a transport system to a footpath.

It is a subject important to me though. At the moment I’m carefully trying to marshal the merger of the function in the System p Hardware Management Console with that of IBM Systems Director and Director console. My desire is to make one simple management platform that acts both as the local platform director, managing configuration, hardware and service management etc. and at the same time providing a set of programmable, function services based interfaces to provide both remote access, and remote management.

So, I’m all for simplicity but it has to be thought through. We are doing this with the System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points. The original SOA Entry points were pure software plays divided into five categories, People, Process, Information, Connectivity, and Reuse. We are taking the entry points one step further and mapping the software onto System p removing another layer of complexity by showing how they work, how you can configure them and testing them as a total solution.

You can read the System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points overview here, via FTP

John Lennon once sang “It’s been too long since we took the time, No-one’s to blame, I know time flies so quickly” … “It’ll be just like starting over, starting over”.

IBM Director and the IBM Systems Director play an important roll in the future of managing IBM Servers and especially IBM System p. I’ve been a long term fan of the IBM Redbooks, and have written three myself, and co-authored or been a contributor to five or six others.

So, it was with some delight that I learned today they Redbooks people are trying a new idea. They are going to build a wiki on IBM Director. It’s an excellent idea, and you’ve done any extensive work with IBM Director, or if you are an IBMer in ITS or S&D who wants to learn more about Director and use the opportunity to create some real value, perhaps you might take part in an ITSO Residency to kick start the wiki!