William Knight, Freelance Writer, Journalist, Commentator and Author

The big time for HPC

There is no shortage of solvable problems that require enormous computer power to find the solution, but has Microsoft's Computer Cluster finally taken high-performance computing (HPC) mainstream.

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Tricky Questions

It’s impossible to predict everything that could go wrong in a business, but asking awkward questions could avert disaster

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An Interview with Santa's CIO

With hands on management and a little bit of star dust, Santa's IT operation goes without a hitch year after year. William Knight talks to the big guy's very secretive CIO and finds out it's not always eternal joyfulness at Christmas HQ.

As interviews go this was not hard to arrange. Some weeks ago I'd said it would be interesting to meet Santa's CIO and he must have been listening because late one evening the door bell rings and an immaculately dressed chauffeur asks me if I'd like an interview.

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A healthy start

The modern enterprise is a dynamic, breathing organisation comprised mostly of human beings. But such is the effectiveness of computing, a businesses heart and soul can only be kept healthy by the careful use of technology.

Therefore, attaining maximum performance is not just about fitting the latest, greatest hardware and setting it loose, you must also maintain sensible human processes. Since the culture of IT management is typically one of problem solving, enjoying the adulation of the fixer must be balanced by the steady control of the planner.

According to a depressing survey from software vendor, Appsense, an average of 44% more users can be accommodated on a typical enterprise server, and up to 112 Mb of memory can be released.

The survey of 160 systems over 1600 days highlights where enterprises are unable to get the best from their server systems, but when you're busy fighting fires and reacting to users' complaints, how are you supposed to pro-actively improve server performance and pre-empt future problems?

A service orientation case study

A company's geographical dispersal can cause problems for IT, but British American Tobacco (BAT) is implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to gain a consistent platform for their global systems without constraining local regions who retain significant autonomy

With more than 300 brands, BAT covers 180 markets with 87 factories in 66 countries, and building IT infrastructure is an ongoing task. Kevin Poulter, Application Technology Manager with world-wide responsibility for application infrastructure and technology components, says BAT was disillusioned with "traditional" methods. "Momentum in our organisation has come from people finding integration expensive and difficult," he says. "The approaches we were using were too expensive and too slow."

BAT's SOA project began nearly three years ago and has progressed incrementally by consultation and by winning the hearts and minds of technicians and management. Mr Poulter explains how the first 9-12 months were spent introducing new ideas, "We tried to seed some concepts to gain traction with our markets in areas where they had immediate problems," he says.