Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

The first UC market is for collaboration. It is about how we converge the desktop productivity environment that supports our Informal Personal Business processes (calendaring, email, etc.) with easy to use tools that combine communications, information, and business process.

The key is the value that comes from having interactions happen sooner with the right tools. UC for Collaboration is primarily about people interacting with other people based on their agendas and personal work requirements. The value accrues to the company in enhancing the way people work, rather than changing the underlying formal business processes. In most business decisions, 70-90% of the time to make a decision is wait time with messages sitting on message queues. The opportunity is to reduce that time by 50-90% by assuring that the right people are available when they need to be to make the right decisions. This can translate into significant both productivity as well as revenue opportunities.

Next post I will talk about how companies will migrate and the differences between service, information, and knowledge workers.

To read other parts of this series, use these links:

Part 1: Unified Communications Definitions 1.0

Well, I think Kermit (the Frog) was wrong.......it is easy bein' green.....for Nortel customers anyway. And especially when bein' green comes with great financial dividends as well.

The last couple of months have seen a swirling of points and counterpoints about what it means to be green in networking... it all started with some strong points by Nortel back at InterOp that the Nortel data products were much more energy efficient than some key competitors. While I have been looking at other areas, the information keeps piling up that Nortel is really a much better solution than Cisco.

In fact, a NEW TOLLY REPORT of a complete converged network including VoIP under different loads shows Nortel uses 40% less energy than Cisco. The Energy Efficiency extends from the data infrastructure into the telephony equipment, where Nortel phones use 40% less energy that equivalent Cisco devices. This continues the debate from before, but now includes more information and results. Also there are some interesting Energy Efficiency videso on YouTube at www.youtube.com/nortelvids.

Finally, the energy calculator I promised has been up for a while. In fact In-Stat says it is the only tool of it's kind in the industry. You can find it either by going to the Nortel SaveEnergy page or directly to the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator.

So, in the end it really is easier to be green. Sorry Kermit, but you were just ahead of your time....by the way, if you want to read the original lyrics, they can be found HERE, or a video of Kermit on YouTube.....in the end he agrees, being green is better, even if it is hard at the beginning. We couldn't agree more, engineering for green takes some time, but it is worth the reward.

Over the past month I have been working on directions in UC and have come to a few key conclusions about this transformation.   I thought a series of blog entires around this subject would be interesting. I will probably do three or four fairly quickly, starting with definitions, moving into market opportunity, and closing with how Nortel sees it's role moving forward.

First, UC is not just about communications, but rather is focused to how communications integrates with applications. While we have been talking about this, I think we should stop talking about "unifying" different communications modalities and rather focus on the application integration component. The key reason is that this is the next big evolutions in the value of technology to business, not just having my desk and cell phone ring together (something I have had for 4 years), but how integrating communications into applications will enable us to change business processes. Much as the integration of technology enabled business to change processes in teh 90's, integrating information and interaction together will allow another fundamental shift. Bob Hafner has indicated he believes this to be true, and some analysis indicates it really can transform businesses.

Next post will be on the forms/paths to UC and how they are different.

I have occasionally been asked in this blog to step outside of the narrow field of networking and computing to comment on other technical issues of the day. So, in the interests of being a little provocative, I decided to a do an analysis on a topic a ways outside of my everyday world. If you are not interested in a mental thought process in a parallel field, skip this post please.......

I found this article about digital media storage to be interesting. It details a number of questions around both the practice and cost of digital archiving and questions in a number of ways. I got to thinking about the comments made and thought it was an interesting topic to post about.

COMPUTERWORLD WorldDigital crisis: Motion pictures may fade to black
Dian Schaffhauser
"February 08, 2008 (Computerworld) Current storage technologies may have a reputation for being plentiful and cheap, but not necessarily in Hollywood, where a recent study warns that the annual cost of archiving a digital film is 11 times that of storing celluloid film.
According to "The Digital Dilemma," a report recently released by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, digital film storage costs $12,510 per year, compared with $1,059 for celluloid. More dramatically, source materials -- those outtakes and audio recordings that often make up bonus content for special edition products -- cost 429 times as much to store, a whopping $208,500 per year for digital materials vs. $486 for film.
The report's authors state the data explosion could turn into digital movie extinction, unless the studios push the development of storage standards and data management practices that will guarantee long-term access of their content."

NOTE: the article is fairly long, so I will leave it to the reader to follow the link above for more details. It will open in a new window to look at my comments versus the article quotes.

While I am not in any way an expert in film, my first reaction was that the claim that storing a digital film would cost not 11x as much but actually $212,000 per year versus a mere $1,500 for film was a really suspicious claim. Even the 11x seemed high (until you realize that digital is storing 3-5x more information as discussed below). Essentially, the claim is that to store something on digital tape costs over two orders of magnitude (141 times actually) more than on film. I also am not qualified to comment on the artistic value of making a film in either digital or film media, my only interest is in the discussion of archival quality around resolution, color density, and archival size and longevity. I will leave the discussion of the artistic merits to others who are more embedded into the process. The following are some thoughts on the article and trying to noodle on what I read and researched about the issue..............

GUT REACTIONS

My first reaction is that this is one of those tales by a bunch of folks that have a vested interest, either personal or business, in the concept of film stock and the analysis and preservation of a "relatively" fragile chemical media. I believe the same genre of people were decrying the automobile as being far inferior to the horse for transportation, both in reliability and in cost and a myriad of other factors....

At the top level, there seem to be many inconsistencies here:

First, the size of the retained record in minutes of material seems to be 2-5x larger with digital production (not archiving). This is presented as an issue, but seems more of a new paradigm in the artistic/production processes that has been introduced with digital media. With digital they shoot more because it is easier...…why not throw out the extraneous stuff…oh, because it MAY have value…but it never existed in the film version, so therefore film is, by definition, a lesser media as it is not capable of capturing the entire "event" of the making of a film due to cost……if there is no value to the 5x increase in base material, a simple process of rejection is apparent. On the other hand, if there is value to this material then we should retain it and only use digital. Also, all of the "intermediate" screening versions are kept in post production in digital, while they are not in celluloid….wow, so we have a record of the steps the team took from their first cut to the last…either it is worth saving or just throw it away...…the sum of all of these comments is that the increase in material per film is due to the digital film-making process, not the archiving.

Tape access is not random???...…is accessing spools of celluloid somehow become random???????....or easier???? This is discussed in more detail below as I believe this may be a significant part of the cost differential quoted.

What they do not emphasize is that celluloid deteriorates with age…there is a gradual reduction in the capability of the particles to effectively image over time as acids, oxygen, and other reagents react with the film stock. This deterioration is not absolute, it is a linear process as the atomic structure of the film deteriorates through contact with the atmosphere. The argument in the industry is that a combination of low temperatures and low humidity will essentially preserve current color film stock for very long periods. If you assume that even with low temp/humidity film deteriorates over time, then the next archival print will be a result of that deterioration (assuming it is not produced digitally). This appears to be primarily in color resolution. On the other hand, with digital media, using a RAID type of mechanism that enables the recovery of lost data and BERs, the archival version can be transferred across storage systems indefinitely with no loss in quality. It is not clear whether the lifespan of magnetic media is shorter/longer/same as that of film stock, as this would drive when an archival copying action is required.

MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS (Some quick thoughts)

One of the questions raised is whether the digital storage is sufficient and then what the size of the stored files are. I tried to do a little analysis of this to validate (and contrast) the numbers in the report. Also there were comments on quality.
Anyway, the following is a quick analysis of the claims, both validating and (potentially) contesting…..

Per Brad Templeton http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html , a frame of 35 MM film has 20M “good” pixels. This is for still camera stock, but let’s assume the same is true for each frame of film stock. The current digital projection standard is 4 Kpixels across, which yields 2250 pixels high in the 16x9 format (this is contrasted to the 1920x1080 of HDTV). The digital projection standard yields 8.8 Mpixels, however, that is multiplied by 3 for the 3 color pixels, so the total is about 26 Mpixels, slightly higher than the “good” pixels in 35MM film. Per Templeton, he argues that a 5300x4000 resolution is necessary to equal top quality film, but this is for a 5x4 still image, so the 26 Mpixels is appropriate for full density with the 16x9 image size. If we assume that this is used, then digitizing a 35 MM print will take about 26 Mpixels per frame with 16 bits of color density and 24 frames per second. This yields 1.27Gbytes per second. Assuming the numbers are correct, that for every minute of final film, there are 60 minutes to be archived and that the film is 2 hours long, the total storage is: 547 TBytes (they actually have 208 Tbytes). The 2 PBytes is not really reasonable for most features which run significantly under 2 hours, though I would think that would be appropriate for a film like “The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple” (Chinese, 1928), which ran 27 hours!!!!, though I would be surprised if there are many extras to archive….."Fanny and Alexander" (1982) comes in at 5 hours, which yields 1.5 PBytes if it actually had the extras. for purposes of the rest of the analysis, I will use the 208 Tbytes quoted in the article.

Now, HP has a tape storage system with a max capacity of 5673 TBytes….so that is only about 27 movies with automated access at these rates…..this means an automatic storage system is probably out as the benefits of quick access do not justify the cost. However, such a system would be useful to actually create or bring back the archival information. The tapes could be removed for long term storage. So, just like film stock, the tapes will have to be manually archived and retrieved.

So the question then is would it be the same storing digital tapes as film? If the film reel has 22 minutes of film on a 12 inch reel, then the 2 hour movie with 20x increase (per the article) would need 133 film reels (see the 129 cans in the article - I will use that number) to store all of the materials with a single copy. If we assume the same film shot as above on digital equivalence, with 800 GByte tape cartridges, and a 208 Tbyte total, it would require about 120 tapes...this would be reduced to 60 tapes with 2:1 compression. I am not sure on the cost points, but if we assume the cost of a tape is the same as a reel, the 50% smaller number of 800Gbyte tapes should generate a decrease in cost. The other issue is ease of recovery, though this should not be a huge issue, you could use one of the above machines to put the data on and off the tapes. Also, with the compressed tape, each tape has twice as much information, reducing the mount time to find appropriate information.

All of this tells me that this is a very complicated issue and is not really a networking issue at all….it is a storage density and size issue and the “inefficiency “ of digital (note that if digital had the same 20 minute to 1 as film versus the 60 to 1 used on the above analysis, the actual number of tapes would be equal to the number of film reels. So the key difference may be two assumptions; that the digital system is automatic (resulting in much higher costs), and the “extra filming/editing overhead” of digital. If the “director” was to remove the extraneous taped material and reduce to the 20 to 1 ratio, and the storage was really archival (which is actually what the reels are for heavens sake), then I think they would be roughly equivalent. The real issue in this document is the assumption of .$.16 per minute archived, or the $500/year/Tbyte. This is a claim they base on the San Diego Supercomputer center. I wonder what type of storage they are quoting, I bet it is some form of automated archiving system and includes active tape management and automated retrieval.

To pursue this further, it would be interesting to talk more with someone like IBM, HP or Fujitsu who makes storage systems to analyze the cost per reel versus tape. Also, I assume that there are some mechanisms for error correction/RAID striping across tapes for data reliability (this would eliminate the requirement for three (3x) distinct copies, potentially driving 2.4x using 4in5 striping and then stored as 1.2x in 2 locations).

Finally, I wonder about optical storage. Sony is doing a 5.25 inch optical system with 40 GBytes per disk and has plans to go to 120 Gbytes per disk. Obviously, even at 120GB per disk, a movie archive of 208 Tbytes is a lot of disks...(866 with 2:1 compression). However, if this technology were applied to a large size disk (think LaserDisk - 12") and if area is proportional to capacity, the 12 inch disk would have 7 times the 120 Gbytes of the Blu-ray disk and if used 2 sided would therefore have 1.68 Tbytes of capacity per disk. If we assume 2:1 compression, then an entire digital movie of 208 Tbytes could be held in about 61 disks. With 4in5 stripping across the disks for error protection, 75 or so disks could hold a entire movie, and should have virtually zero degradation over time. As each disk would be about .25 inches in a secure holder versus the about 1.75 inches for the film cartridge, the total archival volume is reduced by 86% per unit. This means that a film archive would take about 1 square foot for the 12" size and have 129x1.75" of linear shelf space or about 18 feet of shelf space. In a 4 foot wide 7 foot tall cabinet with 6 12" shelves (24 cubic feet of 12" deep storage), only one movie could be accommodated. In the same cabinet using optical 12" disks, 16 movies could be accommodated. In cubic feet, the film storage is 18 cubic feet, while the optical disk, even accounting for the 25% add for reliability, would take up about 1.5 cubic feet (.25x60=15inches/12=1.5 cubic feet).

As an aside, tape storage can be in steel cases that hold 60 tapes in a 20"x5"x20.75" form factor. Each 60 tape box is about 1.2 cubic feet, therefore the 60 tapes for the movie described above would require a single case or about 1.2 cubic feet or about 10% the physical storage of film or essentially equivalent to the optical above. I am not sure of the archival value of these boxes or the longevity of the tapes, that would need comment.

In any case, after spending a little time thinking through the parameters. I really find the assertions that it would cost 147 times as much to store movies in digital format to probably be a wild exaggeration.....

Anyway, interesting mental exercise……good for keeping the brain aware, and now I have a new topic to discuss……

This is abit of a belated post as I have been out of pocket for a week or so. I will try hard not to let that happen again.

Global Connect was a great event with attendance up about 38% and it was a dynamic environment.FOr those of you I saw there, it is always great to meet agian (or for the first time).

I did two sessions that I thought were interesting; one as a panel moderator with CIOs for a group of industry pres and the second a joint presentation panel with Bob Hafner of Gartner.

The CIO panel was interesting as it focused on how the results of the IDC Hyperconnectivity survey were seen in the eyes of CIOs. While all of the CIOs saw some evidence of Hyperconnected individuals, almost uniformly they saw it as less of a corporate issue than an individual issue. The discussion was lively and I think Rich Tehrani did a great job in his blog discussing this event and I would suggest taking the time to read it.

The second session was positioned as a presentation panel for Nortel Channel Partners to understand how Unified Communications would change their business. At this talk there were two significant areas of interest. First, as Nortel has stated in our analyst conference, the market for networking and communications is growing from about $41M to about $63 million from 2008 to 2012 as the communications enablement of software applications through SOA transforms the market. Out of this market, we are anticipating about $25M of revenue in 2012 directly associated with UC (this is a combination of VoIP, Voice Applications, SOA Comms Enablement, SOA Comms Composites and associated data networking purchases). What made this interesting was Bob commenting that he thought this view was conservative. Overall this is exciting as this transition provides a huge opportunity in the market. In many ways I think it is akin to the transformation that happened when IT and Processes merged in the 90s and created a variety of companies like SAP and Oracle's app business.

The second are was the discussion that Bob created when he postulated that over the next 3-5 years the Session (call) Processor would move from being in the purview of the telecom/networking organization and into the data center applications group. While the telecom/networking would continue to manage the PSTN GWs and the devices, he postulated that the operation and management of the Session Server would move into the app group. This is a direct reflection of the Nortel belief that integrating our Session Servers, Applications, and Network more closely with the IT vendors (IBM and Microsoft) is critical for long term success.

I flew out Sunday for the Global Connect event in Dallas. This is the huge Nortel User event that is the opportunity to interact with our customers, partners and a fairly large group of analysts and press.

If you are coming to Global Connect, look me up. I will be at many of the events and look forward to meeting any of you that are there.

I will do a couple of blogs next week from Global Connect. I am doing a session with Bob Hafner of Gartner that is discussing the opportunities in UC with our partners and I think it will create some exciting discussion. I also am talking about Hyperconnectivity and the recent IDC study at a session on Monday evening.

Once again there is a lot of focus on the energy efficiency of networking gear and the significant differences between products in how effectively they use energy. Nortel is calling this the Cisco Energy Tax, and it can significantly increase the Total Cost of Ownership of a network. I wrote about this in a posting a few weeks back; Green Makes Sense, but I thought it was worthwhile commenting a bit more now that there is more detail up on the Nortel site and on YouTube.

As I commented before, there is a real difference in the power consumption of Nortel data products and Cisco equivalent products. It is enough that if you replace all the Cisco gear in the world with Nortel products, it is equivalent to 20% of the US automobiles in carbon emissions.

A while back I got into a long dialog with a number of folks (some from Cisco) about whether using merchant silicon was better than custom. Now it appears there is another strong reason to use the more sophisticated merchant silicon; power consumption. For quite a while, the engineers at Intel and AMD have realized that designing efficiency into their chips is both common sense and good business. It would appear that the merchant silicon vendors have either listen to Intel and AMD or hired from them as their designs reflect the same good engineering as the large chip houses in terms of energy consumption and efficient design. As Cisco builds it's own chips, we can only assume that the engineers designing those chips did not learn or understand that lesson of the value of power efficiency in chip design.

I guess the touted comparisons that Cisco products are like a Ferrari that some in Cisco tried to put forward were close but wrong, the Cisco products are closer to Hummers; big, flashy and real energy hogs. You get all the weight and consumption and it is not even fun to drive!!! I guess that would make the Nortel products more akin to the Prius, tailored to the need and optimized for efficiency. Perhaps it is time to consider the energy efficient and green alternative?

I found the recent study IDC IDC did with Nortel sponsorship of the emergence of the Hyperconnected worked to be very interesting, it confirmed what many of us know to be true; we are increasingly living in a Hyperconnected world and are ourselves connected everywhere, all the time.

The following is the link to the white paper and the associated materials, I encourage everyone to take some time to review it. IDC Hyperconnectivity Report The report offers some great insights about how individuals view the emerging transformation. It is based on almost 2,400 interviews globally and is the most comprehensive view I have seen of defining the transformation coming.

What I found very interesting is the fact that of the workers polled, North America (which is dominated by the US in terms of population) had lower levels of Hyperconnected/Increasingly Connected Individuals and lagged in the use of IM/Texting for business, and blogging/wikis/etc. While this may be due to the variance in the types of workers surveyed, I cannot help but come away wondering if it is a true reflection of the state of the technology in the US.

The question is whether the average technology employee in the US, who has become familiar with the last generation of technology, is not adopting the change to the new. At the same time, workers in many other parts of the world, adopting technology for the first time today are leap-frogging to the new technologies. The ultimate question that emerges is; will this will have a significant impact on US productivity gains over the next few years if American companies and workers harness themselves to the last generation of technology/productivity changes while many others jump to the next generation and reap transformational returns?

Last week at InterOp, Nortel created a sensation with it's commitment to Green Technology and demonstrations that Nortel data equipment is dramatically more energy (and carbon footprint) efficient than our major competitor. The Tolly Group has analyzed Nortel data products versus the major competitor and has independently verified the veracity of the Nortel claims (Tolly report).

Green thinking in IT makes both good corporate sense, but it also makes good financial sense as well. Nortel has built a Green Calculator that allows companies to analyze their ROI on Green Networking. For example, a 2,500 seat network with gigabit desktops and IP telephony would save almost $2,000,000 over 5 years with the Nortel Green Network versus the major competitor. That represents almost $800 per seat, which exceeds the equipment cost component of the network and rivals the operational costs. This will become a critical component in the overall analysis of network TCO.

Finally, a couple of single device examples are important. Comparing a similarly equipped Nortel 8600 with a Cisco 6500 , the 8600 will save almost $52,000 in energy use over 5 years. Similarly the Nortel 8300 saved over $18,000 over the Cisco 4500 in a similar 5 year period.

For the 2,500 user network above, the CO2 emissions savings are 7106 metric tons. This is equivalent to 150 large cars or 249 small cars driven 100,000 miles each in the 5 years. This is about 23 Kilograms per network port per year (7106 Metric tons/2500/5*1000). If we extrapolate this to the worldwide enterprise users of networks at about 500 million (it is actually probably larger), the total is 11.5 MILLION metric tons. That is equivalent to 656 BILLION miles of travel in small cars or 46 MILLION cars at 15,000 miles per year!!!! That is about 20% of the estimated 250 Million cars in the US.

Just imagine, if we got "Cisco off the net" instead of "cars off the road", gas might be back to $2 a gallon and we could all breathe a little easier. While this may be too much to hope for, we can all do our part by deploying green networks.

Look for the Green Calculator to run on your network in June, the results will amaze you. It will be available on Nortel.com.

I was in an office recently that had a 42" wall mounted plasma screen installed. I have always thought that this was an extravagance that more related to the occupant than business, however my recent experience has convinced me this is not the case.

Over the course of a couple of days, a number of meetings were held that I participated in. In almost every one the screen was used to present information used by the group. This included presentations as well as using the web browser to quickly find information needed during the discussion. The set-up included a dock station that could go to either the desktop monitor or this screen. Connected to the dock was a wireless keyboard and mouse so the PC could be controlled from a table or the desk.

I found this to be a very productive mechanism. Repeatedly it reduced the time and was much simpler than the "flip the monitor" I have traditionally relied on. I wonder if a good $1000 projector for the office that could be tethered would sell? The other option is one of the latest LCD screens in the 37 inch range. I need to think more about the cubicle, though the meetings that take place there are minimal, though it would be great in small team rooms.