Archive for the “Cloud Computing” Category
This is not a new year predictions list. Given the fact that it’s over two weeks into the new year, this is not a new year anything list. However, after spending the better part of the year so far reviewing the business plans for my clients and working on 2010 strategies I thought it would be valuable to share the common trends I’m seeing as a snapshot of what large enterprises are doing with Virtualization and Cloud Computing.
Keep in mind that my clients cover a number of different business sectors, technology use cases, as well as technology adoption profiles. Across all the business units and groups that I work with, nearly the full range of technology adoption categories are represented: from early adopters to late majority.
Painting with a broad brush, here are the general trends that I’m seeing for the year ahead. I’m interested in hearing from my readers on what they are seeing. Please leave a comment and let me know!
Do More With Less…again
While economists and pundits alike claim the recession is over, I’m seeing the general attitude of doing more with less continue within Enterprises. Part of this can be brought back to some groups leveraging the recession to invest in the future and work on game changing projects. Some of this tends to be more cost cutting constraints where the cutting could be debated as being well past the muscle. I’m even seeing a few groups adding in new key objectives for the year on top of the the ones they had previously agreed to, thus adding more work on the current staff levels.
IT As a Service
This has been one of the most talked about strategic initiatives for IT for over a decade now. While the idea has had numerous names over the years, I’m seeing consistently more and more organizations moving their IT thinking to be more service based. Rather than planning on a project by project basis, it’s about leveraging and maximizing the utilization of your infrastructure across all projects. The logical out spinning of this is measuring and monitoring your capacity to stay ahead of demand. IT organizations are either actively moving toward a services based approach or adapting their plans to start moving this way. The biggest laggard in this area would be the financial systems to charge back IT services to the business units, but most IT organizations is not letting that hold them back — they just plan on adding that charge in when the financial systems catch up. The side affect of this is the IT staff, those with an eye to the future are adapting their skill sets, those who aren’t will be wondering what happened when their jobs go away.
Private Clouds
While IT as a Service is not the same as Cloud Computing, there are many similarities. Most of my clients are actively working on building Private Cloud environments where the end users are not just sharing all infrastructure as a service but are completely abstracted from the IT organization managing the infrastructure. Users buy their VMs from a service catalog, get their VMs configured and deployed automatically and then get a bill with usage details every month. When they don’t need their VM anymore, they click the delete button and watch their bill go down. IT is moving to just configuring infrastructure and abstraction management tools and monitoring usage and planning for expansion. The furthest along with this have gotten their with a small number of existing IT architects and engineers and will have an environment that can grow quickly with no additional head count needs.
Desktop Virtualization Foundations
Make no doubt about it; 2010 is the year that the foundation for desktop virtualization will be firmly cemented into IT. The risk mitigation (keeping desktop data in the data center), time savings (quick deployment and updating times) and flexibility (re-use of physical office space for shift workers with each having their own desktop) of virtual desktops are understood and now being leveraged in pilot applications. Once this genie is out of the bottle, desktop users will be wanting more.
The side affects of this include the eventual destruction of old dekstop oriented service vendors and the rise of new virtual desktop solution providers. I don’t think the enterprise is ready for desktops in the cloud run by a 3rd party, but a few of my clients have been asking about putting desktops in their private cloud.
Cracks in the Towers
Another side effect of desktop virtualization is clear cracks forming in the various IT towers. The knee jerk reaction I saw last year to desktop virtualization was the data center folks say “I’m not managing dekstops!”. While moving desktops into the data center doesn’t shuffle the cards of responsibility for the different towers (the desktop team will still be supporting the desktops), it does force these towers to work together more than they have before. Server teams talking to desktop teams. Desktop teams talking to storage teams. All these teams talking to the networking teams. The philosophies of “this is our domain and these are the rules you have to follow” are being softened by the stones being thrown at it from virtualization. Desktops in the data center requires everyone to think outside their normal boxes and understand the end users’ needs are changing.
Data Center Virtualization: Narrower and Deeper
As data center virtualization has continued on it’s march, it has resulted in the physical infrastructure options within the data center to narrow. By standardizing on a smaller number of physical options within the data center, virtualize becomes less complex and automation becomes easier. At the same time, the use cases for virtualization continue to get deeper. Virtualization first policies are forcing all business units to run everything in a VM.
A side effect of these aspects of virtualization’s success is that CIOs are now looking at other areas of expense and driving for consolidation there as well: software, services, even real estate.
Migration to ESXi
VMware has been stating for a number of years now that ESXi (a thin hypervisor with API only access for automated management and a much smaller security attack surface) is the wave of the future. IT organizations have finally realized that VMware wasn’t kidding. With only two weeks into the new year, I have seen more requests to discuss ESXi that I did all last year. And with the automation and stateless aspects of ESXi that were talked about at VMworld 2009, I expect this area of activity to only pick up.
Tags: 2010, Enterprise IT, Trends
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… Most customers can’t afford that status quo, where the majority of their expenditures go into keeping the lights on versus innovation. It really comes down to the CIO’s desire to enable their business strategy rather than a cost center. …
This is how Cisco’s John Chambers portrayed today’s VCE announcement during the joint webcast with EMC’s Joe Tucci and VMware’s Paul Maritz. What Chambers was describing was the Private Cloud. While only time will tell if VCE will be the tipping point of Private Clouds, today’s announcement was clearing laying out a destination for IT over the next few years.
What is VCE?
 Industry Leaders at VMware vSphere Launch Rather than repeating all the details that have been provided elsewhere, the cliff notes summary is that VCE is a partnership between Cisco, EMC, and VMware. By combining Cisco UCS server hardware and networking with EMC storage and management VCE creates a certified and supported data center solution to enable turnkey virtualized data centers running VMware vSphere on Cisco and EMC hardware components. Along with the partnership, a new corporate entity called Acadia was announced to provide solution services under a separate entity from the primary stake holders of Cisco and EMC with participation from Intel and VMware.
Here is a list of others talking in more detail about VCE Coalition (I’ll try to update this over the next few days as well):
All of this private cloud chatter just a day after Gartner predicts cloud computing spend to take off. Should be interesting to watch Cisco announce their Q1FY2010 earnings tomorrow…
Why Do I Think Enterprises Should Care about VCE?
Private clouds are a reality in the enterprises. I have clients who are either mid-project of building a private cloud or deep in the architecture and planning for their private clouds. The simple reason being that they know they need a fully virtualized, self service environment to respond to their internal business customer’s needs. The stories of business groups being told it would take a year or more to deploy their new application environments are true. Some times this is due to lack of data center space or capacity (that seems to be the pandemic spreading quicker than swine flu), sometimes due to lack of human resources in today’s recession recovering economy, sometimes a combination of both.
Virtualization is the key to the data center capacity pandemic facing many enterprises. But just layering virtualization on top of the existing data center is like providing some Tamiflu to someone who is sick with the flu. It may help them get better over time, but not over night. There are still data center designs which don’t take into consideration the ramifications of virtualization. I have clients who have plenty of extra floor space in their data center, but not enough power, or backup generator capacity, or floors that aren’t strong enough to support a storage array needed to fill the empty space with virtual computing infrastructure.
On top of that, virtualization with the legacy process in place don’t allow IT to respond to customers needs at the speed of business. This is where private clouds with automated management and self-service provisioning capability come into play. Take that low hanging visualization fruit and let the users feed themselves. Providing internet cloud capabilities in the enterprise data center for web apps and basic services is just the start. Once you start providing that self service capability for enterprise applications as well, now you’ve got something.
What I see VCE providing is the same building block approach that Amazon, Google, and Yahoo have each individually custom built for their own data centers, but in a packaged, tested, and supported format from trusted infrastructure vendors. Now any Enterprise, big or small, has the ability to run their data center in an automated fashion using virtualization and hardware solutions purpose built for the task. Enterprises are risk adverse in their IT departments, so having Cisco, EMC, and VMware standing behind the solution with a independent services and support group in Acadia, will help ease concerns. And with the enterprise sales forces of both Cisco and EMC selling VCE solutions, access into the key decisions makers in Enterprises is there.
It’s easy in the early days of a partnership like this to show how all of this is nothing new, and in many ways true statements. So the additional details that come out over the new few quarters will be important. And the amount of traction that VCE has over that same time still needs to be seen. But I see the foundation that is presented in VCE, as well as the potential that is there for the near future, as helping many enterprises solve the data center challenges facing them today as well as help enterprises break through that 30% virtualization barrier.
And What Impact Do I See to VMware?
I have seen various discussion today debating whether the VCE coalition is a good or bad thing for VMware. Scott Lowe, for example, raised some interesting questions on the impact of VCE on VMware which sprouted some interesting discussions. But over all, today’s VCE announcement was largely Cisco and EMC with support from VMware. VMware’s partnerships with other hardware vendor’s and solution providers are still in full force. If down the road the VCE coalition starts to show high numbers of VMware enableed servers shipped than other hardware vendors, there is nothing that prevents those other vendors form creating similar partnerships that include VMware.
In the end, it comes down to the same thing as always…market demand. If the enterprise customers demand a fully integrated virtual data center solution, then more and more of the enterprise vendors will need to start offering them to remain competitive. As The Register pointed out, right now it’s a two vendor story: VCE and HP…and both include VMware.
And will VCE/Acadia be the tipping point for Private Clouds? We’ll have to look back in a few years and find out. But between now and then we’re all in for an interesting ride in IT-land.
Tags: Acadia, Cisco, EMC, VCE, VMware
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Last night I presented the following at the SDForum Cloud SIG in Palo Alto (you’ll have to bear with the animations that didn’t come through well on the online version..).
We had a great turnout considering we are in the middle of summer vacations. Thanks to Dave, Dave Nielsen & Bernard Golden for coordinating and everyone for attending! (Even thought I have my brand new camera waiting to be used, I completely forgot to take photos! Luckily others did and I’ll update this post there photos once they have them online)
My goals for the presentation was to first help everyone understand that Virtualization lies at the heard of cloud computing. Second was to explain that private clouds are just the evolution of an enterprise’s existing virtualized data center (their internal cloud) with the flexibility to expand the private cloud to external cloud provider’s data centers if and when needed. The key point of clarity here is that an enterprise’s data center could be referred to as both an internal cloud and a private cloud. But, the cloud that federates the internal cloud with an external cloud should always referred to as a private cloud. And my third goal was to detail the VMware components that go into creating a private cloud.
I was glad to see that everyone mostly understood that an enterprise’s cloud needs are not the same as a internet application’s cloud needs. Enterprise’s have to deal with legacy applications that can’t or don’t need to be re-written to become fully cloud aware. And with a vCloud enabled private cloud they don’t have to be. But, if you have an application that you want to be cloud aware that flexibility is there. Enterprises also have demands that require features like HA and Fault Tolerance and understand that adding those features may increase overall cost due to technical requirements these features require.
There will be a lot of additional cloud related announcements in the march up to VMworld 2009. (Dave did a good job of trying to get a scoop on some…) All the attendees showed great patience with my answers of coming soon with regards to more details. And today they get a small reward with the Rackspace announcement: Rackspace Private Cloud leverages VMware to Extend Enterprise Computing on Demand.
If you’re attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco in a few weeks, I included a list of a few sessions that help build on the overview that my presentation gives:
- DE-03 – Introduction to vCloud APIs
- TA3326 – Building an Internal Cloud-the Journey and the Details
- TA3901 – Security and the Cloud
- TA4100 – Internal Clouds: Customer perspective and implementations
- TA4101 – Buying the Cloud: Customer perspective and considerations on what you should send to an external cloud
- TA4103 – Engineering the Cloud-The Future of Cloud
- TA4102 – Unveiling New Cloud Technologies
- VM2706 – Improved cloud interoperability using virtualization management standards
There are many other cloud related sessions during VMworld, so make sure you check the schedule. And Register early! Last year I had clients who registered too close to the show and couldn’t get into a number of the sessions they wanted. Some are hands on labs and there are only so many VMs to go around…
And now, some links based upon some of the questions that were asked and items that I promised:
Tags: Private Clouds, SDForum, vCloud, VMware
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 Photo by Stuart Herbert A bit last minute, but for those in the Bay Area, I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow (Tuesday, 7/28) at SDForum’s Cloud Services SIG on the Convergence of Private Clouds. If you’re in the area and available, join the event…
I’ll try to post the presentation here after the event.
Tags: Private Couds, SDForum
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 © Greg A. Lato - All Rights Reserved Over the past few weeks I have been involved in long term planning discussion with the senior IT management from multiple clients. While I can’t go into details of these meetings, a few common general trends emerged in these long term virtualization strategies.
First, all of them were roughly at the benchmark of having 30% of their compute workloads virtualized and looking at how to get well beyond that (see my prior post on Breaking the 30% Barrier). Part of the growth strategy included defining a specific set of applications that are set aside from virtualizing in the next wave, typically somewhere between 10%-30% of the overall computer workloads. General reasons for this are:
- Organizing things into the next logical set of workloads primed for easy virtualization
- Setting aside the workloads where resistance was being felt toward virtualization to give the business users more time to warm up to virtualization
- Workloads that are “too big” to virtualize (typically because of CPU requirements, storage requirements, or IO requirements; some of these are just misnomers with the current VM scalability limits of vSphere 4)
- workloads where the ISV specifically don’t support the software running in a VM (this is becoming less and less as more ISVs actively embrace virtualization or Enterprise customers flatly tell their ISVs “we’re running it in a VM, get on board”.)
Second, they are all planning on building a specific internal cloud within part of their infrastructure. This alone isn’t that surprising. There are specific use cases where a self-service internal cloud solves a lot of problems for the business users, most glaring being dev/test scenarios where lots of dynamic short used workloads are involved and web hosting where the business units (typically marketing) need to be able to react faster to market opportunities and popularity spikes of new products and viral marketing activity.
What is surprising is that when IT started to talk about the ideal end state view of their “non cloud” virtualized environment…it was essentially a cloud. As Jian Zhen described recently in The Thousand Faces of Cloud Computing Part 4: Architecture Characteristics there are a set of architectural characteristics that describe cloud computing:
- Infrastructure Abstraction
- Resource Pooling
- Ubiquitous Access
- On-Demand Self-Service
- Elasticity
(Note: Jian Zhen changed his list of characteristics in the above post from his initial The Thousand Faces of Cloud Computing post.
The enterprise long term vision for their virtualized computing environment include all of these characteristics with exception of On-Demand Self-Service and in some ways Ubiquitous Access. On-Demand Self-Service is typically not in their plans because the Enterprises don’t have a key part of this, an internal finance model that allow for charge back of resources used — though most seem to be thinking about that. On-Demand isn’t as needed in this part of the enterprise environment as the workloads are the known sized, planned, enterprise applications that are the classic “Enterprise IT”. Ubiquitous Access is also something that isn’t being thought of by IT for this part of their environment primarily because access to these workloads is already pre-defined by the workloads themselves: web servers are accessed by web browsers, email is from an email client (whether static or mobile), etc.
And yet, all the other things that Enterprise IT strategist are thinking about fall squarely in the realm of “cloud computing”. Get the business users to think in terms of capacity and SLAs and abstract all other aspects of the infrastructure from them. And then drive up the utilization on that infrastructure to maximize their ROI. Some are still only comfortable driving per physical server utilization up to 50%-60% range while others are damning the torpedoes and want to get as close to 100% as possible. On an overall basis across the entire infrastructure, you can never reach 100% utilization because not all work loads are that consistent, this is where resource pooling and elasticity come into play.
Thought I do have to argue that Resource Pooling is not the best term to use for what is meant for this characteristic. Creating and managing pools of resources is included in this specific characteristic, but I think a more accurate term to describe this is as Resource SLAs. The end users of the environment are buying a specific amount of resources as a “guaranteed maximums” or as a an “on average maximum”. The architecture of the cloud needs to ensure that spikes in resource usage by one user are serviced up to their agreed upon limit, but also allow IT to “over subscribe” the environment during the non-spike times. Then mixing in guaranteed with on average work loads allow the performance spike of guaranteed work loads to be serviced at the cost of the on average work loads should no extra capacity be available.
It becomes a game of how tight of an IT airship do you want to run…
Tags: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Cloud, Internal Cloud, IT Strategy, Virtualization
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