Musings of Rodos

Yesterday I mentioned that there would be a roundtable hosted by EMC on The Emergence of Private Clouds – A Roundtable Discussion with Industry Experts. The experts are Stephen from VMware, Chad from EMC and Doug from Cisco.

The recording is out, if you register you can probably get a link to it. The verdict is its worth the time. Here are my simple notes of the types of things discussed. I occasionally remembered to mark the time of the recording as well.

• What is a private cloud?
• How IT is run rather than where, giving you the freedom of choice.
• Virtualisation an enabler for cloud, allowing you to move between data centers. Removing the penalty of application rewrite. Non-disruptive disruptiveness.
• A discussion around the assumption that things need to be virtualised, what about high end loads and the non-x86 environment.
• A discussion on centralized desktops in your data center in your private cloud, whilst being able to take it offline into your local device.
• Discussion on Cisco UCS for delivering all those virtual workloads. Provisioning networks in software rather than in hardware. 
• The change in organizational models with the lines between network, server and storage teams changing. The precursors of this are occurring now, for example when trying to implement BCDR with SRM.
• The VM is the new atomic unit or building block of the datacenter. It breaks how we build networks, how storage moves. Seeing many things now being built around this new atomic unit. Interoperability is becoming pervasive.
• 24:00 A discussion on service providers, how big will they build, the choice it brings and new pricing models they bring.
• vCloud initiative.
• Service providers are evolving from hardware to software providers. 
• There is a lot of work to do to broaden out the use cases. People want migration between the private and federated clouds which may require lots of data movement. How do you bridge the DC with layer 2? Not for all workloads but some. 
• Expanding the security model out into the external cloud.
• VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together on the hard problems which will surface in the future.
• 32:00 Where does Green IT fit it?
• What are the barriers to adoption? Moving from manual to automation, look at the change in DRS automation. Knowing your data is protected and highly available. 
• Running your infrastructure the way a service provider would do it, quality services at a flexible price.
• 40:00 Questions
  

Enjoy, Rodos.

VMware have given support for the Open Cloud Manifesto.

VMware Director of Standards Architecture, Winston Bumpus, put out a post today detailing some of the standards activities he is working in for VMware.

VMware supports the idea of cloud standards and has already made good progress on some key pieces. As one of the original authors of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification, VMware has already shown its leadership and support for working with the industry to drive interoperability standards. In fact VMware believes that interfaces should be open so customers can have choice and improved interoperability while service providers can differentiate on functionality and performance of their services.

One of the details mentioned was

VMware agreed to be part of the Open Cloud Manifesto. This document and discussion, while providing a very minimal set of principles to agree upon, will form a basis for initial agreements as the standards for this new computing paradigm are developed. We don’t believe there will be a single standard or standards body that will standardize all aspects of cloud interoperability.

Of course Microsoft voiced concerns regarding the process and possible outcome which they detailed. Microsoft are not listed on the signatures page of the Manifesto.

Its good that at this stage of the cloud development we are seeing intent for standards and a dialog.

Also great to see so many cloud posts from VMware in the last few days!

Rodos

This one is more of a heads up. There is an round table today that will be worth listening too.

The Emergence of Private Clouds – A Roundtable Discussion with Industry Experts

Don't try registering to attend as its already full. Would have been nice to see VMware advertise this somewhere a bit earlier. Could not find any details in any of my RSS feeds but thankfully someone tipped me off (thanks Tim!). If you do register you can get a link for the recording. Once I get the recording I will let you know any good details or if its worth listening to. Given that the speakers are Doug, Stephen and Chad it should be really good!

For an example of something probably not worth it, there was a webcast last week from VMware "Protecting Confidential Data in Cloud Computing Environments" which was woeful. It was on at 5:00am my time and to me it missed the mark and would have been better described as "Security in a essentially traditional shared VMware environment but it sounds cooler if we put the word cloud in there". Please don't send me hate mail, see for your self when the recording appears in the webcast section of the Cloud Resources tab on the VMware site.

Very excited to see what the discussion in this latest round table is though. Should be great.

Rodos

Update : I did find an announcement 30 minutes after this original post, it was on Chads blog (which is aggregated into Planet V12n) but it did not appear in my search as it was brief and did not have the keywords in it I was looking for. Still stands though, VMware should have advertised this a bit more.

Is the cloud kicking your butt? It's certainly kicking Mike DiPetrillo from VMware. Mike is one of the very few people from VMware who has been writing on cloud in the past. Yes, they have info at conferences but in terms of conversation VMware has been whispering.

Mike (pictured left) put out a post over the weekend which revealed that since the 1st of January this year he has been the "global cloud architect for VMware". Don't misunderstand this, Mike has not become a coder and is sweating lines of code in R&D these days. What this means is that Mike is the "how to put it all together" and make this work guy that customers and partners can talk to. Of course there are others involved too (he is not flying solo on one of the 3 key pillars in VMware's platform) but he is playing a pivotal outward facing role.

The reason why I think this is so great is that Mike has shown himself to be a good outward bound communicator, sharing his knowledge and experience. This is great for us people who are keen on the VMware story and capabilities around cloud.

Go and have a read of Mike's post. He details out 4 observations on his role so far. They are:

1. Cloud means 1,000 different things to 1,000 different people.
   
2. Everyone wants cloud today.
   
3. No one trusts external clouds and yet everyone wants to use them.
   
4. Absolutely everyone is ignorant on cloud.
   

I certainly agree with the first two.

I sort of agree with the third one but I would colour it by saying people are distrusting of clouds that are internet based as opposed to external but accessed via private networks.

The third one made me laugh. I know its hopefully tongue in cheek but I don't think everyone is ignorant, but there is a lot of education to do. Mike says "Really there are only about 20 people in the world right now that truly “get it”. Well, maybe more than that but not many more. Some people pretend they know which actually works pretty well." I would love to see who is on his list of 20 so I can track and digest everything they say whilst ignoring everyone else who is just pretdending!

Rodos

One of my 5 steps to prepare for Cloud is to understand your current cost model. After all, how are you going to know if the cost of a new service is attractive if you don't know what your current costs are?

What will the costs models of the new cloud services look like? Well many are yet to be seen but a large difference we are already seeing is moving from a fixed cost, whether that be monthly or annual to a consumption based pricing, only pay for what you use. Consumption based pricing is of course nothing really new, its has been around in many areas for a while, such as hosted storage or carriage. Although a slant on cloud based consumption is that it is not pre-provisioned.

Yet the consumption based pricing was one of the more visionary elements of Amazons EC2 service. Pay by the hour or pay by the Gigabyte. Thats they way people want to consume cloud services is what we keep hearing, pay-as-you-go.

Therefore it was interesting to see that this month Amazon introduced an additional pricing model, its called "Reserved Instances".

Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it.
...
Reserved Instances can be purchased for 1 or 3 year terms, and the one-time fee per instance is non-refundable. Usage pricing is per instance-hour consumed. Instance-hours are billed for the time that instances are in a running state; if you do not run the instance in an hour, there is zero usage charge. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.

So you can have pay-as-you-go or you can get a discount by paying in advance. People have even done the calculations to determine where the change point is to swap to the prepaid model. Sounds like the new pay-as-you-go model may not be as great after all if the old model of longer term contracts can bring the customer cost savings and the supplier some more predictable revenue stream.

What might the future hold for cloud pricing? I think the mobile phone market is a great example of where we will end up; too many plans which you can't really understand and compare, many different means of bundling and packaging. Pre-paid, account, big packages with large usage amounts included or small packages with hefty additional usage fees.