The FLATS of Cloud adoption

Monday, June 28, 2010 Category : 0

Its always good to have a short and sharp hook to hang and idea off and I like using the first letter of each word to remember something. For example my steps to prepare for Cloud are Virtualise, Centralise, Networking, Automation, Cost Models which I remember by the phrase "VMware can neatly achieve consolidation".

I have been mulling over a way to remember the topics I speak to in the next phase after preparation, the adoption phase. Its not quite fully baked yet but I thought I would throw out where I am up to.

The adoption journey if you want to really distill it down could be remembered as FLATS.

Function
Location
Aspiration
Time to return and implement
Service Levels

The order is not that great but here is some details on each. As you look to adopt Cloud for a particular use case work through those elements.

Function
What functions do you require in order to successfully run this application in the Cloud? There will be straight forward technical things and these will be based around the type of Cloud you are adopting. For SaaS you will be reviewing the features and functions of the software against your needs. For IaaS you will be looking at things such as the performance or configuration elements such as a load balancer.
Beyond the straight technology will be operational elements such as how much self management you can perform and how much the Cloud provider must do for you?What is the management Portal like? Can you integrate the authentication? What training might be required?
Also consider commercial functions. Do you already operate with and trust this provider? Are there legal contracts for you to arrange? What are the security characteristics of the Cloud service and do they meet your standards?
In the end you want to be confident that this particular use case for Cloud adoption can functionally do the job you require and that you can integrate it into your business.
Location
Where is the Cloud located? In this region (Australia) this topic comes up a lot and it certainly needs consideration. Where will the data reside and under what legal jurisdiction? However as Cloud is Network based the location and hence the network latency and bandwidth available may be very important as well. If you are using the Cloud for backup your location consideration may be different to if you are doing some Desktop-as-a-service.
Aspiration
This is a weird one and I have only just added it into my thinking. I am seeing in the market a real lack of aspirational ideas for Cloud adoption. How is your use case aspirational? Is it going to change the world and is anyone going to really care? I am not talking about living on the bleeding edge and being risky with "bet the business" workloads. What I am saying is are you actually changing anything. When I talk about what can be different with Cloud I often mention, "faster, cheaper, better". However when describing better I enforce that this is not just "doing things better but doing better things". As technology people we get all excited about cutting deployment time by days, but who really cares, how does this matter? What is the user or business outcome of this use case. What if a dramatic reduction in provisioning time meant that your Q&A team could run their regression tests every day rather than once a week, could this reduce the software defect lifecycle? With a shorter defect lifecycle could your programmers attack bugs closer to when they were introduced, giving faster turn around and getting the product out the door faster than would have otherwise been possible? Now thats doing better things not just doing something better and thats what your business and your users care about.
I am seeing too many people stuck in an Enterprise Architecture and looking at Cloud from a totally technical point of view, attempting to shifting their existing workloads feature for function from point A to point B. Interesting exercise but not very Cloud like. What do the users want? How does the different operational model of the Cloud bring to bear innovative opportunities that are just not possible if it was not Cloud based? This can be the case even for IaaS where the IT department may be the consumer/user.
In your adoption, lift your game, put some effort in and get aspirational. If not, why bother.
Time to return and implement
How long is it going to take you to implement the solution and how long to make your financial return. Now not all use cases will have a financial driver but it is usually a consideration. This is why one of the preparation steps before adoption is understanding your internal cost models. Yet you also need to consider how long is this going to take to implement, is this a rewrite of your application or do we just fill in a form and start using it? What is this going to take and is it worth doing?
Service Levels
What service levels do you require and what service level is available to you from the Cloud provider? This is something that could be tucked in under Function but its good to call out on its own. Don't be mistaken into thinking that the service level at a Cloud provider are lower than your own internal ones. A lot of companies do not run a 24 hour service desk, but the Cloud provider probably does.
Based on these 5 elements you can review each of your Cloud adoption use cases. Some of the elements are more internal to your use case and only need to be applied once, such as the aspirational effect. Most of the others you will need to run a score card against the different Cloud providers you are considering. Having a score card will assist in your selection process.

Of course there is much to consider when you are ready to adopt Cloud. There are certainly things you need to consider at an organisational level along with your readiness program. However these are the ones I have matured for reviewing a particular use case as you embark on your actual adoption.

If you have any other ideas or feedback please post in the comments. Hopefully over the next few months I can lock this down, be great if I don't have to add another letter to FLATS.

Rodos

More VLANs for UCS

Friday, June 25, 2010 Category : , 2

Just a quick note that the new release of UCS Manager (UCSM) for the Cisco Unified Computing System now supports 512 VLANs. Many have been waiting for this increased support and there are more to come in the future.


The version is 1.3(1), the details of the update (apart from this hidden fact) are in the release notes.

Other tweaks are:
  • UCS Manager now supports up to 14 chassis (was 12)
  • Blade level power capping
  • Setting additional BIOS parameters in service profiles
  • Configure vCenter wizard
  • SNMP traps extended to chassis and blades.
Rodos

EMC Inform Sydney - Live Blogging

Wednesday, June 02, 2010 Category : 0

Today is the EMC Inform event in Sydney Australia. I started Tweeting during the sessions but got carried away and sent out a lot! Got some good feedback but others felt spammed. Thanks to those who cared enough to point it out.


Well I am going to attempt to a live blog for the remaining two sessions I am attending. Lets hope it works.



One cool things about this social media stuff is one is always learning. If there is any really good comment I will Tweet, for the stream of conciseness check the live feed above.

Rodos

Stack Wars

Thursday, April 22, 2010 Category : , , , , , , 0

Stephen Foskett (http://blog.fosketts.net/ @SFoskett) has started a series over at GestaltIT on the Stack Wars topic. Stephen reached out to a few people in the blog space to see what they thought. I thought his questions were really interesting so gave it some thought (okay it was only enough thought that could be done on a bus trip to work).


To the questions.

Why is this happening?

I think a number of factors have lead to the "stack" or the return to the mainframe model.

One of these is virtualisation. Virtualisation has in many ways collapsed the different components of compute, networking and storage into a blob where differences in each individual layer are diminished. The layers are abstracted away through the hardware independence and it starts to make sense to obtain an entire "virtualisation" machine rather than build it from scratch each time.

Likewise the continue performance improvements means that these more generic solutions can solve a might greater scope of workload than ever before. Certainly the advancement in hardware processing capacity has outpaced softwares ability to consume it.

The second element is the change in behaviour of the vendors. The vendors are much more willing to get in front and sell to end users these days. Even those vendors who are so channel focused do this. I remember 10 years ago in the integration space; it was only the top of town that could get a sales person or a system engineer from a vendor to visit and flaunt their wares. These days, if you are a fish and chip shop you could probably get a vendor to turn up for a presentation and a proof of concept.

However the vendors are realising what the system integrators learnt a long time ago, there is money to be made by combining all the parts and providing a whole solution. Plus the cost of sale can drop if you can have a few packages that fit most sales, rather than doing everything as customised solutions.

The vendors have realised that by using virtualisation and stacks they can make larger sales whilst reducing their cost of sales whilst targeting an increase number of opportunities.

Is this good for end-users?

It is probably a little early to see how the benefits for end users will pan out. If we learn from history the mainframe era certainly had its drawbacks for many organisations towards the end.

There are certainly some up sides for the end users. Improved levels of support and integration can't be bad. Certainly lower costs by removing lots of customised design work and through economies of scale is going to be a benefit.

But there will be drawbacks too. I don't think anyone has been thinking or talking about the lifecycle of these stacks. Will you have to replace the entire stack each time at end of life to keep your support? What if you are happy with your compute and storage but have brought in a new networking fabric that is much faster, do you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Where are IBM and Dell?

My hunch is that IBM and especially Dell are in the wings waiting to see how things pan out. Let the early adopters play and make the market, see where the success and failures are. Once they have learned from all of their mistakes they can swing in bringing in their existing value propositions. They don't want to leave it very long but we are still in the incubation period for the stacks.

I think Dell is the one to watch here rather than IBM. After all they have been essentially doing this today in the lower end of town. They have the parts to bring it together and they can suck the bottom tier right out of the market from under everyone else.

Of course HP is the other one to watch very carefully, especially now that 3Com is on board.

What about the smaller players?

If the stacks take off the smaller players are going to continue to do what they have always done, value add. Many elements of technology have turned to commodity. Remember the days when you would always pay people to come in and do Exchange deployments. Remember how hard it was to maintain Unified Communications solutions. Over time the technologies became utility enough that organisations could do these themselves.

Smaller players, whether they be systems integrators or vendors will continue to find those niche requirements and the hard projects or problems that will always be around. Our consumption of technology is growing not shrinking, the small players will continue to deliver and support the early adoption technologies.

What does this do to innovation?

Many people in IT need to understand that we are in a young industry which is starting to mature. A lot of stuff really is going to become utility and standardised, thats the way industries evolve. Yet innovation still continues in mature industries.

What about cloud?

Bingo, we can't talk about anything with mentioning Cloud. Are the stacks the vendors means of abating the move of all of the revenue to a handful of global cloud providers. Build an internal Cloud with our stack please so we can keep making some money off you.

I see the stacks working well with the Cloud, certainly the IaaS and PaaS based ones. Improved standards adoption will allow the federation and creation of meta Clouds. So there is still a place for internal work loads (there is some good thinking on this that uses the commercial property market or food production analogies).

What I DO predict we will see is the vendors offering the stacks to Enterprises is Cloud based service models for internal use. How do people consume photocopiers and printers today, they pay per page. The vendor puts in the equipment, maintains it and supplies it, you just pay for what you use. In the future we are going to see this model start to appear more in IT, once you have a utility stack, this can successfully be achieved for the vendor and the Enterprise. By the way virtualisation is the key enabler here, abstracting away all the hardware from the workloads.

Is this the ultimate form of IT infrastructure?

The word "ultimate" makes it sound like the most amazing. No, I don't think its going to be the ultimate. I think the stacks might become the boring utilities they they are meant to be. A standardised, reliable, cost effective computing block thats does what it is tasked to do, no more and no less. Its the IT version of the multi-function photocopier. Roll them in and roll them out. The stacks are more about an operational model than speeds, feeds, dials and knobs.


Well there you have it, thats enough for me to come up with on a bus trip. Be keen to hear your thoughts, post in the comments.

Rodos

Cloudwashing

Saturday, April 17, 2010 Category : 1

My word of the day yesterday was "Cloudwashing".


Cloudwashing is "simply last year’s technology in new clothing". Take something old or existing and just label it Cloud! How often are you seeing that. Some aged managed service now turned into a Cloud Service.

Its hard to verify but it looks like the phrase started with James Staten from Forester Research.

In the TechWorld article Maxwell Cooter wrote
Forrester analyst James Staten said that vendors' statements about cloud had contributed to the confusion with companies using the term indiscriminately. " We call it ‘cloudwashing'" he said. Staten said that Forrester had tried to distinguish between genuine cloud services and those pres-existing services that had been ‘cloudwashed'. "A true cloud service has two features: does it include an element of self-service provisioning and does it include ‘pay-per-use'. Many vendors claim to offer cloud services but their offerings only contain one of these elements," he said.

The paradox for Staten that such attempts by vendors to rebadged their services is not playing well with their target market - the large enterprises. "Enterprise customers are not attracted by this re-labelling To my mind it's like a well-known folk singer striking out in a new direction and doing hip-hop - no matter how well he does it, it's not what he was known for and it's not going to appeal to his target audience."

There companies who have grasped the nature of cloud computing said Staten and are offering genuine cloud services. He said Amazon was one as was Savvis, a company that quickly realised that companies wanted a cloud just for them and have gone after the high-end hosting market.

But Staten pointed out that cloud computing could have fundamental changes in the way that companies do business. "What cloud computing has created, said Staten, is a new opportunity for enterprises to work in a different way. "It's way too easy for business unit developers to by-pass their own IT departments and go straight to Amazon. And as long as the IT department is more expensive and less responsive that's what they'll do".
Now we all have a new game to play. When you hear someone washing their existing service and selling it as Cloud, call it out, yell "Cloudwashing!" and for emphasis extent your arm and point whilst you do it.

Of course the current game is Cloud Bingo. You yell Bingo in a meeting or presentation the first time someone mentions Cloud.

Rodos

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