Musings of Rodos

Wired put out a special electronic issue which pulled together many of their previous articles about Steve Jobs.

One article was from 1996 when Steve was at NeXT. The hardware side had failed and they were focusing on Software, in particular around the web and object based programming. At this point in our history, the web was only a few years old. (As a side not the first HTTP server was created on a NeXT box.)

Jobs said a really interesting thing ...

The Web reminds me of the early days of the PC industry. No one really knows anything. There are no experts. All the experts have been wrong. There's a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. And it hasn't been confined, or defined, in too many ways. That's wonderful!

There is a phrase in Buddhism, "Beginners mind." It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind.

I thought that was a really interesting comment and made me think of the current Cloud space. Cloud is so new and exciting and there is a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. We are a few years in but its early days. There are no experts and it's only through a beginners mind that we might get some insight and true innovation.

Rodos

Having just purchased an iPad and been at VMworld in Las Vegas I figured I should write up how to get your iPad working with a US carrier.

I did some research before I went and there was a lot of complicated information about getting SIM cards, signing up plans etc.

• Jumped into a cab. Ask driver where is the nearest AT&T store.
• Walk into AT&T store, hold iPad out in front of me and ask person behind the counter "I want to get this on the internet with a pre-paid SIM".
• The lovely assistant (photo below) replied, "No problem Sir".
• She took my iPad, ejected my existing SIM, inserted a new AT&T one and waited for the activation screen to appear.
• Followed the online activation screen entering my credit card details for my Australian credit card (they recommended not using an AMEX as it can have issues with the region check). I selected a plan of 2G for 30 days for $25 USD.
• It started working.

Some of the best bits from VMworld are the keynotes. The first was by Paul Maritz, the CEO. Here are my notes from the presentation. You can view the video of it on the Internet. Paul is not the most dynamic speaker, he is no Chambers on that front. However is is recognised as one of, if not the, smartest.

Last year there was the tipping point of more new apps being deployed on Virtualisation over physical. This year its now more virtualized across the entire installed base! More than half of anything is import for an industry.
1 virtual machine is deployed every six seconds, more than 20 million VMs across the globe. There are more VMs in flight with vmotion than there are airplanes in flight. More than 800k admins, 68k vcps and done with the support of the application vendors.

Is the cloud just timesharing rediscovered? It's about three profound things. It's the next major interation in the consumerisation of IT.

It's the canonical applications that define the generation of computing. In the mainframe era it was book keeping. It the late 80s it moved to the consumer world. New users through personal computing, the GUI, Intel architecture and the relational db. This allowed a new set if applications, client server, the Internet. CRM and non real time analytics.

With the Cloud we will see a new set of applications and the industry will change. Billions of new users and devices coming into play. Three years ago most devices connected to the net were PCs. In three years it will be less than twenty percent will be PCs. HTML5 might have a big impact.
The Relational Database can't cope with this new world. We need customized information in real time, for the facebook consumer of today.

How do we go forward from here? Let's ring fence off the mainframe. But what do we do with the client server world and migrate it to the new Cloud era.

How do we make it more efficient to run those apps we can't walk away from. Then what do we do about the renewal of applications.

Apps were built around real paper or what was paper on the screen. We need application renewal.

Lastly users are expecting to see everything on a new set of devices that can't be controlled by IT, whatever device they have in their hand.

How do we allow infrastructure renewal for those client server apps. To get operational efficiency. Virt can do this in a non disruptive way which is why it has been so successful. We can't just make more operational tasks but rather create more automated efficiency.

They had to have overlapping development efforts to release a new release of vSphere each year. Twice as many man hours in Q&A than development. This is like building hardware and has the same importance. First time Paul has seen a major bit of software be released on time with all it's original function set.

The new version is starting to do with this operational automation. Storage load balancing and tiering, automated host provisioning. The new version results in great scale, resiliency and automation.

A new schedule of how releases will be done. Not just vSphere but all the elements to deliver functionality, such as security, disaster recovery and Cloud portals. New versions of SRM, Operations, vShield and Director.

There are many service providers one delivering Cloud with Director. Plus virtual clouds such as NYSE. The vCloud Data Center program has expanded. A subset is clubbing together to give a world wide available cloud, global connect.

New virtual storage appliance for the SMB to get advanced features.
VMware GO to be expanded with things like patch management.
Application renew is the big effort in front of us. The new apps will be done by those under 35. Last 5 to 8 years developers have resulted against complexity and have new environments and fabrics. Let's give them those on the same underlying fabric. They are not interested in the low level details, more of a PaaS. They are willing to give up some control.

VMware are putting these elements under vFabric. Keys off Spring and now starts to include data, with the acquisition of Gem. A scale out in memory database.

Now SQLfire which brings an easier programming model with the scalable nature of GemFire.

Data Director will manage the task of administration of these databases. It can do backup and all those things. It's vSphere aware. They have taken Postgress and optimized it's memory management for a virtual environment and it can get much better density.

Cloud Foundry is about how apps will be built in the future, those new modern programming frameworks. It's open source and the community has been extending it. It's designed to be portable across clouds. There is a danger of going back to the lack of application portability, the Cloud should not be like this. What will be the new cloaking layer between hardware and the cloud? This needs to run from the provider down to the developers desktop. Developing a version for a memory stick.

Lastly we need to give a way to give people access to the applications that they need, continuing to invest in VMware View and releasing View 5.0. There will be more clients available.

PCs are not the only device any more. The PC can't belong to just one person any more. Horizon is about association of functions to people and not a specific device. But you now need to map people's activities to a device. Such as giving a user a virtual phone.

The PC was about automating the white colar worker experience of 1975. Xerox PAC started it and apple and Microsoft took up. The new workers and not using documents, they are streaming, filtering, they are not from the folder and document world.

What about the 50 percent which are not virtualized? Got to tackle the mission critical applications. That's what vSphere5 was about. Then start to work on those new applications and new way of doing things.

End of presentation.

Rodos

Got invited to a panel at VMworld of HP CTO and Cloud advisor, thanks Calvin. I was not sure what to expect or what they would say but it sounded like fun, I love a bit of cloud talk.

Here are the notes I took. They might be easy to get out of context so post in comments if I got anything wrong. The room was noisy and it was very hard to hear.

I was impressed by some of the good analogies that the guys used in answering the questions. Especially the one that al the server vendors have access to the same components and tech but some vendors servers are better than others. That's a good insight not only for HP but for all of us, it's what you do with what you have that counts.

Also you have to like a bunch of guys who wear lab coats!

Q. HP and openstack.

A. We are the number one partner with VMware and Microsoft and others and we do that by partnering well. We are involved in the open stack initiative and helping that community. Of course VMware offer their software on other hardware. Each of the hypervisor environments have different value propositions.

Q.is HP going to develop software for object storage?

A. No.

Q. Integration with different Cloud providers but what about with different Hypervisors.

A. today we support VMware and HyperV plus ( missed )

A. How will HP store my apps

Q. Cloud storage today has generally been for static data. Cloud 1.0. The change we are going to see and difference is going to come from solid state devices which have different characteristics. Apps are going to get faster. As storage moves into the server layer then it can get faster and in the cloud we will be able to provide apps for non static data.

Q. How will you reduce the cost of SSD.

A. Volume, volume, volume and that is what HP does well. Research on new things like memrister might change SSD, but it's five years out from changing things.

Q. How will HP differentiate themselves from other Cloud providers.

A. You can take a pile of parts and throw them together to build a Cloud but performance sucks. HP can provide and integrated solution that does network, storage, servers plus the software. One vendor. This is part of our value prop. It's the applications which create value, not the blinking lights. HP has industry knowledge and can assist with the business process too. You have this flexibility when working with HP. Look at servers, the vendors all have access to the same components, it's how they are put together that adds value, that's what HP can do for Cloud. Just deploying a virtual machine is such a small part of what's required.

Q. Will HP stand up it's own Cloud?

A. We are already a public cloud provider in the apps space and will continue to do so. ( missed name of this service ) HP can't own the industry on this, it's to big so we will work with others and do things to. For example we work with a pile of hosters are msps and HP is a large msp, we are used to this.

Q. With the ease of provisioning in the cloud what safeguards will be in place from doing stupid things.

A. Sounds like how the unix guys used to talk about the windows guys. It's hard to get it down to being simple but nothing is going to be fool proof. What we do is based around policy models and rules which can provide many safe guards. Because of the soup to nuts elements HP can make things easier.

Q. What comes after cloud? Are the models of hybrid etc all there is? Will everything move to the Internet?

A. we have an abundance of data from these news sensors, an abundance of compute and lots of networking to move it around. Attention span has not changed. Analyzing and making sense of all this through these resources is what comes next. Jobs will evolve and we will not be mucking around with some of the primitives we do today. Just like a pilot is having their job automated, getting attention of the pilot is important and we will see lots of research on this as computer technology becomes more automated.
It's going to take a very long time for things to move to the cloud, there is a lot still to do, yes technology will change

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I went to two sessions this morning on DR to the Cloud.

I think the first thing you could say about these sessions is that they were named a little wrong. They should have been about DR to "managed service provider" or "hosting company". There might have been a bit of Cloud washing going on here. There were certainly elements of clouds and this is a developing space of which we are at the start if the journey, but I think the topics may be a little "over sold" in their wording.

So what were my notes?

• SRM will evolve to be application or vApp aware rather than it's VM centric nature of today.
• Today SRM is all about protecting a machine in site A in another site B. In the future there will be more sites involved, protecting works in one site to multiple sites. For example you might protect a machine to your internal second site plus an external Cloud provider.
• VMware are working on creating layer two connectivity between multiple sites. This combined with VMotion across sites will allow some interesting DR scenarios. In my opinion this will be helpful for disaster avoidance.
• The goad is to be able to intermix vSphere and vCloud Director as either sources or destinations of DR.
• There is the use case of DR to the cloud as well as DR off the cloud.
• The plan is their would be a plugin for your vSphere Client that would do all the work of setting up DR to a Cloud provider. I imagine this would be like the vCloud Connector plugin.
• The attributes that are proposed for this future state of software are; VM level protection granularity, multi-tenancy, self serviceability, storage agnostic, vm portability, role based management, scalability, extensibility, simplified deployment and management, security and RAS (reliability, serviceability and availability).
• Hosting.com described their use of SRM 5 to provide Cloud DR. From what I could see this looked like an implementation of SRM on top of a vSphere implementation that had a Cloud front end. They have their portal for consuming virtual machines in a Cloud manner. By adding SRM underneath and then using the SRM APIs to control it from their portal they are able to give DR functions to users. This shows what can be done when you build your own world and don't use vCloud Director. The service is in Beta.
• A question was asked from the audience about when SRM and vCloud Director would be integrated or compatible. The answer was that thus was in the roadmap but no detail. I suspect this person was like a lot in the audience was wondering about this given the title of the session.
• In the service provider session a number of organizations got up and spoke about their DR solutions and how they were integrating in SRM. There was a lot of managed services wrapped around these. Lots of array based replication, customer specific ESX clusters and other such non-Cloud scenarios. There is certainly some great solutions out there and the providers are working hard with what they have.

What was my take away from two hours of presentation of SRM and Cloud. Essentially we are not there yet. Yes there are some DR solutions and some providers will even let you use SRM. The true cloud experience DR from your own infrastructure into a VMware based Cloud is there in parts but there is still portions of string and sticky tape holding all together. Actually that is probably not fair, it makes them sound unstable. What we don't have is the simplicity that we have with SRM today.

The question is, how long will it take for VMware and the providers to get there. I suspect 12 months, problem is we are greedy and want it all TODAY!

Rodos

P.S. Slowly getting used to Blogsy on the iPad to write this stuff up. Doing straight content is a lot easier than pulling things in from multiple places.