March 11th, 2010 by David Link
Wow, what a surprising news story as CA purchased Nimsoft yesterday evening. It is a very good news story for our industry. I admire CA’s strong acknowledgment that the IT Management industry is in the midst of a significant shift. History is repeating as we must look at the past 1960 – 1980’s when Mainframes were the dominant computing model to the late 1980’s – today as Moore’s law drove a huge shift to the distributed client server computing model. During that period, a new group of emerging tools grew around the need to model and manage a different set of operational challenges that Client Server computing demanded.
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Where are we now? Check out the slide above… who will be the dominant management players as we have the next seismic shift towards Cloud Computing? CA clearly understands this shift is happening now, and their purchase of Nimsoft was a huge endorsement that the nimble obtain a first mover advantage (from a set of recent acquisitions: 3Tera, Oblicore, Cassatt, and now Nimsoft) that becomes hard to displace for slower moving multinational Tier 1 technology companies.
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March 11th, 2010
March 11th, 2010 by Larissa Fair
Today in DC the Women in Technology Group held a session on cloud computing at TeqCorner in Tysons.
We heard from experts Phil Horvitz of Apptis and Tim Silk from Cisco Systems. The session focused on: the economics of cloud computing; how companies of all sizes and government agencies are benefiting from cloud computing; best use cases for cloud computing; private vs. public clouds; and, are whether or not security concerns about cloud computing were valid. We had some technical difficulties, so both presented on the fly minus their prepared powerpoint presentations. They did a great job!
Tim works at Cisco Federal and manages the data center team for the federal government and also works with the intelligence community. Phil is the CTO at Apptis and runs their advanced technology group to look at market trends. Cloud computing was identified as a mega-trend a few years ago, and Phil has been analyzing it ever since.
TIM SILK, CISCO
Tim kicked off by asking, “What are some things that come to mind with cloud computing?” Responses included: Salesforce, Webex, Google and Facebook.
We all relate to the services we use whether it’s collaboration, CRM, or email. From a technology perspective, virtualization has helped drive the cloud computing market. However, one distinction is that cloud computing provides cloud services (such as email, CRM, conferencing).
A working definition of cloud computing from NIST – IT resources and services that are extracted from underlying infrastructure provided on demand at scale in a multi-tenant environment.
There are different service models for cloud computing. There are SaaS (Software as a Service) models like Salesforce, Webex’s Go-to-meeting and Gmail. There are also PaaS (Platform as a Service) such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon EC2. Those are services where you have more customization and freedom. The last is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). These are companies that are like service providers, with large companies and large data centers that provide services (storage, bandwidth) to different organizations.
How do we deploy the cloud? What about private and public clouds? What about hybrid clouds? Community clouds are also looking at shared services between clouds. On-demand resources, scalable resources, security and privacy are all pros and cons of cloud computing.
Why would you or would you not use cloud computing? Cost is a big factor, you can subscribe to a cloud service without paying a lot. Flexibility is another factor, you can build your own infrastructure and allow yourself to be more flexible and do more with less.
Barriers to cloud computing. Security – is your data safe? Can others access it? Service Management and SLA’s are important from a service provider standpoint and offers more complexity to your cloud solution.
Interoperability will continue to be more important as more people step into the cloud. Having multiple clouds and sharing data will become a big issue as more companies and services utilize the cloud.
Security has four important things to consider. Encryption, access control (where is your data?), managing SLA’s and compliance. Think about FISMA compliance. For somewhere like the National Archives to move into the cloud, there are compliance considerations to think about.
Data center consolidation is a trend that is becoming more popular. Data centers have grown out of control, and now need to be consolidated. Whether your goal is to save power and cooling or to control larger devices, implementing virtualization provides a solution for you to scale further. You can now have a virtual environment, but provide more flexible
Tim sees the path to success as:
Consolidate –> Virtualize –> Automate –> Cloud Services
PHIL HORVITZ, APPTIS
Ever heard this story? The New York Times has an IT problem. They have 11 Million articles from 1845 to present that have to be scanned and put on the website. How did they do it efficiently? They used Amazon and commissioned multiple servers to handle the uploads, and the articles were up and running within 48 hours. That’s the power of the cloud. Efficiencies are at stake here. Cost is one, but also how quickly something can be up and running.
Phil considers cloud a mega-trend, something that comes along every ten years or so. The 2009 Gartner Technology Hype Cycle puts cloud computing at the top of its list for emerging technologies.
Some of his key points included:
- What’s really pushing it and why is the government interested?
- The 70/30 rule. In a normal IT shop, 70% of your time is spent on maintaining and 30% is spent on innovation. With cloud, this is switching.
- Amazon’s cloud computing offering has exceeded their retail operations from 2001 to present. In Q3 of 2009, Amazon’s S3 Storage growth reached 82 billion, with peak requests of 100,000 per second.
- Forecast of federal IT spending from 2010-2015: 26 billion will be spent on the cloud. By 2015 that’s about 7% of the federal IT budget.
- Challenges to cloud adoption? Security. The problem isn’t that you can’t secure it, it’s that the government guidelines were written before cloud computing came along. If you’re a CIO, the old way is easier. But now, OMB and the CIO are forcing agencies to be more efficient.
- Procurement is another challenge. How do you buy cloud? Now you have to predict what your demands are going to be. How much bandwidth and storage will you need? What happens if you go over? GSA took a big step with apps.gov to answer those questions.
Overall, my takeaway was this: Cloud is here to stay. There are a lot of benefits, and it works to well not to take notice.
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March 11th, 2010
March 5th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
What are some of the factors you should consider when deciding whether to run your applications in-house, in a private or public cloud or on a hybrid cloud (a combination of private and public)? Some factors to consider:
- Characteristics & processing requirements of the apps, like requirements for performance, storage, security, availability requirements, and SLAs
- The mission-critical nature of the applications
- The resource capacity available in the data center
- Desired cost savings
- Politics
Organizations are also warned to take into account the many ways that cloud computing, a technology designed to save IT resources, can unintentionally waste them.
With the federal government set to undertake the largest data center consolidation project in history (1,100 data centers), here’s a look at the likely contenders for providing the federal cloud (in addition to the big guys like AWS, Microsoft and Google).
The General Services Administration has cancelled its initial RFQ for cloud infrastructure (issued in July 2009) and is taking time to take a fresh approach. Dave McClure, associate administrator for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications, said 11 months in cloud computing time is really 11 years.
“The cloud market and services are dramatically changing at a very rapid pace. So, we thought it was prudent to kind of step back and see whether there were significant changes in the vendor and industry community, both in terms of the companies that are in the space now, the offerings — which are increasing — and the experience.”
Dave McClure
Meanwhile, former National Security Agency technical director Brian Snow, commenting at the RSA Conference said that while cloud infrastructure can deliver services customers can access securely, the shared nature of the cloud leaves doubts about attack channels through other users in the cloud. “You don’t know what else is cuddling up next to it,” he says. Funny that another panelist at the conference said he doesn’t trust clouds either, but his reluctance was based upon worry about what NSA might be up to.
You can get a quick update on the trial of Terry Childs. We’ve been following the trials and tribulations of the rogue network administrator who has been in jail a year and a half for locking co-workers out of critical IT systems.
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March 5th, 2010
March 2nd, 2010 by Larissa Fair
Virtualization has come of age this year with more and more companies using the technology for server consolidation (and cost cutting) projects. The federal government is taking that a massive step forward with plans to consolidate more than 1,100 data centers, and cloud computing will have a major role in how this is achieved. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is asking federal agencies to prepare an inventory of their assets before April 30. Kundra targets having a consolidation plan due by June 30 which will then be finalized by the end of the year. This is a major IT initiative for 2011 set forth by the Obama administration earlier this year, and the OMB will be working with agencies to reduce the size and cost of current data centers.
As for enterprises, this move makes sense on many different levels. Consolidating data centers will greatly decrease high costs of keeping up over 1,000 data centers and enable the government to act in a more efficient manner when it comes to their IT operations management. Running all these data centers requires over six billion kilowatt hours of energy (estimated to reach 12 billion kwH by 2012), and as is too often the case, the data centers are heavily underutilized. Some estimates by Kundra state that the data centers are using only 15-20% of their capacity. With virtualization and cloud computing, that’s a lot of room for improvement.
Need additional proof that a change is needed? Information Week says this:
…in a smaller survey carried out last year, OMB discovered that the number of data centers has ballooned more than 150% in the last dozen years from 432 in 1998 to 1,100 in 2009. According to Kundra, agencies are only using 15 to 20% of the capacity of many of their data centers.
This initiative has large implications for service providers of data centers to the government- in particular it signals a major shift of IT investments to public and private clouds. Some agencies are already utilizing private clouds.
We’ll be interested to see what our own survey results say at FOSE about this new initiative. Will agencies be compliant and work towards a better goal? How will cloud computing impact agencies’ plans to consolidate their resources? And how fast will this happen? Our survey last year showed that cloud computing was at the very bottom of the list of important technologies; stay tuned for this year’s survey results because we’re betting they will be very different.
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March 2nd, 2010
February 26th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
While it’s hard to gauge how much money private cloud providers are making, here are revenue numbers from some of the public companies that offer cloud computing services:
- Salesforce.com – $1 billion in 2009
- Amazon Web Services – less than $735 million (AWS revenue is clumped in the “other” category)
- Rackspace Hosting – $56.4 million
- Savvis – $7.4 million
IT security managers are equally divided over whether virtualization and cloud computing make network security easier or harder or the same.
Microsoft is targeting the federal government with a new suite of productivity services offered via the cloud. The suite that includes email, calendar, collaboration and communication software has obtained a number of security and privacy certifications, but needs additional security mechanisms for agencies like DoD and NASA. Federal Vivek Kundra weighed in saying, “This is a huge opportunity to apply best practices from the private sector.”
Is EMC backing away from the IT management market? VMware is buying portions of EMC’s (its parent company) Ionix software business for up to $200 million. This latest twist is raising eyebrows and re-opening wounds surrounding Diane Greene’s ouster in July 2008.
As cloud computing arrives in the government space, the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) is reminding agencies to consider the requirements around data retention and records transfer. NARA is concerned with the lack of formal technical standards about how data is stored and used in the cloud. Regulations include maintaining records so their functionality and integrity remain constant and that links between records and their metadata are maintained.
The Veterans Administration’s IT accountability program has saved $54 million from the budget for fiscal year 2010 by flagging problem projects and suspending them or getting them back on track. The Program Management Accountability System (PMAS) has proven so successful that it is being extended to all of its IT projects. While the VA is getting one of the government’s biggest budget increases, IT spending will remain flat.
IPv6 will be making its appearance on government networks soon and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is advising network engineers and administrators to familiarize themselves with the challenges of IPv6. According to NIST’s Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6, “IPv6 is not backwards-compatible with IPv4, which means organizations will have to change their network infrastructure and systems to deploy IPv6.”
What are some of the pitfalls to avoid when considering moving to the cloud?
- Governance and security – don’t wait until deployment to consider
- Big consulting – not knocking the big guys, but this is “newer” for everyone.
- Keep your eye on the solution, not the technology – don’t be overwhelmed by the hype
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February 26th, 2010
February 24th, 2010 by Larissa Fair
Congratulations to our customer, CBTS (a division of Cincinnati Bell Inc.), for their recent launch of a new Enterprise Network and Operations Center (ENOC) in Mason, Ohio.
This state-of-the-art ENOC monitors and manages over 100,000 technology infrastructure devices and uses EM7 for integrated system, network and application management. CBTS has also been able to take their network monitoring solution global by using a centric location to support existing clients in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
According to the President of CBTS:
“We are extremely excited about the expansion of our operations and the ability to support our clients both domestically and globally. The organization will continue to invest based on our customers’ needs and objectives, as we are committed to having one of the most comprehensive support models in the market,” said John Burns, President of CBTS.
We love good news stories – especially ones about fast-growing customers that use EM7 to make sure they can grow just as fast as the business needs to.
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February 24th, 2010
February 23rd, 2010 by Larissa Fair
Alejandro (of InteropNet notoriety) just had a merry olde time in merry olde England installing EM7 at new customer, Fasthosts, the UK’s number 1 web host. Fasthosts is now able to do things they weren’t able to do before, including offering customers a monitoring portal that takes advantage of the multitenancy built right into every EM7 solution to show customers only their own gear.
Who/What: Fasthosts selected a full High Availability deployment of our award-winning EM7 G3 to monitor the thousands of devices – from servers to network gear – that makes up their Global Tier 1 Network.
Highlights:
- High availability – complete monitoring redundancy from the mirrored Dell SAN to the EM7 collector groups that provide automated failover and data collection load balancing in case of outages.
- Single pane of glass – instead of logging into individual systems and tools to see availability and performance, Fasthosts now gets a holistic view of their entire web hosting infrastructure, including the VMware virtual infrastructure, all available via the single EM7 platform. And a little birdie (Alejandro) told me they referred to our dashboards as “sex appeal”. (I’m blushing a little.)
- Custom monitoring platform – Fasthosts engineers had a highly customized monitoring environment and were happy to use EM7 Dynamic Applications (with Snippets) to easily recreate and extend their custom monitoring of Microsoft SQL, file systems and more. Snippets allow the engineers to create their own scripts for complete flexibility of what and how to monitor devices and applications, and all scripts are stored and pushed out via EM7.
- Single source of truth – instead of a separate database for asset information, EM7 provides a centralized data store that integrates asset information (automatically populated from discovery) with availability and performance info for efficient proactive operations.
- Rapid deployment – took only week to get it not only completely stood up but customized for their business.
The Fasthosts implementation shows EM7 at its best – a single integrated solution for service provider operations that is quickly deployed, cost-effective and highly scalable to support the agility a fast-growing business like Fasthosts needs today and tomorrow.
And look, isn’t it pretty?
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February 23rd, 2010
February 19th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
The competition between Cisco and HP took another turn earlier today when Cisco announced that it’s booting HP as one of its privileged partners so the company would not receive confidential Cisco product roadmap details. On the flip side, HP is not rejecting Cisco as a partner and will continue to make sure its products work with Cisco. Who needs the Olympics for drama?
Casey Coleman, CIO of GSA sums up her priorities in two words: IT modernization. Two words that cover many specific projects, as Coleman manages GSA’s proposed IT budget of $639 million for fiscal year 2011. She views the GSA as a service provider to the federal government and feels her agency should be a “stellar example” of the services available to other agencies. Coleman notes (and admits) that 83% of the IT budget across the agency is spent on steady state operations and maintenance. Since she doesn’t expect to get a lot of new dollars for innovative capabilities, she hopes to free up money from legacy systems to reinvest in new “stuff”.
IT cost-cutting in 2009 and the new economic reality of doing more with less has pushed technology projects like IT cost management, chargeback and IT financial management to the forefront for many CIOs for 2010. Surveys and roundtable discussions show a big shift in how IT organizations approach financial transparency by formalizing the process, using tools and presenting costs to business units. IT chargeback practices – knowing how much IT services truly cost and billing business units – will enable more responsible consumption and requests for services within a company.
There’s another report of the shortage of IT pros with skills for the “data center of today” – highly automated, dense and virtualized IT infrastructure that relies on the most advanced electrical and mechanical components for ultra power efficiency. The modern data center demands that IT professionals understand many disciplines as well as the facilities infrastructure, giving rise to hiring difficulties in finding applicants with the right mix of expertise for the rapidly changing data center environment.
The federal government’s use of Quest Communications for cloud services is expected to ease security concerns for enterprise. While there’s been tremendous hype, just a small percentage of companies are doing cloud computing in a production environment.
“The fact that Qwest has that federal customer means that it has been audited, it’s received its certification and accreditation from government as a prerequisite for the agency becoming a customer.”
Ted Ritter, analyst at Nemertes Research Group
Here’s some research showing that government agencies, faced with shrinking budgets and resource constraints, are turning to newer technologies to help trim costs. Some challenges include:
- Roughly 62% of federal, state and local agencies are challenged by reduced budgets and lack of resources
- 58% of federal agencies are challenged with keeping up with rapidly changing technology
- 52% of local governments cite challenges with enhancing the technical skill sets of their employees
“Tight budgets often spur creativity and can increase the willingness to try new approaches. Our research points to government interest in software-as-a-service solutions, cloud computing, virtualization and social networking initiatives as evidence of the need to meet the dual goals of containing costs and modernizing technology.”
Tim Herbert, vice president, research, CompTIA.
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February 19th, 2010
February 17th, 2010 by Larissa Fair
With the snow that hit the DC area last week, agencies that had already implemented telework policies got to experience firsthand the benefits of their efforts. But for those federal workers not lucky enough to have the ability to telework, those employees were anxious to check the operating status of the federal government.
Unfortunately, the millions of necessary (and the merely interested) folks who continuously hit the OPM site to check operating status caused the site to go down. Fortunately, cloud computing came to the rescue.
OPM Director John Berry spoke to Federal News Radio this past week about his experience implementing a cloud computing technology solution to manage the huge influx of traffic.
In one hour they had 1.8 million hits, and the site was down on Sunday night (February 7th). Talk about a scalability and availability issue. Let’s also consider that if OPM was using Twitter, Facebook, or other services hosted elsewhere, they would have still been able to communicate with employees and media on the operating status. Even a simple RSS feed or mobile text alert system would have been helpful in this case.
Instead, a solution that is of particular interest to TimYoungDC was used to combat the down website. Using cloud computing, OPM got together with the CIO at GSA to come up with a solution to share the load with other computer networks, and since then, the website has been up.
The silver lining in this cloud? They forged this solution together while working remotely.
If that wasn’t a case for teleworking and cloud computing, I don’t know what is.
Although Berry consistently cites cloud computing as the reason for keeping his sanity last week, I wonder if the solution was created by implementing a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid solution? Anyone with more information, please let us know!
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February 17th, 2010
February 12th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
Snowmageddon I & II, Snowpocalypse, Snoverkill…
"Snowmen of the Apocalypse" submitted to the Washington Post by TheTransporter88
These are some of the names for the back-to-back snowstorms in the DC area over the past week and a half. The federal government shut down for four straight days and the kids have been in school two days over the past two weeks. The dialogue about telecommuting for government workers became a hot topic and many workers reported that with power outages they relied on their Blackberries to stay in touch. Heavy traffic crippled the Office of Personnel Management’s website, which registered more than 6.1 million page views in five and a half hours (normally 151,000 per day). Getting around was impossible for a couple of days resulting in the new GSA administrator being sworn in by phone from her home.
While White House cyber coordinator Howard Schmidt works to foster public-private partnerships to prevent cyber attacks, a worldwide survey of industry executives indicates that more than half don’t think their nation’s laws are strong enough to deter cyber attacks and 45% believe their countries are incapable of preventing attacks. The report shows a mixed view of government’s role in private sector cybersecurity and question that information is only shared “one-way”. To top it off, which country is most feared when it comes to cyber attacks? The U.S.
Fears of job security are part of the latest hype around cloud computing but IT professionals have nothing to fear, as network jobs will be just as vital – if not more so – as networks get more complicated because of cloud computing. Analysts from Frost & Sullivan expect new job opportunities for cloud-savvy network administrators among the cloud providers, as well as within enterprise.
“If you want to evolve your career…you’re going to have to start gaining the skill set that’s going to encompass the skills to deal with virtualization, to deal with the cloud and to manage the infrastructure components of things that are in the cloud.”
Vanessa Alvarez, Frost & Sullivan
Many federal agencies are quickly ramping up server virtualization projects, according to CDW Government’s survey of 377 federal IT managers: 73% responded that virtualization is an integral component of IT efficiency and improving costs. While 79% say they are deploying virtualization, only 50% say they are succeeding. Implementing virtualization runs into familiar barriers including limited budgets, security concerns and staff with the appropriate training to manage virtualized environments. Read how three agencies tackled virtualization projects for server consolidation, infrastructure as a service and desktop virtualization.
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has set up TechStat sessions – meetings between the Office of Management and Budget and agency CIOs, CFOs and other stakeholders to hammer out solutions to IT projects that are over budget, behind schedule or underperforming. The sessions began in January with three or four sessions held each week. Today, TechStat topics are chosen at least partially based on data reported on the White House’s IT Dashboard
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February 12th, 2010
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