Or What Little League Baseball taught me about IT Infrastructure Operations and Management (IOM)
This was the third year that ScienceLogic sponsored a AAA Little League team and the third time proved to be the charm. As we watched the ScienceLogic sponsored NY Yankees team win the regular season playoff for the Mason District Virginia league it dawned on me that there are a few commonalities between what the boys and girls are learning in their “classic” American sporting event and the events that shape our field of IOM.
1) Event Management – Trying to predict if a batter who has never successfully bunted will get on base is about as easy as predicting when a hard drive will decide to stop spinning. The best course of action is to stay on the balls of your feet and be proactive so that you can see the beautiful bunt down the 3rd base line and all-out-run to make it safely to 1st. Lesson learned - always have a good line of sight (proactive IOM) because your prediction will occasionally be dead wrong at a very important moment in the game.
2) Application Management – It is not just the boys and girls on the team, it is also about good equipment and keeping the equipment in good working order. One scary moment during the season involved an aggressive cut at a ball, which produced a foul ball into the catcher’s neck. The catcher had put his helmet on, but forgot to put the dangling neck guard on and was badly hurt in that split second. It reminded me how quickly things can go wrong without the right protective equipment and consistent use with some degree of compliance checks. Had we had a compliance checklist for the equipment the catcher put on each inning, we could have prevented the injury. So keep that protective IOM infrastructure in place with the appropriate investments to ensure excellent outcomes!
3) Workflow Management - The Yankees started out strong, (6-1) but in the mid season, they hit a rough patch with a couple games against the Phillies that were unexpectedly difficult. A few curve balls and good pitching required the team to win two different games from a 5 run deficit in an all-out comeback in the 5 & 6th innings. The only way this was possible was to change the line-up and try a few different players in new positions to generate some spirited play. Just as IOM projects can get difficult and routines can get old, when you change things up for an inning or two, you would be amazed at the results that follow!
4) Asset Management – Little League rules require that pitchers receive 3 days rest if they pitch between 65 and 81 pitches. (this usually happens in 5 innings) Typically you can have commitments to play games every 2 days, which requires great Resource planning and cross training of the players. You have to develop your new pitchers so that on the days where pitchers are off for the required rest, you have a bench of developing talent that can take over. This is so true in IOM. Too often we find that only one subject matter expert really knows how to maximize specific IOM tools in place. That leaves your human assets in a vulnerable position, so I am reminded that cross training resources to manage mission critical IOM applications is a MUST.
5) Service Quality - The difference between winning and losing can be ever so small. A missed tag at home plate because the catcher doesn’t secure a difficult pitch, a foul ball turns fair and everyone is relaxed and out of position to make the play and stop the extra bases, and of course the umpire call on a strikeout can be ever so close on an important at bat. What this adds up to in my mind is that the difference between winning and losing is so close that without the help of IOM automation tools that are tuned and working properly, it is exceedingly hard to provide impeccable service quality. In the end, if you do your best to deploy a great team that is continually improving/cross training, and work to deliver customers a great IT experience, they will see your service quality just like superior sportsmanship – an attribute to be appreciated and thankful that you are working with the right team!
Despite the loud protest out in front of the Moscone Center, Cisco Live officially kicked off with a keynote by CEO John Chambers. This is the 20th anniversary of Cisco Live, and I had been told many times that hearing Chambers speak was not to be missed. Me and several thousand other people apparently. The line to get into the the keynote hall stretched from one Moscone Center Hall to the other underneath Howard Street.
Entertained by scenes of Cisco Live’s past and quite loud 80’s music, we waited for the great man. To pass the time and make sure the OCD of us actually stayed put, there was some live texting going on. One of the questions: “What did you tell your boss to get to come to Cisco Live?” Some of the answers:
I would bring him back a hat.
I had to learn more about these router thingies.
KISS would not be playing this year.
I am the boss.
Free telepresence!
Our “Host” for Cisco Live this year is Carlos Dominguez, Senior VP, Office of the CEO. Carlos told the audience that the first Cisco Live was in Palo Alto with about 100 networkers. And this Cisco Live has over 10,000 attendees, plus over 3000 people joining virtually. What a difference 20 years makes!
Some Cisco internal tidbits:
Even the Cisco SVP’s fly coach
They eat in the cafeteria; there’s no private executive dining room.
The SVP’s offices don’t even have windows. (OK, that was a joke)
Next up: John Morgridge, Chairman Emeritus, Cisco Systems
Cisco was conceived and incubated at Stanford University. The business was started on the campus - but then Stanford kicked them off when they found out. So the business moved to two of the founders’ home complete with a nice 3-car garage, which extra space came in handy for the big equipment they were using at the time.
Logo evolution: Cisco as in Frisco as in San Francisco. The golden gate bridge is the inspiration for the image on the logo. There have been many logos over the years - one for each new VP of marketing…[I think the people around me were a bit taken aback at how hard I laughed at that one.]
Advice from John Morgridge: in addition to talented engineers, what do you need to create a successful startup? t-shirts, pizza and beer
Next came CEO John Chambers
The protesters made it inside the keynote and broke John Chambers rhythm for a bit. (I can tell that they’re being taken outside - as the yelling fades)
The point of John’s talk was to share where Cisco is going. What’s on John’s mind?
The economy of course, but a company like Cisco needs to look at where is the marketplace 2, 3, 4, 5 years out and not just where it is today.
“There has never been more innovation opportunities than today.”
[Note: I will say that at times it felt like I was at a Cisco Employee Annual Kickoff - but perhaps that was the point.]
Cisco combines: Vision (5-10 years out) + Differentiated Strategy (2-4 year cycle) about how to get there + Execution Plans (12-18 months)
Where Cisco is Headed - The Big Points: 1) Despite or perhaps because of the down economy, Cisco is going to be more aggressive and certainly more ambitious than ever before in its history. Instead of heading into a couple of new market adjacencies (John’s word), they are attacking over 30. The only way to make something like this work? Well it doesn’t hurt to have $30 billion in the bank. But John talked about building technology architectures - with building block components that were shared across the market adjacencies they are planning to go into.
2) Focus on Video: The Flip video (and its mass acceptance) has made video simple and pervasive in everyday life. Video is the communication vehicle that changes how business is done. “Video is the killer app.”
3) Focus on Collaboration (Web 2.0): with all Webex and social media/networking, collaboration and Web 2.0 are becoming mainstream. It is these types of communication media that will fuel the next decade of productivity.
And the changes start internally for Cisco. All these plans necessitated a major org structure change. Not “command and control” but “collaboration and teamwork”. [Note: seems rather black and white. Cannot believe collaboration and teamwork didn't exist to a great extent at Cisco pre video and Webex.] John turned right and 60,000 people turned right with him.
“Majority of times I talk to the customers, it is now virtual. This is how every employee of every company will work, not just the CEO.”
Here’s an example of this new business model: traditional vs virtual events
Recently, Cisco held a Leadership Offsite meeting and cut costs per person from $2800 to $600.
Another example of how video/collaboration changes/enhances the customer experience:
New Cowboys stadium - 3000 HDTV cameras. Everything done with networking - video, digital media, wireless, etc. “Changing the fan experience” increased revenue per customer by 50%. Changes everything. And eventually, Cisco will be bringing this experience all the way to the home with consumer TelePresence.
List of 30+ market adjacencies Cisco will move into:
video, china 3.0, india 3.0, cloud computing, small business, consumer, green, cisco 3.0, collaboration us/webex/telepresence (at the top of the pyramid), virtualization/data center, managed services, RIS - routers in space, mobility, Smart Grid, Software/XaaS, Smart Connected Communities, Media Solutions, Emerging Countries 2.0, Virtual Healthcare, Safety/Security, solutions, consumer, commercial acceleration, mexico 3.0, advertising, sports/entertainment, quality, advertising, command/control moving to collaboration/teamwork
Nobody else in the industry thinks about this as more than 1 or 2 products. We think about it as an “architecture”.
Cisco’s (and John’s) mistakes (what might trip them up)
1) don’t move fast enough
2) try to move fast without a replicable process to make it happen again and again
Oracle Acquisition of Sun Microsystems: Advice from the Gartner Analysts
A nice bonus session at the Gartner IOM Summit. The packed audience just goes to show you how much interest and how much remains unresolved in what the Oracle Acquisition of Sun (and MySQL) really means for enterprises.
Software in 3 parts: (Donna Scott)
1) Java: < 1% of Sun’s revenue but huge opp for Oracle (mobile devices and applications). Oracle’s challenge is to make sure the Java community continues/develops and remains open in order to make this successful.
2) Application integration middleware: about 10% of Sun’s revenues. Serious overlap with Oracle’s capabilities (BEA). Oracle middleware will be the survivor. Oracle will support Sun’s middleware but eventually going away so plan for it.
3) MySQL: > 3% of Sun’s revenues. Huge opportunity for Oracle to get additional revenue from subscription license base. Oracle needs to position clearly when customers should buy MySQL vs when to buy Oracle database offerings. But good news: Gartner is expecting Oracle to support and move forward with MySQL (except for overlaps like the Falcon project). The key is cleaning up the positioning and target market opportunities.
Servers: (Carl Claunch)
We are seeing the tearing down of the “gentleman’s agreement” for companies focusing on their portion of hardware/software stacks. (Look at Cisco and HP). So increasing competition across the stack, and Oracle has a more vigorous vertical stack to compete with now.
Culture - Oracle is an ”adult supervision” type of business, and they are going to make some hard-headed business decisions about what survives/thrives and what goes away.
Sun had multiple competing hardware lines. Sustaining this wide overlap contributed to financial pressures on Sun. Gartner does not expect Oracle will walk away from any of the product lines immediately- will support customers for a time at least.
Oracle’s need to shift to x86 and Linux creates a high interest in this Sun product line for Oracle going forward.
In the area of virtualization, there is a lot of overlap thanks for acquisitions on both sides. Expect an announcement about how this product line gets rationalized very soon after the deal closes; they are very aware that every minute they don’t talk to people about this, they’re losing money/customers.
Storage (Stan Zaffos)
Recently gotten a lot of inquiries by customers:
Will Oracle stay in the hardware business? Or was this acquisition just a sw acquisition play?
If you believe what Larry Ellison says, then yes, hardware business will move forward.
Commitment to hardware
Limited liabilities, probably continued investment
But on the Tape side - some caution is advised
Questions from the audience:
Virtualization - Oracle/Sun has multiple technologies/tools but all based on Xen. What will happen here? Expect rationalization of what are the compelling features and picking a favorite solution among the options. May not be the “best” technology but holistic decision - in the sense, perhaps, of how they fit into Oracle’s management strategy/plans.
Oracle licensing is notoriously unfriendly for virtualization. What’s going to happen to MySQL’s more virtualization friendly licensing? Goes away? Currently, MySQL priced at $5K per server not per socket. Oracle will change this to per socket. So you should expect some price increases but subscription model will continue.
A day in and it’s pretty obvious there are some mega-trends running through the sessions. Cloud computing is being coveredextensively - and the underlying issues of reducing opex (power and cooling costs in particular) and getting away from traditional “overprovisioning” of servers crops up again and again.
But the star so far must be Virtualization. We’ve heard: Virtualization leads to cloud computing. Virtualization drives/enables/requires [Fill in the blank]. Moving beyond the initial server consolidation and test environment usages, virtualization is a driving/enabling technology that will have far-ranging impact on IT as evidenced by the emerging and disruptive technologies talked about in this morning’s keynote.
Analysts: David Cappuccio, Carl Claunch, Bob Hafner, David Williams
Carl Claunch:
1) Virtualization is not a new idea but a hot topic because it’s spreading into so many different areas/possibilities. Examples:
aggregation - using virtualization in an way opposite to what it’s currently well known for; instead of breaking up a server into multiple machines, put together multiple machines and make them look and act like one
new software distribution method - cutting down labor during installation and managing better version/platform challenges
2) Converging Communications - for interconnect, storage, data, video, voice, sensors, etc
- Everything IP
- Analog to Digital
- Integration
Yes it will be more complex to manage - the point is to “add complexity internally so that it reduces complexity where it matters more.” [Note: pretty much sums up our own product philosophy]
Bob Hafner: Previously we thought of the network as a pipe, with components built sequentially and often underutilized. Going forward…
1) Virtualize the network - do this logically instead of physically.
Benefits:
reduced the number of boxes
significant reduction in power, cooling and space
improved performance - reduced congestion and latency
Issues:
heavy use of VLANs
requires better monitoring tools that can handle this
requires good operational discipline
2) Virtualize UC and Communications-Enabled Business Processes
Video can be an issue - you don’t want the scenario of everyone with Webcams on their desktops. If successful, the network cannot yet handle this kind of widespread adoption not to mention the cost. Also, video has to be given priority over data on the networks - otherwise degradation of service. AND all this stuff needs management. [and we plan to have an announcement about this soon]
David Williams: Economy is another driver to adopt virtualization - cost savings coming from hardware, power and cooling, but management is always behind the curve.
1) IT Process Automation/Run Book Automation
4 companies 5 years ago - over 22 now
If you’re not ready for this, you should get ready because you will have this. All the big vendors [and ScienceLogic!] are embedding them. For the frameworks - RBA was originally a way to orchestrate all those tools they offer in their portfolio (all those acquisitions and not a lot of integration). Most IT orgs not ready for this; RBA works best across silos but most companies still work in silos. Success will depend on designated process owners - but that is currently very rare.
Ideal scenario example:
Standardize configuration. Automation process created to do configuration checks. Voila efficiency.
2) Behavior Learning Tools
self-learning; ability to identify patterns
dynamically changing thresholds - set against “normal” operations
predictive capabilities gained by correlating and analyzing real-time data against historical and thresholds
ability to apply learning at both element and services levels
Skepticism is the biggest competitor here. Virtualization is pushing the need for this - increases the amount of data/speed of data and need to do data analysis to help get to root-cause faster.
The RBA Path:
Discovery (also via integration) >> real-time data collection >> data modeling/profiling >> pattern matching and correlation >> dashboards and reporting
3) Performance Management Database (PMDB) IT Infrastructure Usage Optimization
“If you thought the CMDB was hard, that was a dream compared to this.”
No one has these yet. CMDB - snapshot once a day. PMDB - snapshot once a second. Virtualization requires this frequency and granularity.
aggregating, normalizing and anlyzing performance usage information from multiple sources (e.g., servers, netwrks, databases)
delivering performance usage information to allow IT elements to be configured and provisioned in support of IT services
Distinguished Analyst and Research VP Tom Bittman breaks down what’s real and what’s not real when it comes to the cloud computing phenomenon in this session, “What You Need to Know about Cloud Computing”.
Cloud computing myths:
1) Only megaproviders will win - False. There are fragmented markets out there with good enough scale for smaller providers and as usual when it comes to technology, innovation makes agility (of a small provider) a competitive advantage. There will be thousands/tens of thousands of providers.
2) There will be a “big switch“ - No despite what Nick Carr wrote, it will be a slow migration that takes decades and won’t be so black and white - cloud and in-house - but instead will end up being more hybrid models (cloud and in-house).
3) Cloud computing is IT commoditization - services offered in cloud may be commoditizing but new applications will be enabled by the cloud.
A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies
Assumption - through 2012 more than 75% of enterprise use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT infrastructure. Not a lot of mission-critical. Mainly experimenting with the cloud for now.
How the cloud computing market will evolve:
Today - cloud services tend to be standardized, elastic but in “chunks,” and monolithic in nature. In future, custom service levels, rapid and granular elasticity and open, federated markets of services.
Not everything will move to the cloud. What types of services won’t:
Not a business differentiator
Relatively static service
Very separate
Service generally not end-customer facing
GOALS:
self-service, easy-to-use
independent from business
ultimate destination is cloud computing
Cloud computing is a continuum: private cloud on one end, public cloud on the other (degrees). Where the cloud services fall depends on ownership and service control/access. Examples:
private cloud - internal dev/test device
public cloud - web search
in between - business partner cloud services, dedicated SaaS instances (e.g., a dedicated MS Exchange online - “hosted”)
ease of sourcing migration (stepping stone to public cloud)
Moving to Private Cloud Computing - How to get there:
- service inventory
- service levels/requirements
- current costs for each service
- roadmap for each service
- evaluate and predict cloud service
- business case for private cloud service
- Build: service abstraction and interface, usage metering, shared technology implementation
Tom: [High Level Perspective] There is perhaps more hype around cloud (that it will solve all our problems) than I’ve ever seen in IT. The reality is that a lot of good things are (and will be) coming out of the cloud but we need to start talking about it more directly to take full advantage of the trend.
Cloud computing does not mean a massive-scale operation, like Google, or even that it’s someone else’s stuff. It means that we have users and providers and between them we have a brick wall. Users ask for what they want (behavior) but abstraction layers and providers need to change, in terms of economies of scale, elasticity, automation, and so on, in order to provide services efficiently and on-demand. Users don’t define what happens behind the brick wall - behind the wall can be an external provider or internal IT (public or private cloud).
Virtualization is leading us to cloud computing, but cloud computing is an evolutionary change, gradual expanding in size and scope for years leading up to where we are now. In 5 to 10 years, the cloud market will look very different than it does now - there won’t be just a few mega-providers but thousands, with cloud supply chains and clouds built on clouds.
The cloud isn’t just about computing alternatives, but rather brand new ways of thinking. For example, the data growth issue - should you “prune” data? This question becomes moot with the cloud - why delete, when you can just put it out on the cloud with efficient access and storage.
The private cloud is all about ROI and will be a bigger phenomenon than the public version for several years. Services destined for the cloud have a different evolutionary path than those that are not, making “cloudsourcing” a new concern in IT, one that requires focus and new skills.
Mark: [Network Perspective] Yes, cloud computing is about the service (and not the underlying infrastructure) but there is a fair amount of complexity - the cloud is not one thing, but several. Take network latency: You can buy bandwidth, but you can’t bribe Mother Nature. Looking at the end-to-end delivery mechanism for cloud, remote applications require more than just bandwidth. As bandwidth increases, the effect of latency on throughput grows. This ensures that large-application delivery across long, fat pipes slows to a crawl on high-latency links.
Cameron: [Operations Perspective] Cloud computing does not mean your management burden becomes lighter. Look at all the outages that get front-page coverage, even just over the last year or so. IT managers sometimes think that cloud computing is going to take away their jobs - in fact, clouds have to be managed, potentially making their jobs more important than ever. It’s up to IT to decide whether (and what type) of cloud computing should be the service delivery mechanism. IT has to choose the right service provider, perform services transition to the cloud and going forward monitor and validate expected service levels.
Stan: [Storage Perspective] The easier-to-use you want to make something, the more difficult it is to implement. This also applies to cloud computing. By using a Cloud Storage Provider, you’ve just abstracted the customer’s application server from storage as well, making it more complex. There are now bandwidth charges for accessing your data, they might be low but they are variable.
Example of cloud computing:
Midsized business - 25% internal IT, 75% to 8 different cloud service providers. The only reason the wheels turn is that the services flow through IT - contracts, service levels, help desk calls, etc.
Questions from the audience:
What should CIOs and IT organizations be doing now to get ready for utilizing cloud computing?
Define service levels with your customers [note: A show of hands showed virtually no one doing this], understand and define how to measure resource utilization and figure out how you’re going to do the accounting/chargeback. The current standard in IT is to over-provision; this is “safe,” as it’s difficult to truly define the service parameters and how they might change going forward, so we tend to build for “just in case.” But the cloud is different - it needs to be automated, not interactive but on-demand as things change; so don’t over-provision from the beginning. Instead, scale up and down as necessary.
Developing a new network for Marine Corps - but can’t find standards/guidelines around what needs to be done to support virtualization and cloud computing. Can you give guidance?
[note: Wow. Possibly summing up the state of all this in one very high-level, quite frustrated question that's asking for specifics based on reality. Sadly, this is an area that is still very much about speculation and trial and error.] One analyst says service levels but another says that IT doesn’t define service levels; that’s the business/application owner’s job. Mark Fabbi brought up the session he’s doing tomorrow on “ How to save $120 billion in Networking & Communications”; the whole point is that there’s waste that occurs around this traditional over-provisioning mindset. In fact, taking virtualization and cloud into account is a great opportunity to cut this waste.
What about security issues with Cloud Computing?
Always starts with policies. You still need your ILM defined, in the cloud or not. Encryption, malware prevention, access control - all of these things still need to be defined by any organization. There’s no one-size-fits-all.
The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2009 kicked off with a bang this morning, literally. Around 5am this morning, we were all woken up by a violent thunderstorm that lit the sky for miles around. Better than a wake-up call. (Side note: I almost fell out of the very odd “princess and the pea” setup I have for a bed; the beds here are so high that they offered me a footstool to get in it.)
So the conference itself started off with Dave Cappuccio talking about the Top 10 Technologies that we should all be watching:
1) Virtualization
2) Data Deluge
3) Energy & Green IT
4) Consumerization & Social Networks
5) Unified Communications
6) Complex Resource Tracking
7) Mobile & Wireless
‘8) System Density
9) Mashups & Portals
10) Cloud Computing
1) Virtualization:
This is not a technology issue but an energy issue: on the typical x86 server, 65% of it is doing nothing (draws power but with low utilization). Compare this to mainframes which on average are runnning at 85-90% utilization; mainframes are expensive and there’s a lot more cost justification that has to happen. x86 seems “cheap” in comparison to a mainframe, but what about power costs?
2) Data Deluge
650% growth in 5 years; 80% will be unstructured! Growth is not the problem - unstructured is the issue. More data will be generated this year than in the previous 5000 years (Over 40 exabytes). Key new storage technologies in the pipeline:
Thin provisioning (IT conditioned to over-allocate - utilization was not the issue, now it is)
Data deduplication
Automated tiering
HSM (hierarchical storage management) principles
Virtual tape
3) Energy & Green IT
“Green is money.” Need the monitoring capabilities to understand energy draw in data center - now and how this hopefully is improving over time: New KPIs based on efficiency. Push to virtualize; need to monitor at the granular level. DCP (data center performance index) = Useful work/Total Facility Power
All those 15K rpm drives are sucking down gobs of electricity for each drive so we have to maximize their utilization… Watch-out: EU and EPA metrics are coming!
4) Consumerization and Social Software Twitter was the fastest-growing social network in 2008 growing 1,382%. 62% of new users are between 39 and 51. That’s data about your company that’s going on that you may not know about.
Not a problem but an opportunity. Consumerization is an attitude not just the use of tech. Generational - need to participate, contribute and be part of a community. Technology examples: Wireless, smartphones, instant and text messaging, social networks
5) Unified Communications # of text messages sent in the last 24 hours exceeded the total population of the planet (>6,700,000,000) UC is: tightly integrated communications applications - email, wireless, voip, mobility, pbx, presence, im, text/sms, etc. The unified communications “dream” would be everything tied together instead of traditional vertical (IT) entities. Critical time frame - not for a couple of years, 2011-13
6) Complex Resource tracking
Back to energy - New KPIs based on power. Vendors good at monitoring performance of systems - but IT is not the base infrastructure. IT depends on physical facilities/infrastructure, which is what also needs to be monitored - from energy to airflow to temperature. The EPA is going to come out with a Data Center efficiency rating. The goal is to get to a single view across all infrastructure, down to the facilities level, something that no single product currently addresses.
7) Mobile & Wireless
Thousands of new apps coming online.
Mobile apps need new servers for delivery
App delivery complexity
Immature management tools
Next target for virtualization
‘8) System Density At current pricing, opex (energy costs for one) to support a single x86 server exceeds cost of that server within 3 years.
$105,000 energy cost per year (single rack of servers)
Last year, Gartner customers were talking about building new data centers. This year - plans put on hold. Gartner sees companies striving to get to the best density and utilization levels - “scaling up” instead of “scaling out”.
9) Mashups and Enterprise Portals
Real business usage instead of stuck in the corner
10) Cloud Computing
Definition (after much internal Gartner debate):
a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using Internet technologies
(Side Note: Cappuccio says ”elastic” is the key here. Love this - as a SalesForce customer who feels we’ve been gouged by these guys for years. Over long term, SalesForce is too expensive. They need to change how they price - the pressures on them to adjust their pricing - after all they are the cloud company. Think I can get a better rate for SalesForce if I tell them they’re not elastic enough to be considered “cloud computing”? Yeah, me too. )
Gartner research is showing that nearly half of all businesses reduced their IT budgets in the first quarter of 2009. IT budgets are expected to decline a total of 4.7 percent this year, according to the research. The sharpest drop (10 percent) was in professional services, telecommunications and technology. However, most of the CIOs surveyed said they were hopeful the economy would begin to rebound in 2010. Even federal IT teams are expecting some form of budget or project decline, as we found out at FOSE.
With IT budgets shrinking how are CIOs supposed to manage? Denise Dubie suggests investing in best practices to streamline work, save staff hours and ultimately cut company costs. “According to a Forrester Research report, 62 percent of more than 500 IT decision-makers polled said improved consistency and quality of IT processes were among the key changes to contributing to a more positive view of IT by the business.”
Some very cool cloud computing research projects are popping up just in time for next week’s HotCloud conference, including “nebulas” (distributed voluntary resources donated by end-user hosts creating nebulas that could complement public managed clouds, perhaps for free!), CloudViews (common storage system using some kind of protected inter-service data sharing) and a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform (still in conceptual stage but focused on “closed box execution” environment for guest virtual machines in pubic clouds).
“The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers,” says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge. Ever the contrarian, the NY Times Magazine breaks the rules and tells the data center story for the public-at-large. The general population doesn’t care about the infrastructure running their shiny gadgets unless it’s not working – they want services to be ‘always on’ or ‘always there’ but have no idea what it actually takes to deliver on the always-on promise. The Times does a good job of breaking the data center down for the angry user who just wants to know why they can’t play Call of Duty online with 65,999 of their closest friends.
The keynotes from Interop have been archived and posted online for the world to see.
Input, a government market research firm, recently issued a 100 Day Report Card for the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) - or the stimulus spending plan to you and me. They had some interesting and harsh things to say about just where and how the hundreds of billions of taypayer dollars are being spent.
First the kinda good news - a “B+” for the government on the Speed of Spending. The government is good at spending money quickly - who knew? President Obama’s goal of spending $350 billion by September 30, 2010 seems to be close to being on track, especially as the spending accelerates. For those of you who want to have your head spin at the numbers they’re talking about, that’s $4.16 billion per week that the federal government needs to be spending.
The bad news is that the end result of all the spending has not yet been realized. Input gave the government an “Incomplete” when it came to actual Job Creation. Granted, they provided a caveat when it came to the impossibility of actually determining the number of new jobs created by the stimulus spending. And then this nugget: The Council of Economic Advisors provided initial guidelines to fed government agencies to report job creation. Their metric - $92,000 of government spending to create one job-year. Wow.
But probably the most relevant part of the report card is how well the government is doing on the Transparency & Reporting requirements that go along with the stimulus package. Despite guidelines set by the OMB - or perhaps because of too many guidelines set by the OMB - Input gave federal agencies a big fat “D” on the report card.
So the government is spending billions a week, net new jobs are not being created and we have no view into how the agencies are actually getting things accomplished. The opportunity: get onto Force.com and create your own cloud computing app that tracks stimulus spending for agencies.
We love to participate in Tier 1’s Hosting Transformation Summits - both to meet with an important section of our customers and to discuss trends in the industry. There were two key themes that emerged at the European edition of this Summit in London this week; business is great, but the future is cloudy.
First the business is great bit: While they may not have seen the breakneck growth of earlier years, hosting companies have continued to keep bobbing along while the rest of the world economy sinks. According to Dan Golding, VP & Research Director of Tier 1, co-location continued to lead the charge with a modest but respectable 4% growth rate from Q1 08 to Q1 09. Managed hosting was a point or two behind that, with CDN the only part of the industry that has been really floundering. The CDN business has been suffering from a number of low-level entrants that have kept prices suppressed, and will likely continue in this vein until some of the current players depart.
There were a few scare stories running around a couple of years ago about the amount of data center space being built and warnings that we were returning to the boom and bust Exodus days. It turns out that much less data center space was actually being built than advertised, and the flashy press releases for 300,000 square foot data centers were really 300,000 square foot warehouses looking for someone willing to spend the considerably higher investment needed to turn them into real data centers. The fact that only a fraction of the advertised space has actually been built out is great news for hosters that have capacity, and is actually great news for everybody in terms of ensuring prices head North rather than South in the next couple of years.
There is still not a lot of capacity being added to ease the tightness on the supply side, mostly due to financing limitations. Many of the mid and large tier hosters are already heavily leveraged, and with banks extremely risk averse there are not a lot of debt funding options, while lower valuations have discouraged hosting companies from equity financing of new data center capacity.
Chances ar, there will be a meeting of the minds over valuations in the coming months, and that plus easing credit restrictions will mean a lot more money available for data center build-outs. Nevertheless the consensus here was global data center capacity is going to be tight for the foreseeable future.
We heard lots about trends in build-out, and one that has been quietly gathering steam over the last few years is modular expansion techniques. This is not necessarily the container-park approach that Microsoft has embraced, but is more often a question of dropping self-contained modules into an existing data center. The “hot-aisle” or rack containment methods employed by these modules mean that a high density module can sit in an older low density data center without impacting the existing limited cooling capacity, thereby prolonging the life of existing data centers.
In a panel discussion, Peter Hannaford from APC emphasized the importance of software in monitoring environmental systems and spotting hot-spots for heat and power consumption. Given our great Dynamic Applications for APC devices, we know he was thinking about EM7 in this point of the discussion!
So now for the cloudy future. We are of course referring to the server and storage clouds here that are a big target for us with EM7 G3 in particular. Interestingly all the major hosting companies at the summit claimed to already have a cloud offering in some fashion. The furthest along seems to be RackSpace who do seem to have an edge at the moment and are actually making quite a lot of money with their cloud products already.
Fortunately, with all the talk of clouds and continual peppering of bad puns about the weather throughout the day, the real weather in London was perfect - 75 degrees and not a cloud in sight!
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