Chuck's Blog

Cisco Gets Serious About IaaS

Given all the things that I'm engaged with these days, it was rewarding to see our friends at Cisco make a good set of announcements around enabling service providers with IaaS -- Infrastructure as a Service.  And I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier ...

But -- at the same time -- as I digest this announcement, I'm torn.

There's a lot to like here.  But it also reinforces my notion that we -- as an industry -- have just started to travel down a rather long road ...

VMware Management Takes A Big Step Forward ...

The headlines reads: "VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation".

People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective.

The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?"

The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal ..."

And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

Do The EMC Monster Mash And Win Big!

OK, cool contest alert.

The folks at the EMC Developer Network are sponsoring their first ever EMC Monster Mash with over $25K of prize money.  Hint: that's better than a free iPod :-)

The idea is simple: go over to the EDN site and create a creative mashup of two or more EMC products using the published interfaces, combining external services as you see fit, and submit your entry.

Lots of EMC platforms to choose from, storage, security, management, content, etc.  And, of course, a big world of non-EMC external services as well ...

Why are we doing this? 

First, we've got a big world of mashable capabilities across our portfolio, and we'd like people to get more familiar with them.  Second, we think that intermixing this stuff with popular online services would be pretty interesting, and demonstrate even more powerful functionality.  Finally, we thought it'd be pretty fun.

So, if this sort of thing gets your creative juices flowing, why don't you head over to the web page and learn more?

Hard Data On The Backup Paradigm Shift

As technologists, we all sort of know that traditional tape-oriented backup is rapidly being supplanted by newer forms of disk-based backup, usually in conjunction with data deduplication.

But quantifiable data on the size and speed of this trend is notoriously hard to find.

This latest result from TheInfoPro helps to frame just how quickly this trend is moving.

Good Governance Equals Good IT?

It's most definitely an uncomfortable topic for many of the IT organizations I meet with on a regular basis.

More often than not, I find myself asking how IT governance is done in their organization?

And I've begun to see a very strong correlation between good governance and good IT.

From Cost-To-Serve to Time-To-Serve

So much of the IT infrastructure discussion today is focused on costs.  Paradoxically, the majority of IT time seems to be spent on the most commoditized aspect of infrastructure: hardware costs.

Software costs seem to get less attention, even though they're arguably more amenable to IT negotiations. 

More interestingly, improvement of operational processes seem to get almost no attention at all.

As hardware costs continue to plummet, and software costs slowly start to move more in line, I'd argue that the next big 800-pund gorilla in the IT organization is re-engineering IT processes to be orders-of-magnitude more effective than they generally are today.

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll know my rant by now: virtualization is changing the way IT infrastructure can be done.

Build it differently (virtualized pools of dynamic resources), operate it differently (zero-touch or low-touch processes) and consume it differently (convenient and variable consumption), and you've got the basics of a "cloud", regardless of whether you run it yourself or someone does it on your behalf.

I believe that learning to think like a cloud operator or service provider is the next big thing for enterprise IT organizations.  Without that mindset, your internal users will increasingly be attracted to external organizations that offer this kind of service.

In my previous post, I discussed a composite metric ("Thinking In Terms Of Cost-To-Serve") in an effort to move the focus away from the ingredients (server, storage, network, etc.) and more towards the visible result, e.g. a usable virtual machine, ready for work.

In doing so, we not only combine the physical inputs but the labor inputs as well.  Focusing on "cost to serve" as a metric makes newer infrastructure approaches (e.g. Vblock) more attractive.  More importantly, it creates a strong incentive to examine the labor (operational) aspects as well.

Cloud Storage Evolves

At the end of 2008 when we introduced the Atmos storage platform, we realized we needed a new term to describe what was essentially a new category -- COS -- or cloud-optimized storage -- storage platforms and services that are designed expressly for cloud applications.

With today's announcement, the uniqueness of the category becomes more apparent.  We're now in a better position to make the case that -- for some use cases -- cloud-optimized storage solutions can be better than their traditional counterparts.

Thinking In Terms Of Cost-To-Serve

We talk about IT-as-a-service all the time -- or at least, we should be!

Whether we're large enterprises, or service providers who desire their business -- you're providing a service, what does the service cost?

It's turning out that this mental leap is proving difficult for many IT people.  For decades, they've been focused on the cost of the ingredients, rather than the price of the meal.

10 Cloud Secrets For IT Service Providers

As part of my role here at EMC, I get to talk to all sorts of interesting consumers of IT: enterprises, partners -- and, more recently, the more nascent category of "IT service providers".

I think of service providers as a new channel for the IT industry.  Yes, we've seen outsourcers and hosters and all manner of people who will offer to run various aspects of IT on your behalf, but enough has changed recently that the whole discussion is somewhat fresh again.

Given that I spend a lot of time with enterprises and more traditional partners as well, I have a pretty good sense of what people might want, and why they might want it.

And, in this post, I'm going to share what usually comes up in the first hour of discussion.

Agree or disagree, as you see fit!

What's The Best Data Protection Strategy For You?

One of the thoughts being promoted by one of our competitors last week was "snaps are all you need for data protection".  Some folks at EMC asked me to comment, so I thought I'd share here.

Let me know what you think?