Back To The Future

In most of my customer and partner engagements, I use the private cloud model as a starting point, and how EMC, along with our partners VMware and Cisco are investing in accelerating the transition to this model with VCE, vBlocks, Acadia and the like.

Very frequently, someone very senior will ask me "where is it all going?" or "what's the end-state?".

And that's where I start to have some fun.
 

The End State

Imagine a world where arbitrary applications don't see physical resources: server, storage, network, etc.  Literally hundreds of thousands of applications run off-the-shelf unmodified, or develop your own with powerful frameworks that can fully exploit the power of the environment.

Resources pool and flex to dynamically meet changing workloads, and -- as a result -- resource utilization is best-in-class.  Capacity planning is relatively sophisticated, much more than the current practice of "have a hunch, provision a bunch".

Desktops have given way to a world where users access resources primarily through thin clients, or with thicker clients that work cooperatively with centralized resources.

Security is best-in-class.  Service delivery is best-in-class.  Availability and recoverability is best-in-class.  Change control, IT compliance, etc. -- best-in-class.  There's a tight level of integration across the various disciplines -- everybody knows what everyone else is doing.

Enterprise IT organizations can pool these dynamic environments across multiple data centers, combine their own assets with those from compatible service providers, or run exclusively out of shared data centers if they choose. 

A few core vendors define the ecosystem, but there are plenty of compatible competitors to choose from.  There's a wide range of consultants, integrators and service providers out there, each trying to get some of your business.

The business can get what it wants -- when it wants -- to drive new forms of innovation and accelerate growth.  Well-understood workloads gain the benefit of steadily declining capex and opex through commoditization of resources, increasing efficient usage and increasingly sophisticated operational models.

IT infrastructure is thought of as a service that powers the business, and not an end unto itself.  IT thinks in terms of a service catalog that it delivers to the business.

And perhaps IT takes on a name that reflects their new services-oriented mission: Information Services (IS).

What World Do You Live In?

I'm sort of describing the "golden age of mainframes" -- roughly the 1970s and 1980s.  I was there.

Even though I was trained on UNIX and C and YACC/LEX etc. in the university system, the best paying gigs after graduation were data center gigs.  So learned to be a mainframe application jockey, and came away with a serious appreciation for the sophistication and integration of the environment.

But it was expensive.  And didn't move as fast as users needed it to do.  So we had minicomputers, and desktops, and then distributed systems, and -- well, you know the story.

The Software Mainframe

I love it when Paul Maritz uses the term "software mainframe" to describe what VMware is attempting to do. 

In one sense, it separates the audience by experience: those who've done hard time on mainframes, and those that haven't.  Like other life experiences, you either have an appreciation for what this environment is all about, or your don't.  There's no real substitute.

But it also pays homage to the single most successful enterprise computing model in history; the ubiquitous mainframe -- a place where things "just worked" in so many cases.

But I think Paul would agree with many of us that the opportunity is upon us to take what we learned from the mainframe model, and make it far better in many regards.

When I talk about EMC, and VMware and Cisco -- whether individually or collectively -- it's usually in the form of a "status report" against progress towards that model that many of us still hold in high regard.