Chuck's Blog

Considering Clouds And Public Policy

If you're like me, you probably understand that cloud concepts represent a transformational way of doing IT.

Which brings up a thorny question -- what role, if any, should public policy play in maximizing the value and minimizing the harm?  

That is the exact question addressed very successfully by the CLOUD2 report, a compelling piece of work from a broad representation of industry and government stakeholders, co-chaired by Michael Capellas of VCE.

While I'm not generally a fan of comprehensive public policy reports, this one perhaps deserves some of your attention.

First, it provides a case study on the ideal role of government when faced with transformational technology shifts, such as cloud.  Second, the recommendations (while specific to the government's role) can largely be translated to the private sector, especially for organizations operating at global scale.

And, finally, the recommendations largely transcend technology and vendor bias -- no small feat in itself.

Learning To Compete -- The Real Challenge Of ITaaS

Competition is the engine that drives us all forward.  

At an individual level, we compete with others who might be able to do a better job, or do things for a lower cost.  At a corporate level, our companies compete each and every day for customers.

Organizations within companies have learned to compete as well.  If you deliver a service to the business, there are always external competitors who'd like to show your internal customers a better, faster, cheaper way to get things done.

I believe the necessity to compete for internal customers is the primary engine behind IT-as-a-service concepts.  

Fail to successfully compete, and your internal customers will likely go outside to get what they need.

In this post, I'd like to share with the the most cogent explanation I've seen on this topic to date: what's happening, what it means to IT organizations everywhere, and -- most importantly -- what you can do about it.

Cloud, Big Data … and Healthcare

Healthcare is a fascinating industry. 

From the drug companies and the insurance companies to the hospitals and clinics -- it's an enormously complex and fast-moving value chain that has a single goal: to help each and every one of us live better and longer lives.

If one were to ask the question "in what industry do you see the fastest adoption of cloud and big data", the answer -- at least for me -- would be healthcare.

Bigger Isn't Always Better

During most of my career in IT, I have tended to hold the larger IT shops in a certain awe: their large and diverse organizations, their ability to field large IT projects, and -- especially from a vendor perspective -- their unquestionable spending power.

I sometimes wondered how the more modest-sized IT shops could ever keep up with the big guys?

No longer.  When it comes to IT transformation -- changing how IT operates to look more like an internal service provider vs. a traditional technology-and-project shop -- the smaller IT teams appear to be winning the race.  They're getting their sooner and delivering results far faster than the behemoths.

And now it looks like many of the bigger IT shops may end up paying a painful price for their size and complexity.

The Thorny Challenge Of Elasticity

Listen to people describe their idealized cloud, and sometimes you'll hear them say "infinitely elastic".

Most IT infrastructure people cringe when they hear that sort of talk, and justifiably so.  At some point, all infrastructure becomes physical no matter how abstracted or virtualized you make it.

Not only that, being able to meaningfully grow and shrink infrastructure resources dynamically in response to changing application demand is a very difficult problem -- especially for general purpose use cases.

The application environment has to be able to request and release resources.  The supporting infrastructure has to work in concert with the application stack, of course.

And then there's the head-hurting topic of policy definition and management: under what circumstances should appplication "A" get more resources, and application "B", "C" and "D" get less?  

How do you define what types of internal or external infrastructure are allowed candidates for supporting dynamic application expansion?  

And how do you communicate back to the business what real-time tradeoffs are being made, and showing them that everything is compliant?

I don't think anyone has complete answers for most use cases, but some interesting work in this area is starting to manifest itself.

In particular, the VCE crew is presenting their current progress on a solution dubbed "Application Lifecycle Manager", or ALP for short.  And it's an interesting discussion, to be sure.

Vblock FastPath/VDI -- Changing The Model

If you follow this blog, you know I'm an ardent and passionate fan of the Vblock concept.  I just can't help myself.

For me, it represents acceleration.  

At a tactical level, that means getting results faster.  

At an operational level, it's the ability to spend more time on the stuff that matters and less time on the stuff that doesn't.

And -- strategically -- it means accelerating IT's transition to an internal service provider.

If you've sat through the Vblock roadmap sessions, you'll notice that development is progressing nicely around two axes.  One important axis is "better Vblocks": faster, more efficient, more functionality, better security, better operational integration, and so forth.  I always am surprised at just how fast these folks are moving.

The other axis is becoming important as well: pointing the Vblock concept at well-established IT use cases, and creating sinlge-SKU "products" that bring the Vblock model (real product vs. reference architecture, speed of deployment, pre-integration, single support, etc.) to specific and popular use cases.

Such is the case with the new Vblock FastPath/VDI.  In a nutshell, it's a single product you can buy that does VDI -- at scale -- in a box.

A Big Step Forward In Creating A Cloud Marketplace

Lots of great news starting to come out of VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas.

Technically, I'm supposed to be there right now, but we had this hurricane come through ...

Metaphorically speaking, though, a hurricance isn't a bad analogy for describing the impact of this important event.

The scope of VMworld has expanded far beyond the initial boundaries of server virtualization and pulled in all sorts of adjacent disciplines: cloud, IT transformation, application transformation, next-gen user experience as well as all sorts of related technologies: servers, storage, security, backup, orchestration and management ... it's perhaps the most compelling cross-section of advanced IT thinking in the industry.

And one of the first blockbluster announcements from VMware concerns signficant and meaningful progress towards establishing a marketplace of compatible service providers, based around VMware technologies.

When Virtualization Changed Databases

Inexorably, virtualization is changing how we think about every aspect of IT.

It’s already vastly changed how we think about physical IT infrastructure: servers, storage and network. 

From static allocations to dynamic pools of resources – without VMware’s popularity, we really wouldn’t be talking much these days about cloud and transforming to IT to a service.

But what about databases and data management?  

Clearly, many of these technologies haven’t made the transition to the new model.  At best, we've only been able to encapsulate and containerize legacy databases using virtual infrastructure vs. revisiting how databases might intelligently work in this new model.

How do we get databases to intelligently use dynamic resources?  How do we deliver database as a service?  And how do we make databases as easy to consume as other forms of infrastructure?

Today, VMware announced their first foray into this new (and important) realm by announcing the new vFabric Data Director.  

And many of us think this is very big news indeed.

In Search Of The Missing IT Gene

Our story so far:

Cloud concepts are in the process of transforming IT organizations into internal service providers.  This -- at its essence -- is turning into an organizational transformation challenge.

Organize IT around technology silos; and that's what you'll end up delivering to the business.  Conversely, organize IT around delivering competitive services to the business, and that's what you'll likely deliver.

Smart IT leaders are quietly assessing their organizations, and figuring out how best to begin to implement these new constructs.  Very often, they find a critical mass of key individuals who can morph to the new roles.

But with amazing frequency, these same leaders are coming up short in a key area when fishing in their internal gene pool.  

They're often missing a few essential DNA strands that are incredibly scarce within most IT organizations, but surprisingly plentiful outside of IT.

And I'm guessing that -- before long -- we'll see some interesting recombinant DNA experiments as IT leaders start to pull in the missing profiles they'll need for success.

Making A Case For Cloud: Perspectives From An IT Practitioner

Despite the vast multitudes talking about cloud and leading IT transformation, there are only handfuls of people I've met who are actually doing it at significant scale.

And of those who are actually leading a large-scale IT transformation, there are few as insightful and articulate as our own Jon Peirce, VP of Global Infrastructure for EMC IT.

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, the name should be familiar -- he's basically the star in popular posts such as "From Silos To Services".

Jon has now taken pen in hand, so to speak, and authored a compelling post on his personal perspectives regarding IT transformation to an "as a service" model.

And, boy, are there are some powerful insights that are worth elaborating on.