Cloud Expo 2010 – Santa Clara, CA

Just returned from Cloud Expo in the heart of Silicon Valley at Santa Clara. It was a great show and furthered my belief that cloud computing is the inevitable next step in IT datacenters. We were showing our Cloud Platform software, formerly Surgient. What was nice was that we had 7 years of experience building private clouds while many others have been at this for a year or just a little longer.

A couple of things were stated in multiple sessions and they really hit home. Virtualization does not equal Cloud and I couldnt agree more. Virtualization enables the cloud but it is not in and of itself the “Cloud”. Cloud computing requires a knowledge of the company’s business practices and goals.

Another item that was readily apparent was that if you have a datacenter that’s more of a hodgepodge than a carefully calculated data center than cloud computing may make that problem worse. You have to have some governance built in and methods and procedures. It would be difficult to automate the construction of a car if you didnt have a standard method that was repeatable each and every time you built that car. In the same vain, you have to have standards and disciplines to be successful in the cloud game.

My number one concern with Cloud has always been Security and while it is a factor, it’s less than I originally envisioned. I was gently reminded that all of my banking is in the cloud, even though I go to my brick and mortar bank, everything is done with Fiserv or Metavante and it’s more efficient. Imagine if all banks had to build those systems themselves. Well it’s no wonder why they chain the pens down, they cant afford to lose any money!

I’ll write more in the upcoming days but for now suffice it to say that I’ve moved from being a Cloud Crumudgeon to a Cloud Optimist, quite a change for this old dog.

 

Until Next time…

Virtually Speaking…

When did you start building your first private cloud?

Some of you may immediately say “We haven’t bought into cloud computing yet so I guess you could say we haven’t started” . I’d respectfully disagree and say that if you’ve started down the path of virtualizing your environment, you have started to build your private cloud.

Cloud computing to me represents a number of resources that can be configured and re-configured many times in order to fulfill the business needs. Virtualization introduced us to the ability to move virtual machines around between physical computers and physical locations in ways that we could have only dreamt of in the past. This has given us substantial advances in Disaster Recovery, testing for labs and of course consolidation and containment or as I like to say, stop the bleeding. Most companies have jumped on the virtualization bandwagon and many are late to the game. I think it will be the same way with cloud computing since to me it is the logical extension of virtualization. Virtualization is one of the enablers to make this work but it’s not the full story. There are 3 main types of clouds that I talk about, the private cloud, the public cloud and the hybrid or federated cloud. The private cloud is the environment that most of us are familiar with. It’s our normal environment with some automation, it’s certainly the most mature model. The Public cloud with players like Google, Amazon and such is less mature but successfully making its way. Applications such as Salesforce.com are great examples of how this type of SaaS can be delivered effectively from the cloud. The third type of cloud is in it’s infancy and will need to be nurtured but just as virtualizing Tier1 apps was a pipe dream 5 years ago, today it’s a reality. I think this will be the case with the hybrid cloud…..eventually. The security concerns are there of course but there are ways to address them.

The promise of the hybrid cloud is that it will let our private clouds scale up, down and sideways based on the business needs and not have to adhere to as rigid of guidelines as before. Just as the introduction of virtualization has introduced some chaos into the mix by reducing the time to rack stack and deploy a server from 4-6 weeks to 4-6 minutes so will cloud computing initially cause some confusion but this will pass as organizations learn to build structure to manage this flexibility. It’s a graceful dance and the winner will be the executive who realizes that his company will need this technology and begins down the path today. Witness the companies who are 80-90 percent virtualized and are reaping the rewards in reduced cooling, amazing disaster recovery capabilities today. They are providing service to their internal customers in a speedier, more cost effective manner, this is the future for those who will do the hard work to cut through the haze of Cloud computing and understand what it can do for their companies.

Well that’s just my initial thoughts but you can bet this will be the topic for many discussions.

 

Virtually Speaking……

 

George

Welcome Natalya Lynn Pradel, my first granddaughter!

Today my wife and I welcomed into our life our first grandchild, a beautiful baby girl weighing 7 pounds 9 ounces. She came to the world through a C section which was scary for a grandfather. What occurred to me in my geeky mind was what type of technologies would be a regular part of her life. During the beginning of labor, my daughter was posting her status on facebook, interesting way to keep her adoring public informed. Sharing photos with friends around the world happened in mere seconds, fascinating stuff to be sure. Yep, growing up I witnessed a computer with two floppy disks which was the envy of everyone near and far. Today, if you’re not online, you’re out of touch. Grandma Pradel is busy showing pictures of her new grandchild to everyone from her ipad.

So will the cloud be a way for my new granddaughter to get the technology that she needs? Will it be private clouds, public clouds, federated private/public? Will she take advantage of SaaS, IaaS? I’m sure she will and it will be as natural as the 8 track player I grew up with in my car. 

Welcome Natalya Lynn Pradel to our little corner of the world, I promise to spoil you to the best of my ability.

 

Until next time…

 

Virtually Speaking……Grandpa George

A Cloud Metaphor that makes Sense!

As anyone who knows me, I havent always been a fan of “Cloud Computing” because I felt it lacked substance. My feelings have changed as I’ve seen technology that can actually tether the cloud to the ground delivering on the promise of cloud computing. 

 

A metaphor was offerred to me that made sense which was of the difference between a full service restaraunt (cloud computing) and a diner. The full service restaraunt can reconfigure itself in many ways offer reservations or first come first serve seating, etc. while the diner is a static environment with limited resources and while it can deliver what it needs to, it’s not as flexible as the full service restaraunt.

 

Sure it sounds like a great idea but delivering on it has always been the issue. I’ve run into a technology that can deliver on the promise since it relies on full blown vmware and microsoft environments (so your tools still work) but it enables you to run large environments with automation to ease the administration burden. 

 

Cloud computing is a vision. VMWare boldly stepped up to claim the cloud, virtualization has made the idea of cloud computing a reality, now it just comes down to software to organize, direct and reconfigure the environment to suit the needs of the business. Think of the government agency which requires massive horsepower to tally election results and then doesnt need those resources for another 2 years, what a great opportunity to virtualize and take it another step beyond and repurpose for other loads that will be put on the system.

 

Hate to say it but I think this old dog is learning some new tricks.

 

Virtually Speaking….

 

George 

VDI

I attended a VMUG in Addison, IL today where Elias Khnaser was one of the speakers. If you havent heard him speak and you get the chance, take advantage of it. Elias presented a great objective viewpoint of the VDI landscape. A lot of people forget the other ways you can virtualized desktops and if you think it’s the same as virtualizing servers, you are going to be in a world of hurt. If you have a realistic view of the situation and have a good head on your shoulders, you can be extremely successful virtualizing your desktops. My 8th layer of the osi model comes into play big time here. If your admin cant see the picture of her grandkids as her desktop and that’s been her desktop for the last 5 years, you’re gonna have problems. Think it through, plan properly and you can be successful at it. Remember I started my SE career with Citrix in 97, the original virtualization method, it’s mindblowing to see where we’ve come since then.

 

Elias’s blogs can be found at http://www.eliaskhnaser.com/blogs.aspx  , check them out, it’s a great perspective on what can be a very confusing topic.

 

Virtually Speaking…..

 

George

Overallocation of Memory is not your Fault!

Many customers I talk to have a problem with overallocation of memory in virtual machines. Seems like an easy task, doesnt it? Just dont allocate so much. If you know me, you know that my thoughts on the state of virtualization all revolve around the 8th layer of the OSI model, the political layer. Most times overallocation occurs because well meaning business units look to deploy sophisticated applications into virtual machines since the state of virtualization has progressed so significantly. In doing so, they listen to their vendors who may not all be familiar with how to optimize their application in a virtual machine so they recommend the same memory you’d find in a physical machine. Because of the ability to over allocate memory within a virtual environment, this is far too often an overallocation of memory. Look for a tool that can report on that condition. vFoglight from Quest SVG is such a tool and includes a built in report specifically for this condition since it occurs in nearly every virtual environment in existence. Just another of the ways where virtualization is different than physical but if you know some basic facts you can live very well in this new world.

 

Virtually Speaking….

 

George

Hacking BGInfo

So I’m at a customer site the other day in these here 50 united states and those of you who know virtualization understand the dilemma of assigning virtual cpu’s to a virtual machine. The problem starts because business units believe that if one is good, two is twice as good, four is better and 8 would freaking awesome. Well, it doesnt work quite that way, in fact because of scheduling needs, less is more. This engineer I met was brilliant, his business unit was implementing an erp system, speaks volumes for where virtualization has come, and he tested with 2 and 4 cpu’s. Turns out 2 was faster so he set up the virtual machine for 2 cpu’s and hacked the bginfo to read from an .ini file for the number of cpu’s so it would read 4, everyone’s happy and his machines are humming along. Tomorrow I’ll talk a little about memory use.

Virtually speaking….

 

George

Bike Riding

It was a beautiful fall day out so I decided to fill the bike tires up with air and go on a bike ride to enjoy the changing of the seasons. The ride was fantastic but even with all the nature around I ran across a situation which I found hilarious. I was riding downhill in a park that has a radar unit and the speed limit was 5 miles an hour, similar to a mall parking lot these days. My bike made the radar unit start flashing red with a whopping 13 miles an hour, sometimes I’m such a radical. Anyways, it just struck me as funny and thought I would share it with others.