December 2nd, 2008 by Julia Lim
The Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off this morning in Las Vegas. Despite the completely packed plane coming out here, Vegas seems quieter and not so crowded. The bartender at Wolfgang Puck’s Bistro told me they were looking forward to the 1800 people coming to this show to fill the hotel up. As we’ve noted, the economic crisis is impacting business travel all around.
22% of the attendees at Data Center come from the public sector and government, with 44% coming from very large enterprises of 20K+ employees.
During the Gartner IOM conference in June, some of the most interesting info coming out of it was the quick polls of the audience on a variety of infrastructure and operations management topics. What are enterprises doing? Where are they headed? What’s important to them? Here are some quick takes from the opening session:
1) What is the largest data center challenge that you currently face?
- Smaller Budgets: 21%
- Power & Cooling: 20%
- Dealing with the Rate of Technology Change: 15%
- Aligning Activities with the Business: 15%
- Modernizing Legacy Applications: 10%
- Lack of Data Center Space because of Equipment Spread: 9%
- How to Source IT Services: 5%
- How to Find and Retain Talent: 5%
Well, it’s taken almost a year to be “official”, but the National Bureau of Economic Research just announced that the US has been in a recession since December of 2007. It should come as a surprise to no one that dealing with smaller budgets is top of mind, even for the predominantly larger enterprises attending here.
2) What projects will receive the most funding in 2009?
- Virtualization/Consolidation: 31%
- Data Center Facilities – new builds: 17%
- IT Operations Process Improvement: 12%
- IT Modernization: 7%
- Green IT: 5%
Virtualization and (server) consolidation projects are clearly a priority for larger enterprises in 2009. What’s interesting here is the relatively very low priority of Green IT projects – in spite of the importance to attendees of getting power and cooling costs under control. Perhaps there’s a gap here between what’s often the hype of Green IT and practical considerations for data center managers when it comes to power and cooling management.
3) Where are you with server consolidation projects?
- No Plans: 3%
- Looking at it now and will start in next 2 years: 13%
- In process now: 58%
- Have already completed server consolidation project: 26%
Larger enterprises are consolidating servers with a quarter of attendees already having gone through the process at least once. And according to poll #2, this trend will definitely continue.
Popularity: 2% [?]
December 2nd, 2008
November 25th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio
We’re very happy to have had EM7 reviewed by The Tech Stop. We originally met Fr. Robert Ballecer SJ at Interop Las Vegas 2008. Padre (as everyone knows him) was one of the networking team leads at Interop and got hands on experience with EM7 in the NOC at the show. As far as we’re concerned Interop was the best way to review EM7. While working with a product in a lab gets you a reasonable idea of how it works, using the product in a high pressure, real world environment like Interop, really shows you what a product can do. We’d like to thank Padre for taking the time to do such a complete review of EM7 and look forward to hopefully working with him again during Interop 2009.
Popularity: 3% [?]
November 25th, 2008
November 25th, 2008 by Julia Lim
VMware made big announcements at their VMworld conference back in September, talking about adding on a slew of virtualization management functionality to a revamped vCenter and extending into the “cloud” with vCloud services. Like most people, I had a lot of skepticism about what vCloud really meant; was this just more hype trying to take advantage of the cloud computing buzz? Certainly CEO Paul Maritz came from this world and virtualization itself (and especially vMotion) is an enabling technology for cloud computing. But how ready were VMware and its ecosystem of partner vendors to actually fulfill on the promise?
So I was very interested when I heard that Opus Interactive, a customer of ours, had “joined the VMware vCloud initiative as a VMware Service Provider”. I talked to Eric Hulbert, CTO of Opus Interactive, to get some details directly from the source.
Eric shared our own caution about making “cloud-ready” announcements. There have simply been too many companies talking about cloud solutions that lack any substance – usually based on definitions of cloud computing that are hazy or just too broad. The backlash against the cloud hype is often quite justified. But in Opus’ case, there are real components that if they don’t add up to a “full” cloud computing solution just yet, are well on their way – and enabled by VMware’s program for service providers (VSPP).
Opus Interactive is serious about virtualization, which is an indispensable tool in their stated goal of creating a high-density micro-data center with the smallest footprint possible. They are 100% wind-powered and have already virtualized much of their data center, reducing the amount of hardware necessary to run the business and driving down costs to produce even more competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.
VSPP for vCloud provides a rental model of VMware licenses – e.g., for Enterprise ESX or VDI. VMware Service Providers report on their customers’ virtual machines (vm) and pay only for what is actually used. This model lets Opus Interactive quickly spin up a vm to get a new customer up and running in about an hour and stay very cost competitive at the same time; Opus offers their vClustr entry-level virtual server for only $99.
Cost-effective, rapidly scalable computing “on-demand” based on shared resources, managed by “expert” third-parties, enabled by virtualization technology and pay-per-use vm licenses. Cloud computing? Instead of thinking about a single definition of cloud computing, perhaps it’s more relevant as the market matures to think about a continuum of cloud computing. And by that definition, Opus Interactive is providing cloud services, enabled by VMware’s VSP program. Next on the schedule, automated provisioning and perhaps in the future, API’s that make it even easier for application developers to test and deploy apps on Opus Interactive’s cloud platform – which, by the way, uses EM7 for its core management solution.
Popularity: 6% [?]
November 25th, 2008
November 24th, 2008 by Julia Lim
The hunt for the nation’s first CTO continues. Although names have been suggested, such as standout nominees include Bruce Schneier, founder of Counterpane and now chief security technology officer at BT; Mark Cuban for his obvious business sense – and in spite of the insider trading indictment – and Carly Fiorina, former controversial CEO of HP, the next question is what policies should this CTO pursue? Visit ObamaCTO.org to view and vote for policies.
SaaS is taking a bite out of the $18 billion IT management market. A new Forrester Research report forecasts SaaS-based IT management accounts will be 10% of the market by 2013. The reason: high level of interest from medium-sized and large enterprises. Forrester also predicts that enterprises with 1,000 or more employees will account for 50% of SaaS installations in 2009. We’ve seen this on the service desk side with the rapid growth of upstart Service-now.com. Companies are looking for easier and rapid deployment, lower upfront and capital costs and rapid time to value – all benefits of SaaS as well as our own appliance model.
IBM snapped up Transitive this week. Their QuickTransit software dynamically translates native code between architectures, enabling apps compiled for one processor to be run on another without any modification. Apple was the first licensee and used it to build Rosetta, a translation system that allowed users of Intel Macs to seamlessly run legacy PowerPC apps. IBM plans to use the technology to move workloads onto IBM systems without recompiling, allowing customers to “save on energy costs due to hardware consolidation and reduced TCO.”
At CA World, CA announced a partnership with Amazon to provide “management capabilities around Amazon’s EC2 utility computing platform, potentially including discovery of software running on EC2 instances, performance monitoring, configuration management, software deployment capabilities and provisioning”. John Willis, in spite of some pretty funny potshots and stories about CA (don’t we all have them), writes that “CA is the first of the Big Four to take the cloud serious”.
Popularity: 5% [?]
November 24th, 2008
November 18th, 2008 by David Link
Recently I participated in an event entitled National Security Perspectives held at the famous Congressional Country Club in Maryland. The featured panelists had impressive credentials from the NSA, DHS and the CIA. The topics of discussion ranged from Current Geopolitical Threats and Evolving Technology Demands to predictions about the New Administrations Intelligence, Defense and Homeland Security focus.
The panelists were:
William P. Crowell – former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency
Michael P. Jackson – Deputy Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr. – former Director CIA, National Clandestine Service & CIA, DCI Counterterrorist Center
Overall, it was a very nicely arranged event on a brisk fall evening with about 100 CXO attendees; mostly large but some small government contractors and a few product companies like ScienceLogic that conduct business with military, intelligence and the public sector.
No surprise, given the financial crisis the economy is suffering from that the panelists said we also have a crisis coming on the Federal budget front. This will put enormous pressure on the way Administration thinks, and how and where to spend the $$.
Obama’s tone regarding the issues he will be confronting in the world during the election was encouraging. Make the world more non-partisan and take on the threats that we have in front of us head-on!
The panel was very upfront about current threats. William Crowell said,
“It is highly imprudent to believe that there will not be another 9-11. We have to fund and support the work to stop other attacks. We can only mitigate risk but we can’t eliminate risk. We have to try to absorb the sense of urgency and wake up every day looking at the intelligence screens as if 9-11 happened within the last couple of months.”
He added,
“They (the intelligence community) need the innovation, sense of commitment and urgency that comes from the private sector – a sense of mutual commitment to that mission.”
Predicted Priorities for investment for DHS:
- Cyber attack as the top issue
- Nuclear threats including dirty bomb
- Chemical and biological attacks
- Explosive attacks against critical infrastructure with maximum # of lives and or financial disruption / loss.
- Large scale natural disasters – hurricane + earthquakes
- Border penetration - identity management and border management issues
An Obama administration will spend dollars around these threat vectors. They will want to spend $$ to help state and local governments. Grants to state and local governments should significantly increase with the Obama administration, so think about how you will increase your focus on the state and local government spending initiatives.
Secure border investments – the panelists believe that the new administration will feel compelled to invest here. Michael P. Jackson bluntly said, “You have to make investments in border tools to get meaningful immigration reform.”
Panelists agreed that the 1st year will be an intense period of scrutiny about fundamental directions. We can’t afford it all at DHS; it is dramatically under budgeted. At TSA/DOT and then at DHS, we spent about $4 Billion on technology investments since 9-11; those investments are now reaching the end of the original service life.
One gripe from the panel that I found humorous: “We don’t have a group of people who think like entrepreneurs.” It is insane how long things last when you buy things in the government. As an example, we are still replacing vacuum tubes in some of the very old FAA gear… this is well beyond what any reasonable person would think these initial investments should/would last.
Final Thoughts:
I actually think that the Obama Administration will be quite favorable to COTS software products, SaaS offerings, and creative financing initiatives from the private sector. The government just won’t have the capital budget to do everything it wants to accomplish. I would say if you look at how intelligently and aggressively Obama used technology to assist his campaign, the odds are good that this new breed of IT talent (which is already really comfortable with SaaS products, blogs, wiki’s, hosted/outsourced Cloud solutions… this team really understands the latest technology trends) will quickly work to bring these new IT paradigms to the Federal marketplace. Clearly the private sector can help the Government achieve more with lower capital budgets – beginning to provide services rather than transaction-based selling. Another clear idea is to think about leasing as a better way to work with the government which going forward will have increased budgets restrictions.
They will likely be in confrontation with members of Congress that won’t change fast enough, however the future of our nation’s ability to fight terror lies in becoming more efficient and effective. It requires the government be flexible enough to figure out what jobs and IT functions to outsource in a nimble and smart way. My prediction: this is great news for Service Providers. Overall the next 4 years should be great for our business as well as the Managed Service Provider/SaaS industry!
Popularity: 6% [?]
November 18th, 2008
November 17th, 2008 by Julia Lim
Wow. I think we all know that we can take or leave surveys – numbers don’t mean a lot without context. In this case the “context” is the current economic meltdown. The Society for Information Management (SIM) released the results of their 2008 IT Trends Survey – predicting an “upbeat” forecast for IT jobs; the HUGE caveat here is that the study was conducted before all the recent economic woes. Apparently organizations are using IT to drive efficiencies, streamline operations, and cut costs rather than just slashing the IT budget to save money during the downturn. What would be a nice follow-up: a quick second survey comparing responses before and after. Regardless Jerry Luftman, SIM vice president of academic affairs, still says the survey results demonstrate “that the overall state of IT remains very strong.”
The sky is falling! Trip Chowdhry, the analyst with Global Equities Research who claimed Red Hat was ‘rubbish and the entire LAMP stack is potty, too’ published some eye-opening predictions, predominantly negative, about tech business in Silicon Valley. Now Chowdhry claims that “almost every VC funded open-source company is struggling and will run out of money within the next six months.” (Probably not the most unbiased guy about open source) Matt Asay argues that organizations in general are struggling, but open-source companies are not that high on the list. (But are they high on the VC “axe” list??) He notes Alfresco, Pentaho and JasperSoft are some of the players with ‘millions in the bank and growing revenue.’ Asay also says Chowdhry has a responsibility to do real due diligence and not create myths. Take that, Chicken Little! (img from Disney-Clipart)
We’re not as far behind as we thought we were. Google presented the results of a study they conducted about how IPv6- capable “ordinary users” are at the RIPE meeting in Dubai a few weeks ago. Turns out Apple Macs drive IPv6 penetration in the US. Fifty-two percent of all IPv6 users in the U.S. own a Mac and use 6to4 (creating IPv6 addresses from an IPv4 address and tunneling packets) – making the US fifth in the list of countries using IPv6. Russia and France took first and second place with .76 and .65 percent IPv6-enabled traffic . The US is at .45 percent. Worldwide, 0.238 percent of Google users’ systems are IPv6-enabled and prefer to use IPv6 over IPv4.
Obama’s win = Google’s win? Apparently Google CEO Eric Schmidt and President-Elect Obama are very good buddies and “this terrifies Microsoft”. Now competitors are more on guard against Google’s growing empire and popularity. Although Schmidt was mentioned as a possible candidate for the country’s new national CTO position, he said he would not accept the post if asked. I guess that’s one less thing Microsoft has to worry about.
Popularity: 5% [?]
November 17th, 2008
November 17th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio
Boy, time flies when you’re having fun. I’ve just gotten my first opportunity to look back at the statistics from Interop NY 2008. Of all the statistics, the ticketing ones have proven to be the most interesting - especially when you compare them to the Las Vegas show earlier in the year. If you look back at the details of that ticketing review the stats clearly showed that most tickets were opened due to user error. In NY, while “user error” dominated the other categories, “facilities” came a close second. The InteropNet Help Desk opened a total of 94 tickets during Interop NY. Of these tickets, 42 turned out to be user error. Coming in second, with 17 tickets were issues with the facilities, with the most common issue being cabling that had gotten damaged between installation and the time the exhibitor was trying to use it. In Las Vegas, despite the show being significantly larger, we only saw 6 tickets of that type. I guess you can chalk that up as yet another reason that doing shows at The Javits Center is so much fun! (Don’t ask Julia about dealing with the Javits Center. She’ll talk your ear off.)
After Interop Las Vegas you may have seen our analysis of the data that we collected and delivered in our NOC view. I thought I’d recreate the same data for NY and do a short comparison.
1) Like in Vegas, uptime for the network 100%. This is no small feat considering that we introduced a new wrinkle in NY, taking down the primary NOC while the education portion of the show was still going on. This was a forced failover to the backup systems, and it went flawlessly. I’d like to give a little credit to EM7 on the 100% uptime as it caught a failover to battery power that allowed AC to be restored before a series of critical equipment would have gone down.
2) Again like Vegas, the average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization. Still lots of computing overhead availabe in the show network.
3) The NY show network wasn’t nearly as busy as in Las Vegas, sustaining an average of only 27Mbps of usage (versus 56 Mbps) in Vegas.
4) Power consumption for the network and NOC in NY clocked in at 445kwh per day, about 25% less than the Las Vegas show. This wasn’t because the equipment was any more power efficient, but instead because the show was smaller and therefore there was less network gear.
5) Finally, a stat we didn’t track too carefully in Las Vegas, but that I find interesting. During show hours the wireless network average 1,100 users attached. That’s a lot of people and a lot of wireless devices.
The good news is there was nothing too unexpected in the data, overall the smaller show led to a smaller number of tickets and smaller consumption of resources across the board. We hope to have the opportunity to work with the InteropNet team again next year and take a look at this data year-over-year for each show.
Popularity: 5% [?]
November 17th, 2008
November 12th, 2008 by Julia Lim
I have to say that Part II of this session was much anticipated after the lively interaction yesterday. It turned out to be less of a debate and more like a fireside chat. (image from pro.corbis.com)
The analysts paired up today:
Antonio Piraino (Tier1 Research)
William Fellows (The 451 Group)
My usual disclaimers on live-blogging: doesn’t include everything covered (just what was most interesting to me) and had to paraphrase some answers because I simply cannot type that fast.
Quick definition of Cloud Computing
WF: The cloud is a continuum of grid, virtualization and utility done right. It is about provisioning services instead of servers; flexible computing instead of fixed assets. Done right, the cloud abstracts users from the complexity of grid. Cloud computing is IT as a service. Cloud computing is the Third Way – not entirely in-house or outsourced, but an optimized hybridized version of both. In light of the Goldman Sachs report out resetting IT spending forecast from up 6% to down 1%, don’t underestimate the ability for enterprises to move from capex to opex by buying cloud computing instead of building it themselves.
The 451 Group conducted a survey on cloud computing in March, and then revisited it a month ago. Some interesting results:
- 84% have no plans to develop an internal cloud. 5% had no answer to this question. And for the 10% who did answer – the uses for a private/internal cloud were the same as those for a public cloud.
- Top 6 vendors they look to help them develop an internal cloud: Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, HP, Oracle, VMware
Is it all “upside” when it comes to cloud computing?
WF: Watch out for the Trojan horse, the red flag. What about the software needed to manage all this stuff? Any management software needs to take a holistic approach to solve the problem.
AP: Increased management requirements and capability – this is actually a great story for managed hosters who can hold your hand while getting you up into the cloud. Hosters alleviate the pain points, and this is why we’re going to see continued growth and focus in the managed hosting sector.
WF: I would argue that they’re too expensive. Look at Amazon – 10 cents a hit adds up.
AP: It’s almost impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison between cloud providers. One reason is that they charge differently. I’d say that when you’re talking about the big cloud providers, you are right – that they are expensive over the long-term, but for use in the short-term, they can be optimal.
WF: The cloud is setting big expectations. Can IT deliver? It’s nice to talk about “shared resources for the greater good” but in any organization, you will still run into issues of power and control! Plus it’s still early days for resolution of regulatory issues and compliance around the cloud.
Final Thoughts
AP: Think of the opportunities of using cloud computing resources in the areas of testing and pre-production – short-term use/environment (quick up/quick down), inexpensive, opex not capex. We’re already seeing the cloud fostering much innovation.
WF: “It’s okay to fall in love with the term.” It is real but keep the expectations lower and realistic.
AP: I agree with you. The reality is that the cloud is driving a very fundamental underlying platform change. This is not just a term or something that will fall out of fashion. There’s a real need to build trust in the cloud and leveraging shared resources in this way – so use the cloud computing term cautiously; don’t abuse it and make the cloud seem like IT’s new toy.
Popularity: 8% [?]
November 12th, 2008
November 11th, 2008 by Julia Lim
I’m out at The 451 Group Client Conference in Boston, lovely Boston. It’s been over ten years since I lived here, but somehow Boston always has a feel of home.
After meetings and calls, I was finally able to slip into a conference session – just in time to catch uber-smart analysts Rachel Chalmers (The 451 Group) and Dan Golding (Tier1 Research) engage in a lively and not-so-mock debate on “Hosting Meets the Cloud”.
Now this doesn’t cover the entire debate – and part II is coming tomorrow. But what it does cover is the most interesting questions (to me) and paraphrase the points made by the analysts. I thought they both had very interesting points and more similarities than differences in the end; the real difference is how they thought about the issues and through what lens – for Rachel it was the enterprise and for Dan it was managed hosting providers. (image from inmagine)
Question: What is a cloud and why?
Dan: Shared infrastructure leveraged/run by third parties for the benefit of enterprises, developers, etc. This is not a new idea – just recently “rebranded.” Given all the discussion and disagreement over this now, what will the cloud end up looking like?
Rachel: The cloud is “IT infrastructure as a service” down to the level of a server operating system. Take the example of Amazon web services – in this case it’s not just the infrastructure but also the internal processes built around service delivery, e.g., provisioning, that are being exposed as a commodity to external customers.
Dan’s Question for Rachel: In your opinion, how much is the cloud a fad versus CIOs really trying to solve a problem?
Rachel: For the practical, roll-up-your-sleeves types of CIOs – those coming up from the engineering ranks – that I talk to, the cloud is real, as opposed to SOA and middleware.
What about “internal” cloud computing – built and maintained by an enterprise versus a third-party provider?
Dan: Cloud computing is done by providers for customers. Certainly there are enterprises that have made internal computing investments, e.g., for publishing, large-scale phone systems, etc - but they were stupid ideas thought up by companies that have too much money. A better question here is does it make any sense for an enterprise to create their own cloud? While an enterprise can play at it, they can’t do it cost-effectively, not in a way that a third party provider can.
Rachel: Many CIOs have “managed-hoster” envy – for things like chargeback and billing that hosters understand and do better. Of course there has been a rise in automation and virtualization tools in the enterprise which may not be as efficient and built for scalability as a hoster can achieve, but what is important is that they are customized/specialized for that business.
Dan: Can you give a specific example of optimization to make it worthwhile for enterprises to do it themselves?
Rachel: One example is sovereignty. The privacy laws around financial and healthcare information are not the same everywhere. Clouds and their geographically-dispersed data centers don’t necessarily have “national” borders. This is definitely a concern for the CIO that has to comply with regulations in their industry around privacy protection, for instance. Another example is security. Dow Chemical does a lot of work via joint ventures and has a need to provide but lock down desktops given to contractors as corporate workspaces. For their level of security, they need to “own” their computing resources.
Dan: But why can’t someone like SunGard provide that as they do for many other large companies?
Rachel: It comes down to a question of trust.
Do people trust their hosting providers?
Dan: Yes. Whether it’s for a content delivery network or collocation, the customers of hosting providers are some of the largest companies in the world in industries like energy and financial services. Give me a case when there was a major security issue with a hosting company. In fact, managed hosting providers usually provide better security than enterprises are capable of.
And a question provided by an attendee from EMC: A few years ago, this would have been a grid discussion. How is the cloud different?
Rachel: Grid computing ended up being applicable only for niches – which I predicted. The real opportunity for everyone else with the cloud only comes up when you combine the kinds of automation tools (originally developed for grid computing) with x86 virtualization.
Dan: I agree. Grid was a niche play. There were very few orgs that needed it and that the economics worked for. There were very few enterprises for whom it made sense to build their own for. The cloud is shared/leveraged versus grid computing. It economically makes sense in a way grid never did.
Popularity: 8% [?]
November 11th, 2008
November 7th, 2008 by Julia Lim
Government contractors spill their thoughts about how Obama’s historic win will affect the industry. A majority of those questioned agreed to the fact that nothing will change overnight and everything will occur within 2-3 years. Others expressed thoughts on who will lead procurement and acquisition policy at GSA and OMB, as well as a possible hiring freeze for the government workforce. We’re also waiting to see what will happen to FISMA and IPv6 compliance going forward as a new administration and new OMB management sets their own agendas and mandates.
Due to the slow economy, most tech companies are being cautious and ratcheting back sales forecasts for software and hardware. The exception: Infra-Strategy, a company that operates a group of Web sites that help people find a lawyer and info to deal with bankruptcies, divorces and DUI cases. Visits to the sites are booming – with visits to totaldivorce.com, for example, up 112% in October 2008 (I found the picture on the website particularly compelling). Apparently, in bad times, divorce rates go up. Who knew?
Is it always a recession when it comes to IT Operations? Companies are constantly trying to find ways to do more with less in IT – reducing costs but keeping the same or even adding functionality – deploying technologies that drive IT consolidation such as mobile and remote access, unified communications and virtualization. Chris Silva of The Forrester Blog for IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals is looking for a research panel to find out what fellow IT companies are doing to keep their IT budgets in check. To join the research panel visit: http://itpanel.forrester.com/.
The Cloud Computing Monopoly debate continues. O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly and technology writer Nicholas Carr (of “IT Doesn’t Matter” fame/infamy) have been discussing the ‘potential for a single company to achieve monopoly control of the world of cloud computing.’ But what’s even more interesting is the “who will make a lot of money” in cloud computing question.
Popularity: 8% [?]
November 7th, 2008
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