Sep 03

The “Private Cloud is not the Cloud”, said Werner Vogels

Industry No Comments »

The first time I saw Werner Vogels present was about 2 years ago at a conference keynote in SFO. Sitting amongst a couple thousand storage and data management architects and engineers, I got this strange sensation the Dutch had taken over the planet of IT and I was sitting amongst legions of luddites, completely obvious to the tsunami of change upon the horizon. Even Werner’s PowerPoint style embodied this futuristic minimalist format with super-crisp concepts and ideas that somehow blended IT architecture genius and Baby Einstein graphics into something meaningful. So, as the room emptied out, the group think = ‘wow, that was cool, what just happened’.

Flash forward a couple of years and now most people are talking about cloud and not many really have a firm definition of what it is. I’m just glad to see Werner is taking a stand and calling it out: a private cloud is not the cloud. All of the classic IT vendors are rapidly promoting their wares as gateways to the cloud, when in fact they are pushing the same old capital intensive approach to IT infrastructure.

This is at the heart of this blog: to bridge the classic world of IT infrastructure to the emerging model of operating cash-driven infrastructure services. You look at Amazon’s latest advance, merging EC2 compute services and virtual private networking, and this is taking a significant step towards ‘data center friendly’ cloud architecture. If I can buy multi-carrier MPLS circuits between my data centers, and also between my data centers and Amazon data centers, what’s the difference?

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Jul 21

Google Data Centers – a Glimpse into our Future

Enterprise Technology 3 Comments »

5 years ago, your average data center hosting 10,000 servers looked like a linoleum covered football field,  was wicked cold, yet had plenty of aisles where you could break a sweat due to warm air-current hot-spots. In the early century, air-convection planning and floor-space reconfigurations were considered ‘green’ strategies to reduce environmental costs.Google

Flash forward to, uh now, for those who haven’t seen the video of google data centers, this is an interesting glimpse into the world of massive-scale distributed computing on the cheap and the green.

First, some observations:

What you see:

  • Lots of modular components: starting with containers, basic power and plumbing conduits, heat-exchangers, and lots of open-case x86 kit crammed into high-density confined spaces.
  • An obsessive design focus on minimizing the Power Usage Effectiveness ratio
  • Centralized cooling and power infrastructure and many non-descript containers in a warehouse rack configuration
  • Vertical distribution of gear and workload (way beyond the scale of your average data center rack)
  • As noted in the exceptionally dry video dialogue, 45000 servers across 45 containers (1000 servers per container), in a single warehouse type facility
  • (now, close your eyes and imagine Google running on over 450,000 servers world wide and tell me if you’re going to sign up for a yahoo account tomorrow)

What don’t you see?

  • No raised floor, specialized rooms or floors built for data center infrastructure
  • The classic air conditioned hockey-rink full of heat generating equipment
  • Large volumes of ambient space being cooled
  • Centralized UPS / Power Fail-Safe equipment
  • No cooling or power machines competing for compute space
  • Vendor labels (notice, no labels whatsoever)
  • Specialized hardware – in fact the hardware is engineered to be dead simple and uniform (which is relatively easy to do if your business runs massively distributed custom application code)

If you’re watching the Google drip-feed of information about their data centers, the innovation is absolutely incredible. The latest news about the chiller-less data center in Belgium, you see geography, climatology, IT infrastructure, and geographic load-balancing strategy all in play, with a goal to load-balance work away from Belgium on hot days, and not rely on a single chiller. That’s seriously more innovative than creating warm/cold air convection cells in your raised-floor meat-locker. Maybe my earth sciences degree will come in handy for IT work after all…

Next, if you take a look at the major IT infrastructure vendors, we now have a horse race to emulate big modularized x86 kit in a box, ready for rapid deployment and consumption. Sun arguably pioneered the concept several years ago with the modular data center, and now we have pods, pods, and more pods.

In the larger picture, these innovations seem to validate Friedman’s semi-futuristic speculation in Hot, Flat, & Crowded, of the convergence between power grid and IT infrastructure. Granted, it will take years, if not decades to purge legacy systems and applications, but for your average enterprise planning on ‘massively virtualized’, this isn’t a far-stretch of the imagination to see where centralized infrastructure could possibly take hold for large parts of IT infrastructure. Absolutely, there are scores of dependencies and assumptions which must be true for this to work.

The Google drip feed also shed’s light on why cloud computing is more than just a link to the next best data center. As a buddy of mine put it, ‘maybe the people who want to build their own cloud are missing the point’.

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Jul 08

Nothing Says Love like Cold Hard Cash: EMC wins the Data Domain Bidding War.

Enterprise Technology No Comments »

The biggest drama in the 2007-2009 storage industry is over. NetApp loses Data Domain.

This is very bad news for Quantum and FalconSTOR, leaves NetApp in a less than desirable position to market, and puts EMC in a strong technology position.  With a capital infusion of 2.3 billion, EMC is going to lead aggressively and move more kit than we can collectively imagine with the Data Domain acquisition.

For Quantum, their main channel was EMC through a not too shabby product line up (if you exclude the Franken-EDL with Deduplication), which extended through the Dell relationship to the mid-market, with a collective wide and deep market reach. That’s going away.

For FalconSTOR, the EMC relationship presumably ends with EDL. EMC still pushes EDL due to the fact it’s a solid product and does a great job at being a non-deduplicated VTL. But nontheless deduplication for backup data storage on disk is usually a deal-maker when you do the capacity sizing and are getting 8:1 deduplication or better.

For NetApp, it’s back to square one with kind of late-to-market VTL+deduplication offering that has yet to even scratch the powerful legacy of the NAS product lineup.

For EMC, things just got a lot more interesting. EMC has acquired arguably the most ‘proven’ deduplication feature set in the field (if you could instances and years in production). While some real engineering will be required for Data Domain deduplication to legitimately play in the primary storage space, the collective deduplication, virtualization, and security capabilities of EMC (Data Domain, VMWARE, RSA), position EMC with a mad toolkit for the cloud storage game. And in the meantime, a simple and proven product offering to market in the small-mid-enterprise market for VTL/NAS deduplication is ready to roll.

Plus, EMC has done a great job of acquiring companies and not screwing them up over the last several years. That is of course if you look past the Data General acquisition and the 2nd-class citizenry of the CLARiiON line, which persists to this day as a result of an ego-driven acquisition. I’d speculate EMC plays somewhat softer and smarter these days, and is going to make this work and take advantage of the investment.

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Jun 28

Legends and Realities

Enterprise Services No Comments »

How many times have you loaded up the charter boat, got a client excited about a grand vision, gone to sea, and returned home with no catch? When customers have large complex problems, presenting them with large complex stories doesn’t help. It’s the worst thing you could do.

In the services business, if a customer is giving you air-time, the reality is they know they need help and direction from an outside source. By presenting a vision of the destination, without illuminating the path, you’re skipping the opportunity to create focus. If you can’t create focus at the onset, what kind of mess are you going to create in an actual engagement? This is why a lot of high level strategy engagements require massive ‘remediation’ efforts in the aftermath – all style and no substance.

Customers are going to pay for outside services if you can make complex problems simple, and provide results in dramatically reduced times. This is where the ’smartest guy in the room’ can accomplish negative selling, by weaving a complex tale of end-results, yet leave the customer without any idea of how to get there or tangible next steps. Free advice, which usually is worth every penny and is exactly what drives good services opportunities into the ground.

You have to make it easy for the customer to contract and make decisions. People no longer have time and won’t make the time for a complex services sell. The business world and people’s personal lives are moving too fast and are too chaotic for 1985 style ‘how can I help you, and what can you pay me’ consulting services. That model is not only worn, but it’s dying a slow painful death.

Bottom line, if you spend hours with a customer giving free advice and don’t identify focused initiatives and next steps, you’re wasting everyone’s time and worse you’re delaying the opportunity to get work done. So what’s the alternative?

1) Lead with a clear position on the industry and technology.

2) Take a clear stand: even if you run the risk of alienating 20% of your potential prospects, the other 80% may be better clients anyhow since their looking for outside help, versus a debate. Tire-kicking is non-productive.

3) Play it straight and practical, and focus on getting things done.

4) Make progress real-time. Create focus, lead with results instead of theory.

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Jun 25

Why This, Why Now?

Industry No Comments »

The mission?

To research, spot, and explore trends and their real world impact as they apply to the next generation of IT infrastructure and enterprise computing.phase shift

Why this blog?

Because there aren’t many independents covering this space in a holistic way. Plenty of ‘company blogs’ but not so many IT infrastructure people. There are plenty of niche bloggers and evangelists who are super deep in various specialities, such as virtualization, storage, deduplication, data protection, and cloud, but few who are looking at the wholesale change underway for IT infrastructure. At first I thought I was late to the party but upon further inquiry realized the party is just starting…

why now?

There’s a lot of hype in IT, it keeps the spending and budgeting up.

Cloud is hype city without a whole lot of focus or clarity yet. I just look at the vast inefficiencies in classic IT infrastructure versus the radically innovative core infrastructures of Amazon, Google, etc and think the cloud gateway to these architectures will crush IT as we know it for some data types, some types of companies, in many different situations. Labor arbitrage for enterprise infrastructure management could become irrelevant over time if next generation architectures flatten out skill requirements.  Why now? It’s timing.

WAN Network architectures are fatter and cheaper. Cheap petabyte scale infrastructures are do-able and you don’t necessarily have to hack together custom built gear and code to make it work. And most importantly you have base of technologies for virtualization, grid, deduplication, all rapidly becoming commoditized, and now cloud emerging as the gateway to super efficient architecture. This is more than just the next wave of Moore’s law and new feature sets or gadget buzz. This is a phase shift.

Why should people read it?

To keep up, to contribute, to challenge ideas, to address a plethora of good questions. Because the whole idea we are used to and for many of us the basic paradigm of distributed computing “as we learned it” and is staple to our entire careers, may in fact be changing. Were talking about 20 years of one model and entering into the next 20 years of the new new new thing. And the practical impacts to us, well that’s really yet to be seen but it’s a fair bet certain roles, functions, and technologies will begin to disappear in the next 5 years as we shift gears into the next 20 year cycle of IT infrastructure.

Who should read it?

Technologists, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, strategists, designers, scientists, researchers, and thinkers who share a common curiosity of what is going to happen to IT infrastructure as we know it.

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