The Future- New, Condensed and Improved.

RE: Cloud = IT Part 1. What the cloud means to the corporate data center

community@netapp.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:22:05 GMT

Thanks Ray- Your observations are right on and give me an opportunity to clarify the point.

The budget is absolutely the domain of the business. Which is why IT practioners need to evolve our thinking about how we deliver value to the business.

The old way was pretty much project based thinking. The business would ask for a new feature or service and we would evaluate options and do an ROI about how we would satisfy the request. If we could bring the service in at a price that made sense, the project moved forward. Otherwise we looked at scope options and lastly we might look to alternative delivery.

There are two problems with this approach.

First, the cost of simply having an IT department is not factored into the ROI. Simply having a data center exposes the project to a number of costs that IT does not factor into the traditional project ROI. For example, Gartner says that 55% of all IT departments have neverf seen the power bill for thier data center. And power is 33% of the cost of running a data center. Seems like a big miss.

Second, most IT deparments do not have a charge back discipline. If they are unable to account for utilization, a feature of chargeback, then they are unable to measure the cost of change for delivering any one service.

Those two problems are solved by Cloud providers. Because aaS providers must deliver a simple Service Catalog with predictable prices, the business can easily understand the total cost of TRYING a project in the cloud.

Yes, the Cloud will win part of the business IT has traditionally delivered, the question is what part of the pie should they win?

I believe that Internal IT departments can be very efficient. But we need to adopt some of the business practices that the cloud providers have adopted. Co-Tenancy, the ability to charge back and a simple service catalog.

I agree with your statement "If Letting someone else run part of our infrasturuct ... is a better choice for the business then we should be ahead of the game" .

Hopefully, this dialog can help us to understand how we can help the business make an informed decision. Which means we IT practitioners need to adopt architectures that compete in an emerging marketplace and we need to know how to be proce competative!

Thanks for keeping this interesting!

RE: Cloud = IT Part 1. What the cloud means to the corporate data center

community@netapp.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:44:42 GMT

There are two perspectives woven into this article which I found a little confusing.

On the one hand there is the IT practitioner perspective highlighted in the statement:

Corporate IT practitioners have competition. Our competitors are organized and they want your budget.

Perhaps this is a wake up call to IT practioners but I have a problem with it. The budget is ultimately the business's and not IT's, and the IT practioner should be aiming to do what is right for the business and not the IT bit of the business. If letting someone else run part of our infrastructure, say with SaaS or IaaS, is a better choice for the business then we should be ahead of the game and evangelising this rather than adopting a defensive posture.

On the other hand the more general perspective of the article is from the outside observing an industry trend. With the general tenet being that the flow towards more IaaS and SaaS is inevitible with a destination of an 80%/20% split of cloud/local being likely, and we need to go with it.

These two different perspectives in the article may really reflect a divide between the "insiders", entrenched practioners getting on with their locally-hosted infrastructure in a rough business cliamte, and seeing the cloud as hype (of which there is more than a little). And "outsiders", industry watchers, early adopters and others who can see a major change happening, but it has lots of parties jockeying for position and muddying the waters.

RE: Cloud = IT: Part 0. Dimensions of the Cloud

community@netapp.com — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:53:26 GMT

Thanks Chris,

You make some great points- particularly the part about the cloud being fluffy and not clearly defined. But it seems like the attributes of the cloud have been pretty much agreed upon- which is why this blog post is post number 0. I haven't really offered anything new here.

I think that the Cloud is real- but it the main features of our future using cloud computing will not be found in products. They will be found in how we consume information processing solutions.

And thats what I hope to explore in the upcoming posts. What does all this mean to the IT practitioner? How do we build new data centers? Do we need to build new data centers? How does IT manage data when any business unit with a credit card can deploy a new application?

This is interesting stuff and we need to discuss our future if we are to shape it!

It's a very exciting time to be in IT!

RE: Cloud = IT: Part 0. Dimensions of the Cloud

ckranz@b2net.co.uk — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:39:03 GMT

Does Dave Hitz get credit for starting at 0?

The "Cloud" stuff to me is a big marketing buzz. There is some great concepts involved, and some great ideas, but these certainly are not new ideas. It's a great buzz to get people thinking about how to make their IT strategy more efficient and robust, but it really doesn't change the way we do business. Are companies rushing to out-source their IT infrastructures into a "Cloud" presence? Not that I've seen. And as you say, the big corporations with large IT infrastructures can embrace the "Cloud" concepts and ideas, but honestly, they've been doing this for years.

Lets take some of the criteria for what defines "Cloud" and reflect on these with 2 of my favourite companies, NetApp and VMware...

It is Scalable

NetApp has been scalable in storage for years, hot adding disks into an aggregate, hot growing volumes on the fly, all been freely (note, free!) on all their storage appliances for around 4-5 years now.

VMware has brought the same flexibility to the x86 hardware platform. We can easily (not freely ) add extra hardware and expand the resources we have with no downtime to the existing infrastructure. A large environment would be pro-actively investing in new hardware to predict growth so that this is seamless to the end-user. Outside of the x86 hardware platform, we have seen this for years! In fact it is one of the backbones of the *nix and mainframe architecture almost since it's birth!

Multi Tennant (It has the capability of serving more than one "customer" at a time)

NetApp have been providing this via Multi-Store for some time, and this is a very powerful way of segregating out your storage. Even if you don't need all the features of Multi-Store, you still have the ability to secure different areas of the storage system with VLAN's, LUN masking, NFS subnet masks and so on. I don't remember a time where you could not multi-tennant a storage array, again, it's one of the fundamental designs of securing a device.

Again, VMware have been supplying this almost since the beginning. A Virtual Machine can be segregated completely by simply giving it it's own network. Further more there are now appliances and new functionality in VSphere to provide firewall level security practices across a Virtual Infrastructure. This makes secure multi-tennancy very simple.

On Demand (If you want it now, you get it now)

To be honest, I'm not sure of the difference between this and point 1, "Is it scalable". If it is scalable, then it is available on demand. All the things that make NetApp scalable, also make it available on demand. VMware have the same benefits.

Pay as you go (<-- what that says)

Operations Manager, previously DFM have supplied us with a cross billing mechanism for storage for several years now. Maybe not pay-as-you-go, but pay-as-you-used-last-month. Reactive billing for services as they are used is quite tricky, but retrospective billing based on usage has been with us for many years. The trick is to calculate the actual cost of storage. I'd love to meet the person who has come up with a definitive method for calculating this!

I agree that that is just really looking at the infrastructure level (director level FC and Ethernet switches have been hot-pluggable for a long time, and base switches are easily stacked or ISL'd). The application level is entirely dependent on the application. Most modern applications can scale in some form or other fairly simply now. yes they need to be architected efficiently from the start, but that goes without saying for most uses.

So really, what is "Cloud"? I think it is just a marketing buzz to get people through the current culture we are in. We have had all the make-up and expertise that "Cloud" promises us for years, and most of us have been implementing and delivering this for years. XXaaS, anything as-a-service has been something that we IT people have always been offering, isn't that fundamentally what IT is?

That said, I think "Cloud" is also a terrible term for showing people the future, and giving them a solution. A cloud by it's very nature is all fluffy and wooly, not clearly defined, and often leads to rain and storms! Based in the UK, I often look out of my office window onto a cloudy city vista, nothing could be more miserable and depressing than clouds everywhere! Bring me the sunshine!!!