Educause 2011 - InCommon becomes more common

InCommon is a federated identity consortium.  It sets up the trust that is needed for information providers (like JStore) to authenticate the students and employees at colleges and universities trying to use their services.  At F&M, when someone tries to access information on a server that is located here, we use LDAP to authenticate them so that the server can decide if they are authorized to access that information.  When that information is not at F&M, authentication becomes much more difficult, which is where Shibboleth and InCommon come in.  They provide the bridge between the information provider and the information consumer.  We are in the final stages of getting setting up this bridge at F&M.

I noticed a lot more buzz about InCommon at the conference.  The reason for this is a shift in emphasis.  When I went to Interop in May, the talk was about what needed to be done IF you moved to the cloud.  At Educause, it was a discussion about WHEN you moved to the cloud.

The Internet2 organization seems to understand this.  They have started a new initiative called Net+ which is all about providing services, and not about the network itself.  They are busy brokering deals with SaaS vendors to make it easy for members of Internet2 to use these services.  The model is that Internet2 contracts with the vendor and then the colleges and universities that want that service are billed by Internet2.

InCommon fits into this model and in some ways is the keystone that makes it work.  In order the colleges and universities to be able to work with information providers, they need to have a mechanism for authentication.  So as Internet2 is working with the vendors, they are getting them hooked up to Internet2 and getting them into InCommon.

With Internet2 pushing InCommon and more and more vendors coming on board, I expect mentions of InCommon to become more common.

Philly cityscape at sunset

Google reception at the Academy of Natural Science

T-Rex at the Academy of Natural Sciences

Mobile computing

The answer is a)

Educause bound

I am heading out tomorrow for the Educause conference in Philadelphia.  I am looking forward to picking up information in lot of different areas.  The area that tops the list is Google Apps for Education and it looks like there will be lots of opportunities to gather information and talk to people who are ahead of us in implementing it.

Final list of vendors and sessions attended at Interop

Here's the final list that was emailed to me of exhibitors who scanned my badge and sessions that I attended.  I know I visited way more than 43 booths, so I'm not sure what happened.  The session list seems fairly accurate.  Feel free to ask me about anything you see that peeks your interest.

Exhibitor Booth Scans:	43
Sessions Attended:	19

Exhibitor Booth Scans Scan Date Exhibiting Company URL 5/9/2011 10:17 AM NaviSite, Inc. www.navisite.com 5/10/2011 11:24 AM Safari Books Online www.safaribooksonline.com 5/10/2011 11:37 AM FireHost, Inc www.firehost.com 5/10/2011 11:48 AM Citrix Systems www.citrix.com 5/10/2011 12:09 PM ManageEngine (Zoho Corporation) www.manageengine.com 5/10/2011 12:16 PM Spirent Communications www.spirent.com 5/10/2011 12:21 PM New Horizons Computer Learning Centers newhorizons.com 5/10/2011 12:24 PM WildPackets, Inc. wildpackets.com 5/10/2011 12:29 PM Alcatel-Lucent (c/o MC²) www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal?COUNTRY_CODE=US&COOKIE_SET=false 5/10/2011 12:38 PM NetSupport Inc. netsupport-inc.com 5/10/2011 12:39 PM CXtec www.cxtec.com 5/10/2011 12:48 PM Diskeeper Corporation diskeeper.com 5/10/2011 12:49 PM APCON www.apcon.com 5/10/2011 12:55 PM Symmetricom symmetricom.com 5/10/2011 12:58 PM OFC/NFOEC www.ofcnfoec.org 5/10/2011 1:01 PM Smith Micro Software Inc smithmicro.com 5/10/2011 1:06 PM DisplayLink Corp displaylink.com 5/10/2011 4:40 PM Eaton Corporation eaton.com/powerquality 5/10/2011 6:31 PM Rackspace Hosting www.rackspace.com 5/11/2011 12:45 PM VeriSign www.verisigninc.com 5/11/2011 12:46 PM Brocade www.brocade.com 5/11/2011 12:48 PM Gigamon www.gigamon.com 5/11/2011 1:01 PM Axis Communications www.axis.com/ 5/11/2011 1:25 PM Symplified www.symplified.com 5/11/2011 1:34 PM Transition Networks www.transition.com 5/11/2011 1:39 PM Blue Coat Systems, Inc. www.bluecoat.com/ 5/11/2011 1:42 PM Securence www.securence.com/ 5/11/2011 1:51 PM Honeywell Batteries honeywellbatteries.com 5/11/2011 2:06 PM Network Hardware Resale www.networkhardware.com/ 5/11/2011 2:10 PM Riverbed www.riverbed.com 5/11/2011 4:17 PM Barracuda Networks www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en 5/11/2011 4:20 PM VMware www.vmware.com 5/11/2011 4:39 PM ESRI www.esri.com 5/12/2011 12:44 PM Arista Networks www.aristanetworks.com 5/12/2011 12:47 PM F5 Networks www.f5.com 5/12/2011 12:57 PM Namescape www.namescape.com 5/12/2011 1:49 PM Tripwire, Inc. tripwire.com 5/12/2011 1:51 PM Hosting.com www.hosting.com 5/12/2011 2:12 PM EMC emc.com 5/12/2011 2:14 PM Electric Cloud electric-cloud.com 5/12/2011 2:40 PM Extreme Networks, Inc www.extremenetworks.com 5/12/2011 2:48 PM APC apc.com 5/12/2011 2:49 PM Xirrus xirrus.com Sessions/Activity Scans Session Date Activity Name Recordings URL 5/8/2011 8:30 AM Enterprise Cloud Summit - Public Clouds www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/workshops-tripreport.php 5/9/2011 8:30 AM Enterprise Cloud Summit - Private Clouds www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/workshops-tripreport.php 5/10/2011 8:00 AM Tuesday Morning Keynotes interop.com/lv/2011/free 5/10/2011 10:00 AM T-Shirt Giveaway 5/10/2011 10:15 AM The Big Questions: Wireless/Mobile Analyst Roundtable www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/10/2011 11:30 AM What is the Impact of Cloud Computing on the Network? www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/10/2011 1:00 PM Tuesday Afternoon Keynotes interop.com/lv/2011/free 5/10/2011 2:15 PM Mac, iPhone & iPad: New Threats in The Traditional Enterprise www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/10/2011 3:30 PM Breakthrough LAN Technologies www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/11/2011 8:30 AM Wednesday Morning Keynotes interop.com/lv/2011/free 5/11/2011 10:15 AM Cloud Storage: DR for Free - Everything in Parallel www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/11/2011 11:30 AM Best Practices for Desktop and Application Virtualization www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/11/2011 2:00 PM Making Sense of Multi-Path Ethernet Networks www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/11/2011 3:15 PM The Real Next Generation Network www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/12/2011 9:00 AM Virtualization + Management & Automation = Private Cloud? www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/12/2011 9:00 AM Making the Case for Storage Virtualization www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/12/2011 10:15 AM Best Practices: The Road From Server Virtualization/Consolidation to Private Cloud www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/12/2011 11:30 AM Building VMware Private Clouds www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php 5/12/2011 1:00 PM NOC Tour - Thu 1pm

Netflix Passes Piracy in U.S. Net Traffic

An interesting blog describing how Netflix traffic in now larger than peer to peer.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/netflix-traffic/

Both sides of a cloud

I saw this cartoon today and couldn't resist posting it, given all the posting I did about clouds last week.

iPad wrap-up

I thought I should do a wrap-up post on how the iPad worked for the trip. To be brief, I would say it worked very well. I would not hesitate in taking one again. The combination of the iPad and the Bluetooth keyboard worked very well, especially when there was a table.

The battery life of the iPad was great and I never had to change the batteries in the keyboard. The lightness of my bag was also wonderful, especially at the end of the day. In short, all of the advantages I hoped for before I left were borne out.

The iPad was wonderful on the plane flights, which is something I hadn't though of. It worked well for blogging. The slides posted to my blog were done by downloading the presentation slides on the iPad, taking a screen shot of the one I wanted and then posting the resulting jpeg by sending it to a secret email address. The photos, by the way, all came from my iPhone and were posted using the same secret email address.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any time I wished I had a laptop. I had to think about different ways to do some things and I did download a couple of apps to do some things that I hadn't thought about ahead of time. My typing skills with the virtual keyboard did improve as there were many times that the bluetooth keyboard was not convenient. This post is being done with just the virtual keyboard.

Having the 3G iPad was important. There were a number of times when I didn't have wi-fi and even more times when the wi-fi was either very slow or not working at all. When that happened, I simply turned off the wi-fi an kept going. That said, I will say that having a wireless access point in my hotel room worked out nicely.

All in all, it was a great experience!

The benefits of attending a conference

It would be easy to say that conferences are not as useful as they once were, given the huge amount of information that is available on the web. All the web sites, online documents, webinars, etc. do provide a lot of useful information.

There is a difference though.  That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week.  I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.

Why is going to a conference so different?  Let me tell you.

Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless.  Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not.  Finding out what they thought about a presentation.  It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me.  I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.

Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important.  The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important.  Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.

The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry.  The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing.  The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network.  So what good does a firewall do you in that case?

Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you.  Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing?  Does this person really know what they are talking about?  Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.

As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet.  The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there.  At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.

So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference.  It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come.   Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours.  Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Getting our heads out of the sand and into the clouds

One of the underlying themes I've been sensing is that we have been spending way too much time on keeping existing systems going and not nearly enough time on looking to the future.  It's the 80/20 rule that one of my blog posts talked about.  I feel like, in some ways, we've had our heads in the sand for the last few years.  We make changes to our infrastructure, but we don't spend a lot of time talking and planning for how the changes we make will effect our clients and what their needs are and will be.

At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud.  We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time.  I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around.  I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.

The cloud is more than just technology.  It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients.  It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.

I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality.    It's about being more agile.  Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT.  Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it.  That's the challenge.  How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.

We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.

Thursday notes

Sorry the last few notes have been so dry.  I wanted to get the notes out there as quickly as possible.  Thursday morning I went to 3 sessions in a row on moving from virtualization to private clouds.  The afternoon was spent in the exhibit hall.

The sessions I went to helped me finally really understand the difference between virtualization and a private cloud.  A private cloud is virtualization with good management tools sitting on top of it.  In a lot of ways it's more a change in business practices than in a difference in technology.  The provide cloud provides a catalog of standardized VMs and storage options that can be deployed very quickly.  The business side of this comes in the standardization of the images and the life cycle management of those images.  It's the automatic updating of those images and the agility this provides to the company.  You want a LAMP server, boom, here you go.

Here is the progression from virtualization to private clouds:

1. Server virtualization and consolidation
2. Infrastructure optimization -- both storage and network
3. Management and automation
4. IT as a service ==> private cloud

There are a lot of tools out there from many different vendors.  They are getting better over time.  The tools are also becoming cross-platform, meaning that one tool can be used to manage private clouds and public clouds from multiple vendors.  Many of these tools deal with the concept of a Service Catalog.  This is basically a menu of VMs, storage and networking choices.  They are standardized for fast deployment and easier management.  As part of the life-cycle management a good CMDB tool is needed.  This will help reduce VM sprawl.  

There was some discussion of the latest version of VMware and some of the tools that are available with it.  This version has some significant improvements in iSCSI performance.  It was also stated that moving to using the VMware backup client instead of individual backup clients on each VM can make a huge difference in backups.  If you are backing up the entire VMFS volume at once, the backup software can do a lot more de-duping.

Applications need to become cloud aware.  How many apps have IP address built into them or their configuration files.  What does F&M need to do to make this happen.  Zimbra is a terrible example of this.

It was suggested that we should put a price tag on the services we provide, even if we don't actually collect money.  It will help our clients realize the cost of what they are asking for.  

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and BYO3

I went to a few sessions in a row that all dealt with VDI and the influx of multiple devices per person.  There are lots of things to think about if you are looking at moving to VDI.  In a nutshell, VDI is creating a VM for employees to use as their desktop system or for them to use to get to company applications.  We've been doing the latter for years and have been experimenting with virtual desktops recently.  Most companies can categorize the employees in to several groups based on their computing needs, what resources they need to get to, and whether they are always in the office or not.

There is no longer a 1 to 1 relationship between clients and machines.  Clients want to access their apps from multiple devices and multiple locations.  Virtualizing apps makes the data more secure, because it is not stored on the mobile devices.  This is a fundamental shift.  The combination of the cloud and mobile means that everything is migrating away from your corporate network.  The network needs to be re-designed to deal with this fact.

One speaker said that he foresees a time when IT wil be getting out the business of providing client machines.  Employees are starting to bring their own machines into work.  Think of the iPhone and any other mobile device.  Think of the personally owned laptop or desktop at home.  With budget crunches, some companies are expecting their employees to provide their own laptop.  This is BYOC or Bring Your Own Computer.  BYO3 is everyone bringing 3 or more devices to work.

Using the cloud for backup and DR

There are several companies that do hybrid cloud storage.  By this I mean they have a device that is onsite at the customer's data center which contains some storage and caches the storage that is out in the cloud.  Most of these vendors support the use of many different cloud storage vendors like Amazon.  The theory is that a lot of your data is not access on a regular basis, so it doesn't need to reside locally.  The local box looks like an iSCSI or FibreChannel drive to your systems.

The cloud is just a tool.  You still need to use best practices to keep your data safe.  You can use multiple clouds to replicate your data or use the cloud to keep a copy of the data you have in your data center.  Using the cloud can be more expensive, but it can be more available to you in a disaster.  Using one of these devices for backup can also free up time since you don't need to manage a tape library.

Data should be encrypted and the key should be stored on a local system and not leave the client site.  This is requirement for regulatory compliance.

I've said this before, but it was mentioned many, many times.  It's important to design your apps assuming there will be failures, because there will be.  Distributing and replicating data and services makes an app more reliable.

Catching up - Wednesday Keynotes

It's Sunday night, and I am finally getting around to catching up on what I saw at the conference.
The keynotes on Wednesday morning were good.  As a group, they were the best set of the three keynote sessions.

It started off with a nice panel discussion on public cloud issues.  The panelists were all from companies that provide public cloud services.  They talked about how the industry is still in it's infancy.  The likened public clouds to other new IT ideas.  At first there are not a lot standards on how things are done, but over time the industry settles down and it is lot easier to move from one vendor to another.  There was some discussion of the Amazon outage.  Those who wrote their apps with the cloud in mind did much better than those that didn't.

Intel did a presentation that emphasized how quickly they are pushing the processing power of cpu chips which is allowing things to be done with computers that could not be done before.  They also talked a lot about what they are doing to save energy.  85% of the power they use in their own facilities comes from wind or solar power!  Pretty impressive.  Here's a couple of facts they threw out:

• 150 Exabytes of data were sent through the Internet from it's beginnings in the 1970s through the end of 2009.  In 2010 alone, 245 Exabytes of data was sent!  Exponential growth.
• Data Centers in the United States consume 2% of the total electricity used.

Avaya did a nice presentation on what can be done with unified communications.  It sort of reminded me of the Apple Knowledge Navigator piece from years ago, but they were demoing stuff that is available from them today.  Pretty impressive.  They even have an iPad client for their unified communications system.

Smoke

I just finished washing the clothes I packed for my trip to Las Vegas. Not just what I wore, but everything I took. I had to because everything I took smelled of stale smoke. There was the smell of smoke everywhere in the building. My room was a non-smoking room, but even there you could still smell the smoke. I hated to turn the light on in the bathroom because the fan would come on too. This would draw air in from the hallway under my door which would increase the smell in my room.

Clothes that went directly from my suitcase to a drawer in the dresser and then to a plastic bag before going back in my bag smelled of smoke. I couldn't believe it.

Maybe I'm more sensitive to it since I rarely encounter it anymore. It still bothers me. What is it about casinos that engenders so much smoking? Is there such a thing as a smoke-free casino? I'd like to know.

Blogger problems

Well, the best laid plans and all that. As I said in my last post, I was going to take the down time I had between the end of the conference at 3 p.m. and my flight leaving at Midnight to bring my blog up-to-date with what I had learned the last couple of days. Unfortunately, Blogger had problems, which took it off line for almost 24 hours. Here's the link to their official statement:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/05/blogger-is-back.html

So now that it's back and I'm back home, I'll redo a few of my posts from Thursday morning that were lost and start working on my backlog. Wish me luck.

Long Days

The days at this conference have been long. Between attending sessions and spending time on the show floor, it's been hard to find time to write posts during the day. I meant to write last night, but crashed in my room for a while after the conference ended for the day. Went to a vendor-sponsored reception for dinner at the top of THE Hotel for an hour or so and then came back to the room and went to bed. I think I was asleep withing a minute after I turned the light out.

The conference ends at 3 p.m. today and I have about 9 hours until my red-eye flight leaves, so I should have a chance to catch up on blogging what I learned. Until then...

Virtualization Phases

The Las Vegas strip at night

View from the top of THE Hotel

Network Evolution

This is a nice summary of where networking is going.

Interesting numbers

Exhibit hall - Tuesday

The ID badges for attendees this year are the size of credit cards and contain an RFID chip in them. Whenever I enter a confernce session or talk to a vendor in the exhibit hall, they hold a device that look very much like an old-style cell phone up to my badge and it reads the RFID info off of it. At the conference sessions, the device actually speaks saying "allowed" if I pass muster. Haven't heard what it says if someone who hasn't paid for the conference sessions tries to sneak in to a session. Makes me think of the old sci-fi movie, Logan's Run.

At then end of the day today, I got an email which detailed exactly which sessions I attended and which vendor booths I visited. According to the email I spent time with 25 vendors today. Only 325 more to go :-)

Exhibitor Booth Scans
Scan Date Exhibiting Company URL
5/9/2011 10:17 AM NaviSite, Inc. www.navisite.com
5/10/2011 11:07 AM Xirrus xirrus.com
5/10/2011 11:07 AM VMware www.vmware.com
5/10/2011 11:24 AM Safari Books Online www.safaribooksonline.com
5/10/2011 11:34 AM Tripwire, Inc. tripwire.com
5/10/2011 11:37 AM FireHost, Inc www.firehost.com
5/10/2011 11:48 AM Citrix Systems www.citrix.com
5/10/2011 12:09 PM ManageEngine (Zoho Corporation) www.manageengine.com
5/10/2011 12:16 PM Spirent Communications www.spirent.com
5/10/2011 12:19 PM EMC emc.com
5/10/2011 12:21 PM New Horizons Computer Learning Centers newhorizons.com
5/10/2011 12:24 PM WildPackets, Inc. wildpackets.com
5/10/2011 12:29 PM Alcatel-Lucent (c/o MC²) www.alcatel-lucent.com/
5/10/2011 12:38 PM NetSupport Inc. netsupport-inc.com
5/10/2011 12:39 PM CXtec www.cxtec.com
5/10/2011 12:48 PM Diskeeper Corporation diskeeper.com
5/10/2011 12:49 PM APCON www.apcon.com
5/10/2011 12:55 PM Symmetricom symmetricom.com
5/10/2011 12:58 PM OFC/NFOEC www.ofcnfoec.org
5/10/2011 1:01 PM Smith Micro Software Inc smithmicro.com
5/10/2011 1:06 PM DisplayLink Corp displaylink.com
5/10/2011 4:18 PM Barracuda Networks www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en
5/10/2011 4:20 PM Brocade www.brocade.com
5/10/2011 4:40 PM Eaton Corporation eaton.com/powerquality
5/10/2011 6:31 PM Rackspace Hosting www.rackspace.com

They are all a blur already, but there were a number of interesting products that I saw.

Talked to someone at Eaton, who works out of Philly who specializes is Data Center air flow. Will come out and offer suggestions on how to save money on cooling.

CXtec sells refurbished VoIP phones. They can sell us phones just like we are using for significantly less than new. They come with lifetime warranties.

Safari Books online has thousands of technical books available digitally. You pay a monthly fee to access their entire library as much as you want. Todd, I know you have talked to me about this service, or one like it. It seems like a good deal for the department.

Compellent/Dell had a booth, which was separate from the Dell booth. I guess they had made their reservations before the merger.

I'm sure I'll remember more as I dig through the printed materials I picked up. That's it for now, though. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow will probably be just as exhausting as today was.

Session notes for Tuesday

Today was a hectic and exhausting day. Didn't have much chance to blog on what I heard and saw. I didn't even have much opportunity to take notes. The three sessions I went to were standing room only, and there were 2 sessions that I couldn't get into the room for. It's pretty hard to type on an iPad when you are standing in the back of the room. A laptop would not have been any better. Also, there were no tables, just rows of chairs, so even when I could sit, it wasn't very conducive to typing.

I went to a panel discussion on the future of wireless. The panelists were entertaining. They felt that WiMax will die and LTE will take over in the cell phone arena. They expect that even Clear will shift from WiMax to LTE in the next year or two. Even though both Verizon and AT&T are going to LTE, they will be incompatible because one is doing time division multiplexing and the other is doing frequency division multiplexing. Apparently Verizon is once again picking the solution that very few other carriers around the world are going to. The panelists reffered to Verizon as the orphan child in this respect. There was a little discussion of what's beyond 802.11n and whether we need gigabit wireless or not. The consensus was that 802.11n will be around for quite a while, so companies shouldn't wait on the next standard. They also mentioned that Microsoft recently announced that they are purchasing Skype for $8 Billion!

I went to the second set of keynotes at 1 p.m. They were marketing presentations by Microsoft, Juniper and IBM. Nothing particularly interesting to say, but the cloud was mentioned a million times again. Referred to ask a fundamental change in the industry.

The next session I went to was about dealing with Mac and iOS devices coming into the enterprise. Alex Stamos was an excellent speaker and I was blown away with his depth of knowledge about security, protocols and how Mac, iOS devices, and everything else acted on the network. He had a lot of very scary things to say about security of data with mobile devices and how easy it is to do man-in-the middle attacks even when you are using carriers. He talked about how important it was to try and write apps that didn't store sensitive data on the mobile devices. Use the cloud to grab the data when needed.

The last session I went to was about Network Futures. There were 5 speakers from various network electronics vendors. Unfortunately, they all gave marketing spiels, so there was very little good content. I left early and hit the exhibit floor.

That's all on the sessions today. I'll do another post on the exhibit hall itself.

Slot machines are everywhere

A view of slot machines on my walk from the conference hall to my room. I have walked several miles today, but haven't been outside at all.

Register for a chance to win an iPad

The most common drawing prize on the exhibit floor is an iPad. There must be close to 100 opportunities to win an iPad at this conference. The only problem is there are 20,000 attendees, so the odds are not that good. Apparently, the iPad is the prize of choice this year. I only saw one vendor giving away an xbox 360.

Tablets are big here. I see a lot of attendees with them. iPads came up a lot in the sessions I went to. I couldn't even get into the session on tablets, as the room was full and there was a line of people waiting for someone to leave so they could get in. The CEO of Citrix mentioned that he was using the inflight wifi to work on his iPad on his trip out here.

I didn't expect to be one of the crowd carrying an iPad instead of a laptop.

The show floor

Tuesday morning keynotes

The morning keynotes were a series of sales pitches by HP, Citrix and Cisco with a wonderful walk down memory lane placed in the middle.

HP talked about their new management console, who's name I didn't write down. It is cloud aware and multi vendor.

Citrix talked about their new Net scaler appliance runs Xen.

Vint Cerf and Dan Lynch did a delightful "fireside chat" with lots of great stories about the beginnings of the Internet and Interop. Vint Cerf is considered the father of the Internet and wrote the TCP protocol that is still the mainstay of the Internet today. He mentioned that June 8th is IP v6 day.  It will be turned up at most places around the world on that day.
Dan Lynch was in charge of the Interop network, amoung other things for many years and also had some great stories.

Cisco talked about the Consumerization of IT. Mobile devices, wireless, social and the cloud driving are driving this. There is expected to be 7 devices per person on the internet by 2013. Video will be 57% of consumer traffic by 2015.

Everyone mentioned the cloud over and over again. It was part of almost every topic covered during the two hours of presentations.
  
  

Vint Cerf

Father of the Internet. He wrote the TCP protocol in 1973 that we
still use today.

Keynote at begining of main conference

An anachronism

Zynga

Zynga, the fine folks that bring us Farmville, Cityville and about a zillion other social network games, gave a presentation on their use of clouds. Here's a few interesting facts from that session:

Cityville went from 0 to 100 million users in 40 days. Think about the logistics of provisioning servers for something with that much growth!

1 out of 5 Americans play social games.

Farmville's success was the catalyst that caused Zynga to move to the cloud in 2009. They literally couldn't rack servers fast enough to keep up with the growing demand.

Zynga's original response was to design and build a private cloud that they call ZCloud. Zcloud went from concept to production in less than 6 months.

Zynga can and has fully provisioned over 1000 physical servers in 24 hours.

Between January of 2009 and January of 2011 the number of servers that Zynga use has increased by factor of 75!

Now, Zynga uses both Zcloud and AWS(Amazon Web Services). So they are using both a Private and a Public cloud. They use a single app to provision servers in both and dynamically move servers from one to the other. They try to build ZCloud up to deal with the minimum demand and use AWS for the spikes.

Demographic surprises

The conference inside a confernce that I have been attending the last 2 days has been interesting. I have also found some of the demographics of the attendees to be interesting.

There are roughly 300 attendees here today. I'm guessing that there are less than 10 women. This suprises me a great deal. Many, many years ago this would have been the norm, but I have seen a gradual increase in the percentage of women over the years. So I'm scratching my head as to why the regression at this conference.

I can't give you any percentages, but there is significant number of attendees here from outside the USA. It seems higher than I remember, which surprises me given the economics times and the cost of travel.

I am seeing way more Apple laptops than I expected to. I would say that over half of the attendees either have an Apple laptop or an iPad. Given that this is not an educational conference, this again is surprising.

The cloud as 2nd data center or DR site

F&M has been very successful in moving our servers to VMs inside our VMware clusters. We currently have 90% of our servers running in a VM and we will be moving to almost 100% in the next year or two. Given that, why not utilize IaaS cloud services to be our DR site or even as a second active data center? The DR site is particularly compelling given the financial model of paying for actual CPU time used. Why not only pay for DR if you have a disaster?

Something to think about...

IaaS vs PaaS vs Saas

Nice slide summarizing which cloud service is best for which apps.

Clouds are the future

The presentations so far this morning have taken a different tack on cloud computing than yesterday's presentations. I begin to see why cloud computing may be the game changer that is so hyped to be. Here's a few thoughts from different presentations that I think tie together into a compelling argument.

You've heard of 80/20 rules, I'm sure. Here's one. Organizations spend roughly 80% of their IT budgets on existing infrastruture and 20% on innovation. We see this at F&M also. The large majority of our budget is already spoken for on the first day of our fiscal year. Cloud computing allows you to shift this ratio in a couple of ways. One, you can avoid capital expenses of equipment and infrastructure for servers and such. You only pay for what you use. Second, if you write your apps to be cloud aware (big if), you can let the clouds deal with backups, redundancy and DR. Again, this frees up CapEx and maintenance on equipment for innovation.

Cloud computing creates a new paradigm for project life cycles. Traditionally, a new project is anylized and a lot of work is done in calculating the ROI (Return on Investment) for a new project. Next, a decision is made on whether to go ahead with the project. If it gets a green light, equipment is purchased and installed. The application is then deployed and you wait to see if your ROI calculations were correct or not. With the cloud, that cycle can be radically different. If you have an idea, you can start with deploying it, evaluating it's effectiveness and then decide to grow it or kill it.

Related to this, is the idea that cloud computing allows you go from "ah ha to ka-ching" faster. The emphasis moves from the infrastucture to the developers. This only works if the apps are written with the cloud in mind. Otherwise you end up with security and reliability nightmares.

None of this is about technology, it's about business practices. That's where the paradigm shift is.

Chaos Monkey

I've mentioned Chaos Monkey before. It stress tests apps in the cloud to make sure they can survive random outages. If your cloud aps are designed to be cloud aps, and don't assume they are running on one real machine, they will survive cloud failures just fine. Amazon customers that designed their aps for the cloud, survived the cloud outage much better than those that didn't.

Cloud Computing - Day 2

Day 2 of the conference begins.

Quick notes from yesterdays sessions

I realized I hadn't posted any specific posts about all the rest of the sessions yesterday. So here is a rather boring list of a things that stood out from those sessions:

Netflix is moving completely to Amazon's Cloud. Again, they take advantage of being able to bring up and shutdown instances as needed throughout the day. They run something called Chaos Monkey to test reliability and redundancy of their systems. It's designed to simulate all sorts of failures with their systems. Netflix runs this on their production environment!

There was a presentation on Cloud Economics. It is important to look at the the total cost, not just the unit cost. Don't expect unit cost to be cheaper in the cloud. The cloud makes the most sense economically when your needs flucturate. Clouds are agille, because you can spin up new instances in the cloud faster than you can purchase and install hardware. CFOs are interested in clouds, not only for the shift from CapEx, but also because it allows expenses to mirror demand much more closely.

Product presentations by Microsoft on Azure, Rackspace and Salesforce. They all looked good. Microsoft seems to be going after this area in a big way. They have spent billions building up infrastructure for Azure.

New term - Cloud Tenant -- Clients of cloud services.  Helps reinforce the concept of renting vs owning IT resources.

There was a session called Measuring and Managing Public Clouds. The government actually ahead of the curve on cloud computing.  They are working with companies to set standards for the industry. Most companies are still less than 50% virtualized.

There are difficulties of moving from in-house applications to cloud-based applications. The companies that had the most problems with Amazon's outage, were the the ones that hadn't written their applications with the cloud in mind. Applications make assumptions about environment that may not apply in cloud.

SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Servcie) -- what's the difference and which one is right for you?

The final session of the day was a customer panel. Here are some notes:
Using Amazon VPC services for VDI instances
Design apps for the cloud and elasticity
Still in early adoption phase
Despite problems a couple weeks ago, Amazon is a great service
Need more visibility and security.
Clouds today are certainly good enough for test and dev.  

Excalibur Hotel and Casino

Inside the Luxor Hotel and Casino

35%

So I'm back in my room, which I left at 7:30 this morning. It as a long, but useful, day. I used my iPad a lot today, but it still has a 35% charge left on it! It's nice to know that I can use it all day without needing to recharge it. The bluetooth keyboard that I brought along was very useful. While the virtual keyboard on the iPad is not too bad (I'm using it right now), I can still type faster on a real keyboard.

It was really nice having such a light bag to carry today. I noticed it especially on the walk back to my room at the end of the day today. So far I am very happy with having an iPad instead of a laptop.

Today was about public clouds, which was good background info. Not anything that F&M needs today, but probably sometime in our future. Tomorrow is all about private clouds, which should be of more immediate interest.

Today's presentations made it clear that clouds are still in their infancy, but seem to have a strong future. It will be interesting to see where things are in a few years.

Cloud Computing is Just In Time for IT

Alistair Croll of Bitcurrent summarized the day nicely by comparing Cloud Computing to the Just In Time manufacturing process championed by Toyota. This is his summary slide which compares the pitfalls of Just in Time (Cloud Computing) to Vertical Integration (in-house servers).

View from the conference center

I hadn't been near a window since 7:30 this morning, so I thought I would find a window during a break. It was a 5 minute walk through the cavernous halls till I found one! You can see the Luxor pyramid which is much further away than it looks.

I am not alone

I'm looking around the seminar room at the roughly 250 attendees of the Public Cloud Day and I realized I am not alone. I would say that at least half of the attendees have iPhones, which isn't too surprising at a tech conference. What is surprising is that while about half have their laptops out on the tables, about 20% have iPads sitting on the table in front of them. The number of people using pen and paper is a definite minority. It will be interesting to see how this mix will change over the next few years.

One of the presenters, who works for HP, had an iPad that he used to take questions via twitter to his presentation. Yeah, this is definitely a tech conference :-)

The Internet is still growing exponentially

I don't even know what a Zetabyte of data is!

Public Cloud morning sessions

We just finished the first 2 hours of the public cloud day and it's time for a 15 minute break. There were 10 different speakers who threw a lot of information at us.

There were quick presentation by 4 different public cloud providers -- Amazon's AWS, CloudOps, VMware's Cloud Foundry, Red Hat's OpenShift and Joyent. Amazon talked about their reliability, which was a little ironic given the problems they had a couple of weeks ago. Cloud Froundry and OpenShift are currently in beta and free. That hasn't stopped some companies from running production services on them.

The other sessions dealt with the economics of cloud computing and why CFOs are so interested in them. Joe Weinman of HP argued that clouds are not less expensive in unit cost, but can be less expensive in total costs. He used the analogy of hiring a taxi vs. buying a car. It expensive to use a taxi, but if you are traveling at a conference or only need a car occasionally, it may make sense. For small companies, clouds can make economic sense due to the startup costs of running a data center. For large companies with variable demand, it can make sense to deal with highs and lows of demand.

The wins with cloud computing come from the agility, flexibility and redundancy that they provide. Companies can spin up the servers needed for a short-term marketing efforts without capital expenses.

Zynga uses Amazon Web Services

Zynga likes the cloud because of the dynamic load they have and the
ability to scale up and down throughout the day as their load changes.

Public Cloud Day

I'll be spending the whole day in a mini-conference on public clouds.

Scale

It seems like Las Vegas is on a different scale from the normal world. When I left my hotel room in the Luxor this morning and walked "next door" to the Mandalay Bay where the conference is, it took me over 15 minutes to get to the registration area for the conference. It was pretty much a straight shot and it was entirely indoors! Think of it as walking from F&M to Park City entirely indoors.

In years past I had stayed at the Excalibur which is on the far side of the Luxor from Mandalay Bay. Staying there added another 10 to 15 minutes to the walk and was, again, all indoors. There is a monorail that runs between these 3 places, but I found that it took almost 15 minutes to walk out to the monorail station at one end and another 10 minutes to get back into the Mandalay Bay at the other end.

The scale of this place is immense!

I'm in my conference room now, after grabbing some breakfast. Just upstairs from the coference registration area, but another 10 minute walk. I guess I don't have to worry about getting my exercise this week!

The view from my hotel room

Welcome to Las Vegas

"Cut the rope" larger than life

Kids of all ages can play "cut the rope" at the Atlanta airport on a
giant 8 foot by 30 foot screen!

Enroute to Atlanta

There's an app for that

I've noticed that I have gotten a lot more email and such related to my trip this time. I received an email from Expedia reminding me that my trip was coming up. I also received emails from the airline and the hotel I'm staying at. In addition to the emails and occasional text messages, they all have told me that they have an app that I can download.

The app from Expedia will tell me if my flights are delayed. The app from Delta will let me check in and change flights if necessary. The app from Luxor Hotel and Casino will let me know entertainment times, show me where I am on a map, order room service, provide location specific "special deals" and of course book future visits.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I also have an app for the conference itself to schedule my time and find vendors on the exhibit floor.

The question is, when do I start needing an app to organize all of may trip related apps. A meta-trip-app, perhaps.

Well, it's almost boarding time. Strange that none of my apps told me that...

I'm on my way

I'm on my way to Interop in Las Vegas. I managed to get to the airport and through security with a minimum of fuss. I grabbed some lunch and I have a few minutes to wait until boarding time.

iPad printing

It's been a number of years since I have been able to travel to a conference. It's been 5 years since I've been to an Interop conference. Things have definitely changed as far as air travel is concerned. I know what you are thinking, but I actually have something positive to mention :-)

So I get this email from Delta Airlines this afternoon exactly, and I mean exactly, 24 hours before the scheduled departure time of my flight. The email is inviting me to check in for my flight. Of course I read it on my iPhone, so I'm thinking I'm not going to to even attempt this until I get back to my desk and can deal with this on a "real" computer. Well I got busy and forgot about the email.

This evening I'm on my iPad checking my mail and I notice the Delta email again. I figure I'll see how far I can get before I have to move to my laptop. So I touch the link in the email, which brings up a browser window and off I go without any need for logging in (or Adobe flash).

The amazing thing is that I get all the way through the process of paying ahead of time for the 1 bag I'm going to check ($23 grumble, grumble, grumble) and getting my boarding passes. What's also amazing is that I click on the print button on the web page and my receipt for my 1 piece of checked luggage and my boarding passes all print just fine, advertisements and all!

How am I printing from my iPad you ask? Well it's printing to a USB printer attached to our desktop Mac which has been hacked to be an airprint server, so the printer just shows up on the print diaglog box on the iPad, which pops up automatically when I click on the button on the web page.

Pretty amazing! I'm beginning to think I might be ok without a "real" computer this week.

Traveling light

Here is what I'll be carrying around at the conference.

No laptop

I've been wondering if it is possible to survive a week without my laptop, so I am going to the conference without it, which is a big change for me. Instead, I will only be taking an iPad and a bluetooth keyboard. We'll see how well I get by without having a regular computer at my fingertips.

I'm looking forward to the fact that the iPad is so much lighter than my laptop. I have lots of not-so-fond memories from past conferences of how heavy my bag would feel by the end of a long conference day.

I'm also looking forward to the longer battery life, which should greatly reduce how often I need to plug in to charge. Many a time at other conferences, I have tried to arrive early to a session so that I could score a seat near an electrical outlet, in order to keep my laptop battery from going dead.

I'll have my trusty iPhone of course as a backup and I'm planning to take an Airport Express along too. Supposedly, the hotel has wired network ports in the rooms, but no wireless. I'm not holding my breath on the in-room network. I've had too many issues with them in the past.

Last minute prep

I'm getting ready for the trip out to Interop next week. I leave on Saturday afternoon and will get back the following Friday morning. I'm taking a red-eye flight back, which I'm not that thrilled about, but the alternative is to loose all day Friday flying. The lesser of two evils, in my mind.

Here's the URL for the conference web site:

Interop Las Vegas

It's been 5 years since I've been to this conference, so it will be interesting to see what has changed. I expect that it will be significantly smaller, as the economy is in a very different place than it used to be. I'm also expecting the technology used to run the conference to be different. The conference is on Facebook and there's an app for it!

Still have to figure out exactly which sessions I plan to attend, but the 1st two days are full day seminars, so I've got some time to plan.

That's all for now. I'll post some more later...

Welcome

Welcome to my blog.  I am creating this blog to report on things that I learn at the Interop conference I am going to in May.