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