I was recently in Las Vegas for Dell’s annual kick off where the sales force learns all about the cool products we have on tap. Not only were there tons of presentation sessions, there was a full expo area with both Dell and partner booths.
In the Cloud Infrastructure Solutions booth I got to act as the official “ShamWow” guy, giving our pitch (over and over and over).
I must have done the spiel literally 50 times over the three days. But the crowds were great so I wasn’t complaining (much ).
The Friday before last my boss Andy and I had a call with James Niccolai of IDG. We chatted about what we’ve been up to at Dell as well as teed up what we have in store for the near distant future.
To get the full scoop you should read the articles but here are some summary bits from the PCworld article:
The DCS [Data Center Solutions] unit was formed about three years ago to help Dell get more business from large Internet firms. Its engineers often spend several weeks on-site with those companies to design low-cost, low-power systems that meet the special requirements of their search, social networking and other Web applications.
That hands-on role means the DCS group designs servers only for large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft’s Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers per year. But that’s about to change, Dell executives said in an interview.
Later this year Dell will turn some of those custom servers into standardized products and sell them to companies that order lower volumes of systems, including enterprises building “private cloud” environments in their data centers, and a second tier of smaller Internet companies.
“What we’ve found is, there are a whole bunch of other customers who want access to those designs but who are not buying in those types of quantities,” said Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell’s DCS group. “So the big thing we’re solving now, and we’ll talk more publically about over the next couple of months, is how to provide more of that capability to many, many more customers.”
Here is the second in my three part series on Virtualization and the cloud. Today’s entry focuses on the 800 pound gorilla in the virtualization space, VMware.
What VMware is seeing customers actually doing to take advantage of the cloud today both with regards to public and private clouds.
Some polling data he collected during his talk based on the ~300 folks who attended: 90-95% were virtualizing, 15% had an active private cloud project, 5-10% had a public cloud project. (This is pretty representative of what Dan’s generally seeing.)
The three phases of cloud:
Phase I: Standardizing and virtualizing an environment.
Phase II: Adopting private cloud from a management stand point: getting to self service and automation in terms of provisioning a new service/collapsing the time it takes to get a new image out to an end user or developer from weeks to minutes/ implementing charge back, dynamic capacity planning and management.
Phase III: Thinking about or planning how to leverage the public cloud in a fully compatible way.
A short history of VMware: how they’ve moved from desktop and server virtualization to VM management and optimization to enabling their platform for private clouds and public cloud providers.
Their “recent” acquisition of Spring Source and how it fits in.
Stay tuned next time for a summary of Gartner’s virtualization presentation from their data center conference.
Last month at the Interop/Web 2.0 I was able to drag Citrix’s Roger Klorese away from booth duty for an interview. Roger is a Sr. Director at Citrix who works on Xen server and the Essentials product family. Here is what he had to say:
Some of the topics Roger tackles
What Roger has been focusing on this year — Free Xen server. Launching the offering (there have been 200K downloads this year)and then bringing more features into it. What comes with it for free and what are add-ons that you get thru the Essentials family.
In the networking space Citrix announced a version of their netscaler app delivery server as a virtual appliance.
Managing “OPVs” (other people’s VM’s)
What Roger is most excited about:
Growing the datacenter into the cloud – Xen.org recently released the Xen cloud platform which is a full cloud distro, with a management stack based on open sourcing the Xen server stack.
Early next year they are releasing the Xen client type 1, a bare metal client hypervisor.
A couple of weeks ago I was in New York to visit customers and attend the co-located Interop and Web 2.0 events. One of the attendees/participants I got to know there was Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe has been focusing a lot on the cloud lately so I thought I’d put down for posterity his thoughts and explanation of what ATT is up to in this space.
Some of the topics that Joe tackles:
ATT’s evolving strategy involves mix of managed endpoints and a variety of network services as well as a variety of services in the cloud.
ATT’s services range from infrastructure services like “Synaptic hosting,” storage as a service and compute as a service thru a variety of SaaS apps like unified comms and collaboration, SAP, Oracle ebiz suite, Seybold and JD Edwards.
They have a large platform as a service offering that is used by tens of thousands developers creating at mobile enterprise apps.
They target a wide variety of endpoints e.g. iphones,windows mobile devices, netbooks, black berries all the way thru tele-presence rooms.
How ATT delivers on both front end and back end architectures.
With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.
Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:
Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.
Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:
Some of the topics Oren tackles:
Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead
Yesterday Gartner distinguished analyst Tom Bittman, who covers cloud computing and virtualization, posted some thoughts and observations from the Gartner Symposium in Orlando.
Private Cloud-o-maina
Based on Tom’s observations, private cloud (however defined) seems to have captured the hearts and minds of IT. Before he began his talk on virtualiztion he did a quick poll asking how many in the audience considered private cloud computing to be a core strategy of theirs. 75% raised their hands. While not overly scientific, that’s a pretty big number.
Little Miss Appropriation
The logical next question one may ask is what do people mean when they say “private cloud.” According to Tom the three most common ways private clouds are being (mis) described are:
IT defending its turf: Shared services that were being re-labelled as private clouds (but without a self-service interface, or much automation at all)
Vendors defending their products: Old products being re-labelled as private clouds in a box (I described most of these as “lipstick on a pig”)
Advanced server virtualization deployments: Although few have a true self-service interface, the intention is certainly there
So it looks like there is quite a bit of misappropriation of the term. However, as we previously learned, just because there is hype and misuse of terms, doesn’t mean there isn’t value in the concept of “private cloud.” The question is what is that value?
Tom sees private cloud’s value as a means to end and concludes his post by saying
The challenge with private cloud computing, of course, is to dispel the vendor hype and the IT protectionism that is hiding there, and to ensure the concept is being used in the right way – as a stepping-stone to public cloud… [italics mine]
(I’m not your) Stepping Stone
This is where I disagree. I believe that while private cloud can be a path to the public cloud, it can also be an end unto itself. Unfortunately (or fortunately) we will always have heterogeneous environments and in the future that will mean a mixture of traditional IT, virtualized resources, private clouds and public clouds. In some case workloads will migrate from virtualizaiton out to the public cloud but in other cases they will stop along the way and decide to stay.
IT will become more efficient and more agile as the cloud evolves but there will be no Big Switch (see above illustration), it (IT) will need to manage a portfolio of computing models.
Just a little while ago Steve Shankland posted an article from the front lines of the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando. The article is based on a presentation given today by Gartner addressing the top 10 trends that will be coming in IT in 2010.
And what found itself moving up two spaces from last year and claiming the top spot? Cloud computing.
Gartner’s cloud advice, notes Shankland, is
…companies should figure out what cloud services might give them value, how to write applications that run on cloud services, and whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company’s firewall.
(On a side note, it’s interesting to see that last year’s leader virtualization has been tri-sected into: Client Computing, Reshaping the Data Center and Virtualization for Availability)
Back on top
Being at the top of a Gartner chart is nothing new for Cloud Computing as you can see in this Hype Cycle from a couple of months ago:
So I guess the moral of this story is, just because something is over-hyped doesn’t mean its still not important. Ignore the cloud at your peril
Pau for now…
Endnote: A word from our sponsor
If you happen to be at the Gartner event and you want to see Dell’s take on the cloud, check out Tim Mattox’s presentation tomorrow at 3:30 – 4:30: Leveraging the Cloud to Reduce your IT costs.
Last Friday I got together with Michael Cote of Red Monk and John Willis of Canonical for a podcast. We met up at a nearby coffee shop and chatted about a whole bunch o’ stuff.
You can listen to the actual podcast on Cote’s blog.
Dell’s cloud building business, focused on a small group of hyper-scale customers (Azure and Facebook being a couple I can name), delivering a high volume of highly customized machines for these customers.
Some of the learnings we’ve gained with working with this group.
Our intent to take this effort to a much wider group of customers and offer complete cloud solutions made up of hardware, third party software, a reference architecture and services.
At last year’s Oracle financial meeting, Larry Ellison went on rant on the over-hyping of the term “cloud computing:”
I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
Well its been a year later and the abuse of the term cloud has gone from bad to worse. As a result, when Mr. Ellison appeared at the Churchill Club last week and the question of Oracle’s possible demise at the hand of the cloud came up, he became a bit animated. Enjoy!
(I love Ed Zander’s bemusement and reactions)
A man of few words
Of note is Larry’s succinct definition of cloud computing: “A computer attached to a network.” And its business model? “Rental.”
Last but not least in my series of video’s from last month’s Cloud World/Open Source World I present to you Ken Oestreich, VP of Product marketing at Egenera. I grabbed some time with Ken to learn about Engenera, the cloud and how they’re working with Dell.
Some of the topics that Ken tackles:
While a hypervisor abstracts software, Egenera’s PAN manager abstracts the “plumbing” e.g. NIC cards, switches, host bus adaptor cards etc.
PAN manager allows you to consolidate networks, fail-over entire machines and, in the case of disaster recovery, recover and reproduce entire compute environments.
Egenera is working with Dell in the form of the Dell PAN system to provide agility in your infrastructure.
This Infrastructure as a Service system can be used inside or outside your firewall.
What developments Ken is most excited about in the upcoming year.
I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last. My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.
Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there. See what Michael has to say…
Some of the stuff Michael discusses:
Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
How Right Scale came to be. Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site. Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class. He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…
The CEO and founder of GoGrid, John Keagy, made an interesting assertion at Cloud World/Open Source World: over the next decade, the IT economy will shrink from $1.5 trillion to $500 billion. I thought this was an interesting statement so I followed up with him after his talk and we sat down for a quick interview:
Some of the things John talks about:
GoGrid plays in the Infrastructure on demand space and has been doing so since 2002.
They work with partners in the layers above infrastructure and don’t have plans to venture north.
The IT economy shrinkage will be driven by automation and reduced capex (commodity hardware is a big component of this)
Right now its hardly a competitive market in the IaaS space (“its GoGrid and a bookstore”) so you can expect to see prices drop as the competition heats up.
If you’re not doing your test and development and QA in the cloud, your not engaging in best practices.
The article which supplies short profiles of 85 cloud players, isn’t wishy-washy about what it believes is the inevitability of the cloud model. While it feels there will both a backlash against cloud-mania as well as a well publicized disaster the article states:
Still, the bad news won’t kill the cloud. We can’t ever go back to enclosed datacenters. The cloud is simply easier, faster and more flexible.
“Who says Dell is just a hardware firm?”
Dell comes in at number 10 on the list of the fab 85. One of the big focuses of the Dell section is Dell’s Datacenter Solutions Group (which I am a part of):
…the company launched DCS – Data Center Solutions – to target an audience of businesses that need help configuring a cloud-based datacenter. DCS handles everything from optimization to project management to global consulting. Who says Dell is just a hardware firm? Referring to DCS, Dell CEO Michael Dell toldBusinessweek in 2008 that, “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers. Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”
It also keys in on some of Dell’s recent acquisitions in this space:
Dell has made a number of acquisitions to build out the software side of its cloud offering, including Everdream (desktop management software), Silverback Technologies (remote monitoring) and Message One (email management). The goal, it appears: provide one-stop shopping for businesses that want to build an automated datacenter running commodity boxes, all optimized for the cloud. That is likely a lucrative strategy.
If they think this is cool stuff, wait until they see what we have planned
Reductive Labs, the company behind Puppet, recently received $2 million in funding. Puppet, a framework for automating system administration across the network at scale, allows an admin to build and configure a passel of servers in a period of hours rather than months.
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World I sat down with Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs to learn more about Puppet, who uses it and what they plan to do with all that money.
Some of the stuff Luke talks about:
In the cloud you can turn on 100s or 1000s of servers at the click of a mouse, but what happens when you want to configure them?
Users include Red Hat, Sun, Dell, Rackspace and Google. Google manages their entire corporate infrastructure with Puppet.
No GUI for you! Puppet has its own simple language that you use to program your infrastructure and then Puppet runs it across your entire infrastructure. The language is based on Perl + Ruby + Nagios.
A good portion on the $2 million will be spent on building some GUI tools (along with a little sales and marketing)
Puppet is 100% open source and based on Ruby. There are no commercial features (yet).
Puppet has a pretty vibrant community: 1,200 – 1,400 on the user list along with what could be the largest system focused IRC channel.
At Cloud World/Open Source World earlier this month I grabbed some time with Forrester’s “Mr. Cloud” James Staten. I wanted to get his take on Cloud Computing and what was hot and what is not. Here is the result.
Some of the things James talks about:
How the conversation about cloud has changed over the last year.
He spends a lot of time telling people what the cloud is not.
The three things they’ve learned (coming soon to Forrester report near you):
First thing to do in the cloud is test and development
Organizations can take short term web promotions and marketing efforts and drop them into the cloud (witness Wendy’s 99c promotion)
Put apps that are triggered by revenue into the cloud
Rather that “Public vs Private” clouds, Forrester segments it into “internal vs. hosted vs. public
Cloud is not an all or nothing proposition, it’s another tool in the toolkit.
I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference. At that time we did an audio interview. Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open World I bumped into Jonathan Bryce one of the two founders of the cloud platform formerly known as “Mosso” (now known as Rackspace Cloud).
Last year when I interviewed Jonathan, I did an audio podcast. This time around I was armed with my Flip Mino and caught it all on video for the little(r) screen.
Some of the topics Jonathan addresses:
When Rackspace funded employees Jonathan and Todd to go off and start their cloud venture 4 years ago, why didn’t they brand it “Rackspace?”
Why did they recently decide to roll Mosso back into the mothership and rebrand it?
The progression of in-house -> colocation -> managed hosting -> cloud.
The three pieces of Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Servers & Cloud Files (infrastructure as a service) and Cloud Sites (platform as a service with the option of using either the LAMP or .NET stack).
Which offering is getting the most traction.
Why their customer Fresh Books went with Cloud Files.
James Urquhart of Cisco and author of “The Wisdom of Clouds” blog on Cnet, gave a talk last week at Cloud World entitled, “Virtualization to Cloud.” I wanted to capture some of the topics he talked about and learn a bit more so I grabbed him for a podcast after he got off stage. Here is the result…
Some of the topics James tackles:
Whereas four months ago the question was ”What is cloud” the conversation has recently shifted to “how can I replicate some of the success stories that I’ve heard about?”
One effect of the cloud is that has greatly lowered the VC capital that start-ups require to get set up and going.
Internal IT needs to realize they are no longer delivering a product but are delivering a service. To be of value to the business they don’t have to wire servers, they can help them through the process of getting the right compute power for each app.
Regulatory and industry standards will be what dicates the speed of the evolution of the cloud, not technology.
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Posted by Barton George 
