Just to say...

Hope you all had a great new years eve, the hangover wasnt to bad (Mine was!) and all the best for 2012... Lets make it a good one!!!

Hope to see some of you at storage beers in Jan!

Cheers,

Stuart.

Commoditised virtualisation products / Multi-vendor hypervisor strategy

Its interesting to watch the virtualisation / support / management / deployment tools as the current and emerging tools continue to mature. I wrote an article some time ago around the choices that you have in the market space, an area that was once dominated by VMWare is now being challenged by a number of players (please see previous blog article here: http://www.stuiesav.com/2011/08/competition-to-vmware-there-is-choice.html )

Watching the emergence and maturity of product sets has got a number of the consumers & technologists that work with these product areas thinking about how to leverage tool sets, what are the right use cases to consider and obviously the cost implications of doing this (everything has a price - and its about what you are willing to pay for a given tech stack).

There is still no doubt that VMWare is best of breed as a x86 virtualisation and consolidation tool but when you look for others that are "good enough" and when taking into account possible "tax-breaks" that you could leverage things get interesting.

So what do i mean by the term tax-breaks? I am really referring to the fact that certain products that can virtualise also adjust the way that licensed guest products will be charged (in some cases it can be a discounted or an out and out release). Hyper-V gives some great wins when it comes to guested Microsoft product sets as an example - so a combination of good enough and a significant price point drop really adds to the case of going multi-vendor in the virtualisation and management space.

So where else are we seeing this level of challenge - just take a good hard look at the emergence of combined deployment, orchestration and workflow management tools that are coming through the ranks - element tools that are provided for just one flavor of stack are becoming less and less palatable for the medium to large enterprise - tool sets that cover complete sets of infrastructure, can tie into an existing ecosystem and fit in with existing tool sets and processes (process does have to change)has got to be the way to go!

So in summary i guess what i am really saying is:
- Hypervisors are commodity as is the ecosystem that wraps around them
- Understand the use case and make an informed decision based on cost as well as the "nice to haves"
- Consider "good enough" rather than rolls-royce - you vary rarely need *all* product functions
- Commoditise your use case by vertical if you can - VDI, MS-SQL Servers, web services etc would be examples of this
- Consider tax breaks you can utilise based on different vendors (i.e. Hyper-V / OS Licensing implications)
- Management tools that tie to one product set will become a thing of the past quickly

Good enough is erm.... good enough!!!! Comsumerisation of DC Products

Why do some vendors not get that commoditisation  / consumerisation of technology is fundamentally changing the way that technology is delivered to an end customer….. 

No longer are we interested in bespoke manufacturing lines that make best of breed silicon / multi-layered circuit boards that translate into bloody expensive product – if  a requirement can  be met with a commoditized product set – then crack on and use it.  Basically we want to start using product that is "good enough" but also at the right price point….

I expect to see this in all product areas that exist in the data centre – Good enough, at the right price point and taking advantage of commoditized technology

Enough said…

When cloud goes wrong - Recent Microsoft Cloud365 Outage

I watched with great interest both the announcements on outages from Microsoft around their office 365 outage and also Google with their cloud offering upshot being they were out of action for good few hours.

For those that didn't know / want to read - there is good commentary from BBC that can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455

It was interesting to watch from both a reaction from the general global technology populous around bad press on Cloud (and there we were thinking that Cloud was the second coming, it could never go wrong and it was capable of doing god-like things) but more interesting was the lack of understanding of implications / issues that this raises around cloud computing and something that lots of people still don't want to admit to themselves when buying into this approach - application architecture is just as important as infrastructure (in fact - even more so).

Why did Cloud365 (Cloud362?) break - was it due to poor infrastructure? - could be... Was it due to issues around application design? - More likely, was it due to both application, infrastructure and design around lack of fault tolerant design? - Almost definitely.... OK - so in this instance it sounds like Cloud365 had issues due to DNS outages / fat fingers / - the point is that it shouldn't matter... It should be designed in a way that it doesn't need rock-solid infra - it can just move around to a location where its compute requirements can be serviced.

Imagine that rather than having a discreet DC with discreet network and its own DNS management - the infrastructure was geographically dispersed and the application was able to take advantage of all of these dispersed infrastructure islands and move both app and state-full data WITHIN THE APP LAYER - would a significant outage have occurred - probably not..

If we want to embrace this new computing paradigm - it shows us that this isn't about smart chunks of hardware, sooper dooper resilience, data replication, really smart hypervisors or a whole bunch of other infrastructure offerings. Its about an applications ability to scale out, scale wide, restart, be tolerant of infrastructure failures etc etc etc - Its all about the application architecture, how it is layered on top of infrastructure and how the presentation to the enduser is designed.

If you were thinking that expensive VDC solutions are going to help with this (FlexPod / vBlock / Matrix etc etc etc) they wont. Sure they (well some) are great virtualisation platforms but they are NOT cloud platforms - the apps and layering approaches are what makes a good cloud platform.

Sorry application dev / architect types - afraid a lot of stuff is falling on your shoulders now to achieve this brave new word.

Finally - a few thoughts / assumptions to take into account when designing for this nice fluffy cloud stuff:

- All server infrastructure breaks
- Datacentres break
- Networks break
- Operating systems break
- geographic issues exist

Concentrate on issues associated with the above points and architect with this in mind - and you might just get something that could be cloud compatible.

Finally - Don't try and architect from the bottom up (i.e. from infrastructure layer upwards) but concentrate on the application design downwards and attributes that are required (scale out, resilience, security, data availability, disaster recovery, encryption etc.)

Cheers,

Stuart.


Note to Microsoft (if you happen to be listening - which I doubt) - take the chance to educate the technology community and explain how you are going to fix these type of issues moving forwards (and as a clue - the answer isn't to make DNS more resilient - all would be very interested in how you are going to change application design, management and orchestration approaches to achieve a 100% uptime goal and not a whole heap of new infrastructure stuff!)

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Location:London,United Kingdom

Cloud ready tools - yeah right!!!!

Cloud is most definitely the buzzword of the decade. If you don’t have a product that can either provide cloud, enable cloud or do cloud type stuff it appears you don’t have a product (no i dont believe this - but the various vendors landing at my doorstep do!)

Have sat in a number of vendor presentations around cloud infrastructure software and specifically focused towards capacity / monitoring / utilization etc it has really started to p!$$ me off - lots of rubbish being spoken.

A specific product & pitch that was being looked at was a really good tool for looking at VMWare virtualised environments – but over night it had suddenly turned into a “cloud enablement” tool with all sorts of random application and cloud functions that just didn’t add up - yep they over-pitched it!

On pushing the above mentioned vendor and asking around how will/ has this helped my “journey to cloud” I asked a number of questions around product direction and roadmap – a flavour of these follows:
• How are you going to help me understand when I need to burst into external provided services but also allow me to bring back into my DC boundary as I either have surplus capacity or decide to “up-rate” my infrastructure
• How are you going to interface to my service catalogue so that we can ensure that we understand where to place
• How are you going to assist with a service model to ensure that the right customer is put on the right platform at the right time
• How are you going to measure my metrics to ensure that when I pass my internal platform to an external source that it meets the right specification based on an agreed SLA

I wasn’t really expecting answers to all of the above; neither was I looking for complete roadmap answers – just a bit of a view into general direction that the product was going to take to answer some of these things.
It became obvious that no real work had been done to turn this into a “cloud tool” but somewhere along the line, someone in their marketing dept had decided that virtualisation=cloud and it was job done!
Needless to say – the vendor did in fact NOT have a great cloud story – what they did have was a pretty good virtualisation capacity management tool…
Lesson – this is an evolution – things don’t just convert / change / evolve without input… Look at where you want to take the tool and work to get it there. Don’t just flip the name in the hope that some unsuspecting customer will just fall into the trap and buy the slideware
Nuff said!

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Competition to VMWare - There is choice

Its really interesting watching the emergence of new hypervisor, virtualisation and "cloud" tools and the way that other companies that are in this space have been dismissive of new tech / options open to end customers. When i here phrases such as “you dont need to worry about that as we already have”, and “what other choice do you have” from some of these bigger vendors - it can make my blood boil

Well... For the other choices - it seems we have lots emerging. Watching the likes of Hyper-V, Xen and KVM come flying through the ranks really should get VMWare quite concerned - and there is a number of reasons for this, the high level points being:

More management tools are becoming readily available
Customers are changing their development practices for virtualized environments
Maturity in DR and new style of application failover techniques will start removing the legacy fail-over / fail-back paradigm
Standards such as OpenStack / OpenStorage will start becoming prevalent
Open-source will win (look at what happened with proprietary unix models and Linux)

Management Tools - Yeah sure, VMWare have a tool for every day of the week - and some of it is pretty slick - but here is the problem... Large enterprises are now making investments in tools for enterprise orchestration, deployment and management - with these comes some pretty comprehensive frameworks and ability to do some smart stuff. If you have done a good job at the infrastructure layer, architected environments appropriately, some of these higher end tools such as vcloud director, vsphere etc become negated.

You start taking on products such as KVM / Xen / HyperV etc - lets buy enterprise class tools around them to manage appropriately. If you are using the correct processes, understand a common approach across your infrastructure your tool selection should not only answer your virtualisation approach but all of your platform deployment / management / orchestration needs.

You only need to take a look at IBM Cloudburst to see what is possible with non VMWare tool sets (and the fact that the likes of IBM are willing to support this config also!)

Open-Source will win! Has VMWare become the same as Solaris is to Unix (i.e. proprietary)? Not sure it has yet - however they will need to navigate there strategy carefully to ensure that this does not happen. You just need to look at market pressures and the commoditisiation / consumerisation of products to see what happens in this circumstance. In the same way that Linux is now way more prevalent than the lock-in Unix products, virtualisation tools will go the same way (Hell look at RedHat - they are shipping KVM within 6.1 - why wouldn't you use it if you can wrap the smart management stuff around it?)

Final thought / and tech that is worth following - OpenStack / OpenStorage - Follow these, and understand them... Are they fully matured yet - No!, Are they gonna get there and are they useable - HELL YES!!! These type of approaches will fundamentally change how infrastructure is architected and more importantly how the application layer is delivered. The smarts that VMWare have introduced / customers have used will start declining at some point. The smart way of working is to not to solve the worlds ills at the infrastructure layer, but solve them higher up in the stack at the application and orchestration layer.

Have a good one!

Cheers.



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My iPad

so... i had to write about it... I finally fell for the rotten fruit brand - and purchased an iPad..... I had avoided the hype and managed to watch various people use different devices. I even played with the ASUS EEE Transformer - which was v good... however, its just not as usable as the ipad...

This thing is brilliant - only downside i have found thus far is a lack of flash - but i guess i knew that before i purchased the device...

grumpy storage - please no nasty comments about apple being the devil ;-)

Have a good one!!!


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