IT is crossing a chasm, and we may not be prepared for the new direction we are taking

I’m an IT revolutionary. I talk all the time about the quaint backwards “state of the art” in enterprise IT, what with its (many) decades old protocols, paradigms, and practices. What we call modern is really just a charade of faked-out old-fashioned open systems infrastructure: Pretend servers talking to fake disks over frankenstein networking technology.

What is Flexible IT?

I’ll be doing a “Twitterview” about Flexible IT today with NetApp. While I’m sure most companies would like to define flexible IT as “what we have in our product catalog,” I’m not going to play that game. IT has to change its ways or The Techie/Business Schismwill get us all.

I see the roadmap ahead as one journey over two paths:

1. Tactically, IT infrastructure groups must immediately begin implementing technologies that are responsive to user needs and focused on improving the performance of the business applications they support. This is what NetApp is calling Flexible IT.
2. Strategically, IT infrastructure must change entirely, implementing revolutionary platforms to support the next-generation apps that are being widely developed. Call this “cloud” if you must, but just about everything we take for granted today will lose significance in this new era.

Flexible IT (as it stands today) is tactical. IT infrastructure must be entirely virtualized to enable “right now” provisioning and reconfiguration. This means embracing enabling technologies like server-side hypervisors, blade computing, converged networking and I/O, and advanced storage technologies.

What Does it Mean to be a Service Provider?

Automobiles used to be raw and mechanical, but today the mechanical elements are obscured by a covering of user-friendliness and hands-off service

But real IT flexibility will mean higher-level abstraction. The next applications won’t want to run on “a server” – even a very flexible one. These apps will require a programming platform that abstracts away the entire concept of “server.” Although there will always be servers and disks and such, they will fade into the background, hidden under a layer of application services.

You know how some people like to think of themselves as “service providers”? They’re on the right track, though I’m not sure that they (yet) grasp the full significance of that concept.

A service provider has to provide the services required by consumers or it will fail. This means IT infrastructure has to prepare the environment demanded by IT application developers, rather than just shuffling around the chairs and tables and hoping customers will stream in.

What happens when the IT applications group asks the IT infrastructure manager to implement Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform? What if they want to run on App Engine or Force.com? The head-scratching in the VMware community about SpringSource is a sign that IT infrastructure just doesn’t comprehend what’s happening (yet).

Stephen’s Stance

This is a strategic shift, and we have to be ready. Being ready means changing not just what we do but also how we do it. The systems we employ in a decade might look familiar inside, but the process of delivering services on them will be entirely different. Making this shift requires real flexibility from IT, not just another round virtualization fake-outs.

Image credits: Highway construction Guizhou S0404 by sweart, VW engine by Grant Foskett

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Flexible IT and the Path to the Services Future
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Check out these detailed posts on cloud storage I wrote for my other blog, Enterprise Storage Strategies:

• Cloud Storage, Storage in the Cloud, and Cloudy Storage Systems
• What Makes Cloud Storage Different from Traditional SAN and NAS?

Eventually, it dawned on me: There’s a big difference between real cloudstuff and plain old stuff in the cloud!

Lots of cloud computing offerings are startlingly conventional. They’re plain-jane IT infrastructure just like we all have today: Virtual servers, storage, and databases. Strip away the management API and self-service model and Amazon EC2 and EBS looks an awful lot like the Xen-based virtual server infrastructure you might find at any old IT shop. The same goes for Rackspace’s Mosso Cloud Servers: They’re extremely similar to Rackspace’s Slicehost virtual private servers!

This isn’t all bad, of course. As I discussed with EMC’s Barry Burke last week, you can theoretically run your ERP application on EC2 without major gyrations. Try that with Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine! And the management layers, especially those from companies like RightScale, turn these run-of-the-mill parts into something really extraordinary! VMware’s vCloud concept really hammers home this evolution-not-revolution mindset.

Real cloudstuff is completely different. Comparing a Xen instance running Linux on some disk (a-la EC2) to a programmable platform like Azure is problematic. Just about the only thing they have in common (apart from the cloud name) is the fact that they’re hosted on multi-tenant servers and offered to the public on a pay-per-usage model. Cloudstuff is the IT revolution that application developers have dreamed of!

Of course, the problem with whole-cloth reinvention is that it’s slow to take hold. Although net-new apps can be built to take advantage of full-on cloud infrastructure today, it will literally be a decade before the corporate IT applications we all rely on will run there. The early adopters will be companies like Microsoft and Google, who have a vested interest in seeing the concept succeed and the development muscle to make it happen.

Then there are the bridges between today’s world and this cloudstuff future. Consider applications like Nirvanix CloudNAS and Jungle Disk: They hide the complexity of API-driven cloud storage behind the familiar face of file server or backup application. Once the data is loaded, cloud-aware applications can access it. This is where the magic happens!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | CloudStuff Versus Stuff in the Cloud
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.