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.

Making a list? Who's naughty and who's nice?

Who’s naughty and who’s nice? The average computer geek of the last decade would have placed Microsoft atop the naughty list. The average corporate IT manager’s nice list probably wouldn’t have included EMC and Oracle. Yet Google, Apple, Sun, HP and even IBM don’t have this frequent negativity directed towards them. What’s the difference between naughty and nice when it comes to IT companies? I’ve heard complaints of the greed and arrogance of these companies, though their boosters would point out that it’s easy to envy the success of others.

But things are changing. Microsoft has a bona fide hit on their hands, with Windows 7, Xbox, and Bing re-introducing the company to new customers that don’t harbor old grudges. Inside corporate IT, the halo cast by VMware seems to highlight the re-energized EMC in much the same way. With their competition taking dents in the ongoing battles, Microsoft and EMC just don’t look so bad anymore.

Microsoft: Hearts and Minds

The blooms in many Microsoft competitors’ rose gardens seem to be fading. With “do no evil” Google only finding lucre in the filthy advertising business and the naughtiness of “evil as we wanna be” Apple peaking, Microsoft’s Internet and consumer efforts are starting to seem downright approachable. That’s one way to change your image: Wait for your competitors to catch up and your customers will catch on. The geek parade still loves Google and Apple, but their ambitious drive and massive revenue are distasteful to many.

Every time I write about Apple products, at least one credible geek has to call me out for being a fanboy. The core of their arguments seem to combine scorn for friendly interfaces and pretty hardware, a distaste for Apple’s huge profit margins, and a belief that the faithful wear Apple-tinted glasses when looking at alternatives. I guess Apple users look like a bunch of sissies to the more manly geeks in the audience.

In fact, it’s become something of a badge of pride to stick by Microsoft, even as the UNIX weenies and Apple-heads wander off. They ask “who’s got the most market share in desktops and servers?” Windows Vista’s appetite for hardware and unstable nature might have challenged them, but the quick, slick, solid Windows 7 has reaffirmed their faith. And they know that those who throw stones at Windows Server are living in the past: Ridiculous naming aside, Windows Server 2008 R2 is every bit as great in the data center as Windows 7 is on the desktop.

But there’s more to Microsoft than Windows. Even ardent Microsoft haters have to admit Bing is solid, functional, and even clever. Indeed, Microsoft has taken the search battle right to Google and is working hard to innovate past their rival. Xbox has a solid beachhead in the gaming world, challenging successful and innovative products from Nintendo and Sony. Azure puts a developer-friendly face on the nascent cloud computing market and is anything but a “me-too” to Amazon EC2 and VMware. Barring any major product or PR disasters, Microsoft is well on the way to renovating their sagging corporate image.

EMC: Keeping It Real

EMC is leaving the little storage market behind and doesn't look as big and scary in the larger IT world

What Microsoft is to average computer users, EMC is to enterprise data storage folks. No one denies that they make great products, and have dominated the market for two decades. Although they don’t have the massive share Microsoft has in the desktop OS market, no one comes close to EMC in enterprise storage. They spent the last decade steadily growing to control 25% of the market leaving a wealth of competitors fighting it out far below.

Through all this growth, however, EMC has never been loved by their customers. I’ve known literally dozens of IT shops who refused to buy from EMC, even though the sleazy sales tactics that turned them off (and indeed the sales reps themselves) are reportedly long gone from the company. Like Microsoft, EMC hasn’t softened its approach as much as their competitors have hardened theirs. With the market getting tougher, the tough guy doesn’t look so bad anymore.

I hear that things have improved inside the company, too. All giant corporations have their share of intrigue, politics, and dead weight, and EMC is certainly no exception. But the reports I hear from insiders are positive, and improving all the time. EMC is making some smart moves, giving acquisitions the independence to thrive and building revenue outside their enterprise storage base. Hiring great folks like Scott Lowe, Christopher Kusek, and Ed Saipetch doesn’t hurt, either.

Customers seem to be sensing a change, too. It’s hard to hate VMware, RSA, Legato, and the rest of EMC all at once, though some have grudges against two or three. EMC is successfully diversifying into other areas of information technology. Like Microsoft, EMC’s new customers never learned the old stereotypes. Now that they’re swimming in a much larger pond, EMC looks neither as big or as bad as it once did.

You Will Decide

Are EMC and Microsoft really turning the corner? We will all know in a few years. If the geeks of tomorrow no longer resent their success and hold past mistakes against them, both companies could enter a renaissance not only of credibility but of business success.

Santa Claus image: Public domain from Project Gutenberg

Gorilla image: public domain from Pearson Scott Foresman

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, 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.

Great! But I thought the new era for IT was a cloud with choice, mobility, and application support, as trumpeted by EMC’s VMware subsidiary! Wasn’t Cloud vServices from VDC-OS supposed to be the prototype cloud strategy for the datacenter?

What we have here is a simple clash of marketing amusingly taking place at (nearly) the same company. VMware figured out how to extend their server virtualization products outside the confines of the data center, and laid that technology out as a strategy with the trendy “cloud” name. Meanwhile, mother EMC is working on next-generation content storage software and decides to roll that out as a strategy and also jumps on the “cloud” meme. What’s an IT manager to do?

Defining Atmos

As predicted, EMC’s Atmos (code-name Maui) is a distributed software layer to handle the storage and management of data objects across geographically-dispersed storage devices. EMC’s Chuck Hollis demonstrates Atmos with a simple, practical example, perhaps making it sound too much like Akamai but generally getting the point across. You have a data object, write it to Atmos through REST/SOAP or CIFS/NFS, assign some metadata, and the software takes care of data placement for you. It’ll add local copies, replicate for availability and performance, compress or deduplicate, manage versions, and all sorts of goodies (if you ask it to).

But EMC already has a capable object storage platform, the Centera. We’ve just got used to the content-addressable storage (CAS) label for object storage (even though this name misses the point of object storage, in my opinion) and now EMC wants us to learn a new label for a somewhat-similar device? Steve Todd, EMC’s object guy extraordinaire, lays it out:

SAN Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for blocks.

NAS Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for files.

CAS Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for objects (content + metadata).

COS Value = Globalized, secure multi-tenancy for content with rich policies.

Ok, so the defining capabilities of Atmos are its global scale and rich policies. And the fact that “objects” has become “content”, presumably since Atmos can handle traditional NAS (CIFS/NFS) chores as well.

Prayers Answered?

It sounds like EMC is answering my prayers for a storage revolution, delivering a highly-capable object storage platform that transcends the old limits of blocks, directories, and files. Steve Todd points out that Atmos handles five policy categories out of the box:

• Replication
• Compression
• Spin-down
• Object de-dup
• Versioning

So we write some data to Atmos, using either traditional NAS or webby dubby protocols like SOAP, and can then apply policies in any of these five categories to that data. One can also extend the Atmos to accept other policies, but the absence (out of the box) of concepts like encryption, secure deletion, retention, and access control are surprising.

I am quite puzzled about how practical these policy capabilities will be in the real world. How exactly would an application say “I want you to compress that file I wrote over NFS just now?” Hitachi’s HCAP platform, for example, also has policy capabilities and a NAS front end, and although archiving applications can communicate their policy needs, I don’t see lots of current general-purpose applications using it.

Strategic Storage?

This brings me to my puzzlement: The default Atmos policies are all general-purpose, production computing ideas, not the special-purpose, archiving and retention needs served by Centera, HCAP, and the rest. So the Atmos is clearly intended to be a production data storage system, not an archiving system to compete with Centera.

Since mainstream business applications currently don’t have any capability to specify policies like these when writing files, and since NAS protocols lack any means to communicate them even if the apps want to, we can conclude that EMC expects that Atmos users will write special applications to take advantage of it.

EMC certainly doesn’t expect that the NAS-capable Atmos will simply replace today’s distributed NAS solutions. NAS is a sideshow for Atmos. The real action will be in the REST/SOAP webby dubby applications that will be written with the platform in mind and will take full advantage of these capabilities.

If this is true, and I and others suspect that it is, then Atmos really isn’t a game-changing platform unless you change your game. If you write new applications to store data with SOAP, Atmos is a nice in-house alternative to Amazon S3 or Nirvanix, and offers a very compelling set of data management capabilities. And if you want to set up shop to compete with those service providers, Atmos is a dream come true with built-in multi-tenancy.

Datacenter Strategy

So EMC alone has two seemingly competitive datacenter strategies. And then there’s Microsoft, which announced its Azure cloud platform recently, and Amazon and the other cloud providers.

So let’s say you’re a CIO for a large corporation. Which of the following strategies is more compelling:

1. Use VMware VDC-OS to add capabilities and Cloud vServices extend your current virtual infrastructure geographically
2. Recompile and tweak your Windows applications to leverage Microsoft Azure
3. Develop new applications to take advantage of the impressive storage capabilities of an in-house EMC Atmos system
4. Point your new applications at a third-party cloud provider like Amazon or Nirvanix

IT people are practical. Although we love new technology, we tend to be cautious. We also hate massive software development efforts, and only sanction them when they’re absolutely necessary. Given these personality traits, I’d say VDC-OS and perhaps Cloud vServices still stands out as the most likely and practical scenario for the majority of applications and businesses.

This is not to say that EMC Atmos will be a flop. I’m impressed by the technology, and expect that Atmos will find buyers, just as Centera did. And Atmos might even replace Centera once EMC adds retention policies to it and scales it down as well as up and out. But Atmos will not redefine the datacenter. We’re stuck with blocks and files, and VMware’s practical strategy is a winner in that world.

Update: Marc Farley compares Atmos to WAFS, with ominous implications, and echos my recent question on what is and is not innovative.

Update 2: Chuck Hollis, Storagezilla, and Len Devanna have all come right out and said that this is only intended for certain customers with massive distributed storage needs, and is not intended as a new datacenter strategy. Even the “cloudfella” says “ciao”:

Update 3: More great information, including a reply regarding VDC-OS and Atmos from the one and only Chad Sakac, more great detail about the inner workings of Atmos from Steve Todd, and even more info from Dave Graham. Finally, although I think that Cloudfellas video is cute, I wouldn’t categorize it as viral. But those Mozy ads are awesome!

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.