This regular series features highlights from the week.

• Tech Field Day related
  • One of the biggest announcements at Tech Field Day was Druva, launched at our event. Their presentation drew quite a bit of attention! Can Druva succeed at mobile backup?
  • The delegates wanted to share their advice for presenters: How To Give an A+ Presentation at Tech Field Day and Presenting at Tech Field Day
  • Another hit presentation was Drobo’s new business products: Tech Field Day #5 wrap-up – Day 1 – Drobo and Drobo – My visit from Tech Field Day
  • Then there was Xangati, which had a shortened presentation. TFD5: Xangati – Stepping stone to Skynet or datacenter “DRS”
  • The big kick-off was Symantec: Impressions of Symantec from Tech Field Day
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day #5 Experience
  • HP StoreOnce – the basics of HP deduplication
  • The HP coffee machine was a hit, too: Introducing Chai Field Day and Joking around with the HP EBC coffee machine
• Other great posts
  • I’ve been a proponent of the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. But not everyone is happy: Users frustrated with Seagate’s next-gen hybrid drive
  • I talked to Sonia Lelli about SAN management in virtual environments. Wanted: SAN management tools for a virtualized environment
  • A great Steve Duplessie piece: Why is Everyone so Fired Up About Big Data?
  • Greg Ferro is right on (as usual): Your Cloud Future Is In China
  • Great news for Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley, and company: Infosmack Podcast to be distributed by The Register
  • I was glad to have Matthew Norwood’s help with this: Wrapping My Head Around The Nexus1000v – Part 1

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 18, 2011
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• Tech Field Day 5 links
  • Official stuff:
    • Tech Field Day 5: The Links
    • Tech Field Day 5: The Videos
  • Rob Novak shared his Thoughts from Tech Field Day 5
  • A great post by Greg Stuart: Symantec NetBackup 7 for VMware vSphere 4
  • I loved Tom’s Things I Learned From Tech Field Day, Part 1
• My writing
  • I’ve wanted to write this for quite a while: ATA over Ethernet protocol overview for data storage managers
  • I talked to Intel this week and wrote it up: Where Is Intel’s FCoE Solution?
  • Another big area for my virtual storage seminar preparation: VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English
  • And finally: Aerobie AeroPress Review: The Hacker Coffee Maker
• Other great stuff I’ve been reading
  • Barry Burke responded to my VAAI post with some competitive digs: reality check vsp vaai support
  • From Robin Harris is a DEC obituary: Ken Olsen, 1926-2011
  • A clever piece by Tom Petrocelli: Public Clouds : An Unregulated Utility
  • vKernel has a good point to make: Dear CIO’s, Please Send Paul Otellini a Thank You Note
  • Chris Evans covers the arrays we saw at TFD: Data Robotics Releases Business-class Arrays
  • Ivan Pepelnjak (inspired by Greg Ferro): Open FCoE – Software implementation of the camel jetpack
  • I loved this infographic: The Most Common and Dangerous Passwords
  • And this one: A Decade of Storage
  • Another great piece by Chris Evans: Managing iSCSI on Windows 2008 Core with Hyper-V

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 11, 2011
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• My work
  • The Four Stages of Vendor Blogging
  • Always Punch Above Your Weight
  • Introducing The Enterprise IT Infrastructure Events Calendar
  • What Does HP Printer “Ink Cartridge Expired” Mean?
  • HP Photosmart Ink System Failure – Error: 0xc19a0035
• Other good stuff
  • Nigel Poulton did a great job covering EMC’s latest Symmetrix updates in VMAX Comes of Age
  • Chris Wolf is always worth reading; witness this week’s Hybrid Cloud Mobility: Converting the VM is the Easy Part
  • I also loved Tom Loverro’s piece, Android “Vista Pie”

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, December 24, 2010
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

2011 will look pretty much like 2010 apart from the differences...

Prognostication is a perilous business, but pundits are drawn to the topic in the month of December. The fact that most predictions fall on their faces demonstrates the intoxicating mix of hope, dreams, and irrationality that mark both geniuses and fools. I am neither, so I like to make predictions after the fact! But this year I’ve been asked to look to the future, so I’ll stick with the safe road and pick current trends rather than guessing what I hope will come.

Five Trends For Everyone

1 – Ubiquitous Connectivity

I named mobility as the mega-trend of the last decade, noting that it’s hard to spot a trend from the middle and harder still from the start. But I feel vindicated on that 2009 call, and will take it one further: 2011 will see ubiquitous connectivity become mainstream. With “MiFi” entering the vernacular, a proliferation of “4G” networks and integrated wireless data, and free WiFi having already become passe, I’d say “online everywhere” is here. Although incredibly challenging from both a technical and business perspective, I expect everyone and everything to be online-capable.

2 – The iPad and Foes

Steve Jobs’ bizarre claim that the overgrown iPhone tablet was the most important thing he ever did is starting to look prescient. A new generation is coming of age without windowing GUIs, mice, and keyboards thanks to gaming consoles, smartphones, iPods, and (finally) tablets. 2011 will finally see serious Android, WebOS, and Windows tablets, but the iPad (and forthcoming iPad 2) are the platform to beat, and Apple is firing on all cylinders. This war will be all-consuming next year.

3 – Wave “Hi” to Kinect!

Microsoft has a serious hit on their hands with the Kinect add-on to the Xbox 360. The gaming system is the best thing to come out of Redmond in a long time, and it continues the “no controller” concept of the iPad, finally kicking the Wii to the curb. The massive success of the Xbox will lead Microsoft shareholders to abandon their calls for Ballmer’s head, instead asking for a spin-out or IPO of the gaming division. Expect PCs to include Kinect-like features in the coming years as well.

4 – Facebook Is the Internet

Now boasting a quarter of all web pageviews. Facebook is looking increasingly like AOL for the rest of us. 2011 will see Facebook’s gravity pull in content from everywhere, and its satellites sprout all over the Internet. It will become the single sign-on, the central “like”, the address book, and the meeting place. But fear not, Facebook-phobes: Nothing is permanent, and this too shall pass.

5 – The Internet Changes and No One Notices

The IP address space is exhausted, BGP and DNS security lapses rise, and net neutrality falls by the wayside but Farmville still works so no one cares. The Internet is changing, and controversies over key components are coming coming to a head. I imagine the network engineers will be busy keeping ahead of catastrophe, but they’ll manage somehow. I’m not sure if IPv6 will finally take off or if the carrier gambit will succeed, but I’m confident we’ll still have an Internet at the heart of the technology world!

Five Trends For the Datacenter

6 – Clouds Gather Quietly

“Cloud” was the buzzword of the last two years, but now it’s getting down to work. Traditional IT staff still won’t see much of it outside of blogs and conferences, but non-traditional systems are all heading that way. Look for major uptake of cloud platforms and services from the home to enterprise applications and everywhere in between. Ironically, the “c-word” itself will soon be dropped from these successful services just as it gains acceptance in IT shops.

7 – Virtual Everything

The impact of server virtualization hasn’t been as great as supporters claim, but widespread acceptance of hypervisor-centric data centers is here. There’s really no reason not to deploy every datacenter server as a virtual machine and lots of resulting benefits. Expect to see mission-critical apps finally move to VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V in 2011. And expect to see the resulting infrastructure called “cloud”!

8 – Farewell, Fast Hard Drives

Storage I/O performance is now the realm of solid state, not spinning disk. SSDs have reached the level of performance, capacity, availability, and sophistication that we no longer need 15k rpm enterprise hard disk drives. You’ll use SSD if you want IOPS, but you’ll still need spinning platters for capacity and maximum throughput for a long while. Don’t expect hard disk drives to disappear, but the fastest will exit at the end of the year.

9 – Not-So-Converged I/O (Yet)

DCB ain’t ready, folks. Neither is FCoE. Although Ethernet will eventually sideline InfiniBand and Fibre Channel, that’s not a 2011 topic. I expect to hear a lot of noise about converged network and storage I/O, including high-profile customer adoption stories, but we’re still a few years short of actual impact and serious market share movement. Practical application starts in 2011, though, and it’ll get major coverage and big-money action in the vendor space.

10 – RAID is (Finally) Dead!

There won’t be much ink spilled in memoriam outside storage blogs like this one, but conventional mirroring and parity has finally met its maker. Today’s hard disk drives are too big to rebuild singly, and alternatives like wide striping, erasure coding, and touch-me-not disk packs are taking over.

And One More For Me

11 – The Internet is Shiva

Every business will be permanently changed as Internet-enabled platforms destroy profitable monopolies and build new opportunities. Google conquered advertising and destroyed traditional publishing but enabled a flowering of democratic dialog. PayPal and Square will do the same to banking in 2011, but their own come-uppance might come sooner than they like. No matter your business, someone has their sights set on you and the Internet is their tool. The trick is to keep dancing, keep innovating, and love the paradox.
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Image Credit: Eleven by Wetsun

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Eleven Tech Trends To Watch In 2011
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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.

What Works

IT folks don’t “get” cloud computing. The repackaged virtual infrastructure they call “cloud” is not the least bit interesting to developers who have experienced web-style development platforms. The next generation of applications are written with scale-out and highly abstracted infrastructure in mind. Virtual machine clusters, virtual I/O, and federated storage are fine for running scale-out apps, but they are not the synonymous of the new IT world. Indeed, advanced server and storage hardware is not even required – the largest clouds already in use rely on plain commodity systems.

Many of us are so in love with big iron that we fail to grasp the power of simple “what works” solutions. Techies criticize products like the Apple iPhone and iPad for being feature-poor even as the real world embraces the ease at which they can accomplish tasks in these “gilded cages.” Single-tasking is a virtue to most computer users, and consumers are happy to pay for media, games, and applications as long as the store is easy to use. The people IT derisively calls “end users” are similar: They want to trade, heal, build, compose, or discuss, not to use this or that software program or computer system.

Fix It or Lose It

The topic of business/IT alignment has been discussed to death, but I’m not sure the message has really gotten through. We should focus on getting IT out of the way and really meeting the needs of the business, not helping business people understand IT. Fixing the process means changing everything we do, starting with our focus on better/faster/cheaper technologies.

I have frequently used storage utilization as an example of this problem. The fact that our storage systems cannot be designed, purchased, and configured in a way that reflects the changing needs of the business is a symptom of decades of misplaced focus, not mere technical deficiencies. Why do so few enterprise systems treat data as flexible objects rather than files on disks? Business people don’t care about directories, let alone SCSI LUNs, because tree-oriented filesystems are outdated and artificial constructs that no longer match the way they work. Most end users already rely on search engines, not directory trees, to locate spreadsheets, pictures, and documents. So let’s shift the focus of enterprise storage to providing more-flexible data repositories, not better SAN and NAS.

The same can be said of other parts of IT. Instead of recreating the mainframe for yesterday’s applications, let’s embrace web-scale technologies and build real cloud platforms to serve the new applications being written today. Instead of creating virtual everything to fake every system component into thinking it’s dealing with yesterday’s technology, let’s sit down with application developers and business people, hat in hand, and offer to build what they really want. That’s really fixing the process of IT.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | The Techie/Business Schism
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

HP invited bloggers to Colorado to show off their storage offerings at Tech Day 2009

Well that was interesting! I spent Monday and Tuesday with a dozen bloggers in Colorado Springs learning about HP’s key StorageWorks products from the executives and engineers of that storied company. Throughout the event, we listened, asked tough questions, and tweeted incessantly. HP Tech Day generated an avalanche of publicity for the company, including press articles and cries of FUD and misdirection.

Here is the truth: HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.

Won’t Be Fooled

But what was HP Tech Day really all about? Did they brainwash us into thinking the EVA was exciting? Did HP hoodwink and misdirect us from noticing the gaps and overlaps in their product line? Were we dazzled enough to no longer question their storage strategy? Of course not! Robin Harris has seen it all before. Rich Brambley can dissect a presentation with the best of them. Nigel Poulton questions everything he sees. This was not a love-fest, and there were some seriously uncomfortable moments for the HP crew.

We were all savvy enough to know what the score was: HP (and especially their StorageWorks product line) has never received much press or blogger attention. They invited us in to spread the word about their products and get blog exposure. And it worked! The storage Twitter-sphere was dominated with #HPTechDay postings for days, and attendees did indeed blog about the stuff they saw. It was a success from HP’s perspective, and now that we know more about their products we will likely cover them in the future.

I personally never blogged much about HP products. I compared them to Ford, called one product an all-time cool flop, and covered their acquisition of LeftHand and Ibrix, but that’s about it. I didn’t even notice that they had started selling LSI’s StoreAge-based virtualization platform, and didn’t know enough about their other product releases over the last two years to mention them. If it hadn’t been for Calvin Zito and the HP Tech Day, I probably wouldn’t mention them in the future, either. They just weren’t on my radar.

We Were Educated

This has changed as a result of Tech Day. I now know that EVA is still pretty much what I thought it was but that it is fairly simple to configure. I now know that HP has two lines of deduplication appliances, and that one is homegrown. I now know that HP develops and sells a FC SAN virtualization platform based on the LSI/StoreAge product. This was great product exposure for HP: Even though I still don’t think I’ll focus on these offerings, at least I now know that they exist.

We also saw some more interesting content: HP plans to leverage their excellent ProLiant server and blade technology to underpin a line of commodity-based storage and consolidated virtualization offerings. This is exciting stuff, and builds on HP’s base and their recent acquisitions. The most interesting concept I saw was a combination of a blade chassis and ultra-dense storage system with VMware ESX, LeftHand, Ibrix, and HP’s management software. They definitely plan to challenge Cisco/EMC and IBM in this market.

But the best part of the event was the people of HP. The company was smart enough to bring in the techies rather than executive marketing droids. They gave us straight and honest answers about their product capabilities and their place within the company, sometimes to the chagrin of others in the room. We saw conflicting definitions, product line overlaps, internal competition, and got a feel for the realities of this massive company. Every company is like this, but most would never admit what we already know. By not showering us with slick FUD, HP won our respect in a way that I would not have thought possible.

Colorado Take-Away

The event was great. Every other IT company should wise up and do the same. But I bet they won’t have the nerve to do it as openly, and I expect HP will be more careful next time too. As for HP’s products, let me lay out my honest opinion:

1. LeftHand was a bargain. HP could replace their entire sub-XP block storage product line with LeftHand variants based on commodity Intel hardware. I think they should.
2. Ibrix is too new to judge, but will likely take a seat next to LeftHand in a unified commodity-based scale-out SAN/NAS platform.
3. I hope HP hasn’t lost focus on their excellent Hitachi-based XP line, since it’s the only challenger they have to EMC Symmetrix at the high end of the market.
4. HP’s excellent server and blade hardware should be leveraged throughout the company and oddball hardware should be curtailed.
5. HP has an interesting lineup of Windows Storage Server and Windows Home Server hardware aimed at the low-end SOHO and SMB market. I’m not a Windows hater, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a super-low-end LeftHand variant there too?
6. I wonder if HP’s home-grown in-line deduplication (the D2D line) could replace the Sepaton-sourced post-process VLS line or vice-versa if an acquisition of that company happens.
7. I don’t “get” SVSP, the LSI/StoreAge SAN virtualization platform. It’s nice and it seems to work, but why introduce a FC SAN virtualization platform at this point? Maybe it sells when integrated with EVA, but not as a standalone product.
8. Where are all the storage arrays that use 2.5″ disk drives that HP talked about over the last few years? And where are the flash solid state drives?
9. They were like deer in the headlights with no story when I asked about sub-LUN automated tiered storage since even full-LUN automation has not yet been released. Might EMC get there first?
10. As for the absence of DCB and FCoE, HP seems to think that Virtual Connect and Flex-10 are good enough for now. HP will OEM a CNA soon and might possibly consider the Cisco Nexus 4000. Maybe. They had better have a more-convincing story when this stuff takes off next year!
11. Most importantly, where is the cloud strategy? I applaud HP for not overusing the current buzzword, but it almost seems like they are avoiding the topic entirely.

I am left thinking that HP is like a boxed puzzle. All of the pieces are there, but they haven’t been put into place yet. Let’s hope Dave Donatelli and his crew can help them work it out when he takes his post as czar of servers, networking, and storage next year. For now, I’ve gained a lot of respect for the people of HP and a pile of knowledge about their storage products. And HP has gained my attention.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, 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.

This new Simple Cloud API is a godsend to PHP developers looking for a simple object-oriented way to access cloud file, document, and queueing services. I’m not much of a programmer, but I use PHP all the time and am looking forward to adding simple calls to my code to store and access data wherever it lives, in S3, Azure, Cloud Files, and the Nirvanix SDN. Most of my PHP work goes into the WordPress blogging platform, and I’m already imagining cool new plugins that this simple interface makes possible.

But the most telling aspect of this announcement is not what it is but what it is not: Rather than meet with a committee or ask for approval, the fine folks at Zend and others in the PHP community just whipped up the whole thing and launched it. The fact that Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, and Nirvanix offer fully-documented APIs and leverage open protocols like IP and HTTP made the creation of this interface a straightforward matter of coding. This may not meet the definitions of open and free put forth by the open source and free software community in the last two decades, but it certainly meets the spirit of openness and freedom demanded by today’s web developers and end users. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Of course, the Zend Simple Cloud API is by no means unique. Indeed, CloudLoop, which launched earlier this month, offers a similar interface to public cloud storage for Java programmers and even included a UNIX-like command line interface. Like Zend, CloudLoop was able to dispense with the politics and implement their open interface using programming skills, API specifications, and technical support forums. It is gratifying to see cloud vendors actively foster and support this kind of creativity, even creating and publishing their own frameworks for languages like Ruby and Python.

These practical interfaces really deliver the goods:

• Developers and programmers get simple, instant access to all of the major public cloud storage service providers.
• End users of these applications will get a choice of cloud services as well as easy portability if they decide to switch.

This is true freedom, available today, and enabled without contentious political battles and long waits for standardization. Another telling aspect: No one asked for permission from the service providers involved, they just went ahead and did it. Now that’s the Internet I love! Who needs standards?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Zend Simple Cloud API = Freedom!
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.

But cloud services are different. Seriously! Cloud services don’t need standards because:

1. Cloud services are still rapidly evolving – No one knows how they will look in a year, let alone a decade, and a premature standard will be worthless. Similarly, it’s not at all clear what use cases will eventually win out, and usage should drive interfaces, not the other way around.
2. Cloud services are many and varied – It’s incredibly hard to come up with a reasonably-complete standard programming API or management platform when each vendor’s offering is radically different. Standards must follow the 80/20 rule, but today’s cloud offerings are only about 20% similar.
3. (Real) cloud systems are open already – The whole point of the public cloud is to leverage existing open standards for access (IP/HTTP) and any worthwhile service already has a freely-usable REST-like API. Cloud services are engineered to be programmable and open, so the only lock-in is in how you use the cloud.

We can’t even agree on terminology at this point. Is data storage as a service DaaS (as SNIA says) or STaaS (as NetApp says)? How do you define public, private, and hybrid cloud? And what is cloud anyway? Cloud computing is not a war, it’s a fantastically exciting race to deliver value!

Open for Business

I’d like to return for a moment to that last point: The key element I’ve seen in most interesting cloudy products is programmability. Service providers publish API documents outlining the inputs, processing, and outputs for their systems and developers and end users create applications that leverage these. The best of these APIs use the concept of REST, delivering services through extremely simple and self-contained HTTP calls. This barely even rises to the level of software coding (and thus isn’t a true API) and is the hallmark of the cloud.

These systems are wide open: You can explore their interfaces, discovering new ways to use the them that were never intended. The same process accompanies all Internet systems, from RSS and Atom to Yahoo Finance. Just as one can rapidly migrate from Yahoo to Google by substituting a few URLs and parameters, so too can one move between cloud platforms.

Note that certain cloud systems lend themselves more to this kind of mobility. Once cannot move virtual machines from Amazon EC2 to Rackspace or Terremark because the underlying hypervisor technology is different. But even here companies like RightScale are stepping in to enable mobility.

When it comes to cloud storage services, the major players’ interfaces are open enough that migrating data in and out is simply a matter of performance: Read from this one, write to that one, and wait until the process is done. I am not a programmer and yet I was able to port an application from S3 to Nirvanix in just a few hours using only the respective API documentation. Interfaces like CloudLoop can also be leveraged to ease the movement of data.

Standards When?

Cloud services will eventually settle down and be standardized. I expect a workable cross-platform API for RESTful cloud storage within 24 months, for example. And one expects that the management of cloud compute instances will pass through a consistent and stable interface in that same timeframe. But these will develop as a natural part of the evolution of the systems themselves, not through some artificial “build it and they will come” standardization process.

There is nothing wrong with big companies sending their representatives to SNIA and DMTF meetings to talk about standardization. In fact, this is a great way to discuss ideas and begin to orient the industry. But the time for standards has not yet come, and users of cloud services have no need to wait for them. In fact, waiting for a standard will just prolong the maturation of cloud services, since real-world applications are the external pressure that forces evolutionary selection. Amazon would never have created their virtual private cloud (VPC) capability without customer input, and they will never perfect this capability if they rely only on pundits, bloggers, and product marketers.

Even when standards do appear, they will not eliminate per-solution APIs. Cloud service providers will continue to explore new concepts, and these will appear first in “proprietary” interfaces. Perhaps they will use entirely unique calls, or perhaps they will leverage reserved or unassigned sections of the standard, but innovation will continue. Witness the radical changes in HTML versions to date, the additions to CSS, and the wide world of browser plugins.

So we don’t need cloud standards yet. They will come, whether artificially pushed by committees or evolving through use, but only useful standards will survive. Isn’t that just how it should be?

Note: I am employed by Nirvanix, a cloud managed storage service provider, providing independent cloud strategy advice as Director of Consulting. Although this article was not created for my employer and is not intended to reflect their views, my perceptions are obviously colored by my daily work.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | We Don’t Need Cloud Standards (Yet)
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.

Although my dislike for certain aspects of trade shows (especially booth babes and chotchkies) are well documented, I’ll be trying some new ideas:

• I’ve been working on a concise overview of cloud storage for my in-stage presentation (Tuesday at 11:30 in the main ballroom)
• Being a cloud vendor, we will have a very plain booth – what better way to represent reduction in data center footprint than demoing our offering from an empty table?
• Rather than giving away some cheap flashy-light junk, we will be offering attendees a free tree. Seriously! Everyone who visits our booth will get a tree planted in their name, doing a bit to offset the massive environmental impact of the show and demonstrating the positive environmental impact of cloud computing.
• We will have three technical experts, one CEO, and two salespeople on the show floor, matching my suggested 50-50 ratio of tech and sales.
• We will be offering a free cloud computing strategy workshop to interested and qualified attendees following the show to facilitate deeper discussion.
• We are also hosting a CIO-level roundtable discussion in New York with some of the City’s top companies in October.

This is a major test, in my opinion, of substance over flash. Although cheap gimmicks might attract short-term attention, I believe that they do nothing to deliver real results. Instead, we’ll be applying our best people and ideas and demonstrating both our values and our value. Wish me luck, and I’ll see you in New York!

As many folks know, I wear two hats: I work full-time as Director of Consulting for Nirvanix, where I help customers realize the strategic value of cloud storage. In my off-hours I also write, speak, and generally gad about the industry as a sort of non-analyst. If you or your company will be at Storage Decisions New York 2009, drop me a line and let’s meet up!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | What’s All This About Cloud Storage? Ask Me At Storage Decisions
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