Cloud Front Office

Denial is Not Just a River in Egypt: IT needs to get over its cloud denial, or management will get over IT

As I've written before in my other blog post "Sixteen digits to freedom,"  cloud computing is already in the enterprise. This article makes an excellent case.

Wake up, IT. You're giving your executives an easy out. Why should they put up with your costly, dysfunctional ways when their fanciful dreams of a utopian infrastructure seem suddenly achievable via the cloud? When any manager with a corporate credit card can go out to the cloud and purchase new services, where does that leave an IT department that failed to satisfy its users? Out in the cold, my friends. Out in the cold.

IT needs to get over its cloud denial, or management will get over IT | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld.

We at newScale have been providing cloud appliances to some customers while they wait for hardware or to jump start development. I'm now hearing those customers saying, "Can we just stay on it?"

View Yonder says: Free the Gladiators! (Through Process, Of All Things)

I'm quite enjoying the View Yonder blog. The Gladiators to be freed in this case, are your top people.

Virtualization is a technology that greatly helps in the road to an IT organization that is service oriented, but as the case is made, it's not enough. There's also a process and culture transformation.

The challenge in rolling out virtualization is that you can’t do it in isolation: all of these SME roles are impacted in some way, either in the justification, design, implementation or operational phases.

At a minimum, the processes they use will be changed, and that spells trouble. Rarely in my five years at VMware did I find a cohesive system of processes that I could tweak because they were all at VMM level 5.

Instead, I continuously found subject matter experts hoarding the knowledge in their brains, acting on “experience” (read: gut feel), and not having the time to document/improve processes. Often the biggest barrier to a virtualization project was the VMware Fanboy, because that individual was awesome at what they did and didn’t see why anyone else (like Operations, or Security) needed to know about virtualization… that was Somebody Else’s Problem. Sigh.

[Editor's note: to be fair to VM admins, every other silo does the same thing. This is why a service catalog with its underlying processes is soooo crucial.

Remember, virtualization is technology, cloud computing an operational model.  The rest is here.
View Yonder » Free the Gladiators!.

Emergent Consensus: Private Cloud Needs a Front Office Part 1

Last week I attended Structure 09, one of the better cloud computing conferences. Everyone I could hear the echo of the need for a service catalog; often it was implicit.

For example, everyone spoke about the need for standardization and multi-tenancy, about the need to abstract computing resources from the application to enable moving workloads as needed.  Which in my mind requires you to a) know what the workload is, b) know the SLA of that workload, c) have well defined underpinning technical services that compose that application service, and therefore d) Have a SERVICE CATALOG to track all of that!

And so a consensus begins to form. I'll track that on my blog.  First up, is a Sandhill article on how to take the next step up from virtualization to a private cloud.
 

Turning Your Virtual Datacenter Environment into an Internal Cloud

Introducing processes and tools that are similar to those provided by external cloud vendors can turn your virtual datacenter environment into an internal cloud.

By first developing [editor note: or acquire?]  tools to handle life cycle management of virtual machines, a user can request a virtual machine using a menu to specify resource requirements (CPUs, memory, storage), operating system details, lease period (no more than 12 months) and other miscellaneous configuration information.

The request then goes through an IT approval process, that once approved, is assigned and the virtual machine is rapidly provisioned from templates. A requisition process that used to take weeks is now completed in just days and urgent requests can be handled within hours. To further avoid server sprawl problems and to maximize resource utilization for legitimate purposes, it is recommended that the virtual machines either get a lease extension in three month increments or are retired when a lease period expires.

SandHill.com | Opinion : Building an Internal Cloud.

It's worth commenting on the lifecycle. I'll do that in future blog posts.

Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law

Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law.

Dramatically reducing the cost of IT operations will require unprecedented levels of standardization, specialization and automation across these traditional administrative silos.

 And finally, the transparency created by more visible service level agreements and charge-backs enables benchmarking internal IT against large and well-run external service providers. New organizations and processes will come from external pressure. Because IT operations can be metered and billed back to each application owner, IT itself will have to compete for resources with external cloud service providers.

SaaS and Cloud Forging a New Role for CIOs

As more work moves outside of IT, the role of IT will be more generalist and business involved; more architect than construction worker.

The control point will be a front office that clearly explains what IT offers, how to contract it, the costs, and provides visibility into delivery from multiple sources.  It will have to be agnostic and customer centric. The traditional role of controlling and withholding IP, resources, permissions will simply shift demand for the cloud.

The article is here.

A recent blog post by former CIO George Tomko has a title that neatly encapsulates this change: CIOs as Brokers, not Controllers. "... a CIO is a broker of business solutions that involve cross functional process stewardship and a provider of a technology and infrastructure framework," he writes. "... Any attempt to be controlling, withholding, short-sighted or locked-in will simply generate powerful incentives for the organization to go it alone, underground, in any number of ways. CIOs that fail to migrate from IT czar style CIO to chief impact officer style CIO will find themselves moved out, passed over or [demoted]."

SaaS and Cloud Forging a New Role for CIOs - The Connected Web.

And this also means a change for the business too. They'll have to be much more responsible for what they consume.  They certainly will be paying for it.

Private cloud: Standard Offerings, Fast provisioning, Ease of access, Clear Pricing, Available Through Self Service

This presentation does a great job of setting the stage for a Cloud FrontOffice.
It defines "Standard Offerings" from a service catalog as intrinsic to the operating model of a private cloud. I agree. Fast provisioning, ease of access, clear pricing and available through self service.

Virgílio Vargas Presentations / CloudViews.Org - Cloud Computing Conference 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from Paulo Calçada.

More about service catalogs at my other blog.

IT to Business: Squeeze Blood from Turnip? Business to IT: We Are Desperate, Get Used to It

The blog entry below ask" Not blood from a turnip, but water from a cloud?  Or as one of my favorite bands of all time, X used to sing: "We are desperate, get used to it."

What Business Wants from IT: Squeeze Blood from Turnip?

Frankly, I'm wondering if it boils down to advising CIOs to squeeze blood from a turnip.

There are a couple of reasons why the report has me scratching my head, but primarily it comes down to this: It strikes me as a list of wants with no clear indication of how companies hope to achieve them. For instance, the report found - not surprisingly - that companies want to reduce IT costs. This seems to me the most clear finding from the report, with 81 percent of businesses saying they want to reduce IT costs. But, a close second demand was better integration between applications, at 77 percent. Likewise, the top initiative for 2009 was updating key legacy systems.

Of course, both would probably save companies money in the long run, so in a way it makes sense. It's the short-term compatibility I question. If your goal this year is to reduce IT costs, then is this really the time to update legacy systems and undertake better application integration? Or could it be that companies expect IT to accomplish these massive tasks without added spending?

Perhaps the answer lies in the press release's quote from Jean Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester:

“The costs of operating monolithic legacy applications makes them unsustainable, and these survey results show that firms are seeking efficient ways to modernize. Companies are willing to adapt their business processes to cheaper packaged software solutions rather than wait for custom applications. Automation is the key to IT’s future.”

Certainly that was another finding in the report – companies prefer packaged solutions to tailored solutions or hosted or SaaS solutions. I was a bit surprised that SaaS came in last, considering the potential for cost savings and the report's finding about reducing IT costs. But apparently security concerns worry enterprises, and SMBs fret about the total ownership costs with SaaS.

If you are curious, this is X and we better get used to it.

You promised that virtualization would save money, what happens when it doesn't?

I've been thinking about this conundrum.  On the one hand, it's clear that we can put more VM's on a physical server than before.  You could argue that the price per server is going down.

But like playing whack-a-mole, the costs shift to other areas like
VM sprawl (because they are free!)
Labor and operation costs rise
Storage is out of control

So the customer will get a bill, or their allocation and ask: where are the savings?!
And talking about higher density, at that moment, is really like asking for it.

So the question is, if you promised that virtualization would save money, what happens when it doesn't

More next post...

Telco as your Cloud provider? Maybe. But Needs Service Catalog, Says Jamie.

However, if you are going to be running a hybrid environment which may include cloud and a couple of in-house virtualization solutions, you may be better off owning a platform neutral solution such as a Service Catalog. It may provide you better control over the implementation plan and a greater chance of success.

Would you use your telecom company as your Cloud provider? - Service Catalog 101.

Cloud Computing on NY Times or KILL ZOMBIE SERVERS NOW!

This Sunday New York Times Magazine has an extensive article, Data Center Overload, about Data Centers and the Cloud as a new type of infrastructure.  You know a topic has reached mainstream interest when it's in the Sunday Times. 

While it's written for the lay person, I recommend you read it. The article talks a lot about the infrastructure, power, location, etc. The big stuff. The cool stuff. But this quote tells part of the story that touches on our topic of the Front Office.

Data centers, however, are loaded with inefficiencies, including loss of power as it is distributed through the system. It has historically taken nearly as much wattage to cool the servers as it does to run them. Many servers are simply “comatose.” “Ten to 30 percent of servers are just sitting there doing nothing,” Koomey says. “Somebody in some department had a server doing this unique thing for a while and then stopped using it.” Because of the complexity of the network architecture — in which the role of any one server might not be clear or may have simply been forgotten — turning off a server can create more problems (e.g., service outages) than simply leaving it on.

Those servers are doing nothing because no one knows for what business purpose they were initially created.  The number "10-30%" is huge and I believe it.  And it has nothing to do with complexity of the network architecture and everything with request, lifecycle, and account management. This would allow us to know who the customer is, what's the intended lifecycle of those servers, etc etc.

This is why it's imperative for this large scale cloud computing to work that we architect the front office as much as we architect these noveau datacenters.  No matter how big and scalable the cloud seems, without a front office even that capacity will not keep with demand.d

Maybe the tag line for the Front Office should be "Kill the Zombie Servers!"