Cloud Front Office

Discussion: Service Catalog Granularity. You Too Can Help the Coast Guard. #ITIL

We get this question about granularity a lot. James at the Coast Guard asks:

Service Catalog granularity

We just started gathering our service info and I'm running into a problem deciding on the level of granularity I need. I suppose it boils down to deciding which activities really are services and not just processes of a service.

For example, one of our divisions listed desktop support as a service, with various activities under that like patch management, user additions/deletions. Where do you draw the line and say "This is a service," or "This is a process under a service?" Are there some reasonable rules of thumb to help decide this?

I've written about this here and on "Using Components in a Service Catalog."

So I invite you to help out the Coast Guard with their service catalog

Lots of Coverage for newScale Support of Cisco UCS

Looks like there's a fair bit of interest in our announcement of support for Cisco UCS.  Here's a sample:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=newScale

http://smart-data-centers.tmcnet.com/topics/smart-data-centers/articles/79186-newscale-offers-support-the-cisco-unified-computing-system.htm

http://vmblog.com/archive/2010/03/17/newscale-announces-support-for-the-cisco-unified-computing-system.aspx

http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1326582

http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31454:rightscale-releases-millionth-cloud-server&catid=69:business&Itemid=58

Today We Announce Support for Cisco UCS. Physical Hardware Now Available in NewScale's CloudComputing Storefront.

The big news out of newScale today is we are announcing support for Cisco's UCS servers.  

So let me explain the method behind our newScale madness with all these announcements supporting major cloud API's like Amazon, vCloud, and now UCS. 

We believe for the next few years, there will be a need to have a business operations cloud storefront OFFER, REQUEST, PROVISION, ACCOUNT, BILL and MANAGE the whole life-cycle for a variety of resources: compute, storage, network, access management, databases, application servers, business applicaitons and virtual desktops, delivered in a variety of ways: physical, virtual and cloud; in a variety of business models: owned, leased,subscribed, outsourced, dedicated, shared.

If it sounds complex, it is. We didn't invent it, we just live in it.  We think we have the only technology agnostic platform to do this.  Cisco UCS is a very addition to our support for physical servers. With a twist.

Cisco UCS enables policy-based management of data center services using service profiles with pre-defined server and connectivity configurations. This means a whole virtual environment can be ordered through our RequestCenter product.

In English this means that there's no HARD ware, rather it's FLEX ware: you can make a blade be different types of servers as needed.  Which means that you need to think about what offers you make.  A blade can support different kind of services. Which means that newScale can provision different types of technical services directly as needed.

newScale provides the ability for UCS customers to configure and request service profiles so that UCS server blades can shift workloads as needed, resulting in increased capacity and utilization. 9 to 5pm one kind of service, then evenings a different workload.

In addition, newScale offers a "just enough console" approach with rich role-based access control (RBAC), so that Cisco UCS administrators can manage their own resources but don’t have visibility into resources they aren’t allowed to see. UCS has a rich API that allows newScale RequestCenter to provide direct functionality to UCS console functionality, except that you can partition it, apply rules to it and put authorizations steps where needed. This is key to cloud self-service: just enough console, and processes where it self-service can't be provided.

Customers can also deploy security and compliance workflows for segregation of duties, ensuring that users only have access to what is relevant to them (i.e. only their own compute resources and resource pools).

We already do this for Vmware, but now we can do it at the lower level Cisco UCS provides which is pretty important when you need full physical hardware access ... like databases or I/O constrained applications.

So why are we the ones to do this? Well, when I was a very young boy....Well, never mind.  The real reason is that few have signed up for this vision and the large companies are all pushing their stacks at a time when it's going to be a very, very, VERY heterogeneous world for the next 5-7 years.

Cloud Computing Is Moving So Fast, Traditional Management Process and Tools Will be Under Pressure.

This morning I got my Amazon EC2 newsletter outlining all the changes they are introducing this month. 

Three things struck me about the changes. 

1) The speed at which improvement and new offerings are coming to market. It's really going to put pressure on all MSP's but also in-house cloud users. It's not just a matter of matching the offers, but having to match and beat them every month.  This requires a deep bench of product marketing expertise and process.

2) Continued downward pricing of instances.Which means more pressure on margins for MSP's. This is going to require more financial savvy  than we usually see in IT departments.

3) The IT storefront will need to be dynamic and fast moving.  The changes Amazon introduces require a continuous evolution of the service catalog and console interfaces.  I think this is going to strain TCO for companies trying to build their own portal with traditional tools ("What? I can't order 16G of Ram because it takes 3 months to change the form?" or "I can't do reserved instances until the end of the year?") At some point the rate of change is such that

This is something we have worked on a lot with our cloud service catalog--our traditional customers make lots of changes to the catalog, continually updating and improving it.  This is possible by the non-programmatic nature of our ServiceDesigner tools  ("New offer, change this here, voila! ready to go.") 

For example, we introduced dynamic pricing in our last release. This allows a cloud product manager to set different prices depending on the options chosen. For example, "Select cloudwatch" as an option, varies your hourly pricing. Now mind you, a web page designer could do that. The trick is to maintain that day in day out against a dynamic market environment.