Cloud Front Office

Citrix Uses newScale Service Catalog to Provide Virtual Deskop Infrastructure

In case, I hadn't blogged this. Citrix uses newScale's Service Catalog in a very advanced way: To provide Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to its 5,000 employees. Read the rest via vmblog.com

Citrix’s new Service Catalog initiative – as well as its recent Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) program – are examples of Citrix’s commitment to providing a self-service IT environment and consumer-like experience for its more than 5,000 employees in locations around the world. Citrix went live with its successful newScale RequestCenter deployment on January 18, 2010, offering more than 250 IT service request options in the Service Catalog for its employees.

With standard IT offerings defined in an actionable Service Catalog for self-service requests, the company anticipates benefits including much better service to the business through faster response times, increased self-service capability and greatly improved reporting and analytical capability – allowing Citrix to spot trends and patterns in IT service demand. Desautels already reports “great employee feedback for ease of use in requesting IT services.”

Reading: "Clouds and Enterprises: Lessons Learned" Yep!

Great notes from a custome panel at InterOp this week from sciencelogic

A few highlights below. My overall take is:

• Groups are using cloud to get what internal IT can't deliver: cost-effectiveness and agility.
• There are multiple ways to get started.
• It's a new continent and there's advantage to get started early.

But really, cloud computing is of course a big focus of Interop (and every other technology conference) this year. Our first panel today featured executives from companies such as Reddit, Inc., Domino’s  Pizza (how’s that new crust and sauce?), PRN, Escape Media Group, and Mu Dynamics, Inc. The panel was moderated by Killian Murphy at VMware (which by the way is the coolest name ever).

A few highlights from the panel, snippets really.

• The cloud is a way to bring things to scale quickly.
• 7,000 retail stores all have physical machines, looking to move into the cloud (from PRN)
• Enterprise software is not built for multi-tenancy. You can’t just throw it up on the cloud. It can be hard. There are many benefits – scaling, cost, management.
• The promise going forward – a more heterogeneous environment.  SLA’s are great from a performance review perspective. But, most important to us – am I up on a Friday night (from Domino’s – hello pizza orders!)
• For small companies it’s cost and agility, for enterprises it’s resilience.
• Conde Nast owns Reddit – they have a standard for IT processing and placing orders. Now with Amazon EC2, we can scale up and down as needed, and working around the process. It’s a loophole.

Reading "Elastician: Failure as a Feature" of cloud - I'm living It

A year ago, we started using Amazon cloud for a number of different projects.

It grew important enough, that we had to hire an administrator to help us deploy and manage it.

So there I am interviewing this very sharp guy and I have to tell him that cloud is different than colo-cation or hosting: instances fail or they get wobbly and you have to bug out of them with only a little notice.

Shock and horror ensued. He looked at me and said he hadn't had any down time for three years, and why don't we just get some cheap sun servers off eBay instead.

So we had a conversation that went something like this post from the Elastician.

What's wonderful and transformative about running your applications in public clouds like EC2 and CloudServers, etc. is not that the servers never fail but that when they do fail you can actually do something about it.  Quickly.  And programmatically.  From an operations point of view, the killer feature of the cloud is the API.  Using the API's, I can not only detect that there is a problem with a server but I can actually correct it.  As easily as I can start a server, I can stop one and replace it with a new one.

So add that hurdle to the other mental hurdles that will need to be broken on our way to cloud.

Cloud will decrease costs, and increase usage of compute power

Great post on the changing economics of cloud computing.

Adoption of private clouds should (ignoring the benefits of using commodity hardware) provide a 5 x reduction in price per unit. Based upon historical precedents, you could expect this to lead to a 10-15x increase in consumption as we find the long tail of applications that companies desire becomes ever more feasible.

via blog.gardeviance.org

The thesis goes to the heart of what I believe. Cloud and virtualization will enable 10-100x increase in consumption of compute resources.

This will require a new management layer and new roles.

newScale Poll Finds More Than 40% of Developers in Enterprises Are Using External Cloud Services

At last week's webinar, we did an informal poll about cloud usage.

The highlights of this informal poll include:

• Use of cloud computing is spreading among developers in enterprise IT: 47 percent answered that their developers were using external cloud services. Of those, 15 percent cited usage for production environments as well as for test and development.
• Enterprises need to plan for a mix of private and public cloud usage: 41 percent stated that it was very important to plan for both internal and external cloud services. Another 39 percent indicated their focus on an internal cloud strategy, while just 12 percent were primarily focused on external cloud services.

via www.newscale.com

And to be specific, we asked these questions:

Are developers in your organization using an external cloud provider?
32% -Yes, but only for some test & dev environments  
20% - No way, it's not allowed                       
17% - Possibly, but we have no way of knowing        
17% - I don't think so, or at least I hope not...       
15% - Yes, for test, dev, and even production         

How important is it to plan for both internal data center & external cloud resources?
41% - Very important, must address internal & external   
21% - Important, but focus is on internal infrastructure   
18% - Somewhat important, primarily focused internally     
12% - Important, but focus is on external cloud resources 
9% - Not important, it's not a priority  

newScale

Telcos Running Scared of The Cloud? Or Eyeing Big Opportunity? Or Both? #Cloud

Telefonica, the Spanish and Latin Telco giant, made an interesting announcement today. They are submitting their own API, based on vCloud 0.8 to the DMTF for standard consideration.

TCloud está basado en la especificación de API vCloud 0.8 publicado por VMWare. En esencia, se ha mantenido en TCloud la compatibilidad para las principales operaciones y tipos de datos contemplados en vCloud. Además, TCloud extiende y mejora las capacidades avanzadas para la gestión de cloud computing, que incluyen la provisión de elementos de red (con diferentes variantes para balanceadores de carga y firewalls), almacenamiento compartido para datos de servicio, monitorización, gestión de copias de seguridad, etc.

via www.networkworld.es

In a nutshell, they are extending the kinds of resources the vCloud API can ask for, such as firewalls, load balancers,shared storage, monitoring and security management.

This makes a lot of sense to me. But why stop there? Why not the actual workload? Middleware, database, Message queing, etc? 

For one, that would be very complex.  We do need that but probably not at the API level. We need something like the service definitions in SPACL.

This is what we are working on at newScale: The ability to define a multitude of things like server, storage, network, apps, stacks and interconnects that make up the widely distributed application environments of this and next decade. Once defined, these can be put under lifecycle management for provision, decommission and a multitude of changes. And do it on a self-service basis.

This is why I get into this kind of API announcement!

My question is: why is a Spanish behemoth feeling the need to do something? I think it speaks to the tremendous disruption that cloud computing represents in the managed hosting world.  And also the tremendous opportunity if you are able to lock customers to your API. 

So for me: good move Telefonica.