#mark thiele

[techguru2010]

Given the wave of new cloud-based and mobile capabilities washing over the business world, IT groups undeniably need to evolve practices to be more nimble and agile. But business leaders and users in other functional areas also need to understand that sometimes there are extremely valid reasons to wait, or at least proceed with caution, that are indeed in the best interests of "the business." Here are three ways for IT professionals to be business heroes: to exceed expectations, enhance productivity, reduce costs and still be home in time for dinner.

[suryaray-blog]

Why monopolies and commoditization would pollute the cloud

#SuryaRay #Surya One of the prevailing assumptions around the cloud computing market is that it will drive towards an über-simplified delivery model that is similar to a utility. Further, this utility model will largely remove the potential for differentiation by most vendors and will lead to a race to the bottom from a pricing perspective. There is ample evidence commoditization is occurring, and we could point to almost any area of IT to see it, from servers, PCs, virtualization, storage, networking, and so on. However, what is often lost in the obvious is that it’s not that simple. IT commoditization vs cars It’s true that with a modern server and chip combination you could likely solve almost any specific workload demand of a modern application. The inherent risk though is that there’s always someone out there looking to make a better rat trap, and the market continues to show that there is real demand for differentiation – consider the viability of both ARM and Intel chips for use with different job types. For instance, in the case of Intel you could easily brute force the same workload that an ARM chip could handle, but processor by processor you would likely be very inefficient from a utilization and power consumption perspective. The same is true for ARM chips being used where a larger Intel processor might be more effective. While the aforementioned example is a simple one, it applies across most layers of infrastructure: storage, network, I/O, virtualization, and so on. To make an analogy: Cars have been around for over 100 years now, they must be commodity by now, right? They all (mostly) have four wheels, two or more doors, a combustion engine (mostly) and generally get you from point A to point B successfully.  Are cars a commodity compared to each hand-built car of the late 1800s and early 1900s? Maybe. But only in the sense that we can each buy a Ford Focus with the exact same feature set as another Ford Focus. You can also buy a Ferrari, which is excellent for country highways and tight corners, or you can pick a Dodge minivan, which is better at hauling the soccer kids around. Each of these two cars have substantially different features and solve different problems, yet they are both cars. So, the simple answer is no, they are not commodity if by commodity you mean there is little or no profit or differentiation to be found. Drivers that make unique IT solutions critical CPU Performance – There are some tasks that will need the fastest possible processors. The benefit comes from the time reduction associated with running a workload. The time is so valuable that the cost of the infrastructure and power is immaterial. In many cases this type of environment is refreshed 18-month cycles, but sometimes as few as every six months. Network Bandwidth – Critical if the data being manipulated or distributed is being moved outside the confines of where the compute resides, or needs to be moved fairly quickly in very large amounts. Network Performance – In terms of not just bandwidth but also latency. In some cases customer demands are on the level of differences of nanoseconds. Storage Scale vs. I/O – Similar to networking, the type of storage you need is dependent on the type of work being done. You don’t solve an I/O requirement by just buying bigger arrays with more and larger SATA disks. You also don’t put large cache or expensive memory on storage that is mainly used for archival or lower performance requirements, such as for photos. These only scratch the surface of the variables associated with building an infrastructure environment, but clearly it would be difficult to create a small handful of solutions or solution providers to take care of _every_ IT workload demand. To the contrary, in my work I regularly see a significant number of players enter the market that either fill an unmet need from an industry perspective or enable new types of performance and pricing models. Why commodity IT is a bad idea Not only do I think we’re many years away from having a small handful of service providers deliver us compute on demand, I propose that more importantly, we should all hope that the day _never_ comes anyway. I am against the idea of a utility form of compute delivered to everyone much the same way for many reasons, but the two that I think are the most critical are monopolies and innovation. Cloud monopolies would be bad The arguments against service providers acting under the pretext of a public utility are legion: inefficiency, waste, corruption, etc.  (For more detail, refer to the eye-opening book “The Fine Print” by David Cay Johnston.) Considering the importance of compute to the global economy, the last thing we should ever want then is for it to become a monopoly. If we allow a few companies to push the technology to a true commodity business model, then we could count on real competition for service delivery to disappear, as there wouldn’t be an easy way for the little guy or regional player to participate in the market. And it’s the ability for little guys to introduce innovation that sparks competition and evolution. If Cloud were to become a monopoly service, we would quickly find ourselves suffering the same issues with many other public utilities:  running on older equipment, getting charged for non-existant services or things we don’t understand, and having no one accountable to address complaints. Innovation would be stifled Beyond that, Innovation in any market only occurs through necessity. Without real competition, the commodity cloud services would begin to act like so many of the early infrastructure outsource providers did and only deliver to the lowest common denominator. They would make changes more slowly and as customers we would be forced to plan our businesses around what providers were willing to do. IT will be its most successful when the business customer doesn’t have to consider the “limitations” before advancing strategic opportunities. While there’s little doubt that several big players would come to dominate the market as is already the case today, we cannot afford to be without all those spunky new companies looking to carve out a market for themselves. These little players will force the larger players to stay honest, to bill correctly, to offer new services, and to continually innovate. The Good News I don’t really think we have anything to worry about, because as I’ve already indicated I don’t believe we are at any near-term risk of getting to a utility-type delivery of compute resources market. There are just too many ways to (in this case) build that car. So rest easy: We’re going to continue to see lots of great innovation in the infrastructure and application services and delivery space for some time to come, but keep your eyes and ears open all the same. Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where he is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10. http://dlvr.it/2VWBNH @suryaray

[suryaray-blog]

The Tale of Two Clouds – What is the future of cloud adoption in IT?

#SuryaRay #Surya It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of clouds, it was the age of legacy IT, it was the epoch of commodity compute, it was the epoch of expensive private clouds, it was the Season of Amazon, it was the Season of IBM, it was the spring of agility, it was the winter of security risks, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to change our paradigms, we were all going to resist the change — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Charles Dickens (who may be rolling in his grave) was right. When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems to be no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private Cloud and legacy IT are here to stay. Underlying IT strategy considerations (What’s good for you) Cloud computing is supposed to save us money, and most would argue that it can. Cloud computing is also supposed to provide agility and flexibility in how you deploy and manage your IT solutions, enabling improved business capabilities. The problem is that depending on what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, saving money could be the only reason for adopting or not a reason at all. If savings was the motivation for moving services to the cloud I might argue that depending on the depth and breadth of adoption you could be using the wrong decision drivers. In other words, how often are major shifts in IT done with savings in IT as the “why”? Savings is the outcome of the “why.” Personally, I always look for ways to make IT more cost effective and efficient, but not at the expense of real progress. If you’re spending your time focused on cost savings and efficiency as the why then you’re likely missing greater opportunities for adding business value. As I’ve said before, you must get away from thinking of IT as a tool to use to reduce the cost of IT. How to know if the public cloud is your best bet. * Limited exposure to heavy infrastructure investments like mainframes and enterprise applications * IT staff are more likely to have been brought up in the days of rapid development, virtualization automation and services on demand * More accepting of risk to availability or supportability of your environments (more open to “open source”) * In a smaller business there tends to be greater flexibility and agility in decision making * Enterprises that have new application requirements should look at all options (SaaS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, etc.). Time to market, skills and costs should be the deciding factor, not dogma. * The above characteristics lend themselves to allowing a company to go whole hog into a new IT strategy and to accept risks where more established enterprises can’t or won’t. Generally smaller companies and younger companies will take this risk. * The staff is much less likely to feel emotional attachment to a SAN or to working on servers and are therefore less likely to feel threatened by looking to an external provider. So who wants to stick with private cloud? * Companies with a decade plus of investment in IT staff, infrastructure and enterprise applications * Those in industries where regulatory and financial controls are stricter, more comprehensive and carry greater risk when failure occurs * CIOs working at places where business change takes much longer and acceptance for risk to the status quo is much lower * Places that have dedicated staffing for very specific roles, which makes it harder to unify quickly around a major change to infrastructure or applications * Businesses with a much larger infrastructure base, allowing for deeper staff knowledge and improved economies of scale The characteristics of a large enterprise mean that many investments in IT have consequences that are measured in the $100s of millions. Any short term investment in hardware or private cloud solutions is immaterial to the greater opportunity for the company. This doesn’t mean that a large enterprise can’t or shouldn’t look to use public cloud where it makes sense, but it does mean that they don’t have to in order to be competitive. In the end, very few companies will ever fail because their infrastructure cost area little higher. However, they could fail if their infrastructure doesn’t protect the business or respond appropriately to need. Your mileage may vary Enterprises can’t and won’t just dump expensive and critical legacy environments so they can move something to public or private cloud. Smaller businesses can now adopt technologies, applications and distributed infrastructure in ways that were formerly only available to much larger organizations. We will have a noisy cloud technology market for some time to come and the split of cloud computing models means that there will be room for everyone. So depending on where you sit the market could look great or scary. It could look like it’s not really changing for the better, or it could look like it’s moving too fast. However, the fact is that change to a cloud operating model is happening and competition will be the deciding factor. Companies will adopt those strategies that offer them the best combination of agility, and cost, while appropriately addressing their level of risk tolerance. _Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10._ _Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user piermario; Server photo courtesy of Flickr user Paul Hammond; __Odometer photo courtesy of Flickr user  quasireversible._ --- http://dlvr.it/258BxK @suryaray