One small step for man, one enormous leap for science

News from CERN last week that E may not, in fact, equal mc² was earth shattering. As the news broke, physicists everywhere quivered in the knowledge that everything they once thought true may no longer hold and the debate that continues to encircle the announcement this week is fascinating. Commentary ranges from those excited by the ongoing uncertainties of the modern world to those who are adamant mistakes have been made.

This comment from Matt Alden-Farrow on the BBC sums up the situation nicely:

“This discovery could one day change our understanding of the universe and the way in which things work. Doesn’t mean previous scientists were wrong; all science is built on the foundation of others work.”

From our perspective, this comment not only sums up the debate, but also the reality of the situation. Scientific discoveries are always built on the findings of those that went before and the ability to advance knowledge often depends on the tools available.

Isaac Newton developed his theory of gravity when an Apple fell on his head – the sophisticated technology we rely on today just didn’t exist. His ‘technology’ was logic. Einstein used chemicals and mathematical formulae which had been discovered and proven. CERN used the large hadron collider and high performance computing.

The reality is that scientific knowledge is built in baby steps, and the time these take is often determined by the time it takes for the available technology to catch up with the existing level of knowledge. If we had never known Einstein’s theory of relativity, who’s to say that CERN would have even attempted to measure the speed of particle movement?

VMworld Signage - "Are You Cloud Intense?"

VMworld always attracts some interesting booth strategies and signage.  We were highlighted as being one of the most innovative with our "Are you Cloud Intense?" theme on our shirts and booth imagery.

Show Your Cloud Intensity

I'm not sure we are philosophers, but we definitely know how to help customers build private clouds with IaaS management software!

Best of VMworld Award for Private Cloud Management

One of the fun elements at VMworld is participating in the “Best of VMworld” awards.  Platform Computing entered the Private Cloud Management category against 15+ vendors.  After several web meetings, live demos and reference reviews, we were awarded the Finalist position.  

Best of VMworld 2011 Private Cloud

This award follows other recent successes such as being named the #1 private cloud vendor by Forrester Research.  Customers want a trusted vendor that has proven themselves in large-scale, enterprise environments, and one that has been around for a few years.  Companies just don't want to trust their data centers to a startup with an uncertain future.  There is just too much at-risk.   

Platform team celebrates the win at VMworld!

Our private cloud / IaaS management solution, called Platform ISF, was cited for the following key differentiators:

• Cloud in a cloud in a cloud – ability to support multiple hierarchical organizational structures with nested virtual private clouds for business units, groups, projects, etc.
• Physical deployment – includes native capability to do bare metal physical provisioning all the way to complex multi-tier application structures
• Application-centric framework – IT services are captured as standardized applications or application components that are multi-tiered, virtual and physical, private and public cloud, etc.
• Automated provisioning of VMware – deep integration that maintains investment in VMware with automatic discovery, import (all or partial), synchronization, and simplification of provisioning VMware environments
• Multi-hypervisor with KVM and Xen – adds a management layer similar to vCenter on top of KVM / Xen to normalize capabilities across hypervisors
• Integration with P2V (physical to virtual) – support for multiple provisioning tools plus a Platform native option to support the ongoing transition of more applications and workloads to virtual environments
• Managing resource pools on DRS clusters – adding control over resource pools on DRS clusters with end user self-service management aligned to hierarchical account management
• Policy management - depth and breadth of policy management capabilities for both initial placement and operational service level agreements (SLAs) such as flexing up and down
• One solution – Platform ISF is an integrated set of IaaS management capabilities that span self-service, billing, automation, etc. versus requiring multiple solutions from different vendors that require stitching together

Which of these are important in your environment?

Top 5 VMworld 2011 Takeaways for Private Cloud

4 days.  115 degrees outside.  20,000 of my closest virtualization friends.  VMworld Las Vegas was quite an experience.  The Platform Computing booth was busy from start to finish with a demo of our award-winning Platform ISF private cloud (IaaS) management solution.  

From attending the keynotes and speaking with attendees, I had 5 key takeaways from the event:

1.       Private cloud is at a tipping point

Gone are the days of having to start every conversation by explaining the difference between virtualization and private cloud.  Of course this is a self-selected group but the education level has dramatically increased.  We had many people stopping by to discuss their private cloud initiatives and how to get started.

2.       VMware licensing has upset many

The new vSphere 5 licensing has caused many companies to reevaluate their dependency on VMware.  The recent price increases had disrupted their planning and created additional fears about being locked in to a costly hypervisor (vCloud = vLockIn).  VMware management tools manage VMware ESXi hypervisor--and that's it.  There is a real fear of being locked into a specific stack and/or being required to upgrade to more expensive packages with lots of unnecessary functionality.

3.       Multi-hypervisor is real

Even before the price increase, users have been evaluating a mixed hypervisor strategy.  A common discussion is VMware’s closed support at the management layers.  VMware is viewed as the gold standard when considering virtualizing production applications.  End users already have or are seriously considering adding KVM (Platform is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance) and to a lesser extend Xen into their roadmaps for non-production use cases (for example dev and test).  These offer great density at lower cost.

4.       The rise of application-centric thinking

In the early days of private clouds, most of the focus was on the transient IT services such as an OS or VM.  Typical end users were developers needing access to standardized IT environments.  Most of our conversations included discussions about additional levels of an application stack – including the middleware, application logic, and post-provisioning scripting.  In summary, an application-centric private cloud.  By standardizing IT service definitions to include these levels and automating delivery, companies can effectively define their own PaaS.  While we position Platform ISF primarily as IaaS management, many of our customers think we are selling the solution short.  Customers are using it to define and provision their own PaaS and SaaS applications.  Ironically this was a major focus of VMware’s messaging, albeit in a hosted PaaS environment.  Most of our larger enterprise customers want to tightly integrate their on-premise data center infrastructure and security systems into an on-premise personalized PaaS. 

5.       Physical is part of cloud

When one thinks cloud, the natural mental model = virtualization.  However, I was surprised by the number of conversations where end users want to add integrated physical provisioning.  Sometimes the focus was for standalone bare metal provisioning.  But as we move more towards an application-framework, there are components in the app stack such as the database server that might only exist on a physical system for scalability and performance.  Operating within this mixed environment is a core requirement to deal with both non-production transient IT services as well as production apps with flexing and stringent service level agreements (SLA).

At Platform Computing, we are not cloud washing our products.  On top of being named the #1 vendor by Forrester, we received the Best of VMworld Finalist award for Private Cloud Management.

Were you there?  What were your takeaways?

Forrester Evaluates Private Cloud Vendors – Platform Tops Media Scoring

Given all the discussion around cloud software, one would have thought a comprehensive analysis of vendors would have been published by now. However, Forrester Research just released the first quantitative analysis of the private cloud vendor marketplace entitled “Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011.” The market overview examines the landscape of vendors providing solutions designed to accelerate the implementation of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud in a customer’s data center.

Complimentary Full Copy of the Report

The report is significant as the first ‘apples-to-apples” comparison of vendors using customer references, a compulsory 30 minute demonstration and written responses. Only 15 vendors were able to meet this initial hurdle, suggesting a number of vendors where marketing far outstrips reality. Vendors were scored 0-4 across 10 criteria. Forrester did not add up the scores but the media quickly did the sub-analysis and published a ranking table. The result: Platform Computing received the most points.

Source: SYS-CON Media

The # 2 vendor was VMware and we congratulate them on their effort. Given that one of the key report findings is to “prepare for islands of hypervisors” – meaning an increase in the need to support other hypervisors such as KVM and Xen -- companies should pause to reconsider locking into a single hypervisor vendor. Cloud is much more than VM. Also, be careful about pricing models that penalize your ability to utilize your cloud environment more efficiently (i.e., per VM versus per server).

Read the Platform Computing press release

Another interesting point was discussed by the report’s author, James Staten, in his blog. Mr. Staten cautions readers to evaluate vendors on their specific requirements. We totally agree.

First, in the report, an attempt is made to catalog vendors based upon their origins, e.g., enterprise systems management vendors versus pure-play cloud solutions, etc. Our belief is that regardless of origins, customers should choose a vendor with a comprehensive technology footprint, solid customer base, strong financials, and global support system. Claiming you are # 1 among pure-play or grid vendors is meaningless and an artificial distinction. At the end of the day, one wants the best solution to solving a set of problems. Period.

Second, Mr. Staten recommends looking differently at either software-only versus ‘physical compute and storage included’ vendors. If you take those points away from HP, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and BMC, the Platform lead just grows. And if you want an appliance, Platform has partners that offer a complete pre-integrated solution today.

Finally, the report recommends a strategy of trying before you buy. Since a private cloud project involves both technology and process change, we recommend running a proof-of-concept (POC) to gain buy-in from end user communities and different business units. A POC can also help validate assumptions against your business case for justifying the value of a private cloud.

Resources

• Learn more about Platform's private cloud solution here
• Download the Platform ISF product here
• Schedule a discovery session with one of our cloud consultants by contacting us at privatecloud@platform.com.

Are there any criteria that you would have added to the evaluation?

Private Cloud at State Street

There is nothing better than a real world customer case study to explain the value of deploying a product. Cut through the marketing and explain:

1. The underlying problem / pain points
2. The vendor selection process
3. Key decisions and lesson learned
4. Actual value being achieved

At the recent Wall Street & Technology Capital Markets Cloud Symposium, the Chief Infrastructure Architect from State Street, Kevin Sullivan, discussed how cloud – specifically private cloud – is being rolled out across 20+ projects.

For more details about Mr. Sullivan's presentation, there is a great article in Advanced Trading magazine by Phil Albinus. Mr. Albinus provides details about the decision making process, key vendors, and next steps. To learn more about Platform Computing's cloud solution, please visit our private cloud solution area.

Some additional metrics that were discussed include:

• Started in 2009
• Went from 400 to 150 use cases
• Operated a 6 month proof-of-concept (POC)
• Down-selected from 150 technology partners to a ‘handful’
• Provisioning has been reduced from 8 weeks to hours
  
• Unique Active-Active two data center configuration for 100% app high availability

One of the four key elements to the State Street cloud environment is the ‘cloud controller’. In their environment, the cloud controller manages self-service, configurations, provisioning, and automation of the application construction within the infrastructure. A key benefit for the developers was the ability to get access to more self-service capacity on-demand much faster. This easily outweighed any cultural concerns regarding not being able to specify to the n-th degree an IT environment request. If needed, IT could still request ‘custom’ but it would take longer.

In addition, Mr. Sullivan highlighted several key design principles driving the design, building, and management of the cloud:

• Simplification – creating of standards, consolidation, and self-service
• Automation – for deployment, metrics, elasticity, and monitoring
• Leverage – commodity hardware and software stack with a focus on reuse of the platform, services, and data

The benefits and successes of private cloud at State Street are becoming increasingly known as their CIO Christopher Perretta is fond of discussing the topic. Some additional resources to learn more about the State Street cloud project are:

• State Street Cloud Strategy at Waters Technology
• Building A Secure Cloud at Bank Systems and Technology
• Modernizing with Cloud and Linux Technologies at ComputerWorld
• State Street Aims For Cloud at Advanced Trading

What do you think can be learned from State Street’s successes?