Congratulations to Rick Parker – a Platform Customer, Partner and SuperNova Semifinalist!

Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with someone I regard as a true visionary when it comes to IT management and unlocking the power of private cloud computing. I am referring to Rick Parker who, until recently, has been the IT Director at Fetch Technologies, a longtime customer of Platform Computing, which leverages Platform ISF for their private cloud management. Now I am proud to now call Rick by a new name: Protostar! From a pool of more than 70 applicants, Rick was recognized in Constellation Research’s SuperNova Awards among an elite group of semifinalists that have overcome the odds in successfully applying cloud computing technologies within their organizations.

Most award programs recognize technology suppliers for advancements in the market.  Few programs recognize individuals for their courage in battling the odds to affect change in their organizations.  The Constellation SuperNova Awards celebrate the explorers and pioneers who successfully put new technologies to work and the leaders that have created disruptions in their market. Rick fits the bill perfectly, and an all-star cast of judges (including Larry Dignan at ZDNET and Frank Scavo at Constellation - to name a couple) have agreed. The award recognized applicants who embody the human spirit to innovate, overcome adversity, and successfully deliver market changing approaches.  

Here is an excerpt from the award nomination to give you a peek into Rick’s story of implementing cloud computing at Fetch (with a little help from Platform Computing solutions!).

Since joining Fetch, Rick has successfully implemented a dynamic, nearly completely virtualized data center leveraging private clouds and Platform Computing’s ISF cloud management solution. Rick’s journey originally began with a simple idea: to build the perfect data center that moved IT away from the business of server management and toward true data center management. As part of this vision, Rick founded Bedouin Networks to create one of the first, if not the first, public cloud services in 2006 and deliver radically improved cost effectiveness and reliability in data center design.

In 2007, Rick carried his passion for disruptive data centers with him when he joined Fetch Technologies. Fetch Technologies is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider that enables organizations to extract, aggregate and use real-time information from websites and, as such, depends on its ability to maximize data center resources, efficiently and effectively. At any given moment, Rick and his IT team can get a call to provision more compute resources for Fetch’s fast-growing customer base. Before using Platform ISF, Fetch provisioned resources manually to increase SaaS capacity, which usually took several hours of personnel time per server. The cost effectiveness of Rick’s innovative design not only made Fetch’s products and services more profitable, it made them possible. The expenditure that would have been required for the hundreds of physical servers, networking, and data center costs to enable the additional capacity required could have exceeded the potential revenue.

A Protostar

Rick has been a vital asset to the Fetch team and an incredible partner to the Platform Computing team over the years. We congratulate him on this latest recognition and wish him the best of luck in his newest adventure – in search of more disruption – in his new position as Cloud Architect at Activision. We look forward to working with Rick on his next private cloud adventure. Congratulations, Protostar!

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?

The Road to Private Cloud Doesn’t Need to Be Bumpy!

Industry analyst Bill Claybrook wrote a lengthy article that recently appeared discussing the “bumpy ride” many companies may face on the road to private cloud implementation. Ironically, the article coincided with the release of Platform’s ISF Starter Pack, which is actually designed specifically to make that road less bumpy!

The good news, according to Claybrook, is that private clouds are the focus of many IT managers these days, as evidenced by Gartner, which reports 75 percent of IT managers would both pursue and invest more in private clouds than in public clouds through 2012.

Claybrook cited a number of challenges that private clouds can pose for companies, which include:

• Budget – According to Claybrook, private clouds can be expensive.
• Public Cloud Integration – Claybrook says companies should build private clouds that can be easily moved to a hybrid public model if necessary.
  Scale – Private clouds often don’t have the same capacity to scale as public ones, says Claybrook.
• Reconfiguration – Claybrook claims many organizations will need to tear down their infrastructure on the road to private cloud.
• Legacy hardware – Similarly, Claybrook recommends not repurposing old servers that require manual configuration for private clouds.
• Technology obsolescence – Claybrook advises that once implemented, private cloud stacks be kept up-to-date with the latest upgrades.
• Fear of change – Finally, IT teams will need to learn new ways of doing things, Claybrook says. This should be turned into a growth opportunity for your IT staff.

At Platform, we’re fond of saying that private clouds are indeed “built not bought.” But we have to respectfully disagree with Claybrook that the road will be bumpy for most. That’s part of why you go through the “build” process in the first place. Private clouds are not necessarily meant to be an immediate replacement for all IT operations within an organization. Taking an iterative approach to private cloud and “building” it out from department to department as necessary is the best way to implement a private cloud—and not all IT operations may need to be part of the cloud, either.

Making private cloud implementation easier and at low cost and low risk is exactly why we came up with the Platform ISF Starter Pack. For $4995, the ISF Starter Pack allows companies to quickly and easily set up a private cloud while avoiding many of Claybrook’s stated pitfalls:

• Budget – At $4995, the ISF Starter Pack is an affordable option. Many private cloud options in the market can cost upwards of $50K.
• Public Cloud Integration – The Starter Pack includes the same functionality as Platform ISF, including the ability extend the initial deployment to public clouds like Amazon EC2.
• Scale – Platform’s history in workload and resource management guarantees a high-scaling private cloud solution.
• Reconfiguration – Platform works with what you have in place because it’s implemented as a management layer – there’s no need to rip and replace your entire infrastructure. Most organizations can’t afford this anyway.
• Legacy hardware – Lather, rinse, repeat the “Reconfiguration” entry...
• Technology obsolescence - with Platform ISF you get a single private cloud management focused product that is the core of your private cloud architecture. This will enable you to evolve your cloud at your pace (not another technology suppliers pace) and ensure you retain control and have a partner that will protect you from technology obsolescence.
• Fear of change – The Starter Pack allows organizations that want to try private clouds to test them at minimal risk without a huge upfront investment. You can ease into the cloud on your own terms.

If you want to test private cloud without changing your entire infrastructure from the get-go try the ISF Starter Pack—it can help make the road to private cloud less bumpy.

Will the CIO allow the frog to be boiled?

What do you get when you combine a grass roots solution portfolio and adoption strategy with enterprise pricing schemes? Answer: A very attractive short-term value proposition that is sure to put many customers on the path to vCloud.

What’s the problem? Cost and vendor lock-in.

Cloud computing is the third major wave in the history of distributed computing and offers the promise of open systems enabling customer leverage through commodity IT components. However, incumbent vendors are fighting desperately to create integrated proprietary stacks that protect their core products and licensing models.

This battle for leverage between big vendors and customers comes down to a basic architectural decision: Does the CIO and senior architect team have an open systems vision for private cloud that they are willing to pursue in-spite of bundled offerings from vendors?

Platform Computing is betting that a large portion of the market will architect their private cloud platforms with heterogeneity and commodity as key principals.

Anyone who doubts that the frog is getting warm or that the intent for customer lock-in is real needs only to read Microsoft’s ad decrying vendor lock-in.

VMworld: A Strategy Straight out of Redmond?

Is the market doomed to a big orange, blue, or red cloud? Even if you won’t be attending VMworld this week in San Francisco, you can bet virtualization and clouds will be dominating the tech media and blogs throughout the course of the week.

We expect that VMware will announce plans to move up the stack and attempt to secure VM management customers into their evolving cloud platform. Platform won’t be attending VMWorld this year, and here’s why.

As we see it, there are four cloud computing camps currently forming:

1. VM camp – led by VMWare and other OS/VM vendors (Microsoft, Red Hat and Citrix) who believe clouds should be based on homogeneous OS/VM
2. Enterprise Management camp—led by the Big 4 enterprise management behemoths who are offering cloud portals tied to their existing management tools and acquiring components to keep their customers as they upgrade to cloud
3. Cloudy Server camp—these are the cloud-in-a-box systems vendors who suggest that building private clouds is as simple as a plug-and-play solution (It’s not! And it’s more than a commitment to a single hardware or software vendor)
4. Open Platform camp—promoted and built by customers who are intent on maintaining vendor leverage and avoiding lock-in. Platform Computing and other independents play here by working across the stack with an explicit heterogeneous strategy

Don’t get us wrong—each of these approaches is a legitimate path. However, when it comes to private clouds for medium and large enterprises, the risks of complexity, high cost and vendor lock-in become clear for the first three approaches. It’s here that the VM and Cloudy Server camps are better viewed as components and pools of standardized building blocks than the über-cloud (hardware + OS + VM + middleware + management, all from one-vendor!). Likewise, the Enterprise Management camp starts to look as complicated and expensive as the thing it was supposed to replace (itself!). We are told that we still need all their existing management tools plus some new functions and glues to build a cloud – just pay them more!

That’s not to say that the Open Platform approach is a panacea. But over time, it does deliver on a core promise of cloud that is to reduce vendor lock-in while commoditizing IT components.

The reason Platform won’t be at VMworld this year is that we want to make the statement that “clouds have no colors” and there is an alternative approach to either going big or legacy.

Integrated stacks are good and provide real value. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that when vendors control those stacks, they are both sticky and expensive. When customers own and control their stacks via heterogeneous open systems, they face integration issues, but in return, they get vendor leverage, great prices and commodity scale-out control. That’s the lesson that we’ve learned over the past 18 years and the core reason for our customer’s success.

We’re betting our business again on the open systems approach with cloud. A cloud management layer, such as Platform’s ISF product, allows companies to have private cloud in their own way and get value from an integrated, heterogeneous stack while also benefitting from the other promises of the cloud, such as automated provisioning, self-service, chargeback capabilities and workload management for a wide variety of applications across both VM and physical servers. And with solutions such as our Platform ISF Starter Pack companies can evaluate how a private cloud can work for them at low risk, low cost ($4995) and in a few days rather than months.

What color cloud do you want for your organization?

Getting Started with Private Cloud: Platform or Toolkit?

A new vendor coalition was announced this week, bringing together software from three vendors and an integrator to enable private cloud. You may be wondering what our take is on this announcement… Well, I can sum it up in one word: Difficult.

As James Staten of Forrester wrote in You’re not a cloud yet – get on the path today, private cloud will take quite some time for many organizations to deploy, and most firms are just getting started with private cloud research. As you get started into the world of private cloud do you really want to spend weeks and months cobbling together multiple toolkits just to see how it works in your environment? Or would you rather have an all-in-one platform that lets you get started quickly, with very small investment?

Platform engineered ISF to tackle all three toolkit approaches in a single software product--enabling self-service, application lifecycle automation and cloud elasticity. And with the Platform ISF Starter Pack we announced yesterday, you can get a sandbox environment up and running in just 30 minutes. For $4,995 you get software, best practices advice and help to set up private cloud – that includes a 1-year software license, training, cloud-builder consultation, and integration advice for your internal tools.

Based on our experience with users in the last year in private cloud, users are looking for a single solution they can get up and running quickly to help crystallize the requirements for their private cloud solutions. No messing around with multiple providers and disparate tools. No lengthy development and deployment projects just to get started. And when you’re ready to move forward with a private cloud deployment, Platform’s enterprise-class expertise and support will be with you every step of the way.

Staten recommends users begin investing now in cloud starter packs to better understand where they need to be down the road. With one all-in-one software product that provides everything you need for private cloud management, parting with less than $5,000 for tangible experience may be the best decision you make all year.

The Glue that Binds: Cloud Management Software and the 7 Key Components of Private Clouds – Part 2

As previously promised, this is a continuation to my earlier blog post on the seven main requirements for successful private cloud deployments, and will outline exactly how Platform’s private cloud management software supports all seven key components. For those of you that aren’t yet familiar with Platform’s ISF product, it’s our private cloud management software, which we introduced to the market in June 2009.

As organizations evaluate how to evolve their internal infrastructures to a private cloud, I want to clearly delineate how Platform ISF can facilitate this evolution:

1. Heterogeneous systems support – Adapters within the Platform ISF integrate distributed and heterogeneous IT resources to form a shared system. All major industry standard hardware, operating systems (including Linux and Windows) and VM hypervisors (including VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat KVM) are supported. Adapters are also available for provisioning tools (IBM xCAT, Symantec Altiris, and Platform Cluster Manager) to set up application environments on demand.
2. Integration with management tools – Platform ISF integrates with many third-party tools for various systems management tasks out-of-the- box, including directory services for user and account management, security, monitoring and alerting.
3. Configurable resource allocation policies – Once a pool of shared resources is formed, a set of site-specific sharing policies is configured in the allocation engine to ensure that applications receive the required resources. These policies also make certain that the organization’s resource sharing priorities are applied, and that the quota constraints applicable to business groups sharing the cloud are reinforced. The allocation engine matches IT resource supplies to their demands based on resource-aware and application-aware policies. This private cloud “brain” is critical for IT agility.
4. Integration with workload managers, middleware and applications – Platform ISF provides interfaces to users and applications as well as supporting the lifecycle of cloud service management. Templates can be configured for simple and complex N-tier business applications to automate their lifecycle management. Platform ISF allows for the starting of all the components of an N-tier application, the adding or removal of a resource, and monitoring and failure recovery. It also supports middleware such as J2EE, SOA, CEP and BPM, and workload schedulers such as AutoSys, Platform LSF and Symphony.
5. Support IT and business processes – A self-service portal enables users to request and obtain physical servers and VMs in minutes instead of days or weeks. Platform ISF has a set of APIs that can be called by applications, middleware and workload managers to request and return resources without human intervention. The service offerings can be structured as: complete application environments (e.g., application packages, CPU, memory, storage and networking); as bare metal servers with an operating system installed; or as virtual machines. SLAs can be associated with each service offering.
6. Extensible to external resources – Platform ISF integrates with many service provider environments (eg. Amazon Web Services via Amazon Virtual Private Cloud), enabling centralized access, management, tracking and billing of external services.
7. Enterprise, not workgroup, solution – Built on a technology foundation found in large scale production environments, Platform ISF is scalable to hundreds of thousands of cores under management which enables IT to start small and feel confident that their cloud will grow as more services are added over time.

Lastly, beyond the seven key components of enterprise cloud deployments, Platform ISF also collects all resource usage data and provides reports and billing information. Alternatively, the cloud administrator may choose to feed the usage data into site-specific reporting and charge-back tools.

Below I’ve included our depiction of the private cloud management stack and the location of Platform ISF with its various capabilities.

Are Japanese Banks Early Adopters of Private Cloud?

The adoption trends for cloud computing seem to be upside-down and inside-out as compared to traditional technology adoption. Instead of a handful of enterprise firms across industries (such as financial services and telecommunications taking the lead) it’s the smaller fish that are giving cloud a go. Although this “small fish” adoption trend is taking hold in the public cloud environment, it’s certainly not the case for private cloud. In private cloud, big banks, life-sciences, media and government organizations are leading the charge in North America, with Europe and Asia-Pacific only slightly behind.

But where does this leave Japan? Not known for its early adoption of technology, Japanese firms (especially the banks) like to play wait-and-see before investing in new options for their IT strategies. Take, for example, a contingent from a Japanese banking customer that I helped host in New York last month at the SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo. You might think they were meeting with several North American banks and vendors to get an idea of where they’d need to be in 5 years, right?

Not so fast. In actuality, some of the earliest private cloud pilots are being run in Japan. For example, one of Platform’s system integrator partners in Japan has built an in-house “training course cloud” for their consultants and customers. Students can request the required infrastructure on-demand for course work requiring many servers, OS’s, etc, facilitating training for more people and eliminating costs associated with manual effort to set up training environments repeatedly.

Platform’s CEO Songnian Zhou discussed this case along with several other real-life success stories at the Global ICT Summit in Tokyo in June. The keynote panel entitled, “New Trends in Cloud Computing Technology,” paired Platform Computing with other industry leaders such as Amazon and Microsoft. To hear more about these case stories, check out the full post-event interview with Dr. Zhou.

Back to the Japanese customer contingent in New York… what did they find? Public cloud is not really an option for any of these financial firms, even for workload-driven cloud bursting. The major institutions the Japanese visited all had the same things to say: the data security and intellectual property issues would never make it past Compliance.

So what are these international firms doing, Japanese included? They’re building an internal private cloud first, where infrastructure operations are streamlined to lower costs and deliver better services. And the next step will not be to cloudburst, but to harvest other resources internally that would otherwise sit idle. Platform already has customers doing this in production--in one case, VDI servers are being used overnight to improve accuracy and timeliness of value-at-risk models for regulatory reporting.

While private cloud (and cloud computing in general) is still in its infancy, more and more pilots are going in every day all over the world. For the rest of the world, watch out. The membership of the early adopter club is expanding, and major Japanese firms are getting aggressive. Being a tech fast-mover is more important than ever to build competitive advantage.

The Glue that Binds: Cloud Management Software and the 7 Key Components of Private Clouds – Part 1

While the IT industry, analysts and media continue to do a pretty decent job at outlining, defining and documenting cloud computing and successful early deployments, I thought to contribute to the overall conversation by discussing some of the key elements that we at Platform Computing have identified to be necessary for private clouds, resulting from our own conversations within the industry and with our customers. This will be a two-part blog series that provides some recommendations for companies evaluating internal shared infrastructures by discussing seven key requirements for private clouds and underlying cloud management software.

As we see it, here are the seven key components of a private cloud environment:

1. Heterogeneous systems support – The private cloud needs to support an organization’s heterogeneous infrastructure, as well as resources from external providers. This includes server, storage and networking hardware, operating systems, hypervisors, storage systems, and file systems.
   

2. Integration with management tools – Enterprises use a variety of IT management tools for security, provisioning, systems management, directory, reporting, billing, data management, regulation, and compliance. Cloud computing does not replace these tools. Instead, properly designed private cloud management software easily integrates with existing tools and invokes them as needed during cloud operations.

3. Configurable resource allocation policies – The cloud must be workload-aware as well as resource-aware. This means that the cloud management software can determine the most efficient placement of application workloads. The cloud management software guarantees resource reservations to its customers based on well-defined policies. And, when demand peaks, the software is able to arbitrate resources based on business priorities of various parts of the cloud workload to cost-effectively meet SLAs.

4. Integration with workload managers, middleware and applications – Clouds exist to run applications. In addition to a self-service portal for users to request virtual or physical machines, private cloud management software provides flexible API’s to enable easy integration with the enterprise’s essential workload managers, middleware, and applications.

5. Support IT and business processes – Clouds provide support for various IT and business processes and allow IT to automate many of its operations. In fact, cloud management enables the definition and ongoing modifications of many IT management processes that had been performed manually.

6. Extensible to external resources – In addition to providing more flexible services with internal resources, the cloud should enable managed access to external resources that are hosted by service providers. This enables more flexible capacity planning where additional resources can be used and paid for only when needed, while centrally controlling access and metering of these services.

7. Enterprise, not workgroup, solution – An organization usually consists of multiple departments and locations, often distributed internationally. A flexible cloud scales to meet their diverse needs in real time. While cloud computing may be adopted initially within an individual line of business or location, it enables the integration of IT across the enterprise by reconfiguring rather than replacing the private cloud management software. Therefore, a private cloud can be an enterprise-wide IT services delivery system that provides transparent and consistent access to global resources.
   

It’s very important for companies to remember that just like other mission-critical enterprise business systems and services, a private cloud is built by the IT organization, not bought from a vendor. Private cloud management software is the key to enabling IT to configure its data center resources, integrating its management tools, and supporting its applications and business processes. You could consider it “the glue” that binds together enterprise data center operations as organizations move into the era of cloud computing.

Stay tuned for the second part of this blog series that will showcase how Platform ISF meets all seven requirements of private cloud management discussed in this blog.

Multiple global datacenters => one virtual datacenter? I think not…

I was just reading Nick Heath’s article Private Cloud: Turning corporate datacentres into a global virtual machine posted on silicon.com about the potential of private cloud turning global datacenters into a massive, global VM, and it made me recall a somewhat-famous quote from Sun Microsystems on cloud from a couple of years back – to paraphrase: All enterprise IT will be run out of facilities hosted by a handful of service providers within the next decade. (I don’t remember the exact timeframe, but I do recall chuckling out loud when I read it).

Now this particular “global VM” article by Nick Heath wasn’t worthy of a chuckle, but--seriously? Who in their right mind would be entertaining a near-term strategy to string together all of their datacenter assets into a single shared resource pool, where apps and workloads could cross the pond(s) and back on a whim? Don’t get me wrong – this is a wonderful vision, with incredible economics of scale and efficiency behind it – but cloud computing is in its infancy and it still has significant political, data security, and financial reporting issues that need to be resolved before a monumental project such as this could be entertained.

When it comes to cloud computing, organizations of all sizes need to start small, either within a specific group (e.g. developers and testers of a BU) or class of apps (eg. stateless Java apps performing simple request/response). From there, they can get the kinks out, work the politics, figure out the chargeback models, etc. You could certainly implement this approach across multiple datacenters/geographies to support these teams/businesses now (some of our early adopters are doing just that), but not for the sake of having an über-global cloud.

You don’t need some science-fiction, futuristic cloud model to realize the economics of private cloud – a small bite will do.

It’s all about CHOICE

Everyone in the tech industry has an opinion about cloud computing these days. More often than not, those opinions come not from the IT people in the trenches who are looking at implementing private clouds, but from industry pundits or vendors that are trying to tell them what they want.

That’s why it was refreshing to see Steven Burke’s article this week where he interviewed actual IT people attending EMC World in Boston about what they are looking for when it comes to private clouds.

In a word, they want CHOICE.

Both IT execs interviewed in the article made it clear that what they need from cloud providers is to be able to offer their users a service—and they’re determined not to be tied to one provider for those services. What they want is a solution that will perform with what they already have and make what they have perform better. As one exec said, “I am not worried about what the chassis is or what the processors are.”

What else do they need? To prove ROI. If they’re choosing your service, you’re going to need to prove that you can deliver—or they may look elsewhere. Again, choice.

They also understand that moving to a service model for IT is going to take time—they know that building a private cloud and transitioning users to a service model is going to take years and what they need won’t come in a box or a plug-and-play solution. As we’re fond of saying around here, “Clouds are built, not bought.”

IT is not going to be in the hands of vendors forever... what choices will you provide your users?

Fetch Technologies Leading the Way with Private Cloud

This week, Platform Computing announced a new customer for ISF, our private cloud management software. Fetch Technologies, an artificial intelligence-based data extraction company, is an excellent example of what cloud computing can do for your business. As a company with a small IT staff, a large-scale SaaS offering and clients that rely on their mission-critical data, Fetch needed to find a cost-effective way to scale and meet the increasing compute power requirements needed for their complex data extraction. Fetch’s story, as told in this excellent article from Nicole Hemsoth at HPC in the Cloud, also exemplifies a trend we are seeing with many of our customers and prospects- the desire to start with private cloud and eventually leverage public cloud resources. Nicole and Rich Parker from Fetch sum it up nicely here:


“It is useful for firms to have the ability to leverage the public cloud as needed. In a discussion about private clouds in the model that Fetch is utilizing, ‘private cloud monitoring of resources and capacity planning are very critical. We need to know when we need to add more resources and how long it will take to add them. For example, we need to add more CPU and memory—that could take us 2 weeks to do. We monitor like crazy; we have over 200 monitors.’ However, as Parker did note, having the capability to scale to EC2—even if that never happens, is one of the attractive features of a cloud offering that the one they chose from Platform.”


To learn more, take a look at Nicole’s article. Rich and his team are true innovators on the cloud front, and are definitely ones to keep an eye on as they evolve their cloud computing model.

Cloud Evolution or Revolution

I recently participated in an intriguing podcast discussion with a flagship Platform customer, Tony Cass at CERN, IDC analyst Stephen Conway, and renowned media pundit and blogger Dana Gardner, entitled CERN’s Evolution to Cloud Computing Portending a Revolution in Extreme IT Productivity.

As the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN has a hefty job - solving extreme IT problems while conducting intense scientific research that explores the origins of the universe. As one of the key contributors to the creation of the World Wide Web, it’s no surprise, the organization is currently at the cloud computing frontier, having evolved high-performance computing (HPC) from clusters, to grid, and now to cloud. Dana said it best in our conversation: “In many ways CERN is quite possibly the New York of cloud computing. If cloud can make it there, it can probably make it anywhere.” Mostly because CERN deals with unbelievably large datasets, massive throughput requirements, a global workforce, finite budgets, and an emphasis on standards and openness. We’ve been working with CERN since 1997, when the organization deployed their Platform LSF grid infrastructure. Today, they’re piloting the world’s largest cloud computing environment for scientific collaboration using Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster.

The conversation was fascinating, and I want to highlight one important part of the podcast discussion here: the evolutionary technology trend from clusters to grids to clouds and the revolutionary effect the technology is having on IT productivity and system management.

The transformation of historically static clusters and grids to highly dynamic cloud resources is what is forcing CIOs and their IT departments to rethink their IT architectures and, most importantly, the management layer. Cloud technology alone is nothing revolutionary, it’s the associated remodeling of architecture that rings a revolutionary bell.

At Platform we see the interaction between distributed, shared computing infrastructures and new technologies such as virtualization, requiring management. Just as clusters and grids required workload scheduling and management, so do the expansive farms of both virtual and physical servers in the cloud require management to efficiently share resources and make those resources dynamic. It’s with the help of a technology-agnostic management layer that all the heterogeneous environments are united across a wide-range of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines to create a highly-scalable, on-demand cloud infrastructure with self-service and provisioning. And it’s this self-servicing in the remodeled IT architecture that will drive the IT productivity revolution – making IT a truly competitive service.

I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast on CERN’s Evolution to Cloud Computing Portending a Revolution in Extreme IT Productivity. It provides great insight into how CERN is managing its own architectural and productivity revolution along with great industry insight from IDC and additional end user case studies.

Thank you Tony and Steve for participating and sharing your valuable insight and experiences! I look forward to the comments and conversations that will result from our conversation.

Beyond Virtualization

Wednesday we had an excellent discussion with Cheryl Doninger, R&D Director at SAS and William Fellows, Principal Analyst at the 451 Group about the benefits of getting beyond virtualization.

Cheryl presented 4 use cases on where private cloud management can improve the end-user experience while reducing costs. The cases included: test/dev, IT operations, SAS customer deployments and SAS on-demand hosting.

Wil discussed why organizations are looking beyond VM management in considering private clouds and gave several financial services customer examples as he characterized the state of the market.

I discussed how Platform ISF is being used for enterprise and HPC applications respectively through two case examples.

You can view the presentations and discussion at: http://www.platform.com/eforums/eforum.asp?1-1KP4BZ

The Private Cloud - Beyond Virtualization Webcast

I’ve spoken to several of our Platform customers and prospects that are either planning on building a private cloud or are in the early deployment phases and noticed that certain questions and concerns repeatedly come up about the role of virtualization in private clouds. The questions that come up most frequently include thing such as:”Is virtualization necessary for the cloud? How can I integrate my physical and virtual machines in the cloud? Can I deploy a cloud using just virtualization?”

As a result of my customer conversations, we’ve put together a webinar to discuss these issues. We’ve gathered William Fellows, Principal Analyst with The 451 Group and Cheryl Doninger, R&D Director at SAS Institute, for a panel discussion titled “The Private Cloud – Beyond Virtualization” to address these questions and concerns. William will provide an analyst perspective on the key elements and methodologies that need to be considered when deploying private clouds and Cheryl will discuss the SAS Institute’s implementation of a private cloud and how Platform ISF helps SAS’ R&D department to bring new products to market faster and more cost effectively.

Please join me on Wednesday, December 16 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern for an in-depth look at why virtualization is just the first step in deploying a private cloud, what the specific deployment stages are and how organizations can benefit from the increased efficiency and reduced costs of private clouds.

To register, please visit:
http://www.platform.com/go/2009/platformisf/webcast.asp

Insights from the Gartner Data Center Conference

I wanted to share some key thoughts from the recently completed Gartner Data Center conference. I had the chance to attend many of the sessions focused on cloud computing, and had several 1:1 sessions with the leading Gartner analysts covering Virtualization, Cloud, and Automation. It is difficult to boil down 4 very long days of sessions, meetings and discussions, but I wanted to share four key points that really caught my eye.

1. Cloud moved from 14th in 2009 to 2nd in terms of CIO priorities based on a Gartner survey. This is an amazing change in a short time period and speaks to the increased interest and focus that many organizations have on cloud. (My guess is few IT technologies or concepts have moved this far this fast.) This rapid acceleration in interest is consistent with the increased activity we see with our customers, looking to determine their overall cloud strategy, while looking for immediate opportunities to get started and get moving. Organizations need to start now on their cloud strategies..while also keeping an eye on the longer term architectural impacts and choices.
2. Business Intelligence is moving from rear view to a forward looking focus: (from Carl Claunch Keynote). This shift to more analytics and more proactive analysis indicates an increasing need for organizations to “out compute” their competitors to accelerate the pace of their business. We continue to see this as many organizations increase the size of their HPC/Grid environments..and look to a private cloud model to enable their users to tap into the compute capacity that lies dormant and underutilized within their organizations.
3. A Caution: 1/3 of startups in the management space disappear every 2 years (from Cloud Management Session). As CIO’s look to their emerging #2 priority (see point #1) it is very important they consider who and what type of companies they partner with to enable the evolution from siloed to shared cloud infrastructure. A balance between innovation and the ability of these software partners to deliver over the long haul is key for a large enterprise to consider.
4. DISA Private Cloud End User session: ¾ of the Battle in Building a private cloud is Cultural. We have seen this time and time again over our 15+ year history as our HPC and Grid customer base has evolved and adopted their large scale shared compute environments. Many organizations have deployed and adopted key technology components that enable them to build an automated, virtualized, cloud infrastructure. What they have struggled with is the political/cultural side of sharing, getting their end users and business unit customers, comfortable with a dynamic shared infrastructure. Our experience in helping customers make this journey is clearly relevant to helping enterprise users make a similar journey into the cloud.

Overall another very good Gartner event clearly indicating the increased interest and importance large enterprise organizations are placing on defining their cloud strategy and the issues/challenges they face on their road to building their next generation IT infrastructure in a cloud model.

Computerworld Takes on Private Clouds

Some of you may have seen Computerworld’s story last week, “IT shops rally around private clouds.” SAS Institute, an early Platform ISF user, is also highlighted in the story for its innovative use of private clouds.

The article provides one of the most thorough assessments of how organizations are actually using private clouds I’ve seen, and hits on some of the key themes we have been talking about here at Platform since our launch of Platform ISF into beta back in June. With this in mind, I wanted to briefly recap the article’s themes, which I believe are fundamental in understanding the private cloud and are also key issues to keep in mind during implementations:

1. Private clouds address real business needs. Hall references research by Gartner, which concluded that by 2012, IT shops will spend more than half of their cloud investment on private clouds. These numbers reflect real needs within organizations to own and manage their compute resources internally.

2. Vendor lock-in must be avoided. In the story, Hall poignantly notes that, “For the most part, CIOs abhor vendor lock-in. Reliance on a single vendor can be costly and can keep a company from making necessary infrastructure changes.” This is something we recognized early here at Platform, which is why we introduced a heterogeneous cloud management solution to the marketplace with Platform ISF. I believe the concern over vendor lock-in will only continue to grow as more companies experiment with private clouds.

3. Tools to manage private cloud are critical. One of our CEO Songnian Zhou’s favorite phrases is “clouds are built, not bought.” Building a cloud requires tools to efficiently managing all the various components, also making management crucial for the success of private cloud implementations.

Survey Says…

Even though “cloud computing” is all the rage right now, there’s a common misperception within the industry that “cloud computing equals virtualization.” Although virtualization is indeed one of the components that can make-up a private cloud infrastructure, as many IT departments are learning, virtualization alone does not a cloud build.

Earlier this week, Platform and independent analyst consulting firm Taneja Group, released the results of a survey we conducted over the summer examining how senior IT managers across a variety of industries are managing the challenges within their Test/Dev environments, as well as the opportunities for server virtualization and cloud computing solutions to address those problems.

Guess what the survey found…

The top challenge facing Test/Dev managers today? Having to manage their virtual and physical resources separately. They also said that virtualization on its own is not addressing their most important infrastructure challenges. Even Gartner reiterated this last week, as my colleague Nick Werstiuk pointed out in his blog http://platformcomputing.blogspot.com/2009/10/clouds-are-everywherebut-where-do-i.html reporting from Gartner’s ITxpo and Symposium.

Enterprises are increasingly relying on shared infrastructures—in our survey, 92 percent of Test/Dev operations are already using shared infrastructures to address operational or budgetary challenges within their departments. But many Test/Dev apps are housed both on physical and virtual machines, so not only does IT have to allocate the workload sharing among the departments, but also among different types of machines. Herein lies the problem!

Although virtualization is helping them to better enable their environments, it often adds several layers of control and cost issues that also must be addressed in order to fully integrate the capabilities of all the machines—physical or virtual. The virtual layer doesn’t include sharing, process, workflow or other management capabilities the departments need.

All of this is important because many companies are using Test/Dev departments as their first forays into private cloud computing. And all of these elements—sharing, process, workflow, management and, yes, virtualization—are crucial to building private clouds.

I’ll leave you with two other proof points from the survey. The use of private clouds is indeed underway in many Test/Dev environments. Despite all the industry hoopla and denials, companies are actually already using this stuff—and they’re not only using it for Test/Dev, but also for their production environments. Seventy-six percent of our survey respondents are already using shared infrastructures or private clouds for both Test/Dev and production applications, such as CRM, Finance and Web applications. They’re also doing this primarily within their own firewalls because they don’t trust the lack of control and immature technology that public clouds currently offer. As a result, 82 percent of respondents said they don’t use hosted solutions, only private ones.

The clouds are coming, and they’re coming fast—is your enterprise ready?

For more information on the press release and the survey, please visit:
http://searchcloudcomputing.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1256567423_786.html
www.platform.com/eforums/eforum.asp?1-1K3AU7