skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Orlando is steaming, and Gartner's newest IT Summit hasn't been far behind. This is Gartner's first summit of its type, with reasonable attendance (~800) and a great line-up of talks and break-out sessions. Monday was also where Cassatt announced its partnership with BladeLogic.
The event opened with a keynotes from Mike Chuba and Cameron Haight, followed by a great forward-looking 
talk on the future of infrastructure and operations from Tom Bittman. He clearly sees the period between 2008-2012 as a shift from "Silos" to shared IT "Pools" - as virtualization itself shifts from consolidation to higher-value to the data center. He further predicted that starting around 2010, true Real Time Infrastructure will become mainstream (see the picture). This will be the enabler as IT-as-a-utility.
But he was careful to define growing distinctions between types of virtualization: A
t the Application level, there are containers, zones, LPARs, VPARS;At the O/S level, we're seeing a number mainstream VM technologies, including SW appliances; and, at the Hardware layer, we are seeing Grid and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (i.e. Amazon EC2).
Perhaps the most entertaining 'guest' keynote was from Peter Cochrane - ex-CIO for BT, and now a highly-regarded consultant. Brilliant, wry and witty, he opened by positing that IT's reality is having to deal with heterogeneity, mobility and increasing availability of bandwidth. With that bandwidth, (which will be exploited via increasing penetration of fiber, frequency-hopping and spatial distribution) the notions of connectivity to the "cloud" will be pervasive. And, the concepts of "connectivity" and "communication" will begin to shift to concepts of "location" and "presence". The other theme he put forward was one of release of control/centralization. He began with the fact that central control of broadcast bandwidth was shifting from a few thousand outlets (broadcast TV, radio, etc.) to billions of sources (phones, pervasive wifi, transmission "hopping", etc.) Release of control was also shifting from creativity in the office to creativity at home... very web 2.0 -- Oh, and he reitterated that the best definition of web 2.o was put forth by Tim O'Reilly a number of years ago (one of my favorite pieces).
One of the most well-attended break-out sessions on day 1 was run by Ed Holub & Debra Curtis, "Running IT Like a Business" - putting forth that IT has to think of itself not as a cost center, but as a business unit with customer management, product management, marketing, financial controls and... yes... pricing. This of course requires that IT figure out how to identify costs and provide charge-back. And finally, it requires that IT be comfortable with losing business to competitors, i.e. outsourcers. More than ever, running IT-as-a-Utility to achieve efficiencies seems more needed than ever here.
Another series of sessions dealt with Data Center Power Management. It was clear that the current way of running data center was essentially going to run out of electrical capacity in the future - so talk was not only about server efficiency, but cooling efficiency, and prudent facilities design as well. One particularly interesting breakout session, hosted by Will Cappelli, "The Convergence of Operations and Energy Management". The observations here were huge: companies w/large data centers will come face-to-face with international & domestic carbon emissions regulations; IT and Facilities orgs will be required to work together to increase overall energy efficiency; IT energy & power consumption will have to be managed and intelligently optimized (on this, see my previous blog on turning off idled servers).
Clearly, there were tons of other content regarding IT Operations management, Process (i.e. ITIL), discussion around CMDBs, virtualization and more. Way too much to summarize. But stay-tuned as I may comment on some of these from time-to-time :)
Last month Cassatt Corp. hosted a special meeting of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Energy Efficient Data Center Demonstration Project. With about 20 companies represented in the room, the topic (hosted by Ray Pfeifer, SVLG's Chair of the Project) was centered on radical new ways to cut the rapidly-rising power consumption (and cost) of running today's large data centers.
The Question: We posed the following question to the audience -- Why keep servers turned on when they are not being used? This is especially impactful when you consider a recent APC white paper indicating that the average server consumes about 50% of its loaded power, even when sitting idle. The analogy is to lighting in modern office buildings, where motion sensors only turn lights on for occupied rooms... and when a room is deemed idle and unoccupied, lighting is turned off. Why couldn't the same analogy apply to the over-provisioned servers in a data center - during peak times, as well as to nights/weekends? Clearly the problem is not as simplistic as light switches, but why isn't there a solution?
The Demo: So, with 3 video projectors blazing, two live data centers on-line, and the Collage Software in control, we set out to prove to the audience that power management was not only possible, but that it would save money as well. The scenario illustrated that an external trigger (say, a "curtailment event" from a local utility) could cause Collage to apply policies to power-down low-priority servers (according to their power consumption and/or efficiency) and even migrate-away their compute loads to another data center where power was cheaper. Obviously, the same could be done on a scheduled basis as well. Well, the demo was a success, even down to watching real-time power consumption curves dip-and-settle.
Not uncoincidentally, it turns out that power companies (like PG&E here in Sunny CA) offer incentives for shifting power to off-peak times, as well as special demand-response programs and incentives for firms that react to electrical demand during "events" by additional short-term reductions in power use (like turning off lights & HVAC). Our initial conversations with PG&E (who was also in the room!) showed that they were eager to pursue this type of approach, and confirmed that Cassatt was the first to tackle this problem!
The Numbers: Following the demonstration, we also ran some conservative financial numbers. They showed that a company with 500 typical servers could regularly schedule shut-downs of idle equipment -- even during peak periods as well as nights/weekends -- and save 20% + of their total energy costs! These indications were significantly encouraging regarding the economics of this approach.
The Punchline: So, what there was to take away here is that medium-to-large data centers can save a bunch of $, be "green", and do so without having to change any hardware or software! So ask yourself -- as you pursue installation of energy-efficient IT *equipment* why are you not also pursuing energy-efficient *operation* of that equipment??
My Related Blogs:
4/6/07 - D'oh: Turning Off Idle Servers
1/22/07 - Clothes Driers, Data Centers, and Power Management
Here's an update on what could be an interesting partnership: XenSource (the commercial end of Xen, the opensource hypervisor) is teaming-up with Cassatt for a webcast on June 6th. (which, by-the-way, is yours-truly's birthday... a distinction which I share with Tim O'Reilly and an old buddy from Sun, Simon Phipps).
XenSource, you will recall, is the current underdog VM provider in the market - a pure-play high-performance approach to application virtualization. Part of their competitive strategy is (a) how they price (zero if you choose the open-source version, but way lower than the competition if you buy from XenSource), and (b) how they distribute (bundled in with the major Linux distros, not to mention Solaris)
The webcast has two heavy-hitters: Simon Crosby (who's XenSource's CTO), and Rob Gingell (who was a past Sun Fellow and VP -- now Cassatt's CTO). It should be interesting to hear their take on automating virtualization, given the market noise around XenSource - but also given the fact that they themselves don't offer a sophisticated VM management/automation solution... but Cassatt does.
Given I have an 'inside track' on this, I suspect that the conversation will also turn to "what comes next" after virtualization - probably a pretty valuable conversation if you care about your IT career a year from now.
Forrester Research last week held its 2007 IT forum in Nashville, which I attended.
If there was any theme during the first two days, there it was a conceptual shift from "IT" (info. technology) to "BT" (business technology) - keynoted by their CEO, George Colony. During one of the keynotes, the oft-repeated adage summed it up: "There are no IT projects anymore, just Business Projects"
To that end, there were a litany of guest-keynoters, notably Jeanne Ross of MIT Sloan, Robert Willett, CEO of Best Buy, and others. Each of their presentations went down a relatively conceptual path of assessing organizational agility and business-readiness, alignment, and somewhat Dilbert-esque abstractions trying to align their talks with the concept of "BT"... I say this only because the audience was less one of MBAs, and more of operations executives looking for tactical trends and pointers.
However, the best talk IMHO came from Robert Beauchamp, CEO of BMC software. He's a very down-to-earth, articulate guy- even in front of 1,000 people. I was most impressed by his Shoemaker's Children analogy... that the IT (alright, BT) organizations in enterprises are arguably the least automated departments around. ERP is automated. Finance is automated. Customer interaction is automated. But IT is still manually glued-together, with operations costs continuing to outpace capital investments. He showed the chart here at right (from IDC!) which hits the point home.
However, I was rather impressed with the analysts we spoke 1:1 with. Each is closely tracking the IT automation trend, how virtualization is playing an initiating role in the IT Utility, and how this automation trend is beginning. Also most notably, I bumped into an old friend from Sun, James Staten, who was just brought on to Forrester to follow trends with the Mega Data Centers such as their economics and use of automation as well.
Surfing has its benefits. I tripped over SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill's Blog today. SmugMug is a rough competitor to Flickr and other (lower-grade) photo archiving sites. They archive about 130,000,000 photos right now. And They use Amazon's S3.
This is a perfect commercial example of server-less IT I spoke about last week. And it's proof that the economics of Utility Computing are compelling. MacAskill 
estimated that he's saving about $500,000 anually by not buying and managing his own storage (he computes the number in his blod). And he expects that number to increase. Amazon has taken the traditional approach to managing storage (S3) and computing (EC2) and applied a utility automation paradigm -- enabling a completely new cost model. How else could they be offering such pricing to users?What's this going to enable in the future, Read on: MacAskill's other Blog: "Amazon+2 Guys = The Next YouTube". (aka the server-less web service!)
I gotta keep wondering: When is corporate IT going to catch onto this utility computing approach, and make "compute clouds" out of their own stuff?
Folks like Greg Papadapoulous at Sun say that a small number of companies will invest in creating a huge infrastructure of computing power. (See my blog of 12 Jan. 2007). And folks like Amazon are already doing so with their Electronic Compute Cloud (EC2), while others like Google, eBay, Yahoo etc. are likely to follow.
To Wit: Carriers like Verizon have announced intentions to do so, and SalesForce.com recently announced its existing ability to host more than just CRM applications. But what will really signal the shift toward "compute cloud" use will be the third-party vendors that make use of these resources.
So Here's my prediction: As the infrastructure vendors build-out their compute and storage farms, a new class of computing "brokers" will emerge. These players will adapt the needs of users and IT departments to make seamless use of these compute and storage "clouds". Everything from backing-up your laptop for pennies a GB, to hosting and failover services that don't own a single server.
And here's proof it's happening, with "mashups" of the following just around the corner:
- JungleDisk: offering a simple windows interface to allow individuals to create a "web drive" onto Amazon's S3 storage
- Weoceo: offering a product that allows existing servers to "overflow" peak computing needs onto Amazon's EC2 cloud
- Enomalism: providing services to provision and migrate virtual "elastic" servers, even onto and off-of the Amazon EC2 cloud
- Elasticlive: which essentially provides virtual hosting services - as predicted - (and works with Enomalism, above). Plus, they charge by the "instance-hour", not by the server type!
- Geoelastic: a beta group of "global hosting providers" who will be creating a "global elastic computing cloud" and presumably balancing loads between physical centers.
- Distributed Potential: beginning to deliver pay-per-use grid computing capacity (powered by Elasticlive and Enomalism technologies, above)
- Distributed Exchange: Also powered by (and presumably founded by) ElasticLive and Enomalism; claiming to "broker" excess compute capacity between providers
- Dozens of 3rd-parties creating even more applications on S3
The question is, how quickly will small- to medium-sized businesses feel comfortable outsourcing their IT needs to a service that itself may not own any physical servers? What security, compliance and privacy issues might arise? My gut tells me that these are merely details that will be overcome as the new economics of this model crushes the existing economics of owning your own iron.
Lastly, from somewhat of a self-serving perspective, Cassatt essentially creates a "cloud" out of existing resources within corporate IT. At that point, shifting loads between "clouds" (internal or external) becomes a simply policy-based procedure.
I had the opportunity to speak the other day with Dan Kusnetzky, who interviewed Cassatt for his ZDnet blog which reports on virtualization trends. And boy, he really gets the trend.
Right off, he started with observing that "virtualization" isn't just one thing (Consider: Hypervisors, zones, containers, LPars, network VLANs and virtualized storage). We also quickly observed that virtualization probably isn't an end-game-in-itself for IT. Rather, it represents the most critical enabler that will ignite transformation in the IT industry.
That transformation represents a new way to look at managing IT: Today, we have specialized hardware, software, HA/failover software, monitoring & performance analysis systems, and dozens more. Tomorrow, the transformation will look like managing all of these systems holistically, much the way an Operating System manages components within a server. The automation will be technology agnostic, made possible through virtualization. A number of Dan's earlier interviews all point to this inevitability as well.
He had a bunch of great observations, but the last I liked best: "It's important to take the broadest possible view and avoid point solutions. From this vantage point, a failure of some resource must be handled in the same way as any other condition that causes the configuration to no longer meet service level objectives."
For me, the takeaway from the conversation was something I've said before: take the "long view" on implementing virtualization... it may yield you quick HW savings today, but if its automated in an "IT-as-utility" context, its future savings will dwarf what the industry is seeing now.
talk on the future of infrastructure and operations from Tom Bittman. He clearly sees the period between 2008-2012 as a shift from "Silos" to shared IT "Pools" - as virtualization itself shifts from consolidation to higher-value to the data center. He further predicted that starting around 2010, true Real Time Infrastructure will become mainstream (see the picture). This will be the enabler as IT-as-a-utility.
Posts
