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Editor’s Letter

2015 Impact Award Winners

Survey Says: IT Budgets Rise

Life in the App Lane

Overheard: Gartner, Dell World

Driven to Disaggregation

End-User Advocate: DaaS Providers Get Serious

The Next Big Thing: Resolutions You Can Keep

Citrix Synergy and Modern Infrastructure Decisions Summit

Impact Awards

Announcing the winners of the 2015 Impact Awards

EDITOR’S LETTER

Impact Assessment

ENTERPRISE MOBILITY


DATA

Survey Says

MIModern InfrastructureCreating tomorrow’s data centers

JANUARY 2015, VOL. 4, NO. 1

SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE


THE NEXT BIG THING

Resolutions You Can Keep

OVERHEARD

Gartner, Dell World

END-USER ADVOCATE

DaaS Providers Get Serious

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JANUARY 2015 2

THE 2015 IMPACT AWARDS are a wrap. We started the pro-cess in the summer, endlessly debating which categories to bring back from last year and which categories to add. We solicited nominations from experts and vendors, and then agonized over the submissions to cut the list down to 10 finalists. Those finalists were then presented to readers—you—who not only voted, but also graciously expounded in writing why you picked the way you did. Editors and experts tallied up the votes, pored over com-ments, reached out to readers for follow-ups and, finally, wrote up the results that we humbly submit to you today.

All this was done for what? So that Modern Infrastruc-ture readers have a head start when evaluating products and tools in support of new IT initiatives (you can find the top eight for 2015 here). Winners of this year’s Impact Awards aren’t necessarily the fastest, cheapest or most full-featured of the products in their respective categories. Instead, they are vetted by real-life IT infrastructure and

operations professionals working in real-life enterprise data center environments, who all vouch for the net-pos-itive impact that using them has had on their day-to-day operations. Congratulations to all the winners—you have fine products on your hands. Thank you to everyone who cast a vote; you did a good deed for your peers.

Now, with the awards process behind us, we can look around us, and perhaps more importantly, ahead.

For a sobering glimpse into the challenges faced by in-house application development and delivery teams, check out “Life in the App Lane,” by guest editor Colin Steele. Business users are accustomed to the self-service updates that are the norm in mobile and Web applications, and now expect the same from in-house IT teams. Few orga-nizations are currently meeting these expectations.

For something more hopeful, check out “Driven to Disaggregation.” While everyone else is thinking about convergence and hyperconvergence, server makers and service providers of hyperscale products are thinking about the converse: ways to decouple processor, main memory and I/O. Doing so will enable more flexible sys-tems and save money, they say. Like splitting the atom (but a lot less deadly), it’s a powerful concept that’s proving difficult to execute. Stay tuned for the Best Disaggregated System category in the 2025 Impact Awards. n

ALEX BARRETT, Editor in Chief

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Impact Assessment

Impact Awards

Out of the technology hubbub emerge the winners of the

2015 Impact Awards, vetted by experts and chosen

by readers.


READERS CAST 1,958 votes in seven key categories. The result? A list of go-to data center products and services that will shake up IT operations this year.

BEST CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

WINNER: Nutanix NX 3460

IT organizations continue to crave lower-priced, seam-lessly integrated server platforms purchased from and supported by a single vendor. Increasingly, many IT professionals are wary of serving as their own systems integrator, piecing together a platform from a dozen dif-ferent piece parts.

This growing aggravation has driven greater interest in converged infrastructure (CI) products. It has also trig-gered a raft of very new and very old competitors to both wage fierce battle with each other and/or to collaborate on unified offerings.

Of all these competitors, many of whom competed for our annual Modern Infrastructure Best Converged Infrastructure Award, Nutanix NX 3460 is the preferred choice by readers and our panel of judges—by a comfort-able margin.

What voters valued the most is the true integration of the compute, storage and networking tiers, coupled with

IMPACT AWARDS

HOMEIGARTS/FOTOLIA

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the product’s building block design. The latter capability gives first-time users the option of dipping their toes into the CI waters with smaller deployments before diving in with full-blown, large cluster installations.

“We evaluated several [converged infrastructure] prod-ucts, but after the testing, Nutanix stood out for scalability, ease of management and a more robust feature set. Other offerings aren’t so much converged solutions as they are bundled solutions,” wrote one reader.

“We found the [Nutanix] one-stop shop products to be very well thought out. I like that I can build a data center that scales vertically and horizontally by just adding an-other block,” said another reader.

Built on the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, the NX 3460 comes in a 2U configuration on the low end and is architected to eliminate the need for a network-based storage architecture, including a SAN or network-attached

storage (NAS). The base configuration is rack mountable and includes 1 terabyte of storage and a 10 gigabyte Eth-ernet interface.

One of our judges agreed with many readers that the Nutanix software does a good job of integrating the compute/storage/networking components. He added the offering has “good levels of scalability” and the company has backed up the product with strong technical support.

HONORABLE MENTION

SimpliVity OmniCube CN-3000

SimpliVity continues to win over new fans. What some users liked about the OmniCube CN-3000 was not just the neatly packaged storage and compute capabilities in one form factor, but also the seamless addition of data protec-tion and IT management in a single management pane.

Traditional data center architectures that separate compute, networking and storage present organizations with a number of technical and business flaws, said one reader from a cloud services provider. He was stuck, until he explored the possibilities that a converged product could offer.

“We talked to all the [convergence] players for several months, and, for what we needed, SimpliVity addressed nearly 100% of our pain points, while the others addressed only parts of them,” he wrote.

HONORABLE MENTION

Scale Computing HC3 HyperCore 5

Most CI vendors chase the big bucks in the enterprise, but Scale Computing makes no apologies about its laser-like

NUTANIX NX 3460: What voters valued the most is the true integration of the compute, storage and networking tiers, coupled with the product’s building block design.


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focus on small and medium-sized businesses. Judging from user and expert feedback in this year’s voting, that dedication appears to have paid off.

“So many solutions are enterprise-focused, but Scale is just the opposite and there’s something to be admired in that. They have the best technology not just for SMBs but many larger shops as well,” according to one expert. “Peo-ple talk about a data center in a box, but Scale’s really is.”

Scale’s HC3 HyperCore v5 also wins rave reviews for its price/performance and technical support.

“They are killing it in the SMB space because they are giving those users what they value most: good tech, good performance, excellent support and an aggressive price. It’s almost a no-brainer for SMB these days,” wrote one reader.

BEST CLOUD COMPUTING PROVIDER

WINNER: Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is virtually synonymous with public cloud, so it’s no surprise the reigning champ in the Best Cloud Service Provider category is this year’s winner, too.

Mega vendors Google and Microsoft continue to make tremendous strides in capturing attention and bolstering product portfolios, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains one step ahead of the competition and doesn’t appear ready to loosen its stranglehold on the market any time soon.

Far from resting on its laurels, Amazon released in the ballpark of 500 new services for AWS in 2014. And while it dropped prices in 2014, after Google cut its prices,

Amazon didn’t follow suit when Google repeated the move later in the year. It appears Amazon is more focused on providing a higher-level range of tools and services for customers.

Impact Awards voters cited Amazon’s array of services, relative low cost and ability to deliver on promises. Voters used terms like “best” and “the standard” to describe AWS.

The platform “offers considerable depth and breadth and is being improved day by day, almost second by sec-ond,” one reader said.

Many features that its competitors release with great fanfare have been available from Amazon for years, and the platform has an unrivaled set of partners in its public cloud ecosystem. And while Microsoft and Google play catch-up, AWS continues to lead the way. At Re:Invent, Amazon’s annual AWS conference, the company an-nounced plans to roll out even more tools, including the Aurora distributed relational database and integration with Docker containers. Meanwhile, some observers

AMAZON WEB SERVICES: Voters used terms like “best” and “the standard” to describe AWS.


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suggest the forthcoming and much-hyped AWS Lambda service, which is targeted at developers, could redefine cloud services.

“They have the most extensive number of services out there,” one judge said. “They’ve definitely done a good job of serving the market and maintaining their position.”

HONORABLE MENTION

Google Compute Platform

Google has a reputation in cloud as being developer- centric, but the deep-pocketed company hit the accelera-tor in 2014 by bolstering Compute Engine, its infrastruc-ture as a service offering, and making earnest attempts to lure enterprise customers away from AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“Google probably wins the ’most improved’ title,” said one judge.

HONORABLE MENTION

Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace spent the first half of 2014 with the vultures circling, amid speculation the company would be sold because of the realization it would never compete with the likes of AWS in public cloud. But the San Antonio-based vendor ultimately opted to stay independent, and its stock is rising. There was a rebrand around managed cloud and the addition of new capabilities, including bare metal cloud and managed tools for Microsoft and Google applications.

“Rackspace kind of rebooted themselves and seem to be headed in the right direction,” said a judge.

BEST SOFTWARE-DEFINED INFRASTRUCTURE

Winner: VMware NSX

Congratulations to VMware, whose NSX software beat out a diverse field of products to win the Impact Award for Best Software-Defined Infrastructure.

“NSX replaces the stale years-old tradition of network hardware design with an approach that allows for true flexibility and scalability for today’s business,” one reader said.

The challenge with a category for “software-defined” products is that there are so many competing views (or perhaps confused views) about what the term really means. Judges in this category agreed that a product isn’t software-defined simply because it is dependent on

VMWARE NSX: VMware’s NSX software reimagines traditional data center networking.


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software. For their purposes, judges determined that “soft-ware-defined” should also mean enabling an application to control its own resources.

“VMware NSX comes in with perhaps the canonical example of ’virtualized’ software-defined infrastructure. In fact, NSX appears to be a key, if not the key, enabler to making productive use of any kind of VMware-based cloud implementation,” one judge said.

The future of networking is not simply about con-necting devices, it’s about delivering services, like load balancing and dynamic firewalling, to the business. VM-ware’s network virtualization platform abstracts network operations from the underlying hardware in much the same way that server virtualization abstracts processing power. NSX’s abstraction of both the control plane and data plane proves the value of the software-defined ap-proach, allowing customers to more easily create flexible, agile, system deployments.

“Software-defined networking is the key to the modern data center that needs to keep up with business. Hard-ware-centric networks will have to embrace this new re-ality or find themselves a burden to the modern business,” one reader said.

While VMware NSX may not prompt many companies

to ditch trusted Cisco networking hardware for commod-ity products, the fact that it is hardware- (and even hyper-visor-) agnostic means that it can be tested and rolled out without a complete overhaul.

It’s not just the improved flexibility that helped NSX stand out. One reader who recently attended an intensive NSX training course said he was impressed with the prod-uct’s security benefits. Micro-segmentation—the ability to completely segregate network traffic between virtual ma-chines on the same cluster—could be a game-changer for hosting providers and companies with strict compliance standards, he said.

“Even at the mid to enterprise level, we continue to hear about all these security and data breaches. Many times, what happens is an intruder will come in through a single unsecured connection, and once they’re in the data center, they’re golden. Micro-segmentation to pro-tect VMs from internal attacks will be truly disruptive,” the reader said.

HONORABLE MENTION

Maxta MxSP 2.0

Maxta’s MxSP v2.0 was runner-up for Best Software-De-fined Product category for its innovative approach to software-defined storage. Maxta’s software-only option can replace a traditional storage area network by pooling storage on standard x86 servers.

“I chose this product as it is software-only and has all the features you expect from a hardware solution,” one reader said.

What made Maxta stand out among other software-

IT’S NOT JUST THE IMPROVED FLEXIBILITY THAT HELPED NSX STAND OUT.


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defined storage products was its ease of use and its support for multiple hypervisors.

“Very simple to install and administer. Excellent perfor-mance and minimum training required. Up and running in a couple of hours,” another reader said.

BEST DEVOPS AND CLOUD MANAGEMENT TOOL

Winner: LogicMonitor

Most IT pros think of monitoring as a necessary evil. You need a tool to tell you about your problem areas, but, un-fortunately, those tools are usually hard to install and dif-ficult to use. So it’s refreshing to hear about a monitoring suite that is comprehensive, customizable and simple to set up. Add great support and a cost-effective hosted SaaS model, and you’ve got yourself a winner.

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based IT monitoring suite that Modern Infrastructure readers called out for its impressive ability to help them get up and running in a matter of minutes.

The speed with which LogicMonitor discovers new en-vironments is “kind of scary,” said Dale Rodriguez, a prod-uct manager at a managed hosting provider. “I was able to get 400 systems online in a couple of hours, compared with a week for other systems,” he said. Simply install a single collector and give it your IP addresses. LogicMoni-tor then auto-discovers seemingly every conceivable piece of data center equipment and begins monitoring it.

At the same time, users say it is easy to add on to Log-icMonitor’s built-in capabilities. “In my case, I created a full-blown SQL Server monitoring product on top of

LogicMonitor,” said Rob Risetto, technical director at DBInsight, an Australian database consulting firm.

And LogicMonitor’s status as a cloud-based (rather than on-premises) tool is an asset, not a liability. “I love the hosted monitoring solution for our data center,” wrote one reader. “With our previous on-prem solution, we had no way of receiving alerts from our environment if our Internet connection was down. With LogicMonitor we now know when our environment is no longer reachable because of connectivity issues.”

Another reader summed it up this way: “[It’s] fantas-tically powerful and yet surprisingly easy to set up and maintain. It’s an indispensable tool for our enterprise

LOGICMONITOR: “LogicMonitor is fantastically powerful and yet surprisingly easy to set up and maintain,” said one Impact Awards voter.


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operations.” Taken another way, “It’s the best thing since pants with pockets!”

HONORABLE MENTION

SaltStack Enterprise 3.1

Automation is supposed to make life easier, not the other way around. But that’s what happens when some IT pros first attempt configuration management (CM). “I tried [other CM tools] but I couldn’t get them up and running,” said one reader, especially ones based on general-purpose programming languages.

Enter SaltStack. It uses Python, a high-level program-ming language beloved by systems administrators. It also works well not just in Linux environments, but also with Windows—a must for enterprise shops. And while it’s the new kid on the block, the open source community around Salt is large and active, readers said. Compared with other options, “Salt’s the standout candidate for supportability through the community.”

HONORABLE MENTION

Chef 12

Among configuration management tools, Chef has always gotten a lot of praise for its support of a wide range of platforms, the versatility afforded by its use of Ruby and a vibrant and enthusiastic open source community. These days, Chef users are loving it for its pioneering work around DevOps and orchestration. “Chef leads the charge towards infrastructure as code, with great support for testing, continuous deployment and re-use,” said Zachary Stevens, co-founder of Elastera, a U.K.-based managed

services provider. “They’re taking the best of what’s come out of the dev community and applying it to ops with test-driven infrastructure development.”

BEST DATA PROTECTION

Winner: Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise

Endpoint Backup 3.6.2

A lot of organizations take a haphazard, half-baked ap-proach to endpoint data protection, putting the respon-sibility in end users’ hands or washing their hands of it

CODE42 CRASHPLAN ENTERPRISE ENDPOINT BACKUP 3.6.2:

Some of the virtues of Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise Endpoint Backup include ease of administration, flexible backup targets and support for a broad range of devices.


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entirely. But with only 20% of corporate data in central databases (by some estimates), plus the proliferation of mobile devices, IT professionals are starting to take end-point data protection seriously.

Ohio State University used to tell users to save files to a networked home directory, which it would periodically back up via script, but that system was less than perfect. “We were very exposed,” said Tim Winningham, IT proj-ects manager for the school of Arts and Sciences. “We decided we weren’t going to ignore people anymore.”

Like the majority of Modern Infrastructure readers vot-ing in the Best Data Protection category, Winningham selected Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise Endpoint Backup. Its virtues include ease of administration, flexible backup targets and support for a broad range of devices, to name a few.

Among enterprise customers, CrashPlan’s security fea-tures, such as 448-bit encryption and HIPAA compliance, are especially important. At the same time, CrashPlan isn’t unnecessarily complicated to set up, and its self-service recovery and e-discovery model translates to “minimal sysadmin overhead,” wrote one reader.

“This was a) the easiest to administer and b) the most secure. The balance was perfect,” another reader wrote.

Readers also like that files can be saved locally or to the cloud—a necessity in professional, mobile environments.

“CrashPlan was exactly what our university needed to ensure we could access our files anywhere our research may take us. Whether it was in New York or London, we were able to access everything we needed in the most cost-effective way possible,” one reader said.

HONORABLE MENTION

HotLink DR Express 4.0

Most IT pros will agree: Disaster recovery is hard to do. But does it have to be? Not if you have HotLink DR Ex-press 4.0, a plug-in for VMware vCenter that provides backup/replication plus disaster recovery by recovering VMs within minutes of a failure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To quote one reader that had never mustered DR before, HotLink DR Express is “effective, simple, quick to deploy … And, most importantly, cost-effective,” he said. “That allowed us to protect all our VMs—not only the mission-critical ones.” Talk about impact.

BEST AWS CONSULTING PARTNER

Winner: Flux7 Labs

While it’s the youngest company among the nominees, Flux7 has made a big impact since its founding in 2013. The consulting firm garnered ringing endorsements from voters.

“We wanted to build a more scalable and secure infra-structure in AWS that could handle high traffic,” said one voter from a startup based in Colorado. “Flux7 was able to put a solution in place with automation and AWS best practices, while tailoring it to the specific needs and work-flows of the development team, building tools specific to our requirements.”

Those tools, for disaster recovery automation and code deployment, were then handed over for management by the startup, one of its Web developers told Modern Infrastructure.


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Customers said they were impressed by Flux7’s knowl-edge of the cloud market and what competitive cloud offerings were available that might match AWS’s services. The company’s skills are especially prized when it comes to automation and scripting. It also specializes in big data analytics work.

“Flux7 has deep expertise in AWS. They are certified in all the AWS technologies that we need and provide hands-on guidance, labs and exercises for our architects, engineers and developers,” said another voter. “They are easy to work with, extremely agile and flexible, quick to re-spond and go over and beyond the required level of effort to make sure every single activity is successful.”

Most important, these services have led to cost sav- ings for companies deploying resources to AWS. “They cut our AWS bill in half in a matter of months,” gushed one voter.

Flux7, based in Austin, Texas, was founded by Aater Suleman, who now serves as the company’s CEO, and Ali Hussain, formerly of Intel, who is the CTO.

HONORABLE MENTION

Cloud Technology Partners

Knowledgeable people are the backbone of any consult-ing organization, and Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) earned stellar remarks from voters on this point.

“CTP has the best team by far,” said one voter. “They have deep expertise on AWS, great certifications and the ability to handle the hard stuff. They were great to work with.”

Another voter had this to say: “CTP is the best cloud consultancy organization I have had the pleasure to work with. The people are top-notch and enjoy their work.”

CTP, founded in 2011, is based in Boston, Mass. It offers both consulting services as well as software it calls PaaS-Lane, which assists customers with application readiness before a cloud migration.

BRIGHT IDEA

Winner: Upsite Technologies, AisleLok Modular

Containment

If your organization has a data center, chances are good that it is low on power. That drives some people to a co-lo or the cloud, and others to modular containment.

“Power and cooling drive data center expansions, moves to colocation facilities and the cloud,” said one judge. “That’s why data center power and cooling is always such a hot topic.”

With that, Modern Infrastructure readers selected Up-site Technologies’ AisleLok Modular Containment for this year’s Bright Idea Award, which recognizes a new

FLUX7 LABS: Customers said they were impressed by Flux7’s knowledge of the cloud.


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technology product.The idea behind containment is to keep the cold air

pumped in by a data center cooling system separate from the hot air exhausted by servers. That prevents hot and cold air from mixing so that the cooling systems don’t have to work as hard. That, in turn, saves money, or makes it possible to achieve greater server densities.

Most data centers that use containment were designed to do so from the get-go. And for those that didn’t plan for it beforehand? They are usually out of luck, as it is difficult and expensive to retrofit a data center for containment.

Not so with Upsite’s AisleLok. According to readers, this after-market containment system looks like a breeze to set up.

“In the past, deploying a containment system took days,” wrote one reader, a data center solutions provider. “With the Upsite AisleLok Modular Containment, we are talking about minutes.”

“They’ve thought it through properly,” added Kevan Har-rison, senior project manager at DataCentred, co-location

and cloud provider in the U.K. AisleLok’s value is in its “clever design and features,

including magnetic attachments and quick, tool-less in-stallation,” a reader wrote. It is applied on a per-rack basis and can be easily moved and reused in different parts of the data center. The company claims it can help lower data center temperatures by 20 degrees.

Summed up another reader: “It is a unique product that provides a great alternative to full containment systems.” n

UPSITE TECHNOLOGIES, AISLELOK MODULAR

CONTAINMENT: “In the past, deploying a containment system took days. With the Upsite AisleLok Modular Containment, we are talking about minutes,” said an Impact Awards voter.

IT’S DIFFICULT AND EXPENSIVE TO RETROFIT A DATA CENTER FOR CONTAINMENT.

w

N=1,198; SOURCE: TECHTARGET 2015 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY

N=413; SOURCE: TECHTARGET 2015 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY


Survey SaysHow IT is spending its moneyHome

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D How do you expect your 2015 IT budget to differ

from your 2014 budget?

30Percentage of IT respondents who said they intend to implement

application virtualization

D Which of these broad initiatives will your company

implement in 2015?

20+30+50+z

15+35+50+z

10+40+50+z

8+42+50+z

18+32+50+z

12+38+50+z

10+40+50+z

6+44+50+z

40%Data center

consolidation

30%Big data

21%Unified

communications

16%Internet of Things

36%Mobility

24%Compliance

19%Social media/ collaboration

13%Video conferencing

N=1,168; SOURCE: TECHTARGET 2015 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY; RESPONDENTS COULD CHOOSE MORE THAN ONE ANSWER

Increase more than 10%

Increase 5% to 10%

Increase by less than 5%

Remain the same

Decrease less than 10%

Decrease more than 10%

Don’t know

24%

27%

10%

22%

6%

3%

8%


JUST A FEW years ago, a major international corporation was going mobile. Corporate leaders wanted to replace the business’ shipment-tracking units with Android de-vices, but they hadn’t considered the implications of such a move.

The operations department, for example, would fix and upgrade the tracking devices by periodically sending out physical CDs and DVDs with massive software updates to end users. However, an executive at the company knew this approach wouldn’t work after the move to Android. Physical media issues aside—you can’t install software from a CD or DVD to a tablet—the length of time between updates wouldn’t meet user expectations. In the mobile era, app updates are constant, sometimes coming just weeks or even days apart. The executive brought this up to his colleagues. “They said, ’We can’t do that,’” he recalled. “And I said, ’You better figure out how.’”

USERS SPEED UP

Today, adoption of enterprise mobile apps—particularly those developed in-house—is on the rise. Enterprise mobility management vendor Good Technology saw

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CIFOTAR/THINKSTOCK


Business users need speedy app updates on their mobile devices, while IT

developers try to adjust.BY COLIN STEELE


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activations of these apps on its platform increase by a whopping 731% year over year, according to its latest Mo-bility Index Report.

But organizations still struggle to get their application development and lifecycle management processes up to speed. It’s not just a mobile issue, either. Employees want regular updates and prompt bug fixes for all of their cor-porate applications.

There has to be a way to provide feedback to develop-ers, especially because employees assume that built-in monitoring and analytics will identify and solve problems proactively.

Marty Resnick, mobile strategist at a large global enterprise, summed up end users’ expectations thusly: “Facebook works this way. Why doesn’t your application work this way?”

Enterprise applications typically include every last fea-ture that every last user could ever possibly need. (This in spite of the old axiom that for 80% of users, 20% of an ap-plication’s features will suffice.) Such code-heavy software with so many moving parts would take a long time for developers to improve—these updates would sometimes come at the expense of a quality user experience (UX).

Today’s successful mobile apps eschew this slow pace and monolithic approach. Take Facebook. For PC users,

the social network’s website offers one-stop shopping: Users can view their news feeds, chat with friends, man-age pages and participate in groups, all from the same interface. On mobile devices, however, each of these tasks has its own app. Facebook also updates its main iOS app every four weeks.

And while the steps of the mobile app lifecycle are the same, from ideation and design to deployment and mon-itoring and back, “the complexity in each one of these phases is getting much more dense,” said Sravish Sridhar, founder and CEO of Kinvey Inc., a Boston-based mobile backend as a service vendor.

For example, when designing a mobile app, you have to consider the UX on multiple operating systems, which are running on devices of various shapes and sizes, each with its own user interface.

“An app is a custom user experience for a specific form factor,” Sridhar said.

Traditional software updates can’t keep pace with mobile app updates, and users have high

expectations for their enterprise applications n App deployment is one key to getting users on board

with your mobile app—and if they don’t like it, they won’t use it n In-app analytics can help modernize

the update process, as can specialized development tools and services

HIGHLIGHTS

EMPLOYEES ASSUME THAT BUILT-IN MONITORING AND ANALYTICS WILL SOLVE PROBLEMS PROACTIVELY.

http://media.www1.good.com/documents/mobility-index-report-Q3-2014.pdf

http://media.www1.good.com/documents/mobility-index-report-Q3-2014.pdf


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USE IT OR LOSE IT

Apps have fueled the mobile revolution, and they’re only growing more integral to daily life. The average iPhone and Android owner in the United States spends 30 hours a month using mobile apps, up from 18 hours in 2011, according to a July 2014 report by Nielsen N.V.

Thanks to the popularity of consumer-focused mobile apps, people now expect the same user-friendly, stream-lined experience from the apps they use for work. Technol-ogy has empowered workers, so if their employer-issued software isn’t satisfactory, they’ll find other tools to get the job done—often, they’ll do it quickly. One in five mobile apps are used only once after being downloaded, accord-ing to a June 2014 report by Localytics, an app analytics and marketing firm. Other estimates say people delete as many as 60% to 90% of the apps they download, either because of performance issues or other UX frustrations.

“Before, it was all about the functionality of the app,” Resnick said. “Whereas with mobile, you really want to get the user buy-in.”

The way in which an organization deploys an app to users is also important with regard to its reception. In the App Store and Google Play, a simple tap of an icon is all it takes to download an app. Enterprises, however, often rely on sideloading, which bypasses these official app stores and typically creates a more complicated process for users.

“They’ve already got a negative taste in their mouth before they’ve even opened the application,” Resnick said.The increasing fickleness of the user base makes the feedback loop an even more important part of modern lifecycle management. Consumers are accustomed to

going into the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, rating apps and leaving comments about what they like, what they don’t like, what features they’d like to see and more. More importantly, they’re used to seeing developers respond to these reviews quickly.

Start Your EnginesIndependent mobile consultant Bryan Barringer

offered these development and lifecycle manage-

ment tips for business and IT leaders who don’t

know where to begin:

n Iterate: Focus on pushing out smaller, more

frequent app updates. Make fewer changes to

features, and build focused apps with fewer fea-

tures overall. Think of the application lifecycle

as ongoing product management, not a one-off

process.

n Retool, retrain, recruit: It’s important to bring

tenured developers up to speed on new pro-

gramming languages. It’s even more important

for developers, new and old, to have the right

UX-centric mindset.

n Provide leadership: Each organization needs a

high-level executive to oversee changes across

all departments, not just here and there. n

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/smartphones-so-many-apps--so-much-time.html

http://info.localytics.com/blog/app-retention-improves


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Problems arise when users don’t bother to leave feed-back; it’s often because they’re so dissatisfied by the app. How do developers know if their apps work properly and meet users’ needs if people are too annoyed to provide criticism?

“The tolerance for these apps when they crash is very low,” said Bryan Barringer, an independent mobile con-sultant. “If you’re waiting for feedback, you’re not going to get it, because they’re not using your app. That’s your feedback.”

UNDER THE HOOD

Enter in-app analytics. Several mobile application de-velopment platforms offer this function, which provides detailed information about how workers use enterprise apps and where they run into problems.

“People need to understand the impact of design choices, and that means being able to gain insight into how users use that application,” said Mike Gilfix, director of enterprise mobile platform and analytics at IBM.

IBM’s Mobile First platform can identify the place in a specific workflow where users abandon the app, and then

pinpoint the cause of their frustration, such as a glitch that causes a certain screen to render improperly.

“The user experience really matters,” Gilfix said. Adapting traditional lifecycle management and devel-

opment processes for the mobile era is no small undertak-ing. But, new development tools and back-end services can help organizations as they get up to speed. Kinvey’s platform, for example, abstracts front-end and back-end app development from each other, so the respective teams can work on different components of the app at their own pace, without creating a culture clash.

“The two teams can work independently of each other and then meet in the middle,” Sridhar said.

Some development platforms allow organizations to take advantage of their traditional enterprise development skills. Resnick’s company, a .NET shop, uses a product called Xamarin, which lets developers write one version of an app and run it on many different operating systems. Developers build an app in C#, a traditional Windows language that runs on .NET, and use this shared code to create native versions for iOS, Android and Mac OS X.

Other tools allow developers to write apps in HTML5 and package them as native mobile apps, leveraging exist-ing Web development skills.

However, no matter the choice of back-end platform, there will be impatient users at the gate.

“Enterprises are going to struggle for a long time before they figure this out,” Barringer said. n

COLIN STEELE is associate editorial director for TechTarget’s End-User Computing Media Group.

OTHER TOOLS ALLOW DEVELOPERS TO WRITE APPS IN HTML5 AND PACKAGE THEM AS NATIVE MOBILE APPS.

zzzzzz

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Overheard

“ We are going to reach a point in which the device doesn’t matter at all. The presence of the cloud will be wherever on whatever screen.” KEVIN SCHWARTZ, CTO, Clear Creek Independent School District, League City, Texas

“ We are far better off in mindshare and growth than where we were a year ago. It’s a case of all of us at Dell Software understanding all the possibilities. It’s not some-thing that happens overnight.”TOM KENDRA, VP and general manager of systems management software, Dell Software

... at Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure and Operations Management Conference

... at Dell World 2014

“ When we do a software- defined network, a control plane will manage the entire mesh. It’s a giant loaded gun. If we are not careful, we can make colossal mistakes.”RAY PAQUET, managing VP, Gartner

“ Our objective is to enable the business and we’ve done this historically through develop-ment. Our second objective is to protect the business. These are contrary objectives.”DAVID CAPPUCCIO, research VP at Gartner, talking about DevOps


THE FREQUENCY WITH which components of data center sys-tems get together and break up could put some Hollywood couples to shame. These days, the “in” thing in system de-sign is convergence—tightly integrated servers, networks and storage in standalone units. But some forward-looking technologists are aiming for convergence’s polar opposite: disaggregation. Think about it as conscious uncoupling, data-center style.

Decoupling system components has a long and storied history. Take networking and storage, for example—de-spite convergence’s current popularity, the two are fre-quently purchased and configured separately from servers. Contemporary efforts to disaggregate systems take things a step further and target the components that today are tightly coupled on the computer motherboard: the processing, main memory and the I/O subsystem—“the three-piece suit” that makes up every system, said Dr. Tom Bradicich, Hewlett-Packard vice president of engineering for servers.

The dream of disaggregation is particularly attractive among hyperscale cloud service providers, which see dis-aggregation as a way to achieve more flexible systems and fewer underutilized resources.

Driven to DisaggregationBehind the scenes, systems vendors are

working to separate server CPU, memory and I/O in the hopes of enabling more flexible

and cost-effective systems.BY ALEX BARRETT

HOME

SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE

SCANRAIL/THINKSTOCK


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“In the public cloud, you’re playing a multi-billion dol-lar Tetris game,” said Mike Neil, Microsoft general man-ager for Windows Azure. “You have all these resources manifested as physical systems, and the challenge is to be as efficient as possible with those resources.”

With north of a million servers underpinning services such as Azure, Skype and Xbox Live, Microsoft spends more than two billion dollars per year on cloud infrastruc-ture. At that kind of scale, disaggregation has the potential to save Microsoft big money by solving the classic com-puter science bin-and-box packing problem—how to build systems (“bins”) that can take the maximum number of workloads (“boxes”), Neil said.

“Let’s say I have a bin that is four feet long,” Neil said. “I put two two-foot boxes in it, and the bin is filled. But what if I want to put in a three foot box, and a 1.5 foot box? It doesn’t work.”

In today’s traditional servers, the ratios of CPU to mem-ory to I/O are pretty much set in stone. With disaggrega-tion, those systems are separated out into discrete pools of resources that you then mix and match to create differ-ently sized and shaped systems, or bins, as it were. Data center architects can then “compose” systems through an orchestration interface that are CPU-, memory- or IO-in-tensive systems, depending on workload demands, and

then tear them down to recreate another system with a totally different profile.

The push for disaggregated systems could easily trickle down to enterprises and high performance computing (HPC) environments if the economics are right, said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research manager for server, virtualization and workloads.

“The standard justification for disaggregated systems is the refresh or maintenance story,” Stolarski said. “Today, if the processor is due for a refresh, then the whole box is going to go,” even if the other components are still viable.

Everyone who spends a lot of money on servers cares about saving money, not just hyperscale folk, said Todd Brannon, Cisco director for product marketing for its unified computing product line. Consider that the CPU represents only about two-thirds of the total system cost, and that the remaining third (memory, I/O subsystem, etc.) typically doesn’t need to be replaced as often as the processor. In a disaggregated system, “just replace the

Convergence is hot, but its opposite—disaggregation—is turning heads with its concept of separating systems

into discrete resource pools n Disaggregation allows for composable systems created through an interface,

bucking the tradition of server lifecycle management based solely on processor life n Separating CPU and

main memory is the real trick, and the software to provision and deprovision resources must also improve

HIGHLIGHTS

EVERYONE WHO SPENDS A LOT OF MONEY ON SERVERS CARES ABOUT SAVING MONEY.


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processing cartridge, and maintain the investment in everything else,” Brannon said.

But while this sounds like an admirable goal, there are plenty of things that could go wrong and prevent disaggre-gated systems from taking off: fundamental laws of phys-ics and engineering, for one; a failure to get the required technology costs down; and management complexity. Only time will tell if the promise of disaggregated systems is attainable or just a noble pipe dream.

WANTED: SUPERFAST FABRICS

By some people’s reckoning, the first disaggregated sys-tem is already here. This fall, Cisco announced the UCS M-Series. The front of the 2U M-Series chassis holds eight processing cartridges that contain CPU and mem-ory—connected to disaggregated storage and connectivity resources via Cisco’s Virtual Interface Card. Brannon believes it is the first example of a commercially available disaggregated system.

But the holy grail of disaggregation isn’t so much at the I/O level, but between CPU and main memory. And for that to happen in any real capacity, systems vendors need to deliver better, faster bandwidth between those components.

“The biggest challenge of disaggregation is the inter-connect,” said HP’s Dr. Bradicich. “But like many things in life, valuable things are hard.”

Today, the distance between processors and main mem-ory is measured in inches, “but for disaggregation to work, it needs to be measured in feet,” he said. That is easier said

than done. “It all has to do with physics—the farther it is, the slower it is.”

One emerging interconnect technology commonly as-sociated with disaggregation is silicon photonics, which transfers data by optical rays rather than electrical conduc-tors. Silicon photonics has three major advantages over traditional data center interconnect technologies: perfor-mance, weight and distance, said Jay Kyathsandra, Intel senior product marketing manager in its Cloud Platforms Group, which is developing the technology. Silicon pho-tonics will support data transmissions of up to 1.3 Tb per second, weighs about a third as much as copper cables and can extend to 300 meters, according to the specifications.

Intel expects CPU and memory disaggregation enabled by silicon photonics to come to market by 2017. But silicon

DEFINED: Silicon PhotonicsSilicon photonics is an emerging technology,

driven by the need for faster connections between

data centers. Silicon photonics transfers data us-

ing optical rays instead of electrical conductors.

The old standard of copper cabling isn’t cutting it

anymore in situations where high performance is

top priority. Silicon photonics requires laser and

silicon technology to be on the same chip, and the

related power-hungry laser devices have long held

up development. n

D


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photonics isn’t necessarily synonymous with disaggrega-tion, said Kyathsandra.

“The actual implementation will be a function of what the OEM/ODM wants to do,” he said. If your system does not require the kinds of speeds it provides, “Silicon pho-tonics may not be a part of [the ultimate implementation].”

Indeed, systems designers will need to weigh the ad-vantages of silicon photonics over its cost, said Microsoft’s Neil. Similarly, consider the tens of dollars it costs to con-nect a hard drive to a system locally versus the hundreds or even thousands of dollars it costs to implement NAS or SAN. In a disaggregated system, it might be physically possible to separate memory and CPU at long distances, but if the interconnect technology is too expensive, that will eat into the potential utilization benefits and derail the whole plan.

As another option, systems designers might find that emerging Ethernet standards provide sufficient perfor-mance and low enough latency to support disaggregated systems. Today, several systems designed for hyperscale systems rely on 10 Gb Ethernet. When grouped with Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) transceivers, Ethernet can go to 40 Gb today, said Kevin Deierling,

vice president of marketing at Mellanox, a supplier of high-performance Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect technology. Meanwhile, work is underway on 25 Gb Eth-ernet, he said. Multiplied by four, that gets you to 100 Gb—the speed of many InfiniBand fabrics required in high-performance computing environments.

Whatever happens, systems vendors aren’t sitting on their hands waiting for interconnect technologies to be fully baked. HP’s Moonshot chassis, for example, is currently equipped with several fabrics that will connect any eventual disaggregated system components, said Dr. Bradicich. One Ethernet fabric is currently used today, and a second “proximal array” fabric was revealed as part of the 64-bit ARM-based m400 servers announcement this fall. Finally, the chassis includes a third, as-of-yet unutilized fabric called the 2D Torus Mesh that will allow any one Moonshot component to communicate directly with any neighbor to the north, south, east and west of it, Bradicich explained.

“The highways are laid down and paved.” he said, “There are just no cars on it yet.”

RUNNING THE SHOW

Plumbing aside, there’s a lot of other work that needs to be done in order to enable disaggregation, specifically around the software required to provision and deprovision system resources.

Intel refers to its overall disaggregation initiative as its Rack Scale Architecture. On the hardware side, that includes its aforementioned work in the silicon photonics

PLUMBING ASIDE, THERE’S A LOT OF OTHER WORK THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE IN ORDER TO ENABLE DISAGGREGATION.


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optical interconnect, as well as a programmable network switch due out in 2015. In addition, a pod management framework communicates with the system components via hardware APIs, and provides a policy-based orches-tration framework to assemble and disassemble systems from the resource pool, explained Intel’s Kyathsandra. Intel has demonstrated the system within a single rack, and will share the results of its efforts with both the Open Compute Project for hardware designs and OpenStack for cloud orchestration, to encourage openness and adoption.

“You should be able to have different racks from differ-ent vendors, and get the same hardware-level information from each rack,” Kyathsandra said. Further, the goal is for different orchestration layers to work together seamlessly. “It shouldn’t matter whether you are using VMware or OpenStack,” for example.

Disaggregation presents challenges for software de-velopment challenges for management and operating systems vendors too. “At the systems level, this presents a whole set of orchestration and fabric management prob-lems: How do you reason across these pools of resources?” said Microsoft’s Neil.

Recently, Microsoft’s strategy has been to innovate in Azure, and then push that work back out via the Open Compute Project for hardware, and Windows Server and Systems Center for management. This fall, Microsoft also made a version of its Azure system—the Microsoft Cloud Platform System—based on commercially available Dell hardware. Going forward, it’s reasonable to expect that disaggregated hardware and software designs will find their way to the Open Compute Project and to the market, said Neil.

“Our general goal is to take innovations that we’ve done in Azure, and drive [them] out toward broader industry adoption,” he said.

And as a general rule, disaggregated system designs may find their way to everyday data centers much faster than may seem possible, said Mellanox’s Deierling.

“Disaggregation will trickle down to the enterprise faster than people realize,” he said. Hyperscale vendors have a lot of engineers who are already doing this work, and it’s not a big leap for them to productize the work that they have been doing internally for public consumption. “They’re saying ’Hey, we’ve already done the heavy lifting. Let’s bring this to the enterprise.’” n

ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure.

DEFINED: Bin/Box PackingThe bin packing problem is a type of algorithm

that aims to pack objects of different volumes

into the smallest number of bins possible. There’s

a range of actual packing and shipping applica-

tions for this problem, as well as other iterations

such as planning file backups. And bin packing

also includes the idea that some items can share

space—and therefore resources—when packed

into a bin, like virtual machines in a server. n

D


AS YOU MAY recall, I declared that 2014 would be the Year of DaaS in my February 2014 column. (I believed it would be the year that all the major cloud providers would launch their DaaS offerings—I didn’t foresee a mass customer migration.)

Now that we’re into 2015, I’m happy to report that this prediction has indeed come to fruition! In other words, the early 2014 vision of “DaaS is going to be cool” has successfully turned into “DaaS is now cool!” For exam-ple, VMware bought DaaS platform provider Desktone in 2013, and in March 2014 the company launched its VMware Horizon DaaS offering, which lets customers run VDI desktops from VMware-owned data centers.

In May 2014, Amazon moved its “Workspaces” DaaS product into production, offering DaaS-based Windows desktops that run directly from the AWS cloud.

In December, Microsoft launched Azure RemoteApp, which lets users access Windows applications that are running on Azure for as little as $10 per user, per month.

We also saw Citrix solidifying its position as a back-end infrastructure provider for other DaaS providers, power-ing hundreds of DaaS offerings, including major ones from IBM and Verizon.

Dell, Cisco and even Google have also joined the fray, all offering various products that deliver Windows desktops and applications directly to end users from their respec-tive cloud data centers.

So what’s the point of all this?One of the biggest reservations customers traditionally

have with DaaS is finding a trustworthy provider (read more in Desktops as a Service, my recent book with Gabe Knuth). After all, if a customer decides to move their users’ desktops to the cloud, what happens if that cloud provider has a breach? What happens if the provider has an outage? Or, perhaps worst, what happens if that pro-vider goes out of business?

Sure, these are all the same concerns that customers have with cloud providers in general, but there’s a per-ception that it’s even more relevant with regard to DaaS. After all, it’s one thing if your sales management or billing

END-USER ADVOCATE

DaaS Providers Get SeriousHeavyweight providers move into desktops as a service—and users are paying attention. BY BRIAN MADDEN

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application goes down, but what happens if all of your users lose full access to every application they use? Yikes!

We predicted that many of these reservations would melt away in 2014 as larger and more established cloud providers entered the DaaS market, and we’re absolutely seeing that now. After all, it can be hard for a customer to trust “Joe’s Discount Desktop Warehouse,” but when an Amazon or Microsoft or VMware enters the market—a provider that customers are already using for critical cloud-hosted services—it becomes easier to move desk-tops to their cloud too.

Looking ahead to 2015, I believe we’re going to start to

see a larger migration to these DaaS platforms across the board. To be clear, VDI isn’t right for every user at every company, so by extension, I don’t believe that DaaS will be right for every user at every company. But just as it’s anach-ronistic for customers to run their own email servers in 2015, VMware, Citrix, Amazon, Microsoft and others are doing all they can to see that fewer and fewer customers run their own VDI environments. n

BRIAN MADDEN is an opinionated, supertechnical, fiercely independent desktop virtualization and consumerization expert. Write to him at [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]


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AS AN INDUSTRY analyst, I feel like it’s mandatory to make some outlandish predictions at the start of every new year. But since this column is already about predicting the next big thing, I’ve decided to adopt another New Year’s tradition: making resolutions. But I have a problem with that too. I only have a few bad habits and I’m intent on keeping them. And there’s no point making an insincere resolution.

So instead, I’m going to suggest some Modern Infrastruc-ture resolutions for IT organizations in 2015:

n Do something predictive with big data. Don’t even worry about the big data part if “big” doesn’t come nat-urally to the top of your pile of opportunities. You can

always grow into bigger data efforts. But do look for a starter project to leverage the power of prediction. Com-mit to a project that embeds predictive algorithms or machine learning to start getting comfortable with what it is, what it can and can’t do, and how to approach it profit-ably. Some areas to consider might be to explore inherent clusters in your customer or client base, to estimate which client or transaction will succeed or fail, or to identify the most likely root causes of support issues.

n Reduce Opex through hyperconvergence. Conver-gence is clearly a natural process of evolution under the ever-present pressure to reduce TCO. Hyperconvergence, which offers a single building block of data center infra-structure that bakes in server, storage and networking resources all into one scale-out unit, takes this process to the extreme. While it might not solve every problem, there is no doubt that a large portion of DIY data center ar-chitecture could profitably migrate onto hyperconverged platforms. If you aren’t ready to completely convert, at least resolve to evaluate hyperconverged solutions for new projects. And if that is too big a leap, at least deploy some software-defined storage this year to get comfortable with this potential “new order” of IT.

n Accelerate your infrastructure. I’ve talked a few times recently about acceleration technologies, several of which, like caching and in-memory processing, you can easily drop into your environment with little effort, cost or risk. Although downstream users may complain about poor performance, they rarely ask if acceptable service could

THE NEXT BIG THING

Resolutions You Can KeepMake 2015 your most modern IT year yet. BY MIKE MATCHETT


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be accelerated 10x or 100x or more. Resolve to improve on the “satisfactory,” not just oiling the squeaky wheels, because acceleration technologies can spur noticeable improvements in quality of service. They can also lead to huge productivity gains for many, if not all, applications, to the point where competitive differentiation or even new sources of revenue might be created.

n Fold facilities closer to IT management. If you have a data center, you might have noticed that facilities manage-ment is maturing along with IT application and infrastruc-ture management. There are now important crossover points between them that can be exploited to great ad-vantage. For example, learn which applications place the greatest demand on power and cooling, and where and when they are actually physically hosted. Cabling itself is also evolving into a more “software-defined” solution; SDN-controlled full optical switching and self-aware physical cable connectors can be dynamically optimized with application-level insight and intelligence.

n Learn to love the cloud. This is the year of broader enterprise cloud usage. Instead of requiring deliberate wholesale IT adoption, which has been difficult for a number of reasons, I see major infrastructure and storage vendors preparing to ship cloud-enabled products as sim-ply part of traditional IT resources. You’ll still be able to choose not use those cloud-friendly features for compli-ance, risk and other business concerns, but little technical excuse not to do so. SMBs in particular will leverage the public cloud for backup, archive and DRaaS in droves this

year, while enterprises may opt to build out larger private clouds for multiple use cases. If you have been shy about anything cloud, now is the time to stop avoiding it. At the very least, commit to giving your users a good secure cloud-enabled file sharing/sync and collaboration solution and you’ll be off on the right foot.

n Prepare for the Internet of things (IoT). Imagine a world in which just about everything you touch or interact with includes a sensor that creates analyzable data. Many of these things will also become dynamically controlla-ble, and some key things may come to contain their own driving intelligence. This is a bright future for those of us in IT. In the data center itself, many things are becoming trackable data sources, including your physical infrastruc-ture (like cables), resources (e.g., virtual storage) and you (i.e., your badge). Instead of waiting for the IoT world to come to you, resolve to look at the world differently and try to leverage some new sources of data that didn’t even exist last year. At the same time, begin to formulate poli-cies for what potential new data is fair to collect, analyze and retain (and what isn’t).

I SEE MAJOR INFRA- STRUCTURE AND STORAGE VENDORS PREPARING TO SHIP CLOUD-ENABLED PRODUCTS AS SIM PLY PART OF TRADI-TIONAL IT RESOURCES.


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n Learn a new “language.” Commit to learning how to walk and talk about a new technical area of expertise or business domain. Whether it’s a new programming lan-guage (e.g., Ruby, Python or Scala), a paradigm or platform for data analysis (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Pentaho) or going deeper into one of your important customer verticals, it’s important to actively stretch both your skills and perspec-tives. You’ll benefit from the cross-fertilization of ideas—most creative innovation comes from straddling multiple areas of knowledge.

The results of resolutions are somewhat intangible, but think of these goals as part of a proactive, forward-looking

strategy. If you want to improve yourself, resolve to im-prove something from the above list. I’m sure that if you stick with some of these IT resolutions, you’ll be better off come 2016. n

MIKE MATCHETT is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

MOST CREATIVE INNOVATION COMES FROM STRADDLING MULTIPLE IDEAS OF KNOWLEDGE.

http://tanejagroup.com/

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Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com publication.

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Phil Sweeney, Managing Editor

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Patrick Hammond, Associate Features Editor

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Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Rebecca Kitchens, Publisher, [email protected]

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