Staying Alive - Bitpipedocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109499/item_678673/Modern... · Staying Alive Will HP, IBM and Dell become casualties of the cloud? WHAT IS SOMOCLO? VMWARE

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STEVE GUNDERSON: CHOOSE COLO CAREFULLY

BRIAN MADDEN: THE ADMIN-RIGHTS-FOR-IPADS SWAP

CAN HP, IBM AND DELL SURVIVE THE CLOUD?

CLOUD APPLICATIONS FEEL GROWING PAINS

THE JUST-IN-TIME DATA CENTER

JONATHAN EUNICE: CROSS-CUT YOUR WAY TO IT SUCCESS

1 MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • MAY 2013

COVER STORY | BETH STACKPOLE

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Mi MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE

Staying AliveWill HP, IBM and Dell become casualties of the cloud?

WHAT IS SOMOCLO?

VMWARE PUSHES END-USER MANAGEMENT

GUNDERSON: HOW TO PICK A COLO FACILITY

MAY 2013

INSIDE: Highlights

from the MI Decisions event

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When we launched Modern Infrastructure in late 2012, we gave a lot of thought to the content we wanted to cover, namely IT infrastructure and operations, plus how macro trends like cloud computing and consumerization were affecting the enterprise data center.

What we didn’t give as much thought to was how these trends were changing how we consume that content. We were launching a magazine, damn it, and sallied forth with an e-zine design that took its cues from a traditional print publication.

A vertical layout works wonders in print, but less so on-screen, and even less so on a tablet. You typically have to shrink the page down substantially to view the whole page, and when you do, it gets hard to read. If the text is in a readable font size, you can see only part of the page. You know what I’m talking about.

The solution to that problem was surprisingly straight-forward: flip the layout to horizontal. Whether on screen or on your iPad, Modern Infrastructure should now fit neatly.

It seems that we at Modern Infrastructure aren’t the only ones struggling to reconcile the old and the new.

Last month marked the first Modern Infrastructure De-cisions conference in New York City, where almost 200 real IT professionals gathered to glean insights about how best to move their environments forward.

Tier-one server vendors, meanwhile, are desperately trying to sell tried-and-true server designs in an era when a lot of IT shops are trying to get out of the data center business. Read my findings in “Can HP, IBM and Dell Survive the Cloud?” VMware is taking an old-school suite approach to taming the chaos of endpoint devices, writes Jim Furbush in “Will VMware Have the Last Word on End-User Management?”

Then there are IT shops trying to run legacy verti-cally scaled applications in the public cloud, writes Beth Pariseau in “Cloud Applications Feel Growing Pains.” Without the benefit of on-premises control and tooling, it has proven to be a tough row to hoe, said Sean Perry, CIO of Robert Half International Inc. “Where we have the biggest challenges and have spent the most time is in moving the legacy stuff.”

Maybe everybody should just step back, take a deep breath and turn the problem on its side. Horizontal. n

EDITOR’S NOTE | ALEX BARRETT

Horizontal Scaling


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Cutting Through the Cloud Hype Sometimes it seems like cloud computing is just the latest buzzword to permeate all IT conversations. And in some ways, it is. But it’s also much more than that, said David Linthicum, senior vice president for Cloud Technology Partners, who delivered the keynote at the April Modern Infrastructure Decisions event in New York City. Cloud represents a fundamental shift in how IT consumes and delivers compute resources, he maintains.

Is cloud computing really that different from other

major technology trends to hit IT?

It’s just one in a long line of macro trends. The moves from [mainframes] to mini computers to distributed systems were about reformulating how we consume and deal with automation within businesses. Cloud comput-ing is nothing more than that—rethinking the models and how we’re consuming them. It has some neat stuff in it, but at the end of the day it’s the storage and the I/O and processor and databases and application develop-ment—the same things we’ve been wrestling with for the past 30 years.

People talk a lot about IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS.

Is that a useful construct going forward?

I think in the next couple of years we’re still going to see Software as a Service and Platform as a Service and In-frastructure as a Service, but it’s going to morph into dif-ferent subcategories and a lot of those terms are going to fall away. I even think the term cloud computing is going to fall away. It will be the model of grid computing and people won’t refer to it as cloud anymore.

If cloud is just the next phase of computing,

what’s the essence of this shift?

The essence is that we’re sharing internal infrastructure

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better than before. The dirty little secret of computing is that even though people think they’re saturating their systems, average server utilization is still very low. So we’re finally getting better at pooling and sharing those resources and providing auto-allocation and self-alloca-tion and provisioning.

It’s also about getting people to think differently about how computing systems are stood up, and getting people out of the mind-set that any kind of new application re-quires that they spend a million dollars with an enterprise resource planning vendor, and another million dol-lars in storage. If they can find those resources online, chances are they are going to have something that is pretty reliable and a lot less expensive.

IT is awful in terms of their ability to kind of step up and solve business issues, and it’s gotten worse in the last ten years. Cloud gets us to a point where we can get resources online, we can change, add, delete those re-sources with relative ease and low cost.

There seems to be a total disconnect between

people at the bleeding edge of cloud and people

in traditional IT about how secure, reliable and

cost-effective the cloud is. Who’s right?

We have studies that come out that say that cloud is inse-cure, and others that say that it’s more secure. I think it’s somewhere in the middle—it’s as insecure as you make it. We’re still gathering data points right now and a lot of this jumping to conclusions is a little too early.

In terms of availability, cloud-based systems trounce internal systems. People with internal IT understand that. It’s easy to pick on cloud because they have to do press releases on outages that affect many customers.

Cloud costs, on the other hand, tend to be higher than people anticipated, even with the cost of public cloud going down substantially. Most people don’t have a clue about how to cost out a cloud project, and often neglect to include things that they need. The reality is that you’re getting into a complex distributed system, and even though you may not own the hardware, you still have to deal with the architecture and a lot of the complexities of the systems. You still have to hire people who know what they’re doing. You still have to secure your stuff and make sure you’re compliant. The end of that process is usually a few more dollars than people thought they would initially spend. —ALEX BARRETT

“ IN TERMS OF AVAILABILITY, CLOUD-BASED SYSTEMS TROUNCE INTERNAL SYSTEMS.” —David Linthicum, senior VP, Cloud Technology Partners

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“ If IT tries to block applications, people will find a way around it. It’s not a ‘no’ world anymore; IT used to be the department of ‘no’ and it’s gotten us into trouble over the past 15 years.”STEVE DAMADEO, IT operations manager, Festo Corp., talking about the consumerization of IT

“ The idea of vendor lock-in is a bit of baloney. It’s not about APIs. It’s about features. There’s not feature parity.”DANIEL BOZEMAN, software engineer at Mosaik Solutions, talking about cloud service providers

“ What I’m finding is that outages [in a public cloud] are not that bad. Your internal system outages are probably worse.”DAVID LINTHICUM, senior VP at Cloud Technology Partners, in his keynote address

“ Public cloud is a software asset, not a hardware asset.”CHARLES HAMMELL, solutions architect, Comcast Converged Products

“ I think most of us remember the virtu-alization wars, where people said, ‘Well, my app is too special to put on a VM.’ The same thing is happening with the cloud.” SEAN PERRY, CIO of Robert Half International

“ If you copy one person’s idea it is called plagiarism. If you copy many people’s ideas it’s called research. I do a lot of research.” NEAL RAMASAMY, CIO and managing director, New York Life Retirement Plan Services, on following the example of other companies’ IT strategies

OVERHEARD AT MODERN

INFRASTRUCTURE DECISIONS

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FROM THE SHOW FLOOR

Toward the Hybrid Data Center

Companies have begun to use the public cloud as an extension of their own data center, mixing public and private clouds with colocation and on-premises IT to be-come as efficient as possible.

The pros and cons of a hybrid data center environment was a hot topic at the Modern Infrastructure Decisions conference in New York City on April 11.

Attendees had a wide range of opinions on the use of hybrid data center, from an IT pro at a large government agency that, despite its high data security demands, uses a cloud-first approach, to those at financial sector busi-nesses that continue to rely on on-premises IT and use public cloud sparingly.

Comcast, for instance, uses a mix of public cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) along with virtualization from both VMware and Microsoft. However, the cable company has developed a bias toward public cloud, ac-cording to Charles Hammell, a solutions architect with Comcast who sat on a panel at the conference.

“For [proof of concepts] or if you have a great idea you want to build out quickly, public cloud is the way to go,” Hammell said. “Getting something to market quickly is another good use of cloud.”

Other companies, such as Robert Half International, a

staffing firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., rely heavily on cloud.

“We have four production apps and all our data ana-lytics stuff in the public cloud,” said Sean Perry, CIO of Robert Half International. “We take every opportunity we have to use public cloud. … My AWS bill is always a good size.”

Indeed, there are many ways to dice up the data center depending on company needs—though public cloud ser-vices has a bigger piece of the pie, according to TechTar-get’s 2013 Cloud Pulse Survey.

The survey of more than 1,200 respondents showed that 39% use public cloud, 28% use private and 33% do hybrid cloud.

Part of the appeal of the hybrid approach is that it of-fers the best of both worlds—IT gets to offload some of its operational tasks while maintaining the platforms that make sense to keep in-house.

“The more we shrink IT on the legacy side, the more we free up our resources for innovation,” said Dave Cas-tellani, CEO and senior managing director, New York Life Retirement Plan Services in Westwood, Mass.

When compared with the cost of a software upgrade, the annual subscription licenses and maintenance fees, cloud’s as-a-service subscription model makes sense in some cases.

It’s a model that Neal Ramasamy, CIO and managing director, New York Life, was able to get at least one of the company’s traditional software providers to follow, he told attendees.

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/guides/Tracking-the-cloud-computing-landscape-in-enterprise-IT

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“We just did a deal with a workflow product provider and after 18 months of negotiations … we forced them to offer us a [Software as a Service] model versus the soft-ware and maintenance model,” he said.

He said they will spend 40% less with that approach, and they now look at other software providers with the subscription licensing mind-set.

Hybrid Data Center Decision PointsStill, IT managers with their feet planted firmly in the data center say they prefer on-premises IT environments to retain complete control.

But with that control comes capacity limitations due to power, space and cooling constraints. Plus, uptime may not be as good as it could be due to high-avail-ability limitations, and bandwidth options may also be constraining, according to Craig MacFarlane, CTO and co-founder of Transitional Data Services (TDS). He pre-sented a session on right-sizing infrastructure by balanc-ing on-premises, colocation, managed services and cloud resources.

Overall, the benefits of the hybrid cloud approach include more efficient use of IT and workload scalabil-ity, emphasis on business agility and strategic use of IT

talent, in that order, according to Cloud Pulse Survey respondents.

Colocation and managed service providers offer the benefit of a higher uptime promise, better bandwidth options and 24/7 management. There is also commodity pricing and expansion as needed, MacFarlane said.

While a hybrid data center brings efficiencies, there are challenges to consider. Application suitability and a lack of interoperability/integration between private and public clouds is a problem. Plus, applications may need extensive modifications, Cloud Pulse Survey respondents said.

IT pros also say the complexity of managing a hybrid environment is a problem that may require additional monitoring tools. —BRIDGET BOTELHO

IT MANAGERS WITH THEIR FEET PLANTED FIRMLY IN THE DATA CENTER SAY THEY PREFER ON-PREMISES IT ENVIRONMENTS.

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SOURCE: SEARCHCLOUDCOMPUTING.COM READER SURVEY

READER SNAPSHOT

13+39+8+40+p39%

The data center

8% The WAN

13% As a man-agement tool

40% The LAN


Software-defined networking applicationsmove beyond the data centern Where will you use software-defined

networking first?

41+31+13+15+p41%

It hasn’t changed

31% I have more

time for other tasks

15% Cloud killed my job

13% Other


How cloud computing is transformingthe IT departmentn How has your role changed since

moving to the cloud?

Cloud computing benefits may trump public cloud security fearsn Public cloud: Game changer or security gamble?

Security gamble Game changer Other

44%

53%

3%

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EXPLAINED

SoMoClo Traditional enterprise computing involves one-to-one communication, on-premises software and PCs tied to desks. The current wave of social, mobile and cloud technologies has exposed users to a new way of working and has even spawned a buzzword that combines the terms: SoMoClo.

SoMoClo refers to a more distributed way of com-puting than most businesses are used to. Information is stored in more places, accessed from more endpoints and shared with more people, all in an effort to increase pro-ductivity and efficiency.

This trend represents a shift away from the client/server model, in which workers relied solely on their employers to provide them with the technology required to do their jobs. IT departments pre-installed software on computers, gave new ones to employees every three years and managed them with Group Policy and Active Directory. On the back end, servers in corporate data centers ran all of the company’s applications and stored all of its data.

More and more, however, employees are adopting technology from other sources and adapting it for busi-ness use. They buy their own smartphones and config-ure them to access corporate systems. They sign up for cloud services such as Dropbox so they can sync work

documents to their home computers. They communicate with large groups of people in real time via Facebook and Twitter, which makes them question their dependence on email.

Furthermore, these social, mobile and cloud technol-ogies do not exist independently of one another. Mobile apps tie in to cloud services. The cloud hosts social net-works. These platforms have their own mobile apps. And for the most part, these relationships all exist outside the corporate data center—and out of IT’s control.

In response, IT infrastructure is starting to move in the SoMoClo direction, but it is a long road with many bumps and potholes. Cloud computing—whether it’s public, private or hybrid—is the backbone of this transformation. Enterprise adoption of cloud services, however, is below 50%, according to TechTarget’s latest Cloud Pulse Survey. And of those IT shops that have yet to adopt cloud, a whopping 85% don’t plan to do so for at least another year.

IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS STARTING TO MOVE IN THE SOMOCLO DIRECTION, BUT IT IS A LONG ROAD WITH MANY BUMPS AND POTHOLES.

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Mobile and social technologies face an even steeper uphill climb. Despite all the hype around the bring your own device (BYOD) trend, in many organizations, “We’re mobile” means nothing more than “Our employees can check email on their iPhones.” To truly embrace mobility, IT professionals will need to find ways to manage pub-licly available apps, deliver legacy apps to new form fac-

tors and develop new apps altogether. These efforts will take significant time and money to get off the ground.

Despite these challenges, make no mistake about it: Social, mobile and cloud technologies are coming to the enterprise. Employees have found their own ways to in-crease productivity, and that’s something IT can’t afford to ignore. —COLIN STEELE

Mailbag: Data center futures

“ A very well-written article on the data center of the future. Didn’t mention standards, though. #greenit”JOHN BOOTH, consultant at Carbon3IT on “What Will the Next Big Data Center Transformation Look Like?” January 2013 MI

“ I believe SDN is the future of virtualization. It may take a different form than what it is today, but it will happen.”SEARCHSERVERVIRTUALIZATION.COM READER, on “Emerging Trends: Vendors Pushing the Software-Defined Data Center” MI special edition, February 2013

86% People surveyed who believe that software-defined data centers are the future of virtualization.

SearchServerVirtualization reader survey

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/What-will-the-next-big-data-center-transformation-look-like

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/2240171034/Emerging-trends-Vendors-pushing-the-software-defined-data-center

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/2240171034/Emerging-trends-Vendors-pushing-the-software-defined-data-center

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How do you plan to consolidate your data center?

What factors have delayed your adoption of cloud IT services/applications?

Using virtual server farms

Adopting integrated

infrastructure

Moving to hosted servers

Implementing cloud

infrastructure

Outsourcing

0 10 20 30 40

N=314 IT PROFESSIONALS; SOURCE: TECHTARGET INC.’S PRELIMINARY FINDINGS FROM THE “2013 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY”; RESPONDENTS COULD CHOOSE MORE THAN ONE OPTION.

N=569; SOURCE: TECHTARGET CLOUD PULSE SURVEY 2012; RESPONDENTS COULD CHOOSE MORE THAN ONE OPTION.

67%

31% 31%27%

22%

Too much capital already invested in internal IT

Not enough security in the environment

Not enough control over the environment

Not virtualized enough to implement cloud computing

Does not offer adequate benefits for our organization

A virtualized environment is enough; we do not need cloud

38%

36%

33%

32%

24%

18%

Most respondents are opting for server virtualization to make more efficient

use of their computing resources.30+40+30+p30% 30%

40%

What principal cloud IT services do you use?

N=649; SOURCE: TECHTARGET CLOUD PULSE SURVEY 2012

Hybrid Public Private

SUMMING IT UP

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NEWS IN REVIEW

Will VMware Have the Last Word on End- User Management? IT pros tasked with managing a flood of end-user ap-plications and devices are asking themselves an age-old question: Is it better to go with multiple “best of breed” products, or hunker down with an imperfect but inte-grated suite? VMware Inc. hopes its customers will do the latter after pulling back the curtain this spring on its long-in-development Horizon Suite, which combines several of the company’s end-user computer manage-ment tools, like View, Mirage and Application Manager. It also introduces two other products: Horizon Work-space and Horizon Data (formerly Project Octopus).

Currently, the integration between Mirage and View is fairly minimal and the integration between Workspace and View requires updating to View 5.2, the most recent version of VMware’s VDI product. With every subse-quent update to the Horizon Suite, however, integration between those individual products will grow tighter, said Ben Goodman, VMware Horizon’s lead evangelist.

Eventually, the goal for VMware is to provide IT de-partments with a single admin console and server back end to manage physical and virtual desktops, hosted and

on-premises applications, mobile devices and even cloud storage and mobile data sync, which is now a necessity thanks to the popularity of Dropbox, said Goodman.

“What IT will manage in the future is a combination of employee identity and their data with policy and context layered around that,” said Goodman.

All Your Infrastructures Are Belong to UsWhile there’s been a lot of pressure on VMware to deliver the full Horizon Suite, which has trickled out in bits and pieces since late 2008, the company is playing the long game, believing it’s better to deliver an integrated prod-uct that works well, Goodman said.

For now, IT departments will have to wait for a truly integrated Horizon Suite, but there is still plenty to like about the product, said Dan Brinkmann, a vExpert and senior sales engineer for Citrix ShareFile.

Horizon Workspace is one of those things. Workspace aggregators like it—such as RES Software’s workspace virtualization platform or WorkSpace Universal from Centrix Software Ltd.—have yet to receive a ton of trac-tion from IT departments. But, as enterprise computing environments continue to evolve at a breakneck pace, a management tool that provides security, orchestration and the delivery of services will be hugely beneficial, said Gunnar Berger, an analyst at Gartner Inc., a research firm based in Stamford, Conn.

“Workspace aggregators will be important as we re-think what the traditional desktop means in the era of

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working from home and using personal mobile devices,” said Berger.

Columbia Sportswear, an apparel company based in Beaverton, Ore., wants a way to deliver the apps and services to whatever device its 4,000 geographically dis-persed employees want to use. The challenge is doing that in a secure manner without causing the back-end infrastructure to swell, said Suzan Pickett, Columbia’s manager of systems engineering.

The company’s servers are 97% virtualized on VM-ware’s vSphere. Most of its on-premises applications, however, are published through Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenApp. For some applications, XenApp hasn’t been suf-ficient, so they also use VMware’s ThinApp. Columbia is beginning to add VDI with 200 View licenses.

“We’re trying to provide an agnostic device experience for end users, and what we really want is the ability to deliver all these applications and services with the same ease and central management as delivering a virtual desktop,” Pickett said.

In Defense of Forever Alone ToolsColumbia’s IT department is kicking the tires on Horizon Suite and hoping to do a phased deployment. For orga-nizations without that existing VMware investment, it remains to be seen whether VMware can convince them of the integrated suite approach.

“The suites don’t make you very agile,” said Matt Kosht, an IT manager for a Michigan utility company. Kosht prefers to adopt the best tool for the job, whether

it’s virtualizing servers, delivering applications, managing mobile devices or offering single sign-on for Software as a Service-based apps.

Managing those different pieces might be easier from a single console, but each one has unique needs and requirements that only a tool purposefully designed for that task can offer, he added. A unified suite means that IT departments would have to trade the tools that work for their environment for ones that might not. There’s also the problem of being locked into a single vendor with one management tool, Kosht said.

“Three years ago, everyone was using BlackBerrys. That’s not the case presently,” Kosht said. “If I need a bet-ter tool to manage my mobile devices to account for that changing environment, I can do that easier when my mo-bile management tool isn’t intertwined with my desktops and applications.”

If the mobile disruption in organizations has made anything clear, it’s that the computers we use to be pro-ductive at work will constantly evolve in both form and function. For IT departments, it will be paramount to use management and support tools that can adapt to those unforeseen forms of computers that employees might one day want to use, said Benjamin Robbins, principal at Palador Inc., an enterprise mobility consulting firm.

“It’s mobile now, but what we do on mobile isn’t going to stay mobile,” Robbins said. “The challenges will still be the same unless IT departments prepare to support anything from a laptop to Google Glass to an Apple wrist-watch.” —JIM FURBUSH


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FROM THE FRONT LINES STEVE GUNDERSON

How to Select a Colocation Facility

Selecting a colocation provider can be a confusing, frustrating process, and the wrong decision can send your data center down a costly path. Part of safeguard-ing against that fate is establishing solid processes for provider selection. Last month, we discussed the first phase of that process and outlined key factors to consider when choosing a colocation provider. This month, we offer guidance on comparing request for proposal (RFP) responses from providers and tips to avoid the most com-mon pitfalls.

Normalizing ResponsesColocation providers differentiate offerings in confusing ways. The end result is often apples-to-oranges compari-sons for customers, especially concerning the two largest

cost components: rent and power. Standardize provider responses so you can make an accurate comparison.

n Rent. Does the provider charge rent per square foot or per kilowatt? A 200 watt-per-square-foot facility is nearly twice as expensive to build as one that costs 100 W per square foot. We recommend comparing by cost per kilo-watt of IT load, since you are buying compute capacity, not space, and power consumption tracks very closely to compute load.

n Power. Here are five common methods for pricing power:

1. Circuit based: A “use it or lose it” approach, where most customers average 30% unused capacity.

2. Bulk kilowatt: A “use it or lose it” approach with less waste.

3. Metered IT load, plus cooling factor: The simplest and most straightforward approach.

4. Metered IT load, plus additional rent: A compli-cated mix of fixed and variable costs.

5. Metered IT load, plus computer room air condi-

tioning (CRAC) load, plus cooling factor: A compli-cated method with the potential for double payment.

We recommend translating a provider’s pricing

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/ezine/Modern-Infrastructure/The-incredible-shrinking-desktop-Have-Apple-and-consumerization-finally-broken-the-back-of-Wintel/From-the-front-lines-How-to-select-a-colocation-facility

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FROM THE FRONT LINES | STEVE GUNDERSON

structure based on your power configuration and circuit deployment.

Avoiding Pitfalls n Don’t buy the brand. Data center providers acquire competitors with different designs; they adjust designs based on building specifications or market variables and sometimes change design philosophies. These design variations often create divergent capabilities across a pro-vider’s property portfolio. Understand the specific prop-erty, and confirm that it meets your requirements.

n Verify and inspect. RFP questions can be interpreted in many ways. Verify your requirements with visual in-spections. Common problems include false promises of N+1 redundancy that can’t be satisfied with a single gen-erator, hot and cold aisles installed at 90 degrees (which exhausts hot air into a neighbor’s server inlets) and water pipes installed directly above cabinets.

n Maximize your options. Don’t disqualify the best facil-ities by requiring power densities that exceed the densi-ties of the providers in the market. Design options can mitigate density limitations.

n Weight requirements according to importance.

Loss of power for even one second can bring your

environment down. Servers can operate even when tem-perature thresholds are exceeded. Both factors are criti-cal, but power trumps cooling.

n Examine the right of first refusal. We’ve seen expan-sion options presented to tenants before they’ve even moved into a data center. Include two or three expansion options in your lease.

n Read the lease during RFP review. Review the lease early in the process to avoid insurmountable problems later.

n Understand the cost of your requests. Requiring early termination rights without cause is a costly request and often ends negotiations with a provider. n

STEVE GUNDERSON is a principal at Transitional Data Services.

DON’T DISQUALIFY THE BEST FACIL ITIES BY REQUIR-ING POWER DENSITIES THAT EXCEED THE DENSI TIES OF THE PROVIDERS IN THE MARKET.

http://www.transitionaldata.com/


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The Admin-Rights- for-iPad Swap

END-USER ADVOCATE BRIAN MADDEN

One of the longtime goals of desktop admins has been to get control of users’ Windows desktops.

But getting control of a Windows desktop means that users have to relinquish admin rights. If users have ad-min rights they can simply undo any of the restrictions a company puts in place, which pretty much defeats the whole point of gaining control in the first place.

In the old days (like, 10 years ago) this wasn’t a prob-lem. Companies provided all of the IT capabilities that users needed. But now that we have this whole consum-erization thing, users need access to software and ser-vices that the IT departments don’t know about.

While many CIOs are on board with that concept in principle, in practical terms it’s not so simple. If compa-nies let users do whatever they want, they can remove

compliance software, get around security restrictions and install crapware applications that steal sensitive data. On the other hand, if companies completely restrict and lock down users’ desktops, then we’re back where we started where users can’t get their jobs done.

The $500 SolutionBut there’s an easy solution: Give the user a centrally managed, locked-down Windows desktop, and a tablet or iPad to do the personal/non-IT-supported things.

This approach is truly a win-win. IT is happy because it can provide a simple, nonpersistent, Windows desktop environment. Since users aren’t admins they can’t screw up their devices or data, and since users can’t install their own apps, IT can simply refresh if users do screw up. It’s a desktop admin’s dream.

And it’s a user’s dream too. They can’t install new ap-plications into their Windows desktop environment, but they now work at a cool company that gave them an iPad, and they can install whatever apps they want on it.

If you can “buy” your users admin rights for $500, that’s a pretty good deal for everyone. n

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


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SERVER VENDORS | ALEX BARRETT

CAN HP, IBM AND DELL SURVIVE THE CLOUD?In the era of virtualization and cloud computing, can the major server vendors survive extinction?

Ten years from now, will we look back on the traditional server vendors like IBM, HP and Dell as dinosaurs that could not withstand the giant asteroid that is public cloud? Or will we marvel at their resourceful ability to adapt—and survive—in the face of rapidly changing conditions?

That’s the $54.9 billion question—which is the amount that organizations spent on servers in 2012, ac-cording to IDC, with IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. garnering a combined 74.3% of that market.

Public clouds come on the heels of server virtual-ization, which has already been a doozy for server unit shipments and revenues. In 2002 the ratio of physical to logical servers was almost 1:1, at 4.4 million and 4.5 mil-lion units shipped worldwide, according to IDC, and rev-enue was just shy of $50 billion. That heyday would soon be over: A decade later, revenue had increased a modest 11.5% to $54.9 billion, while the number of physical serv-ers shipped had increased by 84% to 8.1 million units,

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and logical servers had increased a whopping 497%, to 22.4 million.

Shifting workloads from on-premises, virtualized serv-ers to the public cloud stands to be even worse for server vendors, since a workload running in the public cloud requires no infrastructure purchase. As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said, speaking at the company’s Partner Ex-change in February: “If a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.”

But traditional server vendors certainly haven’t given up on selling infrastructure to the enterprise. “They’re going to fight,” said Kuba Stolarksi, research manager for enterprise servers at IDC. “But a lot can happen in five years,” he added, and come 2017, server offerings from the traditional vendors might look very different than they do today.

The Cloud-First ImperativeOne small business has shifted the brunt of its processing from on-premises to the public cloud.

Mosaik Solutions in Memphis, Tenn., collects mobile network coverage information that it delivers as geo-spatial, analytical, creative and Web data. The company relied on a combination of on-premises and colocation systems from its founding in 1989 until 2008, when it began experimenting with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In 2009 it increased its AWS spend by 1,000%. In 2010 it discontinued its use of colocation and increased its AWS spend another 500%, and another 250% the year after.

Today, the firm runs the lion’s share of its processing

on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)—an average of 335 EC2 compute units and 668 GB of memory on AWS, compared with just 64 cores and 384 GB memory in-house, mainly for its “customer facing” applications, said Daniel Bozeman, solutions architect for the firm. It has not purchased a new server since 2011.

That’s great for Amazon, but it’s decidedly bad news for Cisco Systems and Dell, from which Mosaik last pur-chased servers. Nor is the firm particularly loyal to any one server shop.

“We go wherever the price is right,” Bozeman said.The firm is, however, looking to reduce its EC2 spend,

Bozeman said, which it will do by modernizing and con-solidating the services running on EC2, increasing its use of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, and by offloading a subset of its operations (test, development and staging) back in-house to a Dell server running Eucalyptus, an AWS-compatible private cloud stack.

“At least, that’s the idea,” Bozeman added. “We’ll see how it goes.”

SHIFTING WORKLOADS FROM ON-PREMISES VIRT- UALIZED SERV ERS TO THE PUBLIC CLOUD STANDS TO BE EVEN WORSE FOR SERVER VENDORS.

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Custom-Made Is in DemandMeanwhile, service providers, with their razor-thin mar-gins and copious in-house technical talent, are increas-ingly backing off their relationships with tier-one server vendors—if they ever had a relationship at all. Google, for instance, builds its own servers, and is reportedly the fifth-biggest customer of Intel server chips, according to the September 2012 issue of Wired.

The value of the support that tier-one server vendors bring to enterprises doesn’t always carry over to service providers, said John Considine, CTO at Verizon Terre-mark, the cloud and managed services provider that has a mix of tier-one, commodity and custom gear.

“For enterprises, the real value is in service and sup-port over the lifetime of a server,” Considine said. “We see a lot less value in that support model.”

Service providers also cite the customization that comes from building their own servers as the main rea-son for the decrease in traditional server purchases. For example, SoftLayer Technologies, the hosting-cum-cloud provider, has a long-standing relationship with con-tract manufacturer Supermicro, which has supplied the

A Rising Tide Lifts All BoatsWHILE PUBLIC CLOUD is cannibalizing some work-

loads, you could also make the case that it is sim-

ply meeting demand that didn’t exist previously.

“It’s like the [former IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson]

quote: ‘I think there is a world market for maybe

five computers,’” said Jonathan Eunice, principal IT

adviser at Illuminata Inc.

In 1943, when Watson reportedly uttered those

words, our collective imagination could not con-

ceive of the need for more compute power. It’s

only in retrospect that we understand how silly

that statement is.

The same dynamic is in play today. “Our com-

pute needs and desires are always growing faster

than Moore’s Law. We always want more,” Eunice

said.

In recent years, new compute resources have

gone in large part to tackling our new interest in

data analysis, Eunice said.

“We’ve been on a multi-decade march from

transactions being the most important to analytics

being the most important,” he said.

These days, “analyzing and figuring things out

has become more important than just keeping

your books. There just aren’t that many books.”

—ALEX BARRETT

SERVICE PROVIDERS ARE INCREAS INGLY BACKING OFF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH TIER-ONE SERVER VENDORS.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/29853/



100,000 servers SoftLayer has under management. Designing servers with Supermicro “allows us to fine-

tune that server to meet the application stack,” by ma-nipulating elements such as CPU, network, hard drives and memory, said Marc Jones, SoftLayer vice president of product innovation.

Dreams of Converged InfrastructureBut traditional server vendors aren’t taking these changes lying down. Over the past several years, tier-one ven-dors have responded to increasing commoditization and outsourcing of server workloads with increasingly proprietary, integrated systems—so-called converged infrastructure—which are designed to make it easy for customers to keep buying from these vendors after the initial purchase.

All major server vendors have converged infra-structure offerings: IBM has PureSystems and HP has CloudSystem. Dell offers vStart and Cisco’s Unified Computing System is the basis for VCE Vblock and Net-App FlexPod. [For a comprehensive look at the major converged infrastructure platforms, see “Who’s Who in Converged Infrastructure,” MI, March 2013.]

But the jury is still out on converged infrastructure. IT organizations are attracted to the ease of procurement and integration but balk at vendor-imposed limitations on how they can use the equipment.

“[Converged infrastructure, such as a] Vblock is great because it’s very deterministic—on this floor tile, I have this amount of infrastructure that will support this

amount of workload,” said Chris Black, vice president of technology and innovation at World Wide Technology, a systems integrator that resells VCE Vblocks and NetApp FlexPods as well as standalone servers.

Black has seen issues in heterogeneous shops that would like to take advantage of, say, storage inside the Vblock but are prohibited from doing so according to the VCE support contract. As a result, customers gravitate toward using converged infrastructure as reference archi-tectures rather than full bundles, he said.

“We sell VCE, but we sell more V-plus-C-plus-E,” Black said, referring to a de facto Vblock without any restric-tions on how customers can use their investments down the road. In fact, EMC recently formalized this type of reference architecture with its VSPEX program.

Still, while sales of converged infrastructure may not be setting the world on fire, industry observers are cau-tiously optimistic about its prospects.

Overall, IT shops are buying in a more integrated fash-ion, said Jonathan Eunice, principal IT adviser at Illumi-nata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., and sluggish sales of specific converged infrastructure platforms don’t concern him. “These are the new mainframes; you just don’t sell a lot of these right off the bat,” Eunice said.

Follow the MoneyAnother tack for server vendors is to sell their wares to public cloud providers instead of enterprises. According to IDC, public cloud consumed 734,000 server units in 2012, with revenue of $2.9 billion—about 9% of total

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http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Comparing-popular-converged-infrastructure-products

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Comparing-popular-converged-infrastructure-products



units and 5% of total revenue—and those numbers are projected to increase to 1.06 million units and $4.1 bil-lion by 2014.

Some tier-one vendors are already well on their way. Dell, for example, formed its Data Center Solutions (DCS) division six years ago to cater to scale-out Web companies and service providers that needed radically

different server designs than it could get from off-the-shelf models. Working closely with this class of customer has been a big success for the organization, said Drew Schulke, Dell DCS marketing director. If DCS were a standalone company, it would be the fourth-largest x86 server vendor, behind Dell, HP and IBM, he claimed.

Then there’s HP, which is also working with service provider and hyperscale customers as part of Project Moonshot, which uses low-energy server technology to create super-dense server platforms.

Server vendors’ work with service providers trickles down to mainstream enterprise shops, Schulke said. For instance, one design developed by Dell DCS for some

early users of the I/O-intensive MapReduce application is now being used as the basis of the commercial Pow-erEdge R720xd, a two-socket server with 24 memory DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) and up to a mas-sive 50 TB of internal storage capacity and enhanced I/O capabilities.

“It looks almost exactly like the solutions we were doing five years ago for a couple of customers,” Schulke said.

Schulke also expects Dell to release DCS designs for hyper-efficient blades that require no mechanical cooling.

But while service providers are an attractive market for traditional server vendors, it’s by no means a done deal, said John Abbott, distinguished analyst with 451 Research. While some server vendors will try and cap-ture the service provider market with custom systems, “the trouble is that service providers want pretty good margins—they strike really hard deals with the systems vendors,” Abbott said.

That’s if they strike deals with them at all. The past couple of years have seen the rise of service providers and hyperscale customers working with original equip-ment manufacturers (OEMs) and contract manufac-turers for their server needs, cutting out the proverbial middleman, said IDC’s Stolarski.

Given a certain scale, “you can save a significant frac-tion of the total cost over dealing with a traditional OEM by going direct,” he said. Going forward, the availability of open source hardware designs from Facebook’s Open

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“ THE TROUBLE IS THAT SERVICE PROVIDERS WANT PRETTY GOOD MARGINS.” —John Abbott, distinguished analyst, 451 Research

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Compute Project could lower the barrier to entry to working directly with OEM partners.

Hyve Solutions, a division of Synnex Corp., develops, tests and integrates custom servers by the thousands. It got its start working with enormous customers such as Facebook, but more recently, has created modified Open Compute designs for service providers such as Rackspace and the gaming startup Riot Games. It can be cost-effec-tive for a customer to work with Hyve for quantities as low as 500 to 1,000 units, depending how much it plans to scale, according to Steve Ichinaga, Hyve senior vice president and general manager.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em …If server vendors can’t convince customers to buy into converged infrastructure and fail to capture the service provider market, they can always capitalize on organiza-tions’ increased interest in the public cloud by creating public clouds of their own.

In fact, some are already doing just that. While not as well-known as other public cloud offerings, IBM SmartCloud, HP Cloud Services and Dell Cloud Com-puting Solutions have various levels of maturity, feature functionality and adoption, and are earnest efforts at laying the foundation for the next wave of enterprise computing.

Offering specialized hardware via the public cloud model could also be an option for server vendors with

specialized, high-performance infrastructure. IBM, for example, is developing ways to offer Watson (the supercomputer that in 2011 beat Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) as a service. Likewise, high-performance computing vendor SGI offers Infra-structure as a Service and Software as a Service cloud services running on its specialized servers as part of SGI’s HPC Cloud Cyclone.

Whatever form enterprise computing takes in the coming years, most longtime server industry observers expect the tier-one server vendors to find their way.

“It comes down to simple economics. What’s the al-ternative? There’s no vast sea of 80 to 100 infrastructure providers like there used to be that you can mix and match with,” said Illuminata’s Eunice. And while some shops may be lured in by the romance of building their own systems, he said, “over time, they won’t see the eco-nomic value of being integrators themselves.” n

ALEX BARRETT is the editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure.

MOST LONGTIME SERVER INDUSTRY OBSERVERS EXPECT THE TIER-ONE SERVER VENDORS TO FIND THEIR WAY.


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CLOUD APPLICATIONS FEEL GROWING PAINSThere are still some things you can’t do in the cloud.

CLOUD COMPUTING | BETH PARISEAU

Cloud computing is the talk of theindustry, but not all applications are a good fit for the new paradigm just yet.

Experts see this picture changing, and most predict that within about five years, apps that are currently diffi-cult to deploy will be better suited to a cloudy home.

Right now, applications can be generally divided into two groups: those that are vertically scaled and tend not to play well with others in today’s cloud, and those that are horizontally scaled and well-suited to generic cloud computing.

Well-suited apps “are really collections of lightweight services that talk to each other over common protocols and data formats,” said Kent Langley, vice president at San Francisco-based digital consultancy SolutionSet LLC. Most Web applications, such as those written for webmail or online retail sites, fall under this description.

Meanwhile, legacy applications like SAP, Oracle’s PeopleSoft and accounting applications, and Microsoft’s SharePoint and SQL Server can still pose deployment challenges in a public cloud, depending on their under-lying architecture.

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Teaching an Old Dog New TricksIndeed, sometimes it seems that vertically scaled ap-plications are at cross-purposes with the public cloud. Applications like these, when designed and deployed in traditional fashion, tend to rely heavily on a monolithic database layer. This layer is expected to be high-perform-ing and highly available; it may be difficult or impossible to deploy onto more than one server; and it requires fast, reliable connections between application layers, which may be difficult over wide area network (WAN) links.

“Where we have the biggest challenges and have spent the most time is in moving the legacy stuff,” said Sean Perry, CIO for Robert Half International Inc., based in San Ramon, Calif. “When we spun up PeopleSoft in-stances in [Amazon’s Ireland data center] a couple of years ago, that was really painful, because the perfor-mance tools we would normally use weren’t really there, and we didn’t have good visibility into the infrastructure that we were deploying on top of.”

Vertically scaled applications can go against the grain of cloud service provider infrastructures like Amazon’s AWS, which offers servers in standardized sizes like small, medium, large and extra large, said Kyle Hilgen-dorf, principal research analyst for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.

“With a traditional VMware environment, you have slider bars, so you can shut down the VM [virtual ma-chine], add more virtual memory to it and turn it back on, and off you go,” Hilgendorf said. “Amazon doesn’t have that.”

Traditional commercial applications aren’t the only ones that fall into this category. Many homegrown cus-tom apps are also designed like this, said Jared Reimer, founder, president and principal engineer at Cascadeo Corp., a Seattle-based cloud computing consultancy.

These apps can be difficult to retrofit for the cloud af-ter they’ve been deployed for a while, Reimer said.

The way that applications are deployed and managed can affect their suitability for cloud computing. Most on-premises applications are now deployed against a “golden image” virtual machine, and updated incremen-tally as patches and other updates arrive. IT pros may also just deploy new virtual machines when the load increases.

In the cloud, automation tools like Opscode’s Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet can be used to completely redeploy applications when there are updates or disruptions in service; to keep public cloud deployments efficient and cost-effective, IT admins should also consider grouping fewer application servers behind a load-balancer in a cloud environment rather than simply adding more ma-chines, Reimer said.

Not every deployment, however, will necessarily have success with the software-based load-balancers offered by cloud service providers.

Ray Williamson, CTO of Bestfit Mobile, a mobile app development company based in Austin, Texas, recalled a situation with a mobile application his firm deployed for the Michaels chain of arts and crafts stores. As traf-fic spiked on Black Friday, Amazon’s load-balancers

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provisioned new IP address after new IP address, until there were 22 different addresses on load balancers con-nected to Bestfit’s servers—and hardly any traffic actually reaching the back-end machines.

“I think what was happening on Black Friday with their software load balancers, a lot of DNS switching is going on, and so we were just getting lost,” Williamson said. “The requests weren’t hitting our servers.”

Eventually, the firm switched over to a hardware-based load balancer and some physical clusters hosted by Rack-space rather than pure cloud for the application.

The Road AheadOver the next decade, the path to public cloud comput-ing will contain obstacles. Compliance, governance and liability for data breaches are well-publicized concerns. In some cases, those concerns will require landmark liti-gation and legal precedents before they are settled.

But from a technical standpoint, industry watchers say the solutions to today’s cloud application challenges are well within reach.

First, some applications are being redesigned or rede-ployed to fit the underlying cloud infrastructure. In some cases, the initial deployment approach may be a case of a simple misunderstanding about the differences between cloud computing and the virtual data center.

“I see a lot of folks do things like simply take Ex-change, move it to the cloud and call it done,” Reimer said. “That’s a really bad idea for a lot of reasons.”

But there are also specialized services for running

legacy apps in the public cloud, Reimer said. Amazon and Microsoft have published a design for a highly avail-able, scalable SharePoint environment running on AWS.

IT professionals may also follow their data center instincts in deploying things like SQL Server into a Windows instance on AWS rather than using Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS), which tends to work better, Reimer said.

If Amazon isn’t an organization’s cup of tea, there are specialized cloud providers, which in many cases are focused on supporting tricky legacy apps in the cloud. Virtustream, for example, hosts one of the biggest SAP deployments in the cloud using a unique system of re-source allocation according to individual CPU, RAM and disk building blocks.

“In some cases, the app doesn’t need to change,” said Edward Haletky, CEO of The Virtualization Practice LLC. “The cloud surrounding it has to be purpose-designed to support the application you’re trying to run.”

In some industries, community clouds can ease the difficulty of doing centralized processing in the cloud and be purpose-built to suit an industry’s unique needs. The New York Stock Exchange’s community cloud is one early example of this.

Finally, Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings may change the underlying scalability of legacy apps, allowing them to ride the cloud wave, Haletky said. n

BETH PARISEAU is the senior news writer for SearchCloudComputing.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com. Write to her at [email protected] or follow @PariseauTT on Twitter.

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When MIT launched edX, an onlineeducation resource, professors never dreamed that interested students would jump at the opportunity. Anant Agarwal, president of edX, had expected 5,000 participants, but 120,000 people signed up instead. That stunning success put an enor-mous and unexpected burden on computing capacity.

The experience of Agarwal and MIT is hardly unique. Business depends on IT to support the computing needs of employees, partners and users, and those needs often escalate—sometimes seemingly overnight. Administra-tors and business leaders need to know what options are available for on-demand data center capacity expan-sions, identify the best options and lay the groundwork for future capacity increases well before they’re actually needed. There are a handful of choices for scaling up data center capacity.

THE JUST- IN-TIME DATA CENTERData center outsourcing options are plentiful, but planning and preparation are essential when matching the right option to your needs.

DATA CENTER CAPACITY | STEPHEN J. BIGELOW

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Plug in a Containerized Data CenterA containerized data center uses prefabricated con-tainers to provide computing space along with suit-able power and cooling infrastructure. Containers are dropped off (often on-premises) and interconnected to an existing facility. Additional containers can be de-ployed as computing needs grow. Containers are often a good fit for long-term projects such as disaster recovery preparedness or during data center renovations.

Containerized data center products are available in an astonishing array of shapes, sizes and options, so IT and business decision makers need to take a close look at what they’re actually getting. One early iteration was a conventional trailer truck fitted with racks and simple power and cooling support.

Today, most organizations opt for custom- designed containers that are highly optimized for power and cooling efficiency such as Cisco’s FlexPod or Hew- lett-Packard’s Per-formance Opti-mized Data Center (POD). These arrive with a full comple-ment of computing equipment and in-frastructure ready to run.

Container costs

can vary wildly, and delivery times can typically range anywhere from 30 to 90 days, depending on the con-figuration. Also, consider the acquisition model: Con-tainers can be purchased outright and depreciated, leased over the long term or even rented over short-term deployments.

Containers need to be situated on a foundation of as-phalt or a concrete slab and need power to run the com-puting equipment. They require additional power or a chilled-water source to cool the equipment inside. These are serious considerations—a fully loaded, operational container may need several hundred kilowatts and a large water chiller.

As an example, the HP POD 40c requires up to 450 kW and 240 gallons per minute

(GPM) of water cooling. The existing data center in-

frastructure may simply not have those additional resources available for the

container.“The chiller plant may

be almost as big as the container, especially of you want redundancy,” said Robert McFarlane, an analyst at Shen Mil-som Wilke LLC.

Security is an-other serious issue for


HP’S POD IS A CONTAINERIZED DATA CENTER

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containerized data centers. Containers are generally pad-locked, but there is always a concern about the potential for theft of the entire container—along with any sensi-tive data inside.

Containers can solve important problems, said Chris Steffen, principal technical architect at Kroll Factual Data, but it may not be appropriate to store confidential or regulated data in them. Organizations can instead migrate secondary or nonsensitive workloads to the container, leaving mission-critical workloads and data within the original, more secure data center.

More forward-thinking organizations may construct an enclosure to protect multiple containers. In effect, a new data center may evolve organically as a set of se-cured, protected containers.

In addition, network connectivity requirements may also justify optical fiber interconnections rather than conventional copper cabling, and fiber installation in-volves the local telecommunications provider.

“Assess the connectivity requirements, and get it in place before deploying the container,” said Aaron Peter-son, senior vice president of product management at IO.

Rent a Data Center with ColocationAnother alternative for data center capacity expansions is the use of a wholesale colocation (colo) provider. Colo-cation allows an organization to rent dedicated space and equipment in a third-party provider’s data center. That capacity can be operated and managed by the customer’s own IT staff, though the provider can render consulting

and assistance. “A colo is a partnership,” Steffen said. “You work with them to host your infrastructure, and they can help as much or as little as you want.”

The colocation provider is responsible for maintaining infrastructure, including power, cooling and all of the equipment. Customers enter a contract with the pro-vider, establish connectivity with the provider and then

migrate workloads to the provider’s facilities. Since the customer typically manages the colocation effort, there is usually full management insight into power use, system performance and so on.

Costs and contract terms vary widely based on many needs, including computing resources such as the num-ber of racks or the amount of storage. Other factors include power and cooling, support, and the level of availability and redundancy, as well as the frequency and degree of changes expected and the types of reporting. These factors will affect setup times, and a customer with substantial bandwidth requirements must install suitable fiber connectivity with the telco provider. As with con-tainers, telco upgrades or installations can often delay a deployment by up to 90 days.

IN EFFECT, A NEW DATA CENTER MAY EVOLVE ORGAN-ICALLY AS A SET OF SE CURED, PROTECTED CONTAINERS.

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A customer with relatively small, static computing needs and a capable IT staff can engage a colo in a matter of weeks, but a large customer with massive computing, resiliency, security and technical support needs may spend more than four months negotiating a contract, and months more upgrading its connectivity and waiting for the provider to upgrade its own facilities (such as HVAC, transformers, and installing cages or hard walls).

Customer changes can increase costs substantially, so colocation is most cost-effective when computing needs remain fairly constant. “The colo needs to plan their space and power,” McFarlane said. “If you change things

around, it upsets their business plan.”However, colocation providers are under increasing

pressure from alternatives such as cloud providers, so contract terms are usually more flexible than years past. Still, McFarlane says that it pays to have a professional colo negotiator to help work out the contract and ser-vice-level agreement (SLA). “Know what you’re getting and what happens if you don’t get it,” he said.

To save expenses, buy only the colo services that you need. Also, do your due diligence in evaluating the true reliability and responsiveness of a provider so that you’re confident that it can meet its claims.

Outsource with Managed ServicesSome organizations demand more comput-ing capacity but lack the in-house IT staff to manage the work needed for containers or colocation services. For them, managed service providers (MSPs) may be just the answer.

Like colocation providers, MSPs handle their own infrastructure and facilities, but the entire effort—a complete platform with access to equipment, services and perhaps even canned applications—is managed by MSP staff. Most MSPs provide little (if any) insight into their actual operations. “It’s ‘fire and forget’ IT,” Stef-fen said. “Customers say, ‘You handle it and just let us know if we have problems.’”

But there are other substantial differences. Costs can run higher than colos because

THE MARKLEY GROUP’S DATA CENTER IS A COLOCATION

FACILITY AND CLOUD PROVIDER.

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customers are paying for the MSP’s management and service personnel in addition to the infrastructure. Unex-pected or frequent service changes, such as adding capac-ity, can also increase costs.

MSPs are also typically less open to negotiation be-cause MSPs emphasize cost competitiveness through economies of scale. In effect, customers use what the MSP has available and accept the provider’s SLA with little change.

Measuring and verifying the level of service is often a point of contention. Don’t underestimate the importance of an SLA when dealing with an MSP, said McFarlane. It should define escalation paths for service and support, as well as remediation expected when problems or disrup-tions occur.

Still, lower flexibility can speed deployment, and a typ-ical MSP can be engaged in a matter of weeks. The actual provisioning and spin up of services can be much faster because there are few (if any) custom tasks that the MSP must perform in advance. The biggest obstacle is usually deploying the appropriate connectivity on the customer’s

side. More sophisticated workloads and user bases may require fiber links through the local telco provider.

Prospective customers must pay close attention to the regulatory ramifications of putting sensitive information into third-party hands. “Check with your compliance or legal teams and determine what regulatory concerns ap-ply to the capacity planning solution you choose,” Steffen said. “Finding a solution that doesn’t comply will be a disaster.”

Plug Into Public Cloud The final option available for data center growth is the public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Pub-lic cloud can best be explained as colocation with the added flexibility of self-service provisioning and a high level of on-demand scalability on top of a shared virtual infrastructure.

A customer can connect to a public cloud provider, provision a server, migrate a workload and start running it in the cloud in less than 15 minutes. Public cloud cus-tomers can add or subtract computing resources on the fly in response to computing demands and then pay for only the resources (such as processing cycles) that are actually used.

It’s the ultimate expression of “pay to play” or “utility computing.” Such control makes public cloud computing the most flexible and granular of all data center capacity options—ideal for organizations with large temporary spikes in computing demand.

Public cloud deployments are generally accessed

LOWER FLEXIBILITY CAN SPEED DEPLOYMENT, AND A TYP ICAL MSP CAN BE ENGAGED IN A MATTER OF WEEKS.

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through typical Internet connectivity, which rarely needs upgrades unless the workloads demand substantial net-work traffic. The two bigger issues for public cloud users are application and data suitability.

A growing number of data center applications can operate remotely from the cloud, but applications not designed explicitly for the cloud may not perform at op-timal efficiency, and older legacy applications may not operate at all. Customers should test applications and measure performance over time before committing an app to the cloud.

“Refactoring the application for the cloud can offer worthwhile gains,” Steffen said. “And a cloud provider can help optimize the code.”

Rackspace is just one example of a cloud provider of-fering assessment services and access to help customers review current applications and establish deployment plans. AWS offers the SDKs, toolkits and documen-tation needed by programmers for cloud application development.

However, regulatory and security concerns can pose thorny issues. The challenge is particularly acute for cloud computing, where the physical location of servers and storage is purposefully abstracted—users shouldn’t know or care where the computing resources are as long as they’re available. But this is at odds with government and industry regulations that typically require direct con-trol over regulated data locations.

Steffen suggested that regulators simply have not yet caught up to technology, but McFarlane isn’t so enthu-siastic about cloud security matters. “If people can hack the Joint Chiefs, why believe that cloud providers have security worked out?” McFarlane asked. “I don’t think we know enough yet.” Customers must approach security with pragmatism; some workloads simply should not be in the cloud—yet.

Mix and Match for Capacity PlanningThe best news is that these capacity options are not mutually exclusive; an organization can combine solu-tions and adjust that mix over time to meet short- and long-term business plans. For example, containers or colocation might be the perfect choice for that second or remote data center, while unexpected spikes in tomor-row’s computing demands can be met with a cloud pro-vider. Or multiple containers could be joined to create a full-featured facility while routine backups are sent to an MSP.

But regardless of your capacity predictions, business leaders should plan for growth now. That involves look-ing past simple value propositions and recognizing work-load management and compliance requirements, which can become convoluted once workloads leave the main data center. n

STEVE BIGELOW is senior technology editor in the Data Center and Virtualization group. Contact him at [email protected].

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ARE WE THERE YET? JONATHAN EUNICE

Cross-Cut for Fun and Profit

Now that we have invested in modern infrastructure—virtualization, the cloud, DevOps or whatever other idealized future state—where can IT find the next set of systematic improvements?

For my money, the answer is cross-cutting, a long-standing concept in computer science that refers to the parts of a system that are interwoven with, and distrib-uted among, other parts of the system.

Cross-cutting is often seen as a negative, a label for things that work against a clean separation of concerns such as security, data integrity, transaction management and logging. Cross-cuts are, at best, necessary evils.

But there’s another way to see cross-cuts: They can im-prove multiple areas in one fell swoop. Done right, cross-cuts are unifying multipurpose tools that reduce the

number of different skills, products and efforts we need. As I look at modern data centers, I see cross-cutting op-portunities and wins all the time.

Cross-cuts go beyond standardization. Look at how data centers now use system virtualization, point-in-time storage snapshots and software version control systems. In the last ten years, they’ve massively overflowed their original banks and come to underpin broad swaths of how apps and services are developed, delivered, deployed and managed. And that’s been a very good thing.

One of my recent projects used the Mercurial distrib-uted version control system. In addition to its primary labeled use (saving revisions to application code), Mer-curial helped deploy new production servers, clone de-velopment and testing servers and replicate the primary database. It aided in in-house and off-site backup and in restore of production data, as well as change manage-ment, performance scaling, availability failover, system and app configuration management, and security audit-ing. While some of these overlap, it’s still a remarkable range of tasks—especially for a developer tool. (And its off-label uses weren’t low-quality shoehorns.)

On the Cross-Cutting HuntIn today’s interconnected IT world, there are many opportunities to have a technology from one domain

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(storage deduplication, say) be a credible solution to a problem in another domain (virtual machine prolifera-tion, for example). Also, new models have broken down IT silos. IT’s different tribes now have the motivation and ability to genuinely cooperate.

Instead of looking for problems that you could solve with a specialist tool, take a broader view and look for situations with similar issues that could be solved with a common tool. Then focus on the common tool, which you can invest in for multiple beneficial outcomes.

Why have a different console for every separate thing being managed? Why have a different hardware frame for compute, storage, networking and other functions? Does it add value, or just variation and complexity?

The cloud gang clearly has this down pat. They eagerly devise new core services—Google’s BigTable being just one example—that cross-cut many application uses. Web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django have the same bent. It’s time to do similar reimagining and re-factoring for many other IT infrastructure and operational issues.

Finding interconnected requirements from diverse activities isn’t entirely trivial, but they aren’t hard to find either. Shops virtualizing servers, for example, mostly wanted to save money; they discovered a dozen or so sub-sidiary uses and advantages after the fact. If you want to wait for their natural emergence, just be open and ready to take advantage. But if you want to see benefits sooner, go looking for those cross-cuts. Happy hunting! n

JONATHAN EUNICE is principal IT adviser at analyst firm Illuminata Inc.

Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com publication.

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