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Cloud

No Pain, No Gain?

May 2nd, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
11 comments

I always reserve my right to change my mind and I am almost at the stage that I have changed my mind on blocks/stacks or whatever you want to call them? And for non-technical and non-TCO related reasons.

I think in general componentised and commodity-based stacks make huge sense; whether you are building out private or a public infrastructure; a building block approach is the only really scalable and sustainable approach. And I wrote internal design documents detailing this approach eight or nine years ago; I know I’m not the only one and we didn’t call it cloud…we called it governance and sensible.

But where I have changed my opinions is on the pre-integrated vendor stacks; I think that they are an expensive way of achieving a standardised approach to deploying infrastructure and I have not changed from this opinion.

However I think that this cost may well be the important catalyst for change; if you can convince a CFO/CEO/CIO/CTO etc that this cost is actually an investment but to see a return on the investment that you need to re-organise and change the culture of IT, it might well worth be paying.

If you can convince them that without the cultural change, they will fail….you might have done us all a favour. If it doesn’t hurt, it probably won’t work. If it is too easy to write things off when it’s tough…it’ll be too easy to fall back into the rut.

So EMC, VCE, Cisco, IBM, NetApp, HP etc….make it eye-wateringly expensive but very compelling please. Of course, once we’ve made the hard yards, we reserve the right to go and do the infrastructure right and cheap as well.

Fashionably Late

Apr 11th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Like Royalty, IBM have turned up late to what is arguably their own party with their PureSystems launch today. IBM, the company which invented converged systems in the form of the mainframe, have finally got round to launching their own infrastructure stack product. But have they turned up too late and is everyone already tucking into the buffet and ignoring the late-comer?

For all the bluster and talk about the ability to have Power and x86 in the same frame and dare I whisper mainframe; this is really an answer to the vBlock, FlexPod and Matrix et all. IBM can wrap it and clothe it but this is a stack and if pushed they will admit this.

But when I first had the pitch a few months ago; I must admit, despite the ‘so what’ reaction, I was impressed with what appears to be a lot of thought and detail from an infrastructure engineering point of view. It looks pretty good as slide-ware.

Still the question is…is it any better than the competitors; well even if you treat it as a pure x86 infrastructure ‘stack in a rack’, it certainly appears to be more flexible than some of the competitors. You have choices as to what hypervisor it’ll support for starters. It appears to be more polished and less bodged together from a hardware point of view.

But at the end of the day, it is what it is and what is going to be really important is whether it can really deliver the management efficiencies and improve IT’s effectiveness. And that, as is with all it’s competitors is still a question where there is not yet a solid answer.

As a product, it looks at least as good as the rest…as an answer? The workings are still being worked upon.

Do you need a desktop?

Apr 3rd, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

Work provide me with a laptop which spends most of its time locked to my desk. It’s quite a nice business laptop but really I can’t be bothered to carry it around. On occasion, when I’m working from home and realise that I am going to need access to some of corporate applications which require VPN access, it’ll come home with me but mostly not.

To be quite honest, even my MBA doesn’t travel that much, up and down the stairs is about as far as it goes. It is quite the nicest and most practical laptop that I’ve ever owned but I think we are getting close to the stage where a tablet can do almost everything that I need where-ever I am.

I was thinking as I was working today whether what I was doing required the traditional desktop experience and could I simply use my iPad as the access device instead. The answer is mostly yes, almost all the applications that I use are generic enough that there are good enough replacements on the iPad or they are accessed by a web interface anyway.

There are a few blockers tho’ at present

1) at present I can’t get my iPad onto the corporate wireless, this means that I can’t access a number of key applications due to ‘security’ restrictions but I can access email which appears to be our preferred file delivery/transfer mechanism.

2) I need a real keyboard to type on, there is a limit to how much I am prepared to type on a screen keyboard. I could overcome this relatively easily by bringing a bluetooth keyboard in.

3) Wired Ethernet is a necessity when working in some of our data centres or secure areas.

4) Unfortunately, I struggle without PowerPoint and Visio unfortunately; I can cope without Word, Excel is a little more problematic but it’s manageable. Keynote is nice but it makes a real mess of rendering PowerPoint in my experience.

5) Working on an external display is often a much nicer experience than using the tablet screen, even tho’ the retina display is the wonderful. But I have both the HDMI and VGA dongles which gets round this. But I wish that Apple could find a way to put a mini-DisplayPort on the iPad as using the adapters means that I loose any chance of using a USB device. Not important most of the time but very useful for transferring files from cameras and other devices.

But then I started thinking some more, perhaps I don’t really need a tablet either for work. Perhaps a smartphone which I dock would do? What we could do with is a standard dock for all mobile devices which charges, displays on an external screen and allows input from a standard keyboard/mouse.

Planes, trains, hotels and the like could simply provide a dock and you would end up carrying even less. At that point a device the size of a Samsung Note or Kindle Fire becomes a very interesting proposition.

And yet, I still expect to keep my PC desktop for some time….why? It’s still the best serious gaming platform out there. But for almost everything else I could probably manage with a mobile device.

Price is Right?

Apr 2nd, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

As the unit cost of storage continues to trend to zero and that is even with the current premium being charged due to last year’s floods; how do we truly measure the cost of storage and it’s provision?

Now, many of you are now thinking ‘zero’? Really?

And my answer would be that many of the enterprise class arrays are down to a few dollars per gigabyte over five years; certainly for SATA and NL-SAS. So the cost of storing data on spinning rust is heading towards zero; well certainly the unit cost is trending this way.

Of course, as we store ever more data; the total cost of storage continues to rise as the increase in the amount of data we store outstrips the price decline. Dedupe and the likes are a temporary fix which may mean that you can stop buying for period of time but inevitably you will need to start increasing your storage estate at some point.

So what are you going to do? I don’t think that we have a great solution at the moment and current technologies are sticking plasters with a limited life. Our storage estates are becoming like landfill; we can sift for value but ultimately it just hangs around and smells.

It is a fact of life that data management is a discipline much ignored; lots of people point at the Cloud as a solution but we are simply shifting the problem and at some point that’ll come unstuck as well. Cloud appliances will eventually become seen as a false economy; fixing the wrong problem.

Storage has simply become too cheap!

Which is a kind of odd statement for Storagebod to make….

 

Local Storage, Cloud Access

Mar 27th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Just as we have seen a number of gateways to allow you to access public cloud storage in a more familiar way and making it appear as local to your servers, we are beginning to see services and products which do the opposite.

To say that these turn your storage into cloud storage is probably a bit of a stretch but what they do is to allow your storage to be accessed by a multitude of devices where-ever they happen to be. They bring the convenience of Dropbox but with a more comfortable feeling of security because the data is stored on your storage. Whether this is actually any more secure will be entirely down to your own security and access policies.

I’ve already blogged about Teamdrive and I’ll be blogging about it again and also the Storage Connector from Oxygen Cloud in the near future. I must say that some of the ideas and the support for Enterprise storage by the folks at Oxygen Cloud looks very interesting.

I do wonder when or if we’ll see Dropbox offer something similar themselves, Dropbox with it’s growing software ecosphere would be very attractive with the ability to self-host. It would possibly give some of the larger storage vendors something to consider.

These new products do bring some interesting challenges which will need to be addressed; you can bet that your users will start to install these on their PCs, both at work and at home. The boundaries between corporate data and personal data will become ever blurred; much as I hate it, the issue of rights management is going to become more important. Forget the issue of USB drives being lost, you could well find that entire corporate shares are exposed.

But your data any time, any place is going to become more and more important; convenience is going to trump security again and again. I am becoming more and more reliant on cloudy storage in my life but for me it is a knowing transition; I suspect for many others, they are simply not aware of what they are doing.

This is not a reason to simply stop them but a reason to look at offering the services to them but also to educate. The offerings are coming thick and fast, the options are getting more diverse and interesting. The transition to storage infrastructure as software has really opened things up. Smaller players can start to make an impact, let’s hope that the elephants can dance.

Empower the Cloud

Mar 26th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

As various organisations continue their journey to the Cloud, I wonder how many will be truly successful and how many will simply Cloud-wash their existing IT. As vendors continue to wash their products and make them all fluffy and cloud-like, so I suspect will many end-user organisations. And in that, they will miss many of the benefits.

But what will guarantee a successful Cloud deployment? Well, if you start with infrastructure, you will probably seriously reduce your chances of a successful deployment. You have to start with the organisational culture, this is something that many pundits agree with but there is not a lot of real discussion about what culture needs to be in place.

I think fundamentally, Cloud is about empowerment; an empowered work-force will get the most out of Cloud and without an empowered organisation, Cloud will fail and dissipate on the old hierarchies.

Cloud empowers users to make decisions and more importantly make mistakes; fail early, fail often but fail cheaply. A huge investment does not need to be made in putting together an infrastructure to support an initiative; it can be quickly brought-up and then ripped-back down again without blame and significant cost. You can run innovative projects ‘lean’.

Cloud empowers IT to put in place standards which are not seen as restrictive as they become almost invisible to the users. A change in hardware should not necessitate a huge round of regression testing; hopefully we will get to the stage where a change in platform full-stop will not mean a massive amount of rework and regression.

Cloud should empower your IT teams to work cross-discipline and cross boundaries but if your teams are already siloed and not able to talk to each other, then ask yourself why? Are you so focussed on internal hierarchies and control that you are preventing this? You need to empower your teams to have peer-level conversations and decision-making ability.

Often when people talk about the tools required for Empowerment, they talk about ensuring that people have the right information to make good decisions; in many organisations, information is still hung onto; knowledge is power and many like to hoard power.

If your organisation already has a culture of knowledge sharing, then moving your knowledge infrastructure to Cloud is a logical step but if you have a culture of controlled ignorance, then the journey is going to be hard.

Personal Cloud Storage

Mar 18th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

As long term readers and followers of this Blog will know, I really like Dropbox but there are issues with it; especially around security and potential access of others to my data and I have stopped storing confidential data in it. What would be ideal would be for me to host my own Dropbox server but unfortunately, they’ve not gone down that route.

However, I have been introduced to a promising contender; Teamdrive are a German software company who have developed something similar to Dropbox but with the added advantage that you can host your own Teamdrive server on your own hardware.

My friend Rose is doing the PR for them and kindly got hold of license for me to play with so that I could set up my own environment (note: there is a free server license which is limited to 10Gb, the unlimited license appears to be €99 per year).

One of the nice things about the Teamdrive server is that they provide a version which will run on a Synology Home NAS; so I downloaded that and I installed it, quickly VI-ed the configuration file and fired it up. The Windows and Mac versions of the server appear to have a nice GUI so that you don’t have to edit configuration files but there are few options and the lack of GUI for the Linux version is no hardship.

I downloaded the latest Teamdrive Client for my MacBook; installed that and pointed it at the newly installed Teamdrive server. The process of getting it attached was painless and worked quickly and easily.

Teamdrive allows you to configure an existing directory as a Teamdrive share or in Teamdrive terminology, a ‘Space’ or you can create a new ‘Space’ and start from that. Once you have created a ‘Space’, you can invite other users to the share. Please note, it appears that they already need to have registered with Teamdrive to be invited. Not entirely sure why this should be the case if you intend to run an entirely private service.

Running your own server is interesting because it allows you to see how the files are stored on the server; they are encrypted and hence even if someone manages to get access to the server; the files should stay secure. I haven’t looked too closely at the encryption yet, so I can’t really vouch for how secure it is. However storing the files like this does mean that they cannot be shared using another protocol such as NFS or SMB from my Synology.

All in all, Teamdrive appears to be a solid shared storage implementation with the added attraction that you can run it privately. There are iOS and Android clients in development but I’ve not tried them, this is a bit of a hole in the Teamdrive story at present. The other advantage is that you can scale a lot more economically than the hosted competitors

p.s Matthew Yeager has recommended a product called Appsense Datalocker which works with Dropbox to provided an encrypted solution. I’ve just started to have a play and it looks most promising.

N

Mar 12th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

I was relaxing in the bath pondering the bubbles, clusters of bubbles are quite interesting, you pop one and the structure re-organises to compensate; you add another one in and everything shifts about to make room. I was thinking about Cloud and Cloud architectures.  Now being an infrastructure-type person, I tend to focus on infrastructure and how you make an infrastructure as robust as possible.

We tend to design to an ‘N+’ model, more often ‘N+1’ but sometimes it can be ‘N+n’ where ‘n’ reflects how important we think an environment is. This sort of model suits the applications and infrastructure we find in the traditional data-centre; it certainly suits the applications which are not especially aware of their surroundings and their resources. These applications generally have no situational awareness and don’t really care. If all of your applications are like this, you will be probably looking at Infrastructure as a Service at best. You want reliable hardware to support your dumb, unreliable applications.

Now this brings me to ‘N’; I think one of the key characteristics of a Cloud application is that you design it to run on ‘N’ nodes where ‘N’ is subject to change and that change is often going to be negative. In fact, you probably ought to design and code for ‘N-1’ or even ‘N-n’; your infrastructure will change and fail more often than it does in a traditional data-centre and you cannot rely on anything. This means that your applications need to be a lot more sophisticated when dealing with concepts such as state but also need ways of discovering services, resources, scaling both up and down. Your applications need to be reliable and intelligent. They need to be like the bubbles in a bath.

By the way, this does not negate the need for infrastructure people; you may need less of them but they are going to be working at a different levels, they need to be thinking about environments and not individual machines; architecting availability zones, scalable networks and storage etc but they will not be providing an individual service to support a specific application.

 

Break the Cycle…

Feb 28th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

It seems the more things change, the more things stay the same…or at least history has a habit of repeating itself and no-one learns from the mistakes of the past. I have read a couple of articles recently which suggest that the role of the CIO is under threat and surprise, surprise, it’s the CFO who has eyes on the kingdom of IT.

Now, in days of yore when mainframes ruled the roost; the IT department often came under the CFO; well it’s all numbers isn’t it? It was only when the PC came along, that IT became something more and IT became more relevant to everyone; it was this era which really saw the arrival of the CIO.

Yet, as IT becomes ever more personal and ubiquitous; we seem to be moving back in time from an organisational structure. We regularly hear nonsensical statements driven by the adoption of Cloud Computing; if we move to the Cloud, do we need an IT department? Do we need a CIO? Does the CIO really need any kind of technical knowledge and should they not be purely business focused?

IT departments need to be business focused; this is very true but IT is a technical function and you need people with an understanding of what is technically possible and feasible, you need people who understand technology. Even if you move your function entirely to the Cloud, you need people who understand technology to manage and administer the Cloud; even if you outsource your entire IT function, you still need people who understand technology who can manage your partners and keep them honest.

IT is the oxygen when enables many businesses; the CIO needs to understand the business but they also need to understand technology enablers. The CIO needs to understand the value of their organisation and needs to move away from a purely cost based model; if the CIO is too differentiate themselves from the CFO, this is an absolutely key area to focus on.

In fact, the CIO needs to come to the fore and lead; championing IT as the enabler for business growth and development. I would argue that where we are today, we have never needed strong CIOs more with a vision based on technology investment model which drives innovation for their businesses.

Desktop, Data, Devilry

Feb 20th, 2012
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

In the post-PC era; the battle for the desktop has moved on to the battle for your data; Microsoft’s leaked new features for SkyDrive demonstrates this nicely; joining Dropbox, iCloud, the soon to be announced Google Drive and a myriad of others, where you store your data is becoming more and more of a battle-ground. The Battle of the Desktop has moved from the Battle of the Browser to the Battle for Your Data; throw Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and sites as Flickr into the mix; this is heading to one hell of mess and one hell of a fight.

Where on earth are you going to store your content? And once it is there, how do you get it out and more importantly will this drive stickiness? Apple seem to think so, Apple are making tighter integrations with their operating systems and the iCloud; Mountain Lion and iOS6 will see more features leveraging iCloud natively; Microsoft will do so similar things with Windows 8 and SkyDrive; yes, you will be able to access your data from other operating systems and devices but it will not be the experience you will get from the native operating systems.

Native Operating Systems? Will we see even tighter integration with the operating systems? Will we see Cloud-Storage gateways built into the operating system? For example as broadband gets faster, is there need for large local storage devices? Could your desktop become a caching device with just local SSD storage and intelligently moving your data in and out of the Cloud? Mobile devices are pretty much there but they deal with much smaller storage volumes, is the desktop the next frontier for this?

But could the battle for your data produce the next big monopoly opportunity for Microsoft and Apple? Building hooks in at the operating system level would seem to make technical sense but I can hear the cries from a multitude; service providers, content providers and the likes will have a massive amount to say about this.

For example, there are the media devices such as PVRs etc; with content providers and broadcasters increasingly providing non-linear access to their content, why is this not all on demand and why do we need a PVR any more? A smaller device with a local SSD cache would make considerably more sense; they’d be greener and removing the spinning disk would probably reduce failures but this would mean a pretty much whole-scale move to IPTV, something which is a little way off.

But arguably, this is something that Apple are really moving towards; owning your content, your data and your life will be theirs. And where Apple go, expect Microsoft to be not far behind; you think the Desktop is irrelevant? I for one don’t believe it; this story has a long way to run. It’s still about the Desktop, just that the Desktop has changed.

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