Category:

Cloud

Crossing the great divide towards the cloud

by Philip Sellers March 31, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

In the past year, I have been fortunate to have many different views of cloud services – from SaaS, PaaS, ITaaS, to WuPaaS. Ok, the last one is a Warm-up Party as a Service, but you get my drift. It seems every vendor has a slightly different take on cloud. But, in effort to simplify, I believe that one thing hold true across all offerings today: Cloud is a radically different way to handling computing for companies and there are complex concepts that must be understood in moving towards a cloud.

In my mind, and from checking with my peers, the cloud is almost a polar opposite of the established IT department. Cloud today seems to be working best for new companies which don’t have the established IT infrastructure. Cloud offers a major cost advantage compared with creating your own IT shop from scratch, with pay as you go and on-demand pricing and availability. I’m not sure how much value cloud offers to a heavily virtualized, established IT shop with storage, compute and networking already in place.

For established IT groups, moving towards IT as a Service is the main goal – to replace and augment all the traditional IT functions performed by internal system administration and storage groups. Testing cloud services with a Software as a Service offering is probably the easiest first step – because it involves a subset of users (sales, for instance). But the nirvana goal would be paying for on-demand usage of computing and storage from a service provider and eliminating most or all of capital investment in IT equipment.

March 31, 2012 1 comment

Cloud Datacenter

HP is taking the cloud message on the road with Pathways to Cloud

by Philip Sellers March 12, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

HP is taking exploration of cloud on the road with the Pathways to Cloud Road Show. The roadshow is a 14 city tour across the United States showcasing HP experts to unpack and discuss strategies to move the enterprise towards cloud technology. It kicked off last week in Houston and Boston, will be visiting Orange County and Seattle this week and all ending up in San Francisco on April 19.

The event will be a time to meet with HP’s cloud experts and discover the important, cloud concepts. Attendees will learn how to discover the present landscape of their datacenter and learn how to move towards cloud-ready or cloud-enabled services and constructs to make a cloud a successful possibility. The show kicks off with a keynote devoted to navigating from traditional IT to convergence, a buzzword and theme from HP in the last several years, and from convergence to the cloud and the Instant-On enterprise as HP brands it.

HP is a great resource to learn from in the marketplace because they are uniquely positioned with a full portfolio of hardware, software and services to enable the private, public or hybrid cloud for customers. HP is taking an open approach to cloud and enabling customers to outsource or grow from a private cloud to a large list of public cloud providers, as well as managing clouds which may be composed of several different external providers or several different hypervisors internally.

With cloud being a complex and multifaceted concept, the one thing that is clear is that moving towards a cloud solution has many, far-reaching implications to an organization. HP reaching out in this way is an indication of how steep a learning curve many customers are going to have and this opportunity to fill in the blanks. Cloud has the potential to fundamentally change the way that organizations views and uses IT. Cloud requires changes from application packaging to deployment and maintenance. Understanding why is important before embarking, so Pathways to Cloud is an excellent event to attend – look for a date in your area. I’ll be heading to the New York date to find out more myself. Perhaps, I’ll see you there.

To find out more about the event or to register, please go to http://www.hp.com/go/pathwaystocloud.

March 12, 2012 0 comments

Cloud Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Getting started with vCenter Orchestrator

by Philip Sellers November 10, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

When I travel for work, I strive to bring back as many good ideas as I can and implement them in our IT shop. VMworld 2011 offered the opportunity to meet a lot of people, one of those being Cody Bunch who is authoring Automating vSphere: With Vmware vCenter Orchestrator for VMware Press. In talking with Cody, he reminded me something I learned and had forgotten – that every vCenter license includes vCenter Orchestrator for free, bringing a great workflow and automation tool to the masses. For the lesser versions of vCenter (Essential and Foundation), vCenter Orchestrator runs in a ‘player’ mode, allowing you to run workflows but not edit them, but for all vCenter Standard edition, it runs in ‘server’ mode with full functionality. This week, I have been configuring, working in and learning vCenter Orchestrator.

vCenter Orchestrator is installed by default along side of vCenter Server Standard edition and can run on the same host, but in other environments, it may make more sense to deploy it as a vApp instead. If you’re interested in deploying a vApp (which I did not do), see this post from Cody. I’m going to detail my installation procedures as an example of the install, which is fairly simple. These are by NO means the official procedures, just my experience and anything I learned along the way. But first…

What does vCenter Orchestrator Do?

vCenter Orchestrator is, at heart, a workflow tool. It is used to string together a series of tasks that can be kicked off repeatedly and performed on different objects within vCenter and with additional system, using additional plug-ins. It is used to automate repeated tasks that are done in the environment, handle bulk operations and handle integration points. It can be used to receive actions from help desk and monitoring systems and kick off actions based on tickets or alerts.

As I have written about before, I have come to define a cloud as an pool of compute, storage and networking resources with a self-service portal and lifecycle management to automate provisioning, management and decommissioning systems. The key to this definition is in the automation and workflow of processes. Although it is not as advanced, I think vCenter Orchestrator can represent a solid first step towards automation and workflowing deployments and management of datacenter assets. Said another way, I think its a solid first step for many organizations towards the cloud.

November 10, 2011 1 comment

Cloud Compute Datacenter Software Virtualization

Burst local and securely with HP CloudSystem

by Philip Sellers November 4, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

When it comes to cloud technology, one of the biggest advantages a cloud brings is the ability to expand and retract on demand. This ability allows IT shops to meet the needs of customers and not miss revenue opportunities due to downtime, sluggish performance or overloaded server outages. This capability does not come without security concerns, since there is some data the IT shops will certainly not want leaving their firewall. For those cases, HP has a capability inside of CloudSytem known as local bursting (although announced in June, I must have missed that part of the announcement until last week at the HP Cloud Tech Day in Houston).

Local bursting is a fairly simple concept. The CloudSystem a customer is delivered is built larger than the customer needs or pays for, and the additional capacity is available to the customer to consume on a pay-per-use, utility basis. This is a very similar concept that has existed with HP SuperDome and Integrity lines (along with IBM’s OnDemand strategy) for a long time, but its now being applied to cloud technology. But this concept allows for a customer to have additional local resources to consume without the need for additional capital expenses.

In addition to local bursting, HP is working to make a network of service providers that are compatible with CloudSystem through its CloudAgile service provider program. These partners will include lots of different cloud providers and customers are not locked into a specific technology, such a vCloud, to choose from. Savvis is a current HP CloudAgile partner, but others mentioned include SHI and Verizon (who is a vCloud provider). HP has reiterated on several occasions that it is seeking to create an open cloud architecture which can interoperate with multiple and varied third party cloud providers.

Since bursting is one of the more promising concepts within the cloud and we took some time last week to talk about some use cases that would benefit from bursting:

School photographers have a large spike in traffic during ‘yearbook’ season when they handle the majority of their business.
College registration produces a peak amount of traffic for schools trying to get students into their desired classes for the coming semester.
Rendering farms for movies would also be a good use case, because the majority of the time, render farms are not processing on a movie – it is only really required during large render sessions.
Scholastic testing is also another seasons activity when users needs must be met and performance is key, but which outside of the season is not nearly as great of a computing load.
Black Friday for ANY retail e-commerce vendor.

But there was one concept which also came up in our bursting conversations – and its an interesting one I’d like to reiterate here – and it is the issue of capacity with service providers. Bursting and service providers are a new frontier for many companies, so knowing who can and cannot handle our capacity and needs is an interesting concept to think about. I would think most service providers are not going to advertise their exact capacity (or lack of) for competitive reasons. So, in those cases, how does a customer gauge whether or not a service provider can handle their workload? Its a good question and I don’t have the answer, but I would love to hear what readers think. One interesting point, is that because HP’s CloudSystem is multi-vendor public cloud, if one vendor cannot handle your load, customers have choice to move to another provider. While this exists for VMware vCloud providers, too, HP is working so that customers can choose from non-vCloud providers as well.

November 4, 2011 2 comments

Cloud Compute Datacenter Home Tech Projects Software Storage

Returning from HP Cloud Tech Day

by Philip Sellers October 28, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

I am currently sitting in Atlanta airport waiting on my flight to return to Myrtle Beach. I am returning from Houston, TX, where I have been on-site at HP’s facility to learn more about cloud and HP’s CloudSystem in particular. Although cloud was our primary focus, we also spent some time looking at other innovations like the EcoPOD and Pod Modular Data Centers. For me, the EcoPOD was an highlight of my past couple days and I have lots to tell my wife about what HP is doing to condense and improve efficiencies of data centers to make them green.

We spent the week diving deep into the HP CloudSystem solution – viewing the workflows and automation that make it tick, learning about the products included and how they are used, and learning about directions for networking and storage for cloud. Coming out of the event, I have a stronger understanding of how we could transition our organization towards a cloud and a better idea of the tangible benefits it would enable, something I have struggled to understand thus far.

I was fortunate to be with a diverse and intelligent group of bloggers for the event. Each of us came from a different background and represented a large cross section of the customers HP services, from small business to enterprise and government resellers. It left for lots of great conversations and debate about products, offerings, use cases and other details for the businesses we represented. I’ll encourge you to follow these folks below and their blogs:

Patrick Pushor
http://cloudchronicle.com
@CloudChronicle

Christopher White
http://www.neowin.net
@Fezmid

Phillip Jaenke
http://rootwyrm.us.to
@rootwyrm

Matt Vogt
http://mattvogt.posterous.com
@mattvogt

Bob Stein
http://www.activewin.com
@ActiveWin

John Obeto
http://absolutelywindows.com
@JohnObeto

Chris Wahl
http://www.wahlnetwork.com
@chriswahl

Frank Owen
http://techvirtuoso.com
@fowen

Michael Letschin
http://thesolutionsarchitect.net
@mletschin

Ofir Nachmani
http://www.iamondemand.com
@iamondemand

October 28, 2011 0 comments

Cloud Datacenter Storage Virtualization

The future is all about (cloud) apps

by Philip Sellers September 29, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

After having a month to reflect on the organized chaos that was VMworld 2011, one message still stands out to me most of anything we heard during that week. VMware conveyed loud and clear that apps, and more specifically the frameworks and middleware to enable cloud apps, are the big area of innovation for the next era of computing. In the VMware world, they are calling it all vFabric. Cloud applications are going to take rethinking, rewriting and re-architecting to really make use of cloud.

VMware is positioning itself as the developers’ friend, much in the same way Microsoft did when the desktop era dawned. The 2009 acquisition of SpringSource that left many, including myself, wondering what VMware was thinking, but the technology is now emerging as a critical part of the VMware ecosystem and vision for the future. The middleware for developers is a critical third piece of the VMware vision of cloud which will bridge the two other primary foci of the company.

VMware has long been the king of the virtual infrastructure game. Their vSphere suite and the type 1 ESX hypervisor are a mainstay in nearly all datacenters around the world. VMware also got its beginnings with its type 2 Workstation and now VMware Fusion hypervisors. But as enabling the cloud, a true run-anywhere architecture and bring your own hardware initiatives have emerged, the two disparate product areas left a gap the company has been working to fill.

Based around the virtual infrastructure VMware has developed, the cloud posed a new set of problems that could only be solved by rewriting traditional client/server applications into cloud apps with distributed data models, distributed processing and distributed display logic across multiple datacenters. And when thinking of cloud, the first thing to come to mind are applications that Google and Facebook have written and how they are architected to be highly available and redundant.

What is vFabric?

The vFabric line up is a multi-product library of solutions to provide developers with the frameworks and middleware needed to build out products on cloud architecture. The focus is clearly on web applications using customized or VMware-branded versions of the Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat, known as vFabric Web Server and vFabric tc Server, to develop Java web applications which use the Spring framework. In addition to the presentation and processing layers, there are also products to handle messaging, monitoring and data storage. In particular, this year VMware announced innovation to add to the GemFire data models, including a new in-memory SQL solution called SQLFire. GemFire and SQLFire both seek to upend competitors like Oracle and Microsoft’s traditional relational database products, which VMware is calling out as bottlenecks. Even while the bottleneck may be true, the real idea is a distributed data model where the data does not exist in a single instance database but rather in a mesh of systems on a cloud architecture. To me, that is the real difference and news with GemFire.

Looking back & moving forward

While I don’t claim to be a Java developer, I can certainly see a clearer picture of the vision VMware has for cloud. I was not fortunate enough to attend VMware 2010, so perhaps things would have began to be clearer had I attended, but 2011 certainly provided the clarity I needed.

The unfortunate side to all of this is that VMware is now attempting to engage a new audience of developers, which are catered to in a very different way than the systems administrators and infrastructure staff they have traditionally engaged with. Saying it in a different way – they have moved past me a bit, as one of the systems guys, and are working on things that excite me less. I realize we must have applications, but I’m not the guy who writes them, so the thrill of announcements at VMworld 2011 was less for me, than at past conferences.

VMware certainly has a learning curve of how to engage developers, too, but the SpringSource acquisition provided them with a solid foundation and a good set of roots in the open-source community. For now, I hear that the user communities will remain separate with VMUG’s and Spring User Groups existing beside one other, which is smart. Hopefully, the same will hold true for the future with VMworld and other events as well. What I most hope is that their message does not become muddled and muddy because they now have two different audiences to cater to.

September 29, 2011 1 comment

Cloud Datacenter Storage Virtualization

The Political Challenge of Moving to the Cloud

by Philip Sellers August 31, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

The way that I see it, VMware is up for a political fight in many of its customers’ IT departments. Two things have become evident to me this week at VMworld 2011 – first, moving to the cloud is going to involve rewriting a lot of our applications and two, this is going to to be as much a political shift in our companies as a technical shift.

I think that the political issue is easier to explain, so I’ll begin there. Unlike virtualization or virtual infrastructure, the decision to move to the cloud is not going to come from the systems group in most companies. The systems groups may be able to advocate the change and provide the reasons for it, but it is going to have to be a strategic move from higher management. The tangible monetary benefits of cloud are less clear than with virtualization, whose primary motivators were increasing utilization of physical machines and reducing the number of physical machines required which saved money. In other words, the IT systems group is not going to be the primary advocate or decision maker when moving to the cloud. Cloud is going to need to meet some higher business need rather than a technical need, although there are technical benefits.

August 31, 2011 1 comment

Cloud Compute Datacenter Networking Software Storage Virtualization

Simplifying IT support and deployments with converged systems

by Philip Sellers August 13, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life. Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for. It means, I have a job. Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert help of vendors’ support departments when our knowledge runs into something we just don’t know.

Unfortunately, when multiple vendors’ products are coupled together as a solution, support can become nasty as vendors point back and forth at each other while trying to get to a resolution. The more complex the solution, for instance a SAN, the more difficult to troubleshoot through the multiple layers of software, firmware and hardware, even multiple vendors of the solution. And, I believe, the hassle has made customers seek a better way.

August 13, 2011 5 comments

Cloud

Intel Cloud Builders creating reference architectures for the cloud

by Philip Sellers June 16, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

At Intel, engineers have been hard at work creating reference architectures with its partners utilizing Intel technologies through their Cloud Builders program. Last week, a group of bloggers, including myself, had the chance to sit down with Billy Cox, Director of Cloud Software Strategy at Intel in the Blogger’s Studio during HP Discover. Cox discussed the initiatives within Intel, why they are creating these reference architectures and what Intel hopes to accomplish.

Intel created the Cloud Builder program to invite industry partners into its research facility to experiment and create reference architectures in the lab to publish to customers. Cloud Builders is not about certifying the hardware, it is about creating references for customers who are looking to be a particular type of cloud. One reason Intel is not seeking certification is that cloud technology is changing at a very rapid pace and certification process would take an extended amount of time, during which technology would have already changed.

Cox said that Intel has really focused on building the private cloud model. Intel surveyed its end-user enterprise customers and came up with a list of use cases to focus on with its partners.

While researching with its partners, Intel has been able to find some gaps in technology, particularly in the case of management software for the cloud. But the research has also turned up other gaps, such as trusted compute pools and missing audit information that would be required for compliance.

Intel has also been working on technology such as the hardware root of trust which allows for hypervisors to send a request to the Intel hardware in plain text and receive an encrypted, signed response certifying that the response is coming from the trusted hardware. This was technology that had not found a use case, but in compliance heavy environments, its finally finding implementation.

Auditing has also been difficult to produce for these environments. This is an area that Intel and its partners are still focusing.

For more information about Cloud Builders and to find details about the reference architectures published, head over to http://www.intelcloudbuilders.com.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover. Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

June 16, 2011 1 comment

Cloud Compute Datacenter Software Storage

A potential service provider’s take on CloudSystem

by Philip Sellers June 14, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Day to day, I work for a telephone company, though we are really much more – we sell cable TV, wireless, landline, Internet, security and home automation. [Disclaimer – these are my views and not theirs.] We have tossed around the idea of becoming a public cloud provider more than once. Last week, during HP Discover, I got my first full view of how we might realistically do that. We are not currently a HP CloudSystem customer, but I could see it fitting our needs.

HP unwrapped CloudSystem during the Discover conference in Las Vegas. CloudSystem is a full stack solution from storage, to networking, to servers and software to enable the cloud, whether it be private, public (service provider) or hybrid. So, where to begin on discussing CloudSystems – lets start with a definition.

June 14, 2011 1 comment