I recently ran across a Gartner report regarding trends in x86 virtualization. In the “taxonomy” section (said with nose raised and pinky high), I found the following:
Hosted Virtual Desktops
An HVD is a full, thick-client user environment (OS and applications) run as a VM on a server and accessed remotely through a window on a remote device. All software execution takes place on the server where the VM is hosted, and only the presentation layer for the VM is sent to the remote device. Access can be via a browser window, remote session on a PC or thin client device.
The Digerati at Gartner hold HVD as the Next Big Thing in virtualization between now and 2014. Assuming they are correct, and I think they are, we will have arrived once again back where we started in the 1970s – centralized computing, albeit way more powerful from an end-user’s perspective. In every computer technology cycle, the cost and complexity of managing distributed technology causes infrastructure to collapse under it’s own weight, after which the cycle trends back to centralization. Web and Cloud are just the latest words for the centralized models that re-emerged after the distributed client/server phase of the 90′s crushed support staff, budgets, and productivity. MBA translation: Poor ROI.
Every incarnation of centralized computing brings with it a new level of complexity, but the advantage is that the complexity must be managed in fewer places, and changes can deployed much more quickly. Anyone who’s ever been involved in software distribution knows the joys of having to change something in just one place on a server versus 10,000 PC endpoints. Server virtualization and HVD, however, up the complexity ante quite a bit, as it implies managing an ever-increasing number of machine images and infrastructure resources.
When choosing virtualization technology, it’s wise to be mindful of the complexity factor. It’s not about the hypervisor anymore – the technology that makes virtualization happen – that’s approaching zero cost as vendors increasingly make it part of the hardware layer. The real value (and increasing cost) is in software that can manage the complexity of dozens, hundreds, or thousands (HVD) of VMs. If you’re purchasing virtualization technology for in-house use, be sure to shop for good tools. The tools make the difference. VMWare currently leads the pack, but others such as BMC, Akorri, ManageIQ, Oracle-Sun, etc, continue to improve.
If you are moving to an outsourced cloud model, you’re probably best served by choosing a provider using VMWare. Among hosting companies, VMware seems to be achieving “Coin of the Realm” status in that it is the most common platform being deployed. The upshot is that if one hosting company lets you down, you can pack up your VMDK files and take them somewhere else. If on the other hand you pick a proprietary cloud (e.g. Amazon) and it doesn’t work out, your options are not very attractive.
Some form of centralized computing is clearly always going to be with us. Back in a previous version of the technology cycle, my preference was a 4-color 3279 terminal running in mod4 mode. Wonder if there’s an emulator for my iPhone? I may soon need it.
Airlines are always looking for a new purple cow. How about this one:
In-flight Wi-Fi is a new purple bovine that’s gaining momentum. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that more than 500 planes are already in our skies with wireless access, and Delta and American are leading the way. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the airlines are having trouble figuring out how much to charge for the service. With price plans ranging from $5.95 for flights under 3 hours to $12.95 for long-haul flights, usage has not been what the airlines had been hoping for. Completely free service has been tried with great success, but as one airline found out, even a $1 plan caused usage to drop off considerably. In a telling comment that exposes a misunderstanding of trends in technology, Michael Planey, a consultant specializing in in-flight passenger technologies, had this to say about the free vs. pay model:
There’s a very substantial decline in passenger usage the minute you start charging for the service. It really begins to invalidate the model on which this service is being built for the next 10 years.
I don’t know much about Mr. Planey, but I hope he’s wrong about the model for the sake of those building the systems. If he’s right, we need to avoid investing in companies building Wi-Fi for the airlines. Why?
We all know Moore’s Law, but less well known is that Caltech professor Carver Mead was the first to focus on it’s economic corollary:
If the amount of computer power for a given cost doubles every two years, then the cost of a given unit of computing power must halve over the same period.
We can substitute the words “storage” and “bandwidth” for “computer power” without invalidating the claim. Storage is doubling in one year, and bandwidth every nine months. That’s why you can ditch your TiVo in favor of Hulu. The upshot of all this is that the cost of computing power, storage and bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper by the day, to the point where it will almost be too cheap to meter. (For an outstanding in-depth analysis of this topic, add Free, by Chris Anderson to your reading list.)
So any revenue model that is built on charging for these commodities that continue to fall in price is, as Al Gore might say, a risky scheme. Moreover, by charging for Wi-Fi access, the airlines are missing better revenue opportunities by forcing people to stop and ask the basic question we all ask when there’s a price tag of any amount: “Is it worth it?” Is it worth opening my wallet to pay for a few hours of internet access? The airlines have already proved that any price lowers usage dramatically. So why not just give it away, and use it as an opportunity to connect with their customers to up-sell or cross-sell them on other services? Don’t force your customer to incur the mental transaction cost of deciding whether to purchase, particularly when you have a captive audience for a few hours. There are oh so many ways to make the Wi-Fi service free andyet profitable at the same time. “Give ‘em the razor” as King Gillette did so successfully.
So what’s the application of all this in our IT shops? Sort of the reverse, actually. While computing power, storage and bandwidth are getting cheaper, they are certainly neither free or cheap enough to ingore. They occupy monetary space in our capital and operating budgets as well as three dimensional space in our data centers. From a financial standpoint, many of us are not in a post-scarcity environment where we can afford to let the user community run wild. If we make all of the resources available for free, they’re going to indiscriminately use every last cycle, byte, and bit. For example, Google used to offer free snacks at their on-site conferences, which resulted in half-eaten power bars and bags of chips strewn all over the room, illustrating that people tend not to care about things they don’t have to pay for. But if it costs something, be it monetary or accountability, the user will automatically stop and ask “is it worth it?”
Am I suggesting charge-back systems? That’s certainly one way to go, but impractical for most of us. (Ironically, charge back systems will be de rigueur in cloud/utility computing). If cost and budget are issues, and you’re up against your resource limits, then simple accountability is a better strategy. Get some tools and actually measure your resource usage. Sounds obvious, but we see few customers do it. There are plenty of low or no-cost tools to measure storage and bandwidth usage, so it’s within everyone’s reach to do so. Then comes the less pleasant part: go to your more aggressive resource users and really challenge them to justify what they’re using. As Pavlov discovered, they will eventually respond appropriately, if for no other reason than to avoid the pain of future visits.
“Free” in the right context (marketing) can be a wonderful revenue generator, but “Free” in the wrong context (IT) tends to encourage wasteful habits, and we ought to be good stewards our of business resources regardless of their cost.
Meet the fearsome spectre of cloud computing. He’s staring at you for a reason. Despite the fact that the cloud computing is currently the most overused, misunderstood, and over-hyped phrase in our industry, trying to ignore it any longer is probably not a good idea. Though still in a very early phase, the clouds are forming, and we all need to start paying closer attention to which way the winds are blowing them and what the future implications are going to be for our infrastructure.
After spending several days this week listening to the major players in the industry outline their current offerings and future plans, it was quite obvious that what I was talking about back in April was not caused by lack of sleep or hallucinogenic substances:
A short history lesson tells us all we need to know about cloud computing. In the 1800’s power generation was the responsibility of those who needed it. Be it steam, water, or electricity, if I had factory with electrical machinery and lights, I had to generate my own power, and if you needed power, so did you. And both of us had the hassles of building, operating, and maintaining a power generation infrastructure which, by the way, was not our core business. Power was necessary to the operation, but it was not the product or service we delivered for profit.
Eventually Edison and Westinghouse figured out how to transmit electricity, and entrepreneurs realized if they could build a Really Big Generator and implement a delivery method, they could sell power to industrial users. The case from the entrepreneurs to business was clear: “Let us worry about the hassles of generating power so you can focus on your core business, and oh by the way, it’s going to cost a lot less than doing it yourself.”
Fast foward to the present…has the light just come on (pun intended)? Cloud computing is nothing more than the name-du-jour for the centralization of computing resources so that they can be delivered as a utility service. Nothing more, nothing less.
Cloud computing is here now, perhaps in nascent form, but it’s here nonetheless.
The cloud is not new technology we’re going to go out and buy, per se. It’s not in a box, and it doesn’t have a part number. It’s more of a paradigm shift back to way things used to be in the Golden Age of the Mainframe (which never died by the way…according to people who enjoy crunching the numbers, IBM’s System z sales last year were in the $3.5B range). You can read the popular Wikipedia page on cloud computing, but I would suggest you think of the cloud more as a way that technology is delivered, much like electricity or water. You only consume the goods delivered rather than first having to generate or pump them yourself.
From a cloud provider’s standpoint, this means a virtualized and highly automated infrastructure, fast and easy provisioning, self-service, enormous scalability, a usage-based billing model, and a very granular portioning of resources. And that means programmers. Hosting companies that plan to operate cloud offerings are going to need a talented programming staff of substantial size along with a very sharp support staff to build and operate all of the plumbing to deliver computing resources to your doorstep. Proof of this lies in the list of the brave few heavyweights that currently occupy the lion’s share of the cloudscape: Google, Amazon and Rackspace. Building these utility services is not for the faint-at-heart or low-on-cash, and the average hosting company is simply not going to be able to really play in the clouds until the Big Boys blaze the trail.
Currently, we can find cloud services offered to us in three flavors, or if you like, three different levels of abstraction:
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is closest thing to hosting as we knew it before today – computing and network hardware offered as a utility service, but essentially without limits or long term commitments. Rackspace’s current cloud offerings are of this type. Here, the hardware layer is abstracted away, leaving you to worry only about the operating system and applications.
Platform as a service (PaaS). PasS takes the hardware layer and adds the operating system and a development environment (software APIs), which you then use to develop your applications. The development environment ostensibly hides all the details of where your code executes and how your data is stored and protected. So at this level, in addition to the hardware layer, the OS and the development environment are now effectively abstracted away. Google’s AppEngine is a prime example of PaaS. You may have already surmised a possible evil in PaaS. If you develop an application on a particular vendor’s proprietary cloud platform (e.g. Google), they’ve got you locked in to their service, and there is no small amount of chatter going on about this in the industry. The open community is crying for an industry standard set of APIs, while the big players are fighting to establish dominance with their proprietary systems. Obviously, it’s best to stay on the sidelines here until the dust settles.
Software as a service(SaaS). With SaaS, everything is abstracted – you are simply presented with a user interface for an application. Salesforce.com is the premier poster child for this model.
Cloud computing is becoming a deeper and more pertinent topic every day, and we’d do well to begin keeping a sharp eye on it. Cloud is not necessarily an either/or strategy. For small business, and to a large degree medium business, the server room will eventually disappear into the cloud, and that will be a blessing for many. For the enterprise space, however, cloud services will be just another tool in the arsenal to solve business problems along with, dare I say it, the mainframe.
If you work in IT for a small or medium-size business, there is a career signpost up ahead in the clouds. Make sure you don’t ignore it.
Warning, this is a long post on a controversial subject. I’d recommend you refill your coffee cup before diving in.
We get a lot of questions about “Green IT.” Is your data center Green? What’s your Green strategy? What do you think of Cap and Trade? And so on. With all the bacteria in the air about global warming and the associated hyper ventilation going on in the media, it’s becoming difficult not to catch the disease and lose perspective. Do we have really have to add “being Green” to our list of worries in the data center? Little did I realize a favorite childhood classic would be a relevant stress reliever so many years later.
Do you like green eggs and ham?
There are many shades of green. I was reminded of that one day when my Dad asked me whether I was waiting for the traffic signal to turn avocado before I was going to pull out. But in terms of going Green in the data center there several flavors, such as reducing so called greenhouse gas emissions, buying RoHS compliant products, recycling old assets properly, etc. Since power for equipment and cooling is the most critical resource for IT, the Greenhouse Gas Police are our primary concern. Over on SearchDataCenter.com, we find this in a piece entitled “Get Ready For A Carbon Tax:”
Today, the U.S. government and other countries are taking carbon emissions seriously. The Environmental Protection Agency last week formally declared carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to be harmful air pollutants. It’s a move that is thought to set the stage for a carbon tax of some kind.[emphasis added]
Kai Reichardt, data center manager for UniCredit Group, an Italian bank, said his company recently built a data center over a canal [raucous laughter added] so it could use free water cooling instead of expending energy for mechanical cooling. And he said the company will also investigate other opportunities to save.
“You have to define rules and implement them,” he said. “You have to punish the polluters and push the innovators.” [more emphasis added]
Well isn’t that rich? You, Mr. Data Center owner, are a polluter that needs to be punished. Whenever the discussion turns from the issue itself to name calling, you know that rational discussion has ended. Let’s assume the title of Evil Polluter for a moment and consider how we might mend our ways.
Would you like them with your server? I would not like them with my server.
Servers are the first potential power hogs that come to mind. To Green our servers quickly, we have to replace or virtualize them. IBM claims their new x3650 M2 class Intel servers boast $100/year savings on power. Yippee skippee. Most companies are not going to be excited about spending thousands on a new server just to save $100 annually on the electric bill. But it adds up in a big data center, you say. Well yes, but if you can show me a budget in this economy that can swap out gear in numbers large enough to make these power savings seem attractive, I’ll show you a budget where that savings is round-off error. $100/yr by itself is not a compelling story, given the capital expense and upheaval to our operations that always comes with putting new boxes in place. The sensible solution here would be to buy Greener hardware as old servers naturally come to end of life. But we’d be doing that anyway without consciously trying to be Green. New hardware from IBM, for example, becomes more energy efficient over time without us asking for it.
If we virtualize, we still have to spend money on product and labor to make it happen, and then we have service outages to incur, end-user politics to negotiate, and all the risks inherent in shutting down and moving healthy systems. Measuring the hard dollar savings of this maneuver from a Green perspective is like trying to weigh a chicken with a yardstick. Virtualization is a Very Good Thing, but using Green alone as the cost justification certainly isn’t going to cut it. Justification is going to found in reduced costs realized from hardware consolidation, new hardware avoidance, and to some degree software license reductions, among other things.
So unless Green means something substantial to the bottom line, who’s actually going to be interested?
Would you like them here or there? I would not like them here or there, I would not like them anywhere.
We could also try to replace or virtualize storage to save power. Kantner’s General Theory of Storage states that:
The rate of storage growth is inversely proportional to the amount of free storage available.
In other words, we’re always going to need more storage at the most inopportune times. Once we advance beyond spinning platters for storage (e.g. SSD), perhaps storage will become more power efficient. But regardless, storage virtualization leads only to a deferral of additional storage purchases through better space utilization, not a reduction of powered up hardware. Ultimately, storage purchases are justified by business requirements, not by an appeal to better power efficiency.
What about network gear? Because of the business impact of disruptions that can occur when swapping out major network components, no one is going to dive into that pool until it’s absolutely necessary. Those big old Cisco 6500 power supplies are going to continue to glow like the sun.
Green really needs to mean something more to the bottom line.
Would you, could you, in your data center? I would not, could not in my data center.
Short of taking a major outage or starting over, what practical facility changes can one realistically expect to cost justify? Few can accord to rip/replace chiller plants, UPS systems, or generators with more efficient units. That said, we are in fact looking at ways to shut our chiller plant down during the winter and just run off the cooling tower loop, but we’re doing that to reduce costs – Green is not the driver, but rather deregulation of the electrical utility.
Sure there are some practical things we can do, but extreme measures are hard to justify. We hear of folks running their cold aisles at temps over 90°F. Anyone smell silicon burning? (Incidentally, we’ve seen equipment get toasted. We like 72° at the equipment inlet for good reason, and the Uptime Institute agrees.)
But let’s get back to our alleged title of Polluters. Here at DSS we don’t have smoke stacks towering out of the data center. Chances are, neither do you. Why? Because the vast majority of us obviously don’t generate our own power. We outsourced that to the electric utility industry a long time ago. Certainly we can turn things off and use less, but the generator plant down the street is not going to run any less and will still make power the same way. And if that way is anything other than nuclear fission, there are still nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, dust, and carbon dioxide wafting into the atmosphere. Greening our data centers isn’t going to change that. Clearly there is something else driving the Green monster.
I do so like green eggs and ham, Thank you, Uncle Sam-I-Am!
Business cares about the bottom line, not greenhouse gas. Uncle Sam-I-Am understands this. Could it be that the clarion call to save the planet is rooted in the discovery of green ham? My hunch is that Uncle Sam is all about the green ham, namely the cold hard cash that will come out of Cap and Trade, or any other similar program. And we get the green eggs of trying to minimize our financial exposure to those taxes…err…programs. Cap and Trade, boiled down to it’s essence, is about government revenue, and it looks like Uncle Sam has done his homework. My bet is that Archie Bunker would smell a rat too. (If you’re a Dem, please don’t be offended – the title should really be “Archie Bunker on Government”).
As major consumers of power, those of us with data centers are squarely in the cross-hairs. Faced with confiscatory financial punishment, we suddenly have an interest in global warming, whether it’s reality or not. If the revenue from Cap and Trade were only intended to replace legacy power plants with nuclear or other clean power, then the idea would be more palatable, but as they’re designed now, these plans look like just more sources of pork to be spent as Uncle Sam sees fit. One need look no further than the UK for confirmation.
You do not like them so you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.
While I’m not alone in my contrary view on Green, the IT jury is still out on what Greening the Data Center really means from a practical standpoint. But let me end with some positive suggestions for both camps. For those truly concerned about going Green, consider mothballing your server room or data center and move your gear to a professional hosting facility. Take your shop off the grid and put it in a cloud somewhere that can, because of scale, do it with more power efficiency that you would be able to achieve on your own. If global warming theory rings true for you, this should have tremendous and obvious appeal. If it doesn’t, and you just want to avoid the hassles of Cap and Trade, you too might consider moving your gear to a professional data center. Let us Evil Polluters smell the sulfur of green eggs and send the ham to Uncle Sam.
In a front page article in the April 6th Wall Street Journal, we’re told that an IBM/Sun merger would result in IBM owning 42% of the $53 billion server hardware market, based on 2008 factory revenue numbers provided by IDC.
With already a third of the market in hand, it hardly seems likely that IBM could be interested in Sun for the hardware. Such a move wouldn’t give IBM much of an edge against close rival HP in the corporate space. Outside of academia and other niches where workloads push performance envelopes to the limit, Sun is just not a big player in corporate computing. The sales figures make that pretty obvious.
Clearly, it’s not about market share – IBM is after something else.
Press pause on that thought for a moment and think about how many times you’ve read about cloud computing recently. Personally, I’ve reached the saturation point, because the word has been commandeered by marketing departments and spun to mean whatever fits a vendor’s product line.
A short history lesson tells us all we need to know about cloud computing. In the 1800′s power generation was the responsibility of those who needed it. Be it steam, water, or electricity, if I had factory with electrical machinery and lights, I had to generate my own power, and if you needed power, so did you. And both of us had the hassles of building, operating, and maintaining a power generation infrastructure which, by the way, was not our core business. Power was necessary to the operation, but it was not the product or service we delivered for profit.
Eventually Edison and Westinghouse figured out how to transmit electricity, and entrepreneurs realized if they could build a Really Big Generator and implement a delivery method, they could sell power to industrial users. The case from the entrepreneurs to business was clear: “Let us worry about the hassles of generating power so you can focus on your core business, and oh by the way, it’s going to cost a lot less than doing it yourself.”
Fast forward to the present…has the light just come on (pun intended)? Cloud computing is nothing more than the name-du-jour for the centralization of computing resources so that they can be delivered as a utility service. Nothing more, nothing less.
So what’s this got to do with IBM? The answer lies in the rest of the electrical power generation story. History shows that small generation companies were indeed started and did successfully deliver power to local business for profit. The model worked, in fact so well that consolidation soon began to take place within the new electric “utility” industry. Those in the business realized that the biggest fish was really going to win big. Moreover, the biggest players early in the game were positioned to be the biggest winners after the first big wave of electrical utility consolidations was complete.
It appears that IBM knows its history and wants to be a big player early in the cloud computing game. Sun is already way ahead of IBM in the race to deliver computing as a utility. Amazon and Google were out there first to be sure, but at this early stage in the cycle there is still plenty of room, and it seems like IBM wants to be an early player – a Very Big early player. IBM may be hoping to paint the clouds in the sky IBM blue in an effort to create a lot of green for its shareholders.
At this point it would not be Al Franken-esque to ask “How does this affect me?”
Like the early days of power generation, most businesses are all still “generating their own power” with their own in-house infrastructures. When so-called “cloud” computing really goes mainstream, those days will be over. Cost will inevitably drive the equation in favor of the utility model.
When I first began suggesting this several years ago, I quickly achieved madman status in the eyes of some of my peers and business associates, but it’s getting closer to becoming reality every day.
Begin to think how your job will change when your server room is gone. You will still need to keep things running, but the way you do it will be very different. Will your business cards also change? Perhaps to an address in the clouds?
If you want to get some early comfort working in a cloud before it’s thrust upon you, I know of a good hosting data center where you can get your feet wet.
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. How about this one:
, by Chris Anderson to your reading list.)
