via mafleen on flickr

“I hate everything about you, why do I love you?” — I hate everything about you by Three Days Grace.  A couple months ago I asked folks on Twitter if IT governance was helpful or a hinderance.  You’d be surprised by the reactions, at least I was.  Back in the day when I was a server hugger in my former life, I hated any form of governance that was going to slow me down. Ok, I need to level with you, I still feel that way.  The operative phrase here is “slow me down”.  There is something have come to respect over the past 5 years when I stopped focusing on what brand of processor or type of server to buy.  I started talking to folks in the business who had loftier goals than I did which was moving the ball forward.  I started to *get it*.  It’s about moving the collective agenda forward.

I realized that you can embrace governance when you have all the key stakeholders involved and this means that you should be able to set up a framework and template for classes of IT offerings.  Why does it mean so much to me?  Because I’ve never seen this offered in a package that appeals to the CxOs and server huggers at the same time.  A vblock (EMC storage, Cisco network and compute, and VMware) represent this union.  Coupled with Unified Infrastructure Manager and some open api’s, we can start to realize a service catalog built around governance that provides the business a lot of agility.  A huge benefit, albeit an uncomfortable one, is removing NRE or non-recoverable engineering from the technology cycle.  I know it’s not perfect but now we get to focus on the important stuff.

There are some really cool sessions around Vblock and VCE at VMworld.  You can find more info here.

EMC is sponsoring and I’ll be doing a lightning talk on private cloud.  If you haven’t been to a CloudCamp before, it follows the unconference format.  CloudCamps have been extremely successful because of the user participation.

Here are some of the topics that have been covered:

• Infrastructure as a service (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace, Nirvanix, etc)
• Platform as a service (AppEngine, Azure, etc)
• Software as a service (salesforce.com, Yahoo! Mail, etc.)
• Application / Data / Storage (development in the cloud)

Let me explain.  I flew into Boston to give a couple of Executive Briefings on the Virtual Datacenter this week.  Some customers saw exactly where I was going and others probably thought I was insane.  I started at a high level and then went into the details but here’s the problem. When we talk about infrastructure becoming a pool of resources that you’re able to push and pull workloads into and out of, some people think it’s fairytale land.  It’s not.  I used to build my own computers but I don’t anymore.  I buy one that has the most, not all, of the best technology and is good enough.

DIY vs All-in-one - DIY image via ~keiby on flickr

What they see:

1. Complex infrastructure with many moving parts
2. Legacy applications, some virtualization adoption
3. Thick fog that’s hard to see through
4. They think they’ll have to trust something new

What I see:

1. A multi-step process that takes time
2. Virtualization allows us to focus less on the boxes, cables and spinning platters
3. Platforms (Springsource with Azure, Amazon’s AWS also qualifying) enabling quicker development
4. We can make existing infrastructure and software better

Infrastructure AND platforms are both part of the “Stack” and “Cloud” conversation.  It’s about businesses being able to let their most valuable asset (their people) work on deploying applications faster instead of provisioning servers.  Yes, the “server huggers” and “IT pros” as Brian Prince (Azure Evangelist at Microsoft) calls them, will still be needed to make sure we’re architecting and deploying apps properly on the infrastructure.

Change is ok.  Things aren’t perfect but continually improving.  Most of us drive cars instead of ride horses and we buy clothes instead of make our own.  People trust technology (network, shared storage, memory, etc) and build around its faults (RAID etc.).

Recently I was bluntly accused of spouting an EMC-centric view.  As if other technology companies didn’t see it this way too.  Guess what, it’s not just EMC, it’s many end-users and vendors both who share this view.  The view of and challenges posed to enterprise customers is much different from those faced by sometimes smaller and more public-facing web service companies.  I get it.  There are still security challenges, management challenges, and legacy application challenges but before so quickly dismiss stacks and cloud, open your mind a bit.

Here are some notes I took during the keynote at the 2009 Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference I attended months before joining EMC.

Session: Bridging the private and public Cloud

• Move has been to get higher utilization
• It’s about the applications and working to get them into the cloud

Opportunity

• Build rich apps for the cloud while preserving app symmetry w/ the enterprise
• Frictionless deployment across the spectrum
• New breed of apps that span from on-premises to cloud

In case you don’t know what Azure is, here’s a description from Microsoft’s web site:

The Windows Azure platform offers an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.

The Windows Azure platform is comprised of Windows Azure: an operating system as a service; SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services: consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

Currently in Community Technology Preview (CTP), the services are free to evaluate through January 2010. We will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010.

I’m excited to be a part of such a big event for Microsoft. One thing that seems to be consistent is that this is not your dad’s Microsoft. Their cloud group started with twenty engineers and has ramped up over the last couple of years.

Like I’ve done in the past, here’s a “What I want out of PDC09″ list. If there’s something you would like out of PDC, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.

1. Get the latest updates on the Azure stack
2. Understand the limitations and where different services are best used
3. See how Azure addresses challenges like deployment, scaling, security and private cloud integration
4. Understand how Microsoft is making their software cloud-aware
5. Talk to more people using Azure and see examples of how they are using it

Much of it is cloud-focused because I spend a bit of my time running Indy Cloud Users and involved with CloudCamp. It has been awhile since I’ve spent time with developers so I’m sure I will be learning a lot. I’ve been impressed with the dynamic nature of the company and individuals like Brian who deliver the message about what Microsoft is doing.

Enhanced infrastructure awareness - VMware and its network and storage partners need to more visibility to each other.  Not only do people need to be able to see what is going on under the covers (storage and network) with things like AppSpeed but they also need to be able to make intelligent decisions on how to fix problems.  It should be easy for an admin to see what LUN on the storage side has too many VMs without having to interpret naa392dxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx numbers.  This is continuing to happen but still has a ways to go.

Desktop Virtualization – The improvements from VDI (2.0) to View (3.1) and continuing to View 4.0 have been good but there is so much work to do.  When I meet with customers, the challenges that they face aren’t just getting applications and desktops virtualized from a technical perspective.  We need more flexibility to determine not only what desktop a user receives but what kind of desktop a physical location receives.  We need application persistence with a physical endpoint.  This is counterintuitive to what virtualizing desktops is all about but this is all going to drive back to the persona of both the person and the endpoint.  Entrigue Systems, which is being acquired by Liquidware Labs,  and other ISV’s are doing this but it needs to be seamless and well supported.

If you have anything you want to know or news to share with me about some of these things, let me know.

IaaS is where most managed service providers focusing on today for their cloud offerings.  We discussed that developing self-service infrastructure as a service provider offering is tricky.  The folks who have done infrastructure understand the glue that is needed for provisioning and allowing users control over their own environment.  Giving users the ability to turn the knobs that control things takes a lot of work.  Today that is VMware Lab Manager under the covers with some special glue for provisioning.  Lab Manager has some challenges today because it wasn’t designed for a multi-tenant environment.  Over the next year you’ll start to see products come out that address this for service providers.  VMware is also heavily focused on delivering more APIs which allow companies like RightScale to hook into VMware to provision and manage virtual machines.  VMware categorizes all of its cloud computing initiatives under the vCloud umbrella.  This will include all of their cloud-focused products and APIs.  The roadmap has developed rapidly over the last year or two.

Helping small, medium and large businesses build out their internal clouds has been a big focus as well.  It needs to be easy to allow people to have the flexibility to move things between the internal and external cloud.  One of the questions I get asked the most is “How can I move my applications out into the cloud?”  It is a lot cheaper and easier to virtualize your existing software stack compared to rewriting things to fit on exotic platform as a service software at the moment.

Another thing we discussed is how enterprise companies don’t really like “elastic” or “usage-based” billing models.  They actually prefer allocation-based where they billed in a consistent fashion.  I’ve never given a lot of thought to this but it makes sense.  A lot of companies do business the way they do because it works well for them.

Today VMware has over 500 service providers who are either in the process to getting a cloud offering off the ground or have one today.  The team at VMware is small when compared to the rest of the organization but things have been progressing fast.

We discussed competition briefly but both agreed how things are changing rapidly.  It was obvious that VMware is agressively ramping up its vCloud offering and the internal structure to go along with it.  The benefit they have as a company is that they’re able to leverage so many of their existing products and IP.

Many thanks to Mike for sparing some time to discuss VMware’s vCloud initiative.