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This article was reposted from “EMC Consulting  Blogs” pages.

What Does Gartner have to say about this?

In the blog Windows 7- To Virtualize or not to Virtualize – that is the question! I talked about a golden opportunity for organizations to move to virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) instead of following a traditional desktop OS upgrade path.

As an update to this pressing concern for IT departments everywhere, Gartner has weighed in on the issue. observing (quote):

“Whether replacing or upgrading PCs, it is clear that Windows 7 migration will have a noticeable impact on organisations’ IT budgets,”

“Based on an accelerated upgrade, we expect that the proportion of the budget spent on PCs will need to increase between 20 per cent as a best-case scenario and 60 per cent at worst in 2011 and 2012,”

“Assuming that PCs account for 15 per cent of a typical IT budget, this means that this percentage will increase to 18 per cent (best case) and 24 per cent (worst case), which could have a profound effect on IT spending and on funding for associated projects during both those years.”

This clearly hits the nail on the head – a standard desktop OS refresh is going to make a serious dent on the ‘CIO purse’ if done following the traditional approaches that are prevalent. This is serious money that could be spent on projects that actually generate direct revenue for the firm!

What does this mean for Corporate IT ?

Essentially, Corporate IT will lock up significant resources in simply performing this upgrade. Those that delay will be well behind the curve (according to Gartner at least), although not being an early adopter has its own intrinsic advantage. The cost of upgrading hardware, either for performance or compatibility reasons, is predicted to be a significant cost.

This is not simple CAPEX, but the opportunity cost of not pursuing those projects/programmes that will directly influence the firm’s bottom profit line. An innovation cost if you will.

Organizations, in a move to innovate, are still employing traditional approaches to solving their desktop OS challenges and the corresponding application stack. However, the dynamics of our time almost mandate a complete rethink of the traditional ‘it’s time to refresh our desktop OS/desktop suites – let’s start a BIG project’ approach. This is a lost opportunity for a CIO to radically shake-up the IT structures/behavior built up over decades in-house.

Such a lock of resources, wholesale disruption of existing revenue generating projects and the outlay in performing the Windows 7 upgrade itself would suggest that ‘alternatives’ to the migration should be seriously examined.

I use Windows 7 extensively – and like it! On the other hand, I absolutely hate the upgrade process, and finding applications that work, new generations of software, and of course the now ‘mandatory’ hardware upgrade – although everyone always insists this is not necessary.  I did this for Windows 3.1x/ME/ XP / Vista  7 – well you can understand the desktop OS fatigue. Imagine what the Corporate-OS-Upgrade-Fatigue for thousands of users!

At a time where leanness has been emphasized; cost-saving/cost-avoiding projects having priority over innovative projects; a general focus on optimizing the IT infrastructure and the pairing down of IT personnel numbers would suggest another approach is needed than the current mass exodus from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Companies are not moving to Windows 7 simply due to a lack of support in the future for the platform, or the fact that Windows 7 is ‘shiny’ and attractive. There is an element of ‘anxiety’ in not being left behind. The group/herd instinct to follow the others. However, distinctness and variety are the drivers of sustained competitive advantage and long term relationship-focused revenue streams.

The CIO almost owes it to the organization to ‘think out of the box’, be a maverick, look for distinctiveness, not follow the ‘herd’ instinct prevalent in the organization and ensure IT is truly a partner to the organization to achieve organizational goals. This includes providing an excellent work environment for employees, and breaking the shackles of the desktop and the men-in-grey attitude still plaguing large organizations. Learn from the smaller guys. Be nimble, agile and creative!

So why is all this important for CIO’s and Organizations?

Innovations streams mandate a series of upgrades to reach that end-state that was originally desired. The main product to roll out should be the capability to have virtual desktops located within the virtual infrastructure that should already have been designed in a rock solid fashion. For exceptions requiring a mobile offline desktop, allow the virtual desktop to be delivered as an offline desktop (but still encapsulated using the virtualization technologies). This can be synchronized back with its online counterpart – replication technologies are really advanced these days. Communication technologies are also powerful and usually available in one form or another. At the very end of the chain, should be the absolute need to have a pure local traditional OS install on the user device. Essentially virtual desktop infrastructures provide an enterprise class functional container for desktop OS’s.

These are the same great features that are partially driving server virtualization – why not use them on the desktop! Applications should also clearly be virtualized to allow them to be independent of hardware and user profiles. They should be simple to upgrade and rollout – with the minimum number of images being used. Why have thousands of variants to support?

This opportunity should also be taken to do a complete cleanup of the existing environment. Windows XP left a lot of rubbish hanging around in registries, file systems, home profiles and questionable applications installed locally.

The new virtual desktop should be lean. There should be a complete decoupling of the OS and the user data/profile. The desktop should be really simple in future to upgrade. Applications should be containerized so that they can run on different OS versions. VMware ThinApp technologies support this notion very well, and Citrix/Microsoft also provide their own encapsulation technology (e.g. App-V).

Indeed the encapsulation technology providing the virtualization should also be independent of the desktop OS and provide complete freedom to choose – that should allow organizations to break out of the straight jacket of the traditional desktop OS vendors. The more desktop OS’s supported in the VDI solution, the better. Mainstream OS support should of course be available, but support for up and coming important variants such as the Ubuntu or Apple variants will allow an organization to rapidly re-engineer their IT to suit the needs of the organization – and negotiate tough discounts on the OS – the prime cost component currently in virtualization solutions.

It does not really matter that there is not a 100% match of VDI solutions to the functionality of local desktop OS installation – there will always be some odd hardware/software that does not quite work out. That is why innovation streams are important – use a hybrid approach with the mass of desktops in the virtual environment.

Over time as more functionality becomes available in VDI solutions (and there is already a 98%+ match), the sheer number of features regarding delivery efficiency and data security will mandate this as the principal solution to deploy a Windows X or whatever desktop OS is your favorite.

Choice and control coupled with efficiency. Doesn’t sound too bad! Welcome to the Private Cloud and Desktop-as-a-Service! Make the jump to VDI now and not lose this golden opportunity!

Posted 29 August 2010 18:00 by jaspal.dhalliwal | 0 Comments Filed under: Cloud, Paradigm Shift, Transformation, Private Cloud, Organizational form, CIO_Agenda

Windows 7- To Virtualize or not to Virtualize – that is the question!

Whether ’tis nobler to rollout a standard Windows 7 desktop,… OR to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by virtualizing desktops end them?

Many of the current discussions we at EMC Consulting (Cloud & Virtual Data Center Practice) are having with IT Managers, CIOs, CTOs and Architect/Designers are typically focused on understanding the Cloud notion, its consumption and management models, and of course ‘how to build one’ . Frequently the ‘what does it mean for us?’ pops up.

Depending with whom you’re speaking the answer will vary in terms of granularity. An administrator asks regarding daily activities, an IT Manager in terms of service delivery and orientation, and the Cxx level is focused more on the realization of sustainable competitive advantage of Business IT amongst other themes.

With the current need to phase out Microsoft Windows XP on the CIO radar, engaging IT resources/personnel for the foreseeable future, and so many other areas of IT strategy still to realize, the move to Microsoft Windows 7 is rather significant. Many are taking the approach of a ‘simple’ desktop operating system (OS) upgrade. There are yet others utilizing the opportunity to replace parts of their desktop estate with long overdue PC/laptop replacements. These strategies are fine if the end result is simply to get rid of Windows XP and come back into the Microsoft ‘circle of trust’. Compounding the situation is the application stack (Ask-not-what-you-can-do-for-your-cloud-but-what-your-cloud-can-do-for-you) – and yet another migration.

Windows 7, different perhaps from the advent of Windows Vista in terms of its timing, comes at a turning point in the IT industry. The desire and interest to move away from traditional models of IT, resource consumption, and device form factors has never been so strong. Indeed the very notion of a desktop operating system is being challenged. We often hear in envisioning workshops this very same thought and if it can be done right now! Not an easy question to answer.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am myself an ardent user of Windows 7, coming from Vista (yes I installed that too), and of course the venerable XP. The functionality is fine, and Microsoft have done a good job of creating something useful. However, it is not really Windows 7 that I use daily. It is the applications and the browser that I mainly use. Certainly then, the OS could perhaps be a bit leaner – or as some virtualization vendors are doing – practically remove the need of an OS by creating bare-metal desktop hypervisors (Citrix and VMware initially).

Corporate IT Missing A Trick?

Based on the macro movement in the industry, the Cloud tsunami, Everything-as-a-Service and unprecedented levels of connectivity to the Internet, perhaps the idea of rolling out Windows 7 needs to be thought of in a different light.

We have discussed with many organizations embarking on virtual desktops as a part of their desktop estate mix, if Windows 7 should not indeed be treated as an innovation stream. One stream of many that would herald the move to the ‘digital-nirvana’ user workspace end-state (which is of course different for every organization).

By treating Windows 7 as an innovation stream, a collection of features desirable for an organization to possess, we come closer to the idea of Windows7 being a stepping stone on a path. The implication is that constant change will be accompanying the ‘desktop’ estate for all organizations – in that new features can be bundled and released rather than a colossal OS upgrade.

The very term ‘desktop OS’ is starting to look tarnished and is in all probability a complete misnomer these days.

EMC Consulting has a very strong practice supporting the migration to Windows 7, and together with customers, a different product mix is being implemented. Large swathes of virtual desktops hosted in a private cloud are being rolled out, with some use-cases mandating a traditional local install approach in the interim. However, in most cases the applications are being virtualized to ease the move to delivery via Cloud technologies. Some applications have already moved lock-stock-and-barrel to Private/Public Clouds.

How does this pan out with the ‘desktop OS’ developers?

Well. Microsoft itself is planning to refresh desktop OS’s more frequently than in the past (Windows x details were leaked onto the Internet this year). Microsoft itself is starting the move to Cloud offerings in partial/full form through its Azure offerings amongst others to come. Microsoft Exchange Server, long the province of corporate IT, is itself being considered to be ‘handed over’ to Microsoft in the form of Exchange Hosted Services (EHS). This of course leads to the question of whether there are other email/collaboraton technologies that can be used? Microsoft is embracing this sea-change after a fashion. It does not really have a choice anymore!

It looks increasingly as if change is going to be the new norm. Change is good – and the ability to rapidly change and reconfigure resources is a fundamental competitive advantage in an ever more dynamic cyber-verse.

Essentially, the change to an innovation stream starts to focus organizations internally on features and capabilities they value – not which version of a desktop OS they are installing next. The capability set essentially underpinning their varied business needs is identified and pursued.

In the move to the virtual desktop, this starts to yield real benefits in a very lean composed desktop (separated user profiles, applications, base OS). Initially we had the first wave of this in the form of server based computing models simply shipping out a shared Windows desktop surface. This was inflexible and required great operational control to ensure adequate features for all users (e.g. Citrix MetaFrame/Presentation Server/XenApp, Microsoft Terminal Services/RDS). This model still has its place in organizations today.

Virtual desktops in comparison, being wholly independent of other users’ workspaces, allow a greater level of flexibility, allowing users to continue to be productive in traditional ways, innovate and indeed generate new methods of working. This wave seems to be making a home for itself in the Private Cloud. Offerings such as the VBlock support near on 10,000 concurrent virtual desktops. This is unprecedented in a single offering. These desktops can be created for all users in seconds/minutes from scratch, and remain always patched, protected, and available 24 hours/day accessible from anywhere! The level of control from Corporate IT and level of freedom for users is a real boon in management terms.

We are seeing in parallel the rise of ‘Platforms and Applications as-a-service’ models in full swing on the Internet. Indeed it is possible to get a pre-purposed virtual desktop with the latest greatest Windows 7 (or Linux, Apple OS etc.) as a complete remote service.

Extend this further to the application stack above the OS, and we start to see exponential gains in manageability and long-term sustainability in terms of user-experience and operations. This is being felt in the wake of offerings such as Salesforce.com. This in turn is being extended to corporate applications being built on these platforms. There is choice here with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others providing similar capabilities. The speed of building new business applications is remarkable in that the time-2-value has shrunk drastically! Good for consumers and definitely good for business!

We haven’t yet talked about how this desktop is consumed. Ever more capable devices are emerging (netbooks, tablets, iPad, iPhone, smart phones etc.) finding captive audiences initially using these virtual desktops for private purposes, and over time morphing to  fully-fledged personal productivity assets equally capable of being plugged in at ‘work’!

This brave new world indicates a net movement away from stuffy large desktop OS deployments on the narrow palate of PC/notebook hardware that organizations are typically still working with.

The consumer experience is driving the need for change within organizations. Organizations everywhere are waking to the clamor of their own users wanting a better experience in the digital workplace (after all they can easily afford a better experience as a consumer – so why can’t the firm do it!).

So why is all this important?

Well if innovation is the lifeblood of an organization, then all the available means to ‘spark’ innovation should be exploited. By reframing the traditional desktop OS deployment approach, an organization may be able to fundamentally change the digital workplace.

There are plenty of examples of companies working to redesign office layouts, use more capable telephony-over-IP, manipulating light and environmental conditions to put the brain ‘in-a-better-state-of-mind’ These approaches are working (Back in 2007 this is how things were - Google Headquarter – Amazing Work Place 9/19/07 )!  Why would we not do the same for the ‘desktop operating system’?

Thinking about that long term transformation of an organization, every person has at least one good idea in them. The idea may be the one that drives your industry for the next decade. Well is that not worth putting in a little more thought about the Windows 7 migration?

Is it not worth thinking about virtualizatiing your applications? Is it not worth thinking about how the jump to the Cloud will be made for desktops? Does it not make sense to virtualize now to allow some/all of those benefits to stream into an organization?

Some careful thinking now – moving away from the traditional ‘administrator/IT group’s worldview in ‘rolling out yet another desktop OS & the time is not right for Cloud – there’s no other way’, and keeping your eye firmly on the ‘big picture’ will invariably be a sure bet!

Agenda
•Overview: Disaster Recovery
•Getting Started: General Advice
• Business & Technology Considerations
•Deployment
• Configurations & what to buy
•Conclusions & Recommendations

Read the transcript

This article was reposted from the “Directions Magazine” website.

Part 1:

Technology Maturation Created the Cloud
When the computing age took off in the 1960s, powerful mainframe computers ran bulk data processes inside large organizations. At that same time, several companies realized they could take advantage of these large-scale systems by selling chunks of processing time to smaller companies that could not otherwise afford such a computer system on their own. Thus was born the concept of “time-sharing” services.

The idea was that access to one behemoth computer could be distributed and shared by multiple users simultaneously running different programs. Enabling many concurrent interactions allowed for maximum efficiency of the system, driving overall costs down. Time-sharing occurred in an off-site environment, complete with storage and various software programs. Users were simply charged for time used on the system, based on connection time, CPU time and disk storage. Sound familiar?

The emergence of the PC in the 1980s gave rise to the independent, fully-detached computer system. However, the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s was the catalyst for individuals and organizations becoming interconnected. This re-defeated the idea of system isolation, as it ushered back in the notion of shared computer resources; this time reincarnated as millions of users accessing solutions spread over vast server farms. All of this led to what we now know as “the cloud,” and the reinvention of the “time-share” model.

The cloud as we know it today offers on-demand, network access to robust and rapidly scalable shared computer resources. Service is typically offered on a pay-as-you-go subscription fee. The cloud is based on the idea of self-service over the Internet, where subscribers with a remote login capability can rapidly provision system resources to stand up their solutions. The entire computing and storage solution is owned and managed by the cloud provider, relieving the burden of IT infrastructure ownership and operational costs.  For many organizations, the cloud offers the simplicity of standing up solutions quickly without making huge investments.

Geospatial Industry Maturations and Growing Infrastructure Requirements
Computer systems, software applications and almost all supporting technology have matured at a rapid pace over recent decades. All aspects of computing, including processor, network, storage and memory capabilities have seen exponential increases in power and efficiency. Databases and application servers are extremely proficient at managing and delivering massive amounts of data and information to millions of users.

Geospatial data and associated systems for management, analysis, processing and delivery have also seen extraordinary advances over the past decades. Only 15 years ago, the best imagery collected was a SPOT or Landsat scene at 15 to 30 meter resolution or an aerial at 2 to 3 feet. A typical Landsat scene was only 2MB, but any processing on imagery of that size could take hours and max out a standard computer system. In general, data collection was infrequent, processing took long periods of time, and data were delivered via snail mail on CDs, if not tape.

Fast forward to today, where geospatial data are collected everywhere, constantly. GeoEye delivers .5 meter, high resolution satellite imagery in a matter of days. The dataset may be gigabytes in size but you can still download it over the Internet. Running geospatial processes on that scene can now take mere minutes or seconds.

But there are still issues that confront us today. Some are new, but some are the same old issues with new twists to them. Geospatial data are larger than ever, both in file size and quantity. And so are our rapidly expanding archives of data, as organizations are collecting more data, more often. We now use so many types of data in our processes, including high resolution satellite imagery, numerous feature datasets, laser scanned point clouds, sub-centimeter GPS points and more. Handling of geographic data has historically been computationally intensive, and algorithms associated with processing data have grown more complex.

In addition, organizations now expect to batch process multiple scenes at one time, or even parallel process them across a networked group of computers. This requires extensive processing power. The advent of location-based services and map services means we have to put more power behind the delivery of data to our end users.

Almost all organizations managing geospatial data are painfully schooled in the variability of demand for geospatial data, particularly on fluctuations in public demand related to isolated, disastrous events. Take, for example, a county government that is struck by a flood event. For a given period of time, the data management, delivery and storage requirements will soar. When the disaster is over, operations will return to business as usual.  The county government must provide a means to accommodate the sudden strain on infrastructure resources, and also the means to return to normal daily operations.

From an IT infrastructure perspective, this becomes a management nightmare. The more data we get and the more users we serve, the more infrastructure is needed. Plus, we need the means to catalog and make sense of all of these data, and disseminate them efficiently to users across our organizations.

This all sounds quite daunting, but for some software vendors, these “new” requirements are converging to make things more exciting in the geospatial industry.

Part 2:

Benefits of the Cloud to Geospatial Organizations
Geospatial organizations need to securely make volumes of geospatial data and services available to their customers. They require solutions to easily store and manage data, and also supply rich sets of Web services that enable not only data delivery but also a variety of unique functions such as catalog queries, data and coordinate transformations, vector editing, mapping capabilities, geoprocesses and much more. For isolated events, infrastructure must be elastic to accommodate sudden increases in demand so that strain does not become overwhelming, and to avoid unnecessary capital expenditures on hardware, software and services.

Most organizations, intent on accomplishing all of the above but still operating on limited resources, are more interested in growing their geospatial human resources than adding to IT head counts, IT expertise or expanding IT infrastructure in-house. Therefore, geospatial organizations have developed a keen interest in powerful, secure and reliable off-site infrastructure solutions that are cost-effective and rapidly scalable. Hence their interest in cloud computing.

Benefits of cloud computing to the geospatial industry include:

• Secure, turnkey solutions can be running in a matter of hours

• Solution delivery is simplified: installation and configuration becomes a known, repeatable process
• Reduces support calls
• Allows more time to focus on R&D
• Improved security due to focused resources and protection systems
• Low barriers to entry: quick and easy to get up and running on the cloud

• Eliminates the need for in-house, physical resources, new IT head count and expertise
• Scales instantly to meet spikes in demand for both services and storage

• Organization pays only for actual resource consumption and avoids unnecessary capital expenses on hardware, software and other services
• Pay as you go, terminate when you want

• Shared infrastructure costs and low management overhead = savings in your pocket

Regardless of these benefits, however, significant fears still exist regarding the use of the cloud. Some of the biggest challenges to adoption revolve around fears of data security, availability and fluctuating costs. None of these fears are new, though; they’ve actually been around as long as off-site data hosting providers have been an infrastructure option.

Layers of the Cloud
Because “the cloud” is a term that is broadly used throughout the IT industry, it is important to understand its manifestation within the geospatial space. Breaking it down, we see four main cloud models:

• Big Cloud Infrastructure: These are the rapidly elastic, pay-as-you-go cloud services offered by companies like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. These companies focus on providing you the shortest route to accessing and scaling infrastructure resources. These companies offer a more generic cloud offering with limited support for the implementation.
• Add-ons to the Big Cloud Infrastructure: Companies are now emerging that implement industry-specific offerings on top of a big cloud provider. Some examples in the geospatial industry include WeoGeo and SpatialCloud, which both provide specialized solutions on top of Amazon EC2.  WeoGeo offers geospatial data storage and transformation capabilities, while SpatialCloud enables application developers and content providers to store and distribute geodata. Delivering these services on top of Amazon EC2 allows these companies to offer flexible and scalable infrastructure and storage capabilities as the foundation for their specialized solutions.
• Niche Cloud Providers: These are smaller cloud providers who build their cloud from the ground up to satisfy particular industry requirements. A great example of this is our partner, Skygone Cloud. Skygone operates its own cloud powered by state-of-the-art data centers. Skygone’s unique offering is that it employs highly skilled GIS experts who are strictly focused on a solution-driven approach to cloud-based GIS implementations. Skygone Cloud staff is made up of many technical and business leaders hailing from some of the leading GIS software and service companies in the world. Via the cloud, they seek to transform the way the GIS industry builds infrastructure solutions to support its mapping operations.
• On-premise/Private Cloud: This is basically building your own internal data center to run in an efficient, cloud-like manner.  Many organizations want to harness the flexibility of the cloud, yet their fears of public clouds include loss of security, privacy and reliability. The solution is to create a cloud infrastructure within the IT framework of their own organization. Some companies that offer on-site implementation of an on-premise cloud include Skygone and Appistry.

Transitioning Existing Offerings to the Cloud
Many geospatial software providers are equipped to easily transition their portfolio of products into cloud based solutions, including systems for data management and delivery, geoprocessing, vector management and editing, location-based services, photogrammetry and general mapping capabilities. For the broader geospatial industry, we see a need for the following cloud-based offerings:

1. Hosted Cloud-based Solutions: Customers may want to purchase and use geospatial solutions, without investing in infrastructure or running the software in-house. Instead, they choose to kick-off and run applications with no long-term contracts in an off-site, scalable environment. Customers can either bring an existing software license or rent the software license along with the infrastructure.
2. Infrastructure On-demand: In this scenario, customers already have the geospatial software they need, but not the computing power. For example, a county may be using ERDAS IMAGINE to generate an orthomosaic. This operation takes a lot of processing power, but it is only run once a year. Consequently, the county may not want to invest in major systems for this one project, nor does it want to wait a week while the processes run over light-powered, in-house systems. Instead of sending the job to internal systems, an option would be available within the IMAGINE user interface to send the process to the cloud. Via this option, the entire process would be forwarded to powerful, off-site cloud CPUs. This is truly scalable infrastructure on demand, easily supported by big cloud infrastructure where everything is pay-as-you-go and elastic. Development of this capability, however, will require significant R&D to understand such concepts as how to potentially connect internal network data to CPUs on the cloud.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS): Some customers do not want to simply buy geospatial software or computer power, but want to buy a full-service, customized, managed geospatial solution. In this scenario, the customer is not only relieved of infrastructure ownership, but also relieved of solution ownership and management. Similar to a Salesforce.com approach, in this case the geospatial vendor would completely own and manage the solution for the customer.

First Offerings to Early Adopters of the Cloud
The cloud computing game has just begun. Now is the prime time for early adopters who can see beyond the hype and fear and recognize the value of cloud-based geospatial solutions.

We see that utilization of cloud-based solutions is where the industry is moving, and we’ve adopted this first tier as a starting point. The reality is that the cloud offers geospatial providers a “silver lining” amidst a perfect storm of requirements for authoring, managing and delivering geospatial data. This is truly an exciting time for our industry and we look forward to offering a variety of solutions in this space.

This blog was reposted from the “InfoWorld” website

According to James Staten at Forrester Research, those of you looking to implement private clouds may be lacking the skills required to succeed.

While many IT pros are hot on cloud computing — Staten notes that the common attitude is “I’ll bring these technologies in-house and deliver a private solution, an internal cloud” — they don’t grasp an underlying truth of cloud computing. As Staten puts it: “Cloud solutions aren’t a thing, they’re a how, and most enterprise I&O shops lack the experience and maturity to manage such an environment.”

I’m reaching the same conclusion. While private clouds seem like mounds of virtualized servers to many in IT, true private clouds are architecturally and operationally complex, and they require that the people behind the design and cloud creation know what they are doing. Unfortunately, few do these days.

Private clouds are not traditional architecture, nor are they virtualized servers. I say that many times a day, but I suspect that many IT organizations will still dive in under false assumptions. Private clouds have to include such architectural components as auto-provisioning, identity-based security, governance, use-based accounting, and multitenancy — concepts that are much less understood than they need to be.

At the core of this problem is the fact that we’re hype-rich and architect-poor. IT pros who understand the core concepts behind SOA, private cloud architecture, governance, and security — and the enabling technology they require — are few and far between, and they clearly are not walking the halls of rank-and-file enterprises and government agencies. I can count the ones I know personally on a single hand.

What can you do to get ready? The most common advice is to hire people who know what they’re doing and have the experience required to get it right the first time. Make sure to encourage prototyping and testing, learning all you can from that process. Focus on projects with the best chances of success, initially. This means not trying to port legacy systems to private clouds on the initial attempt, but instead focusing on new automation.

Pat Gelsinger, EMC’s COO for Information Infrastructure Products, recently imparted a new vision for the future of IT to a group of analysts gathered in Hopkinton, Mass.

Gelsinger, who now manages some of the company’s crown jewels like VMware and the storage products division, said EMC is out to change the structure, technology, and possibly the behavior of the IT community.

That’s a tall order to fill even for someone as obviously energetic and experienced as Gelsinger, and so if you react to that statement with a measure of skepticism, you’re not alone.

However, it is well worth looking closely at what’s at the core of this vision. What he and EMC really want to do is to challenge the notion that applications and application data are essentially stationary. Critical business application software and the data sets that support critical business applications are difficult to move around quickly and particularly so over great distance. As fast as light speed is, communications networks as we know them are still a bottleneck. Latency is still an issue. Applications stay put. On the other hand, imagine an IT world where an application could wake up in North America, then move to Asia, then on to Europe, continually circling the globe and following the sun.

What EMC plans to offer by way of a product that turns vision into reality is a distributed data caching appliance (V1 of the vision). Perhaps the concept is better described as a network of geographically distributed data caching appliances that maintain coherency and data consistency with respect to one another. This network is capable of spanning great geographic distances between network nodes. The term Gelsinger uses to denote how individual caching engines relate to one another and to an application environment supported by VMware is “federation.” The result is that EMC has, in his words, solved the problem of cache coherency over distance. That, combined with VMware’s ability to move applications, yields application fluidity. It also, according to Gelsinger, creates the illusion of from an application perspective of having “petabytes” locally when they could actually be physically living in storage devices thousands of miles away. One could think of this as adding data abstraction on a potentially global scale to VMware’s ability to do server abstraction.

I hear some of the storage industry cognoscente out there saying that they’ve seen distributed data caching before. Yes, Gelsinger did allow that the underlying technology is based on an EMC investment in, and the subsequent acquisition of, a somewhat obscure Canadian big-box storage array company named Yotta Yotta (as in yotta-byte scale storage). Nonetheless, YY was years ago and couldn’t get market traction, even when it came to shows with the cute fuzzy dice that chirped “Yotta Yotta.” EMC today can apply it’s highly respected marketing savvy to getting distributed data caching into mainstream IT architectures. Version 1 is in beta test status now.

Gelsinger sees distributed cache coherence as fundamental to the private cloud in that it supports around-the-clock data availability, the ability to aggregate and pool infrastructure and application resources on a grand scale, and the ability to geographically move critical applications at will.

Could this be game-changing, disruptive, and (insert you favorite superlative here)? I think that for sure, users of this technology combined with VMware can now challenge application vendors to come up with new licensing models–as if VMware wasn’t challenging enough for the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. Remove application and data dependency on physical location and, in at least some situations like the “follow the sun” example above, you remove the need for multiple application licenses for multiple locations. I also believe that the federated view of distributed IT resources will indeed impact they way enterprise IT architects design systems. But as I mentioned, I also think that coherent, distributed storage caching will challenge some long-time EMC partners in the both the applications and networking spaces.

But that’s just for starters. As an application administrator or application architect, I can now think in terms of having a data abstraction layer underneath a virtualized OS layer. I now no longer have to worry about where the data is physically. I could have multiple, globally distributed instances of an application using the same data repository no matter where the application instance lives. If you want to call that a private cloud, I won’t argue the point. What I think the distributed cache network does do is create a dedicated storage cloud that can be given the security and manageability attributes common to storage arrays and supports the creation of highly mobile applications running on both stationary and mobile platforms.

Bottom line: EMC has to demonstrate that distributed cache coherency really works and delivers the presumed benefits. If it does, the superlatives are earned and those who struggled at Yotta Yotta to realize their original vision will not have struggled in vain.

This article was reposted from “CIO.com“.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on parts one and two of this three-part series on “The Three Revolutions of Cloud Computing.” This series is based on my perspective that cloud computing represents the next major platform shift in computing, and will undoubtedly impose as much change as previous shifts like client/server or the rise of the Web. In parts one and two I focused on the changes cloud computing will cause in IT operations and application funding patterns. Now I’d like to turn to the changes cloud computing will cause in applications — and, to be blunt — those changes will be enormous.

If you look at most application architectures today, it’s clear that these assumptions underlie their creation and deployment:

• Compute resources are expensive and difficult to obtain, so the number of applications must be limited, with only the most critical applications being deployed.
• Compute resources are static, so application architectures can assume a stable application topology, with compute resources rarely joining and almost never leaving an application deployment topology.
• The responsibility for compute infrastructure provisioning and modification lies with IT operations, so application developers need only focus on functionality and rely on others to manage the infrastructure.

However, those assumptions are no longer appropriate in a cloud computing world. As I explored in the first part of this post, cloud computing will alter — even disrupt — IT operations practices. The “resources on-demand” nature of cloud computing means process re-engineering for IT operations. The new model is “resources when I want, as much as I want, how I want.” It’s important not to underestimate how liberating this will be for application groups. When there isn’t a lot of organizational overhead to obtaining resources, app developers will — surprise — use more resources — a *lot* more resources. We haven’t yet begun to understand the scale of resource demand as application groups learn to work in an unconstrained environment.

In the second part of this series, I examined the change in IT costs that cloud computing’s metered pricing and lower costs will cause. Put succinctly, the opex-based nature of cloud computing costs will encourage experimentation and allow many more applications to be deployed.

So the combined effect of these changes means that two very strong friction points for applications — resource provisioning and funding — will dwindle. What does this mean for applications?

Price elasticity means apps explode. While there is lots of controversy on this topic, my viewpoint is clear — cloud computing is cheaper than what went before. And I expect that classical economics will hold — higher consumption of goods as they get less expensive. Also, the “pay by the drink” nature of cloud computing will only amplify this trend, as it only costs dollars to get started on an application. Certainly this phenomenon has been our experience — every client we’ve worked with starts with one application and then starts finding others to do once the ease of getting an app going becomes clear. I would not be surprised to see a 10X increase in the number of applications running in most organizations. And the low cost and ease of scaling means that the deployed topology of applications will increase as well. Horizontally-scaled, multi-tier applications with 50 or 100 individual virtual machines won’t be anomalies in the near future.

Apps explosion puts unprecedented pressure on IT infrastructure. Guess what? The infrastructure designed and built with outmoded assumptions about the number of applications that will be running, their resource consumption, and their agility. As applications are deployed that take advantage of cloud computing’s unique characteristics, current infrastructures will groan under the load. Moving to server virtualization bought time for a lot of companies which had data centers maxed out, but the growth of applications will outstrip the compression of consolidation. In the future, expect to hear that “private clouds suffer resource constraints.”

Apps take more responsibility for app management and IT operations. Everyone gets the vision of agile provisioning — or orchestration as it’s often referred to. Engineers writing apps self-provision computing resources by filling out a Web page, asking for X amount of processing power, Y amount of network capacity, and Z amount of disk storage. Not as commonly recognized is that future apps are not provision-and-leave-alone; they’re going to be provision-and-adjust-resources in near-real time as load changes. Bypassing IT operations in the initial provision but needing to consult with it for every subsequent change solves only half the problem; consequently, application groups will take on much more responsibility for monitoring the performance and stability of their applications. This is likely to be a troubled transition, as application groups today really have no responsibility (or even visibility) into application performance and stability.

Apps create big data, which creates new apps. The very nature of applications is changing from inward-focused operations optimizers to outward-facing engagement enablers. Associated with this change is much greater flows of data along with deeper analysis and integration of the data. These applications will tie in new sources of data like sensors, generate much greater amounts of data, which, in turn, will provide opportunities to slice-and-dice the data in new applications. If you think you’ve seen a lot of data in the recent past, get ready for a real deluge.

App developers need new skills to build scalable apps. If there’s one thing that comes through during our cloud computing workshops, it’s that most developers don’t comprehend building dynamic apps that can gracefully add or subtract compute resources on-demand. I’d add that there is a difference between having a system management package that monitors application load and spins up new instances and an application that can integrate new resources into an operating environment successfully (or indeed, release unneeded resources — remember, the future of apps is scalability responsiveness, both up and down). Software developers creating the new, ever-larger number of applications will need to learn new skills to successfully build “cloud-ready” applications. This isn’t any different, really, than past platform shifts, but every time a new platform comes out, people are surprised that there’s a learning curve. Expect a big one with cloud computing.

App developer shortages, with emphasis on locating talent and leveraging service providers. Something else one can expect is a shortage of software developers. The price elasticity of applications will drive up demand for complementary goods (or services, in the case of people). CIOs are going to be haunted by line of business groups demanding human resources to take advantage of the availability of compute resources. Expect to see significant shortages of software engineers, particularly those able to write cloud-ready applications. IT organizations will turn to outside service providers, but will find many of them subject to the same shortage of talent. I expect even the seemingly (or at least, typically assumed) inexhaustible pool of offshore talent will be found inadequate for how much software will be desired.

In conclusion, I’m sure it’s easy to dismiss these three revolutionary developments of cloud computing as over-dramatic. However, as a species, we humans have very little temporal perspective. In 1995, who would have predicted the rise of a computing giant like Google (GOOG)? Computing at that time was underpowered PCs communicating to servers that looked like slightly beefy desktop computer upended onto its side. Rack servers didn’t even exist. We don’t do a very good job of extrapolating current trends into the future, but it’s clear that cloud computing is a trend that will overturn the practices and assumptions used in IT today. It’s going to be a wild ride.