One of the more popular questions that gets directed at me by journalists and others these days is around the above topic.
I guess since EMC does storage -- and is very active in things cloud-like -- they expect us to have some nice sound bites.
Well, I have my pre-packaged answer that's suitable for the press, but -- if you have the time and the interest -- the deeper answer is much more engaging.
Going out to the GigaOm Structure09 cloud event gave me an opportunity to reflect on "what is cloud" and, more importantly "what is not cloud".
While many of the discussions were interesting, I did feel that there were way too many contrived arguments needed to support thinly-veiled product pitches.
At the event, a journalist I know stopped me, and begged me for a very short, understandable description of what this cloud stuff was all about so she could better understand what everyone was talking about.
Needless to say, I was very sympathetic.
I did my best to oversimplify -- let me know how I did?
It's a key concept in getting any sort of shared resource efficiency. We see it everywhere we look in our daily lives.
But as we talk about IT strategies, private cloud and fully virtualized environments, one of the biggest stumbling blocks I'm encountering is the idea of intentionally pushing oversubscription of IT infrastructure resources -- servers and storage.
And that's going to have to change, I think.
Continue reading "Getting Comfortable With Oversubscription" »
I haven't looped back to this thought in quite a while, but felt motivated to do so by this recent press release announcing EMC's business continuity professional services for virtualized environments.
Once again, it's another example of virtualization changing everything, including how we think about protecting against the unthinkable.
Continue reading "Business Continuity -- Virtualization Changes Everything" »
I've must have had the private cloud discussion well over a hundred times with customers.
Begin to fully virtualize your environment
Learn to manage it more like a cloud, and less like a data center from 1989.
Start to consider the strategic implications of the new choices you now have -- everything from dynamic federation of resources to a bring-your-own-laptop program.
Mostly, it's gone pretty well. Far better, in fact, than any other discussion I've had with customers -- ever.
And I'm starting to see more and more consistency regarding the structural barriers to private cloud adoption by enterprise IT groups.
When talking about private clouds, there's just so many interesting angles to dig into -- it ties so many different themes in IT into a consistent story that I keep getting drawn in like a moth to a flame.
Fortunately, I'm not the only one -- all of the customers I talk to are starting to get the buzz as well. At some future point, I'll share my reasons why I think this is the case, but -- for now -- I'd like to discuss the user experience part of this discussion.
This post was triggered by a VMware news item describing how health care professionals can use VMware View to create a "follow me" user experience across thin clients, laptops, desktops, tablets -- just about any reasonable user device.
IT gets to package up a user experience, push it to multiple devices, and manage it all centrally.
Talk about your win-win scenario!
Continue reading "Private Clouds and Portable User Experiences" »
I've worked with the press and analyst community for many years.
Say what you will, but I've found them a very good barometer of what ideas will fly, and which ones won't.
Sure, they don't actually buy IT products. But they do get exposed to just about every IT pitch in the world, and they usually have a good nose for what's going to be a popular discussion, and what won't.
I've now had a few outings where I've had an opportunity to share private cloud concepts with these folks -- and how VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together to accelerate this vision.
The reactions have been mostly favorable, but with a few interesting wrinkles here and there.
Continue reading "Press and Analysts React To Private Cloud" »
Sometimes you see things in this industry that make you shake your head and wonder.
Such is the situation with Oracle's recent acquisition of Virtual Iron.
Put in the context of other recent activities, the picture is crystal clear: it appears that Oracle intends to use their market power with databases to force customers to consider their soon-to-be-announced virtualization stack.
And, from a customer perspective, this will not be a good thing.
Continue reading "Oracle Wins Virtual Iron, Customers Lose" »
In my travels and customer discussions, this particular topic is coming up more and more frequently.
Now that EMC and VMware and other vendors are encouraging customers to seriously consider virtualizing their more critical applications, it's going to become a increasingly hot topic.
As a matter of fact, I'm now quite ready when I hear the familiar "well, Oracle doesn't support VMware".
Getting to the truth of why this actually might be has proven a bit difficult. It's not something the Oracle people really want to talk about.
In the meantime, I've put together a list of possible reasons why this could be, and offered a bit of commentary as to the thinking behind it.
So let's go take a look at what could possibly be behind this rather unproductive stance towards customers.
OK, so I'm on a theme here.
The concepts around private clouds have been introduced and discussed, and there are even a few large enterprises who have declared they're building one.
I'm now very interested in looking at the operational impact -- going from IT topic to IT topic -- and seeing how familiar discussions change radically -- and for the better -- when thinking about private clouds.
The last post was about securing the private cloud; this one's about backup.
And, as we'll see, how we think about something as familiar (and essential) as backup might be up for some wonderful re-thinking in this world.
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