Chuck's Blog

The Private Cloud Has Failed Us

Perhaps there is no deeper disappointment in life than when a cherished concept fails to produce the desired results. Such is the case with the industry’s notion of private clouds.

I’m throwing in the towel, walking away – and cursing under my breath. It’s a failed concept.

Yes, I was seriously seduced early on. Check out this Jan 2009 post where I breathlessly made the case for this new private cloud model. If I wasn't the first person to do so, I was certainly close to being the first.

I argued vigorously for the cause for many years. For me, it was the right answer at the right time.

I hereby publicly admit the error of my ways. The world has changed, and so must I.

Why is it that traditional private clouds have left most IT shops at a dead end?

Yes, Something Very New Has Come Along

If you're a grizzled infrastructure guy like me, you're completely justified in your skepticism when any vendor claims to have announced something Truly New^TM.  

I mean, how many flash arrays, converged thingies, etc. does the world need?

Because we tend to focus on the underlying technology, we tend to miss other equally important innovations.  For example, Uber didn't really introduce new technology to the world; they just changed a familiar consumption model.

A few weeks back, Oracle announced a new industry category -- cloud machines -- under the banner "Cloud At Customer". First up: the Oracle Cloud Machine -- on-prem PaaS/IaaS targeted at enterprise application developers.

Simply put, it's a public cloud model delivered in the data center.  It fundamentally changes the familiar consumption model.

In the short time since, I've been seriously stunned by the level of customer and partner interest. People  immediately grasp the concept, realize that it's fundamentally different alternative, and are immediately curious.

We must be on to something here :)

Sure, I personally thought the notion of a cloud machine was going to be successful.  But at the end of the day, what I think doesn't matter that much; the opinion of thousands of IT professionals matters far more.

And -- so far, so good.

On Being Happy

From time to time, I am preoccupied with a simple question: why are we all here?

Perhaps the same thought nags at you as well.

I prefer answers that are simple and direct, and don't require invoking a cosmological constant. It wasn't until later in life that I came up with an answer that works for me.

Your results may be different, naturally.

I believe it's very simple: we are here to be happy -- individually and collectively.

When Generic IT Infrastructure Doesn't Cut It

Many IT infrastructure groups are intent on building their own landscapes, using horizontal technologies.

Maybe they want to standardize on HP servers, vSphere for virtualization, RedHat for Linux, Cisco for the data center network, EMC for the storage, and so on.

The specific choices aren't relevant in this argument; the underlying philosophy is what matters.

The newer thinking in this arena is pre-integrated stacks: converged (e.g. VCE Vblocks, HP CI, etc.) or perhaps some of the newer hyperconverged offerings (e.g. VMware's EVO, Nutanix, etc.). Less effort all around thanks to a modicum of integration, but still a generic stack by any other name.

So, let me ask a clarifying question: what are the most important and demanding workloads in your landscape?

I'm guessing it's databases, and the applications that use them. Might it make sense to think in terms of *optimized* stacks for these crown jewels vs. generic ones?

If your business is heavily invested in databases, maybe mainstream generic infrastructure thinking isn't doing you any favors.

Overcoming Cloud Envy

Enterprise IT is a tough job for most practitioners. The list of things that need to be done never stops growing, and resources are always constrained.

Distractions don't help, and there are no shortage of these it seems.

One of the biggest IT distractions I've witnessed -- and perhaps most damaging -- has been what I call "cloud envy".

Maybe call it "Google envy" "Amazon envy" or perhaps "Facebook envy"?

The symptoms are always the same.  Folks in IT leadership become enamored with what these web-scale companies are doing with their clouds. They may even visit with them, take the data center tour, all that. They are inevitably dazzled by the experience. They come away thinking, "hey, maybe we could do that too!".

Much time and effort is then lost chasing a dream that isn't right for them: wrong model, wrong motivations, wrong abilities, etc.

Precious resources that could have been spent on things that really move the needle get needlessly frittered away on a fantasy that can't -- and shouldn't -- happen.

Changes In The IT Industry, Or Why I Came To Oracle

When I announced that I was leaving EMC and VMware to join Oracle, the reaction was interesting to say the least.  

There was a certain crowd that thought I’d be part of the EMC Federation forever.  There was another crowd that couldn’t truly believe I’d join Oracle, and enthusiastically at that.

Gratifyingly, there were also plenty of well-wishers -- that was nice!

At the time, I really couldn’t go into the reasons why this made such logical sense to me. It had a lot to do with what I was seeing in enterprise IT – both on the supply and demand side.

When the world changes, you need to change as well.

So I did.

Uncomfortable Truths In Enterprise IT

Yes, I've moved to Oracle to work on infrastructure products and solutions.

What I haven't shared yet was my real motivation -- a deep and fundamental shift in my personal perspective of what's really going on in the enterprise IT industry -- and what's happening in enterprise IT shops.

For me, when I realize the world has substantially changed, then I inevitably have to make a change in response.  

That's a decent piece of career advice, by the way.

Needless to say, ours is a dynamic industry -- both on the supply side and the demand side.

Enterprise IT shops are getting slammed to do more with less.  They don't have the time, the money or the people to address even a small fraction of what they could potentially contribute. 

Worse, they tend to spend far too much time on things that don't create unique value, and far too little time on things that could really move the needle.

That's the uncomfortable truth.

Enterprise IT vendors are getting slammed as well: the commoditization of IT infrastructure, death-match competition, overly-funded startups running amok, the cloud in all of its many forms, activist investors -- you name it, it's happening.  

That's another uncomfortable truth.

What attracted me to Oracle is that they have good, solid and substantiated answers to both challenges.

On Being Happy

What makes us truly happy?   One of life's most important questions, no?

A group of researchers at Mayo Clinic think they may have the answer: train the mind to focus on positive experiences vs. negative ones.

The rationale is simple: we are conditioned by evolution to focus on — and thus avoid — the negatives in our lives vs. celebrating the positives.

Although few of us will have the opportunity to partake in their 10 week, four-step program — it made me reflect on how I’ve been challenged over the years to crack that code for myself.  It wasn’t easy.

And I meet so many good people who are trying to be happier.

I don't know what will work for them, but I do know what worked for me.

We Change The World, The World Changes Us

I was born in 1959.  I guess I have the dubious honor of watching the world change for over half a century.

Yes, I could fill several uninteresting pages with the rapid pace of innovation in technology, human health, physics, economics, chemistry, etc.  

It seems the boundaries of human knowledge continue to expand like a supernova.

More interesting to me is how this new world is changing us — as individuals, and as members of society.  

It’s easy to get caught up in the wave of “now”, and lose sight of how we used to think about the world.

But, make no mistake, as we change the world, the world changes us.

Big Ideas — Where Are They Now?

Like so many people in this industry, I can get easily enamored by Big Ideas.  Powerfully intoxicating, they take your mind off the day-to-day, and transport you to a different place that might exist in the future.

Like a moth to a flame, I’m drawn in — and it takes major willpower to put them down, and move on to something else.  Fortunately, I don’t appear to be alone in this regard.

Over the course of eight years of blogging and 1200+ blog posts, there are clearly times when I have fallen prey to the seductive power of Big Ideas.

I thought it might be fun to go back and ask the question — where are they now?