Chuck's Blog

Running IT Like A (Financial) Business

The enterprise IT model is changing fast: IT now strives to become the internal service provider of choice, offering an attractive portfolio of services that are convenient for the business to consume.

This transformation should not be a revelation to anyone.

All of the sudden, IT starts to look more like modern manufacturing, and less of a project-oriented crafts guild.

As anyone who has run a good-sized business will know, it’s all about “the numbers”: how much, how good, how fast, etc.

You wouldn’t try to run a business without good financial instrumentation — and the same is quickly becoming true for many progressive IT shops.

But the question comes up — what tools exist that do all of this?

I’d like take you on a quick tour through VMware’s vRealize Business offering.

I think is one of the many “hidden gems” in the VMware portfolio. It offers a surprisingly rich suite of ITBM (IT Business Management) functionality that’s becoming essential in modern IT environments — and stands head-and-shoulders above many alternatives.

Say what you want about bean-counters: money matters.

Federation Solutions And The New IT Agenda

One of the more fascinating efforts across the EMC Federation (EMC II, VMware and Pivotal) is the substantial investment behind what is now known as Federation Solutions

 

Like many of you, I have developed a natural skepticism of just about anything branded a “solution”, as so many are just marketing wrappers for familiar technologies.  

 

This time, though, it appears to be quite different — there’s real engineering at work here, pointed at real heavy-duty challenges.  

 

Once you wade into the gory details, there’s a lot to like.

Managing Availability In A Cloud World

The public cloud proponents often wonder -- why is that the enterprise IT world is not beating a path to their door?  After all, each of these services provide great functionality coupled with an attractive consumption model.

I patiently explain to anyone who will listen: enterprise IT is different.

And one of the ways enterprise IT is very different is the critical need to manage availability.

Availability is one of those things that everyone takes for granted -- until there's a problem.  When there is a problem, a speed recovery is expected: service resumed, data restored.  It doesn't happen by magic -- there's an enormous amount of hard work that goes into creating highly available environments that protect predictably.  And never enough resources to do this right.

Most people not deeply entrenched in the topic think this must be a simple matter: a public cloud vendor simply establishes an SLA around their services, and incurs penalties if this is not met.   Case closed.

The reality is far more complex: effectively managing availability at scale is a difficult and nuanced discipline.  It's incredibly hard to get right in a traditional enterprise setting; much more so when external services are part of the landscape.

What stands out for me is that one of the core tenents of virtualization and cloud -- abstraction -- is in direct conflict with what many availabilty professionals demand: a precise knowledge of configurations and associated failure domains.

And, until we solve that one, I don't think we're going to see a lot of critical enterprise workloads using cloud resources.

What Cloud Pundits Miss

The content generators for the IT industry continue to harp on about cloud. 

Amazon will rule the world.  Anything that isn't open source is doomed for failure.  Any IT group that hasn't moved to a public cloud is quaintly obsolete.  On and on. 

Time for a rant.

I wish some of them would spend some time in a real-world enterprise IT environment. Walk a mile in their shoes, and you'll come away with a very different perspective of today's public clouds. 

Yes, Amazon is getting very big -- but it's still only a tiny fraction of global enterprise IT spend. 

Yes, open source models have their advantages -- but also have their disadvantages. 

And IT groups who aren't embracing public clouds aren't antiquated -- they're just being incredibly pragmatic.

After all, that's their job.

Introducing EMC ViPR: A Breathtaking Approach To Software-Defined Storage

I'd like to think I have a pretty good capacity for approaching new technology concepts, internalizing them and explaining them effectively. 

Those capabilities were severely put to the test when I first approached EMC's new product announced at EMC World: ViPR.
 
The effort paid off: I came away with a deeper understanding of some of the more powerful forces at work in our industry, as well as a breathtaking appreciation for what ViPR intends to achieve: both now and into the future.
 
Rather than debate terminology and categories, the best approach with ViPR might be to relax, follow the discussion, and come to your own conclusions: what ViPR does, what it means to the IT industry, and -- most importantly -- how it might affect you in your world.
 
Trust me, the journey will be rewarding ...

NYSE Technologies and The Community Cloud

Almost two years ago, I wrote about how NYSE Technologies was launching a "community cloud" targeted at the financial trading community.  At the time, it was a brave experiment, with powerful ideas behind the offering. 

I was duly fascinated.

Now, two years later, they're now reaping the benefits of being the first mover in their industry: many customers, expanded services, increased investment -- success is clearly at hand. 

Could the dynamics behind their success lead to similar community clouds for other industry sectors?

I think so ...

When Public Cloud Isn't Cheaper

The economics of various cloud models has been hotly debated back-and-forth for over four years.

Are public clouds cheaper? Are private clouds cheaper? Under what circumstances is one form of cloud more cost-effective than another?

I don't think we'll ever have the definitive answer, but there's some interesting new data to contemplate, courtesy of the recent EMC analyst day.

For most people doing IT at any reasonable scale, the number shows that private clouds can be significantly less expensive than public alternatives in many situations.

And that's *before* any concerns about availability, security, regulatory compliance, control, etc. are factored in.

Thriving In A Post-ITaaS World: Clouds As Platforms For Innovation

For me personally, it's been crazier-than-normal-crazy over the last few months.  Most years, summer slows things down a bit, but not this year. 

Why?  As I might have predicted, the brunt of the ITaaS (IT as a service) transformational wave has started to hit.  We are now starting to be collectively besieged by growing cadres of  IT leaders who want to start driving meaningful change in their own organizations. 

I couldn't be more pleased.

The hard part is that since I've been so personally identified with this subject, I seem to be the first call people make, so I've been completely swamped.  But help is on the way, as many parts of the EMC organization are now investing their time and cycles to learn more about ITaaS, and specifically how to best help our customers who want to make that journey. 

Most of our customer and partner engagements start with the lessons we've learned from EMC IT's own transformation, roughly from 2009-2011. 

Not every situation is identical, but there's a lot to be absorbed from someone who's already made that big investment in transformation. 

Thanks to the EMC IT team, there's no shortage of that material here in my blog.

But, in some sense, EMC IT has now moved to a post-ITaaS world. 

Yes, they've done the heavy lifting to transform to a service provider model.  They've re-architected and re-skilled.  They've changed the way IT services are produced and consumed.  They've established price transparency and started to shift the very way IT is funded at EMC. 

Always more to do, but -- now that they've achieved a great measure of success -- there's now an important question: where do we go from here?

And the answer is turning out to be "all sorts of great places".

VMware's Project Serengeti And What It Means For Enterprise Hadoop

Virtualize something -- anything -- and you make it easier for everyone to consume: IT vendors, enterprise IT organizations -- and, most importantly, business users.  The vending machine analogy is a powerful and useful one.

At a macro level, cloud is transforming IT, and virtualization is playing a starring role.

Enterprise-enhanced flavors of Hadoop are starting to earn prized roles in an ever-growing variety of enterprise applications.  At a macro level, big data is transforming business, and Hadoop is playing an important role.

The two megatrends intersect nicely in VMware's recently announced Project Serengeti: an encapsulation of popular Hadoop distros that make big data analytics tools far easier to deploy and consume in enterprise -- or service provider -- settings.

And if you're interested in big data, virtualization, cloud et. al. -- you'll want to take a moment to get more familiar with what's going on here.

More From VCE At Cisco Live 2012

I make no apologies whatsoever for being an unabashed fan of VCE and Vblocks.

Converged infrastructure (and converged operations!) are turning out to be a compelling transformative tool for enterprises and IT service providers alike. 

Rarely in my career have I seen something change so much for so many people.

When VCE announced a number of enhancements at EMC World 2012 a few weeks back, I thought they were done for a while. 

Nope, as it turns out they've got even more interesting bits to share at this week's Cisco Live event. 

And, if you're going, you might want to make some time to chat with the VCE crew.