Chuck's Blog

Towards Better Convergence Models

Convergence is one of those powerful IT concepts that powers progress.  Functions that were once seen as separate and distinct get combined and deeply integrated in a useful way, and there’s no going back.

Cell phones meet handheld computers, and smartphones are born.  Consumer electronics meets automobiles, and the market shifts.  Home networking meets smart appliances, and modern living starts looking like a 1960s science fiction movie.

Convergence plays out powerfully in enterprise IT settings.  So many operational models are based on the historical distinct and separate nature of many IT functions. Converge those functions, and the IT model can evolve to a much more powerful and efficient state.

But digging a bit deeper exposes some interesting philosophical questions.  For example, how and where should convergence ideally occur? 

I’ll give you a hint on where I’m going.  I believe the hypervisor is the inevitable platform for infrastructure convergence — both today, and into the future.

From Storage Admin To Storage Service Manager

I've been talking to storage people in IT for about 20 years now.  Sure, the new technology is always interesting -- but what storage folks are always interested in is how does this change things?  How do things get done differently as a result?  

And -- always unspoken but omnipresent -- how will this affect me?

While no aspect of enterprise IT is static these days, the storage team sits at the intersection of some particularly powerful forces these days.

Change is coming -- what does it look like?

VVOLs, VASA — And Why It All Matters

Just about everyone involved with either storage or virtualization has heard the terms.  Maybe you have an idea of what the concepts are about. 

But not many people have a good understanding as to why these VMware technologies under development can be a really big deal for storage users — and their vendors.
 
I admit — my initial understanding was a bit thin in a few places.  But during my time here at VMware, I’ve come to have a much deeper appreciation of what’s going on in this space, and why it’s important.
 
If you already deeply grok all of this stuff, feel free skip this post.  The rest of us might want to read on …

Beyond SDDC: The "Burger King" Model Of Service Delivery

We are constantly bombarded with marketing slogans, etc.  Some of them stick in your brain for a very long time.

In the hotly-contested fast-food burger market, Burger King launched a very successful campaign -- "Have It Your Way" -- that emphasized their willingness to tailor each and every hamburger ordered. This was in sharp contrast to others (e.g. McDonalds) who had relatively standard offerings at the time.

In our virtual infrastructure / cloud world, something similar is happening as well. The historical approach of pre-defined menu items (performance, availability, capacity, etc.) are giving way to a strong desire for a-la-carte ordering on a per application basis, with the ability to change your mind at any time.

And, of course, this creates new challenges and opportunities all around.

Beyond SDDC: New Convergence Models In The Data Center

Enterprise IT organizations are wonderfully complicated and fascinatingly intricate things to behold.  A dizzying number of moving pieces, all with sophisticated interactions and a variety of nervous systems that inform, command and control.

The promise of SDDC -- software-defined data centers -- is tantalizing: fully-programmable and orchestrateable functionality that easily spans across familiar functional silos: everything dynamic, everything software-based, everything transparent.  Amazingly powerful concepts when fully considered.

But with great power comes great responsibility :)

Will we use our new-found capabilities to simply recreate familiar workflows, or entirely re-envision how we do things?  Will we converge familiar functions and tasks into brand-new processes and control points?

You can see the beginnings of this starting to happen in today's devops discussions, but there's much, much more to be considered before long.

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.

When Networking Met Storage -- Again

Of all the "software-defined" categories, software-defined networking is now garnering the lion's share of industry attention.  A simple scan of industry publications and associated vendor positioning will amply demonstrate this.

A more tangible example was at the recent VMworld: VMware announced NSX, and demand for sessions was apparently 3x-5x oversubscribed.  It seems that everyone wanted to go learn about the new capabilities -- even though VMworld is not a network event.

From my inevitable storage perspective, I couldn't be more excited about the potential.  SDN concepts applied to storage and availability can potentially remake how we think about architecture, services and operations.

SInce I've never been shy in speculating about the future, let me share what I think we may be looking forward to down the road.

What's Really Driving SDDC

Software-Defined Data Center. 

While I'm not a personal fan of the specific term, I am most definitely enthusiastic about the ideas and concepts it embodies.   Although it's a term promoted by VMware, the thinking reflects the industry at large.

Having now sat through many dozens of VMware SDDC presentation, I've realized most people prefer to describe it through a technologist's lens: control planes, data planes, key abstractions, etc.

That's sort of like describing the impact of the internet in terms of its constituent parts: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP etc.  You might miss the bigger picture of what's really going, and how it's changing all of our lives.

Sure, the various technologies involved -- individually and collectively -- are heady stuff indeed, but that's not where my real enthusiasm lies.

For me, the mind-blowing bits are the entirely new operational models that can result from the newer technology.  I think that we, as technologists, have to curb our natural tendency to study and pick apart the shiny bits, and instead invest in a serious and uncomfortable discussion about the new processes and new models.

If we don't, the technology will inevitably be used to recreate exactly what we're doing today -- only a bit better.

Considering VSAN

For us storage types, one of the more interesting announcements coming out of VMworld is VSAN (formal name "Virtual SAN"), which will now be available in beta form before too long.

Although VSAN does many of things a traditional storage array does, it's not a traditional storage array: it's a software-based storage array that uses clusters of commodity server hardware to do its work.  Storage and compute workloads run together on the exact same resource pool.

Yes, it's a v1 product in many regards (that's to be expected!) but there are some great ideas to be found in what the team has done -- worthy of deeper understanding -- as I'm sure we'll see more of these newer concepts going forward.