Well what a year it has been, looking forward to 2012, Last year I posted some 2011 predictions, after rereading them back, it certainly was a slow year with the economy stalling any massive growth but some of them were near enough correct.

So onto the next year in 2012, for me this is a year of change from the very off. In January 2012 I start a at a new company in there Architecture team. This was a tough decision to make, but it was time to move on to pastures new I felt, I have the crave for new challenges and hurdles to jump, and lastly if I want to reach my eventual goals and aspirations I need to broaden my experience in a different industry and diversify.

As for the industry outlook in 2012, here are some small potential predictions and scenarios that may arise in a few areas of datacentre related infrastructure and technologies;

Infrastructure technologies

When it comes to Storage we’ve got a hard disk crisis, hard disk prices have increased by 10-15% due to natural disasters in the far east, and with the increase in cost most likely being fronted by the customer, this may mean the following scenarios arise;

• Price premium of new disks may mean it is actually more cost effective utilising tiered storage archiving technologies. This quest means the the old school on-premise archiving and optimisation toolsets in the marketplace will get reprieve for another year in what is seen as a dying marketplace,
• Price increases due to disk cost increase will have a knock on of a slowdown on new array procurement. (Or maybe pigs might fly and the markup on implementation and design of arrays may be reduced to factor in the increased pricing of disk),
• Dependent on chosen vendor, the “Big data” strategy in organisations will slowdown and be potentially put on hold,

Lots to look out for in the area of Virtualisation, we will see more push from the alternative Hypervisor vendors arise, this may only be exploratory for larger committed Vmware shops but 2012 will mark the beginning of new horizons at least,

• Microsoft finally get a bigger foot in the door over VMware, it is only a matter of time before cost becomes the biggest driver for change to alternative “Just enough” hypervisors,
• Adoption of alternative hypervisors such as KVM may well become more realistic due to 2011 price increases from VMware,
• VMware finally release a mobile hypervisor platform, whether this will be any good only time can tell, but i’d say in 2012 this will arise,

Onto the desktop that has apparently been dead for the last period of 2012, well will it be in 2012? I doubt it very much but expect to see some of the following;

• A Marketing/PR ambush over the course of the year when Microsoft release early versions ofWindows 8. It will certainly stir the pot that was filled in 2011 thats for sure with the likes of Apple and google pushing for market share.
• As with any Microsoft implementation or upgrade, Windows shops wake up from the hangover of Windows 7 implementations wondering “why did I do that” when Windows 8 is about. W8 has a bit more too it, certainly with the next gen Metro apps, was all that investment in Windows 7 upgrades really worth it?

Cloud

In the area of IaaS we will certainly see more and more uptake of cloud based service delivery in organisations, this will be driven more by board level mandates to save cost (as per usual), and will also be driven by the desire to implement the same levels of service that public cloud offerings are already providing. This will mean;

• More feasibility studies on the use of open source IaaS alternatives such as Joyent, Opennebula and Openstack,
• Self service increases in adoption with more and more organisations wanting IT to be run as a business.

And on a lighter note

• Cloud will fail (again),
• A Storagebeers might actually happen in full force,
• There will be a surplus of Thin clients, monitors, printers and dodgy low end servers available for purchase from the London 2012 olympic committee,

That’s all folks

Whilst driving home I listened to a small amount of an interview on Radio 4 with Film producer Martin Scorsese.

Discussing his new film which is in full 3D, he discussed the use of 3D and what fascinated him about the technology, examples were made to childhood in an era of Black and White screenplay he saw a moving image that appeared as 3D and create this in a screen play. It gripped him so much he wanted to change the way films were made and so at nearly 70 he has created in a new breed generation of 3D film, a 3D film likely to be a box office hit. Lastly when discussing emergence of 3D he said that history has shown that the trends of adding Colour to films was what viewers demanded and that it would be the norm in years to come, so based on this the industry changed and adapted.

This got me thinking about me and my future (selfishly), I like most and people like yourselves who read my blog should realise in the IT Industry we work in an ever evolving world of technology that in order to benefit and provide value to your organisation requires vision, persistence and embrace to change. If you fail to embrace new change and trends and you are not prepared, it is safe to say you may well be limiting yourself a successful future and more importantly you may limit potential benefits gained by your business through lack of embrace to change..

Remember, there is a new generation of computing arriving in the shape and form of cloud computing. Forget the marketing campaigns on cloud, forget the fancy toolsets used to provide or run a cloud, this is a generation of computing that as with film did when moving from Black and White production to Colour will be used by a generation who really don’t care about whats running underneath or in fact where it is located. What they will however care if it’s a service which doesn’t meet the same criteria and de-facto standard as competition.

So to quickly summarise embrace the change and move forward, it will be the best thing you can do to enable you to have the vision on the trend that may well ever replace cloud computing in many years to come.

Seeing as Microsoft have just hedged there future on cloud with Windows 8 announcements I thought I would add some context into the blogosphere on the subject.

Consumer cloud wars have officially begun, and with the Windows 8 release, the middle aged balding guy (sorry if your bald) has now gone out and finally bought a new mid life crisis Harley Davidson. According to the Redmond posee, Windows 8 apparently is “Windows re imagined” and when having a sneak peak myself I instantly see there is definately no lack of focus on end user experience.

Microsoft were beginning to lag with Windows, and this includes more recent releases of Windows 7. To me Windows 7 has been nothing more than Churna-gramming, with at best minimal side benefits to deploying it across an organisation. W7 was Microsoft caught between a rock and a hard place, it certainly was designed I imagine at least Two years before competition and Cloud Computing was beginning to grow in adoption, but with Windows 8, my initial impression from what I have been exposed too from the cheesy marketing pitches and product demos from MS Build 2011 are leading me to believe that this Windows release could well be the entrance for Windows into both developer and consumer cloud wars.

So why is this now the case with Windows 8? Most of what I have seen and read about the Windows 8 buzz are geek marketing pitches aimed at devops, with this being to be honest only the attempt to lay kernels for the next 12 Months. However from the demonstrations of basic UI and also based on the complete rewrite of application framework, I am beginning to think Microsoft has finally started to take note about the design rules needed to architect a cloud experience, and more importantly from an R&D perspective I think they are slowly realising there are now some harsh rules about design and architecture principles to support the modern day consumer of your product. So although you may have heard some of the below factors in many iterations before, across many other news and websites, I will iterate them in my own commentary;

Designing for a tablet and not a PC

Even though anyone with an Ipad may think the Tablet and touch devices are brand new form factor, it isn’t, they have been around in various incarnations for many years. However the difference then was that were designed in a a Frankenstein affair with the end user experience being dictated by functionality within a a legacy OS that was designed for use with a keyboard and mouse. Tablets of today such as the ever popular Ipad have had the end user experience dictated through the end user experience i.e. Touch, App store, instant on etc. Add into this fold the popularity of Android and the even larger device coverage and I believe Microsoft have realised that they have to up there game and say “They were a PC” and are now “Also a tablet” and provide to end users a tablet experience and not a PC one.

Cloud user presence

It is probably fair to say that in this arena Microsoft has taken a gigantic leap of faith with the all new Windows metro interface. Metro has the capability to project Microsoft away from the tarnished legacy of the point and click user experience from which we have all known (and hated) for the last ten years in the PC/Server architecture era to next gen Cloud. From what I have seen, Metro focusses more on presenting what is relevant to you all through a single personalised pain of glass portal from which the end user obtains instant visibility through relevant apps and widgets.

I see greater scope in this, and I expect we will see an ecosystem of hardware devices which utilise this to customise the view further, one potential scenario I could see is that you eventually are provided with a customised and relevant view based upon the relevant time/date or season even, and to boot you could even go as far as saying it will decide what applications and cloud services you may want to utilise, the possibilities (if embraced) are immense.

Instant on/off

Leading on from the tablet and cloud presence design characteristics from which Windows 8 appears to follow, it is useless doing this unless the experience is delivered to work within seconds of requests or devices being initiated. With Android and Apple app store its clear that the consumer wants to access to downloaded applications the minute they finish downloading. In previous incarnations of Windows as Microsoft users will know, the OS has rarely been able to deliver on this consumer demand, with this in part being due to the legacy underlying architecture of both Win32 and Windows services. Introduction of Windows Metro applications means even Microsoft are now focused less on how the “sysinternals” of apps and services are running and more on focus of presentation of the running applications, again which is a big step for Microsoft who I expect have some exceptionally tired development teams who are transforming this architecture.

Devices matter

Microsoft have finally realised that they can use there core strength of designing an OS that can be supported on multitudes of devices. Microsoft have been the kings on the PC device at doing this and in the tablet/mobile world they have had to respond with the popularity of Android. I see Windows 8 being probably an OS if bought on a tablet to be sunk into the cost of the device in the same way Apple do this on MacOSX. Microsoft mobile 7 has not been great on uptake, however with Windows 8, this may provide Microsoft if they rub the vendors up the correct way with a means to gain more OEM agreements. 

Consumer meet Enterprise

When you add all of my above factors up (and also the fact that you have to go and work for a living to pay for fancy tablets and OS’s) you will begin to now see ever an even larger push by consumers to support and provide the same levels of functionality that are provided by functions in Windows 8 in there day to day job. If IT in your organisation isn’t able to transform legacy IT within at least 2-3 years to meet this demand then you are going to certainly struggle. As most of Enterprise IT in organisations are finding out, the consumer is finding out about cloud a lot faster than the enterprises are without even knowing it, which is applying increasing pressure on Infrastructure, applications and the governance processes that underpin those services. Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 8 will now mean a tried and trusted household name has recognition just as Apple and Android have had with the consumer and will have the potential to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Windows 8.

You will probably have seen from the content of my blog posts that my view of IT over the last Ten or so years ago has been pretty blinkered. Anything within my daily role has been focused on the world of proprietary solutions and what they either do or fail to do. Over the last two or three years this has certainly changed for me, with my focus turning to what Open source projects are capable of providing to an enterprise.

When it comes to Open Source projects, Instead of learning about the intriquete technical nuts and bolts of how they work, I have focussed more on how the API, Interfaces i.e. REST, and the all round general ecosystem, and lastly what value and benefits that opensource provides to a business, and this is where my post dovetails into the relationship between this and my post title.

It appears that with IaaS solutions there is a much larger wave of projects based upon an open sourced architecture. More importantly the open source alternatives to proprietary IaaS cloud (or supposed cloud) options in the start of the Cloud computing era are extremely more ubiquitous and are becoming ever more pervasive with the more uptake of cloud. Cloud Computing is now much more different than previous computing eras when it comes down to available technological choice, which yes for the likes of you and me can become an issue when it comes to governance and control, however this provides IT with much better enablers and at a much better price point.

So is opensource going to be a better selected platform for IaaS strategy or will it still have the same uptake as experienced in Server/Client architectures? Here are some of the reasons why I think it may end up being more dominant in most larger enterprises.

Opensource and open standards have several key benefits for a cloud computing world and here are a few which I think make this statement stand true.

Scalability

Functionality wise, in order to deliver reliable performant solutions to meet the usually extremely rediculous functional requirements, the technology solution must be able to scale and be readily available to devops. Proprietary solutions can scale, however when you delve into a Proprietary technology architecture it may well be operating on an underlying operating system or service which is proprietary and inherently subject to scalability limits. This underlying dependancy creates a vicious circle of the development cycles being based upon customer volumes, i.e. if companies do not invest in a proprietary product they cannot increase R&D costs.

Accesibility

Open source has always been everywhere and readily available, however I’ve just never known it. What I have certainly realised is that with cloud the use of open source is much much more larger. Look at solutions such as EC2, Openstack and OpenNebula and this is certain enough evidence to suggest that there is a heavy accessible available amount of community and resource to tap into. And of course each of the above aforementioned have a plethora of system integrators or Consultants that have external available skill (at a price) that can work on integration and deployment of such technologies into your existing architecture.

Cost

Well this is an obvious one, however don’t think that open source projects such as Openstack or Opennebula are all completely devoid of cost, the open source model has a indirect cost associated with the integration and design of whatever solution you want to implement. This cost however in the financial budgeting world today is much more preferred by projects or programmes that build cloud solutions. Additionally the people factor cost of open source is far more preferred I feel on budget sheets than a lengthy 3-5 Year proprietary software license cost, with this cost being susceptible to additional increases and reductions in level of service OR even death of a product of that all important investment that was set to deliver what you originally asked for.

Agility

Open source is much more agile and responsive to architecture change in both functional requirement and in response to evolving changes and trends in the IT industry. With a much larger development community and not the equivalent of how a proprietary SW lifecycle operates, with a shop of paid developers this means that in response to general changes to IT trend the opensource world can much more easily adapt.

Resourcing

In regards to resourcing for support and maintenance of an open source model this was where the open source model in Client/Server architectures failed to succeed in uptake within larger enterprises. With most larger enterprises now outsourcing IT operation, the benefits of this include having a much larger footprint of employed outsourcers who have cheaper opensource skillbase.

Summary

By no means am I inferring that proprietary is going to falter in the next 5-10 years, organisations will always want to invest in technology which has the insurance of a solution that is “known” to function to a certain degree and level. Proprietary solutions will feed off of a IaaS ecosystem in some shape or form, and these will provide certainly what an organisation initially wants and also to be able to deploy known entities into an Architecture.

Opensource has the charateristics to be able to meet all of the demands that are imposed by the end consumer of the services whether this be a private enterprise or a public consumer based services. This provides interesting alternatives to the architect when decisions are made upon the roadmap and direction of where they will want to align there future IT strategy towards, and at the end of the day if Opensource fails to deliver there will always be the proprietary alternative to invest in to with a more direct throat to choke.

I am going to talk a bit about public cloud. One of the main benefits that Public cloud services inherently have, is the ability to utilise the extreme volumes of infrastructure in order to reactively burst and support additional workload, this is more commonly known as Cloud bursting. Cloud bursting is only really made achievable by the economies of scale of public cloud services, with services having coverage across multiple datacentres all geographically located.

When it comes to Public cloud burst I have always been a bit skeptical on embracing the functionality, and this is mainly due to me naturally always being conscious of efficiency within any architectural design and strategy. In ye olden days, Cloud bursting is/was rarely achievable in any other infrastructure architectural model such as private datacentres, primarily due to the requirement to have infrastructure dormant on standby ready to service request (incuring excessive cost) and in order to facilitate a burst in workload would require upfront over provisioning of resource.

A question I ask myself (and readers might), is why does public cloud bursting make this any different? Cloud computing is based upon an operational cost however infrastructure still has to remain dormant (and be paid for indirectly) in order to be able to facilitate both your companies own burst strategy and the burst demand of the 101 other customers that you share services with, so is this really as efficient as older strategies of just provisioning hardware to prepare for a burst?

Lastly putting the practical issues of cloud bursting a side and looking back on the mistakes of the past, when you look at issues such as VM Sprawl and dreaded upfront server over provisioning, this could suggest that cloud bursting will be end up being no different. Bursted capacity will need to shrink down to its original non peak size in order to remain cost effective, so do you think developers are actually considering this in any application design and strategy? Or is cloud burst just the next big problem along with VM sprawl etc that will plague IT?

Lastly there is also the risk this might even get worse with another common old problem, many non IT business units are potentially being sold SaaS/PaaS based cloud solutions that are marketed and pitched to be able to “burst”, and with no careful control education and wisdom being provided to the business on the potential issues that this might end up turning into based upon previous incarnations of problem. 

This wasn’t an insightful post you may say, however I just thought i’d provide you with a shade of reality that might just not be something you’ve yet to consider when exploring public cloud.