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Well not upto the point of writing this post and publishing it. With the lack of content being published you would not be mistaken to think I had popped it. There are excuses for the no show, over the last few months I have been busy at work, have had a holiday and also have took advantage of the early break of spring to shoot some evening golf but I’ll admit i’ve suffered from a bit of blog exhaustion.

Needless to say I will most definately be working on finishing some more material/insomnia cures, this will probably be on emergent developments in the world of cloud, datacentres and probably an acquisition commentary.

Keep your eyes peeled

I’m seeing a lot of this, many industry figures within the industry have a lot of evidence that suggests that the further adoption of x86 Server virtualisation strategy is stalling. After being involved in various original Virtualisation consolidation projects, and more recently projects that involve virtualising at quite later on in the Virtualisation trend I am definitely beginning to see this statement stand true. In this post I will explain my view on VM stall and will provide explanations based on what i’ve since the Virtualisation era began;

Cost

A large slow down of adoption of more virtualisation in Infrastructure is the cost to actually run it. Virtualisation technology has certainly increased in overall cost. Compare virtualisation software available today with original incarnations and you’ll find that most vendors have hiked the primary purchase and renewal costs of this software dramatically.  You can argue that technology available today compared to original Hypervisor variants have additional functionality or in vendor talk “Bang for Buck”. However those features are also indirectly limited by cost, due to the adoption of those technologies not exactly being a turnkey implementation in large enterprises any more. Also additional features or functions in some cases perform tasks or features that either are done by alternative methods and software to provide “just enough” value to an organisation.

VM Sprawl

Ok nothing really needs to be said here about this one its old hat, but unfortunately its Stalling Virtualisation strategy. We have been subjected to sprawl since Virtualisation strategy arose. And the reality of deploying yet more management technology to control VM sprawl with a Service Catalog is expensive, reliant on knowing your business processes, reliant on educating your business and requires large amounts of investment buy in amongst many other problems.

Nothing is left except….

Tier One based workloads, and I expect they are not as widely adopted as virtualisation vendors state. There is a certainly a stall in the uptake adoption of Large Database, Middleware and Application based servers. I’ve found in larger enterprises very few are lucky to be gaining full acceptance across there organisation to be able to host Tier One on virtualised platforms. Also important to note is the physical servers hosting Tier 1 are not exactly under utilised and obtain quite good value for money. Also remember costs of designing, transformation, testing and integration of Tier 1 apps before they can move into a Virtualised world.

Lastly another issue with reviewing the potential to migrate Tier 1 workloads onto Virtualised estate is software licensing which is next on my list of stall factors…

Software Licensing

I think this is more of an issue for the more “greedier ISV’s” used, with a prime example (amongst many) being a large database company that is used by most shops. Very few actually virtualise platforms to run the software they produce based on there rip off pricing strategy. To counteract this you either have to adjust how you architect the estate with siloed clusters which incur more cost and operational complexity OR pay through the nose, and most struggle to justify to a stakeholder that the costs outweigh technical benefits.

This situation is changing (thank god) but it is a struggle to educate stakeholders that it actually is, with vendors very rarely actually stating they are Virtualisation friendly.

Summary

Its ironic that to Virtualise it is now beyond economical reach, we have excellent technologies that allow it to be done yet we are limited by increased licensing costs from Hypervisor vendors and ISV’s who have now completely tailored there licensing plans to ensure they do not fall short by it being Virtualised.

Lets hope the stall trend does not continue, Virtualisation technology has served a good purpose to organisations for many years and it would be a shame to see the further adoption of it fail due to basic greed.

So this is my first blog post of 2011, the theme was brainstormed while I was doing yet another “first thing” in 2011 and that was Clean the car. My car has been filthy ever since the UK had the excessive unusual abundance of snow in November and December, I have not cleaned it since then for obvious reasons, today we have had a bit of sunshine and this gave me the opportunity to finally clean her off. So whats car cleaning got to do with my blog which focuses on all things in the Datacentre? Well nothing to tell you the truth, both subjects are about as far apart as I am from the gym this time of year! However the actual job of car cleaning isn’t what I am going to discuss, what I am going to discuss is the similarities that lie in the choice who who does your Car Cleaning and IT Outsourcing.

Car cleaning just like IT projects are tedious at the best of times, this job took nearly an hour of my limited spare time on a Saturday afternoon, additionally it is still 5 or so degrees here which is hardly something you want to get soaked in. With all of these thoughts arriving in my head before actually doing it I thought i’d take the car down to the local hand car wash and outsource the whole shebang to my local “cheap labourers from overseas”, hey they do only charge a Fiver after all for a first class finish? I mulled over this option in the morning, eventually deciding to insource it and do it myself. Whilst out on the drive and while I was doing it I drifted into thought on how this decision would have panned out if I did outsource it, and why I decided not too. This type of strategic thought process happens quite a lot in IT for both business aligned and financial reasons, IT decision makers make decision on Outsourcing in a similar way to i’ve done with my car cleaning activity and here are some of the comparatives and analogies that I thought about while doing it;

Down and dirty

After deciding not too outsource the car cleaning activity I had to obviously use my own resources (Capex) in the garage to clean her up, the first requirement was the shampoo and water, then of course there was the bucket, all items I pay for out of my own pocket. Had i’d outsourced this, all of this cost would have been divulged in my no questions asked £5, the outsourcer would have provided all of the materials and divulged the cost, however How would I have known they were using as good a mitt as I use at home, or how would I have known they were even using a “good” grade shampoo? they could have been using fairy liquid for all I know! All questions or sometimes questions that never get raised when evaluating IT outsourcing/Cloud.

Man Power

Resourcing and project delivery was a no brainer, there is no way that just me alone could have washed and buffed off the car in as much time as a hand car wash would, my local (like most I assume) have a large volume of “cheap” labourers, where as me in my Internal operation had to unfortunately plan the day more effectively. I did of course only wash and buff off, a task that 8 year olds can do, if I were to do my usual summer routine of Wash>Buff>Claybar>Wax then this would have been a bit different, the rates i’d pay someone to do a “specialist” job like this would involve I expect a lot more time and of course money. Fact is this task was one that I didn’t need to kneejerk to do, I wasn’t rushing about trying to finish it before it got dark, it was a task that had to be done but was done in an allotted low priority slot on my day off. Again the same could be compared to how IT outsourcing deals or bespoke outsourcing with SI’s for installs get commissioned, some are done due a specific immediate need, some get planned months if not years ahead.

Service delivery quality

Quality of work today for me was probably a “must try harder” result, mainly as I know that on this car cleaning project initiative the grime and dirt will appear the next time I go out, and for me to do the full job I usually do was not something me as the business stakeholder would get large amounts of value from (i.e. looks from good looking women . I could however on the other side have outsourced this task, but in reality would I have got the same desired result my stakeholders expected? Would the women really be that worried about looking at a grubby old banger like mine in this weather? So based on the decision weigh up, I thought i’d save a little cost and do it myself and apply a little less attention to detail due to me being able to monitor the volume of effort going into the actual wash. As with a lot of IT contracts, and more especially within emergent cloud this would have been a bit difficult. Try tailoring an IaaS instance on any well known cloud services that will suit your need exactly, in comparison the car cleaners have a service at a cost that they stick too, I couldn’t say “do it for £3.50 guv but put in 75% less effort in, they have a team of guys that provide a service and pride themselves on it.

Horses for Courses

So after an hour of semi hard graft the car was finished and I was in short term monetry terms I was under budget and provided a service to my to my stakeholders that will be satisfactory. Had I outsourced I’d be sitting here with £5 less to spend on something else such as a beer or Fish and Chips for dinner to then still find that in Two weeks time I’d have the same dirty car with an unhappy Five pound less stakeholder.

Summary

To summarize this post, IT Outsourcing of either services or project implementation activity has its place and is appropriate at certain times and for certain activity within your business, Outsourcing dosn’t provide you with the silver bullet for every business requirement, however if you use the services strategically within your business it can pay dividends, do it willy nilly and you run the risk like I did of running the risk of your car being cleaned with what could be duff materials of no benefit to my paint work in years to come, and also having no tailored control over what work gets done for your money, both of course meaning you get very little pay back and satisfaction

I thought I would provide some short and sharp predictions for what I think 2011 will bring (or fail) to bring;

Cloud confusion….still

Cloud confusion will still be strife with a complete lack of true understanding within most organisations of what the cloud really is and can achieve. Expect the beloved vendors to still use Cloud next year as the next big opportunity to not repeat previous mistakes in the Client/Server world. Ones thing for sure Vendors in question will continue to bet their future strategy on Cloud and they will dam as hell send us as much garbage via any form of media possible to ensure that this strategy doesn’t fail.

I expect that even more fancy web portals, API’s and technologies will grow within vendor cloud portfolio offerings and I predict (don’t laugh) we will see more vendors adopting standards within cloud offerings such as CDMI and OVF, however I do not expect this to ramp up to be completely black and white, with vendors still trying to ensure they win the hearts and minds of the consumer with product offerings before putting the consumers flexibility and interoperability first.

Hybrid cloud approaches will be more heavily utilised within 2011, I see potential adoption of hosting Test/Dev in the cloud and outsourcing your Workflow engine to a third party becoming quite popular for organisations that suffer from having Production Virtualisation environments within the datacentre yet lack of budget or flexibility to use this infrastructure for hosting Test/Dev VM’s.

Last but not least expect to see some vendors pushing portfolio offerings less directly and more via the Cloud providers they are in bed with. We’ve seen this with Email, we’ll see it further with PaaS/SasS offerings providing CRM, BI and other business application services (in enterprises not SMB’s).

Storage

Wall Street was busy in 2010 with a massive amount of consolidation and acquisition by the big fish, we saw the bidding wars and the surprise tactic purchases for the more innovative smaller fish within the world of data storage. However a prediction is that I doubt we’ll see much change here in 2011, I expect the acquisitions are merely to improve existing portfolio offerings and gain more customers. We may see some of that innovation be integrated into portfolio offerings but I expect this will be to merely to be at a level Par (No pun intended) with the 100 Pound gorilla.

2010 was a year for new optimisation technology offerings within vendor portfolios, top ones being Sub lun tiering and read cache modules. 2011 I predict and hope will bring more innovation to intelligent data placement. One hope is that we see toolsets supporting orchestration/workflow capability to align any sub lun policy to a businesses requirement and logic such as SLA and performance metric, all of course something that we do today but is all done pretty much under a headless chicken project methodology.

Virtualisation

Expect to see focus from Virtualisation companies being more within application delivery technologies, and this prediction is relevant to even traditional server virtualisation companies. There will no doubt be a big big push to get customers out to using SaaS offerings whether its vendors core product or its a product they resell to hosting/cloud companies.

This shift to SaaS delivery no doubt provides much better opportunity for vendors to make up for the licensing mistakes made on existing portfolio offerings, it also provides the opportunity to sell more indirect cloud offerings/services. My view is that the vendors whom have developed and sold application delivery technologies will continue to be dominant but at the later end of next year new emergent entrants to the app delivery space will gain traction with Cloud delivered solutions.

Expect the Hypervisor and all of its offered bells and whistle to be more or less abstracted completely, the main focus will be on technology offerings capable of the consumer applying business logic. We have seen this already with product releases from market leading virtualisation companies and we will see probably much more push in 2011 with this for the same reasons as they will push SaaS as the defacto application delivery model, which is to either sell the product better or sell products via hosting/cloud companies indirectly that know how to do it successfully.

Networking

Not a hot topic for me but I predict converged networking will still be deployed for the majority, this is a technology that requires changes in IT Efficiency and IT structure which is not something that can be introduced into and IT strategy overnight. FcOE will become “more” popular within the datacentre but I wouldn’t expect it to replace existing storage protocols purely due to cost and nested investment facts of life.

I expect 2011 will be the start of more software driven functionality, what I mean by this is similar to what we see within the world of server virtualisation and that is a move to encapsulating the underlying hardware and concentrating more on intelligent software capable of excepting business logic. This has been seen with Unified platforms in 2010 but I expect that more portfolio offerings will begin to advance on this.

Something new?

I’d hope so but wouldn’t want to predict the unlikely, 2011 is going to be a recovery year for vendors, they will want to play it safe in 2011 to gain any lost revenue over 2009/10. Expect to see obvious innovation from big corps to come from acquisition and not in house R&D, however I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that. I’d like to see something new evolve, we’ve had server virtualisation evolve but i’d really like to see technology with a wow factor, its been far too long a year to be just hearing about packaged “building block” or Fancy web portals.

Summary

I’ve given a few prediction and thoughts as 2010 comes to a close, hopefully it was short and sweet enough. Some of these are more my hopes that I would like to see, i’ve got a lot more I could add but have tried to keep this concise and to the point.

At the moment I am doing a lot of investigation into the IT Self service portal in the internally on premise scenario. Before you read this post though Mr salesman don’t get too excited and start licking your lips, the reality is I think that there is still a large amount of problems that exist in orchestration and work flow tools when put into a world of how IT does things today. It takes more than a few fancy bits of Web page and drop downs to convince me that existing tool sets and methodologies can provide a business with a completely self efficient Infrastructure, and also to convince me that I can leave the whole design and planning and go pioneer someplace else in my organisation.

When it comes to fulfilling the Virtual Machine request with a SSP (Self Service Portal) the available marketplace solutions are all capable of delivering this functionality, link some code to use an API, build some VM templates and off you go. However something that I currently fail to see is the detail within the devil (yes I did mean to type that, that way round within the way orchestration portals deal with how the deployment of storage for that VM occurs, how you govern the amount of space that user can have or request, how you ensure your storage is below threshold and many more day to day operational tasks.

It’s all so cheap!

With Server CPU and RAM (supposedly) being so dam cheap, most vendors building tools that support automated self service tools, are under an illusion that because of this anyone that wants a server can have one, however when it comes to virtualised environments and to the spinning rust that most likely stores a VM this is still not the case. Storage is an expensive beast and due to this it needs to be more tightly controlled, if it isn’t you run in to all manor of issue in providing performant services to your business.

My beef with Orchestration tools is that they seem to give the requestor of that service no real understanding of whats happening behind the fancy web portal, take a App/Database set of VM’s for example, a project may well request a VM for this that needs a certain volume of RAM, CPU and then the all important Storage config comes up, its not easy as far as I’ve established ensuring that the storage allocation in such an example would be suitable to meeting the businesses expectation. How do you ensure that the disk subsystem is configured for the request to meet the dedicated IOP’s? How do you ensure that its at the most appropriate RAID/Media type? the fact is the requester won’t. Remember, that VM goes into a big storage array which has a 101 other VM’s running on it, how does the request for a new service via an SSP ensure that these are not effected?

Land of confusion

Maybe i’m missing the point about the purpose and protocol for an SSP, maybe its still something that needs someone with architectural knowledge to be performing the service requests via the portal on behalf of that business requirement? Maybe i’m thinking that “da cloud” really isn’t as self sufficient via a SSP as the industry marketing states it is?

SSP’s will no doubt become more and more prevalent within businesses, we have enough virtualisation and other Infrastructure technology that supports this now to not have the excuse not too, I’m convinced that SSP is definitely the most future proofed way of ensuring that you reduce the large amounts of time lost due to red tape, and I’m convinced that if approached properly, the SSP will reduce significant cost.

SSP’s in an on premise hosted infrastructure certainly do offer slightly more “hands off” requirements, the reality is though even with the HW resources that grow on trees such as the physical server hardware it will always I expect need someone to be ensuring that environment is completely capable of delivering the workloads and any future workloads.

Summary

After dipping my toe in the world of orchestration and work flow activity It does appear to me that there is still a large amount of change that needs to occur before tools can do the job they state they can, it will come in time.

My hope is that enhancements will arrive (cheaply) that can negate the need to require as much attention to detail when it comes to storage provisioning, however until then I feel that SSP’s will more than likely be the general gatekeeper for wild cat development environments and will merely be a shopping window to advertise the price of something (usually unaffordable) when it comes to deployment of end to end requirements.