Virtualization

How a private cloud goes beyond virtualization management

At first blush, private clouds can look a lot like virtualization. But first looks can be deceiving. While it's certainly true that we see virtualization management products extended--for example, with self-service portals--in ways that make them look superficially like clouds, we're really talking about different categories of software.

There are two ways to think about these differences. The first is in terms of different mindsets and approaches to IT operations. The other is to consider specific features and capabilities.

Consider the "big picture" aspect first. Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president of enterprise system management software, … Read more

The cloud backlash

There's no doubt that the recent "partial failure" of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform is giving enterprises, service providers, and developers pause--and will continue to do so for months to come. Amazon called the outage "partial" and a "degradation," but it was a very big deal. A significant part of Amazon's flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was offline for a day, as were the related EBS (Elastic Block Store) and RDS (Relational Database Service) offerings. The failure affected only the northern Virginia data center ("US-East"), and the majority … Read more

Assembling the IT emergency kit

Much of the world is consumed watching the coverage of the enormous disaster that recently struck Japan. As if a massive earthquake and subsequent major tsunami didn't cause enough death and destruction, they unleashed a cascade of failures that led to serious nuclear power plant accidents that have yet to be contained, and that threaten lives and indeed the inhabitability of an entire area of Japan. It's simply horrific.

We humans think that we're in control of, well, everything. We have plans and lists and goals and policies and fallback positions. Then something like this comes along … Read more

Living in a VM world

The big industry event about virtualization is VMworld, usually held in late Summer / early Fall. You don't have to wait for VMware's conference, however, to find yourself in VM World. We now live in it, every day.

It's really quite amazing how quickly virtualization has swept through, and become ensconced in, IT. Data centers have--for decades--been famously conservative when it comes to introducing changes that might threaten to disrupt production applications. For years, whenever we'd ask operationally focused IT managers about introducing new control software--for workload management, service provisioning, automated orchestration, and so on--we always heard … Read more

Avoiding the cost of entanglement

Modern IT is very focused on economics. We talk endlessly about cost. We debate capital costs vs. operational costs--CAPEX vs. OPEX, in the lingo. We look at Total Cost of Operations (TCO) and we try to calculate our projects' Return On Investment (ROI). But even with all of these economic metrics, we miss an enormous source of costs: Our long-term entanglement with the products, technologies, and approaches we choose.

Long ago, we had a bright idea. "We could represent the year portion of dates with just two digits--that would save space!" We happily did that for a few … Read more

If virtual desktops great, why not used more?

Virtualization analyst Brian Madden asks an excellent question:

If VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is so great, then why aren't you using it?

It's a really good question, isn't it? Brian observes that however encouraged we are by the progress VDI has made, and however enthused we may be about extending the wins of server virtualization over into the desktop realm, we, personally, are not using desktop virtualization. You don't see analysts and developers doing so. And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse--the people selling VDI, for goodness' sake!--use traditional &… Read more

How evolution begat the cloud revolution

Asking why cloud computing is happening today is something of a tautology. That's because an inclusive definition of cloud computing essentially equates it with a broad swath of the major advances happening in how IT is operated and delivered today.

Pervasive virtualization, fast application and service provisioning, elastic response to load changes, low-touch management, network-centric access, and the ability to move workloads from one location to another are all hallmarks of cloud computing. In other words, cloud computing is more of a shorthand for the "interesting stuff going on in IT" than it is a specific technology … Read more

Failure is an option

I recently discussed techniques for reviewing projects to improve their likelihood of success. Underlying this is the reality that projects do fail often, at a greater rate than we'd like to admit.

Some failures are spectacular. After spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of years, nothing ever really works. The entire investment of time, money, energy, effort, and focus has to be completely written off. Those are the legends. The laughing stocks.

But it's a mistake to conflate failures and catastrophes. Most failures are mundane and much smaller scale. They result from changing … Read more

Thin client computing grows up

I've been following the evolution of client-side computing off and on for over 20 years. Remember ASCII terminals? Green screens? Beehives? X terminals? If you do, they're most likely dimming memories.

The history of client side computing is filled with efforts to shift the balance of power between the server (ne host) and the client device. Which side is responsible for what, and how the sides communicate with each other, determine the cost, control, security, flexibility, and richness of the result. Some years it's "do everything meaningful on the server." Others, "do most work … Read more

Cloud-computing predictions for 2011

2011 will be the Year of the X. Next year, Technology Y will kill Technology Z. Something will "die."

These sorts of predictions are commonplace as we approach the end of the year. They have a satisfying finality to them. They're dramatic. They're also, with few exceptions, rarely correct--certainly not in any literal sense.

That's because IT rarely advances in a way that invokes mass extinctions and spontaneous generation. Rather it's a more evolutionary process. There's lots of change but even when rapid the new stuff often doesn't displace the old--and overnight replacements are rare indeed. For example, proclamations about the death of Bluetooth were wildly premature even though that technology didn't live up to early promises.

This is especially true of cloud computing, given that it refers as much to the way the industry is moving to implement IT as the technology it uses to do so. Will those changes lead to broad shifts in where and how computing is done? Certainly, that's what makes cloud computing of so much interest after all. But we're mostly talking about transitions rather than sharp inflection points.

Within that context though, cloud computing is a rapidly developing set of trends that's generating lots of interest and discussion. And those discussions suggest to me some things that are going to be qualitatively different next year compared to this past one and some that will remain elusive.

Less focus on definitions (and dare we say hype?). If we were to do a survey of presentations, articles, and analyst research reports throughout this past year, we'd find that many of them spent a lot of time defining and categorizing cloud computing. I myself wrote a Cloud 101 white paper earlier this year. This sort of content may be old hat to the analysts and vendors who have been writing about or implementing cloud strategies over the past few years. But, as I've discovered to only partial surprise, themes that some of us consider well-worn are still fresh to many mainstream audiences. That said, in 2011, we can collectively start to move on from talking about the big picture while remembering that the future doesn't happen everywhere at the same time.… Read more