I wrote not long ago about the various disciplines that data center operations teams will need to work through to address those cloud-computing values you often hear hyped by people like me.
In that post, I noted that many organizations had gained an understanding of how server virtualization could be used to abstract software concepts, thus managing them distinctly from the underlying hardware. I also noted, however, that few organizations had made the decision to systematically automate that management.
Channel-V tonight pointed me to an interview by Virtualization Review's Keith Ward of Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's senior director of product marketing. In the interview, Balkansky discusses the upcoming VDC-OS product release, and what it means to the next generation of data centers. He starts with a very familiar theme:
"Henry Ford introduced automation to the manufacturing world," Balkansky says.
"We're transitioning from swinging hammers to pushing buttons," he continues. "The focus becomes on what needs to happen, not spending the majority of your time executing it and making it happen. Ford introduced speed and efficiency and predictability in the (manufacturing) process." Those same elements will characterize VDC-OS, he says.
Balkansky goes on to point out that the very core of the system administrator role will change as a result, an argument that I've been making for some time. Rather than focusing on reactive, tactical operations, the system administrator of the future will "specify the service levels the application requires: availability, security, scalability."
... Read moreIn a recent post titled "Cloud maturity models don't make sense," Roger Smith of InformationWeek's Analytics Weblog takes umbrage to my recent "A maturity model for cloud computing" post. In Roger's post, he quotes my model and the "cloud adoption model" of Jake Sorofman, and then goes on to use a post by Ron Schmelzer--in which Ron debunks an earlier SOA maturity model--to express a strong objection to any cloud maturity model.
Just for review, here is the graphic from my post:
(Credit: James Urquhart)Another way to look at the model is this: is it possible to have an open cloud market not formed from competing compute utilities, themselves profiting from the efficiencies of automating the management of abstract components in an optimized--or consolidated--physical infrastructure?
Unfortunately, I think Roger completely misunderstood the tenor and theme of the post. This core argument from his post I think best illustrates the problem:
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One of the really difficult aspects of cloud computing for most established IT organizations is the fact that the move to clouds, even private clouds, is not a simple, intuitive one. Replacing the bulk of both technology and process with a focus on capacity as a service--an automated, self-administered service--results in many organizations "experimenting" with the cloud, but few pushing any barriers. To make matters worse, we are in that wonderful "discovery" phase of a technology, where there are few if any guides to how to do it right, with minimal risk, and those that do exist are generally personal opinions, not "burned in" recipes for success.
This post does not pretend to be such a recipe. However, over the course of the last several months, culminating in some great conversations with some really smart people the last few weeks, I've come to realize that there is a basic maturity model for moving from data center consolidation architectures to true open market cloud architectures.
Remember maturity models? They've been around for some time, but a couple of years ago there was a small burst of creativity among system integrators and analysts alike, and maturity models were defined for a variety of IT subjects, ranging from business processes to technology architectures, such as SOA. The basic idea was to lay out some milestones, or even "gateways", to be achieved by IT as they worked towards achieving some idealized computing or process goal.
To that end, below is a simple five phase maturity model that I and others believe describes the stages of evolution for an enterprise data center trying to achieve cloud Nirvana:
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