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The Hitchhikers Guide to Cloud

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

I have just started using a service called Evernote to try and allow me to keep my notes and thoughts organized across all moments of inspiration, brainstorming and discussions with others whenever or wherever they occur.  So far it looks to be a promising solution.  Evernote is essentially providing me with cloud based storage with their particular access paradigm on top of it.  They have clients for all manner of OS and device as well as a web client.  I can access my Evernotes pervasively, wherever I am, and from whatever technology mechanism I have at hand.  This is one of the promises of the cloud and they fulfill this promise.

This however, is not the ultimate promise of the cloud.  Ultimately I would like to be able to access my Evernotes and any other data or data management/manipulation services from the cloud as a single federated source of information and information processors/transformers.  Aside from the fact that there are no standard cloud information sharing protocols or data manipulation standards being used by all service providers, one of the key problems is the issue of federation and trust.  We’ve got passport, openID, and other technologies for a federated identity management solution, but the adoption of these technologies seems to be absent in many of today’s cloud offerings.  I use a few different cloud services now, and I have a different userid for all of them.  Even if they provided a means for me to link their services with one another, I would still have to manage a different identity across services.

This same federated/aggregated service mashup challenge exists in the systems and server monitoring space.  With services moving to the cloud, multiple datacenters and 3rd party IT interfaces, you need a management and monitoring tool that can manage these components locally, but still be able to aggregate them into a global view with the flexibility to mash them together into higher order views that take the local information and, through a little magic, allow you to create global knowledge. 

For Example, in up.time we have had our local monitoring instance – or what we call and LDC instance - and our global console – or EMS -  deployed in a large distributed enterprise to allow customers to extend basic monitoring from  a local monitoring tool into an enterprise service delivery knowledge platform. This provides you with critical information on your infrastructure, as well as knowledge about how those services are delivered across your business, with the explicit understanding of the business impact of those services.  When we have silos of valuable information, combining them together turns that information into actionable knowledge.

The cloud is allowing us to create highly accessible and pervasive silos of very valuable information.  However, no matter how much information you have, it’s only valuable when we can convert that information into knowledge.  The potential for the cloud as a future knowledge platform, with the appropriate federation between services and between users of those services, is a great opportunity enabled by technology of the 21st century.  It has the potential to fundamentally change how we do things. 

When speaking of knowledge, “Tacitness generally describes the extent to which knowledge is not codifiable (Galunic and Rodan, 1998). Tacit knowledge is personal, context specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate whereas explicit or codifable knowledge is transmittable in formal and systematic language (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Furthermore, intangibles like specific knowledge is expensive to transfer across because it cannot be easily aggregated meaningfully (Hayek, 1945).” – (Theory of the firm, Bach Seung, Bai – 2004)”

We are filling the cloud with an unimaginable amount of tacit knowledge about anything and everything imaginable at an astronomical rate.  Combined with the AI technologies already available to mine, link and understand this data, we will be able to take these islands of knowledge from across the cloud and leverage it into a global knowledge platform with a tacit knowledge breadth that covers virtually everything.  We will be able to access this ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy‘ from anywhere at any time, and it will always be up to date, with literally hundreds of millions of people updating this knowledge base in real time.

(I realize there are several major challenges to the earthly H2G2 related to the information processing, but look at where we are today already, and in a very short period of time, it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’)

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, monitoring, Systems Management, Uncategorized, uptime | No Comments »

2010 The year of cloud enabled convergence

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

This is my thesis for today’s post: Geek toys are important for the future of digital convergence.

2010 will be a year where we will obviously see unprecedented leaps in the availability of geek toys. As you are all aware, CES is happening and a few well timed launches are expected.  The general themes are extremely clear, thanks to a few “leaks” to the press this year.  Consumers are expecting a huge explosion of  devices in ‘tablet form’ as well as a dollop of mobile computing devices based on the Android mobile application ecosystem.  In essence we are all expecting 2010 to be full of ultra powerful, low power, beautifully designed tablet ‘like’ devices that look like they came off the latest set of a Star Trek episode. All of these juicy play things will be delivering waves of toy induced Geek euphoria among the masses for months to come. Will I be partaking in this geek fest? Absolutely, I’ll be one of the early adopters rocking a Nexus One, but that’s not really the point of my post.

From a consumer standpoint, the entire internet and our entire digital lives are converging into devices like the Nexus One and the Apple tablet. That’s amazing when you consider that these devices are essentially a “piece of glass” with a wireless interface, a processor, some kind of solid state memory and a camera. This has been enabled by huge leaps in battery technology, low power computing, but more importantly the richness the “cloud” or essentially what the internet has to offer us on these new types of devices.

The contrast is that, from an IT systems management perspective, the stack used to deliver business services, and ultimately, the content and services to these endpoints gets exponentially more complex and layered with every iteration in the design of the devices. The iterations are also getting faster, as the race to conquer this wild west arena heats among all the usual suspects.

So, this is going to be great for consumers. We are going to see an explosion of different operating system variants, hardware paradigms, and new ways of consuming media. The question becomes, how many IT decision makers are already wondering, what will the impact of people wanting to rock an “ISlate” at work be? What will be the impact of having to provide more and more business services over the wire to mobile platforms like Android, Apple’s mobile tablet OS, Chrome on the Google Tablet (and the list will go on and on for 2010) be? What will be the business impact of having to monitor all the new infrastructure or SAAS based services needed to manage these devices from a corporate policy perspective? How about even the basics of trying to monitor the explosion of different kinds of endpoints themselves as they penetrate the enterprise? We all remember that the IPhone was initially a consumer only device, that later penetrated the enterprise with impunity. Most of my posts end with the same question – are you ready?

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Posted in cloud, IT Management, IT operations | No Comments »

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 1 of 2

Monday, November 30th, 2009

At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud’s potential but feel it still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I wrote a blog in January looking at a hypothetical company and the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Cloud (using Amazon EC2). The results were not impressive, Cloud computing was too expensive (in this example) to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on. It’s amazing how much had changed in the ten months since that blog, as we have learned more about how the Cloud can be best utilized. Recently, the media has driven the Cloud excitement and IT managers are now thinking about how the Cloud, in one form or another, can be used in their environments to drive performance and efficiencies.

The real question is this; in what capacity will organizations adopt Cloud over the next few years? With that in mind, we see the coming year as one of exploration and experimentation. The first step is for companies to quantify what Cloud means to their business.  Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes, or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?

Let’s take a look at the “IT Spectrum,” which is loosely aligned with IT maturity and size of organization.

In this diagram, the left represents most small businesses who house their own servers and have a small number of IT staff.  As the small business matures, they may evaluate SaaS-type applications (like Salesforce.com) or push some servers out to an MSP.  Further maturing, or growing, businesses may have additional servers in remote hosted datacenters, like web servers or remote disaster recovery storage.  At the right-most point in the spectrum, businesses/enterprises have opted to completely outsource their IT and minimize the number of IT staff employed by the business.

Understanding the spectrum’s components is important. They represent a “menu” of options that businesses can use to leverage virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce costs (either labor or infrastructure).  This “menu” is most likely how IT managers will choose to evaluate the relevance of Cloud to cost savings and enhanced service delivery.  For example, with VMware’s new VBlock offering and the ongoing relationship with Terremark, entire stacks of infrastructure can be pushed into off-premises locations and operated in a mission-critical environment. So, whether it’s just dipping a toe into the Cloud waters (like hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application) or leveraging the VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures, there are many options to consider. Keep in mind that issues such as backup management, lifecycle management, and systems management need to be addressed in all cases.

How is the experimentation starting?

[ more next week in Part 2 ]

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization | 3 Comments »

Would you like some HYPE with your Management Tool Soup?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

As a Solutions Architect, part of my job is to work with new prospects who are quite often bombarded by messaging from a wide variety of sources. By the time they get to me, usually ultra-niche players, or platform focused players have tried to convince them that what they need is a tool to solve their needs in a narrow or short sighted manner.

An example of a platform focused player are the tools the have a specific focus, say Windows for instance. Although tools like this appear to be broad, with a solid framework, they fall flat on their face when your organization brings in other platforms. This need will eventually arise in your organization at one point or another because of expansion, a need for new technologies to drive the business or even more importantly when your company has success and buys another company.  The contrast, of course, is a tool that can give you a single point of visibility into all hardware/software stack combos commonly found in the data center – including virtualization stacks.

The question to ask yourself is, what is the cost of going with a niche player? What will the time investment loss be when you are forced to adopt new technologies?

An example of an Ultra-Niche player would be the virtualization-only focused players in the market. Any vendor that focuses specifically and only on VMWare capabilities and visibility would be a great example. One such vendor focuses narrowly on consolidation and migration products. These products have such a narrow scope of focus, and can only be used as such a limited part of the IT systems life cycle.  They end up being thrown out after the consolidation and migration process is complete. More broad tools (like <here is my plug> up.time) in contrast, has the capability to aid you over the entire life cycle of your virtualization project AND most importantly ensure you have visibility over this infrastructure and the application and services that run on them – in the context of the whole data center.

The above two points often act as a point of illumination into the true capability of our product. It is very hard to find a product that incorporates the real useful features of those niche tools, that maintains a broad spectrum of platform support for heterogenous views, and lastly does all of that in an easy to roll out manner. It’s easy to see, that of the 300 to 400 vendors you can find on google that say they do systems and server monitoring, there are only a handful that can say they have the mandate and mission that uptime has set forth to accomplish.

“Ease of use” is a point that cannot be overstressed. In my role, we have displaced many products from much larger competitors, simply because our product focuses squarely on quick roll out and measurable results. We focus on ensuring that a minimum amount of administrative overhead is required to start collecting data that is immediately useful to your organization and then ensuring that that data can be used for a wide variety of uses. All the while the focus is to ensure that the client is able to do “what they need to do”, “when they need it”. Our clients realize that you need a tool that will guide you from simply monitoring infrastructure in a way that encourages adoption and pro-active action from “day 1″, while also allowing your organization to grow into sustainable capacity planning, virtualization planning, and SLA monitoring, reporting, and management.

It’s also very important that clients remember, that it’s the little things that matter. Many products emphasize alot of hype around their latest GUI features. Don’t get me wrong, uptime is no ugly duckling, we have one of the cleanest and most professional UI’s out there. What I am saying is, that clients quickly get caught up in needless or useless visualizations to impress people, not realizing that they are focusing on the features that really matter to the big picture. If your chosen system has a fantastic 3D rotating flaming logo, that’s amazing! I am sure it will likely impress alot of people initially and likely easily get you budget when you present it internally. But if the chosen system doesn’t have the features to laser guide notifications, escalate problems effectively and ensure that your staff don’t get unintelligible or spurious alerts at 3AM – you can bet that flaming logo visualization will be ignored soon and the product will be considered a bad investment down the line, putting you and your team at risk.  

By focusing on the ideas behind the examples above, one can see how quickly you can cut through the hype, avoid tool soup, and ensure that your organization ends up with a toolset that’s going to “get you there today” and “take you there tomorrow”.

I encourage you to join one of our public webinars to see for yourself how different and refreshing it can be to see a product demonstration that focuses on real client challenges…and no you won’t  be left at the end of the presentation asking  yourself if you should get some of that hype with your management tool soup.


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Posted in IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring, Systems Management, uptime | No Comments »

Disaster Recovery Planning

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Wait! Don’t go!  I know this is a horrendously boring topic but I’ll try my best to make itsomewhat interesting…

For a while now I’ve been knee deep in planning how the IT department at uptime would respond in an emergency, or disaster.  It’s not an easy task. In fact, when I sit down to write the plan I become consumed by it and find myself expanding the document beyond it’s scope.  It has become one large brain-dump document and, while useful as reference material, it would help little in the event of an emergency.

With this document looming over me like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey, I decided to break it down into manageable chunks, and break out the meat of the document into an Interim DR Plan.  As DR can be daunting, and take a considerable amount of time, an interim DR plan can help you out of a sticky situation should one arise.  It’s better than having nothing while you build your comprehensive response plan.

In a nutshell, an interim plan is…

  • A low-effort, quick-to-market plan.  Don’t spend more than 20-30 person-hours on it.
  • An outline of how your business can continue operations with limited resources in the event of a disaster.
  • Not a substitute a full DR plan.  Though it can and should be a framework for building out your comprehensive DR plan.

Your Interim DR plan may contain:

  • Emergency response team members, and all their contact information
  • The Disaster Declaration Procedure — How the business actually declares an emergency.
  • Communications procedures – How your emergency response team will communicate before, during and after the recovery efforts.
  • Recovery Plan Procedures – This is the hard part, but in essence is a description of recovery procedures, alternate locations and contingencies for the business functions identified in the plan.
  • Background information – Who owns, sponsors and updates the plan.  How often the DR team should meet, and the document update frequency.
  • Preventative Measures – Simple things like off-site backups, or data replication to a secure location can save loads of time and money.  Consider moving to Software as a Service for critical business functionality.  I’ll write a post on SaaS later.  I’m not a big fan, but in the event of a disaster it could just save your hide.

Once you’ve documented the plan, publish it and store it in several locations.  Even consider putting it online somewhere outside of your infrastructure.

uptime software has a DR plan in effect and we continue to evolve it over time to meet our needs.  We are confident that, should disaster strike, our operations will continue relatively unharmed.  If you are looking at server monitoring solutions elsewhere, ask them if they will be able to support you if their operation catches fire, or floods, or endures an earthquake.  uptime will.

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Posted in IT Management, management | No Comments »

Adapting to the Integrated Technology Stack: Next Generation IT Systems Management

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

I read  The race for the integrated technology stack, from Enterprise Strategy Group this week. Some completely valid points are made about the transition that IT departments and tool vendors in the ITSM space are going to have to go through to add value to the ‘new’ integrated data center. Virtualization has already challenged many deeply entrenched paradigms that many IT staff, and software vendors, have struggled to adapt to.

Agility from a training and tooling point of view are going to be essential for companies to see success in their rapidly changing environments and ensure that they are able to maintain their IT SLA with their users through this transition. As the integrated stack and adaptive infrastructure continue to gain share in large environments I have to wonder how software vendors, who are already unable to adapt to the rate of change in the data center, will stay relevant.

I see more agile companies like uptime, who already have mature solutions in the virtual systems management & physical server monitoring space, being able to adapt faster and offer solutions that directly address challenges in the new data center well before the big 4 framework vendors are able to align their solutions with the modern day problem set.

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Posted in IT Management, monitoring, sla, uptime, virtualization vmware | No Comments »

Proactive IT Systems Management isn’t that Hard….Really

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

A brief introduction:  My name is Dave Mitchell.  I’ve been in the business of delivering enterprise level IT service management for over 15 years.  I call uptime software my home.

I believe that far too many IT Managers are pulling the wool over their employers eyes. You know who you are! The one who runs that dark, mysterious department who’s systems administrators and help desk people run around wearing dirty polo shirts, with a half-empty Starbucks Tall Bold in one hand, and a constantly buzzing Blackberry in the other, screaming “MOVE!” as though the server room is some constantly burning pit of fire that must be put out yesterday. This persona is, in my opinion, a ruse.  A way to ward off prying employees, managers, otherwise evil spirits, that may get in the way of the Sysadmin’s leisure time.  I’m not saying that Mr. Admin isn’t doing his job.  I’m simply suggesting that he could be doing it more efficiently.

So, is this you?  Are you one of those guys who works for a company full of people who don’t understand your job just enough such that you can pull a fast one once in a while?  If so, there’s hope!  It’s not so bad running an open and accessible IT department.  Really.

Here’s a few questions to ask yourself, your department or your IT manager (depending on who you are);

1. Do you have a Service Level Agreement with your customers?  Is it published?  Can you prove you’re hitting it?  Having an SLA is like a contract between your department and your customers (the rest of the company).  It sets their expectations of your group, and allows you to function within them.

2. Is a monitoring system in place?  Does it do more than report up/down status?  Can other employees see system status at a glance?  The ability to report on system status in real time comes in handy when troubleshooting problem, sure. However by allowing other departments visibility into system status you give them the ability to check before opening a ticket. It also gives others a glimpse into that dark, mysterious world!

3. Do you meet with department heads on a regular basis?  I mean every department?  Not just the technical ones?  A brief meeting with Marketing, or Sales management can yield amazingly positive results and prevent potential problems due to lack of communication.

Now,  I’m sure you do all these things and more.  You are not that IT guy, or girl.  You’d be surprised how many of them are out there.  If you know someone at another company who deals with that kind of IT department, please pass this post along.  Tell them Mitchell says there’s hope!  IT isn’t a scary underworld, full of secret rituals and other sorts of geekery.  Sure, we’re proud geeks but that’s no reason (to paraphrase Mr. King) ‘we can’t all just get along’.

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Posted in IT Management | No Comments »

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