Storagebod's Blog

Big Data, Little Information?

Big Data like Cloud Computing is going to be one of those phrases which like a bar of soap is hard to grasp and get hold of; the firmer the hold you feel you have on the definition, the more likely you are to be wrong. The thing about Big Data is that it does not have to be big; the storage vendors want you to think that it is all about size but it isn’t necessarily.

Many people reading this blog might think that I am extremely comfortable with Big Data; hey, it’s part of my day-to-day work isn’t it? Dealing with large HD files, that’s Big Data isn’t it? Well, they are certainly large but are they Big Data. The answer could be yes but the answer generally today is no. As I say Big Data is not about size or general bigness.

But if it’s not big, what is Big Data? Okay in my mind, Big Data is about data-points and analysing these data-points to produce some kind of meaningful information; in my mind, I have a little mantra which I repeat to myself when thinking about Big Data; ‘Big Data becomes Little Information’.

The number of data-points that we now collect about an interaction of some sort is huge; we are massively increasing the resolution of data collection for pretty much interaction we make. Retail web-sites can analyse your whole path through a web-site; not just the clicks you make but the time you hover over a particular option, this results in hundreds of data-points per visit and these data-points are individually quite small and actually collectively may result in a relatively small data-set.

Take a social media web-site like Twitter for example; a tweet being a 140 characters, so even if we allow a 50% overhead for other information about the tweet, it could be stored in 210 bytes and I suspect possibly even less; a billion tweets (an American billion) would take up about 200 Gigabytes by my calculations. But to process these data-points into useful information will need something considerably more powerful than a 200 Gigabyte disk.

A soccer match for instance could be analysed in a lot more detail than it is at the moment and could generate Big Data; so those HD files that we are storing could be used to produce Big Data to then produce Little Information. The Big Data will probably be much smaller than the original Data-set and the resulting information will almost certainly be much smaller.

And then of course there is everyone’s favourite Big Data; the Large Hadron Collider, now that certainly does produce Big Big Data but let’s be honest, there aren’t that many Large Hadron Colliders out there. Actually a couple of years ago; I attended a talk by one of the scientists involved with the LHC and CERN all about their data storage strategies and some of things they do. Let me tell you, they do some insane things including writing bespoke tape-drivers to use the redundant tracks on some tape formats and he also admitted that they could probably get away with loosing nearly of their data and still derive useful results.

That latter point may actually be true of much of the Big Data out there and that is going to be something interesting to deal with; your Big Data is important but not that important.

So I think the biggest point to consider about Big Data is that it doesn’t have to be large but it’s probably different to anything you’ve dealt with so far.

 

Verily, tis Consolidated Evil

Okay, despite the title; I don't actually think that VCE is Evil, certainly no more so than any other IT company. As we move to an increasingly virtualised data-centre environment; I believe that VCE does have something to offer to the market, the more vertically integrated a stack, the more chance that it is going to work within design parameters and with a reduced management footprint. 

Yet, I do have a problem with VCE and that is it is not consolidated enough; it's like some kind of trial marriage or perhaps some troilistic civil partnership. (And I have similar problems with the even looser Flexpod arrangement with NetApp/Cisco/VMWare.) 

As a customer; it seems that I am expected to make a huge commitment and move to an homogeneous infrastructure even if it is some kind of 'virtual homogeneity'. Yes, there are management benefits but the problem with both vBlock and Flexpods is what happens when the relationship founders and fractures? What happens to my investment in consolidated management tools to support these environments; where is the five, ten year roadmap? And where is the commitment to deliver? Who gets custody of the kids?

Are the relationships going to last more than one depreciation/refresh cycle? Perhaps the problem is that the evil is not consolidated enough? Or am I just cynical in expecting the relationship to fail? I would say that the odds are that one of them will fail, you?

Perhaps Cisco/EMC/NetApp should de-risk by all merging!

Elegance

I went to the London Turing Lecture given by a very cold-ridden and croaky Donald Knuth; you always know things are going to be interesting when the speaker opens with comments along the lines of 'I got the idea for the format of this lecture from my colleague and friend at Caltech in the 60s; Richard Feynman'. See even the great Donald Knuth can name-drop with the best of them.  The format was of a question and answer session where Donald took questions on any subject from the floor and I believe that it will be available to watch as a web-cast; please note that he was very cold-ridden and it's probably not his best 'performance'.

Don for a long time has been talking about Literate Programming and that programs should be written for human beings to read and not just for computers to process; arguing that 'They tend to work more correctly, are easier to change, easier to maintain, and just a pleasure to write and to read'. He is passionate that code can be beautiful and art; funnily enough I feel very similarly about IT infrastructure and I think that is what potentially Cloud can bring to the world of infrastructure.  

I'm not sure we can have a 'Literate Infrastructure' but I wonder if we can get to 'Elegant Infrastructure'; I come across infrastructures all the time which make me question the byzantine perversity of infrastructure architects and designers. At times it is like an artist who has decided to throw all the colours in his palette at a canvas with little understanding of aesthetics and form; yes, you can do this but you really have to understand what you are doing and unless you are very good, you will simply produce a mess. 

This is why the various block-based infrastructures are potentially so appealing (this is not a discussion as to the merits of vBlock versus Flex-pod versus another-Lego-block) as they restrict the tendencies of techies to throw everything but the kitchen sink at a problem. Yet the most stringent advocate of these infrastructures has to acknowledge that they will not solve every problem and at times, a little subtle complexity is more elegant than adding more and more blocks. 

The infrastructures of the future will be simple, understandable but not necessarily devoid of colour and subtlety. Otherwise we'll fall into another trap that Don hates; 'the 90% good enough' trap. Infrastructure needs to be 100% good enough; 90% won't do because 90% will not be easy to manage or understand. I think this is the challenge that the vendors will face as they try to understand what they are selling and creating.   

SRM - Stack Resource Management

2011 will see acquisitions continue to come as all of the major players try to position themselves as owners of the vertical stack; we will see acquisitions to enable the general compute stack but also acquisitions which enable specialised appliance based stacks. Obviously, we will also see the major players continue to announce home-grown stack products as well.

All of these stacks will blow up smog which might well look something akin to a Cloud; the question is whether this will be a toxic cloud or something more beneficent bringing the necessary components for business growth?

One of the biggest challenges will be that we will have different types of stacks; there will be the odd case where a data centre is homogeneous but it will be more usual for a data centre to have at least two vendors. This might be for either technical reasons or for purely commercial reasons; two vendors competing may well be more honest than a single dominant vendors. And of course, there is the ever present public Cloud option to be considered.

The question is going to be one of how to manage these stacks; both from a data centre point of view but also from a rack/server position. How do we manage both the data centre and from application to spindle? 

To this day we struggle to manage storage arrays from different vendors with a single pane of glass; we even struggle to get a common view let alone a common configuration tool. How much more complex will this become when we have several vertical stacks from a variety of vendors to manage?

Yes, we could struggle on and manage at the component level but how is this going to bring the reduced complexity and business benefit that these stacks could bring? We could even find ourselves using shell interfaces/APIs to produce our own consolidated tools; assuming that these shell interfaces/APIs are available. 

Storage Resource Management has been a big #FAIL in general; Stack Resource Management could have a similar future unless we see vendors and other interested parties begin to get a handle on this. I certainly expect to see acquisition in this space as vendors try to steal a march on each other but really, this might a place best served by co-opetition and standards.

Formal standards? Possibly not but two or three of the bigger players could do the market a huge service by beginning to think along the lines of an open standard. And if one emerges; they could do an even bigger service but not taking the approach of 'embrace and extend'.  

 

Bod's Annoyances: Server Virtualisation

Server Virtualisation? Is 'Bod simply being obtuse; yes it is entirely possible but before you write this off as lunacy, I do have my reasons. 

Firstly, server virtualisation is not actually a bad thing; it's been around for many years but the landscape today is actually more than a little concerning and I wonder if it will come to bite us really rather nastily over the next decade. The sheer number of virtual servers being built leads me to wonder about the long term sustainability of the current infrastructures and with the current virtualistion==cloud lazy thinking; I am really rather worried.

So how did we come to such a position? The seeds for this were sown in the early eighties when IBM launched the personal computer; prior to this (and yes I am ignoring the early adventures in personal computing by Apple, Commodore, Radio-shack and the likes), computers were large, complex and extremely expensive beasts managed by the computing department; access was very restricted and not many people had access. But with the personal computing revolution; our relationship with computers changed, indeed we actually started to develop a relationship with computers. 

One person mapped to one PC; that's the very definition of personal computing but as these devices became more powerful, it became pretty obvious that they were capable of so much more but the big, multi-user, multi-tasking operating systems which ran on the large corporate mainframes were not available for these personal computers. So we ended up running larger and more complex applications on these devices but using the operating systems available on the desktop; these were single-user operating systems with limited multi-tasking capabilities. So an application per device paradigm became the norm and even when multi-tasking became available and more common; the paradigm had become firmly embedded. 

And the lack of multi-user capablities really hampered the development of a centralised management and secure environment; so it became even more embedded. Add into that, a growth in CPU power far outstripping our ability to use it for a single application; we ended up in the position that we had rampant physical growth but with ridiculously low utilisation figures.

So in order to use this power and to manage it effectively; we have looked to server virtualisation to fix this problem allowing us to build virtual servers which more effectively use the available CPU or more to the point allow us to run multiple single application servers on a single physical server. It also allows concurrent management of these applications to be more easily achieved. Even the rise of the Intel-based Unix systems has not done little to break the paradigm of one application per server but instead of a physical server, we now talk about virtual servers.

It doesn't have to be this way and we only have to look at the way that virtualisation is used in the mainframe environment; you don't talk about running 1000s of server instances, you are more clever about how you virtualise. You may virtualise an environment but it will still only run a few actual virtual machine instances.You may group related applications into a single machine instance but not have those applications running as separate server-instances.

We could do this in the Intel-space; we should move away from the default position of one application per server instance, we should move to the position where we understand why we do so. There are applications which certainly work better when run in massively distributed and parallel environments but this is not every application. A database server can run more than a single database instance; a web-server can run more than a single web-server.

Okay, it's not server virtualisation itself which annoys me but the unthinking use of it and the traps that we are busy building for ourselves.

Turning desktop operating systems into powerful server systems probably was not the wisest move that the IT industry made but the short-term gains were probably too attractive, can we hope that we don't do the same thing with mobile device operating system? Actually, I am not that hopeful really; history does unfortunately have a habit of repeating itself.

Information Technology

2011 is the year of 'Big Data' or I so hear; organisations are collecting ever more data which may hold some value. The problem for many of these organisations is unlocking the value and turning this data into useable information. But I am not going to talk about how this is done; that is topic for another blog and perhaps for someone who has more expertise in that area; I am more interested on how we access the information and the tools that we use.

I wonder if we could see a change in how corporate IT is consumed; the explosion in mobile, non-traditional computing devices has led many to posit a future where much of IT is consumed in the form of apps; small specialised applications which do one or two things very well and this might very well be true but before these apps become truly useful to the corporate 'Knowledge Worker', there are other changes which need to happen. 

The IT department needs to enable the access to the information and at times to the raw 'Big Data' to allow these workers to move beyond the superficial; it is the area of curation and publication which could well be the growth area for IT departments. Building information stores with standard APIs to allow the publication of information which these apps can access; the IT department may not necessarily control the apps and presentation but they will control the access to the data. They may publish reference clients in much the same way that Twitter publishes a reference client but does not mandate its use. 

Technologies such as Object Storage for example will come to the fore as enabling technologies as will the already more established interfaces for exposing data and information but instead of trying to restrict the use of these to IT applications; more innovative uses will be encouraged. 

IT moves away from supporting individual devices but simply provides interfaces to Corporate Information and at that point becomes truly the 'Information Technology' department and not the 'PC Support department'. 

I think we are some years away from this happening and there will always be a place for traditional IT as it does support many essential functions but it's probably a more interesting future for many of us than the current status quo. 

 

 

Reading the Ruins

So 2010 is nearly done and I must say that 2010 in storage went pretty much as I expected. 3Par, Isilon and Compellent being gobbled up by bigger companies; no special surprises there. New hardware from HDS, NetApp and IBM; no special surprises there either. And more Cloud-washing from everyone; from Public-Cloud to Private-Cloud, everyone wants a piece of the action. I've taken to calling my test-environment at home a Pico-Cloud. 

So what will 2011 bring us? These are some of my guesses and thoughts.

Even More Cloud?

 I expect EMC to continue painting just about everything they do with Cloud-wash and adding a layer of virtual tarnish to the Cloud. Despite all of this, I think EMC are going to be interesting as always.
It's no secret that we should expect some kind of NetApp killer in the coming together of Clariion and Celerra; with the much maligned Celerra-brand to die and it all to come together under some Unified Storage brand. We should also be expecting very tight integration with VMware; I think EMC still feel very hurt that NetApp have managed to do a better integration job with VMware, whether perception or reality. EMC are going to focus some serious attention on NetApp and believe that technically they can now compete; expect the war of words to escalate.

However, having built a NetApp-like Unified Storage platform; EMC have muddied the water again by buying Isilon and yet again have a standalone NAS product. An internal battle brewing within EMC? If they've learnt the lessons from the DG and Clariion; one would hope not but history does have a habit of repeating itself. At the very least, expect some serious marketing spin to try to differentiate the capabilities. Don't believe it for one minute; if the future of most storage is predominantly file with a ever diminishing proportion of block; Isilon become extremely important very quickly to EMC with the new Unified Storage Platform getting squeezed between Isilon and Symmetrix. Granted not a 2011 problem, more a 2013 issue but something worth thinking about when planning investments.

A side question on Isilon, how quickly do EMC try to move Isilon from its BSD roots to their more preferred internal Linux platform? Now, that's a holy-war brewing!

Huge Portfolio?

HP have far too many storage lines and this has left many of their user-base confused and more importantly, I suspect many of their user-base are feeling reluctant to invest more heavily in an HP strategy. 

David Scott is going to have to be ruthless over the next six months and he will have to move fast to get his charges all pointing in the same direction and singing from the same hymn-book. The future of EVA will need to be clarified very quickly; letting the market decide seems to be pretty rash at this point and is adding to the confusion. I'm expecting a statement of direction from them by the middle of the year allowing customers to put together an investment strategy.

HP's problem is how they scale 3PAR's technology both up and down; I'd expect announcements from them on this. Or are they going to have to look at Lefthand for this.

HP's other problem is that they still don't have a really strong file story; they have stories but most of these have as much substance as a Dan Brown thriller. Could HP acquire again; if there were anyone left to buy, that would not surprise me but I don't see anyone who could fill this hole for them.

Net Apprehension

NetApp refreshed their hardware and released another version of Ontap 8; also announced a virtual appliance version of the filer and by all accounts, they've had a stonking 2010 sales-wise. They continue to out-grow their competitors and continue to gather plaudits; so what will 2011 bring?

Well NetApp aren't a company without problems as much as they like to claim and they appear to have got away with a lot; customers are still giving them a fair amount of slack but...

OnTap 8 needs to get tightened up and there needs to be a single mode; this is certainly NetApp's plan and there is some deserved embarrassment when you bring up the current situation. So expect this to be rectified at sometime in 2011 with OnTap 8 cluster-mode to be fully functionally equivalent to 7-mode with the advantage that it is cluster-able. EMC's acquisition of Isilon makes this all the more important and NetApp cannot afford this to be delayed much longer.

NetApp's teams are tired; I would say that the company is struggling to keep up with it's own growth. I've heard this from people inside and out; teams are stretched too thin and the company is going to have to grow the number of foot soldiers. NetApp are not the only company with this problem but they've always run very lean with no fat; admirable in start-up but NetApp can probably afford to grow some girth.

And finally, NetApp need to acquire someone relatively substantial and not only for the obvious reason but also to prove that they can do so successfully. I don't expect NetApp to stray too far from the storage beat with someone like CommVault in their sights but that will probably bring them into a bidding war with Dell.

Ring the Dell?

It appears that Dell want to be the storage game; getting involved in and loosing a very public auction for 3Par and then ending up the year by purchasing Compellent. If you had asked me at the beginning of 2011; I would have bet very heavily on 3Par going to HP and probably not so heavily on Compellent ending up with Dell but it seems a more logical fit than vice versa.

Dell have three interesting pieces of a storage jigsaw right now; Equalogic and Compellent, solid SME products and Exanet, a clustered NAS product. The latter needs some serious investment to turn it into more than an intellectual curiosity; it's market presence is somewhat less than zero and ever since Dell acquired it, it has been invisible. 

Somehow Dell have to turn all of this into a coherent strategy but Dell have a secret weapon; a couple of years ago, Dell bought a small British storage consultancy called The Networked Storage Company. They have continued to run this as an independent entity; TNWSC generally get involved with enterprise customers when they are looking to issue RFPs etc and you can hear the sighs of pain/irritation/annoyance when a vendor finds out that they are responding to a TNSWC tinged RFP. They also run birds of the feather type get-togethers for storage end-users and the agendas always look interesting even if for various reasons I've not managed to get to one yet. I like to think of them as a more sober #storagebeers. 

Dell by now should have a real insight into the problems that enterprise customers are trying to solve; turning this into a product is going to be more challenging but at least they've been listening.

Its Bazza Magic?

IBM's announcement of the v7000 based on SVC technology was one of the more stand-out storage announcements; not because of the technology, most of the industry had been expecting something like this for some time but because it wasn't strangled by the other interests in IBM. Even long-standing rivals were quietly pleased to see that IBM finally came to their senses and realise that the answer to many of their storage problems had been sitting in Hursley for sometime. 

The DS8000 also appears to the array that refuses to die; in a year dominated by zombie-tinged media, the DS8K is almost the zombie array; every-time someone thinks it's dead, up it rises. Unfortunately, like zombies; it will never be popular and people will keep trying to smash it with shovels and whatever else comes to hand.

Next year tho'; XIV should get its long awaited upgrades, time will tell whether these will be enough to see it become a strategic stand-alone product. Infiniband connectivity between the nodes should finally be with us; this was discussed at the IBM launch many moons ago; a 'flash cache' type enhancement to help XIV cope with more random workloads and give the SATA a boost; clustering to improve scalability and I am wondering if we could see 2.5" drives make an appearance to improve floor-space-to-byte density?

I am also expecting to see significant enhancements to v7000; with both some of the artificial limiters coming off but also Storwize making an appearance with block level compression. Obviously, feature enhancements will make an appearance in SVC as well.

Also expect Storwize to make an appearance in the SONAS product range; expect IBM to launch a smaller version of SONAS to compete with their partner NetApp but also aimed at the smaller Isilon deployments. Finally, expect IBM's storage OEM agreements to become less important to them.

Highly Dependable Storage?

Finally, HDS have refreshed their USP platform with the VSP; feature-rich, enterprise-ready and very capable but is it really where the real growth is? I think this is HDS' real problem; how do they show real relevance to the problems that many storage managers are facing?  

I don't believe that they will but I'm expecting them to push very hard on the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform as a catalyst for IT transformation. I think HDS have a very rich seam to mine here in their traditional high-end market place especially with those customers who are very uncomfortable with putting all of their eggs into Cisco's basket

And just perhaps they will finally buy BlueArc? Perhaps we can convince Dell or HP to put in a bid, just to get things moving? 

And Storagebod?

Well, 2010 was the year when somebody finally allowed me to have storage in my job title again; which was nice as my nascent storage team went from having a few hundred terabytes under management from something closer to three petabytes with an ever steepening growth curve. 

Next year brings the challenges of render-farms, 3D HD editting stations, migrating most of our storage into a new building, building disaster recovery capabilities, multiple upgrades and lots more fun I hope.

Happy New Year!!

Martin

 

Elf Issue!

Dearest Storage Santas,

last year I took time to write to each of you individually and I must say that most of you appear to have taken note and have generally delivered what I wished for, so for that, thank-you very much. Unfortunately, this year I'm finding it hard to find time to write a letter to each of you; so perhaps a letter to you all as a group.

You have all been very busy acquiring companies and launching new products; your elves must be very tired and perhaps you should give them some time off over the festive period. A time for them to recharge and to launch themselves back into the fray.  And some of the new elves that you have acquired might need time to acclimatise to their new surroundings, I can see little Elf Farley blinking in the corner after his lucky escape after nearly getting caught by Mr Dell again. 

As you fly your sleighs across the cloudy skies; contemplate what the meaning of Cloud really is? Is it simply a way of selling more of stuff or indeed a way pressing your elves into servitude providing Cloud consultancy? Or is it more fundamental? It certainly has many aspects of the clouds that you are flying in; it can be a threat of a deluge or it can be the bringer of life; either drowning or nuturing. Too much Cloud is a bad thing; so think what are users trying to do and then how does Cloud enable them. Stop thinking Cloud can do this, how do we get customers to do it so that we can sell it to them. Don't look so perplexed Little Chuck-Elf; you're a clever chap, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

Now Christmas is time of goodwill to all men (and Elves) but surely we can do better than this; no more poking and prodding at each other all year, most of the time you miss and end up poking yourselves in the eye. You don't have to play nice but you don't have play nasty either; you can be competitive but it can be a bit friendlier. I don't want to have spend 2011 seperating you! 

Val-Elf stop kicking Elf-Zilla; yes, I can see him prodding you but you are big boy and you don't need to react. Yes, Zilla-Elf; I know Val-Elf gets a little self-important and proud of himself but we all do at times. And Calvin-Elf, 'Don't Do That!'; put him down, you don't know where he's been!

Anyway, Storage Santas; some of you appear to have far too many toys and don't seem to know what to play with. I think it's time to throw out the broken ones; yes, it might upset a few people but in the long run, it will probably do everyone a power of good. And then again, at least one of you needs some different toys; spread your horizons and take a few risks. 

Ahhh, look at Wee Barry-Elf; almost bursting with pride at his new invention! Yes Barry, we know that you worked very hard and the nasty Moshe-Elf tried to stamp on your new toy but he's gone away now, so time to make it really good. Storwize is a very good name by the way; did you think of that all by yourself? No? Big Blue Santa bought it for you? Well what a nice man he is!

Oh, look at Big Barry-Elf running around as FAST as he can; good for you; is the new version available yet? And you've been a bit quiet on the blog front; what have you been up to? Talk to Chad-Elf, he's got an army of pixie-helpers (have you met @Kiwi_Si, he's not big enough to be an Elf) and perhaps he could lend you one to help you write some more blogs. 

Och, there you are McElf; congratulations on the new role, looking forward to seeing you co-operate and trying your best to be nice to people!! You can do it, I know you can! 

All in all, it's been a good year for many of you. Let's hope 2011 is equally good to you all!

So Storage Santas, have a very merry Christmas and just remember, Clouds can hide Mountain-tops; don't crash those sleighs!

Merry Christmas,

Storagebod

Wikileaks, Cloud and Lessons

So what does the Wikileaks saga have to teach us about Cloud, if anything? Actually I think that there are a number of lessons to be learnt.

1) The first lesson actually has nothing to do with the Cloud and certainly nothing to do with the debate about private versus public Cloud. Without people leaking data to Wikileaks, there would be no Wikileaks; Wikileaks is not about hacking really, it's more often about people already having access to the data taking it away with them and leaking it. 

Make sure that only the people who need access to the data have access to the data and make sure the distribution of such data is controlled. Flashdrives etc are very convenient but they also make it relatively easy for someone walk away with large quantities of data. The move to towards 'Bring Your Own Device' type Corporate IT could open new conduits for 'data theft'. Be aware, you may be allowing people to bypass your perimeter security and that brings risks.

2) The actions of your Cloud provider may put your own environment at risk. If you decide to run your systems in the Public Cloud, if your Cloud provider does something which leads it vulnerable to attack etc; your services might be impacted. Obviously, this is true of not just Cloud but any hosted environment or even arguably any service provider. For example, your network provider may manage to piss off a number of people and find itself under a DDOS and this might impact your operations. 

However, most sensible organisations ensure that they have their network services provisioned from multiple network providers. You should apply the same principle to your Cloud environments; running in the Cloud does not abrogate the requirement for proper DR and BC planning. If the EC2 Cloud goes down and you have no way of carrying out your Business; you are pretty much guilty of negligence.  

3) Amazon's Cloud is remarkably robust and it has certainly survived a number of DDOS attacks over the past few days; whether the outage last night in Europe was due to a hardware failure or a DDOS has yet to be fully revealed. If I was an AWS customer, I would be more concerned about a hardware failure/issue having such wide ranging implications; if it was a concerted attack against Amazon, well the fact that they managed to get themselves up and working again so quickly, that's pretty impressive. If your organisation underwent a concerted attack, would you recover as quickly?

Hopefully Amazon will disclose everything that went on and allow us all to learn from the events. 

4) Understand the 'Terms of Service' of your providers; if your actions endanger service to all, you might find that your service is withdrawn as a precautionary measure. You may feel that this is censorship but at the end of the day, if your service provider takes a business decision to sacrifice your service to protect the rest of their customers and their business; that is something that you are probably going to have to live with.

5) The Internet still often operates like a wild frontier…beware of signs saying 'Here Be Dragons', they may be telling the truth.

 

Cloud Ennui?

I must admit even though I use the term myself, I am getting pretty fed-up with the whole Cloud thing and the pretty constant attempts of vendors to both Cloud-wash their products and generally try to sprinkle Cloud Magic Dust around the place. Cloud has become so vague as a term that it has all the substance of a Cloud I suppose. The hijacking of the term by both storage vendors and virtualisation vendors has probably been a major factor in dilution of the term; when either of them talk about Cloud, you will find their old products cloaked pretending to be a Cloud.

But there is something else which is more concerning and that is the blinkered acceptance of the hype by many in the end-user community. That Cloud is somehow that solution to all of their IT problems and issues; that solution which solve it all. Now I am not talking about process and the necessary organisational changes that are required to make Cloud work. I am talking about a more fundamental re-evaluation of IT and what it means to business.

At the moment, Cloud mostly seems to be focused at the delivery of infrastructure; faster, cheaper and better but I do wonder if there should be a more significant appraisal. If Cloud is simply a method for the delivery of more and more IT stuff, does it really change anything? If Cloud is simply about delivering thousands of virtual machines, if Cloud is simply about the delivery of petabytes of storage, if Cloud is simply about delivering more of the same is it really a paradigm shift akin to that of the personal computer?  

At some point, we need to look beyond the infrastructure utility and consider what this means. Yes it's great that we can consume more and more but if we look at what we as humans tend to do with abundance; we gorge...

'Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width...'

Do we want this to be the legacy of the Cloud? I think some of the vendors out there would be quite happy with a legacy where we build more stuff. But I think that we owe it to ourselves to ensure that any move to a Cloud infrastructure includes an appraisal of the whole IT sphere. Our customers do not consume 'tin' or even 'virtual tin'; they consume applications. 

Does Cloud enable applications or does it enable application developers? Will it make a difference to the person sitting in the Call Centre? Does it matter? 

I guess this is what is really keeping me up at night when I think about Cloud; does it really change anything? 

What do you think?