Peter Christy

A Shoutout to Marvin Wheeler ....

I just learned that Marvin Wheeler is leaving Terremark, having completed their transition into Verizon. Marvin is one of nicest and most interesting people I've worked with.

I met Marvin at EMC's "Road to the Private Cloud" analyst meeting late in 2009. Terremark was a featured EMC customer "poster boy" talking about the government business they had been capturing into their new Cloud data center offering. I asked Marvin what the key to their value proposition was. He said that his answer would probably surprise me: it was the security that they provided. He was right. At the time (and to a large degree still today) security shows up on the "con" side of the Cloud ledger, not on the "pro." I asked Marvin if we could follow up on the topic and he arranged a follow on briefing with Chris Day, Terremark's security leader.

Marvin explained that five years prior he had hired Chris, noting that whenever computer crime was mentioned in the Miami papers Chris was always the expert quoted. In that time, Chris had built up an interesting set of security services sold togovernment clients and in support of areas like forensic accounting. They specialized in what you did after you had been penetrated, not just preventing penetration (until recently, the prime focus of the "security companies"): discovering penetration; understanding the nature of the threat and scope; stoping the threat; remediating the damage. Terremark had realized that in a virtualized SP data center they could offer versions of these services that were pre-wired into the infrastructure fabric (rather than having to be patched in after an attack) and they could provide the expertise to use these offerings whereas their government customers couldn't on their own. On balance, although you might be slightly more vulnerable to penetration in a multi-tenant data center (or at least it was arguable), you were clearly better off if you were penetrated. Terremark was way head of the rest of the world being able to view the Cloud as a new medium with new opportunities rather than something where you did what you always did.

I was impressed and added Marvin to my "bright people worth keeping in touch with" list, and discovered along the way he was one of the "nice" guys in the business, always possible to reach and always useful to talk to.  More recently, Marvin as been central to the formation of the Open Data Center Alliance that was spun out of CIO discussions that Intel had.  I would guess that the Cloud purists think this is another example of how hopeless private clouds are, but ODCA is an important venue for making progress on building practical hybrid Cloud integrations.

I can understand completely why Terremark all of a sudden getting much bigger quickly is a time to move on. I'm sure Marvin will show up somewhere interesting soon enough, and wish him the best!

It Should Be Quite a Week ......

Next week (July 8 - 12) should be exciting (hardly the summer doldrums). I'll be at Cisco Live in the fast part for their annual analyst event. It's going to be illuminating to hear what the story is now and how it's changed since they hit rough waters. In addition to problems in the core switching business, a lot of the organizational changes recently were motivated to fix the problems done with the goal of optimizing  innovation. So there is no easy answer: the core business has issues, and innovation is more important than ever.

Then, on Tuesday, VMware is making a major announcement about the next release of VCloud. Last time, the new additions in security came at some cost to their ersatz security partners. Presuming that this release incorporates additional "adjacent" functionality, it will be fascinating to see the new implications for the partner ecology. And you have to be curious about why the announcement is now rather than capping the upcoming VMworld meeting.

And on Monday Citrix is going to be talking (at least to the analyst community) about the Cloud. You have to wonder whether this is to keep from appearing reactive to whatever VMware is going to say.

Anyway, it should be an interesting week!

Cloud Opportunities: The Willie Sutton Thesis

My "Big fat idiot" post has lead to lot of interesting discussions on why enterprise IT (the "Private Cloud") should or should not be considered to be "Cloud." My logic might be wrong, but couldn't be simpler: Just like what Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, it's "because that's where the money is."

When we work with clients to help them understand emerging market opportunities, our ultimate focus is always to follow the money and understand how a new product or service delivers tangible value to the customer (i.e., is a good investment), and from that perspective, to help them understand in which vertical or use case the aggregate value is greatest. That's how I choose to look at Cloud opportunities as well: where's the money to be made?

In an earlier post (Why Clouds Exist) I argued that we've had a remarkable confluence of events without which neither Public nor Private Clouds would exist today, including these specific contributors:

• The consolidation of applications into data centers that started 10 years ago.
• The victory of Intel's X86 architecture.
• Virtualization enabling mixed platform X86 workloads to be run on a shared server.

But the Cloud isn't about virtualization; rather it's about how virtualization enables long-standing visions. In the Enterprise that means one thing:

• On demand computing: the ability to automate data center operations (take manual activities out of the provisioning loop). All of a sudden the management of many specific applications becomes much simpler, the application quality improves, and the cost of operations goes down.
• Service-Oriented IT: Automate what IT used to do (e.g., buying and racking a server; provisioning the O/S and software load). Automate everything possible. Let the business drive use. Focus on forward-looking enablement. By making this transition, IT becomes a more important part of the business.

Outside of the Enterprise the Cloud has very different benefits:

• Infrastructure as a service: AWS and a credit card eliminates the need to buy and operate computers. This takes capital spend out of new venture development. This is unquestionably a revolutionary change and utterly transforms how systems can be funded, built and operated.
• IaaS in turn enables whole new IT ecologies. iPhone or iPad applications with some server requirement would never have happened without the ability of App developers to exploit AWS for the backend.
• From this perspective, it's also true that applications designed for this new world have very different architectures (stateless, RESTful, ...) that is very unlike legacy application architecture.

I agree with my detractors that IaaS on AWS has very little to do with what is called the Road to the Private Cloud. But that's not my point. It seems to me that Willie Sutton would have chosen the Private Cloud because it seems to me that's where more of the money is. The Private Cloud is as important potentially to CIO's as AWS is to startup, albeit for entirely different reasons. But they are going to spend a boatload of money because that investment will save them even more money!

 

VCubes — a really clever idea

One of the announcements at EMCWorld was the packaging of the Documentum software offering into a virtual application. On the one hand, this seems very unsurprising given that VMware is part of the family. But on the other hand, this transforms "enterprise" software dramatically. Historically selling enterprise software (a complicated application) was just nasty. Every customer had a different set of infrastructure elements (O/S choice, storage choice, networking design, ...) and the application had to be carefully adapted to all of that, after which you had a custom application and another supported configuration for the vendor to deal with. Documentum certainly had those issues. Packaging it as a virtual application means creating a composite application, including the underpinning infrastructure elements that then run on a VMware fabric. If the customer has a VMware data center they can just plop it down and run it (of course it's really more complicated but still much less complicated than what it replaces). Or the application can be run by a service provider that provides VMware services. EMC also mentioned the possibility of selling the application along with a hardware system to run it (a stand-alone VBlock perhaps). The hidden gotcha in the idea is all of a sudden there is a new set of software infrastructure (operating system, middleware, ...) that must be kept up-to-date with patches, especially if vulnerabilities are discovered. If the VCube platform was to be really simple to deploy, that problem had to be solved too (and was). The VCube includes a "maintenance socket" (my term, not theirs) that can be connected back to a maintenance service provide by EMC. EMC needs to know all the patches and updates for the components of the VCube and how to correctly sequence them for minimal disruption. Interestingly this is just what VCE is learning to do at lower levels of the stack. This definitely feels like an important element of the future.

Hadoop Gets Hotter

As if Big Data and analytics needed anything to get hotter, the space heated up with EMC's Greenplum team adding Hadoop to their portfolio. Hadoop is the Open Source project that is building a version of the MapReduce paradigm developed at Google. At the core, Hadoop includes a mechanism for distributing data to many processors and then coordinating relatively simple parallel programs run on that cluster of servers. Compared to traditional database "programming" it is much easier to do arbitrary processing on unstructured data (data that is not already in a database). With servers already cheap, Hadoop simplifies brute force programming to take advantage of cheap parallel computing. The big commercial forces in Hadoop so far have been Cloudera (a Palo Alto startup with some of the Hadoop creators, aiming to be the RedHat of Hadoop) and Yahoo who has driven much of the ongoing core development (although Carol Bartz seems interested in spinning the group out if the market is hot enough). IBM dabbles in Hadoop and has it as an adornment in their much bigger database and analytics business. EMC is interesting because they aren't a big database company; they are much more a big-data database company if you get the nuance, and the addition of Hadoop is more significant in that context. Like Cloudera and others, EMC is going to have their own Hadoop distribution (a specific version of the OpenSource code with specific testing, integration and potential for support). Where EMC expands the Hadoop horizon is by offering a variation of the GreenPlum appliance that can do Hadoop processing, probably as a front-end processing step to be followed by more conventional analysis on the Greenplum appliance.

EMC Does Software (Really)

It's quite amazing to see the degree to which EMC has transformed itself into a software company compared (for example) to Cisco which is still largely a network box company. Part of the difference is the fact that EMC has been a strategic IT partner at the application system level much more so than Cisco. Part of it is probably due to the fact that for 20 years EMC has sold products that were integrated with business critical mainframe applications intimately. That notwithstanding, five years ago, EMC was very much a storage box company in terms of how they presented themselves and that has changed enormously. A lot of the product innovation in the new lower-end VNX line leverages innovatively functional componentization internally (what EMC calls the CSX architecture). Finally, EMC has a truly unfair advantage in the fact that they are the majority owner of a very successful software company that is highly valued in the market, and that gives them a way of selling software products without necessarily having (for example) to train the sales team to sell software alternatives to hardware.

VCE Updated

The EMC analyst conference presented a lot of opportunity to understand what has happened with VCE and Acadia. If you remember, when they were first announced VCE was a consortium that created and maintained reference architectures for specific integrations of Cisco's UCS with EMC storage running on VMware, called VBlocks. At the time Acadia was to be a sales and service JV that would actually build and deliver VBlock systems including optionally running the system for a time. Much has changed. The name Acadia is gone and the JV is now called VCE. VCE now engineers, manufactures and ships VBlock systems but no longer offers extensive services beyond that (it was too confusing to Cisco and EMC's integrator partners). VBlocks are engineered in the sense that great effort goes into integrating all the constituent parts (VMware, EMC and Cisco software releases) as well as integrating storage element management into the UCS management system. The VBlocks are manufactured so that all the component integration is done by VCE and what the customer gets is a ready to use, integrated system. VCE is now up to 700 people (!), and is moving forward aggressively to offer certified integration with important applications like SAP. VCE and EMC report high customer acceptance for the VBlock concept and a very healthy revenue pipeline. VCE works hard to make what it learns available both to the parents and distribution partners (the largest would like to also be manufacturers in this sense), so the part that isn't clear is whether this is a long term function or intrinsically transitional, but for now it seems to be an important enabler in providing pre-integrated systems for virtualization and that seems to have real market traction.

"Eight Days a Week"

EMC & Greenplum 75 Days In: EMC (Pat Gelsinger) and Greenplum (Bill Cook and Scott Yara) spoke to analysts to discuss progress and to announce a new offering — the Data Computing Appliance — that tangibly represents the results of the marriage (Greenplum was a software company, EMC very much a hardware sales company at its core). The amount of progress is impressive, certainly as slide ware. EMC is motivated to make all this work because of the increasing number of database appliances incorporating storage that replace the pure software implementations that used EMC storage. The Data Computing Appliance physically looks like an EMC storage system (and can be purchased in ½ to 24 racks of stuff). Since EMC uses X86 controllers already, the piece parts existed to quickly build a Greenplum appliance without much compromise. And then once aligned with EMC system architecture, it's relatively easy to offer other EMC "family" integrations such as Data Domain backup and de-duplication and/or remote site replication. Greenplum has always had a lot of edgy vision and ambition. EMC is fueling that with bodies (30% staff growth already not to mention all the hardware system synergy) and seemingly doing what it takes to keep the large company from killing the newcomer. At this rate the product progress is going to fun to watch.

Wouldn't This Be a Kick in the Pants

Earlier in June we picked up a wonderfully juicy rumor: Oracle wanted to acquire EMC. Oracle's Market Cap is about 3X that of EMC (and you get 80% of VMware as part of the deal) so it seems financially plausible. We don't think that Ellison would do this just for "Carly Fiorina" reasoning ("If it's larger it must be better!"). But we do think it would be a very interesting (and large) structural leapfrog along the lines of Cisco's UCS (modular mainframe), VCE and Acadia — the reconstruction of the mainframe company. Virtualization enables much bigger plays (utility computing, service delivery) but taking practical advantage of them requires doing as much standardization of the lower levels of the stack as possible. Putting together Sun, VMware and EMC infrastructure, and then piling Oracle database and applications on top of that stack would be really interesting from that perspective. The rumor seems to have quieted down for now but it seems like a harbinger of something that might really happen in the future. And the impact on existing and likely marketing and business partnerships would just be amazing to watch as an analyst! pchristy@irg-intl.com

EMC and Data Federation

At EMC's Analyst Meeting in the Fall they spoke about Data Federation being the next architectural frontier — the ability to federate many large data systems (think V-Max size) together so that data is automatically propagated and synchronized among them in support of emerging Cloud requirements like VMotion at a distance, DR, Cloud expansion. More recently Pat Gelsinger, EMC's new (six month) head of all the storage infrastructure products gave an analyst presentation in which he dove into this topic. Pat came to EMC from Intel where most recently he ran the Enterprise Computing half of the business. He joined Intel 30 years earlier as a Technician Grade 2 and worked his way up the technical ranks, including becoming Intel's first CTO. The point is only that Pat has technical credibility. Pat did a great job of being a little more specific about what data federation was (how you would recognize it if it came up and bit you so to speak) and how it can be done technically — it's all about caching. Pat means caching like in modern CPU's more than caching like in web object caching. With Web objects "good enough" is often good enough; with microprocessors caching has to deal precisely with the ordering sequence of reads and writes and always give a program the "right" data. I'm absolutely sure that Pat knows what a correct design has to do and why it is a non-trivial problem (he spoke of some new patents in WAN synchronization protocols). I'm sure that Pat is the driving kind of executive to get EMC to really focus on this and build a working system. What remains to be seen is how well caching works given the latency, packet loss and cost of modern communication and as a result how large the solution footprint is and what use cases are best served.