Converged Infrastructure and the five pillars

It's been a while since my last post; between family and work things are a little bit hectic. I guess this has provide me more information and experience to talk about Converged Infrastructure.

I must say I bought into "Cloud Computing" very early in the game. It made sense to me even before the "cloud" term became official.

The reason I had an easy transition to it is because my experience has been of buying and selling everything as a service. I always saw IT, especially Infrastructure, as a potential utility and nothing more than that. The same way it's second nature to us consume electricity and water should be to consume IT Infrastructure; and that's for me what Converged Infrastructure tries to enable. It's not the only piece necessary but it's indeed the foundation for it.

Converged Infrastructure is, in my opinion, the ability to provide flexible and elastic IT Infrastructure resources within an Enterprise. It's in essence, these resource pools should be available to IT users consume based on demand. We lived for many years on this separate silos of technologies within the Data Center, the Storage, Network, Compute Silos where simple provisioning and capacity management has been a challenge. Throw on top of that the need for regulatory compliance the complexity grew exponentially and therefore the impact to the business has been that IT is simply not keeping up with the need for business needs for agility.

In essence converged Infrastructure has to apply those concepts around agility, elasticity around five key technology areas:

Orchestration

* IT needs to be provisioned, managed, offered and consumed as a service, using a catalogue. That's is not new by any means within IT; but it was never fully implemented to its potential because the underlying hardware was not elastic, and not always ready for real on-demand provisioning. 

Virtualization

* Virtualization at the OS level; really sparked the ability to provide on demand resources, with a better physical resource utilzation ratio. What that meant was that finally the orchestration tools that were out there; are now capable of truly provide capcity on demand. Virtualzation is the catalyst to enable Cloud computing.

Network

* Network has explored virtualization of some components for some time now but was lacking tools that would enable agility of provisioning and the lack of vision from most service providers really tampered innovation. Now network has evolved and it's ready to be simpler; not only with the increase on speeds and feeds but the management tools as well; the ability to converge LAN and SAN using new technologies like FCoE are bringing massive savings to Data Centers. 

Compute

* Compute has evolved quite rapidly and the advent on multi-core processors; advancements on memory and the advent of new architectures around Blades have create the ability to Compute scale much better; and it definitely has sparked a lot of innovation from multiple vendors.

Storage

 * Virtualization has increased the need for Storage; we always focus on the server gains around virtualization and forget that it has sparked the need to fully adopt Shared Storage. Also; the massive amount of data we all create these days by using social networks and collaboration has sparked the need for more and more storage.

When it comes to converged Infrastructure these five pillars are key for the successful adoption of Private Clouds. If you have a real good handle of those you most likely will start to see substantial savings and start to meet the demands from the business.

What the consumer space can teach corporate world?

I truly believe we are living interesting times in IT.  In the middle of a long-term recession where budgets are tighter than ever we are seeing such an amazing number of innovations at the consumer level. 

You can point to companies and technologies that are creating this revolution at the consumer space but I want to step aside from the technology that makes it happen and just talk about what I believe is the true catalyst for this revolution.  I call it the need for Simplicity and Focus on User Experience.

Let’s face it; real people (Not us technical professionals) are tired of all the complexity associated with computing and technology in general.

People are tired of bringing their PC home and have to spend two hours setting things up before they could send an email.

People are tired of carrying a bag full of gadgets to take pictures, listen to music, answering email on the go, watch their favorite TV show while traveling, and the list goes on and on.

Real People just want things to be simple and to work!

I am not trying to down play the need to specialized devices or customized, powerful PCs. There’s a market for people that need to have it but most of people out there don’t actually need it. 

In summary, while for the enthusiasts and professional photographers there’s a need for a DLSR Camera for most people out there any camera phone would do it.

The companies that understood this are the ones thriving today.

I think that now this needs to spread to our corporate IT.

For years we in corporate IT lived with the notion of making things very customized to fit our “special” needs. This behavior led us to push technology further and advance in a lot of areas. However at the same time we were doing that I believe we distanced ourselves from people that just want technology to help them achieve a task.

We, corporate IT professionals, find ourselves talking about bits and bytes and personal preferences for hours and hours, meeting after meeting and very rarely we truly listen to what the people that actually will use what we are creating have to say. 

Let’s be honest, how many of us out there working in IT departments can truly say what the business we are supporting is all about? 

How many of us could describe one business process, from end to end, that is essential to our company and how technology is making a difference there? OR how many of us understand what an end user actually uses when it comes to technology to complete most of his/hers daily tasks? 

To regain the business confidence in what we do I believe we need to listen to what the consumer space is telling us and translate that into our corporate world.

How do we make it happen?

I think we need to step outside of our comfort zone and think about our users and our value to the business as a whole.  

Most likely you will notice the need to shift from spending hours keep things running to actually spending hours understanding the business we support. 

A practical example would be if I am an IT professional on the infrastructure side and I spend most of my day, racking and stacking equipment, installing devices and keep the machine running I need to shift my focus to things that can make an impact on my corporation, like understand a business process and how it can be provided by technology.

I am not saying this will be an easy task, as it will require a major cultural shift not only at the IT professional level but also in the corporation as a whole.

CIOs will have to truly push this as a priority to their associates and make this a continous effort and part of the overall strategy.  

Enterprise Architecture I think is a key factor on this and as the glue between business and IT it will provide the framework necessary for this transformation.

On my next post I will talk about what Cloud means to this transition in IT and why I think converged Infrastructure is one of the key elements of that. While you can build your own Data Center to support your business applications you can, today, look outside for products that can offer you a complete solution.

Are you selling a commodity?

I have this very old sofa which has followed me an my family for almost 10 years now; and as part of the family it has moved with us overseas and throughout five states. My personal computer (Macbook Pro) is not that old but essentially is not performing very well with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

After serious thoughts and financial considerations I built a business case and decided to replace both (actually the sofa is my wife's idea). These are my functional requirements:

For the sofa:

• It has to Leather (just feels better)

• Not too big (I don't like to feel that I can't touch the floor while sitting)

 For the computer:

• Macbook Pro 15
• 2.8GHz i7 Processor
• Anit-Glare High -Resolution Display
• 128 Solid State Drive
• 8 Gigs of RAM
• Aperture
• Office 2011 (Business Edition)
• VGA Adapter
• And of course I will run my Windows 7 on it too....so I need my VMware Fusion!

What does it tell me? It tells me that I know and care a lot more about computers than I do about sofas and the appearance of my living room.

So, kick and screaming I went to buy the sofa with my wife and daughter. The sales person from the store was really nice and very knowledgeable about their product and while he was talking about this and that feature I was only looking at the pricing tag. After 3 hours I left it with a headache and with the impression that I spent more than I wanted to. Looking back now I believe  the only way the sales person could have changed my perception about his "commodity" product  was to somehow link the sofa with my computer.  Don't ask me how; I don't know and don't care about sofas to even think about how that could influence my computing needs.

Today I found myself thinking about it and realizing that customers buying IT may feel the same way. Unless we as IT professionals realize that we need to tie our product to a real customer need he/she will feel that is buying is a commodity .

It's difficult to break our sales model as it is a lot easier for us to understand our own product rather than focus on how real people will actually use it.

My strategy is always to research a lot about my customer's environment and build a straw man of the its ecosystem and from there I try to make sure my pitch talks to their business needs.

I must say it's much easier said than done; sometimes you don't get it right, but I must say even when I got it completely wrong customers always appreciated the effort and walked away with the sense that I actually spent sometime to understand their challenges.

So our challenge in Sales is to decide whether we want to spend time and add value to our customers or just being a commodity.

Remember It's not you that determine what is a commodity, your customer does.

Why buy a pre-build Private Cloud platform makes sense.

As I worked on building my strategy for Private Cloud; I constantly have to answer “why don’t we do it ourselves? We already have all the pieces!”

I tried to answer this in many ways; technically, politically and sometimes even philosophically. What has worked, for the most part, is to answer by really approaching this from a value proposition perspective reminding people (and myself) why we in IT were hired in the first place.

In essence; IT is there to support or enable businesses to make their products, offer their services, etc… The less a company, that is not on the IT business, gets involved with it the better. In summary if I make cars; diapers or nails I have to focus on that and pronto.

It’s tempting to anyone in IT to roll up the sleeves and build your own environment; but you have to think; am I affecting positively my company bottom line or not?

If you are not; you should try to step back and look holistic and think; if I was running this company and my main job was to make diapers why should I spend my time doing anything else?

Build your own Private Cloud; getting all technical pieces together; build your processes around it; make this a service to your internal customers is great; but with great offerings out there why should I go to all this trouble?

I’ve seen, in general, that customers that are already used to buy IT as a service are better prepared to this journey. Companies that have International Presence are usually experimenting Managed Services and usually are the ones ahead on this game. I still believe we are a long way from having IT departments, in general, thinking that way; but I see progress here and there most of them driven by Enterprise Architecture. I think in a very near future we will all see IT departments adding more value to the business.

Make your processes ready for Private Cloud!

There’s no doubt that transition to a Private Cloud has many advantages for customers and its adoption will increase dramatically in the coming years.  The technology is mature and you see no fear from most companies to adopt a “virtualize first” approach when deploying new servers and applications. The Cost reduction is clear and ROI doesn’t require elaborated calculations and assumptions to be convincing.

However one of the big promises of Private Clouds and Cloud Computing in general is AGILITY.  IT needs to respond to business requirements quicker than ever before. In rough economic times; business has little room and patience to wait for IT to bring a new key application; expand into a new market; support a marketing initiative, etc…

To make things harder to IT, it doesn’t take much to anyone (including your CIO) to find a Service Provider that can bring a Virtual Machine in a matter of minutes. So the expectation at that point has been set and you are on the hook to live up to that.

The technology is there; you prepare your environment and you master the technical aspects needed to bring a VM up in no time. At that point you may think you are ready but there is a big piece of the deal and perhaps the most important one that is adjust your processes to bring the level of automation and standardization you need to support the business.

You may have your orchestration software and your portal ready but if your processes are still based on the non-virtualized environment and SLOs (Service Level Objectives) between IT departments are not reflecting the new environment it may still take weeks before you bring a VM up that is fully managed and supported like your old physical server.

You need to make sure the advantages of a virtualized environment are reflected in all aspects of provisioning and support.

Example; time to burn-in a Server; and time to transition servers between different system lifecycle developments may potentially decrease when working in a virtualized environment.

A hard analysis of this processes and the involvement of the stakeholders can truly help you fulfill the promise of agility to the business.

Technology is an enabler (and the fun part) it doesn’t change processes!