Tactical Management versus Transformational Management

....coming soon....

http://consultingblogs.emc.com/andrewmccreath

Simplicity and ‘The Cloud’

Many years back I read a great book by Jack Trout & Steve Rivkin on the Power of Simplicity. It has become part of my daily ethic when talking to peers, clients and when I get home I even use it with my kids!

Nobody really wants to be bamboozled with complicated explanations, and those that try to do the bamboozling are often lost is a hazy vision in the first place. Vision is for dreamers, the ability to bring vision in to a strategy is where the smart people come in. Let’s face it we can all watch an episode of Star Trek and think “how cool are warp drives and photon cannons”, but unless somebody turns that in to reality then is remains in the fiction drawer and never sees the light of day.

So what’s happening with this term ‘The Cloud’ then? Well, simply put many folks are calling themselves cloud when they’re not a cloud, others are calling themselves cloud application providers, or cloud networks, etc, etc ,etc, the list goes on. It appears that if you put the work cloud in front of your primary marketed product then you are in-the-cloud-game!... WRONG!
Any single organisation that calls themselves a cloud must be scrutinised closely. By implication a cloud is a heterogeneous common platform for on demand compute resource that is available everywhere to anyone at anytime.

So simply put, how does one create a cloud. Well, one doesn’t, many do. It is going to take all service and compute providers to come together and agree a common architecture for platform integration. We have seen the starts of this with the VCE Alliance for example, where VMware, Cisco and EMC created a journey for their customers to take in the Private Cloud Formation, this involved the three main components in the infrastructure (Storage, Compute and Network), working together to form a service. Now you have a building block (or common hosted platform) for your Private Cloud, what do you do next? Well you need to make it available which means you need scalable architecture across sites. No point having a Cloud Compute capability in one country when the world runs 7x24! Major in-country disruptions through internet, power, strike-action, or any other number of potential business hazards, could lead to a complete outage; much like the recent O2 network, and Google mail.

So now you have a common hosted platform, a Private Cloud, serving your organisation you are ready, and indeed waiting, for the industry to provide a common-link. How do you connect with somebody else in the Cloud arena? And what controls, security and data protection is on offer? No point sharing somebody else’s cloud if they’re going to be taken over by a competitor, or worse go bankrupt! How do you control the data in this cloud and stop it wandering off anywhere else.

This is going to be the stumbling block of full cloud formation for many years to come, and indeed prevents many Private Clouds from being much more than Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). EMC has Atmos Online which delivers cloud computing for the enterprise, real world storage and compute capability- http://www.emccis.com . Admittedly it is only out of the Americas right now, but it is a huge step forward in actually offering tangible cloud services. Need a virtual server or set of virtual servers, grab Atmos Online Compute services, install your application, control your own systems, and hey presto you’re up and running. Now that is simple! The first real option for anyone to take a cloud service. Interesting, I think so, especially if you consider what must be going on “in the private cloud”....

EMC Blog site

Where am I blogging now?

OK, so I've been on the Virtual tour with clients for the last few months, but I will endeavour to keep up to dat over on my corporate public blog from now on too ....

http://consultingblogs.emc.com/andrewmccreath

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Yes, I do things outside of work....

http://twitter.com/GoingForBroke

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How Virtualisation affects Backups

Most of the mistakes made when running a virtualisation project usually occur when a process, work stream or department has not been consulted in the initial planning & design phase of the project. This may be due to virtualisation being seen as a quick win for the server infrastructure team, or cost avoidance for desktop through virtualisation.

The fact of the matter is, when it comes to backing up the virtual infrastructure, this can be the main area of pain, especially when there are constrains in that area to begin with, then virtualisation can negatively compound the issue.

 

Server virtualisation enables us to squeeze the most out of our server/ storage/ network infrastructure, but it gives us a new problem in the backup arena. How do we go about capturing this information, and what strategy do we adopt?

 

There are typically three main options here for most SMBs:-

1.)             Backup at the host level.

2.)             Backup within the virtual machine

3.)             Backup via SnapShot (VCB)

 

The first will put a backup agent on the ESX host and allow the host to backup its visible LUNs. The benefits are the simplicity of the roll-out, and the low level of additional hardware required to deploy this scenario.

The challenges are that this places a high resource requirement on the host itself which can negatively impact the performance of the virtual machines. There is no support for database backups at this level, nor file restores and the overall performance of the backup is low.

 

The second option is to place an agent in the virtual machine itself.

This is ideal for organisations that wish to continue with the simple but familiar route to backup, and gives the granularity that has become expectant of the process to date. However, this does required to continued maintenance and management of each client, the virtual machine resources are swamped during the backup and can affect resource pools in the virtual infrastructure, and the bottle neck becomes the network bandwidth to the media server.

 

The third option is to deploy a smart set of tools/ services which support VCB or SNAPShots. These minimise the resource impact on the hosts and virtual machines, while increasing the restore options down to the file level as well as the entire VM instance. The management becomes simplified and processes optimised.

The disadvantages are the increased requirements on shared storage (iSCSI/SAN) and an additional Proxy Server. For databases pre and post scripts may be required for live (hot) backups

 

Looking up the service maturity model however, some enterprise organisations will have separated the data sets from the service (server/ application) layer, and applied an ILM or Content Management & Archiving system; therefore the “Information” or data layer is already protected, and the challenges move to service availability and compliance. 

Virtualisation boost in the year of doing ‘more with less’

So last years economic and financial events have established ’09 as the year of doing ‘more with less’ as I mentioned pre-Christmas. 

Cost is now the central factor for consideration, whether that involves production BAU services, or the cost avoidance for DR hardware and new application server deployments.

The ability to deploy a new application in days rather than weeks or even months has had many an industry jumping for joy, and doing-more-with-less.

But looking back over the last twelve months, what can we say were the other primary drivers for deploying a virtualisation solution?

We have seen business agility at the forefront of virtualisation uptake, but the enhanced availability and management tools of the virtual environment from vendors has also come along in leaps and bounds. This has supported the strategic move forward for organisations to adopt the technology with confidence.

The messaging behind virtualisation has also been transformed of late and more visibility of the product roadmaps have been revealed, to building strategic confidence. So how do these factors help affect uptake this year, and more importantly, what will be this years’s key virtualisation drivers?

With the ‘more is less’ objective remaining imperative, the word on everyone’s lips will be cost cutting and optimisation in 2009. The age old adage off ‘sweating assets’ will be reinforced, and virtualisation is predominantly positioned to deliver against both of these.

Organisations will look to improve their ROI in shorter time frames, and be looking for more quick wins to support the business operation this year. Simplified management, smart-sourcing and a focus on the internal operations will be at the front of the CIO’s mind, and they will be looking for simple answers to these problems.

Getting the right people for the job will no longer mean recruiting the skilled labour or contractor, it will be more about ensuring you have the right services aligned to your operation. IT will be accountable to a new range of questions – “Who will support my virtual environment and at what cost?”. “Who will continue migrating my physical servers when my limited resources are stretched even further this year?” “When and how will I start being able to measure the effect of virtualisation, and continue to lobby support for this strategic move?”

The good news is that there are services out there to address these questions and they’re not just available from the virtualisation software providers. There are now a range of smart-services on the market available at lower costs. There are answers to the challenges but we need to fully understand the question and work out how these will benefit the short term problems, while not negatively impacting long term strategy and existing ROI commitments.

Another key driver in 2009 will be desktop virtualisation, thereby leveraging existing products, skills and processes to deliver flexible, cost effective, simpler to manage desktop environments. With organisations having many more desktops than servers to manage, support and refresh, and various product developments through 2008 to 2009, this will certainly be in the Top 5 on the business To-Do list.

Flying the flag for ‘more with less’, this rapidly growing technology will also provide the strongest ROI within an IT organisation and eliminate environmental control issues in the general office, as well as the enhanced security, management and reduced support requirements.