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February 2010 - Posts

3Tera brings powerful, simple way for customers to move apps to clouds

Published: February 24 2010, 09:48 AM | no comments
by Jay Fry

 

Today's announcement of CA's definitive agreement to acquire 3Tera has a couple of interesting wrinkles. It's definitely of interest for those of us who have followed 3Tera and the many companies in the cloud computing space for a while. But it also has the possibility of shaking up the admittedly stodgy image of CA - and what CA can deliver for customers thinking about cloud computing.

But first, for those who haven't been living and breathing this stuff, here's the quick take:

3Tera is one of the early pioneers in cloud computing. Even better, they are one of the early pioneers with customers, which tells you that they are onto something.

The 3Tera product, AppLogic, has a pretty slick graphical user interface that customers can use to configure and deploy composite applications to either public or private clouds. It takes the many, very manual tasks required to put an application into a cloud environment and lets you take care of them with an elegant series of clicks, drags, and drops. (For a high-speed tour of how this works, they have a 4-minute demo you can watch here.)

Yes, as you'd expect, there's "some assembly required" up front to make this all possible, but one 3Tera customer noted that their IT folks would not allow them to go back to doing app configuration and deployment the old, manual way now that they were using AppLogic. We considered that a good sign.

And, because 3Tera creates a layer of abstraction for the applications that you're encapsulating, you have a bunch of deployment options, both now and at any point in the future. That could come in very handy as you think about both public and private cloud possibilities.

Both service providers & enterprises can use 3Tera for cloud enablement

3Tera's most aggressive customers have been the managed service providers - companies that are scrambling to find compelling, differentiated ways to offer cloud-based services to their customers. Enterprises have also started see 3Tera's possibilities for deploying composite apps into a private cloud environment. However, enterprises have been a little more reticent to make sure they know what they are getting into before making the leap to cloud.

This is probably one of the areas that CA can help improve by backing the 3Tera innovations with significant resources: enterprises need to feel comfortable to move applications to the cloud. A 3Tera/CA combination will give enterprises a significant partner that's providing a technology to make the steps possible - and much more doable.

And luckily, we're expecting the whole 3Tera team to come over to CA: there's still a bit of evangelizing left to do.

Even so, however, 3Tera customer successes have been noted by an analyst or two. In his report on private clouds last year ("Deliver Cloud Benefits Inside Your Walls," April 13, 2009), Forrester analyst James Staten called 3Tera's AppLogic "the leading cloud infrastructure software offering available today" and noted that it was "the foundation of many public clouds." That's a great foundation to build from.

One of the reasons 3Tera's probably had good success with service providers is the fact that it uses Xen to help abstract the applications from the infrastructure. Xen is usually good news given the margin pressures that service providers are under. In the enterprise, however, VMware is a much more common and acceptable choice. It was already on 3Tera's roadmap to deliver VMware support, but here's another bit of good news coming with this deal: CA plans to extend AppLogic to also be able to use both ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V.

Note to self: This is a big shift for CA

The 3Tera deal is certainly a very public acknowledgement by CA that cloud computing is front and center to what's changing in IT. And, the deal drops another piece into place in a rapidly filling-out strategy by CA to address those changes.

Customers are likely going to have a number of important needs as cloud computing becomes more central. Organizations want to know how their systems are performing using business metrics (Oblicore can help with this). They need to decide what components to take to the cloud - and what components not to. 3Tera can help them cloud-enable and deploy the apps they want to move now. And, as customers look to optimize this process and their environment, that's where the Cassatt expertise can be useful.

Alongside these moves, the existing CA portfolio continues to have a strong, immediate role to play. The 3Tera deal may seem like quite a shift from CA's traditional assurance, automation, and security businesses, but in fact, is a complimentary piece. Customers need to have the ability to manage their environments end-to-end, even if the cloud is involved, and they can (and are) working on that using CA's existing solutions today. There are lots of opportunities for more linkage going forward as well.

Which leads me back to comments like those in a Derrick Harris's GigaOM article (complete with some prognosticating about CA's next moves) a week or so ago: "Let's be honest, systems management vendor CA doesn't exactly inspire visions of innovation."

Hopefully (as Derrick mentions), we're in the process of changing that. But we'll leave the verdict on that up to customers.

3Tera: Since the "good old days" of cloud computing...before it was cloud computing

On a more personal note, I've been watching 3Tera since my early days at Cassatt, as we and they were all wrestling with how to describe our respective offerings, how to get market traction, and what moves would pay off. Like Cassatt, these guys were cloud before cloud was cool. A lot of the way they describe themselves predates the cloud computing phraseology. And that's OK. As I noted earlier, they focused on the problem of how to encapsulate apps and make it possible to deploy them in lots of ways and locations, including the cloud.

An interesting connection point: after Cassatt landed at CA, our former CEO Bill Coleman took on a consulting role with 3Tera that I wrote about back in August. Some of his comments then look interesting now, in light of the CA deal with 3Tera.

More details will follow here as I have a chance to dig into some of the interesting aspects of this deal, its implications, and other questions that will come up. Until then, the press release about the acquisition is posted here.

This is cross-posted at my Data Center Dialog blog.

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By: Jay Fry
Jay Fry is vice president of marketing, Cloud Computing, at CA Technologies. He has over 20 years of experience in marketing and management for innovative enterprise software companies. Prior to CA, Jay was vice president of marketing at cloud computing start-up Cassatt and founded the marketing department...
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How fast is the European Cloud? (Results of Pan-European Cloud Survey)

Published: February 16 2010, 02:41 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by CA Community

In Europe we are releasing the results of a new independent annual survey:  "Unleashing the Power of Virtualization - Cloud Computing and the Perceptions of European Business". It shows that despite huge uptake of server virtualisation European businesses are still by and large unconvinced of the benefits of the next logical step, cloud computing.  Granted, only 11% of respondents felt cloud is a short-term fad (these folks may have thought the same of the internet), but a whopping 72% need more convincing before seeing it as a long term shift in technology!

Vanson Bourne, a respected international research organisation, contacted 550 enterprises and found that server virtualization is gaining real traction, with 70% of respondents surveyed saying that they are either implementing it or planning to. However, the number drops significantly when looking at the other steps which move from a static environment towards infrastructure as a service and cloud computing: Here are the percentages of people that have started implementing or planning: automatic provisioning (19%), automatic deprovisioning (11%), automated workloads (33%) and dynamic resource allocation (31%). Only self service seems to score slightly higher at 45%.

Cost or Benefit driven

Companies seem to be using server virtualization in their data centres to reduce costs. However, they indicate they still feel somewhat uncertain on how to automate, manage and secure virtualized environments. Until they do this they will struggle to reap the full benefits of virtualization, which go far beyond the cost savings of server consolidation. This is one of the reason we are launching The Cloud Academy - a series of educational roundtables which are designed to help show organisations such as these get the most out of their virtualisation efforts and how to mature them towards a cloud-connected infrastructure and services.

Cloud Sourcing = Outsourcing?

The jury is still out on that. Of the organizations surveyed there was an exact even split between those who see cloud as synonymous with outsourcing and those who do not. Also there is a fair diversity in organizations that feel they can manage their cloud efforts in house and those that expect to need external advice or help. A slight majority of 65% of respondents feel that they do not have adequate in-house capabilities to deliver a cloud infrastructure at present.

Talking business

Striking is to see how most seem unable to link the technical advantages of cloud (on-demand self-service, broad network access, rapid elasticity and measured service) with business benefits such as cost savings, better ROI, increased availability, ability to deploy new services more quickly. This may make these IT departments more vulnerable against vendors going over their head and approaching the business owners directly.

Any inhibitors?

When looking at the drawbacks of cloud, management (54%) and security (27%) aspects are seen as the biggest inhibitors. At present a small group of forward thinking companies , interestingly enough concentrated in a small number of countries) are beginning to dynamically manage virtualised environments to deliver infrastructure as a service and thus ‘Unleash the power of virtualization.'

One Community?

Personally I found the difference between the European countries most interesting. Some answers seem to directly related back to the countries' cultural archetypes (like skeptical, thorough, open/entrepreneurial, relaxed), while in some cases two neighboring countries are so far apart that they might as well be from different planets. When it comes to cloud computing Europe may have a lot more than two speeds.

To view the survey report please visit: the EMEA media resouce center  

To find out more about The Cloud Academy: http://www.thecloudacademy.com

 

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By: CA Community
CA Community is the blog manager’s account used to post general updates and news items.
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How Lean is your Cloud? - cloud economics

Published: February 14 2010, 01:58 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by CA Community

Yesterday, in a service management blog, I discussed lessons that IT can learn from a hundred years of manufacturing best practices. It showed that cloud computing will play a key role when upping IT to industrial strength and scale.  We now continue that discussion here with what may very well be the area that IT can learn most from manufacturing and where cloud computing may have the biggest impact: costing, sourcing and quality.

Costing. Many feel that the billions that the industry invested in ERP systems can be justified by the improved planning capabilities that such a global perspective gives. Reality however is that the benefits of ERP – if any – come more from improved financial visibility. By being able to compare costs, prices  and efficiencies per country, the overall portfolio could be optimized. And although most ERP systems have added a supply chain planning solution over the past years, their cost analysis and financial functionality is often both more advanced and more widely implemented.

Full, loaded, integral products cost. In manufacturing understanding the cost of a product is both an art and a science. Using a variety of tools and methods direct and indirect cost elements are allocated  to cost carriers (products). In fact, most manufacturing  innovations are first screened against their impact on product cost, before their implementation is even considered. The two main allocation methods are a roll up based on the Bill of Materials (BOM) and an activity based allocation using intermediate pools  of costs. IT cost and especially infrastructure cost traditionally were  fixed and allocated in an overhead way. With CMDB’s (configuration management databases) becoming more widely implemented , organizations  can start to allocate specific technical cost directly to the business service they support. And also the pay as you go model of cloud computing makes that easier. As a result many an IT department is starting their own financial and cost analysis function or department. Something which is also required as cloud computing renders make  or buy decisions more granular and more frequent.

Global sourcing and spot markets. It will be clear that under the above market conditions, smart sourcing becomes a key competitive differentiator. Static long term contracts and multi-year commitments are replaced by spot markets, hedging and pricing based on average daily price. Also in Cloud computing we already see the first examples of this, again with Amazon leading the pack by introducing spot pricing for its EC2 elastic cloud offering.

Just in Time. At first sight Just in Time manufacturing seems to be at odds with a focus on product cost. Making large quantities to stock (just in case) seems more efficient than producing each item when and only when required (just in time). The revolutionary idea of  lean manufacturing was that if it is more efficient to make hundred of the same in a row, the conclusion should not be to make batches of a hundred, but to change and tweak the system until a batch size of one could be produced as efficient as a batch of hundred.

Single Minute Exchange of Die. SMED, sometimes jokingly referred to as “single minute exchange or die”, is the practice where the whole factory team works together to change over the manufacturing process from one type of product to another, within a minute. Imagine a formula one team getting ready to exchange tires, including a guy with a whistle and endless rehearsals and you get an idea how serious this practice is taken in lean factories. To most of us this may feel outrages and expensive. But in fact this singular focus on achieving together what everyone agreed is important (in this case make to order and meeting real and not forecasted customer demand) and makes SMED relevant in a cloud context. In the past, each IT department or discipline (network, databases, applications, development, etc.) - could focus on meeting their own SLA’s, but all together they often were delivering an overall customer experience that was less than desirable. Case in point, also with cloud computing is that improvements cannot come from only technology (cloud in this case), it has to be grounded in mentality and processes.

Total Quality. Before lean manufacturing introduced the concept of zero defects, the consensus of the industry was that there was something like “optimal quality”. The idea behind that was that if one in X-thousand products failed, it was  cheaper to repair those few then to improve manufacturing quality even further. It will be clear that Just in Time and zero inventories had no tolerance for that idea. If even a single component fails, the whole delivery to the end customer will get delayed severely. As a result manufacturing started measuring defects in PPM (Parts per million) instead of percentages or promille’s. Basically the idea was that manufacturing something first time right in the end always is cheaper than having to repair it later on, as all these unplanned repair activities are essentially waste that adds no value. Also in IT the idea of “first time right” is gaining traction and  cloud computing, with its large scale, is accelerating this even further. With a million users the impact of an error or (security) flaw is much higher and does warrants a larger focus on quality. Interestingly this focus on zero defects also further another lean concept, namely excluding any functions  that the user sees no value in , as these do increase complexity and the chances of errors, but not the value.

Maximize Value, Minimize Waste. Even if the above analogies between Lean manufacturing and IT may seem far fetched to you, one thing you may find useful regardless is using the Lean IT mantra of “Maximizing Value” (only do what adds value to the end customer) and “Minimizing Waste” (eliminating steps that do not add value) to guide your decisions.  Just take any idea or proposal and evaluate it against these two simple criteria: does the service in question add significant value in the eyes of your end customer? Or, does it minimize waste by eliminating steps that do not add value relevant to your customers. These two very simple criteria can also prove very useful in streamlining your cloud computing efforts.

Now is the time for organizations to start evaluating how cloud computing can help them transform their traditional IT factories into a modern IT Supply Chain.  With the Cloud Academy initiative we are trying to support these efforts.  On the one hand by furthering knowledge about basic cloud building blocks and cloud security, but also by discussing possible management approaches to cloud computing in the Cloud Academy discussion group on Linked-In. Regardless of whether you are looking to start your journey to cloud computing with Software as a Service, Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service. May your cloud be a lean one!

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By: CA Community
CA Community is the blog manager’s account used to post general updates and news items.
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Introducing the Cloud Academy: as cloud is not a sprint but more a marathon

Published: February 04 2010, 04:18 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by CA Community

More and more people are realizing that Cloud Computing may be a hype, but for sure it is not an invention.  The components that make up or enable the cloud are not new. We have had fairly broad networks for 10 years, have used virtualization for 20 years and were sharing of computing capacity (time sharing) even before I started my working life. As CA’s Ajei Gopal recently said, Cloud Computing is much more a “practical innovation”.   Practical innovation combines existing technology into a compelling new product. Best example of a “practical Innovation” is probably the iPod that combined existing and readily available technology like a portable hard disk, a compact headset and MP3 compression in a new type of walkman.

The thing with “practical Innovations” is that it is not about having the best idea; it is not even about having the idea first. It is all about FLAWLESS EXECUTION. Over the last couple o weeks we saw a few insightful article appear. For example in “Don’t Rush to Cloud Computing”  by Art Wittmann in Network Computing and “Five points to make when your CEO cries cloud” by Chris Murphy in Informationweek. The morale of these basically is that despite the hype and the (peer) pressure “ready-fire-aim” is not a good strategy for cloud computing.

And this is exactly the reason why we started an initiative called “the Cloud Academy” (www.theCloudAcademy.com).
The aim of the academy is to offer IT and BT (business technology) professionals an opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss the pro and cons and brainstorm about execution strategies for their complex environments. What the academy is not is a school or course where a “teacher” explains how it should be done, but to facilitate the discussion we do provide a short primer “Shedding light on Cloud Computing” to all attendees. 

 

To start we picked four areas to explore: 1) Security First!, discussing security and governance concerns, as this seems the dominant topic in most initial cloud discussions, 2) The changing role of IT management, what will be the core task of IT (if any) once we no longer are busy trying to keep an assorted bunch of infrastructure in the basement running 3) My first Cloud: about building a private cloud, as most companies are starting there to get their feet wet. And 4) Assuring Cloud Performance, about warranting your customer’s and users experience in a cloud environment. This last one is interesting because – even though many organizations seem to perceive the cloud mainly a something they will consume - reality is that if you’re a bank, a travel agent, a media company or even a government, you likely will be delivering a large part of your customers services over the cloud.

All four session are technology agnostics and touch upon different aspects of cloud computing such as Iaas, PaaS and SaaS. But we also have one technology specific session: Mainframe goes Cloud, why 20 years of virtualization and massive scalability give this platform a head start.

As the Cloud Academy is all about peer to peer communication and exchanging ideas we are running these in our local facilities and where possible in local language, initially  throughout Europe (remember: ready-aim-fire) with the Netherlands and France already underway.  But to kick things of we invited Craig Symons Vice President and Principal Analyst of Forrester Research to give his perspective on how Cloud Computing may change the role of IT. Join us on March 3rd for this complementary webcast.

PS For more discussion and news updates please join the Cloud Academy group at LinkedIn

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By: CA Community
CA Community is the blog manager’s account used to post general updates and news items.
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The Cooperative Enterprise Cloud – Easy as a whistling song

Published: February 01 2010, 02:21 PM | no comments
by CA Community

For anyone still doubting whether the Cloud indeed will change everything, the below video is really something to watch. It tells the story of how UK headquartered Logicalis group partnered with Cisco, Netapp and CA to deliver their Cooperative Enterprise Cloud Service. After being the first vendor to deploy Cisco new Unified Computing System in the UK it took the approach one step further and developed it “as a service”.

Don’t let the name BOCS, which stands for “Bespoke On-Site Cloud Service” put you off. Because it seems to deliver everything one could want from a cloud. It runs indoor - nice and secure - during normal conditions, but can scale seamlessly to include additional capacity when needed. And best of all, customers do not have to go out and buy several tyes of software and hardware and piece it all together, that has already been done. Seems too good to be true? Well the video is an animation and the offering is available as contracted service from Q2 of this year, but it sure seems worth the wait.



Now why is this so different, why does it change everything? First of all, this is not traditional outsourcing - where every change is to be regretted as conditions are cemented into concrete. Neither is it “traditional cloud” where even the biggest customer is a mere number and the vendor is typically only reachable via email. This is cloud at a human scale: seemingly promising the benefits of scale and elasticity, but at the same time addressing the potential drawbacks that more and more organizations are starting to realize. 

And unlike previous internet innovations, cloud does not seem to be about cutting out the middleman, but about making the IT supply chain as a whole more efficient and effective through intelligent brokering. Welcome your feedback.

BTW in case you’re wondering what technology CA provided to the mix in areas like automation, provisioning, monitoring and energy metering , I am sure Logicalis will be happy to tell you, but reality is that for its customers , it does not matter. And it should not matter. Just like Salesforce makes a point of not discussing what databases it uses and like the specification sheet of a Rolls Royce under horsepower simply says "enough".
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By: CA Community
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