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February 2011 - Posts

A Q&A with Principled Technologies: Digging into the CA 3Tera AppLogic platform

Published: February 24 2011, 10:05 AM | no comments
by Matthew Richards

We recently engaged with Principled Technologies to explore several different technical aspects of our CA 3Tera AppLogic cloud computing platform and to write a series of technical white papers.  We wanted to share some of the firm's early insights about working with the technology here on the blog.  Following is a recap of a recent email chat with founder Bill Catchings. 

Let's start off with a brief overview of your company.  Tell us about Principled Technologies.

Principled Technologies Inc. is an industry-leading technology assessment and fact-based marketing services company based in the Research Triangle area in North Carolina. We have extensive experience and expertise in all aspects of technology testing and analysis, from researching new technologies, to developing new methodologies, to testing with new and existing tools. We provide customized services that focus on our clients' individual requirements. Whether the technology involves hardware, software, Web sites, or services, we offer the experience, expertise, and tools to help our clients assess how it will fare against its competition, its performance, its market readiness, and its quality and reliability.

I founded the company with Mark L. Van Name, and we both have worked together in technology assessment for over 25 years. As journalists, we published over a thousand articles on a wide array of technology subjects. We created and led the Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation, which developed such industry-standard benchmarks as Ziff Davis Media's Winstone and WebBench.

How long have you been using the CA 3Tera AppLogic software?

We have been using it since November 2010 to test a series of technical aspects of the product for a set of white papers that CA Technologies hired us to write. We completed tests of its networking, storage management, and security features, and its usability by MSPs for providing complete cloud-based application services to their clients.  We will make our findings available in the near future.

As part of your testing work with the CA 3Tera AppLogic platform, you built a private cloud.  Can you describe the steps you took?

The first step was to get the hardware in place.  We set up a test cloud using commodity Linux servers running CentOS and network switches and cabling.  We then downloaded all of the necessary cloud software into one of the servers, which we designated as the distribution server. Next, we set up the distribution server and configured our initial cloud, then followed that by setting up the rest of the servers and initializing the complete cloud. The CA 3Tera AppLogic software recognized the network topology we had configured and automatically created a virtual SAN out of the direct attached storage available in the server, and the cloud became operational.

How long did it take from start to finish to deploy the private cloud?

We implemented our first cloud with CA Technologies help. It took us a total of four days, one day to set up our hardware and three eight-hour days to set up our cloud. Some of the more time-consuming elements were waiting for file downloads to take place and making changes to our network that were needed for the software to operate correctly.

We completed the second setup on our own. As we already had the necessary software, we did not need to set up the distribution server this second time around.  It took us one day to set up the additional cloud servers we for the new cloud. It took us about two additional hours to get the cloud operational.

How many people were involved?  

Our first cloud required our facilities people to provision the hardware and networking, plus one technical person from CA Technologies and one technical person from our company.  For the second installation, we used a few people in different roles, and one technical person to do the final cloud configuration and deployment.  

How long did it take to model and deploy your first application?  

For our first application, we chose a basic Web application running WordPress. Modeling took us about an hour with coaching from CA Technologies. Deployment was very fast -- about 15 minutes.  For our second application, we chose to deploy the WebBench benchmark because we have substantial experience with it. It took us about 2-3 hours to understand how to get files onto the Web server, plus another 30 minutes for modeling, and another 30 minutes to deploy the application. We then decided to deploy a redundant WebBench application. Modeling was more complex in this case, and it took us around 2 hours to produce a working model. The deployment took us only 30 minutes, just like it had in the initial WebBench simple deployment.

How long did it take to deploy a second copy?

The entire process to deploy a second copy took no more than 30 minutes including modeling and deployment.  We needed to make a few changes for the second copy (IP addresses, etc.,) so altogether the modeling step took us around 15 minutes.

Were there any surprises as you ramped up your private cloud using the CA 3Tera AppLogic platform?

We were surprised to see how easy it was to do multiple application deployments. The process was very straightforward and fast.  We liked working with the "Microsoft Visio-like" interface to describe an application from its component appliances. The application template libraries, the visual icons and the ease of use were probably the most unexpected advantages of the CA 3Tera AppLogic software. If an application can be instantiated from a template in the template library, its configuration and deployment are easy.

On the other side, defining our own application templates to add to the template library was more complex. For a custom application that required a specific Tomcat version and RPMs to deploy correctly and other nuances, we found that the effort to ramp up to develop our own application template was larger than what we expected from our experience with configuring and deploying more standard Web applications, like we did in our initial experiments. Of course, once you have produced a working application template and instantiated it in the cloud, creating new cloud instances of the application is easy.

What are your general observations about CA 3Tera AppLogic?

Overall, CA 3Tera AppLogic is a fairly easy-to-use, application-centric cloud platform.  We were impressed by the ease of the visual interface for application structure definition and modification.  In particular, we were impressed by how easy it was to convert our WebBench application into a redundant, firewalled, load-balanced Web application.

 

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By: Matthew Richards
Matthew Richards ( @MTRichards ) is the Senior Director of Product Marketing for the Cloud Computing business at CA Technologies. In this role, he is responsible for driving customer-focused initiatives related to the company’s cloud computing vision and products. Previously, Matthew spent a couple years...
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Insight: CIOs must fix strategic misconceptions

Published: February 22 2011, 08:18 PM | no comments
by CA Community

How cloud computing helps clear the way to greater strategic involvement of IT

Together with my European colleagues and in association with a leading analyst firm we recently started on a new series of strategy insight papers. In the first issue - which you can download here after registration - we reviewed recent analyst research on the relationships that CIOs have with their CEOs and with other senior executives. The document includes the full analyst report called "How CIOs Must Fix Strategic Misconceptions" and discusses some of these misconceptions concerning technology that many CEOs have, along with approaches to overcome them.

The premise of the paper is that, if IT ever had the opportunity to prove its potential for strategic contribution, it is today. But, to be successful, technology needs to be applied beyond short-term cost cutting, towards the strategic goal of better supporting the fast changing needs of the business. At the same time, IT can also play a major role in rebuilding trust and credibility by enabling flawless execution and delivering on what was promised, both to the business and to the customer.

That said, technology has to be applied and managed in the right way. The role of the IT department and of the CIO will need to change significantly - from production manager of the IT factory to orchestrator of an IT supply chain - in order to do this effectively, and cloud computing and virtualization are two ideal approaches that can help make this happen.

Throughout the paper, you will find practical advice from our local specialists, as well as experiences from our customers, to illustrate how the findings in the research can be addressed. We hope you find the original analyst research, our commentary and the supporting articles valuable.

https://www.ca.com/gb/register/activity.aspx?cid=115313

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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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A Cloud of Two Speeds: Europe vs. America

Published: February 22 2011, 04:06 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by CA Community

CCL image courtesy 96dpi - http://www.flickr.com/photos/96dpi/3929685760/sizes/s/in/photostream/Cloud computing is gaining rapid acceptance, but not everywhere. Governments across Europe - in what many call "the old countries" - are still remarkably conservative or even reluctant to embrace cloud computing.

This week President Obama organized a dinner with the CEO's of 12 high-tech and cloud companies to stimulate job creation in North America, meanwhile - over in Europe - the Dutch Minister of the Interior replied to questions of parliament about the use of cloud computing by governments.

The fact that this particular minister had to be invited three times by Dutch Employers Association to switch from his pre-war model cast iron bike to a more modern bicycle with gears and suspension, says something about the tone of this debate. A hilarious misunderstanding was that the official government delegation kept referring to cloud computing as a new invention, while the representatives of the industry (including Google and a large international accounting firm) tried to explain that cloud computing was an established practice with many real life use cases and success stories, both inside and outside government organizations.

Remarkably the US and this European government announced almost at the same time a plan to radically reduce the number of government data centers:  by about 60 in the Netherlands, and by about 800 in the U.S. The underlying idea in the U.S. is to make greater use of "data centers as a service" a.k.a. cloud computing. On the other hand, the Dutch plan so far sounds more like a traditional consolidation approach with the objective of creating more efficiency by increasing the scale of use (an approach that has so far not proven to be very successful; in fact, we see globally that the bigger the scale of the projects, the more spectacular the reports in the public press about the outcomes).

In the meantime, the CIO of the U.S. Federal government, Vivik Kundra, published a very readable cloud strategy - at only 43 pages this is a must read for anyone involved in setting IT strategy (a shorter analysis can be found at sys-con). Kundra presented his strategy not as a way to save on IT costs, but as a way to get more value from existing IT investments. In many places, but certainly in the public sector, "protection of budgets" has become a primary survival strategy. By positioning cloud computing not as a way to cut cost but as a way to increase value he makes  IT (and of the whole civil apparatus) an ally to his plans, instead of a potential opponent.

CCL image courtesy fogl83 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fogl/517608879/sizes/s/in/photostream/The technology industry likely was already on his side, because the government's ‘promised' cloud spending in cloud services is likely to amount to about $20 billion per year, or 25% of the total budget. This annual amount is approximately equal to the total government investment required to put a man on the Moon. In my view, the U.S. government's cloud program is also a way to create and safeguard jobs for the coming decade - in a sense, an industry stimulus program.

Due to European free trade rules and regulations, creating stimulus packages for national industries in Europe is at best complicated, and in many cases even illegal. Within the European Union, Neelie Kroes - the former free trade commissioner - has taken on the role of Commissioner for the Digital Agenda.  In a recent lecture, she indicated her ambition is to make Europe not only "Cloud-Friendly" but "Cloud-Active" (a kind of "all-in" strategy?). The plan is built around three core areas: 1) a legal framework, 2) technical and commercial fundamentals) and 3) the market. There are now more than 100 actions on her European Digital Agenda, of which more than 20 specifically addressing the European "Digital Single Market," an online equivalent of the European single market for goods and services.

However, a fundamental problem for cloud computing in Europe is that the European Union was based on enabling free traffic of persons, goods and services, and NOT free traffic of DATA. This puts European providers of cloud services immediately at a disadvantage. American, but also Chinese, companies have a huge domestic market, which they can serve from one geographic location. Europe has, in theory, a similar large domestic market for cloud services, but the various European languages, cultures and laws make this market a lot less uniform than the American market. Some argue that this diversity has made European suppliers (or European divisions of global providers) better at providing a differentiated approach, instead of the more traditional "one size fits all" solutions. But in a fast growing new market like cloud computing, all this diversity does makes achieving the required scale more difficult.

And in addition to issues with European privacy laws as described in this NY Times article, there are a variety of local and national laws preventing local suppliers from serving the European (government) market from one location, even if this location lies within the European Union. For example, the German Government requires that all data of local government agencies is kept within Germany. From a historical perspective this may be understandable, but it prevents the European government sector from becoming a launching force for "One European Cloud Market."

Maybe it's time for a European cloud of two speeds? Just like we saw smaller groups of countries signing the Schengen treaty (which enabled traveling between selected European countries without checkpoints) or for the introduction of the Euro single currency, a small leading group of countries could opt for accelerated introduction of uniform cloud legislation.

Comments: Please leave them below or send a message to @ gregor petri on Twitter

P.S. For some links to the European local language sites we used automatic web translation facilities from Microsoft and Google. Thought that with #IBMwatson defeating the human trace at Jeopardy the time might be right for this. Let me know whether you felt these were useful or not.

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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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DonorsChoose.org Makes Fast Company's 2011 List of Most Innovative Companies

Published: February 18 2011, 10:16 AM | no comments
by Christine Needles

We wanted to take a moment to congratulate the team at DonorsChoose.org for making Fast Company's list of The World's Most Innovative Companies 2011! According to an email from Founder Charles Best, DonorsChoose.org is also the first non-profit selected for the honor.  There are some amazing household names on the list of 50 companies - the likes of Apple, Twitter, Groupon, GE, and Nike.

It's really exciting to share such great news about one of our customers.  Great job DonorsChoose.org!

DonorsChoose.org is a unique charity that provides an online system allowing people to make charitable donations to classroom projects of their choice. Public school teachers post their best ideas for classroom projects that their schools cannot afford, and donors browse the projects, find ones that inspire them and help bring them to life with their credit card. After a project is fully funded, DonorsChoose.org purchases the materials, ships them to the classroom, and donors receive a thank you from the classroom, including digital photos and thank you cards. In 2010, the charity processed $30 million to help 4.4 million students, with the average project totaling about $500. 

Wondering what's the tie to cloud computing (ahem, since this is a cloud-themed blog)?  Here's a very brief video (1:40) from a recent chat we had with Oliver Hurst-Hiller, CTO and Head of Products at DonorsChoose.org, to inquire about his experiences moving the firm to the cloud:

 

Want to give back?  Visit DonorsChoose.org and pick your favorite project!

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By: Christine Needles
Christine Needles ( @cmneedles ) is a director of communications at CA Technologies, working with the Cloud Computing business. She is immersed in the world of B2B public relations and marketing communications, with 11 years of experience spanning several PR firms, until joining the communications team...
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The 110-year-old light bulb is a little too much like today’s IT

Published: February 15 2011, 09:49 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by Jay Fry

Last weekend the San Francisco Chronicle had a big write-up on a crazy fluke of technology: a light bulb that has been working for over a century without burning out.

The celebrity bulb hangs from a ceiling, high above a Livermore, Calif., fire department, and has baffled anyone trying to figure out why it is still functioning after 110 years. It obviously does not have the same manufacturer as the light bulbs in my upstairs hallway - it seems that at least one of those needs replacing every month.

The curious part about the "centennial bulb" - and the part that strikes me as having some relevance to the IT systems we know and interact with on a daily basis - is that no one knows why it's still working.

And, given that it is still working, no one is going to interrupt its operation to find out why.

That sounds a lot like how IT has traditionally been run. There's a bunch of hard work and complicated technological details that go into getting a certain system or application up and running. The good news is: getting it up and running in the first place is often the hardest part.

The more successful applications are the ones that then keep running with a minimum of effort, the fewest upgrades, and least changes required. In fact, once something is doing its job, the ROI for an upgrade of an underlying hardware or software infrastructure component is, frankly, really low in the eyes of the users (vendors will often beg to differ, of course). You really don't want to touch it, lest you break something.

The Golden Rules of IT, starting with "If it's not broken, don't fix it"

Amusingly, that same topic came up in a conversation I was having with analyst and ZDNet blogger Dan Kusnetzky. He tied our conversation back to the "Golden Rules of IT," which I first saw when Dan published them (for a second time, apparently) back in 2007. "If it's not broken, don't fix it" was merely the beginning of his list.

Dan included inarguable IT wisdom like "Don't touch it, you'll break it" and "If you touched it and it broke, it will take longer to fix and, in all likelihood, cost more than you think to fix." Which, of course, leads to "Don't make major changes unless people are screaming!" And, finally, that means settling for "good enough is good enough."

But, as pithy as they are, those "Golden Rules" lead to really bad IT choices, I would argue.

When Golden Rules become bad advice

Thinking back to the long-lived Livermore light bulb, I can't argue with the fact that it's still working. But is it doing anything useful for the fire station other than attracting curious tourists from China, Germany, and Fresno?

Nope. In fact, it's barely accomplishing its intended purpose - giving off light. It began life as a 60-watt bulb, but is only producing 4 watts at this point - about the same as a night light. Not so good if you're trying to find the keys to the fire truck.

If you're running an IT shop that's supporting a rapidly changing business, this kind of technology nostalgia and tolerance for something that doesn't seem to be making the grade seems quaint at best. More likely, it's exactly the kind of thing that, in the end, is going to put your IT systems -- and your business - in jeopardy.

In IT, you would rather have "new idea" light bulbs turning on

In my post about how cloud computing lets organizations focus on "good enough" IT - being able to try out things quickly and effectively, without having to worry about every bell and every whistle - I'm essentially arguing for the opposite of the centennial light bulb. (Sorry, Livermore.)

Just because the old thing hasn't broken doesn't mean you shouldn't try out something new. Tolerating a creaky, old system just because it hasn't come crashing down yet is not pointing you in the right direction. "Good enough" is not something you settle for, but in fact an approach that gives you the freedom to try things, and to do so quickly. I can't really speak for the light bulb industry, but the pace of IT technology change is so fast that you really have to be paying attention to what else is possible. And even if you aren't, you can probably bet your competition is.

In fact, I'm arguing, cloud computing is perfect for this sort of experimentation. Cloud lets you dip your toe in and see how it goes. Cloud lets you try a new way of resourcing (or architecting) a given application. Cloud also means you only have to pay for what you use, when you use it. Experimentation like this is how innovation starts - and how new light bulbs go on in peoples' heads in the first place. I'm betting it will lead to something better.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a bit of quirky history along the way. Those looking for a thrill-a-minute can check out the 24-hour-a-day webcam pictures of the centennial bulb doing its thing at http://www.centennialbulb.org/.

 

This blog is cross-posted at Data Center Dialog. Do you tweet? Follow @jayfry3 on Twitter.

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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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