This week we are attending the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, a great event where the who is who of Cloud Computing meets. The three day conference will bring a number of sessions and workshop and a huge exhibition with about 45 stands to the Olympia Conference Centre. To bring the most ROI, the three conference days are packed with a special events like the Cloud Computing World Series Awards, where the best Cloud Solutions will be awarded and the co-located Cloudcamp London, a well-known unconference-series, where the Cloud  Community gathers for the 10th time in London.

The Cloud Computing World Forum conference topics for the three day will be

• Business Models and the Current Marketplace
• Deployment and integration strategies
• The future of business computing

Find more information in the Online-Show Guide <here>.

Please feel free to contact us for a meetup via DM on twitter: @rjudas and @boosc

Last week I attended Pulse Comes To You 2010 in Frankfurt. This great one-day event series tries to capture the Pulse spirit and bring it to a number of major cities around the globe. The german issue, which attracted round about 180 people, was hosted by Tivoli’s General Manager Al Zollar in Frankfurt.

The agenda was split into a generall session in the morning and workshop sessions in the afternoon. After German Tivoli Business Unit Executive Oliver Grell’s welcome note, Al Zollar took the stage and presented IBMs vision on Integrated Service Management, which is the foundation for their Smarter Planet vision. He showed how Tivoli tools like Maximo Asset Management will help us to manage growing complexity of IT systems and plenty of other devices beeing around in todays technical infrastructure. After presenting a couple of case studies from various customers and annouced partnerships with Ricoh, Johnson Controls and Juniper Networks.

 A second keynote was held by Forrester Research Director Thomas Mendel, Ph. D. who presentend Forresters view on IT Management 2.0. He made some interesting comments on the importance of infrastructure & operation for 2010 spendings and said the that the biggest concern for IT managers is, that they fear to be unable to support business growth in these troubled times. A new approach for IT Management 2.0 that Forrester promotes is  “Do less. But do those things superbly!“, which is quite a step-up from the much overstressed “Do more with less” meme. More interesting comments from Forrester were, that ‘Service Catalogues’ are currently the second most requested topic at Forrester and the  recommendation to build a “Just enough CMDB“, which from my point of view should be common sense, not to mention the usual call to “Break down the silos” and “know your Business” for Operations. Mendel concluded that Tivoli should grow into an abstraction layer between infrastrure/applications and the business processes.

Following the Forrester keynote was an fresh talk from geman author, management trainer and lateral thinker Anja Foerster, who tried to motivate the audience to expand their horizons and go for unconventinal solutions. After an excursion into examples of cross-industry innovations, she described homogeneity as the true killer of innovation and asked the audience to forster diversity amongst their subordinates and coworkers. Contradiction lays ground for creativity.

After the lunch break PCTY2010 contiued in 4 parallel workshop tracks, headlined

• Late-breaking Service Management
• Service Management for IT
• Service Management for Development and Deployment
• Technical News

where IBMers, partners and german customers presented a number of  Tivoli and Service Management related sessions (see Agenda). The day closed with a Get-Together and Dinner, where all attendees had the chance to get hold of the specialists and to continue the discussion.

All in all I had a great day, talking to many people and listening to interesting talks and sessions, but I’m confident that next year I will have the chance to go for the “real thing” in Las Vegas again.

What was really a pity that there was no Social Media coverage at all: There have be a handfull of Tweets – about 90 percent of them were sent be me (@rjudas) and some by IBMer Ingo Averdunk (@ingoa). I haven’t found any picures on Flickr, nor any blog article, yet, so:

Come on IBM, you can do better.

Everybody is talking about process optimisation these days, especially within the area of IT services, consultants and so called strategists often claim new methods, usually wrapped in lots of buzzwords and three-letter-acronyms: Their goal is of course not only optimising processes, but at the same time – using appropriate software tools – to increase the quality and lower the costs. Unfortunately this usually doesn’t work that way for the customers. Instead the tool-vendors and their Consulting- and Training-Branches are making money. If expectations are not met, it’s basically customers’ or users’ fault, who didn’t order enough training or consulting services. Then usually someone starts the discussion about ‘Business-IT-Alignment‘, pointing the finger at the business user: Anything would be great if ‘they’ just had correctly defined their requirements.

The dairy farming industry proves that smart and intelligent tools can help to completely automate the truly manual process of milking cows. The milking robot Lely Astronaut A3 Next is able to autonomically milk cows. Not only that manual tasks are omitted, but also – through improved working conditions for the cows – the output is increased. They can decide on their own when to go inside the Astronaut for beeing milked. Using RFID tags the Astronaut is able to see if milking is necessary. If it is, their turn, the high tech robotic arm moves below the udder, detects the teads with a 3D-laser scanning system (Tead Detection System), cleans them and attaches the milking cups with a high accuracy and minimal stress for the cows.

The over-all result is, that after a short period of acclimatisation the herd has a greater yield. To ensure that only highest quality pure milk reaches the end customer, the Lely Astronaut has an integrated monitoring system, the so called MQC (Milk Quality Control) system, which controls the milk before it is pumped to the main tank. The whole process can be monitored by the farmer sitting in his rocking chair via an PDA or in front of his herd management workstation, utilizing the Lely T4C - (Time for cows) management software, which not only provides a dashboard with a number of KPIs but also allows benchmarking against other farmers in the world.

Not only the technology is interesting, but also the service lifecycle draws a good picture of this truly smart solution: The Ethernet-equipped Lely Astronaut A3 Next only requires 4 service assignments per year and is delivered as a fully integrated Plug-and-Play (milking from the first day) solution. To be able to afford the investments, and to minimize the capital expenditures the product can be purchased as a pay-per-milking offering.

Doesn’t this story sound like being from another galaxy?

For us IT people it will, but the Lely Astronaut A3 Next exists. Here you can see it action:

Here are some images:

[View with PicLens]

If you’d like to read more about the milking robot, a product brochure is available here <LINK>. It includes some really nice pictures of the product and also more pictures of happy cows.

By the way: The dutch manufacturer Lely has invented milking robots 20 years ago and improved their products since then year by year.

Yesterday night I attended the 2nd CloudStorm in London <LINK> togther with more than 100 other people interested in Cloud Computing solutions.
The organizers (namely Arvid Fossen from A-Server) have choosen a fantastic location at Allen & Overys offices in the 10th floor, which offered a great view over London, as you can see from the images. The venue was very decent and everything was perfectly arranged.

After a great keynote from Joe Baguley (@JoeBaguley) of Quest Software, serveral 5 to 6 minute talks presented Cloud Computing solutions and described some interesting real world customer scenarios. Following the talks there was a 40 minutes panels, where the audience posed a number of questions to the speaker: Most interest appeared to be the topic of security and how organisations and SME’s could benefit from Cloud offerings. There were a number of questions proving that Cloud Computing is a hot topic and people are starting to discuss benefits and tradeoff with their customers.

Following the panel there was a intesive networking party, including great finger foods and drinks, which offered a perfect framing for interesting discussions between the audience and the speakers, which countinued until around 22:00.

Overall it was great event, and we will continue to attend and contribute to the Cloudstorm events series. Find mor information at the Cloudstorm Homepage www.cloudstorm.org. There you soon will find all the slides from the event.

[View with PicLens]

As Organizers of Cloudcamp Frankfurt, we are proud to present the new event homepage for Cloudcamp Frankfurt: At

www.cloudcamp-frankfurt.de

you’ll find latest information about this upcoming, unique event. Beside the agenda, news and photos the site integrates all our media channels and will also show the press coverage. Following the event, we will have the slides and Audio and/or Video recordings of the talks, so please stay tuned.

Remember: Cloudcamp Frankfurt will be the place, where business meets Cloudcomputing, so be sure to register.

See you there.

Chris Boos is attenting the IT Automation Summit on BrightTALK.com on 7th of April 14:00 CET. All webcasts will be recorded and are available for download afterwards.

When discussion comes to clouds, there are some arguments, that are often repeated by skeptics: data privacy and security but also the availability of data.

These points are aiming the spine of IT, touching the most valuable IT-assets, data. From private photo collections to enterprise data warehouses, loosing data is usually worst that could happen and is often not an option. This is true, independent which computing paradigm you follow: if you keep your hardware under your table, in the closet, in a (On-Premise)-Data Center or if you store it in the clouds, that means in data centers of the computing-service provider of your choice somewhere in the world.

And this is the point: Why is it, that with any new technological invention these discussions are brought up? I remember these 25 years ago, when RAID-systems came up, starting to conquer the later on so called SLED (Single Large Expensive Disks). Rember that Fujitsu Super Eagle, 19″, 8 Units, 150 pounds and 600MB Storage? How is it possible to securely store a single file by splitting it up and store it on 5 disperate, cheap SCSI-Disks? And years later, you might say, skeptics where right – I save raids dying for some reasons and we had to restore data from logically corrupted tape backup – **it happens.

Human Nature?

I guess it is human nature to bring up these arguments. Security and steadiness are human needs that follow directly after basic needs like food, shelter or clothing.  Because I understand that this is an important issue, I’m willing to have a candid discussion on this topic.

Living in Germany I’m not only looking human needs, but also have to keep Law and order in mind. Laws that influence not only public life, but we also have certain laws aiming at handling, storing, processing of data, trying to protect any indivual person from harm by loss or misuse of their personal data and also putting regulations on any institution that handles any kind of person-related data. Other countries have similar laws or regulations, eg. HIPAA in the healthcare sector.

Holiday Photographs

I assume, that anybody in the past, storing his/her personal holiday photographs, didn’t waste a thought nor a dime on keeping redundant copies. Possibly the most important images of the first day in school were duplicated. Nobody asked about redundancy or data security. Ok. Privacy was not the issue, keeping them in the locked drawer. But when it comes to personal photo cloud-storage, eg. Smugmug, based on Amazon S3, people start asking questions. My personal opinion is, that Smugmug’s business model is based on the fact that you pay money for a secure and reliable data storage (“All that was left after a twister struck my house are my holiday photographs” <LINK>), so the will take every measure, that this won’t happen.

Talking about Risks

If I still feel uncomfortable with the situation, it’s up to me to develop my private data protection strategy and keep files stored on my local harddrive. So I still can use the cool, new community and sharing features and still have a local copy of my photographs. Same point applies for enterprise computing. Just bigger databases and more users. Repeat after me: Security is just a matter of personal needs and money.

I don’t want to start a case in favor or against Cloud Computing like others, but instead I suggest to openly discuss risks and their management <See Bernard Golden>. But this discussion is not related or limited to cloud computing. Any data processing or management, regardless if paper/pencil based, server-based or cloud-based imposes risks that have to be assessed and hopefully mitigated or maybe not, so you have to bear or share them.

So What?

The cloud-vendors have to face the enterprise grade security discussion and need to offer concepts and architectures that provide the personally or even statutory relvant level of security. Maybe in the past the they didn’t do enought to help cloud computing to come out of beta state and enter the enterprises. In the mean time we should be looking for new ideas like RAIC described be Storage Architect Chris M. Evans <HERE> and Enterprise Architect Mark Masterson <HERE>.

I’m sure there are more people and companies working on concepts and products addressing these issues, so let’s find solutions and look forward to new opportunities, rather than only whining about dangers and risks. Trying to keep the status quo also bears risks. Especially in these times.

Roland

First Microsoft’s concept to build servers into 40ft containers was tauntet by some people. Now after the industry adapted this concept, the advantages of their idea regarding flexibility and power effectiveness are approved and several companies jumped on the bandwagon:

• Dell <READ_HERE>
• HP <AND HERE>
• IBM <HERE>
• Sun <OLD_NEWS_HERE>

but wait, why are news from Sun old?. Right – Sun presented their Project Blackbox 2 years ago, but they seemed to be ahead of time, maybe the oilprice wasn’t hight enough and the worldwide crisis was beyond imagination or ….

To give you the full storie, datacenter containers were invented by – guess who – Google. This is really alarming, because they seem to have finger in every pie <LINK>. As I found out, Google patented the concept of having many servers inside a container and stacking multiple containers to a datacenter in 2003 <READ_HERE>. While Sun misinterpreted the concept just for creating a showcase for server hardware, other put more efforts in developing the idea. How the idea evolved, you can see here:

Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision

Thanks to datacenterknowledge.com, who directed my to this story.

Roland

After blogging some months about automation, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about the definition of automation. Nearly everyone seems to have an “Automation solution” in place. So what is that Automation-hype all about?

The word Automation is derived from the ancient Greek language and means that something is operating or moving self dictated, which gives quite a good idea about what we are looking at.

Automation might have started with the invention of the wheel decades ago, is omnipresent in many branches and industries and a substancial factor for producing any kind of goods and services today.  Robots and Automated Manufacturing systems and During my journey through the world of IT Service Management, I encountered various kinds of Automation. From my point of view most vendors will agree to the following categorization:

Automated IT-Service Management / ITSM Process Automation

This is a umbrella term for solutions focused on supporting Service Management workflow, usually based on best practices and standards like ITIL or Cobit. Subordinated terms are Support Automation or Run-Book-Automation.

Support Automation

Support Automation refers to software packages are focused on supporting the routine work of help desk personnel. Think of it as a kind of script integration in existing Service desk, CRM application or even in Knowledge Base Applications for Automated Self Service. Examples for this category are products like CA SupportBridge or mValent Integrity, which is focused on Change Management Automation.

Run-Book-Automation

Products belonging to this category are very popular nowadays. They allow to define a set of ITSM-Workflows through a Graphical user interface. Good products offer a multitude of connectors and interfaces to existing ITSM suites like OpenView, Tivoli or Unicenter. Examples for this kind of products are Opalis Integration Server, BMC Realops or HP/Opsware/IConclude Opsforce.

IT-Workload Automation

These concepts stem from early (mainframe) days of computing, where batch processing or job Scheduling were a big improvement, allowing operator to “automate” recurring tasks. Though modern products are highly evolutionized through offering multi platform compatibility, event-triggering, policy-based execution and configured to smart coloured visual GUIs. These products are gaining ground in modern service oriented environments and are represented through products from big vendors like CA/Cybermation and IBM Tivoli or smaller competitors like ASG and UC4

Data Center Automation

This is the hottest topic today, as companies have started to deploy myriad of servers into an extremely fast growing number of data centers all over the world, bringing high demand for automated tools to provision, change and manage vast numbers of components. Any of the large vendor offers such a tool or suite and – you guessed it – here is place, where the bucks go. HP know that story. Products in this category are former Opsware Server Automation System, BMC BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and to bring in some cloudy haze modern and cool products/players like Elastra or 3Tera/Applogic which allow to mix data center and cloud offerings.

Roland

Despite the fact that the new Google competitor Cuil is considered to be more energy efficient (because the black page background seems to be a big energy saver – if they get as big as Google of course <LINK>), Google is cutting edge when talking about the energy revolution. Sites like http://www.blackle.com or http://www.ecofree.org/ which claim to provide a more energy efficient Google search interface (at least on CRTs), by having had the black background idea ahead of cuil, are a minor issue to this revolution.

Google committet to be carbon-neutral by end of 2007 <READ HERE>, a goal, which they just missed, but as you might guess, they are working on that issue. Google needs to do somethink, as long as some of us believe that one Google search consumes as much as a 11-watt light bulb <READ HERE>.

There are rumours/news that Google buys large chunks of land (800 acres in Oklahoma <LINK> and 1000 acres in Iowa <LINK>). So what to build on a site being 4 kilometer long and 4 kilometer wide? A fancy new datacenter with some Hi-Tech, sophisticated cooling facility? Housings and facilities for an army of human taggers to annotate the whole earth? A theme park?

Nope, my I guess is the big Google has other plans for using these site. A hint could be found on a page Googles homepage titles “Powering a clean energy revolution“, where Google describes their effort toward reaching the goal of beeing carbon neutral. I like especially the part, where the author name some companies Google and Google.org are cooperating with. Do you see the point? It’s obvious.

So in the near future Google will not only provide grid-like computing services with GAE, but they will provide carbon-free computing services and this might be putting some pressure on some people investing billions of dollars at the moment in build hi-tech datacenters. Sounds like Google not only wants to index, map and annotate the earth, but they want to save it.

Good luck.