Chris Boos on Automation

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.

Everyone knows the big four auditors (Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KPMG, PWC) for a long time. In recent times, while our favourite topic becomes more important from week to week, there are the IT Service management big four aka BMC, CA, HP and IBM (alphabetical order!).

As Erin Joyce on enterprisestorageforum.com describes <here> EMC is integrating two solutions they acquired in recent years (Smarts in 2005 and Voyence 2007). Voyence Control is a solution for Automated Configuration and Change Management, while EMC Smarts is a solution for fault isolation and root cause analysis. In combination with the in 2006 acquired nLayers solution for Application Discovery, which is now labelled as EMCs ADM (Application Discovery Manager), it looks like they added ITSM and BSM (Business Service Management) to their interesting product portfolio.

So if I were Cisco and had 45bn$ to spend, I definitly would take a deep look into EMC. I guess together with Cisco, we would see the Big Five.

Roland

The worlds-famous retiree Bill Gates annouced some weeks ago, that in the future Microsoft will have many millions of servers in their datacenters, which first of all is a very impressive proposition. Nicolas carr has some thoughts on Bills speech <HERE>.

If you break down the numbers – Microsoft claims to add between 10.000 to 20.000 servers to their infrastructure each month – and read datacenter newsletters like <THIS> and <THAT>, you soon will realize, that this definitely will become true rather sooner than later. Sure, MS has to because we might be right before a huge shift of paradigm in the software industy – moving every type of application and data from your destop straight to some datacenter somewhere (hi Google) . Thus making Microsofts main business modell looking kind of old-fashioned.

If you bring things together and look at “Live Mesh” and “Office Live” you will understand, where the world will be in 3 to 5 years from now.

And, I’ll promise you: Microsoft is paying attention to the enterprise market much better than Google and Apple together.

Roland

Hi folks,

we survived the 4th Frankfurt International Dragon boat Race, that was held from 30.5. to 1.6. in Frankfurt Germany, where our head office is located. Beside some sunburns and aching arms and legs, the whole team and our supporters, families and friends had a lot of fun. As being an IT projectmanager, the first thing that comes to my mind on monday morning is: What are the ‘lessons learned’? Beside the fact that water sport is wet sport.

dragonboat_finish.jpg

If you look at the photos you’ll see why this sport is booming all around the world: Dragon boat racing is all about teamwork. 20 people are working together and the most important point is not sheer ‘power’, but much more to stay in sync and to follow the stroke. And this is really not that easy with 6 boats starting at the same time, 18 paddlers plus drummer and steerer in each boat, counting the strokes or screaming ‘GO-GO-GO’.

OK, the distance is just 250 meter or about 120 strokes, but I promise, you learn how to manage and use your power because you are part of a team and anyone is trying to be a part of the success in the end – really great team building and also great fun for all of us. In the end nobody cared about our position 42 of 67 Teams participating the ‘Corporate Cup’. That was more than expected, because we only had one training session to prepare. Maybe there’s also a higher meaning in our final position 42, but I don’t dare to ask “Deep Thought” about that.

Next year, we hopefully will take this event more seriously and to advance from the middle to the first third of the starter field.

Roland

I’m working on a simple formula to describe clouds and cloud computing. After working through numerous blogs and posts, reading vendors press releases and visiting their websites, I feel confident enough to give a first try:

What do you think about this:

Cloud = Computers*x + Virtualization + Automation + Service

where x depends on the cpu power of the utilized machines.

I’m begging for comments.

Roland

As we have learned in a previous post of my valued collegue Chris, automation is a very easy thing -

It is the execution of actions based on conditions.

From the technical standpoint this simple explanation sums it up. But for me, working on productmanagement and marketing issues, I can tell you, that there are loads of other aspects of our featured subject Automation.

Today it’s possible to automate almost everything, starting from doors to production plants and – to switch over to the IT world – from simple applications to system run books even whole datacenters. All in common is the goal to make life easier and to prevent the “user” from doing unnecessary, repeating tasks, like opening doors, pressing knobs, typing commands into a shell window or even executing restart scripts.

I’m sure the potentials of Automation becoming the “next big thing” seems to be huge. So is the number of vendors offering offering products. The wheels are turning and the M&A guys have already started earning money. HP bought Opsware in summer last year for $1.6 billion and BMC Software by that time acquired RealOps, the so called “Run Book Automation pioneer” for $52.5 million and in March this year BladeLogic for an impressing price of more than $800 million. The latest news is CA signing an OEM agreement with Opalis, which leaves plenty of room for rumors. Happy merging.

The answer to the question “why companies are spending these huge amounts of money for Automation technology?” gives Bob Beauchamp, president and CEO of BMC, who said

“Organizations around the world will spend more than $140 billion this year running data centers, Automation is the only way IT can bring this spending under control and still meet the requirements of their businesses.”

Just a last word to think about: How much are companies spending for all the other stuff outside of datacenters?