Private Cloud Infrastructure

Dell just announced that they are discontinuing their owned and managed public cloud strategy that was based on OpenStack. I was kind of surprised when the announcement was released. I also found the release timing a bit interesting – after all VMWare is just getting rolling with their public clouds and now Dell seems to be getting out. 

So you’re going to fix all your company’s virtualization woes with your new architecture. You’re going to be the IT hero. The parts for the new solution show up on your loading dock and you start putting the pieces together, only to find out that the NIC cards you ordered don’t support a required protocol. Or worse yet, the expensive network gear you already ordered is missing a critical feature your users depend on. You persevere, scaling back your design, and exchanging components. It never seems to be an even exchange, but at least you are still within budget.

WOW! 3,000 people in the main events (users) and a full on analyst day with exclusive time with Keynotes, founders, and key partners. Rackspace also had a private analyst dinner where we sat and chatted with the key cloud people and founders of OpenStack from Rackspace. My biggest impression: This is real, it’s serious, and there are a lot of BIG players putting a lot behind it.

I have been speaking about ICPs during a series of events across the country and received a fantastic question: “What do I do if it breaks?”

This video captures the state of server virtualization and the impact it is having in adjacent IT initiatives. I also step through desktop virtualization, network virtualization, and storage virtualization and the potential economic impact these strategies have on the business.

Virtualizing Tier-1 Application Workloads with Confidence

This ESG Lab report documents the results of independent, hands-on testing of Exchange Server 2013 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with improved Hyper-V virtualization. Testing was focused on the performance scalability of Exchange Server 2013 in a Hyper-V virtualized environment, as well as the ease of deployment and manageability.

ESG’s research has shown that online file sharing (OFS) adoption is rising rapidly. However, many organizations are reluctant to trust their files to an OFS provider’s platform because of security concerns. One possible solution to these security concerns is a hybrid cloud model of OFS. In the hybrid cloud model, some of the organization’s files are stored in the OFS provider’s environment, while others remain within the organization’s own premises.

A hybrid cloud implementation can be an attractive deployment model for a corporate online file sharing (OFS) solution. Hybrid cloud benefits may include greater security and control for the customer organization. An ESG survey of nearly 500 IT professionals working at organizations of all sizes, with varying levels of interest (or disinterest) in OFS, revealed how much of an  impact hybrid cloud offerings will have on the OFS market.

This video blog highlights some of the possibilities when a company make the transformation to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).

Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier started off the day talking about the impressive changes in interest and contributions to the OpenStack software. Just quarter over quarter stats from Q4’12 to Q1’13 when they went from 148 member companies to 189 and 175 developers to 252. Also just this past week Juniper and Erikson joined as Gold members with Juniper’s code seeing adoption already through their partnership with CloudScaling. Jonathan and Mark presented their strategic vision that includes three focuses for the OpenStack platform ecosystem – tech, users, and innovation.

Microsoft Cloud OS strategy consists of on-prem, Azure, and the service provider revolving around the consistency of experience and services across each of the consumption models. Microsoft is additionally taking an aggressive stance by maintaining lock step pricing with Amazon.

One of the phenomena in the cloud world that has gotten a lot of press is the OpenStack project which is a free open source software set managed by the OpenStack Foundation. A few years ago most traditional manufacturers were all trying to find ways to extend their existing portfolios into the cloud. Some felt that private cloud was a great strategy. From their perspective – why not just convert all that great investment on the floor by converting it from being virtualized to cloud. To me this means making it self-service, on-demand, including a fee-for-use cost model, available to any endpoint, and able to scale elastically as needed.

It’s challenging to absorb everything Microsoft at the cadence they would like IT pros to keep pace with, but here are four areas to pay close attention to: Cloud OS, Azure, storage, and Configuration Manager. Microsoft Management Summit was an excellent event for those who attended, now Microsoft needs to crank up the volume for the world to hear. Too many IT pros keep saying “I didn’t know Microsoft did that!?!?!”

In this video blog I discuss some of the highlights from the cloud service management market summary report to help IT begin to convert a virtualized data center to a private or hybrid cloud service.

Moonshot is going to be used as a pivot point in the company to demonstrate technology leadership, validate that HP can and will innovate in a rapidly changing market, and, if all goes as planned, execute in delivering a new breed of servers into today’s modern data center.

Enabling Simple, Scalable, Flexible Cloud Deployments

This ESG Lab Validation documents the results of hands-on testing of Citrix CloudPlatform, a flexible, scalable solution for deploying public and private clouds. The report focuses on ease of deployment and management, flexibility, and scalability.

One of the cool things ESG has is a channel development team that provides insights and guidance to the  companies we work with when they  want to find new ways to engage partners or just bounce ideas for new programs off of us.  Since my interests lie mostly in all things cloud –working with my colleague Kevin Rhone I’ve become more and more aware of how much the cloud is also disrupting the channel. Partners are trying to find new ways to leverage the cloud while not losing business to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). I’ve talked to a number of CSPs who are also trying to find ways to leverage different types of partners  to create a channel of their own so that they can extend their reach (e.g. promote their brand, multiply their sales force and implementation expertise).