Cloud Washing: Slapping Lipstick on a Pig!

Recently, I was having a conversation with my colleague, Brian Lenane, Program Manager with SRA International about what’s going on with cloud computing offerings. He related to me how customers are confused with all the “Cloud Washing” going on. Truthfully, if I didn’t know what’s going on, I’d be confused, too. So many companies have called themselves cloud providers when they are nowhere near the cloud. I told him “Thanks, that will be my next blog.” Unfortunately, that was back in September 2012. I found myself transitioning from job to consulting via my personal company, VerdeSol LLC. Being laid off during the holiday seasons seems to be a theme for me in 2011 and 2012, but the beat goes on. I am, however, currently on the market for Cloud Solution Sales, Channel Relationship Management, and Business Development. If you, or someone you know, needs someone like me, look me up.

Cloud Washing Defined
So what is this so called “Cloud Washing”? Marketing people seem to latch onto the cloud to get attention. If you are not savvy to the cloud hype cycle, that strategy will work on you. Because the definition of the cloud is sometimes unclear, the marketing departments tend to call everything the “Cloud”. In my humble, but accurate opinion, the cloud is Information Technology Services delivered exactly like a utility. It doesn’t matter if it is Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS), it must be delivered like Telecom, or Heating and Air Conditioning. I will even go a step further, and lump Managed Services Provider (MSP) into the mix. Unfortunately, we have project-based IT and Software Development companies slapping the cloud onto existing products and services.

If I replace my email with Google Apps, Exchange Online or Office 365, I will eliminate Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Windows Server 2012, and possibly VMware and the engineers that go with them. That is what we call a “No Brainer”. I want to configure, virtualize, and scale Exchange, like I want to poke my finger in my eye or kiss that pig with lipstick.

Beware!
If you find yourself paying the same rates or higher than traditional IT costs, you probably have a pig with lipstick. Your cloud fees should be one third to one half the cost of traditional IT. Cloud services should have a significant savings compared to hardware, software, and salary costs you pay now. You should NOT be buying hardware to get your cloud service projects off the ground. If you are, you are probably building the pig’s cloud service for the future. Now you will have to pay a fee for numbers of users when it comes to software licensing, but that’s to be expected. Cloud Solution Providers should have their systems baked, and ready for consumption. The order process should be smooth and fluid. If you find them writing a Statement of Work that looks like a project, start asking questions. In addition, they should be able to provide Service Level Agreements for all of their services.

Another thing to be greatly concerned about are data centers with fancy buildings and gear, who sell real estate in their data center, and have decided to add Cloud Solutions as an afterthought because they figured out they can make more margin. Make sure they offer Cloud Security, and Cloud Back Up. I have spent a lot of time evaluating, offering, and selling data center space for the last decade. Many only offer cage space, racks, services, ping, power, and pipe. They leave the rest to you. Well times have changed. Companies are burdened with certifications and compliance, which requires them extensive expertise. If you want to be a true cloud provider in 2013, you need to have Cloud Security, Cloud Back Up, and Disaster Recovery built into your cloud service. Otherwise you are not securing the cloud. PERIOD.

Here is a list of Certifications and Compliance designations your cloud provider should meet or exceed:
• FFIEC (FDIC)
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
• Sorbanes Oxley Act (SOX)
• National Credit Union Association (NCUA)
• Payment Card Industry (PCI)
• FISMA (Department of Defense)
• FEDRAMP (General Services Administration)
• HIPAA
• SAS 70 Compliance
• ISO 27001
• SSAE 16 Certified

Keep in mind each certification may be designed for a specific industry like banking, healthcare, and government. But these are areas to start valid discussions. In addition, passing a certification exam does not guaranty success. The cloud provider should be able to show past performance, and have case studies, and testimonials.

In short, your cloud services should be easy to acquire, easy to implement, and safe and secure. So beware of the charlatans, be smart, and come on in. The cloud is fine.

Disruptive Technology from the Desktop to the Data Center

According to Wikipedia, a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.  Virtualization and software design have been the main drivers in the development of disruptive innovations in hardware.

From the Desktop…

One of the main concerns at the desktop level is the need for powerful, yet efficient endpoints, but desktop virtualization rapidly changed the landscape.  The endpoints can be anything you want these days; including, desktop pc, tablet, smartphone, or thin client.  The dream of desktop virtualization has not been fully realized until now with V3 Systems.  In the past, customers were punished for attempting to use thin clients and desktop virtualization (VDI), due to limitations in network, storage and computing capabilities.  Most VDI performance made you feel like you were using dial-up.  V3 Systems offers an innovative server appliance that hosts 50-400 high-performance virtual desktops in a 1U or 2U form factor. The simplicity of their high-density solution, combined with V3’s optimized technologies and management tools, allows you to easily and affordably scale into the thousands.

Imagine having to architect a VDI solution with the traditional and complex server and SAN based architecture.  That project will need at least four separate specializations in network, server, virtualization, and storage.  In addition, you would need copious amounts of time to implement. Then here comes V3 Systems with an all-in-one simple appliance you can plug and play into an existing environment, or create a new one from scratch.  You can have 400 people up and running in a matter of a couple hours verses a couple weeks. V3 boasts that its solution is 2x to 8x faster than existing desktops. What about VMware, Citrix, Redhat, and Microsoft?  It doesn’t really matter, because V3 Systems rocks them all.

The CEO, Peter Bookman and his team of merry snowboarders up in Salt Lake City, UT got a good thing going.  They work hard and they play hard.  http://www.v3sys.com

…To the Data Center

What high density, low powered servers uses ¼ the power and 1/6 the space of today’s best in class volume server without requiring any modifications to existing software.  In the data center we have seen some awesome things happening at the server level, but nothing as extreme as SeaMicro.  Imagine squeezing 768 processors in a 10 RU Rack. How is that even possible?  Well, they’ve done it.  I heard through the grapevine from one of my buddies at EMC that SeaMicro is being installed at some secretive government agencies, which will not be named.  If DOD and the Intel community like them, they must be hot stuff. So hot I had to look them up myself.

Volume servers consume more than 1% of the total electricity used in the United States—More than $3 Billion dollars each year. Over the last six years, the power consumed by volume servers more than doubled. For companies in the data center, power consumption is the largest Operating Expense for often accounting for more than 30% of Op EX.  In fact, research has shown that over a volume server’s lifetime the cost of power exceeds its purchase price.

SeaMicro has identified the primary drivers underlying the power inefficiencies in volume servers and has systematically rectified these shortcomings. The result is a small form factor server that uses one-quarter of the power and requires only one-quarter of the space used for traditional servers. SeaMicro servers are plug and play—they require no changes to software operating systems, applications, or management infrastructure.

Over the past 10 years, the data center has undergone a sea change in size and scope, including dramatic changes in the demand for compute, the type of compute required, and  the economics of operation. Scale out replaced scale up, and the Cloud became the home of many business services and a source of on-demand compute. Despite these changes, the server has remained architecturally unchanged. Server manufacturers made no accommodation for the new and different workloads and traffic patterns despite the highly specialized workloads that rose to dominance in the data center. This mismatch between specialized workloads and generalist servers is an underlying cause of the power consumption issue in the data center.

SeaMicro is a small company led by CEO, Andrew Feldman, that may still take the typical start-up foozeball break, but it's at the leading edge of a trend that's bringing innovation back to the high-volume server market. To me that is very exciting, since I haven’t seen a foozeball table in the office in a decade.  http://www.seamicro.com