Category Archives: Bussiness

Full Steam Ahead With Windows 8 & Hyper-V in 2012

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Some History

There have been a good number of people who’ve always used, some a lot more and some others a lot less, a bit of Microsoft bashing to gain some extra credibility or try to position other products as superior. Sometimes this addressed, at least, some real challenges and issues with Microsoft products. A lot of the time it doesn’t. I have always found this ridiculous. In the early years of this century I was told to get out of the Microsoft stack and into the LAMP stack to make sure I still had a job in a few years’ time. My reaction was to buy Inside SQL Server 2000 among other technology books Smile. The paradox is that in some cases, like some storage integrators, is that the ones doing the bashing are forgetting that their customers are often heavily invested in the Microsoft stack.

I Still Have A Job

As you might have realized already, I still have a job today. I’m very busy, building more and better environments based on Microsoft technologies. Microsoft does not get everything right. Who does? Sometimes it takes more than a few tries, sometimes they fail. But they also succeed in a lot of their endeavors.They are capable to learn, adapt and provide outstanding results with a very good support system to boot (I would dare say that you get out of that what you put into it). Given the size and nature of the company, combined with IT evolving at the speed of light, that’s not an easy task.

Today that ability translates into the upcoming release of Windows 8. Things like Hyper-V 3.0, the new storage and networking features, the improvements to clustering and the file system are the current state an evolution. A path along Windows 2000 over Windows 2003(R2), to  the milestone Windows 2008 which was improved with Windows 2008 R2. Now, Windows 8 being the next generation improves vastly on that very good and solid foundation. With Windows 8 we’ll take the next step forward in building highly scalable, highly available, feature rich a very functional solutions in a very cost effective manner. On top of that we can do more now than ever before, with less complexity and with affordable  standard hardware. If you have a bigger budget, great, Windows 8 will deliver even more and better bang for the buck if and when your hardware vendors get on the band wagon.

Windows 8 & Storage

One of the things the Windows BUILD Conference achieved is that it wanted me to buy hardware that I couldn’t get yet. Just try asking DELL or HP for RDMA support on 10Gbps and you get a bit of a vacant blank stare.

Another thing is that it made me look at our storage roadmap again. One of the few sectors in IT that are still very expensive is storage. Some of the storage vendors might start to feel a bit like a major network gear vendor. You know the one that has also seen the effects of serious competition by high quality but lower cost kit. Just think about what Storage Pools/Spaces will do for affordable, easy to use and rich storage solutions. Both with standard over the shelf available (read affordable) hardware and with modern SANs that leverage the Windows 8 features there is value. Heath my warning storage vendors. You’re struggling in the SMB market due to complexity, cost and way to much overhead and expensive services. Well it’s only going to get worse. You’ll have to come with better proposals or you’ll end up being high end / niche market players in the future. Let’s face it, if I can buy a super micro chassis with the disks of my choosing I can build my own storage solution for cheap and use Windows 8 to achieve my storage needs. Perhaps is 80/20 but hey, that’s great. It’s not that much better with more expensive solutions (vendor disks are ridiculously over priced) and the support process is sometimes a drain on your workforce’s time and motivation. And yes you paid for that. Compare this with being able to buy some spare parts on the cheap and having it all available of the shelf with the vendors. No more calls, no more bureaucratic mess for return parts, nor more IT illiterate operators to work through before you reach support that can be sub standard as well. Once you reach a certain level of hardware quality there is not that much difference any more except for price and service. Granted, some vendors are better at this then others. The really big ones often struggle getting this right.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that all stuff breaks. SLAs are fine for lawyers and for management. CYA is part of doing business. But for the IT Pro in the field you need reliable people, gear and services.  On top of that you have to design for failure. You know things will break. So it should be a cheap, easy and fast as possible to fix while your design and architecture should cope with the effects of a failure. That’s what IT Pros need and that what’s keeps things running (not that SLA paper in the mailbox of your manager).

Show the Windows customers a bit more love than you have done in the past. Some in the storage industry tend to like to look down on the Windows OS. But guess what, it is your largest customer base. Unless you want to end up in the same niche as a very expensive personal trainer for Hollywood stars (tip: there’s not a huge job market there) you’d better adjust to new realities. A lot of them are doing that already , some of them aren’t. To those: get over it and leverage the features in Windows 8. You’ll be able to sell to a more varied public and at the high end you’ll have even better solutions to offer. Today I notice way to many storage integrators who haven’t even looked at Windows 8. It’s about time they started … really, like today. I mean how do you want to sell me storage today if you can’t answer my queries on Windows 8 & System Center 2012 support and integration? To me this is huge! I want to know about ODX, RDMA, SMI-S and yes I want you to be able to answer me how your storage deals with CSVs. You should know about the consumption of persistent ISCSI-3 reservations and a rock solid hardware VSS provider. If you can do that it creates the warm fuzzy feeling a customers need to make that leap of faith.

When I look at the network improvements in Windows 8. Things like RDMA, SMB 2.2; File Transfer Offload and what that means for file sharing and data intensive environments I’m pretty impressed. Then there is Hyper-V 3.0 and it many improvements. Only a fool would deny that it is a very good, affordable & rich hypervisor with a bright future as far as hypervisors go (they are not the goal, just a means to an end). Live Storage Migration, an extensible virtual switch, monitoring of the virtual switch, Network Virtualization, Hyper-V Replica, … it’s just too much to mention here. But hop on over to Windows 8 Hyper-V Feature Glossary by Aidan Finn. He’s got a nice list up of the new features relevant to the Hyper-V crowd. Again, we see improvements for all business sizes, from SMB to enterprise, including the ISPs and Cloud providers. Windows 8 is breaking down barriers that would interdict it’s use in various environments and scenarios. Objections based on missing features, scalability, performance or security in multi tenancy environments are being wiped of the map. If you want to see some musing on this subject just look at Group Video Interview: What is your favorite Hyper-V feature in Windows 8?.

2012 & Beyond

Hyper-V is growing. It’s already won a lot of hearts and minds of many smaller Microsoft shops but it’s also growing in the enterprise. The hybrid world is here when you look at the numbers, even if it’s not yet the case in your neck of the woods. Why? Cost versus features. Good enough is good enough. Especially when that good is rather great. On top of that the integration is top notch and it won’t cost you a fortune and save you a lot of plumbing hassle.

Basically everyone can benefit from all this. You’ll get more and better at a lesser or at least a more affordable cost. Even if you don’t use any Microsoft technologies you’ll benefit from the increased competition. So everyone can be happy.

The Private Cloud A Profitable Future Proofing Tactic?

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The Current Situation

I’m reading up on the private cloud concept as Microsoft envisions we’ll be able to build ‘m with the suite of System Center 2012 products. The definition of private cloud is something that’s very flexible. But whether we’re talking about the private, hybrid or public cloud there is a point of disagreement between some on the fact that there are people that don’t see self-service (via a portal, with or without an approval process) as a required element to define a *cloud. I have to agree with Aidan Finn on this one. It’s a requirement. I know you could stretch the concept and that you could build  a private cloud to help IT serve it customers but the idea is that customers can and will do it themselves.

The more I look into system center 2012 and it’s advertised ability to provide private clouds the more I like it. Whilst the current generation has some really nice features I have found it lacking in many areas, especially when you start to cross security boundaries and still integrate the various members of the System Center suite. So the advancements there are very welcome. But there is a danger lurking in the shadows of it all. Complexity combined with the amount of products needed. In this business things need to go fast without sacrificing or compromising on any other thing. If you can’t do that, there is an issue. The answer to these issues is not always to go to the public cloud a hundred percent.

While the entire concept might seem very clear us techies (i.e. still lots of confusion to be found) and the entire business crowd is talking about cloud as if it’s a magic potion that will cure all IT related issues (i.e. they are beyond confused, they are lost) there are still a lot of questions. Even when you have the business grasping the concept (which is great) and have an IT team that’s all eager and wiling to implement it (which is fabulous) things are still not that clear on how to start building and/or using one.

In reality some businesses haven’t even stepped into the virtual era yet or only partially at best. Some people are a bit stuck in the past and still want to buy servers and applications with THEIR money that THEY own and is ONLY for them.  Don’t fight that to much The economics of virtualization are so good (not just financially but also in both flexibility & capabilities) that you can sell it to top management rather easily, no matter what. After that approval just sell the business units servers (that are virtual machines), deliver whatever SLA they want to pay for and be done with it. So that problem is easily solved.

But that’s not a cloud yet. Now that I’m thinking of it, perhaps getting businesses to adopt the concept will be the  hardest. You might not think so by reading about private clouds in the media but I have encountered a lot of skepticism and downright hostility towards the concept. No, it’s not just by some weary IT Pros who are afraid to lose their jobs. Sometimes the show stoppers are the business and users that won’t have any of it. They don’t want to order apps or servers on line, they want then delivered for them. I even see this with the younger workforce when the corporate culture is not very helpful. What ‘s up here? Responsibility. People are avoiding it and it shows in their behavior. As long as they want to take responsibility things go well. If not, technical fear masked as “complexity” or issues like “that’s not our job” suddenly appear.

There is more, a lot of people seems at their limit of what they can handle in information overload at every extra effort is too much.  Sometimes it’s because of laziness or perhaps even stupidity? Perhaps it’s a side effect of what Nicolas Carr writes about the: the internet is making us dumber and dumber as a species. But then again, we only have to look at history to learn that, perhaps, we’ve never been that smart. Sure we have achieved amazing things but that doesn’t mean we don’t act incredibly stupid as individuals or as a group. So perhaps things haven’t changed that much. It’s a bit like the “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” sort of thing. But on the other hand things are often too complex. When things are easy and become an aid in their work people adopt technology fast and happily.

Sometimes the scale of the business is not of that nature that it’s worthwhile top deploy a cloud. The effort and cost versus the use and benefits are totally out of sync.

That’s all nice and well you tell me, but what’s are technologists to advice to their customers?

Fire & Maneuver

The answer is in the sub title. You can’t stand still and do nothing. It will get you killed (business is warfare with gloves on and some other niceties). Now that’s all good to know but how do we keep moving forward and scoring? There will always be obstacles, risks, fears etc. but we can’t get immobilized by them or we come to a standstill, which means falling behind. The answer is quite simple. Keep moving forward.  But how? Do what you need to do. Here’s my approach. Build a private cloud. Use it to optimize IT and to be ready to make use of * clouds at every opportunity. And to put your mind at ease you can do this without spending vast amounts of money that gets wasted. Just provide some scale up and scale out capacity & capability. The capability is free if you do it right. The capacity will cost you some money. But that’s your buffer to keep things moving smoothly. Done right your CAPEX will be less than not doing this. How can this be?

Private Clouds enable Hybrid Clouds

The thing that I like most about the private cloud is that it enables the use of hybrid cloud computing. On the whole and in the long run hybrid clouds might be a transition to public cloud but as I’ve written before, there are scenarios where the hybrid approach will remain. This might not be the case for the majority of businesses but still I foresee a more permanent role for hybrid clouds for a longer time that most trendy publications seem to indicate. I have no crystal ball but if hybrid cloud computing does remain a long term approach to server computing needs we night well see more and better tools to manage this in the years to come. Cloud vendors who enable and facilitate this approach will have a competitive advantage. The only thing you need to keep I mind that private or cloud computing should not bee seen as replacements or alternatives for the public cloud. They don’t have the elasticity, scale and economics of a public cloud. They are however complementary. As such they enable and facilitate the management and consumption of IT services that have to remain on premises for whatever reason.

Selling The Public Cloud

Where private cloud might help businesses who are cloud shy warm up to the concept, I think the hybrid cloud in combination with integrated and easy management will help them make the jump to using public cloud services faster. That’s the reason this concept will get the care and attention of cloud vendors. It’s a stepping stone for the consumption of their core business (cloud computing) that they are selling to businesses.

What’s in it for the business that builds one?

But why would a business I advise buy into this? Well a private cloud (even if used without the self-service component) is Dynamic Systems Initiative (SDI) / Dynamic Data Center on steroids. And as such it delivers efficiency gains and savings right now even if you never go hybrid or public. I’m an avid supported of this concept but it was not easy to achieve for several reasons, one of them being that the technologies used missed some capabilities we need. And guess what, the tools being delivered for the private could can/could fill those voids. By the way, I was in the room at IT Forum 2004 when Bill Gates came to explain the concept and launch that initiative. The demo back then was deploying hundreds of physical PCs. Times have changed indeed! But back to selling the private cloud. Building a private cloud means you’ll be running a topnotch infrastructure ready for anything. Future proofing your designs at no extra cost and with immediate benefits is to good to ignore for any manager/CTO/CIO. The economics are just too good. If you do it for the right reason that is, meaning you can’t serve all your needs in the public cloud as of yet. So go build that private cloud and don’t get discouraged by the fact that it won’t be a definition example of the concept, as long as it delivers real value to the business you’ll be just fine. It doesn’t guarantee your business survival but it will not be for your lack of trying. The inertia some businesses in a very competitive world are displaying makes them look like rabbits trapped in the beams of the car lights. Not to mention government administrations. We no longer seem to have the stability or rather slowness of change needed to function effectively. Perhaps this has always been the case. I don’t know. We’ve never before in history had such a long period of peace & prosperity for such a broad section of the population. So how to maintain this long term is new challenge by itself.

Danger Ahead!

As mentioned above, if there is one thing that can ruin this party it’s is complexity. I’m more convinced of this than ever before. I’ve been talking to some really smart people in the industry over the weekend and everyone seems to agree on that one. So if I can offer some advice to any provider of tools to build a private cloud.  Minimize complexity and the amount of tools needed to get it set up and working. Make sure that if you need multiple building blocks and tools the integration of them is top notch and second to none. Provide clear guidance and make sure it is really as easy to set up, maintain and adapt as it should be. If not businesses are going to get a bloody nose and IT Pros will choose other solutions to get things done.

A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool

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Aidan Finn started this cool blog post visually explaining how cool Hyper-V engineers are. This prompted a funny a response by Marcel van den Berg concerning the technology used. Well those blog post inspired me to demonstrate an issue popping up in certain ICT projects to our business audience with the help of some visual aids. That public might not always be IT savvy, but I think we can show them what goes wrong in the ICT world every now and then. Especially if experience, context and realism are missing in a team. For this purpose I’ll use technology everyone knows from TV, the movies & the news. That way even the technically uninitiated (management) will get the drift.

So what goes wrong with a certain percentage of IT implementations today?  Well they tend to look like this:

Over the top deployments, using every option & technology known to man that become unmanageable to the “ridiculous” level and end up reducing operational capabilities and reliability. These projects cost vast amounts of money and are very costly in time / billable hours.

Look, we have a lot of features at our disposal. That’s great, as this gives us options to build the best solution, in a cost effective way, for the business need that needs to be addressed. But we don’t have to use everything everywhere just because we can. Look at the monster setup above. All pretty neat tools & option in itself but it just won’t work this way. Do note that this is not just a simple case of overkill. That would be more like a tank where a rifle suffices. This is using the entire content of the  toolbox when only few tools are needed.

Constructions like this only result in final prove that TCO stands for “Totally Cost Oblivious” and ROI for ‘”Running On Instinct”. These configurations are, more often than not, bought & configured by wannabe “’professionals” who do so to in vain attempt to get some instant credibility. The “Hey, it sure does look impressive”  approach so to speak. These people can’t hack it anyway and often look like this guy.

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He’s got the gear, he’s got the tools. But there is just no way poor  “bubba” can figure out what’s wrong. Really he can’t.

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Now a good engineer (like the one below) knows how to use the correct technology where and when needed in a professional manner. He or she does so in the most cost & result effective way.

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And it’s not only implementations where things go wrong, stuff also breaks.  That’s were a secondary (a.k.a  a backup) comes in. We all know that, no matter how charmed the lives we lead are, inevitably, luck runs out at times. Yes Murphy is out there and bad things happen to the best of us. So tell me, when that luck runs out, who do you want to come take care of business and save you?  Bubba or the guy above? In ICT that’s exactly the same question you need to answer to address the challenges your business faces. Great solutions are, even in this era of commoditization, seldom bought of the shelf as a one size fits all package, they are custom built to specs for the job at hand.

I’m Attending The E2E Virtualization Conference

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Well I’ve just finished doing the paperwork for attending the Experts 2 Experts conference in London http://www.pubforum.info/pubforum/E2E2011London.aspx. It runs from 18th to 20th November 2011. I’m looking forward to this one as I’m going to meet up with a lot of people from my on line network and have a change to discuss our virtualization experiences and share information in real life, face to face.

It’s good to get to attend vendor independent events and exchange information, enrich and extend our networks. I already know several people from my twitter/blogging network will be attending and I’m happy to meet up with you if you’re there. Just let me know via e-mail, the feedback option on this blog or via twitter (@workinghardinit). Well, I’ll see you there!