collective unconscious of the smarter planet

Some predictions on cloud computing - with a shout out to the mainframe.

1. Brands May Come and Go – But No Technology Will Die

Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC’ world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe’ world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not kill DVDs. The technology pie is growing, our choices are expanding, and almost every slice is getting bigger. So be prepared to manage an ever-increasing selection of technologies across public and private boundaries.

2. Hybrid IT Will Be ‘The Next Big Thing’

‘Hybrid cloud’ was soooo 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.

3. Service Quality Will Be IT’s Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling, or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

4. Public Cloud Adoption Will Slow

Given the results of this year’s Longhaus research from Australia – an early adopter market and a bellwether for business technology – I suspect the rest of the world is in for a slowdown of public cloud adoption. Issues (perceived or real) with security, compliance, service quality, skills, staffing, complexity, and good old politics will all put the brakes on. Whether ‘cloud stall’ will be as pronounced as ‘virtual stall’ is unsure, but 2012 will see a marked slowdown in public cloud adoption.

5. Public Cloud ‘Gets’ Security

Sad but true – many (most?) enterprise decision-makers still do not trust public cloud. In 2012, IT must do a better job of deploying and explaining cloud security – and I believe we will! In 2012, CIOs will see security as less of a barrier to cloud adoption as organizations adopt more and better cloud-oriented security solutions – including solutions designed for complex hybrid cloud services, as well as solutions that are delivered through the cloud with easily-consumed Security SaaS options.

6. Big Iron is Back – Part I

No, mainframe is still not dead. On the contrary, 2012 will see the rise of the mainframe as a *gasp* cloud platform. Massively scalable, hosting critical (and underutilized) ‘big data’, capable of running complex cloud workloads on a variety of architectures (z/OS, Linux, UNIX, Windows), mainframe is really an obvious cloud platform. It will not replace commodity clouds, but large enterprises and governments especially will leverage their investments and bring big iron into their cloud mix.

7. Cloud Gets Heterogeneous

Not only will mainframe become part of the cloud landscape, but public cloud providers will also start to offer UNIX and maybe even other non-x86 platforms. I have recently seen this in action (CA did it internally years ago), and most large enterprises are heavily dependent on heterogeneous systems for their mission-critical applications. Despite the common myth that cloud == commodity servers, heterogeneous servers will start to become more available for large enterprise deployments.

8. Big Iron is Back – Part II

Big iron concepts of integrated compute, network, and storage are resurgent – but this is not your grandpa’s mainframe. Deployment of integrated fabrics like Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock will accelerate rapidly in 2012 as IT changes the way it thinks about integrated infrastructure for virtualization and cloud – and realizes how amazing these integrated boxes are for diverse, dynamic, high-volume workloads like desktop virtualization, pop-up data centers, and cloudbursting.

 9. ‘Grown-up’ Cloud Service Management Comes To The Forefront

In 2011, the NIST Cloud Reference Architecture devoted a whole section to ‘Cloud Service Management’, and IT started to talk about ‘grown-up’ disciplines – planning, budgeting, performance, asset, inventory, service levels, audit, etc. In 2012, even ‘commodity’ cloud vendors will finally take cloud management seriously, as enterprises and governments demand these disciplines – and smaller providers differentiate on service and security, not just price.

10. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant

In January 2009 I predicted, “in 3-5 years … niche [Virtual System Management] vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric.” Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.

EMC and Cisco are releasing a pretty scary looking converged system featuring the ultra-fast Greenplum Hadoop database.

Well, that took long enough. Cisco Systems and the Greenplum big data unit of server partner EMC have finally gotten together and put the Greenplum wares on Cisco’s Unified Computing System servers.

In a blog posting, Raghunath Nambiar, an architect at Cisco’s Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group, reveals that the two partners in the Virtual Computing Environment Company has circled back and are now offering pre-configured Hadoop stacks that marry Cisco’s C-Series rack servers and Greenplum’s eponymous Greenplum MR Hadoop distribution.

Greenplum doesn’t like to talk about the hardware its data warehousing and Hadoop clusters run upon, mainly because EMC, as an independent disk array maker and the owner of server virtualization juggernaut VMware, has to position itself as Switzerland in the server racket. Before it was acquired by EMC in July 2010 for an undisclosed sum, Greenplum had run its heavily customized implementation of the PostgreSQL database, which was parallelized and juiced to run data warehouse clusters, on Sun Fire x86 servers from Sun Microsystems. This was a good choice at the time, given the large amount of disk capacity that Sun had crammed onto its Opteron and Xeon servers, but a bad choice in the long term because database rival Oracle ate Sun. In the wake of the Sun acquisition, Greenplum has certified its code to run on Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Huawei Technologies x86 servers and OEMs this iron from those companies, depending on what customers want.

EMC did not, interestingly enough, plunk the Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance data warehouse or its Hadoop appliance, which is actually based on a rebadged Hadoop stack from MapR Technologies, on the Vblock server-storage clusters it cooked up with Cisco to chase server virtualization and private cloud business in data centers and now virtual desktops. While the B Series blade servers in the UCS family may not be suitable for Greenplum workloads, the C Series rack servers could certainly be configured in a Vblock by EMC and Cisco to run this Greenplum code, but were not.

Part of the problem was that Hadoop doesn’t use external storage, so there would be no EMC iron in such a Vblock. It is very likely that EMC and Cisco were waiting for Cisco to get a little more traction in the server racket – Cisco’s server business now has more than 10,000 customers and a $1bn annual revenue run rate that will probably nearly double in the next year – before committing the Greenplum wares to the UCS platform.

According to Nambiar, the fully integrated Cisco-EMC stack takes Cisco’s UCS C Series rack servers and its UCS 6200 converged server-storage 10GE switches and fabric interconnects and configures up the Greenplum MR Hadoop distro to run on the boxes. (This Hadoop distro is MapR’s M5 Hadoop distribution with the names changed.) The setups start at a single rack and can be expanded to cover multiple racks. The UCS 6200 switch links into UCS 2200 fabric extenders, and according to the reference architecture (PDF), the UCS C210 M2 server is the workhorse that Cisco and EMC have chosen to run Hadoop. The C210 M2 server was announced in March 2010 and is a two-socket box that uses Intel’s six-core Xeon 5600 processors and will no doubt be replaced by a new machine using Intel’s “Sandy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5 chip. The C210 M2 can support up to 192GB of DDR3 main memory and has room for 16 2.5-inch disk drives and one or two RAID disk controllers.

In a single-rack configuration, the Greenplum MR-UCS stack has two 48-port UCS 6248UP fabric interconnects and two 2232PP 10GE fabric extenders. These link down into 16 of the C210 M2 servers, which have 96GB of main memory and 16 1TB disk drives, an LSI MegaRAID 9261-8i disk controller, and a Cisco UCS P81F virtual interface card that presents two 10GE ports to the fabric extenders. Cisco is dropping in the six-core Xeon X5670 processors, which run at 2.93GHz. Each rack has 192 cores, 256TB of raw storage capacity, and up to 350TB of usable Hadoop capacity with three-way data replication across the nodes and data compression turned on. The nodes are configured with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard Edition.

IDEAS is always good for a more technical POV on IT industry trends. Here is their list of trends to watch for in 2012:

At the beginning of the year, IDEAS analysts collected their thoughts on the key trends that are poised to play out across the IT industry over the next 12 months. The analysts identified several major topics that are likely to dominate the attention of IT managers throughout 2012, including the continued rise of cloud computing, the diversification of client devices, and the next stage in the evolution of server designs and storage systems. Some developments will be incremental and fairly predictable. Other developments could fundamentally change the course of the industry, as organizations adopt public cloud services for a growing number of workloads, and as users shift from traditional PCs to tablets and other mobile devices for more and more client applications.

In 2012, IDEAS predicts the following:

• Customers will become increasingly concerned with the possibility of lock-in from cloud service providers as those customers grapple with the decision of whether to embrace proprietary cloud solutions that deliver unique benefits, or adopt more open solutions that may have limitations.
• IT workers will start to discover an acute need to reassess their skills in order to reap the benefits of cloud computing; new skill needs may require workers to seek out training in new areas.
• Public cloud consolidation will continue as larger, better-financed companies cherry-pick the best smaller companies and push out the weaker start-ups.
• Vendors that enjoy strong visibility in the client device market (such as smartphones, mobile PCs and tablets) will be able to translate this presence into success in the area of back-end cloud services. This trend will cause traditional server-focused vendors, such as Oracle or IBM, to rethink their client strategies to try to pick up some of this more-consumer-oriented business.
• New x86 processors, coupled with a major push from Microsoft with the release of Windows 8, will help to rejuvenate interest in PCs by underscoring their importance for many critical computing tasks. Intel’s next processor will deliver a quantum leap in performance for the mobile systems that use them, including PC laptops and other devices, and its arrival could impact the mobile market to the same degree that Westmere and Nehalem impacted servers in 2011.
• Solid-state drives (SSDs) will be much more widely deployed, and in a variety of ways: on many clients, directly attached to servers, and within storage arrays. IT architects will start to rethink their data storage and caching approaches as they consider whether SSDs are more effective when deployed close to processors as large caches directly attached to servers, or as added tiers in storage devices. Systems vendors that can offer storage management software that spans both servers and storage arrays, thus addressing both uses cases for SSDs with an integrated solution, will break out from the pack.
• Vendors will step up efforts to simplify and automate storage management as they focus increasingly on emerging world markets (such as BRIC and CIVETS countries). In particular, automated storage tiering solutions, which arbitrate how classes of data are assigned to high-performance SSD pools, will extend into the small and midsize business (SMB) space.
• Unified storage, which manages block and file storage using a single interface, will become a common requirement for entry-level and midrange customers.
• IT infrastructures will continue to become standardized, with increasingly critical workloads deployed on x86 servers and industry-standard operating systems such as Linux and Windows. This standardization means systems vendors will find it harder than ever to establish meaningful differentiation in hardware; as a result, they will go further than ever before to vertically integrate their platforms with unique and proprietary software stacks that are specifically optimized for their server platforms.
• Software-defined networking (SDN) will start to get some attention in 2012, as developers find that they can achieve more deterministic network behavior, and hence higher performance, by integrating network switching directly with applications.

Oracle revenues fell in its second quarter (ended November 30) largely due to declining hardware sales and software licenses. Not good news for their exa-line.

Software behemoth and systems player Oracle missed its projections for both hardware revenues and new software license sales in its second quarter of fiscal 2012. While Oracle was facing a very tough compare, the miss is something that will make Wall Street and the rest of the IT community jittery for a spell – at least until they can spike their egg nog.

In the quarter ended November 30, Oracle’s overall sales were up only 2 per cent to $8.79bn, which was lower than the 5 to 9 per cent revenue growth that Oracle’s CFO and co-president Safra Catz had guided for three months ago. Catz said back in late September that Oracle also projected for earnings per share in the range of 44 to 46 cents, and the company only hit 43 cents. Net income rose by a very healthy 17 per cent to $2.19bn, which shows that Oracle, unlike Sun Microsystems that it ate nearly two years ago, is more focused on the bottom line than it is on the top line.

Perhaps most disconcerting to Oracle, considering the very respectable Sparc T4 systems and mix of Exadata and Exalogic clusters it launched earlier this year, is that hardware sales, which includes both standalone servers and storage arrays as well as the “engineered systems” that combine servers, storage, switching, and systems software in a single stack, fell by 14 cent to $953m.

Back in September, Catz said the plan was for hardware sales to be flat to down 5 per cent, so clearly there was a little too much optimism about how the new systems would be received by customers.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts after the market closed on Tuesday, Catz said that Oracle was seeing good demand building for the new Sparc T4 machines, but that a bunch of customers who might have otherwise bought Sparc T3 machines decided to wait and qualify T4 boxes instead.

The Sparc SuperCluster, an Exa-like cluster machine based on the quad-socket Sparc T4-4 servers, only began shipping at the end of the month, with retailer Macy’s buying two and the state of California buying one. Co-president Mark Hurd said that Exadata database cluster systems had record bookings and the pipeline is the biggest Oracle has seen since launching the product.

Exalogic middleware cluster sales doubled sequentially and are growing at twice the rate of Exadata systems at the same point in their product cycles, and Hurd added that ZFS storage array sales doubled year-on-year.

Oracle co-founder and CEO, Larry Ellison, said that the company sold over 200 Exadata and Exalogic systems in the second fiscal quarter – by systems, Oracle appears to mean “racks” – and added that the company will do 300 machines in Q3 and 400 machines in Q4.

“It’s easy to remember. We didn’t plan it that way, but that’s the way it is working out,” Ellison quipped in the call.

Ellison said that that the combined Exadata and Exalogic systems would exit Q4 with an annualized revenue run rate of $1bn by Q4 of fiscal 2012 (which ends in June) and would have a $2bn run rate as the company exited fiscal 2013. He conceded to one analyst that rather than tripling the installed base this fiscal year, Oracle might only grow the combined Exadata and Exalogic installed base by a factor of 2.5. Hurd piped up there was still a chance to hit that 3X figure, but that is currently not the plan.

Oracle’s hardware products had operating expenses of $471m, thus leaving $482m as an operating profit, or a rate of 50.6 per cent. That’s not bad, and is an improvement over the prior quarter – and a hell of a lot better than Sun Microsystems did in the past decade. Hardware support revenues came to $625m, falling 2 per cent, but operating expenses for support fell by 27 per cent to $258m, leaving an operating profit of $340m, or 54.4 per cent of revenues.

Adding it all up, Oracle’s hardware and related support businesses drove $1.58bn in sales and an operating profit of $849m. Of course, once you allocate R&D, SG&A, and other overhead costs attributed to the systems business, the actual net income from the Oracle hardware business is much lower. Oracle doesn’t report its earnings this way, so we can’t know how truly profitable the systems biz is for Ellison & Co.

While people expect Oracle to have some issues with its systems business, especially considering how many new products were announced in the fall, they might not have expected for the software side of the Ellison house to lose so much steam in fiscal Q2.

Catz said three months ago when Oracle reported its Q1 results that the company expected for new software license sales to rise between 6 and 16 per cent in Q2, but shiny new code only accounted for a little more than $2bn in sales, up only 2 per cent compared to the year-ago period. New software sales grew by 17 per cent in the first quarter, to $1.5bn, so sequentially Q3 still represented a 36.8 per cent jump. (The compare was a lot stiffer in Q2 than it was in Q1.) Software license updates and support revenues rose by a more Oracle-like 9 per cent, to just under $4bn.

This time around, on the Q2 call, Catz said that CRM software sales were up “close to 20 per cent” and that ERP “did very well,” but that as the quarter was coming to a close, there was a sudden increase in the number and level of approvals needed to close software deals, and this pushed sales that might have otherwise closed in Q2 out into Q3. Catz said that Oracle had put procedures into place to prevent such last-minute surprises in the future. She also said that wild currency fluctuations in the quarter pushed down reported software revenues more than Oracle had anticipated in its prior guidance for Q2 from three months ago.

In the third quarter, Oracle’s database and middleware products accounted for $1.48bn in new license sales (up 4 per cent), while support for these products was $2.71bn (up 11 per cent). Oracle pushed out $569m in new application license sales – down 2 per cent from a year ago and no doubt hurt by the announcement of Fusion apps for on premises and on the Oracle cloud back in October. Application support and update operations yielded $1.28bn in revenues, up 6 per cent from Q2 fiscal 2011.

Looking ahead to Q3, Catz provided guidance for Oracle in both constant currency and in US dollars as they will ultimately be reported. (We’ll ignore the constant currency numbers for the purposes of this story.) Oracle is facing a much tougher compare in Q3 than it had in Q2, and expects new software license sales to be anywhere from flat to up 10 per cent. Hardware product sales (not including support) will be anywhere from 5 to 15 per cent down compared to a year ago. Total revenues will grow by anywhere from 2 to 5 per cent.

Predictably, given the miss and the might of Oracle in the IT racket – it is not always fun to be a bellwether, is it Larry? – Wall Street will not be happy. Oracle shares were up nearly 2 per cent as the market closed, rising on optimism about the European debt crisis being resolved and housing starts in the US, but in after-market trading in the wake of Oracle’s numbers coming out, the company’s shares were off nearly 10 per cent.

Wednesday will probably not be a lot of fun for Oracle shareholders, but with Wall Street, it is always hard to say until the second bell tolls.

Fantastic article about PaaS - and more. Worth it alone for the opening in which Vambenepe discusses the headaches that enterprise architects face in building out applications and services. I love his description of middleware and the choices that enterprise architects need to make.

I’m not much of a cook. Of the many errors I commit in the kitchen, the most common is a failure to use the right tool for the job. Not because I don’t have it, or I don’t know how to use it, but because I over-optimize for the post-cooking cleanup at the expense of the cooking experience. The saucepan used to boil the potatoes isn’t the best tool for a sauté, but it’s already out and it will do. The wooden spoon used to stir-fry vegetables doesn’t make as good a serving instrument as the metal ladle, but it’s already dirty so let’s use it. Sometimes this make-do attitude just produces inconvenience, sometimes it leads to disaster (“I don’t need to dirty a colander; I can just hold the lid against the pan and slowly pour… Oops! OK kids, we’re eating pasta off the sink tonight.”)

What is true for cooking is true for software development. Using the right tool for the job means higher productivity and a more robust, efficient implementation. But, just like cooking, there are many tools in the drawer and each one that you take out comes with its own cost.

Enterprise applications are made of more than just code. The selection of the platforms they are built on is as important as their specific code and configuration. That’s why “middleware” is a much broader category than just “application servers”, and even “middleware” doesn’t capture all of various runtimes that support enterprise applications. Just looking at the list of application-related “Magic Quadrants” offered by Gartner gives an idea of the diversity of these product categories and the difficulty of the task, for IT architects, of deciding which to use: Just for the application runtime, there are Magic Quadrants for “Enterprise Application Servers “, “Horizontal Portals”, “Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms”, “Ajax Technologies and RIA Platforms”, “Application Delivery Controllers”, “Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA-Style Application Projects”, etc. Add to this data-related platforms (relational databases, distributed databases of various forms, master data management), as well as messaging infrastructure, security, identity management infrastructure, application performance management tools and soon enough one has to decide whether to optimize for employing the right tool for every task or optimize for assembling an easy-to-manage set of tools.

Each new tool, when selected, brings additional features that the application can take advantage of, but also a new set of administrative tasks, another platform the administrators need to be trained on, another set of operating system requirements, additional license and support costs, another support channel, etc. That’s when people start wondering whether they really need a portal or can they make do with the more basic UI reuse features of the application server. Integrated product suites from portfolio vendors alleviate many of these issues (tested integrations, centralized management, unified support…) but not all. Enterprise application platforms, like Java EE, provide a large set of features, but in many cases they provide a portable interface to infrastructure tools that are not themselves included in the platform runtime (e.g. a database). It significantly lowers the barrier to using these external tools, but from an operations perspective the cost of yet-another-tool-to-manage remains.

The next leap in making it practical to always use the right tool for the job will come with PaaS.

Today’s PaaS offerings are, with few exceptions, focused on the basic building blocks of application platforms: an application runtime (“app server”), a database, and an Identity Management (IDM) store. For now, the flexibility of the various offerings has been most often measured in terms of number of programming languages supported (Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript…). But PaaS changes so quickly (compare today’s PaaS landscape to what it was a year ago) that the current landscape is almost irrelevant already.

Soon we will realize that supporting yet another language that offers the same interaction style is not a very important measure of diversity. Diversity will instead be measured in the number, richness and comprehensiveness of value added platform services offered. From map-reduce services to business process orchestration.

In the same way that many application runtime tools are under-utilized because of the operational cost of setting them up, configuring them and maintaining them, many application management tools are also under-utilized, for much of the same reasons. So system administrators and developers scroll through various log files in scenarios where transaction tracing tools might provide a much more direct answer. They add crude browser-side instrumentation in places where network-based traffic capture can provide a rich view of the user experience and permit replay of transactions. They manually generate test transactions in places where the right tools can capture actual customer traffic, scramble confidential information and deliver a usable and realistic set of test input and output payload.

All these “right tools” exist today and are sometimes used in traditional data centers, but not as often and as consistently as they should be. Because their acquisition and operation cost aren’t perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be worth the value they can deliver. Because trying them out (in a realistic way, applied to your application) is, in itself, a time-consuming effort.

As of today, in most cases, in a PaaS environment one cannot use these advanced tools, because the environment is too restrictive. Today, advanced runtime services and advanced management services are used occasionally in traditional environments (to some extent including IaaS) and never in PaaS environment.

As PaaS matures, this trend will reverse and PaaS environments will be those in which users (almost) HAVE to use the right tool; where they’ve lost all the excuses (both of the valid and the imagined kind) for not using (or at least trying out) the full richness of runtime and management tools. That’s because the underlying Cloud operating system is built from the ground up to host these various platform services and present them in a unified way not just to the application running on top but also to the administrators in charge of maintaining them.

This change is even more profound than it seems. Getting transaction tracing, user experience monitoring, transaction capture, auto-scaling and all kinds of advanced platform features by default (or by just checking a checkbox) is a big improvement. But the move to PaaS will hand to developers and architects, tools that aren’t even on the table today. Here are 3 examples:

Example 1: There is no reserved domain

In traditional settings, the application is confined to what happens on the computers on which it runs. There is a lot more infrastructure than just computers in a datacenter, but all that is the domain of IT administration and out of reach for programmers. The best they can do is document what network topology and load balancing configuration is desired. In PaaS, the entire infrastructure is accessible, and when that happens, you can count on developers using it in ways that will horrify traditional IT administrators. The CDN is not just an after-the-fact deployment optimization; it becomes a core part of the application logic. Even DNS, old, boring, sacrosanct, must-never-go-down DNS, becomes another programmable entity. And it is used in completely new ways as a result, as illustrated by people currently experimenting with giving almost everything a CNAME and gaining complete location transparency.

Example 2: Business is code

The mantra of “aligning IT and business” is frequently heard. Nothing is wrong with it. But PaaS gives you not only the tools to align them but also to merge them in many places. Fine-grained metering and billing, programmatically driven usage of pay-on-demand resources put a significant part of your operating costs under direct and explicit control of your code. If you want to lower your computing costs by 10% next month, you can make a configuration change that will have exactly that effect, in the same way that you can change any other application parameter. Of course, this stricter constraint might affect the performance of your application in some way, there’s no free lunch, but the point is that the monthly cost is not a guessing game; it’s much more precisely controlled… What’s true on the cost side may also be true on the revenue side. At the risk of stretching the definition of PaaS, an app store is a PaaS service, in the same way that an application hosting service is. And the line will blur. I would be very surprised if, as I type this, someone at Amazon is not working on better integrating their app store with their AWS platform, so that you deploy your app (its server side logic and its client side piece) to their infrastructure, the client side gets uploaded, via the app store, onto the user’s Android/Kindle device, the server side runs on AWS and the AWS bill is paid by the app sales (hopefully with some leftover for you). And the charging model goes from one based on just app purchase to one based on consumption, as measured by the platform which hosts the server side.

Example 3: Everything is a platform

It is my contention that the “Platform” part of PaaS refers to anything that can be programmed. An application server obviously meets this definition, but there are many other things that can be programmed. Not a day goes by that something gets an API that didn’t use to have one. This opens the door to PaaS including many different kinds of hardware. It’s not just traditional computers. You can get GPUs and supercomputers (both of which Amazon offers today). One day you’ll get to use observation or communication satellites by the hours via an API. Or maybe wireless spectrum. You can already access logistical services (a warehouse, transportation) that way. The line will blur. Ultimately, PaaS is not just raising the IaaS abstraction level by pushing the app server into the Cloud offering. It’s about making all the useful resources programmatically accessible.

For a long time, the basic building blocks of IT have been simple: computers, storage and networking. It was the age of computer-centric IT. Everything else was the responsibility of the system administrator and out of reach for the programmer. IaaS made these resources available in a more flexible manner, but didn’t change the nature of computing. In its first iteration, PaaS doesn’t change the nature either, it just looks at the way people typically use these infrastructure pieces (install a database on them, install an application platform on them, etc…) and offloads that responsibility from the application owner. That has the important benefit of lowering the barriers to using the right platform tool for whatever task the application is accomplishing. But that’s just the beginning of PaaS. PaaS is about to multiply the variety of IT building blocks, offering to the application owner access to resources that would be very hard, or impossible, for them to compose based on the traditional resources of networks computers and storage.

In the early age of PaaS (e.g. when Google App Engine entered the scene), you wrote applications differently for PaaS because you had to. The idiosyncrasies of PaaS were mostly driven by the need to make its delivery easy and cheap for service providers. We’ll grow out of this. But we’ll do more than outgrow it by removing these constraints. We’ll transcend them. The ultimate goal of PaaS is not to get rid of the early PaaS limitation and to allow developers to do things in the way they are used to. It is to make developers write applications differently not because they *have* to but because they *want* to; because the platform services offered by PaaS are better than what developers had at their disposal before it. They’ll come with little incremental operational cost; they’ll provide access to a much wider range of services than those traditionally offered by an application server; they will provide direct control of cost and revenue parameters as part of the application logic.

The transition from machine-centric application design to PaaS is of the same magnitude as the transition from chemistry of simple molecules to one in which amino acids became available as building blocks. Applications are about to come to life.

EMC is pushing even harder into the server space with a solution called “Project Lightning.” It’s a super-fast storage array on the surface, but it’s essentially a converged infrastructure offering that integrates storage, compute (server), and networking resources to provided pretty insane amounts of performance.

Server vendors, prepare for an attack. Lightning strikes are coming - and they’re welding app and storage boxes together in a way that reminds El Reg of the mainframe era.

EMC’s array-controlled server flash initiative, Project Lightning, is getting ready. There may be announcement before Christmas, but it won’t be a happy Christmas for the server vendors - not if what El Reg has put together from hints, nods and whispers is true.

Consider what will happen if server apps can get data from storage arrays in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds: instead of data being fetched from a VNX or VMAX, or even Isilon, array across a SAN fabric with slow delivery due to disk latency and fabric transit time, it is available pretty damn well instantly, directly across the server’s PCIe bus from flash memory.

Because, in some secret sauce fashion, the array knows what data the application is going to need and pre-loads the flash using FAST-VP. Data that’s written goes into flash and the app can carry on working while a background process copies it to disk back in the array. To be more certain it’s safe to do this, Lightning flash cards can be dual’ed and mirrored.

Faster apps need fewer servers

The net of this is that an application’s run time could be halved, even quartered; it depends how I/O-bound it is. Customers could then say to themselves: “Okay, we have saved 50 per cent - for argument’s sake - of our server application suite’s run time. What shall we do with this recovered server resource?

“We could double the virtual machine density of our servers, and cut their number in half, or we could use servers with half the processing power; two-socket ones instead of four-socket ones.”

Either way the server suppliers will take a hit and so will software suppliers who license by processor core; fewer processors and cores will be needed. EMC isn’t a server vendor and its revenues won’t be affected. The main server vendors - Dell, HP and IBM - don’t have technology that can do what Project Lightning does because their arrays can’t manage the server flash as Project Lightning does.

The end-game here is to weaken the server vendors and then, as storage and servers become progressively more and more co-located while the SAN becomes a server-area network (or DAN in Fujitsu’s terms) instead of a storage area network, we will see VMAX arrays with extra engines to run app software. This could be 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, even 128 extra engines, who knows how many, with a speeded up Virtual Matrix taking care of the server-storage inter-linking and - is this a master stroke or what? - the app engines being equipped with Lightning flash cards, and everything running in an ESX-managed environment.

Is this real or just a fevered tech-obsessed hack’s fantasy?

You better believe it

EMC is pushing the converged IT stack game and has been open about its arrays running app software and about the Lightning server flash effort. Why else is it doing this? This is not a company that commits suicide; seppuku is not in its game plan.

Yet the direction of VMware’s storage function development is towards commoditised networked storage arrays, EMC’s included, and we’ve been wondering if EMC will cripple this part of VMware or somehow evade the VMware trap that threatens every networked storage array vendor.

This is how: EMC’s strategy people are saying, in effect, let standalone networked storage array vendors (the block-heads and the filer guys) fall into the VMware trap, because we will circle around it and use VMware to transition apps from running in standalone servers into server-storage powerhouses - or mainframes as people used to call them - and run apps faster than anyone else - Oracle, IBM, whoever. We’ll evade the VMware trap laying in wait for storage array vendors, EMC’s chiefs say, and instead use it to attack the server vendors.

It’s a breathtaking idea and will, if it succeeds, propel EMC into the big-time, an equal in revenue terms to the server vendors. How about that?

Ideas International looks at Oracle’s high-end cloud play and at the overarching market for premium, workload-optimized systems.

When Oracle released Exalogic a few years ago, it was billed as a private cloud-in-a-box. At OpenWorld, Oracle doubled down on the plug-and-play features of Exalogic and Exadata by having these systems serve as the backbone for its new public cloud offering. Recently, IDEAS published a blog post offering a broader definition of mainframes as an integrated solution stack. By this definition, Oracle is eschewing commodity solutions, the architecture on which many existing cloud services are based, in favor of a high-end solution as the basis for its public cloud (see graphic below). Computing as a service has been successfully monetized (recently confirmed), but by taking the high-end approach, Oracle is trading larger potential sales volumes for a niche customer base. The strategy may prove to be as profitable, but it is not without risk.

The above taxonomy defines three types of server platform solutions, but in truth server architecture today is a spectrum along which we highlight three key points. On the one end is the commodity solution. This is the setup that is typical in most data centers for cloud-based workloads. Somewhere in the middle, further integration of hardware and software can be applied. Such converged server platforms, which include HP Matrix and Cisco UCS, have been a hot topic in recent years.

On the opposite end, a solution integrates software and hardware into a single smoothly functioning entity. Such a high-end solution is what Oracle plans to sell as its public cloud, incorporating Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic platforms with Fusion software and other application layers. At first glance, this may seem unexpected, but as long ago as 1999 commentators were noting that Larry Ellison’s preference for a high-end solution stack was pretty clear:

“Oracle chairman CEO Larry Ellison is taking aim at Microsoft’s core enterprise strategy, mounting an attack on client/server computing, which he describes as an evolutionary dead end, and more specifically taking a pop at Microsoft’s ‘servers everywhere’ distributed computing model. …x86 server isn’t yet sufficiently scalable to rival centralised computing models based on Unix, mid-range and mainframe models… and that’s why Ellison is finally attacking the right target…distributed computing tends towards the chaotic and expensive.”

For Oracle, the verdict on how to best package hardware was in long ago. In the meantime, of course, Microsoft strategy did not fail. But mainframes did not fail either. Cassandra predictions by others about the dim future of the mainframe have been overzealous. IBM still sells plenty of big iron, and the mainframe ecosystem remains a solid, albeit cyclical, business.

A true metric to determine the winner of the commodity vs. high-end solution contest would normalize the amount of compute cycles (or I/O) that are now being delivered by high-end solutions vs. total compute cycles (or I/O). By that measure, high-end solutions have been losing ground quickly over the years to commodity solutions.

High-end systems with tightly integrated software have traditionally been applied for very specific tasks, such as:

• High-performance computing (HPC), which employed specialized hardware designs in the past, but which is now increasingly based on commodity hardware.
• Business-critical systems (in many cases, but not all).
• Code that needs to have an edge to beat competitors. An example of this would be hedge funds that pay big money to experts in multithreaded and parallel programming.

Android apps are an example of a commodity application layer at the low end, in consumer technology. Android applications have to run on many different chips, OS flavors, and hardware. Therefore, investments in optimizing an Android app may be a losing proposition for developers, because that app could be buggy or useless on nonoptimized devices.

On the high end, investment bank hedge funds may hire programmers to make sure that each instruction is matched to a thread of a specific Intel processor (Intel even has a special suite of tools to help enable this degree of optimization). Granted, the hedge fund programmer is working on a x86 platform. However, not everyone can afford a team of high-priced experts. The next best thing may be the high-end solution, in which software has been preintegrated and optimized for a specific hardware platform.

Most public cloud vendors build their services on commodity hardware, because part of their added value is the development of a software stack that provides meaningful differentiation from competitors. This differentiation is essential for avoiding true commoditization, in which the cloud service competes on nothing other than price. There may be a few exceptions where a vendor has some more exotic hardware offerings in the mix, but the majority are built on x86 servers, together with a hodgepodge of applications. This environment lends itself well to being partitioned into compute instances that are sold cheaply.

However, in finally embracing public cloud computing, Oracle faces a dilemma. On the one hand, it cannot afford to cannibalize its own margins on Exadata and Exalogic hardware, Fusion software, its enterprise database, and so forth to customers for on-premise deployment. Therefore, its public cloud offering cannot be too cheap in absolute terms. On the other hand, its cloud offering needs to promise customers genuine benefits in terms of price-performance and other metrics. These two forces are driving much of the risk in Oracle’s business maneuver – will end users choose to deploy Oracle high-end server platform solutions on premises, or purchase access to these systems from Oracle’s public cloud on a utility basis?

Oracle’s databases lead in market share, and Oracle’s middleware sales are second only to IBM’s. Big corporations, especially financial institutions, have traditionally been loyal customers of premium architectures. By accepting that not every startup is going to want to use an Exa-based cloud with an expensive relational database management system, Oracle is forsaking low margins and high volumes in favor of pursuing opportunities with high-end enterprise customers. Oracle’s approach is also a novel way to sell the Exadata and Exalogic to new clients, who run plenty of high-end solutions, but not necessarily on those two systems.

Oracle’s high-end cloud solutions may appeal to fewer customers than other public cloud platforms, and the analyst community may not fully understand the move. However, there is little doubt what the company is trying to achieve: as Ellison seemed to be predicting in 1999, Oracle will try to capture the enterprise with its own centralized, integrated hardware architecture and applications stack – deployed either on premises, or off.

HP and Cisco are beginning to work more closely together again - following the fall-out around Cisco’s introduction of UCS and HP’s purchase of 3Com. Apparently customers continue to want more choice when it comes to networking options. Who knew? This Forrester post also has some interesting arguments concerning customer uptake of converged solutions from IBM and Dell, as well.

The thawing of the cold war between HP and Cisco breaks down the walls that limited choice and, hopefully, ignites more innovation between the companies. HP customers can now connect and configure their HP BladeSystem c-Class infrastructure with Cisco’s Unified Fabric.  Quietly, HP has been offering Cisco’s legacy switching technology in its c-Class BladeSystem enclosure but halted integration with Cisco’s next generation data center products after HP acquired 3Com and Cisco released UCS.  Similar to Juniper’s QFabric architecture that extends virtual line cards to server edge, the relationship between a fabric extender and a Nexus 5000 is similar to the relationship between a traditional 6500 line card and its supervisor engine, only now the fabric extender can be connected to its master switch — Cisco Nexus 5000 — with remote fiber connections. This allows I&O to effectively decouple the line cards of the modular switch and spread them throughout the data center, all without losing the management model of a single “End of Row” switch. The master switch and all its remotely connected fabric extenders are managed as one Cisco Nexus switch.

As Rich Fichera points out in his blog, customers are the winner in this coopetition.  Even though the walls are coming down, this doesn’t signal the end of HP networking, but customers should be wary of HP’s networking commitment (see Prediction: HP Cuts Loose Their Networking Hardware And Transforms Into A True Networking Alternative).Customers have been telling me they’re putting pressure on HP’s Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) of ESSN (Networking) to open the door to choice. Infrastructure and operation teams are telling Forrester that they want the option to leverage newest data center alternatives to HP’s networking infrastructure so that they can:

• Simplify operations.The top priority within I&O over the past three years has been to increase efficiency. Most networking vendors have responded by offering their own way of eliminating the link down state in spanning tree. A few others have taken increased utilization a step further and offer the capability to manage a large pool of switches under one logical grouping like Juniper’s QFabric. With Cisco’s FEX technology, customers can manage up to 24 modules under one logical grouping, which wasn’t possible under HP’s Virtual Connect technology and their IRF technology in their switch line.
• Standardize processes.HP’s Virtual Connect (VC)technology was designed by server teams to simplifying server operations; for example, virtual connect technology allows organizations to move or replace the server without reconfiguring MAC/WWNs, but VC has fallen short in the network controls. As with SANs, there’s no need for VM or server administrators to manage network policies in the hypervisor while network administrators do it on physical switches. Consequently, I&O personnel want solutions providers to move that network demarcation line from the physical port to the virtual one on the hypervisor; network administrators’ roles are evolving so they take ownership of monitoring and controlling traffic in the virtual world. Cisco’s technology provides consistent control from the physical to virtual world under one management domain.
• Scale capabilities.Forrester Research surveys indicate that few enterprise infrastructures have matured their infrastructure to the point where they have created an abstracted set of resources (storage, software, compute, etc.), assessed in a standard way and billed by use. This means a majority of data centers are in the process of evolving with virtualized hardware and legacy systems. Customers can tie them together with Cisco’s 1000v, 2000 series, and HP’s new Fabric Extender.
• Implement it now. At this point, I&O managers are telling us that IBM, Dell, and HP’s converged solution sound good on paper but are too restrictive at this point since they are in the infancy stage. In addition customers are saying they aren’t bothered by the proprietary nature of the data center network, because they can’t wait for VEPA, TRILL, or OpenFlow functionality—mostly waved around by the convergence vendors—and feel all data center networking solutions have various levels of proprietary functionality: QFabric, VCS, IRF, and FabricPath.  Consequently, customers are choosing to stay the course and purchasing networking solutions from traditional networking vendors: Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Juniper, etc… . at least for right now.

What does this mean? More choice. More flexibility. The old days of mainframe computing are over, and there is no sign of customers going back to that model no matter how much marketing spin is put behind converged infrastructures. Besides HP, we’ll see IBM and Dell embrace Cisco’s FEX.

And you might ask, “What about their networking acquisitions?” The real value behind them will be the development of networking expertise to create better orchestration solutions.

HP is extending its VirtualSystem line of converged systems. Things are getting interesting in the server space again!

HP is expanding its line of preconfigured, virtualization-ready VirtualSystem machines and offering financing and design and implementation services for the more fully fluffed up CloudSystems – which are VirtualSystems gussied up with cloudy management software and self-service portals.

The VirtualSystems take some of the concepts of the BladeSystem Matrix automated blade machines that were launched nearly three years – coincidentally, on the day that Oracle announced it was buying Sun Microsystems – and apply them to both rack and blade servers.

The VirtualSystems, which include servers, storage, and networking all pre-integrated at the HP factory, are backed off a notch from the CloudSystems, which include Cloud Service Automation Suite, which has some control freakery licensed from Adaptive Computing as well as the management and self-service goodies HP originally created for the BladeSystem Matrix boxes. The CloudSystems also use HP’s 3PAR disk arrays by default, while some of the smaller VirtualSystems use HP’s EVA or Lefthand Networks arrays instead. The VirtualSystem configurations come from HP all ready to support a set number of virtual machines on a particular hypervisor.

Back in August, HP launched two VirtualSystem machines tuned up for VMware’s new ESXi 5.0 hypervisor and wrap-around vSphere 5.0 add-ons that activate features in that hypervisor. This 5.0 server virtualization stack was announced back in July.

The ESXi variants of the VirtualSystems came in three sizes – VS1, VS2, and VS3 – and supported 750, 2,500, and 6,000 VMs when fully configured, respectively. (We provided all the feeds and speeds of these three ESXi-based VirtualSystems in our original coverage).

This time around, HP is rolling out VirtualSystems tuned for Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 hypervisor – and is letting customers sneak an ESXi hypervisor onto the machines if they really need to.

For now, there are only two VirtualSystem configurations for Hyper-V setups, and they’re again called the VS1 and VS2 – technically, the machines are called VirtualSystem for Microsoft, so you can keep them straight from the VirtualSystem for VMware.

The VirtualSystem VS1 setup for Hyper-V includes two ProLiant DL360 G7s, each with two Xeon X5690 six-core processors running at 3.47GHz. They come equipped with 96GB of memory, two 146GB disks, and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. This base VS1 setup also comes with 14.4TB of iSCSI SAN storage implemented in HP’s Lefthand P4500 arrays and a 48 port 10GE switch. If you scale this up to eight servers and four P4500 arrays, you can hit that 750 VM limit. You’re talking about 185 VMs or so on this initial machine, which costs $175,000.

The VirtualSystem for Microsoft VS2 configuration seems to be a little light on the main memory compared to the VMware systems announced in August, but are similarly based on HP’s BladeSystem blade servers instead of ProLiant rack servers. The base configuration comes with one BladeSystem c6000 enclosure and four BL460c G7 two-socket servers using the Xeon six-core X5667 processor running at 3.06GHz.

Each blade has 48GB of main memory, two 146GB disks, and two VirtualConnect Flex10 networking modules in the c7000 blade enclosure. There are also two SASA switches to link out to the Lefthand P4800 array that has 42TB of capacity. Those Flex10 switches provide 48 Gigabit and 48 10GE ports; two of the 10GE ports per blade are used to link the blades to the P4800 arrays.

This initial VS2 configuration will not support the full 2,500 VMs, of course. It takes around 28 blades to do that. This initial setup, which costs $425,000, will support around 535 VMs, if you do the math. Well, it’ll support them even if you don’t do the math, but you get my meaning.

‘vBlock killers’

“These systems are vBlock killers,” says Jeff Carlat, director of marketing for the Industry Standard Servers division at HP, referring to the virtual server infrastructure stacks put together on the Unified Computing System blade servers from Cisco Systems, with VMware hypervisors and EMC storage.

Carlat claims that the VirtualSystem for Microsoft machines cost one half what the vBlocks cost, VM for VM. The vBlock machines debuted in November 2009 and came in three sizes: vBlock 0, vBlock 1, and vBlock 2.

The vBlock 0 setups scaled from 300 to 800 VMs and cost on the order of several hundred thousand dollars, while the vBlock 1 setup scaled from 800 to 3,000 VMs with prices ranging from $1m to $2.8m. The vBlock 2 setup scales from 3,000 to 6,000 VMs, and the VCE alliance that sells the vBlock machines did not divulge pricing on this machine.

Neither HP nor VCE allow you to configure their respective VirtualSystem or vBlock machines online, so it is not possible to verify Carlat’s claims on HP’s pricing being better for VM support.

In 2012, HP will roll out a VirtualSystem for Microsoft VS3 configuration that will scale up to 6,000 VMs, matching the top-end vBlock iron.

All of the Hyper-V variants of the Virtual System come preconfigured with HP’s Insight Control for Microsoft’s System Center, which allows admins working within the Windows environment to see all of the alerts coming in from the HP iron, as well as supporting patching and provisioning from within the Systems Center console.

HP-UX and nPars and vPars get to play now, too

These Microsoft machines are not the only VirtualSystems that HP punted on Tuesday. There is now a version of the VirtualSystem based on the Superdome 2 extended blade servers, which were announced in April 2010 with eight-socket and 16-socket configurations, and which were extended with a 32-socket box in August of this year.

The Superdome 2 machines are based on Intel’s quad-core “Tukwila” Itanium 9300 and run HP’s HP-UX Unix variant with support for Linux and Windows as well.

HP did not announce a VirtualSystem based on the low-end, two-socket Integrity BL860c i2 blade servers, of which you can put one, two, or four in a single system image to run HP’s HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems. But it seems likely that HP eventually will put out a smaller VirtualSystem for HP-UX customers.

In the meantime, the high-end HP-UX shops are getting the first preconfigured virtual Superdomes. The starting configuration is a 16-socket Superdome 2 SD2-16s machine configured with 1.73GHz Itanium 9350 chips. Main memory on this box scales from 32GB up to 2TB, and it offers 24 internal PCI-Express 2.0 x8 peripheral slots.

This VirtualSystem for Superdome 2 machine is configured with HP-UX 11i v3 and uses the Virtual Server Edition-Operating Environment variant of HP-UX, which is explicitly designed for virtualized server instances. (Other HP-UX variants do not include virtualization, offer extended clustering support, or roll everything into one giant package.) The VSE variant of HP-UX offers nPar hardware partitions, which isolate at the blade level, as well as vPars, which offer containers inside the HP-UX environment.

This Superdome VirtualSystem has four nPars spanning its eight blade servers: a database nPar spanning four blades with 128GB per blade; an application nPar with two blades and 128GB per blade; a test nPar with one blade configured with 96GB, and a development nPar with one blade with 96GB. The application nPar has four vPars to create virtual app servers. The whole shebang is fed by a 3PAR F400 clustered storage array and includes three years’ worth of HP critical care tech support.

Carlat says that it will be available in November or December. Pricing has not been set yet.

In addition to rolling out the new VirtualSystems, HP’s Technical Services unit – which is now tucked up inside of its Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking group where it belongs – is trotting out services to help companies design new data centers or retrofit old ones to take advantage of dense-pack VirtualSystem and CloudSystem hardware. The engagement typically takes six to eight weeks and involves one or two consultants; pricing is not available.

HP says that in the engagements it has had to date, it can get a data center built or retrofitted about 40 per cent faster than was possible before it acquired this expertise, and it lowers facilities costs by about the same amount.

Finally, HP is reminding everyone that the $2bn in financing it made available in June can be applied to CloudSystem virty hardware stacks. HP says that a CloudSystem configuration with eight ProLiant server blades, an EVA array with 5.4TB of storage, and the Matrix Operating Environment costs around $340,000 but can be financed for as low as $9,500 per month. And if you are a service provider, HP is willing to scale the payments so you pay less on the front-end and more on the back-end of the deal so you don’t take the hit upfront as you add customers to a machine and eventually use its capacity.