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Software as a Sea Change

Twitter on #VMware #vCloud #vSphere6

VMware-Google Deal Underwhelms

Real-Time Analytics: Better. Smarter. Faster.

End User Advocate: Windows Apps, Transformed

In the Mix: Rethinking Data Center “Commodities”

Citrix Synergy and Modern Infrastructure Decisions Summit

Scale Away With MeNew approaches to large-scale storage are helping IT

mine business value out of large amounts of data.

EDITOR’S LETTER

Room for Improvement

DATA

Survey Says

OVERHEARD

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SAAS APPS


MIModern InfrastructureCreating tomorrow’s data centers

MARCH 2015, VOL. 4, NO. 3

DATA PROCESSING


IN THE MIX

Rethinking Data Center “Commodities”

HYBRID CLOUD


END-USER ADVOCATE

Windows Apps, Transformed

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • MARCH 2015 2

JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING is new doesn’t mean it’s good. But when something old gets better, that’s certainly cause for celebration.

Storage is one technology where you can never leave well enough alone, probably because as contributor Mike Matchett says, “there has always been more data than we could keep.” In his article, “Scale Away With Me,” Match-ett describes new approaches to address ever-growing data needs, including scale-out vs. scale-up designs, the shift from hierarchical file systems to object storage and the Hadoop Distributed File System. Pretty soon there will be absolutely no excuse not to store every crumb of data ever created.

Delivering Windows applications remotely is another area that could use some improvement, especially in to-day’s age of tablets and mobile devices. In this month’s End User Advocate column, Brian Madden discusses the con-cept of app transformation, in which existing Windows

applications are intelligently delivered to the target device, similar to how responsive Web design principles package Web pages differently depending on whether the client is a traditional PC, tablet or smartphone. This ap-proach has many benefits—namely, not having to rewrite a large stable of Windows apps for a tablet. “Converting 20 years of Windows desktop apps to iPad apps would cost an enterprise millions of dollars and take years of effort,” Madden writes. In contrast, with VDI plus app transfor-mation, “delivering Windows desktops with Windows desktop apps to an iPad is something that could be done (relatively) cheaply and quickly.”

Nor is fast ever fast enough when it comes to analyt-ics—but there too, performance enhancements to stream-ing and event-processing techniques have saved the day, finds contributor Alan R. Earls. (See: “Real-Time Analyt-ics: Better. Smarter. Faster.”) Whether it’s applying accel-eration to traditional databases, using net-new NoSQL databases, or tapping new real-time data streaming and event-processing services, there’s a world of data out there that can now be processed and analyzed lickety-split.

Even VMware seems to have hit a home run among users with the latest release to its venerable vSphere vir-tualization platform. (See: “Overheard on Twitter”). Some things, it seems, get better with age. n

ALEX BARRETT, Editor in Chief

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EDITOR’S LETTER

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Scale Away With Me

Unrelenting data growth has spawned new scalable storage designs.

BY MIKE MATCHETT


IT SEEMS EVERY storage report starts with some grand statement about overwhelming data growth. It’s certainly a big and growing challenge that deserves attention, and we tend to store about as much data as we can no matter how much data there might be. In other words, there has always been more data than we could keep. That’s why even the earliest systems implemented quotas, archives and data summarization.

The challenge today is effectively mining business value out of the huge amount of newly useful data being generated, with even more coming fast in all areas of IT storage—block, file, object and, yes, “big data.” To stay competitive, you’ll likely have to tackle some data storage scaling projects soon. The good news is that there are newer approaches to large-scale storage available to help.

SCALING OUT INTO SPACE

The first thing to consider is the difference between the scale-up and scale-out approaches. Traditional storage systems are based on the scale-up principle, in which you incrementally grow storage capacity by simply adding more disks under a relatively fixed number of storage controllers (or small cluster of storage controllers, with one to four high availability pairs being common). If you

STORAGE TECHNOLOGY

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exceed the system capacity (or performance drops off), you add another system next to it.

Scale-up storage approaches are still relevant, espe-cially in flash-first and high-end hybrid platforms, where latency and IOPS performance are important. A large amount of dense flash can serve millions of IOPS from a small footprint. Still, larger capacity scale-up deployments can create difficult challenges—rolling out multiple scale-up systems tends to fragment the storage space, creates a management burden and requires uneven Capex investment.

In response, many storage designs have leaned toward a scale-out approach. In scale-out designs, capacity (and performance throughput) is grown incrementally by add-ing more storage nodes to a networked system cluster. Scale-up designs are often interpreted as having limited vertical growth, whereas scale-out designs imply a rela-tively unconstrained horizontal growth. Each node can usually service client I/O requests, and depending on how data is spread and replicated internally, each node may be able to access any data in the cluster. As a single cluster can usually grow to very large scale, system management remains unified (as does the namespace in most cases). This gives scale-out designs a smoother Capex growth path and a far more overall linear performance curve.

MILLIONS OF FILES, TRILLIONS OF OBJECTS

Another trend that helps address scalability is a shift from hierarchical file systems towards object storage. File sys-tems were built primarily to provide a human-centric way of navigating smartly through and around large numbers of files. But the way many file systems are implemented builds in natural constraints on scalability—file systems require a live “meta” database to manage and track file locations, security, read and write locking, and serve nav-igation information (e.g., when you list the contents of a directory).

This can limit most file systems to the millions-of-files range. There are some scalable file system designs like NetApp’s WAFL-based Clustered ONTAP and EMC Isi-lon’s OneFS, both of which support clustered approaches and scale to serve many service-provider scenarios, but in today’s vast cloud-building world we see object storage as the No. 1 scale-out solution.

Object storage takes a different design approach than file or raw block storage. By essentially limiting I/O to just storing and retrieving whole “blobs” (e.g., whatever size binary large object you want to store as an “object”) in a flat namespace, it can readily scale out to billions and even trillions of objects. Obviously an object can be a file, but it is really any arbitrary set of raw data bits.

n The challenge for IT is to mine business value out of giant blocks of data.

n In order to stay competitive, IT must tackle data scaling projects.

n Storage designs now lean towards scale-out designs, where capacity is grown by adding more storage

nodes to a networked system cluster.

HIGHLIGHTS


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Object storage systems occasionally use erasure coding for data protection, which is basically RAID for distrib-uted objects. In most cases, however, data protection is achieved via outright replication, which lessens the cost of storage nodes, but at some penalty against total storage capacity.

There are other drawbacks to object storage: client applications must keep track of their stored object’s unique storage keys, they can’t edit files in place on the storage system and humans aren’t able to navigate directly around the namespace. But for applications—especially Web-oriented ones—object storage provides great natural alignment.

Distributed object storage with built-in replication can also act like a content delivery network. Object storage provides a natural data layer for massive, global, distrib-uted, multi-tenant storage services, and is therefore often associated with cloud building.

Of course, the water gets a little muddy as to what exactly an object storage system is. There are object sys-tems that are internally built over file systems, and file

systems supporting object storage APIs. In the cloud there are massively scalable distributed file services built over object storage (e.g., Dropbox on Amazon Web Services S3). We even see object storage used for block-based I/O when supported by fast native object stores (e.g., DDN WOS). But the takeaway here is that object storage is a fundamental part of the solution to the largest growing storage requirements.

HADOOP-DEDOOP

Here we should mention Hadoop and its Hadoop Distrib-uted File System (HDFS). Hadoop is of course designed for storing and processing big data on scale-out clusters. Still, Hadoop data is usually found in large files. When it comes to number of files, HDFS can only realistically track about 10 million in its memory-constrained namenode controllers.

While the big data lake idea might serve for an enter-prise’s data sets in terms of its large databases, unstruc-tured text repositories and accumulating logs, it’s not designed to deliver storage services for trillions of files or objects.

There are some hybrid big data solutions like MapR and IBM Infosphere BigInsights using the general parallel file system (GPFS) that can provide far more capable storage services under Hadoop than native HDFS. And recently, BlueData rolled out a Hadoop virtualization solution, which essentially makes big data processing possible over whatever storage arrays the data is already sitting in, turn-ing the idea of the data lake inside-out.

THE TAKEAWAY HERE IS THAT OBJECT STORAGE IS A FUNDAMENTAL PART OF THE SOLUTION TO THE LARGEST GROWING STORAGE REQUIREMENTS.


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HYBRID CLOUDS

The third shift to consider is the increasing use of cloud-hosted storage. Making use of elastic cloud storage as a colder storage tier backing up on-premises data is gaining speed. You see this in the popularity of Microsoft’s Stor-Simple and NetApp’s SteelStore based on their recent acquisition of the Whitewater solution from Riverbed. And most object store use cases, hosted and on-premises, naturally look like cloud service offerings.

But what about live block storage? Zadara offers a way for you to pay for block storage as an elastic subscrip-tion. The company delivers the storage using a hybrid of pre-positioned, on-premises (your data center) scale-out appliances and virtual cloud hosted arrays.

On the high end, IBM’s high-powered GPFS has also been rolled into an elastic cloud storage system: scale-out, multi-protocol, and suitable for high performance workloads and cloud-building. The EMC ECS Appliance is their latest generation of scale-out cloud-building storage, and Red Hat Storage based on Gluster is a good option here, too.

SOFTWARE IS FLEXIBLE

Software-defined storage is perhaps an overused and under-defined term, but the general idea is to imple-ment storage services such that they can be dynamically reconfigured as needed, usually through the use of software-based “virtual” storage nodes. Generally, soft-ware-defined versions of storage have extremely compet-itive price points, and deploy on virtual machines and/or

commodity hardware. While some software-defined products are aimed only

at the virtualization environment (e.g., VMware Virtual SAN), many software-defined solutions available today— like those from HP, Maxta, Tarmin and Nexenta—are cross-platform, global and more grid-like solutions that can be provisioned and grow across an organization as

needed. The best of these “free-scaling” offerings might offer built-in global replication, a single namespace and usually advanced analytics (for a storage system) like content indexing, distributed big data style processing and sophisticated usage/auditing management.

All of these storage trends—scale-out, object-based, cloud-ready and software-defined—should be getting your attention in 2015. There are many advantages to migrating all or part of your storage base, but it is likely that most organizations will first deploy these scalable capacity tools for their new data storage needs and to mine data for po-tential business value. n

MIKE MATCHETT is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

ALL OF THESE STORAGE TRENDS—SCALE-OUT, OBJECT BASED, CLOUD-READY AND SOFTWARE-DEFINED—SHOULD BE GETTING YOUR ATTENTION IN 2015.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Software-defined-to-define-data-center-of-the-future

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Software-defined-to-define-data-center-of-the-future

w

SOURCE: TECHTARGET CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SURVEY, 2014; BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 357 BUSINESS AND IT PROFESSIONALS. *MULTIPLE SELECTIONS ALLOWED

SOURCE: TECHTARGET CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SURVEY, 2014; BASED OFF RESPONSES FROM 924 BUSINESS AND IT PROFESSIONALS. *MULTIPLE SELECTIONS ALLOWED


Survey SaysHow to choose a virtualization systems management toolHome

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D What features are you looking at with your new virtualization systems

management tool purchase?*

D What are the top 3 factors in choosing a virtualization systems

management vendor?

Server availability monitoring

Networking capacity and utilization monitoring

Systems and security management

Capacity planning and monitoring

Change and configuration management

Storage or backup management

Private cloud management

Chargeback management

Price

Management console and dashboard functions

Integration with virtualization platform APIs

Interoperability with hardware environment

Reporting capabilities

Support for multi-tenancy

Support of multiple hypervisors

Vendor reputation

Existing vendor relationship

Ability to project ROI

47%

42%

42%

35%

34%

28%

19%

17%

16%

14%

67%

56%

54%

54%

51%

48%

34%

20%

say they currently deploy some kind of virtualization systems management tools81%


NOT BETTER. Not worse. Just different. That’s how IT professionals describe how their jobs change when their organizations move from running on-premises appli-cations to outsourcing to hosted software as a service providers.

It’s easy to think that software as a service (SaaS) makes IT’s job dramatically easier. Replace an on-premises appli-cation with a hosted version thereof, and all of a sudden IT has one less application to procure, provision, configure, backup, patch and update.

It’s also easy to see how that same hosted application could complicate matters—by hosting IT staff out of a job. If the application doesn’t need a person to manage it, then does the organization really need to keep that IT person around?

While hosted applications don’t need as much care and feeding as on-premises applications, they do require a lot of up-front architecture and integration work—and who better to do that than IT? SaaS apps also tend to beget more SaaS apps, which, in turn, beget more architecture and integration work. And someone needs to be left to pick up the pieces if something goes wrong with the hosted app. It all spells a lot of change on the horizon, and

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Software as a Sea ChangeAs SaaS apps infiltrate the enterprise,

IT still has plenty of work to do.BY ALEX BARRETT


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IT professionals must think about what role they will play in increasingly SaaS-powered organizations.

UNSTOPPABLE SAAS

If you don’t think that the world is moving to SaaS, you’re living in the wrong decade.

Consider this: “There hasn’t been an on-premises soft-ware company funded since 2007,” said R. “Ray” Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. “You have no choice. It’s all going to be SaaS.”

According to a recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners, SaaS adoption grew five-fold from 11% to 74% over the past four years. Meanwhile, the legacy on-prem-ises deployment model is shrinking, according to Gartner, declining from 34% today to just 18% by 2017.

The good news is that the speed and ease that organiza-tions can deploy a new SaaS application brings enormous benefits—often with little to no impact on IT.

Cedar Fair, which owns 11 independently branded amusement and water parks throughout the U.S., recently began using hosted customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing software from Merkle and Salesforce (ExactTarget). Whereas customer data used to be siloed and difficult to get at, today the firm “has much

better information on guest behavior,” and “more robust abilities to honor guests and market to them,” said Daryle Power, vice president of CRM at the firm.

The amount of work that IT needed to do to make this happen, meanwhile, was relatively minimal. Occasionally, IT will be called upon to provide access to new data cap-ture points, but, for the most part, “IT has stepped away from Merkle [and ExactTarget]—they don’t support any of those platforms,” Power said.

Instead, the staff concentrates on maintaining the infra-structure that runs day-to-day park operations: the master database of record, ticket sales, the website and redemp-tion data. “It’s really freed up their time, and alleviated the need for them to understand customer data and be able to focus on park infrastructure,” Power said.

THE IT CASE FOR HOSTED SOFTWARE

Elsewhere, implementing SaaS puts IT at the forefront of improving business processes.

AAA Allied is the twelfth-largest AAA club in the U.S., with 1.6 million members in seven states. The organiza-tion made its first foray in to SaaS about a year ago, when it implemented the ServiceNow project-management platform.

n IT pros must think about what role they play in increasingly SaaS-powered organizations.

n As legacy on-premises models shrink, SaaS adoption has grown at a rapid rate.

n SaaS models bring a shift in security models since they don’t play by traditional rules of availability

and predictability.

HIGHLIGHTS


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That was a big leap of faith for Rob Pickering, vice pres-ident of IT services.

“I’ve always been a [proponent] of on-premises infra-structure,” he said. “I like having on-site infrastructure and talent because we get to manage the end-user experience.”

But a review of on-premises project management soft-ware came up cold—none of the products AAA Allied con-sidered integrated with Cherwell, an existing IT service management tool. “The work and resource controls were always going to be split,” Pickering said. Rather than settle for that, it implemented ServiceNow project management in a first phase, with the goal of moving to its ITSM suite a few months later.

Pickering’s resistance was softened by the fact that AAA Allied deployed ITSM, for which there are sound techni-cal reasons to outsource. “IT orgs are willing to have that stuff live outside, because if there’s an issue internally, you might not be able to get to it otherwise,” he said.

These days, the IT team is in the throes of automating every conceivable business process. It started with the HR employee onboarding and offboarding—“a horribly broken process that always used to tie up a lot of time, a lot of very expensive time.” Its automation will grow to include password resets, disabling and creating accounts, adding people to distribution lists and even ordering new paper towels. “Every interaction with the business is going to go through this platform,” Pickering said.

Besides improving efficiency, automating these pro-cesses has put Pickering’s team in a new light—and for a relatively small amount of effort on the team’s part. Out of a total of 32 IT staff, 10 trained as ServiceNow admins.

Programming is sometimes done in JavaScript, but more often, through pre-packaged workflows that ServiceNow provides through an orchestration engine subscription. And in the 18 months since it deployed the package, Pick-ering said, “We’ve had zero seconds of downtime.”

DEEP BREATHS

Still, moving to hosted applications isn’t all sunshine and roses.

One of the big changes that IT professionals need to contend with is the shift in the security model, said Nat Kausik, CEO at Bitglass, a company focused on securing cloud environments.

“Normally, security is about securing the infrastructure, but [in a cloud world] you don’t control the infrastruc-ture,” Kausik said. Traditional security tools are no longer useful, and IT must scramble to identify and secure the data that resides outside the firewall.

SaaS apps also don’t necessarily play by enterprise rules of availability and predictability, said Rob Castaneda, CEO at ServiceRocket, a provider of hosted training software and a big user of SaaS apps itself.

A lot of hosted apps change very quickly, especially con-sumer-grade applications, and often without the permis-sion of the enterprise. “Rarely does a Monday go by where we log in and something hasn’t been updated,” Castaneda said. “Most users roll with the punches pretty well,” he said, but not all do. Frequent, unanticipated changes can be a challenge for IT support organizations.

To be fair, SaaS vendors that cater to enterprise clients


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work hard to insulate customers from these sorts of is-sues, said Peter Coffee, Salesforce.com vice president for strategic research. His company, for instance, displays the system status of all the instances that make up the service at trust.salesforce.com. And when it comes to software updates, the company limits itself to three yearly releases, and gives administrators several weeks to review the new features before they go live. Further, features can be turned on or off individually by invoking an API.

“You really need to distinguish between consumer- and enterprise-grade hosted apps,” Coffee said. And on the bright side, hosted apps never need to be manually up-dated, he added. “The fear and loathing of the enterprise software update is just not there.”

THE INTEGRATION IMPERATIVE

Meanwhile, it’s a mistake to assume that legacy on-prem-ises apps are simply being swapped out for hosted ones, said David Linthicum, senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners in Boston. “I just don’t see the shut-ting down of on-prem that everyone expected,” he said. “If anything, cloud apps tend to be additive. For every app that shuts down, another app pops up.”

Further, while some applications lend themselves well to SaaS (enterprise resource planning, CRM, HR) that’s not true for all new applications. “Big data systems tend not to live in the cloud because of the I/O and bandwidth requirements,” Linthicum said. The same is true for many new business intelligence, data mining, analytics and

Internet of Things applications, setting up the need for a hybrid cloud management layer that spans your data centers.

Integration work, thus, is a never-ending process.“Integration is not an occasional thing, especially with

organizations of significant size,” said Salesforce’s Coffee. To that end, SaaS vendors sometimes provide facilities to expose and consume Web services in order to connect to external data services and sources.

Making that as easy as possible will lay the groundwork for a new world of so-called citizen developers, Coffee said, where line-of-business users themselves create ap-plications and integrations they need to do their jobs. IT’s role is then to act as the “adult supervision” by providing governance, control and data integration.

Until then, many SaaS applications still can’t be easily customized, said ServiceRocket’s Castaneda. Ironically, some SaaS vendors have begun to offer both hosted and on-premises versions of their wares. With the latter, users can customize it to their heart’s content, but many shops find customization not worth the trouble.

“It’s a hare or the tortoise situation,” Castaneda said. “We find friction every time we have to customize some-thing on our own,” and the firm has hard rules about where it spends its energy. “We give a lot of thought about where we don’t want to differentiate as a business, and try to keep things as simple as possible.” n

ALEX BARRETT is editor in chief of TechTarget’s Modern Infrastructure.

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Overheard Twitter on #VMware #vSphere6 #vCloudAir

Jan Schwoebel @MindTheVirt

Finally #VMWare vSphere Fault Toler-ance #FT starts to be useful. #vSphere6 #HA #multi-cpu http://wp.me/p4LPqN-6

Andrew Rodriguez @thesilence84

The installation process for vsphere 6 appliance? Crimi-nally easy. Feels like cheating :) #vmware #vSphere #vsphere6

Johannes Roux @JohannesRoux

#vSphere6 on the list for tomorrow! Weekend of IT. Fear Not there will be time for beer also!

Michelle Arendall @MichelleArendal

My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend—#VMware And #Google Cozy Up http://ow.ly/IdGXk #hybridcloud #vCloudAir

Andrew McIver @Andrewmciver

MS #Azure is a great product, easy to use. How will it compare with @vmware #vCloudAir?

Alexandru Covaliov @peposimo

#vSphere6 install can be delegated to my daughter. Next->Next->Next->Finish. It’s ready Daddy.

Marcio Maisonette @mmaisonette

A lot of new features coming with the #vSphere6. I guess that is a good time to review them and present to my team.

Tyler James Johnson @Tyler_J_J

I guess #VMware vRealized that they have some gaps in #vcloudair.... https://lnkd.in/bBZz2cX

https://twitter.com/hashtag/VMWare?src=hash

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https://twitter.com/hashtag/vSphere6?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/HA?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/multi?src=hash

https://twitter.com/hashtag/vmware?src=hash

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https://twitter.com/hashtag/VMware?src=hash

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BRINGING GOOGLE CLOUD features into VMware’s cloud plat-form was seen by many as a win-win for both vendors, but don’t expect it to act as a tipping point for enterprises still wary of moving workloads outside their own data center.

Customers of vCloud Air will be able to use features from Google Cloud Platform in the first half of the year as part of an arrangement that adds staple features of pub-lic cloud to VMware’s platform and establishes Google‘s presence in enterprise IT. And while VMware on-premises customers say the deal is a step in the right direction, they don’t expect much of an impact on their operations.

Enterprises are still unsure of a cloud move, despite the

strides VMware has made around hybrid deployments, said Bob Plankers, a virtualization architect at a major Midwestern university.

“For us it’s about tolerance for risk,” Plankers said. “VM-ware is finally getting their stuff down into our tolerance level, but these hybrid cloud sorts of things are just new enough that we haven’t gotten there yet.”

The partnership with Google will allow vCloud Air cus-tomers to use Google’s Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Datastore and DNS. Capacity is more of a problem for startups than large enterprises, Plankers said, so block storage shouldn’t be too much of a draw. And while BigQuery is interesting, it doesn’t serve much of a purpose for him at this point, he added.

These new features are largely just buzzwords without much practical use for enterprises that are not already using public cloud. But when a CIO puts out a request for proposals (RFP), it does allow VMware to check those boxes and gives the customer one less reason to turn to another vendor, Plankers said.

NICE FOR SOMEONE ELSE

As a regulated utility, VMware customer Tucson Electric Power gets a guaranteed rate of return on capital invest-ments from the government for purchase of things such as hardware and software. But since operational expenses

HYBRID CLOUD

VMware- Google Deal UnderwhelmsWhat does VMware’s partnership with Google mean regarding on-premises vSphere shops? For now, not a lot. BY TREVOR JONES


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don’t receive that same return, his is one of the few in-dustries where moving infrastructure to the cloud holds little financial incentive, said Chris Rima, manager of in-frastructure systems for the Tucson, Ariz.-based company.

Security remains the biggest hurdle for enterprise adoption of public cloud, but there is certainly upside to the technology and this deal could be positive for the right customer, Rima said.

“I see tremendous value in this partnership,” Rima said. “If someone is already on Google’s platform or has VMware in house—what a wonderful story.”

Hatco Corp., a food service equipment manufacturer based in Milwaukee, Wis., uses vSphere and VMware Horizon. The company hasn’t had a need for cloud ser-vices to date, but the Google features do sound interesting, said Aaron Bolthouse, manager of IT infrastructure.

“It all looks pretty good from a big-data sense and a cloud-ready sense,” Bolthouse said. “It’s expandable and it’s stuff that allows you to leverage the whole idea behind cloud, which is to process things you need when you need them.”

At the same time, Google is seen as more of a consum-er-oriented vendor than an enterprise-grade provider, so there will be some in the VMware camp who are wary of using those tools, Bolthouse said.

“Look at things like Gmail, Google Apps—for the most part they aren’t being leveraged prolifically in the enter-prise yet,” Bolthouse said. “I wouldn’t put my company secrets out in Google Drive.”

Another hurdle for VMware is that most customers that want the advanced features that the Google partner-ship provides have already found them somewhere else, Plankers said.

“They probably didn’t move into vCloud Air because of new things on the roadmap but more likely for [disaster re-covery] capabilities or something like that,” Plankers said. “If you need those capabilities they’re probably already with AWS or Rackspace or something else.” n

TREVOR JONES covers the cloud for SearchCloudComputing. He can be reached at [email protected].

“ IT ALL LOOKS PRETTY GOOD FROM A BIG-DATA SENSE AND A CLOUD-READY SENSE.” —Aaron Bolthouse, manager of IT infrastructure, Hatco Corp.

mailto:[email protected]


AS THE DUCHESS of Windsor once quipped, you can never be too rich or too thin. In IT, the comparable observation is that you can never have enough data and process it too quickly.

That’s the essence of the drive toward real-time analyt-ics and the use of event processing and event-driven ar-chitecture. There’s a lot of data out there and some of it is best analyzed sooner rather than later. Most businesses are trying to improve cycle times to be more responsive—by catching problems faster and spotting opportunities even faster, said Maureen Fleming, an IDC analyst. So, shifting to a faster, event-driven approach often makes sense.

There are numerous approaches to real-time analytics, said ESG analyst Nik Rouda. For that matter, there are many definitions of what constitutes real-time. “We did a survey and found most respondents thought data must be updated in seconds for real-time, while smaller groups preferred different sub-second times,” Rouda said. No matter the specifics—faster, it seems, is always better.

“In the [business intelligence] world we were always trying to stuff data into data warehouses faster and faster,” said Claudia Imhoff, founder of the Boulder Business Intelligence Brain Trust (BBIBT). Meanwhile, she said,


The time to process all that data is now. Right now.BY ALAN R. EARLS

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there was an entire world of complex event processing “that we didn’t know a whole lot about” until it hit the big time with stream analytics. “Now they can take data as it streams and throw it against an analytical model for something like fraud detection or some kind of customer pattern behavior model,” she said.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

In the last year, Rouda said, popular traditional relational databases, like Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 Blu Accel-eration and Oracle 12c Database, have acquired in-mem-ory options for analytics. This typically provides an order of magnitude or more improvement in performance, he said. “Some would argue that their approaches are retrofits that don’t properly design for this use case,” Rouda said. The alternative would be “younger” NoSQL databases that are reputedly better suited to in-memory analytics such as MemSQL and Datastax’s Cassandra offering.

Rouda also said that in the spacious Hadoop ecosystem, the transition from batch to real-time is evidenced by the fact that Apache Spark, a fast and general purpose engine for large-scale data processing, is challenging MapReduce for in-memory analytics thanks to its ability to use data not only on the Hadoop distributed file system, but also

other data platforms like Cassandra or Amazon S3. “This space is still maturing, but there is a lot of development, momentum and interest,” he said.

Of course, for “real-time” performance, you still must capture data at the speed it is being generated. Depending on the data type, streaming the data can be accomplished with data pipes that use tools like Apache Flume or Kafka, or even Amazon Kinesis.

The lattermost is important because it is cloud-based, said Eric Dynowski, the CEO of Turing Group, an infra-structure as a service provider. However Kinesis is more of an intermediary, enabling more and better processing on demand. Thus, for Dynowski, the bigger game changer is the more recent Amazon Lambda. “Lambda provides a framework for analytics that is the first opportunity for an organization to simply implement a little bit of code or a whole neural network with Java Script and artificial

n Most businesses are trying to improve cycle times to be more responsive by catching problems faster.

n There are many approaches to real-time analytics, and many definitions for what constitutes real-time.

n Traditional relational databases like Microsoft SQL Server have acquired in-memory options for analytics.

HIGHLIGHTS

WHEN IT COMES TO “REAL- TIME,” THE SPECIFICS DON’T SEEM TO MATTER—FASTER, IT SEEMS, IS ALWAYS BETTER.


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intelligence completely on demand. You can have an API and a real-time response without having to have a big ap-plication infrastructure,” he said.

However, Lambda is even more radical because it is completely scalable and demand driven, Dynowski said. “IT has always been about systems of consuming—some-thing processes data and then waits for more data,” he said.

“Lambda is a quick flash of code that adds a new layer to how you analyze data when needed.” Now, analytics can scale more realistically, based on events and on what is actually happening.

So is cloud the new paradigm for real time analytics? Perhaps.

Rouda cited an ESG survey (Enterprise Big Data, Busi-ness Intelligence, and Analytics Trends) where 21% of respondents wanted to use a public cloud like Amazon for analytics, while 10% preferred a hybrid approach.

On the other hand, there are other online options including Google Data Flow and a new permutation of Microsoft Azure, said Mike Gualtieri, principal analyst at Forrester Research. And, even without the cloud

there are powerful open source projects such as Apache Storm.

However, according to Shlomo Swidler, CEO of Orches-tratus, a cloud computing consulting firm, Amazon is head and shoulders above the other options. “Both Kinesis and Lambda appeal to audiences who value technology as a tool, not as an asset,” he said. “In the long term, your tech-nical needs will be served much better by allowing Am-azon to worry about the infrastructure and the message passing, and instead focusing on the unique processing that your business requires.”

AGILITY TOO?

While speed is crucial, some organizations are also con-cerned with agility.

Rouda said agile business intelligence development could allow you to more rapidly prototype and build new real-time analytics applications, but it isn’t necessarily linked to the [real-time] movement.

“Agile is actually one of the biggest challenges because over the last 20 years, the expertise to build robust, scal-able, mission critical BI environments has grown, but we still don’t know how to build them quickly, reliably and inexpensively—and when requirements change we don’t know how to change them,” said Boris Evelson, vice pres-ident and principal analyst at Forrester.

Self-service BI is an approach that could help deliver some degree of agility, he added. “It should require very little help from IT professionals and should only require IT infrastructure.”

“ BOTH KINESIS AND LAMBDA APPEAL TO AUDIENCES WHO VALUE TECHNOLOGY AS A TOOL, NOT AS AN ASSET.” —Shlomo Swidler, CEO, Orchestratus


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DELIVERING REAL TIME

The desire for real-time analytics is also tied to a general movement regarding the need to build speed and flexibil-ity into applications, said IDC’s Fleming. “That involves simplification of containers, and micro services that can be assembled in a more dynamic fashion,” she said. There are many drivers, according to Fleming, including:

n Real-time promotions, where there is a need to identify an opportunity to make a targeted promotional offer to improve conversion rates. Immediacy is an important part of the strategy.

n Maintaining a real-time view of inventory across omni-channel points of purchase.

n Preventive maintenance and outage detection associated with revenue and customer satisfaction, particularly in Internet of Things systems.

n Monitoring costs in cloud utility billing.

And, she said, the challenges involve skills gaps in build-ing these types of systems, skills gaps in building models that detect problems and opportunities and challenges in “building a responsive culture inside the business.”

GETTING THERE

All of the work being done to improve analytics capabili-ties has observers giddy with the possibilities.

“To me the most interesting part of this is the tense shift taking place with businesses moving from looking at the past [batch] to looking at the now [real time],” Rouda said. “This enables all kinds of immediate responses to new information that otherwise weren’t possible.”

However, warned BBIBT’s Imhoff, as real time becomes more “invasive,” practitioners will need to make sure it doesn’t have a performance impact on operations. “That is something that needs to be thoroughly considered ahead of time,” she said.

And at the end of the day, getting analytics systems up to today’s super-fast standards is easier said than done.

A common stumbling block is that too many initia-tives don’t have a strong business case. It is better to look for tangible benefits that can be achieved by “quick and dirty” methods, which you can integrate into the whole enterprise environment later, said Forrester’s Evelson. “Instead of aiming for a big bang, take baby steps, reach for tangible benefits and measure them, and then build up from there,” he said.

“I think the key to success is a relaxation of some of the old rules that we used to go by, like the need for a single enterprise business intelligence architecture and plat-form—or the idea that you must have a so-called single version of the truth,” he added. “You should have these idealistic goals as the light at the end of the tunnel but you also need to realize that you are on a journey and it will be hard to achieve 100% along the way.” n

ALAN R. EARLS is a Boston-based freelance writer focused on business and technology.


IF YOU’VE FOLLOWED my columns in Modern Infrastructure, you’ve most likely noticed an evolution around virtual desktop infrastructure to where today’s VDI technologies “solve” many (or all?) of the VDI shortcomings of even a few years ago. So if VDI works now and solves everything we want, what’s next?

The next big trend in VDI is called app transformation. In a nutshell, app transformation rearranges the user interface of an app that was designed for one form factor (i.e., the desktop) and makes it usable from devices with a different form factor (i.e., a tablet).

To understand the significance of app transformation,

let’s take a step back. Most organizations rely on Windows on the desktop. This has nothing to do with Windows itself per se, but because enterprises rely on 20-plus years of Windows desktop applications.

Precursor products to VDI, such as Citrix WinFrame and Microsoft Terminal Services, are popular because they can deploy the existing Windows desktop applica-tions that a company might rely on to any platform, like Windows desktop apps on a Mac client.

WINDOWS’ IPAD PROBLEM

When the iPad took the world by storm in 2010, desktop virtualization vendors wrote VDI clients for the iPad. This wasn’t because companies necessarily wanted to use Windows desktop apps on iPads, rather, it was more like, “Well, users want to use iPads, but all our enterprise apps are Windows desktops apps, so I guess we have to figure out how to either (1) magically convert our 20 years of desktop apps to iPad apps, or (2) figure out how to get our existing Windows desktop apps on the iPads.”

Obviously converting 20 years of Windows desktop apps to iPad apps would cost millions of dollars and take years of effort, whereas installing VDI and delivering Win-dows desktops with Windows desktop apps to an iPad can be done (relatively) cheaply and quickly.

The performance of VDI on an iPad is fine, but that

END-USER ADVOCATE

Windows Apps, TransformedWhy App Transformation is the future of VDI. BY BRIAN MADDEN

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doesn’t make using a Windows desktop app on an iPad a good experience. But that’s not the fault of VDI. The prob-lem is that Windows desktop applications were designed to be used by “desktop” form factor clients. Desktops have one (or more) large displays, a full human-sized keyboard and a pixel-precise pointing device.

Apple’s iPads, however, have a single small screen, the keyboard is a virtual keyboard that pops up to take even more of that small, valuable screen space, and the pointing device is the user’s fingertip, which only has half an inch or so of precision.

Today’s Web technologies have solved this problem nicely with responsive Web design. This is why you can visit the same website from a phone, a tablet or a laptop and get three different UIs. The desktop might show a full sidebar menu, whereas the phone might show a little menu icon in the corner that, when tapped, brings out a full-screen menu.

Responsive design is possible with Web apps since their UI is defined by CSS and Javascript. Unfortunately, Win-dows desktop apps don’t have that kind of separation—the core application and its UI are one in the same.

This is where app transformation comes in.

TRANSFORMING WINDOWS APPS

Windows-based app transformation technologies let IT departments create UI “translations” of existing Windows desktop apps to make them more usable from mobile

devices. These tools run on the remote Windows hosts, and they do their UI translation at runtime. Using them does not change the app at all, and access to the applica-tion’s source code is not needed.

An IT pro can use a visual designer to quite literally build a new UI for an app, with visual tools that link but-tons, menus and other components of the new UI back to the app’s original parts.

What’s great about app transformation is that the orig-inal Windows app still runs in the VDI or remote desktop session host session, complete with its security, plugins and everything else it needs. The app transformation tool simply grabs the UI, applies the transformation profile the customer created and sends the new interface down to the user instead of the original one.

App transformation is a new concept, but we’re already seeing vendors like PowWow and Capriza create interest-ing tools. And Citrix and VMware are talking about this, so we’ll expect more from them in the future.

A transformed app will never be as ideal as a pure mo-bile app. Still, the capability to build a mobile-friendly version of an existing Windows desktop app in a few days instead of a few years means that app transformation will become a big part of our VDI and remote Windows envi-ronments. n

BRIAN MADDEN is an opinionated, supertechnical, fiercely indepen-dent desktop virtualization and consumerization expert. Write to him at [email protected].

mailto:bmadden%40techtarget.com?subject=


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THERE’S A LOT of talk that parts of our data center are now commodities. “Hardware is a commodity,” people say. “So are hypervisors.” But are they really?

The dictionary, as presented by Google, defines a com-modity as “a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee.” Dic-tionary.com adds “something of use, advantage, or value” and “an article of trade or commerce, especially a product as distinguished from a service.” [Italics mine.]

If the data center is getting commoditized, vendors haven’t gotten the memo—or if they did, they chose to

ignore it. Dell keeps making its hardware better and more easily operated, which is contrary to the idea of hardware as a commodity. Similarly, Supermicro keeps making its hardware denser. In the realm of virtualization, VMware’s recent updates to its flagship vSphere virtualization platform reignited the debate about the hypervisor as a commodity.

RAW MATERIALS VS. SERVICES

It’s easy to make the case that servers and hypervisors are the raw materials of the data center, the primary building blocks we use to do anything. The only things lower on the food chain are power, cooling and physical space. But let’s reconsider whether servers and hypervisors can really be deemed commodities.

In the hardware space everybody seems to use one of two suppliers for hardware: Dell or Supermicro. Look at the back of a Pure Storage array sometime and you’ll see that it’s actually a Dell, with the service tags and every-thing. The same applies for SolidFire arrays. Other com-panies such as Nutanix, Coho Data and Nimble Storage have taken the Supermicro route. Why pick one of these vendors over the other, if they’re both commodities?

The answer is that they’re not, and that’s because of the services. Dell offers particular services around building custom products, and its hardware platforms also offer

IN THE MIX

Rethinking Data Center “Commodities”Labeling servers and hypervisors as commodities like corn and cattle may be overly simplistic. BY BOB PLANKERS


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more services than SuperMicro’s: Dell servers have ro-bust, fully-featured management controllers, hardware diagnostics, and configuration tools. Supermicro has very basic implementations of these, but its hardware is often less expensive, and can be much denser.

SHOULD YOU DO IT YOURSELF?

A choice exists for companies building atop these hard-ware platforms: Is hardware management and configu-ration something you implement yourself in software, or something you ask the hardware vendor to do? We used to think that we’d do it all in software. Software-defined everything. But as it turns out, there’s some merit to hav-ing the hardware take care of the mundane tasks. You can step back and focus on other problems—issues that are more central to your product offerings.

Let’s look at the virtualization space. Certainly there are a few different hypervisors: VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hy-per-V, Citrix Xen, Linux KVM. And on the surface they all let you subdivide a server into virtual machines. However, VMware seems intent on putting a whole lot more into its hypervisor layer. Its VSAN hyper-converged storage product sits there. Fault Tolerance and High Availability sit there. And these aren’t features that are delivered with

other hypervisors. For instance, if you want fault tolerance under Linux KVM you must build it into your application. That service isn’t provided by the hypervisor itself.

So is the hypervisor a commodity? I don’t think so. A hypervisor isn’t easily interchangeable, and it more closely represents a collection of services rather than a single monolithic product. You pay service and support on it throughout its lifetime, either directly to a vendor or in the form of payroll for support staff. It may be a primary product but I don’t think it counts as a raw material. VM-ware and others do a lot of refining to make the products we see in our data centers. n

BOB PLANKERS is a virtualization and cloud architect at a major Midwestern university.

IS HARDWARE MANAGE-MENT AND CONFIGURATION SOMETHING YOU IMPLEMENT YOURSELF IN SOFTWARE, OR SOMETHING YOU ASK THE HARDWARE VENDOR TO DO?

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