Just as a bunch of customers and partner are enjoying the great EMCWorld show in Orlando, AT&T announces a new Cloud Storage offering, based on their round about 40 datacenters worldwide and the freshly announced EMC Atmos internal to external Federation

functionality. The service named Synaptic <LINK> is available for selected customers and will probably reach general availability later this year. In the coming month there might by other offerings based on the so called EMC Atmos Online solution <LINK> which is currently in beta phase and strives to extent the existing Atmos functionality towards the clouds.

While mother EMC takes storage to cloud, the daughter VMWare also is attacking the marking with is Cloud Operating Systems, which opens their worlds most famous Virtualization plattform to cloud providers. VSphere will allow to move virtualized systems and services from a private cloud to public cloud offerings provided by roughly 500 worldwide VMWare cloud service providers <LINK>.

Welcome to the cloud club.

Still beeing in Las Vegas after 3 interesting days at IBM’s Tivoli Pulse 2009 <LINK>, I want give you some thoughs on IBM’s cloud strategy. Attending only one Session on Clouds (Manageing Clouds), I got the impression, that clouds are not a big deal, if you stick with IBM.

After months of rumors on “Blue Cloud offerings”, they unveiled their strategy and showed that using IBM Tivoli products can help you setting up a complete privat, public or mixed offering. Based on the characteristices of Cloud computing:

-          Elastic Scaling

-          Rapid provisioning

-          Resource Abstraction

-          Flexible pricing

IBM has almost everything in place to set up a cloud offering: Ranging from Virtualization and Provisioning, over open Standards for SOA and Information management up to a complete IT Service Management solution (based on IBM Tivoli), that monitors and controls the processes around the offering. Sounds quite easy, doesn’t it.

IBM is pushing pressure on the competition on the cloud front. To emphasize this, they also start a new offering based on AWS EC2 to provide parts of their Software portfolio (DB2 and Informix Databases, as well as Webshere Portal and Middleware) to customers on a On-demand pricing model <LINK>. This offering might be used for setting up rapid test and developments environments. Dana Gardner has more on this topic <LINK>.

This step is kind of suprising, because some people might have though, that Big Blue was going to have a competing offer for public clouds. I think that this step proves, that IBM won’t battle Google and Amazon, instead they are focussing on Enterprises. This is what their customers demand.

In combination with these releases, IBM also presented a bunch of customers for their offerings <LINK>, to prove that their offering are real.

So it seems, that cloud computing could be quite easy, if you have a good set of products and some good, strategic partners. Let’s wait and see.

“What would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?” asked Google Senior Software engineer Christophe Bisciglia some time ago. To me this seems to be THE big point with cloud computing. After learning about economical and market forces driving the cloud wave, I still think that money and flexibility alone are only half the truth. Even if those two arguments are important for most private and corporate IT users, there are a number of drawbacks like security issues or the question of who is in control of the data.

My guess is, that clouds will have their final breakthrough when we’ll have more applications that exploit the new possibilities the cloud computing paradigm offers. More stuff like Google and Amazon. Or even smaller but innovative like Gigaspaces.

It looks like the financial crisis will help to clean not only financial markets, but also puts some pressure on top 2009 IT issues.

After breaking news in 2008 that Novell is extending their stand in IT Service Managment and Data center automation with acquiring Platespin and Managed Objects <HERE>,  these days SUN is shifting gears by buying QLayer <READ_HERE>. Sure, they lost ground in recent months and they had to move. Let’s wait and see how other big competitors like Cisco respond. Not to ask what Big Four will pull out of their hats. And there are other minor albeit open conquerors which are quite successful.

To me clouds in all their facets and IT Automation (in different disguise – <READ_HERE>) are tight close together, because they scale IT Operations to dimensions far from beeing able to be handled manually. Maybe it’s a good time for digging out old (and new) autonomic computing concepts and to put flesh on the bones.

2009 will be an interesting year, possibly bringing some groundbreaking advances to IT and business.

So let’s tell everyone to stop whining about recession but rather to look forward.

Roland

In the keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Gartner VP Thomas Bittman predicted that ‘cloud computing will eventually support thousands of specialized providers, with services being put together like Lego blocks’ <READHERE>. My guess is that Mr. Bittman tried to say, that cloud computing will intrinsically tied to Saas. But is that true? Let’s first discuss what the point with cloud computing is. Is it just a new buzzword for modern service providers with very flexible provisioning features and/or highly distributed high capacity datacenters? Or is it a new computing paradigm, enabling users to write applications capable dealing with thousand times higher computing capacity, like Google asks students promoting their cloudy mindset <HERE>. So whats the point?

The close relationship between Clouds and SOA is common sense (see interview with IBM Autonomics director <HERE>). That may be the reason, why all big IT vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Novell and thelike  have broadened their portfolios in the past few years and will be able to not only offer platforms for building service enabled applications, but are also providing/buying technology for automating data center management and provisioning.

So managing clouds is the new Infrastructure paradigm (vs. on-premise or ’serverhugging’), while SOA might be the new application development paradigm (vs. ERP dinosaurs)? If it was that simple, then we probably will have thousands of providers, providing 2nd Tier service offerings and several large scale 1st Tier infrastructure providers offering cheap and enormous computing power.

Even if I haven’t looked into topics like security or IAM, the paradigm shift may be a long way, thinking of todays heterogenous computing landscape. Key to success might be the possibility to be able to provision, manage and support large scale (utility) systems. For that reasons I’m really glad to work in the interesting area of ITSM, BSM and Automation <RELATED_READING>, which definitly will be the key to the future.

A very interesting company these days seems to be Elastra <HOMEPAGE>. They are evangelists of a new approach to so called ‘Elastic Computing’ which might be the ‘next generation in IT infrastructure

‘. What in the beginning seems to be a very ambitious idea, is well presented and well documented and seems to make sense in many respects. My understanding after a first look is, that they basically of tool set, called the ‘Elastra Cloud Server On Demand

‘ sitting on top of a generic cloud provider like e.g. Amazon EC2. Utilizing the ‘Elastic Computing Markup Language

‘ (ECML) and the ‘Elastic Deployment Markup Language‘ (EDML) to have a structured description of cloud environments they want to revolutionize design, deployment, management and especially the automation of cloud computing solutions, including new pricing models and much more.

If one wants to dig into details, navigate to their smoothly designed products page <HERE> and have a look in the Whitepapers to learn something about clouds and their constraints. Or read this Grid Today article <HERE>.

I will watch them closely.

Roland

Ever thought about the relationship of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing? Some say, cloud computing is a evolution of SaaS, which from my perspective is not true. As far as my research goes, both developments aim at the same goal – to make computing services available on-demand:

• No need for hardware and software on premise
• Reduced efforts for administration and governance
• No idle hardware consuming electricity

While Software-as-a-Service

covers the application part, cloud computing is more about the hardware topics covering cpu, storage and network. I see both as the two extremes with several other buzzy things in between like Platform-as-a-Service

, Mash-Ups and Next-Generation-Hosting. The baseline seems to be quite clear and the multitude of offerings is immense. So no one needs to question Gartner top ten predictions for IT organization <LINK> earlier this year. One question from my side is: Isn’t this a little bit too conservative? Is this only true for IT-organizations? Doesn’t other industries have margin pressure as well?

Especially predictions No 4

By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.[...]

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and No 5

By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.[...]

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are really compelling – just image the market size we are talking about….

Just to give you some brainfood: Salesforce meets GoogleApps

Roland

If you read comments on the HP-EDS deal, one can get the impression, that this deal is not only about market-shares, but also to a large extend about HPs future positioning in the IT world and – I hardly dare to say the all new 2008 buzzword of the year – ‘clouds’. Or do you think these commenters are wrong?

HP-EDS: It’s About The Clouds, Baby!

Om Malik of Gigaom.com saying

[...]If you plot the EDS bid against these four recent developments, it is not that difficult to postulate that HP is building its own cloud focused on large global companies.[...]

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Combined HP-EDS can explore missing methodology around how to offload IT to the cloud(s)

ZDNets Dana Gardner saying

[...]HP with EDS has now clearly staked its future on the top prize in IT: next-generation IT operations efficiency, proper outsourcing methods, cloud computing services management, and high-level consulting as the onramp.[...]

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[...]The cost efficiencies, utilization rates, flexibility, marketplace-driven productivity aspects of cloud computing are simply too wonderful to ignore. We simply should not have standalone email servers every 60 square yards inside of companies. It’s foolish.[...]

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The Clouds Part on HP’s Computing Strategy

By Kevin Maney, Portfolio.com saying on wired.com

[...]But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It’s looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing — a.k.a. hardware as a service.[...]

Comment: nice Term ‘Hardware as a service’ or ‘HaaS’. i’ll come back to this later

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HP Acquires EDS: More Cloud Computing Fallout?

Bob Warfield saying on Smoothspan Blog:

[...]Who knows, maybe HP can push this into a higher level strategy to get into the Cloud Computing game on their own. Certainly EDS has been very active in the application outsourcing business, but historically that’s been an ASP’s game and has not been very competitive against true SaaS offerings.[...]

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HP + EDS = Enterprise Clouds?

Michael Bowen saying on Cubegeeks blog

[...]Only large cross functional services organizations teamed up with serious compute clouds and grids can do that. If that’s what HP has in mind with EDS, it’s going to be a brave new world.

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I’m in the first phase of the ‘cloud enthusiasm’, so maybe it’s not a good mood to comment on this. Most of what the commenters said makes sense. But if all this was true, It feels like there is some ‘cloud hysteria’ arising, showing me the importance of cloud computing for the future of IT.

Roland

I’m glad, that I’m not the only one who was getting confused about this ‘game-changing’ topics when reading sentences like

‘IBM today unveiled Blue Cloud, a utility computing initiative designed to help customers run efficient grid-based platforms in enterprise data centers.’

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This is the introductionary phrase of a datacenterknowledge.com article <READIT> from last year about IBMs ‘Blue cloud’ press release. Grid, Utility and Clouds plus datacenters in one sentence is quite a challange today, where new players and commenters are popping every day. In Dells cloud blog, Jimmy Pike tries to give a definition on these three important 2008 buzzwords <READIT>. After first beeing sceptic about the definitions, I partly changed my mind. I’d put more emphasis on “Utility computing” beeing not only an idea, but more kind of marketing buzz. And I wouldn’t call clouds beeing a subset of grids.

So what is the point? How are grids and clouds working together?

Does a cloud have to be a grid

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?

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like John Willis asks <HERE>. The answers is definitely no

.

As far as my research goes at this point, gr

ids

are more focussing on the hardware, the platforms, the interoperatbility between some or many or vaste number of systemes to provide ‘Internet scale’ computing power. The term ‘grid’ is describing more or less an architectural pattern.

Clouds

are more focussing on the delivery of computing services. It’s about APIs, payments and so on. Clouds are can

be based on computing grids, but can also have a different system architecture like seti@HOME (p2p clouds).

IBMs press kit <SEEHERE> for the Blue cloud press release adds some more interesting points about to the discussion

IBM today unveiled plans around cloud computing, a revolutionary approach to computing that will allow corporate data centers to act with the efficiency of the Internet. IBM’s commitment to cloud computing echoes another major commitment to computing the company made in 2000 when it announced its support of Linux.

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So here we learn from IBM: Clouds are about ‘internet’, ‘data centers’ and ‘computing’, which sounds like defining a new computing paradigm:

From Host

over Client Server to Web based and cloud

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I’ll come back to point, I promise.

Roland

Commodity hardware vs. high tech. This is seems to be the baseline. While Google has shown that commodity hardware using the ‘right’ OS and architecture is able to outperform everything else, IBM entered the battlefield about six months ago <ARTICLE_READWRITEWEB>. They even teamed up with google to <PRESSRELEASE_IBM> to provide cloud developement facilities to US universities. But what’s IBMs goal? Just to be on the field? No. IBM has several handicaps compared to Google. They have a long history and many customers putting pressure on them, so It’s not just “here’s our new cloud plattform – just use and pay”. Instead IBM has a long track record in developing and selling hardware from a to z – or was it System i to System z , so they want to take their customer base with them to the new age. While ‘newcomers’ like Google and Amazon attract young companies and early adopters, traditional player like IBM need to take care of corporate customers and the masses. And maybe they are working on preparing the public for several years now with their “On-Demand-Computing” campaign? Who knows?

So probably, there will not be a big war, It’s more like sharing the cake.

Roland