cloud
There are 49 entries for the tag cloud
Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think...
Developers are a great lot of folks, people who spend their day trying to do the impossible with bits for a customer base that is, by and large, impossible to satisfy. When the bits all line up correctly, the last line of code has been checked in, and the nightly compile accepted for deployment, then they get to sit back, relax for five minutes, and start over again. If this makes you think it’s not a great life, then you should live it. Developing gives instant feedback. No matter how unhappy users can be, fixing that nagging bug you’ve...
When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few...
We spend an obsessive amount of time looking at the market and trying to lean toward accepted technologies. Seriously, when I was in IT management, there were an inordinate number of discussions about the state of market X or Y. While these conversations almost always revolved around what we were doing, and thus were put into context, sometimes an enterprise sits around waiting for everyone else to jump on board before joining in the flood. While sometimes this is commendable behavior, it is just as often self-defeating. If you have a project that could use technology X, then find...
Farm tractors and military tanks share an intertwined history that started when some smart person proposed the tracks on some farming equipment as the cross-country tool that tanks needed to get across a rubble and shell-hole strewn World War One battlefield. For the ensuing sixty years, improvements in one set of tracks spurred improvements in the other. Early on it was the farm vehicles developing improvements, but through World War Two and even some today, tanks did most of the developing. That is simply a case of experience. Farmers and farm tractor manufacturers had more experience when...
Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....
Think about this for just a moment. When the automobile was invented, the idea was known. The idea was to free horses from transport duty, have less… Mess in the streets that horses generate, and move stuff. Over time, “stuff” became differentiated into “people”, “goods”, and “major shipping”. Though the transportation industry eventually spawned off many other industries such as farm equipment and military vehicles, it stayed relatively true to its purpose and true innovations in automotive transportation became fewer and fewer. There has not been a geologic shift in automotive technology in my lifetime, and only undependable oil...
This is the second part of this series talking about things you need to consider, and where cloud usage makes sense given the current state of cloud evolution. The first one, Cloud Storage, can be found here. The point of the series is to help you figure out what you can do now, and what you have to consider when moving to the cloud. This will hopefully help you to consider your options when pressure from the business or management to “do something” mounts. Once again, our definition of cloud is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - “VM containers”, not...
There’s a whole lot of talk about cloud revolutionizing IT, and a whole lot of argument about public versus private cloud, even a considerable amount of talk about what belongs in the cloud. But not much talk about helping you determine what applications and storage are a good candidate to move there – considering all of the angles that matter to IT. This blog will focus on storage, the next one on applications, because I don’t want to bury you in a blog as long as a feature length article. It amazes me when I see comments like “no...
Information Technology – geeks like you and I – have been responsible for an amazing transformation of business over the last thirty or forty years. The systems that have been put into place since computers became standard fare for businesses have allowed the business to scale out in almost every direction. Greater production, more customers, better marketing and sales follow-through, even insanely targeted marketing for those of you selling to consumers. There is not a piece of the business that would be better off without us. With that change came great responsibility though. Inability to access systems and/or data...
I recently read a piece in Network Computing Magazine that was pretty disparaging of NAS devices, and with a hand-wave the author pronounced NAS dead, long live cloud storage. Until now, storage has been pretty much immune to the type of hype that “The Cloud” gets. Sure, there have been some saying that we should use the cloud for primary storage, and others predicting that it will kill this or that technology, but the outrageous and intangible claims that accompany placing your applications in the cloud. My favorite, repeated even by a lot of people I respect, is...
Lori and I’s youngest daughter graduated from High School this year, and her class chose one of the many good Vince Lombardi quotes for the theme of their graduation – “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” Those who know me well know that I’m not a huge football fan (don’t tell my friends here in Green Bay that… The stadium can hold roughly half the city’s population, and they aren’t real friendly to those who don’t join in the frenzy), but Vince Lombardi certainly had a lot of great quotes over...
A few of us were talking on Facebook about high speed rail (HSR) and where/when it makes sense the other day, and I finally said that it almost never does. Trains lost out to automobiles precisely because they are rigid and inflexible, while population densities and travel requirements are highly flexible. That hasn’t changed since the early 1900s, and isn’t likely to in the future, so we should be looking at different technologies to answer the problems that HSR tries to address. And since everything in my universe is inspiration for either blogging or gaming, this lead me to...
A few years ago, a gentleman created a video showing how quickly an unpatched, unprotected Windows XP machine was infected once connected to the public Internet (the linked video is worth a watch, and is short). That video took the business community pretty much by storm, but was old news to security administrators and most systems administrators. Things have improved on the operating systems side of the house, but so have the systems, attackers, and environment for hackers, meaning things aren’t much better today. In the confines of your enterprise, that’s all cool. Whether you are deploying a...
After a short break to get some major dental rework done, I return to you with my new, sore mouth for a round of “Maybe we should have…” discussions. In the nineties and early 21st century, positions were created in may organizations with titles like “chief architect” and often there was a group whose title were something like “IT Architect”. These people made decisions that impacted one or all subsidiaries of an organization, trying to bring standardization to systems that had grown organically and were terribly complex. They ushered in standards, shared code between disparate groups, made sure that...
On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...
Since I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I thought I’d offer you all a link to my article in Computer Technology Review about The Cloud Tier. The point was to delve into how/when/where/why of cloud storage usage. While there is a lot to say on that topic and the article was of limited word count, I think the idea that it can fit into your existing architecture with minimal changes and then be utilized to service the needs of the business in a better/faster/more agile manner is the key point. Normally I keep my blogs relatively vendor-independent....
Mike Fratto over at Network Computinghas a blog that declares the need for standards in Cloud Management APIs is non-existent or at least premature. Now Mike is a smart guy and has enough experience to have a clue what he’s writing about, unlike many cloud pundits out there, but like all smart people I like to read information from, I reserve the right to completely disagree. And in this case I am going to have to. He’s right that Cloud Management is immature, and he’s right that it is not a simple topic. Neither was the conquering of...
I was on the road last week, doing my bit for a roadshow with VMWare and NetApp sponsored by CDW. My team has spread these trips out amongst us, and I drew Nashville as my city to visit. I’ve been through and around Nashville, but never stayed there. This trip was no exception to that rule, I saw the airport, the hotel, and the venue where the event was held. But that’s okay, I was there to do business, not sight-see, so I was in one morning and out the next. The attendance was okay, and the attendees were as...
Every spring I get excited. I live in Wisconsin, which my travels have shown me you may not understand. I have actually been told “that is not your house, there is snow on the ground. All of America is sun and beaches”. Well, in Wisconsin, it gets cold. Moscow style cold. There are a couple of weeks each winter where going out is something you do only after bundling up like a toddler… Mittens, hats, coat, another coat, boots… But then spring comes, and once the temperature gets to the point where the snow starts to melt, the sun...
Our basement, like most geek basements, has a pretty good collection of outdated computer gear. Some of it is running on the network, some of it is sitting there waiting for the end times. Or for a crook to break in and steal it so we don’t have to dispose of it. I’ve posted this picture before, but here is “the cable box” before the last time I went through and cleaned it up. Or at least a close-up of one part of it, it is a pretty large box. One of the things that we have been...
Lately there has been a whole lot of breast-beating and article writing attributing this trend to that vendor and this other trend to this other vendor. You may have noticed that we at F5 benefit from some of this noise. It is pretty well accepted that we are the ADC leader and most pundits include us as one of the few “cloud enabling” vendors. But all of this misses the point. The point is that you, and your contemporaries around the world decide what The Next Big Thing will be, not some marketing person writing a campaign plan. The...
While helping Lori with her fishtank avocation, I have learned a lot of incidental information, like the fact that there are essentially three types of tank – reef, fish, and mixed. Reef tanks hold corals, anemones, etc, while fish tanks hold fish, with a minimum of incidental coral or coralline structure. Mixed tanks have fish who are carefully selected specifically not to eat the pretty corals, soft corals, anemones, and other tasty tidbits growing on the rocks. This is somewhat amazing to me, because in a sense, I share the Toddler’s view of fishtanks. He points and says “That’s...
It is an interesting twist in the IT world that with the increased usage of purchased packages and the growth of on-demand IT, we increasingly find ourselves talking about “Applications”. This is a good reference point, it addresses all of the things running on our servers with one fell swoop, but much like when you talk about “vehicles”, the phrase has little meaning beyond discussing similarities. In the IT sense of the word, Application can be defined as a program running on hardware. In the datacenter sense of the word, it can be a program running on one of our...
The hype around cloud shows every indication of settling down, which, if you go with the Gartner Hype Cycle model means that the trough of disillusionment is yawning before you. But you don’t have to dip into the trough, if you didn’t ride up the hype hill. The thing is, that with this particular hype cycle, IT was the brakes on the hype cycle, wanting to quickly identify what Cloud could and could not do for your organization, while the business was riding the hype up. That’s good, it will serve to smooth out the trough. If you’re...
I had a blog partially written for today when @GeorgeVHulme tweeted this: "WAHOO! Minnesota goes Private Cloud! “. And that changed my thoughts and direction completely. Here’s the article George linked to State of Minnesota Signs Historic Cloud Computing Agreement With Microsoft. The fact that it was private cloud and with Microsoft got me to read the article. And it’s actually a pretty impressive story for both the state and for Microsoft. In essence, this takes “private cloud” to a different place than I would have envisioned. They’re outsourcing. Yes, there’s a line in the sand, beyond which...
I’ve been talking about Cloud Storage Gateways off and on, and F5 doesn’t have any reason to care one way or the other which Cloud Storage Gateways win the race, so even though I always strive to keep my blogs only biased based on merit, this one should scream at you that it is unbiased. I’m not bucking for a new job (F5 really does rock as an employer overall), we’re not in the space, but we do care about the space because our ARX box can take a Cloud Storage Gateway and treat it like a NAS… Presuming it’s...
Someone said something interesting to me the other day, and they’re right “at 10 Gig WAN connections with compression turned on, you’re not likely to fill the pipe, the key is to make certain you’re not the bottleneck.” (the other day is relative – I’ve been sitting on this post for a while) I saw this happen when 1 Gig LANs came about, applications at the time were hard pressed to actually use up a Gigabit of bandwidth, so the focus became how slow the server and application were, if the backplane on the switch was big enough to...
We developers used to be obsessed with optimizations. Like a child with an Erector Set and a whole lot of spare parts, we always wanted to “make it better”. In our case, better was faster and using less memory/CPU resources. Where development came from – a few Kilobytes of memory, a much slower CPU, and non-optimizing compilers, this all made sense. But the rest of IT, and indeed, the business, didn’t want to see us build our Erector set higher, or make our code more complex buy more efficient, machines were speeding up at a relatively constant rate and the...
There is an interesting bit in high-tech that isn’t much mentioned but happens pretty regularly – when a good idea is adapted and moved to new uses, raising it a bit in the stack or revising it to keep up with the times. The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the progression from “subroutines” to “libraries” to “frameworks” to “APIs” to “Web Services”. The progression is logical and useful, but those assembler and C programmers that were first stuffing things into reusable subroutines could not have foreseen the entire spectrum of what their “useful” idea was going to become over...
I was pondering the weather in Northeast Wisconsin this morning, it’s gloomy and oppressively hot. Between heat and humidity, I’d say it felt more like the US’s Pacific Northwest than the Midwest. And it’s been that way all summer. We’ve been plowed under with 80+ percent humidity for months, and every once in a while the temperature dips to remind us that we’re in Wisconsin. It is the last day of August, tomorrow is September, when cool and wet is supposed to start converging upon us. It will be a relief after months of hot and humid....
My father was an antique dealer that specialized in furniture refinishing. All of us children spent some amount of time down at the shop getting instruction in how to handle antiques from dishes to weapons to furniture. But each of us got special instruction in how to treat a piece of furniture. The man looked at a piece of broken down furniture with a critical eye, and then caressed it like it was special, he could recover some of the most horrifically damaged furniture with nothing but experience and trial-and-error. The one lesson all of us received over and...
As I write this, Lori and The Toddler are on their way to the store, his first trip out of the house without a diaper (nappy for our UK friends), she bravely told him that they would go get some robots as reward for being a big boy. I told her that it was brave – possibly brazen – to take him out straight away, to which she replied “I’m putting clothes in the diaper bag and taking it along just in case”. I’m sure all will be well, he has inherited his mother’s stubbornness, and is pretty focused on...
Jessica Scarpoti over at Tech Target has an article discussing the state of CDN and application delivery. While I had not put a ton of thought into this particular market – CDNs grew into some pretty special-use, high-end items because of their pricing models over a decade ago – it does bear some obvious similarities to cloud, so this is a pretty well thought-out article. The question that springs to mind for me is “will CDNs remain CDNs?” in the rush to cloud services, CDN providers are a large portion of the way there already, having to have massive...
This week has been a banner week in the world of Cloud computing. The experts have been out there saving us from ourselves in droves. Good to know that there is no shortage of people who either don’t get what cloud is and think they do, or don’t get what cloud isn’t and think they do. Meanwhile, they will offer us a bit of entertainment. The second more than the first, admittedly, but both are amusing. I CAN HAS FUD? First for your studied consideration is Phil Wainright, writing over on Ziff-Davis’ website....
I read an interesting blog the other day that is pretty spot-on about IT, customers, and what we’ve spent the last 30 years doing. We’re in a field whose purpose is to increase the capability of the enterprise while simultaneously making it easier to do whatever the organization in general and IT specifically does. IT’S WHAT WE DO It is a pretty rare enterprise that can do without IT these days, for systems are what the military refers to as “force multipliers” – they make the people available more effective. We blame a...
At the end of the odd but intriguing movie Existenz, one of the primary characters looks at the other after killing a bunch of people and says “We’re still in the game, right?” With the implication that you the viewer really don’t know if they’re still in the Virtual Reality game they were playing. Sometimes, Cloud feels like that. I can just go “We’re still in the cloud, right?” Here we are, it is 2010, the pundits have been hailing cloud for years, and yet there is still a vast gulf of understanding of what is the cloud, exactly...
A couple of articles that have come out in the last week or so got me to pondering the current state of IT Management mentality, and it is somewhat amusing, if you think it through. We’re risk-averse where all evidence indicates we don’t need to be, and we’re cutting edge, risk aware but not averse, where all evidence says we should be treading with caution. The curious thing to me is that all of this is happening at once, and we’re okay with it. The first article that brought this to my attention was published on The Register about...
One thing that some companies seem to have grabbed onto and run with while others don’t seem to have made the correct connections to fully utilize is testing in a highly virtualized or cloud environment. Of all the things these environments can do well, testing is one of the best possible use cases to deploy them. For some of you, this isn’t news. I know some testing people who have this down to a science, and no doubt their wisdom is palely reflected in this post. VIRTUAL OR CLOUD? In this case, cloud...
Those who love to hear themselves talk about the growth of cloud computing just seem to keep barraging us with numbers, and it is time that those of us with a desire to understand what is really going on demand some clarity into those numbers, because many are obviously questionable, some are even obviously bunk spewn by those who want you to believe everyone else is rushing to the cloud and you must too. First of the issues is defining what is “enterprise computing”. It amazes me to see some of the numbers thrown about for how much enterprise...
In the rush to cloud, there are many tools and technologies out there that are brand new. I’ve covered a few, but that’s nowhere near a complete list, but it’s interesting to see what is going on out there from a broad-spectrum view. I have talked a bit about Cloud Storage Gateways here. And I’m slowly becoming a fan of this technology for those who are considering storing in the cloud tier. There are a couple of good reasons to consider these products, and I was thinking about the reasons and their standing validity. Thought I’d share with...
I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now. By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta...
THE (STORAGE) WORLD IS A-CHANGING Innovation in the storage space seems to be at an all time high, and that means you have a lot more choices in what to do for storage tiering. Maybe too many choices if you are considering everything you possibly can. Seriously. Tons of moving parts underneath you at different layers of the stack. It’s pretty out there. Or pretty ugly, depends upon your view. A NEW KIND OF HYBRID The new hybrid disk being offered by Seagate, well evaluated in Storage...
THERE WAS A DAY… In the heady days of the networked IT explosion, it was a green field. We had very little data stored anywhere, everything was reasonably new, and whatever we thought might help the organization we were able to just go do, assuming the organization had the money to do it. Systems started to make everyone’s life easier, not just the few who benefitted from mainframes, we were helping the organization be more efficient and more adaptable. For the enterprise, those days are gone. Now we are a key part...
LOVE AND… NOT LOVE There are two interesting and complimentary rules in IT When a technology takes off, vendors will keep trying to find “the next big thing” to earn more of your business. Until something takes off, most IT staff doesn’t have time to worry about it. Virtualization is one of those things that has kept IT shops humming over the last few… several… Many years. When it first came out I was in an R&D group at a mid-sized company, and from that...
We take tables for granted. Really take them for granted. We cover them with our stuff, we sit down to eat on them, we put them in front of the TV to hold our computers, we put them pretty much everywhere, and we use them for everything from holding collections of important papers we will eventually get around to sorting to using them as workbenches to hold stuff down while we saw. In Lori and my house alone I could fill a blog with the things we use tables for. And yet we never see them when we’re...
TO OUTSOURCE OR NOT TO OUTSOURCE? There is a published debate on NetworkWorld’s website that discusses if and how much IT to outsource in light of the current state of the economy and technology. These debates have intrigued me for years, and for those who don’t know, I wrote an award-winning article for Network Computing on offshore development. I’ve worked in IT, managed IT, and watched outsourcing projects come and go, so I do feel that my opinion has weight. F5 has no horse in this race – someone will own the infrastructure...
The scene - Five years in the future, a boardroom of a mid-sized company with a large web presence. The VPs are assembled to hear the CIO report on the progress of the cloud computing initiative. * Jeff Digglesby, CIO of NeverSold, strode into the boardroom with the gathered VPs and C-Level executives, oozing confidence. He skipped the small talk and went straight to the business at hand. Probably because the business at hand was good news. He clicked to the first "meat" slide of his presentation. "As you all know, after years of...
The ongoing saga of everything cloud is entertaining, if nothing else. I have a couple of areas of interest that aren’t really burning up the electrons, one of them is cloud databases. Let’s face it, while “the cloud” is interesting in an application sense, for IT it is relatively useless without the ability to access databases. Normally databases housed in your internal IT department. Of course internal “private” clouds will address much of this issue, until they are readily available, we are faced with the reality that we have to find a solution we can trust to house data that...
