A front row seat for the private cloud evolution: our top content

An interesting way to get a bead on the future is to take a moment to look back at how it evolved. Amidst the flurry of the recent announcement of CA's acquisition deal with Cassatt, I nearly missed an important milestone of my own: the Cassatt Data Center Dialog blog has been going strong for 6 months now.

Now, that probably still makes this blog a neophyte in industry terms, but I figure it's an excuse to look back at what you, the readers, have found interesting over the past half-year.

Obviously, this retrospective comes at a bit of a crossroads for me personally and certainly for Cassatt. Like many who worked at Cassatt, I have been offered a job with CA and will be taking them up on that in mid-July. There's been a bit of commentary on what CA's acquisition of Cassatt assets and employees will mean for CA, what it means for the evolution of public and private cloud computing, and even what lessons other start-ups or entrepreneurs can learn from it all. There will be plenty of time for me to weigh in more specifically on those as time goes on.

In the meantime, however, I'm taking a much-needed 5-week leave of absence and having a bit of a summer vacation with my family in Berlin, Germany. The timing is perfect for a rare, extended break between responsibilities. So I'm taking it.

The circumstances also seem to be good for giving you something to ponder while the blog entries slow down for a bit (sorry, but biergartens are winning out over private clouds...for the moment). Here are the highlights of this blog's past 6 months as I (and our readership stats) see them:

Our Top 10 most popular posts

1. Are internal clouds bogus? This entry is probably the defining post for Cassatt Data Center Dialog. I wrote it on the plane on the way back from a visit with New York and Boston press and analysts. It is a reaction to the skepticism I heard on that trip about the term "internal" or "private" clouds -- a skepticism that is only now beginning to fade. It is also an attempt to emphasize that many folks get wrapped around the axle in talking about specific terminology with customers. It's much smarter just to make sure you discuss something an IT operations person wants to discuss, no matter what your vision is of a next-generation data center infrastructure.

2. When an elephant sits on your blade center Trade show humor is very popular, it seems. Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge picked up my tongue-in-cheek summary of what started out as a very bad day for our demo guy at a Gartner trade show. You know, the kind that begins with the forklift (or something very big) trashing your demo equipment. This one comes complete with photos -- and a happy ending.

3. Sorry, VMware, you don't need virtualization for cloud computing. While the folks at VMworld Europe were talking all about cloud computing, one thing was really bothering me: the underlying assumption that seemed to go unchallenged -- that virtualization was going to take over the data center completely -- and was an interchangeable term cloud computing. This topic is still controversial. This one got some notice from Mike DiPetrillo (of VMware itself).

4. Applying an internal cloud to disaster recovery. Looking for an example of how an internal cloud concept could be applied to a specific, tangible use case? This post used a real-life Cassatt example and was picked up by Dave Rosenberg’s CNET blog "Software, Interrupted."

5. Public/private hybrid cloud computing: sooner or later? Or, what comes next after you figure out that private clouds aren't bogus? This follow-up post chronicles the industry's shift to discussing a dynamic mix of internal/external, public/private clouds. I talk a bit about why I'm skeptical that this will happen in the short term. Long term? Different story. (And a story that's still being written.) I did an even more recent "where are we now on this debate?" update here.

6. Gartner's Tom Bittman says the future looks a lot like a private cloud – This post started out to be simply a report of Gartner analyst Tom Bittman's keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Vegas last December. However, the content ended up being one of the defining bits of industry commentary on where things are headed in the future, in my opinion (and, according to the stats, is still of great interest to readers many months later). His opinion is right there in the title. Can't say I disagree. Tom's blog is a good one to check out, too.

7. Nicholas Carr: IT and the economy are cloudy, but the Big Switch is on - My visit to the IDC Directions conference in March in San Jose produced this post about Nick Carr's presentation. It also was the first conference in which I was attending, blogging, and Tweeting. Not sure how I survived, but readers were interested in what he had to say. And though I saw counterarguments in the blogosphere from folks like Gordon Haff, Nick's message obviously resonates. (Though, I agree with recent tweets that it wouldn't hurt if the cloud computing folks stopped quoting him for a while.) Also, Data Center Dialog has run several interviews with individuals we thought IT ops folks would find useful: Al Gillen of IDC, Derrick Harris (now doing bigger, better things at GigaOM), Mark Thiele of VMware, and John Humphreys of Citrix. My biggest disappointment on the Nick Carr post was that I wasn't able add him to this list with a one-on-one interview. Yet.

8.-10. The Craig Vosburg "technical details" posts. The final 3 entries in our Top 10 weren't written by me, but were written by co-contributor Craig Vosburg, who was Cassatt's chief engineer before moving over to CA earlier this month. His post on Is your organization ready for an internal cloud? became the basis for a webinar we ran on that topic with Steve Oberlin. More details here. His post was a no-holds-barred look at what IT and their business partners need to be ready to swallow if they're going to try to pursue a private cloud initiative. The goal was to help you in IT operations to know what you're in for. Craig also wrote up Business agility: Using internal cloud computing to create a computer animation render farm in less than a day, which chronicled his use of the Cassatt product to create an animation render farm from spare capacity in our own IT machines. Don't try that without permission, mind you.
Rounding out our list was Craig's first post, Cloud computing: It's all about the '-ilities.' He uses that entry to define what he sees as required for internal cloud computing. It's an important list of things that seemed pretty basic to us, but also really struck a chord.

Who said cloud computing can't be fun?

I've tried to mix in a bit of levity along the way, even if it helps to be a bit of a geek to enjoy it. My favorite post? Hands down, my recent Star Trek post was the most fun to write. Though the one about our squished trade show blade center was pretty amusing both as something to live through and to write about.

Some words of gratitude

Thanks to bloggers and Cassatt alumni James Urquhart and Ken Oestreich for inspiring me to actually get started on this blog in the first place. Christofer Hoff (a newly minted Cisco employee!), Chuck Hollis of EMC, and Lori MacVittie of F5 via blogs and Twitter have been unknowing influences on what gets posted here, so they all certainly warrant a big, unsolicited thank-you mention.

What’s next for Cassatt? For me? For this blog?

Well, the Cassatt question has been answered, at least. Stay connected with CA for more on that. As for me, in the short term you can follow me and my tech-related thoughts from the other side of The Pond as @jayfry3 on Twitter.

When I get back to the States in mid-July, you should expect this blog to kick back into high gear. Until then, someone save my seat for this cloud computing show. I'm expecting the flurry of activity to continue, and I'm not one to let a little vacation time get in the way.

Cassatt cloud innovation added to CA muscle

For those who have been watching and wondering what's next for Cassatt, the wait is over. CA announced today that they are the new home for much of what Cassatt has to offer: technology assets, patents, and a very significant chunk of the employees.

After the dire situation that Quentin Hardy wrote about in Forbes back in April, this is certainly a win for Cassatt and those with vested interest in seeing its ideas -- often described as both innovative and too far ahead of the market for its own good -- find a backer.

Here are a couple relevant excerpts from the CA-Cassatt press release:

CA Acquires Cassatt Data Center Automation Innovation and Expertise:
Acquisition Enables Dramatic Expansion of CA’s Automation and Cloud Capabilities

ISLANDIA, N.Y. and SAN JOSE, CA, June 2, 2009 -- CA, Inc. (NASDAQ:CA) today announced the acquisition of certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt Corporation, a provider of innovative cloud computing software that makes data centers more efficient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Some comments from Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of the Products and Technology Group at CA:

"This acquisition strengthens CA's ability to deliver on the promise of Lean IT for our customers. With the addition of Cassatt's engineering team and advanced data center automation assets, CA will accelerate its development of software that helps customers make more intelligent, business policy-based decisions. We are ensuring that CA will continue to be at the forefront of managing our customers’ evolving IT environments."

And some comments from Cassatt's chairman and CEO, Bill Coleman:

"Cassatt has long been a champion for using a cloud-style architecture to manage data centers like a 'compute utility.' This is a great move for both organizations because of the vision we share -- delivering a new, dramatically more efficient way to run data centers. The acquisition of Cassatt's data center automation technology and expertise by CA, one of the world's largest and most successful software companies and an innovator in business-driven automation, will help make this vision into a reality for customers."

And, finally, from Donald Ferguson, CA's Chief Architect:

"Cassatt invented an elegant and innovative architecture and algorithms for data center performance optimization. Incorporating Cassatt's analysis and optimization capabilities into CA's world-class business-driven automation solution will enable cloud-style computing to reliably drive efficiencies in both on-premises, private data centers and off-premises, utility data centers. We believe the result will be a uniquely comprehensive infrastructure management approach, spanning monitoring, analysis, planning, optimization and execution."

As I look at CA's infrastructure management portfolio as a (now former) outsider, I see a lot of product breadth in something near and dear to the hearts of those of us from Cassatt: data center efficiency. This deal combines CA's already broad product set and its formidable execution capabilities with some new data center optimization, cloud computing, and automation expertise from Cassatt. That seems like good news to me, especially since one of the dings against Cassatt has always been that infrastructure management is pretty difficult to entrust to a small vendor.

Neither Cassatt nor CA are going to have much more comment on today's announcement beyond the official press release. Don't take that as negative. We're spending our time and effort (starting today) to bring it all together in a way that will make sense for everyone involved. We'll share those details when we have them.

One piece of bittersweet news is that while Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman has been the face and personality behind Cassatt since its beginnings in 2003 (including a starring role as a Forbes cover boy in September 2006), he won't be coming with us to CA. I'd like to personally thank Bill for his vision and passion, and for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the story at Cassatt. I like to think that even though we didn't achieve the massive customer adoption we were hoping for, we did have a significant impact on the industry discussions about how to run and manage a data center, about utility computing, and about what has come to be known as cloud computing.

Along the way, we at Cassatt have all tried hard to make sure we're part of a real, on-going conversation with the industry and with end users. The name of this blog is just one reflection of that. Many things will likely change for us Cassatt folks as a result of the CA deal, but I for one am confident that we'll keep the dialog going. Stay tuned.

You can continue to follow Jay Fry on Twitter as @jayfry3.

Interview with IDC's Al Gillen: in 2009, virtualization will help bridge to the cloud

When I first started this blog a few months back, I told you we'd do our best to bring you a cogent collection of useful ideas, opinions, and other relevant tidbits from those steeped in the world of running data centers. So far, that's generally taken the form of blogging from industry events (like my posts from the Gartner Data Center Conference in Vegas in early December) or commentary on IT ops topics sparked by an article or event. Our chief engineer, Craig Vosburgh, even got in on the act last month, launching the first in a series of posts scrutinizing the necessary components of cloud computing, relying on his experience in this space (and his highly tuned B.S. detector, I might add) to help cut through the hype.

And now for something completely different.

In that first blog post, I promised we'd feature give-and-take interviews with people you should know, in and around the world of IT. We're starting the new year off with a bang, in fact: today's post is the first of these interviews -- an interview with Al Gillen, program vice president of system software at IDC. When we talked to Al about Cassatt's "internal cloud" capabilities announcement in November, he had some interesting observations about virtualization, cloud computing, and where the industry is headed.

I recently had a chance to ask him about some of these comments in a little more detail, and I'm posting his responses today and tomorrow. By the way, Al was just recently promoted to run the Enterprise Virtualization Software research team at IDC following the departure of John Humphreys to Citrix. Nicely done, Al.

In today's excerpt, Al notes some shifts in the reasons people are virtualizing servers. In 2009, he says, it won't all be about consolidation. But, as the shift toward virtualization continues, the need for a way to manage virtual systems (in parallel with physical servers, I might add) becomes much more urgent. He believes this move toward virtualization is actually a bridge to cloud computing.

Here’s an excerpt of that interview:

Jay Fry, Cassatt Data Center Dialog: Congrats on the expanded role at IDC, Al. When we talked last you mentioned the industry was starting to see the "secondary impact of virtualization" -- one of which being a necessary intersection between systems management and virtualization. Can you explain a little about what you are seeing out there?

Al Gillen, IDC: The first wave of virtualization adoption was heavily weighted to consolidation and server footprint reduction. Those use cases were a natural fit for virtualization, and to be honest, there is still lots of consolidation to take place in the industry. But users find out very quickly that server consolidation does nothing to simplify the management of the operating systems and layered software, and in some cases, can make it more complex, especially if there is any balancing going on aboard the virtualized servers. Therefore, organizations that did not have a strong management solution in place before beginning to adopt virtualization will be finding that is their next most important acquisition.

DCD: How do you see the virtualization market changing in 2009?

Al Gillen: Our survey data is finding that consolidation is no longer the stand-out favorite use case for virtualization. To be sure, consolidation is not going away, but other use cases are growing in popularity as a primary objective for deploying a virtualized solution. Use cases such as high availability and disaster recovery are emerging as strong use cases today. The other factor in play here is that a lot of the largest consolidation opportunities -- not all of them, but many of them -- already have either been consolidated or are committed to a consolidation strategy and to a given vendor. As a result, the "green field" for large scale consolidations is becoming less green and less big. However, the opportunity for larger numbers of smaller scale consolidations is still enormous.

DCD: How will the economy affect how organizations are adopting virtualization?

Al Gillen: The economic conditions are likely to drive customers more quickly toward virtualization simply because the IT departments, which often are seen by management as a cost center, will be charged with reducing expenses, while still delivering the services the business needs to be successful. Being charged with "doing more with less" has been the mandate that has helped many of the transitional technologies that we now consider mainstream to get a first foothold. Can you say Linux? x86? Or Windows?

DCD: You probably guessed I was going to ask a cloud computing question. How do you think what's going on with virtualization intersects with or is different from cloud computing?

Al Gillen: There is no question that virtualization will serve as the bridge to bring customers from today's physical data center to the compute resource that will serve as tomorrow's data center. Virtualization serves several roles in this transition, including a "proof of concept" that you really can pool multiple smaller machines into a larger resource and begin to allocate and consume the resulting superset of resources in an intelligent, scalable, and reliable manner. But virtualization also will be the lubricant that makes it possible to slide software stacks off the hardware foundations to which the software used to be permanently attached. That said, cloud will be adopted very much on a transitional basis, and will penetrate different verticals and different platforms at different rates. I believe we will be talking about the transition to cloud computing for the next 15 years.

Next time: more from Al on cloud computing and the impact of the economic meltdown.

Cloud Computing, it's all about the "ilities"

Hi, Craig Vosburgh here. Starting today, I'll be one of the authors contributing to the Cassatt Data Center Dialog blog. Given my role here at Cassatt as Chief Engineer, my posts will be on the technical side of things, with an emphasis on real-world implications, with the occasional peek into how we do what we do. Well with the intro out of the way, on to today's posting...

In my 20+ years of being in the tech sector I haven't seen any other emerging technology with as many buzz words as what is now being termed "Cloud Computing." Normally, I'd want to stay away from using the term du jour, as the past few years have shown that if you wait just a few days someone will likely create a new name to further muddy the waters. However, in this case, I think the industry may finally have found the one that'll stick for the transformations underway at companies around the globe as they re-invent their computing infrastructures and IT processes to better serve their needs.

Let's start by grounding ourselves on some of the terms being used and get us on the same page before we begin this discussion (or at least closer to the same page). If you've been around the space for any time you've likely heard people throw around terms like Autonomic Computing, Adaptive Computing, On Demand Computing, Virtualization, Utility Computing and the new comers to the stage Cloud Computing and Internal or Private Clouds. All of these terms are in one way or another trying to describe a transformation of a company's IT infrastructure from today's rigid stovepipes to one that efficiently and dynamically addresses the company's evolving IT needs.

Over the past few years, many people have begun to recognize that they can't continue to manage their IT infrastructure with 10- to 20-year-old practices as those practices have resulted in too much sprawl, too much complexity, too much management cost, too much power usage and too little utilization.

As we move forward, we have to figure out how to unlock the available IT capacity (most companies believe they are running 10-20% utilized on their existing infrastructure) and leverage that excess capacity to increase the company's agility in reacting to the ever-changing business climate. As one of my co-workers, Steve Oberlin, points out, there is only so much you can save by optimizing efficiency within IT as it is usually a fixed percentage of a company's overall budget. To the extent companies look only to increase IT efficiency, they limit their savings to only their bottom line.

If, instead, companies focus not only on increasing efficiency but also on increasing their internal IT's ability to respond to new company products with their existing IT investment, they will allow for growth of the top line at a much faster pace. I believe that over the next three to five years Internal Cloud Computing (or Private Clouds as Gartner refers to them) will be the vehicle to allow companies to unlock their IT infrastructure to enable (rather than hinder) their new business ventures.

Now, before we jump into just the efficiency/agility topic (more on that in an upcoming post), let's broaden the discussion a bit to include all of the other "-ilities" we need to consider as a part of a Cloud Computing solution. Off the top of my head some of the big ones that come to mind are: Scalability, Availability, Recoverability, Usability, Interoperability, Extensibility, Swizzleability (more on what I mean by that later), Affordability (as in minimizing the huge amount of money spent to purchase, maintain and power all of this IT infrastructure) and the already discussed Agility.

Over the next few months I'm going to spend time talking about each one of these "-ilities" and how Cloud Computing can help address problems in each specific area. In addition, I'm going to talk about some real-world problems and how they have been solved today by our currently available Cassatt Active Response product line (turns out that here at Cassatt we've been thinking about and working on this transformation for five years now and we have some pretty cool stuff to show for it. I think it's time to show it off).

I hope you'll come back and check in on me and my musings over the next few months as I explore this thing called Cloud Computing.

Want the best ideas for running a data center? Have a dialog.

For the people running data centers these days, there are plenty of things that can keep them up at night. In fact, that's the easy part. Many of the problems, or "opportunities," or whatever euphemism you want to use, have been around for years (like, say, having servers that sit idle for 99% of their existence). Some are new (like managing virtualization - from multiple vendors). And some are the clash between the way things have always been done and the new, "better way" (like what happens when you actually try to start sharing IT resources).

Luckily, there is no shortage of ideas, concepts, architectures, and plain old things-to-think-about to solve these problems. The main issues we're seeing people struggle with, though, are these:
* How do I get from where I am now to where I want to be?
* What advice (expert and otherwise) is out there?
* What have others done?
* Who has some insight that helps me look at my problems and potential solutions in a new, more useful way?

Well, that's what Cassatt's Data Center Dialog blog is all about.

Sure, there's the "Cassatt" angle: as a software company actively engaged in helping some of the largest companies in North America improve their data center efficiency in a lot of ways, Cassatt has some useful tidbits to contribute to the data center conversation.

But, there's also the "Dialog" part: we run into a lot of interesting folks out there with the smarts, experience, and war wounds from being in and around data center operations. Through this blog, we'll do our best to bring you a collection of their ideas, thoughts, advice, and opinions (and how to get access to more).

First, we'll be doing an on-going set of give-and-take interviews with people steeped in both the problems and actual solutions in IT operations. They will be the people that you really should be talking to formally or informally. Some you'll know and recognize; some you won't. They're the folks who are in the data center or are intimately involved with it who have a lot of useful info we can all tap into, if we just ask the right questions. That last thing will be the tricky part, and we'll do our best.

Then, in addition to interviews, several of us here at Cassatt will be contributing to Data Center Dialog, providing our own opinions and commentary - plus ideas we're hearing from others and at industry events about the topics shaping what's being discussed today (oh, say, like cloud computing?).

Finally, the other part of this dialog comes from the readers. But, this being a blog, and you being readers, you all know how that works already. We're hoping to make the discussions here as lively, interesting, and useful as the other pieces of this blog. We'll do our part by posting things we think will spur discussion. The next step will be up to you.

Oh, and one last note: we'll certainly talk about Cassatt-related things now and again, but we will work hard to make this blog much bigger than that. If we can help you find a perspective or idea that you hadn't thought of before that helps you in your day-to-day job, that's a good thing. And if you see something that we should do differently, tell us.

This is, after all, a dialog.