Back to school -- for the cloud? Try not to forget the multiple paths for virtualization & cloud

Summer vacation is really a bad idea.

At least, that’s what TIME Magazine reported a few weeks back. Despite our glorified, nostalgic memories of endless hours on the tire swing above the old water hole (or, more likely, trying to find towel space on a lounge chair by the gym’s overcrowded pool), apparently kids forget stuff when they aren’t in school.

So, now that everyone’s headed back to the classroom and hitting the books again, they’ve got to jog their memories on how this learning stuff worked.

Luckily, as working adults who think about esoteric IT topics like virtualizing servers and actually planning cloud computing roll-outs, we can say this is never an issue. Right? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

However, with VMworld imminent and people returning from vacations, it’s a good time to reiterate what I’ve been hearing from customers and others in the industry about how this journey around virtualization and cloud computing goes.

Some highlights (take notes if you’d like; there might be a short quiz next period):

Rely on the scientific method. You’re going to hear lots of announcements at VMworld next week. (In fact, many folks jumped the gun and lobbed their news into the market this week.) In any case, be a good student and diligently take notes. But then you should probably rely a bit on the scientific method. And question authority. Know what you need or at least what you think you need to accomplish your business goal. Look at any/all of our vendor announcements through that lens. You’ll probably be able to eliminate about two-thirds of what you hear next week from VMware and all its partners (and, of course, I realize that probably includes us at CA Technologies, too). But that last third is worth a closer look. And some serious questions and investigation.

The answers aren’t simply listed in the back of your textbook. Meaning what? Well, here's one thing for starters: just because you’re knee-deep in virtualization doesn’t mean you’re automagically perfectly set up for cloud computing. Virtualization is certainly a key technology that can be really useful in cloud deployments, but as I've noted here before, it’s not sufficient all by itself. The NIST definition of cloud computing (and the one I use, frankly), doesn’t explicitly mention virtualization. Of course, you do need some smart way to pool your computing resources, and 15,000 VMworld attendees can’t be wrong…right? (Go here for my write-up on last year’s VMworld event.) But, just keep that in mind. There’s more to the story.

In fact, there may be more than one right answer. There isn’t one and only one path to cloud computing. My old BEA cohort Vittorio Viarengo had a piece in Forbes this week talking about virtualization as the pragmatic path to cloud. It can be. I guess it all depends what that path is and where it goes. It just may not be ideally suited for your situation.

On the “path to cloud computing,” to borrow Vittorio’s term, there are two approaches we’ve heard from folks:

Evolution: No, Charles Darwin isn’t really a big cloud computing guru (despite the beard). But many companies are working through a step-by-step evolution to a more dynamic data center infrastructure. They work through consolidation & standardization using virtualization. They then build upon those efforts to optimize compute resources. As they progress, they automate more, and begin to rely on orchestration capabilities. The goal: a cloud-style environment inside their data center, or even one that is a hybrid of public and private. It’s a methodical evolution. This method maps to infrastructure maturity models that folks like Gartner talk about quite a bit.

Revolution: This is not something you studied in history class involving midnight rides and red coats. If organizations have the freedom (or, more likely, the pressure to deliver), they can look at a more holistic cloud platform approach that is more turn-key. It’s faster, and skips or obviates a lot of the steps mentioned in the other approach by addressing the issues in completely different ways. The benefit? You (a service provider or an end user organization) can get a cloud environment up and running in a matter of weeks. The downside? Many of the processes you’re used to will be, well, old school. You have to be OK with that.

Forrester’s James Staten explained ways to deliver internal clouds using either approach in his report about why orgs aren’t ready for internal clouds in the first place. Both the evolutionary and the revolutionary approaches are worthy of more detail in an additional post or two in the near future, I think. But the next logical question – how do you decide what approach to take? – leads to the next bit of useful advice I’ve heard:

When in doubt, pick ‘C’. Even customers picking a more evolutionary approach won’t have the luxury of a paint-by-numbers scenario. Bill Claybrook’s recent in-depth Computerworld article about the bumpy ride that awaits many trying to deliver private clouds underscores this. “Few, if any, companies go through all of the above steps/stages in parallel,” he writes. “In fact, there is no single ‘correct’ way to transition to a private cloud environment from a traditional data center.”

So, the answer may not only be a gradual evolution to cloud by way of increasing steps of virtualization, automation, and orchestration. And it may not only be a full-fledged revolution. Instead, you want to do what’s right for each situation. That means the co-existence of both approaches.

How do you decide? It’s probably a matter of time. Time-to-market, that is. In situations where you have the luxury of a longer, more methodical approach, the evolutionary steps of extending virtualization, automation, and standardization strategies is probably the right way to go. In situations where there is a willingness, eagerness, or, frankly, a need to break some glass to get things done, viva la revolution! (As you probably can guess, the CA 3Tera product falls into this latter category.)

Learn from the past. Where people have gotten stuck with things like virtualization, you’ll need to find ways around it. Sometimes that will be helped by tools from folks like VMware themselves, broader management tools from players like, oh, say CA Technologies or a number of others. Sometimes that help will need to be in the form of experts. As I previously posted, we’ve just brought a few of these experts onboard with the 4Base Technologies acquisition, and I bet there will be a few consulting organizations in the crowd at VMworld. Just a hunch.

Back to Claybrook’s Computerworld article for a final thought: “[O]ne thing is very clear: If your IT organization is not willing to make the full investment for whatever part of its data center is transitioned to a private cloud, it will not have a cloud that exhibits agile provisioning, elasticity and lower costs per application.”

And that’s enough to ruin anyone’s summer vacation. See you at Moscone.

If you are attending VMworld 2010 and are interested in joining the San Francisco Cloud Club members for drinks and an informal get-together on Wednesday evening before INXS, go here to sign up.

CA, 4Base, and why consulting is a good idea, even in the era of self-service

Sure, self-service is one of the key attributes expected from cloud services. But contrary to what you may hear from vendors, it’s not always possible to do everything you need to do to using only something that comes in a box (or even if it’s provisioned as a service, as is increasingly the case). Getting virtualization broadly adopted in your organization or a cloud-style infrastructure running well in your shop is more complicated than that.

David Linthicum noted this in his InfoWorld column this week. “While private clouds seem like mounds of virtualized servers to many in IT,” he writes, “true private clouds are architecturally and operationally complex, and they require that the people behind the design and cloud creation know what they are doing. Unfortunately, few do these days.”

As strongly as folks want to believe that everything can be solved with a mouse click, the rise of boutique consulting firms focused on cloud and virtualization tells you that there’s a need here. And it’s something that CA Technologies decided to address head-on.

CA Technologies acquired 4Base Technology to fill customers’ real-world virtualization and cloud experience gap

As you might have seen from yesterday’s news, CA Technologies is pulling in a new type of expertise to offer customers help with the real-world issues that both virtualization and cloud computing create. We’ve acquired 4Base Technology, a small, focused consulting firm with people on the ground who know how these technologies and related operation models can and should work. They have seen the intricacies that IT departments are faced with daily when trying to go from a fluffy, conceptual future to a working implementation.

The folks at 4Base know the relevant technology from Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, and, especially, VMware. In fact, their partnership with VMware will be a great way for CA Technologies to expand our existing relationship with the market share leader in virtualization. It doesn’t hurt that 4Base is headquartered in Sunnyvale, not so very far from VMware’s sunny Palo Alto HQ (well, normally sunny. This summer, not so much).

Side-by-side collaboration with customers on virtualization & cloud

In rolling out virtualization and cloud computing for large enterprises, you really have to work side-by-side with your customers. I’ve seen this during my time here at CA Technologies and in my previous years at Cassatt. Leaving customers to figure everything out on their own is not a path to success.

In fact, I’ve heard many stories about customers struggling with what Andi Mann (from the CA Technologies virtualization management group) calls “virtual stall” as they proceed with their virtualization roll-outs. Customers start down the path, but for a variety of reasons that Andi describes, get stuck. One large customer we talked to in the Cassatt days knew they wanted to virtualize more of their thousands and thousands of servers, but really didn’t have the staff or understanding about what process to follow to get the benefits they were looking for. Or even identify what servers to virtualize next. So nothing moved. That’s not a good return on anyone’s investment.

I think this acquisition is a nice start toward helping customers address these issues (so does Andi Mann, by the way, according to his blog about 4Base). It shows that CA Technologies understands that the customer’s success isn’t something that should be left up to chance or just a best effort. It should be approached methodically using an approach that’s steeped in experience.

The 4Base Technology acquisition also means CA Technologies can start working with customers much earlier in their planning process – not just at the point in time when they need help installing and deploying software. That’s a shift for CA Technologies.

In fact, 4Base’s practices, service offerings, and skills will be a solid foundation to a team being formed in the services organization called the CA Global Virtualization and Cloud Consulting Team. The 4Base team has offerings ranging from virtualization operational readiness assessments, to virtualization capability assessment & strategy, to cloud-based advisory services. Watch for more interesting details on this group as it matures.

These types of offerings give CA Technologies the opportunity to provide the benefit of our experiences in planning out a customer’s cloud approach, and the opportunity to help see this through to its roll-out. Same with virtualization. Customers can make use of as little or as much of these capabilities as they need. But just having these offerings will help us be more proactive, rather than reactive – which I’m betting should please our customers.

But isn’t consulting doomed by the self-service aspects of cloud computing?

Beefing up on consulting capabilities, however, begs the question I alluded to at the start of this post: if all this cloud and virtualization stuff is supposed to be completely handled by one of the things that’s in the standard definition of cloud computing (“self-service” qualifies in most definitions these days), why is this capability even needed?

Along those same lines, I saw a recent article at CIO.com by Thomas Wailgum (@twailgum on Twitter) that discussed The Coming Upheaval in Tech Services, a report by Forrester analysts John McCarthy and Pascal Matzke, that was skeptical that the big consulting firms would be able to pull down successful services business in the cloud space in the short term.

My conversation on Twitter about that article with Laurie McLaughlin at CIO Magazine and others centered on the complexity issue: “Here's the quandary,” she tweeted, “who wants to [market] cloud as so complex that you should pay consultants to help?”

While it’s true that no one’s looking for complexity, we know that complexity is with us in current, more traditional IT environments. As we get early cloud computing implementations off the ground I don’t think we have much choice: complexity will follow IT to the cloud (and back) as well. Especially if you want to connect them in any way to existing environments. This article in IT World says, in fact, that the best way to build a career in cloud computing is to help people actually implement it.

Experience matters

It may be true that the larger consulting firms will have trouble building a business on cloud implementation consulting in the short term, but this is likely because they (so far) lack the best-practices and actual experiences that lead you to trust someone with a strategic project like a virtualization roll-out or cloud computing project.

“At the core of this problem,” said Linthicum in InfoWorld, “is the fact that we're hype-rich and architect-poor. IT pros who understand the core concepts behind SOA, private cloud architecture, governance, and security -- and the enabling technology they require -- are few and far between, and they clearly are not walking the halls of rank-and-file enterprises and government agencies.”

So, instead, I’m betting IT will want to hire the ones who have done it before. Says Linthicum: “What can you do to get ready? The most common advice is to hire people who know what they're doing and have the experience required to get it right the first time.”

And those folks are mostly – at this point, anyway – with small firms like 4Base. Keep tabs on what CA Technologies is planning to do from here. I’m hoping for a lot of real-world success as the company builds on what 4Base has been able to learn so far, expands their reach, and accelerates from there.

This article is cross-posted at the CA Cloud Storm Chasers blog.