Cloudwashing, Oracle, and the "logic" of IT product naming

After hearing cries of “cloudwashing” following nearly every product announcement from established vendors these days, I started pondering a bit about IT product naming: is it helping or hurting? From IBM in the ‘90s…to VMware’s recent moves…to Oracle’s newest product this week, some amusing patterns emerge that just have to give IT buyers a chuckle now and again.

Should you hang your hat on a single letter?

Coming out of VMworld 2010, I was convinced that the ‘v’ was the ‘e’ of our decade. You remember how the poor ‘e’ was abused in the ‘90s, don’t you? Everything was either e-commerce, e-business, or e-something-else. At BEA we had eWorld and the e-generation. The list went on. Never mind that “e-mail” had already been ubiquitous for quite a while. The reality was that the IT industry latched on to that ‘e’, sunk its teeth in, and held on like a pit bull. Marketers know a good thing when they see it.

The lesson of the ‘e’? Find a good letter – and stick with it.

Fast-forward 15 years. VMware has built a successful franchise around bringing the simple idea of virtualization to a new hardware platform. From that they inspired a lot of talk about VMs (virtual machines) and companies starting their names with a ‘v’ (including VMLogix, which was snapped up by Citrix at VMworld this year). Don’t forget all the talk of migrating work from P to V (P2V, if you’re really cool). I even got into the act myself in a previous blog reminding folks about the things IT misses out on if they assume V = P in a cloud environment.

And, as we all probably should have expected, the ‘v’ product naming began in earnest. First, vCenter and vSphere. Now vCloud, vShield, and vFabric. Kudos to VMware CTO Steve Herrod for having a little fun with this and poking fun at his marketing guys onstage at VMworld for the last-minute value-add of adding the ‘v’ to vCloud Director.

And so the ‘v’ brand was born and nurtured. Pretty effective. Add a ‘v’ in front of something and it’s gotta be something virtual. True? Not necessarily. Cool? Certainly. At least at the moment. Until the next big thing comes along, which just might be…well, cloud computing.

It’s ‘v’ -- but is it cloud?

A big focus of VMworld 2010 (and even as far back as 2008 – see this “golden oldie” post from former co-worker Ken Oestreich, now at Egenera) was underscoring their plans for taking customers to the cloud. So the big question is, will ‘v’ be able to get you there (brandwise, anyway…technology is a separate discussion). One vendor voted with its feet: VMOps changed its name to Cloud.com several months ago. The cloud, to them, was beyond just a ‘v’.

Time for the next letter to weigh in: the Big O

As Oracle Open World was underway this week, it’s only fitting that they put their stamp on things. The Big O, of course, went from cloud-bashing rants one year to having a full slate of cloud computing sessions at their conference the next. As they do. Larry's no dummy. And he did buy those Sun guys (still...it's fun to watch the head-to-head video clips courtesy of Matt Stansberry at SearchDataCenter here).

But Oracle took a different naming tact altogether. They boldly went where many had gone before and made the, um, logical choice of “Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud” for their new cloud-in-a-box offering. No ‘v’, no ‘e’, not even an ‘x’(a favorite of some of the Sun folks). Nope. Instead: “logic.”

Funny. I was just musing how IT needed more creativity in product naming because so many IT products seem to end with “-logic” these days. It’s actually quite impressive. Here’s my (partial) list: WebLogic, Pano Logic, LogLogic, MarkLogic, OpenLogic, Alert Logic, and even our own CA 3Tera AppLogic. Originally I even left off Science Logic, (the former) BEA AquaLogic, and the close permutations of the aforementioned VMLogix and Passlogix.

Logical or not, is Oracle cloudwashing with Exalogic?

Larry Dignan at ZDNet ranted about Larry Ellison going from cloud skeptic to cloudwasher. There are a couple good articles on the Exalogic announcement (Loraine Lawson lists quite a few), many very aggressive in their slam on Ellison trying to pitch a physical box as a cloud.

“Cloud computing is supposed to turn capital expenses into operating expenses,” writes Dignan. “Exalogic looks like more capital spending. …But is Exalogic really elastic? Is it really cloud?” Probably not, he concludes. “Simply put, Oracle’s Exalogic box gives you capacity on demand because you’re still buying more capacity than you need.”

Others marveled (or, with all the Iron Man references, Marveled) at the high-end nature of the machinery involved – it’s certainly a far cry from stringing together a set of disposable commodity boxes – and the corresponding high-end price. My CA Technologies colleague Jeff Abbott posted a few questions about the cloud-in-a-box concept in the first place. He wondered if these kinds of systems aren't actually against the self-interest of the customer -- and the vendor -- in the long run.

Still others called Exalogic a “credible offering” and thought it would have a big impact. It’s certainly a big vote in favor of internal clouds. As Ellison said in no uncertain terms, “we believe customers will build their own private clouds behind their firewalls.” And the product certainly backs up that premise.

Time to bring on the cloud

I think it is interesting how similar Exalogic is in name alone to brands Oracle already owns – products that really had nothing to do with the cloud. At least, not originally.

The name gives Oracle the ability to fit this product line in with the software they bought with BEA, the hardware they bought with Sun, and attach it to the cause of the moment – cloud computing. And that seems to be exactly what they want to do, no matter what they said a few years ago.

The good news: they can do all of that without having to put an ‘o’ in front of all their product names. (Don’t laugh: others like MorphLabs are trying it. But I guess it’s not so wacky – sticking an ‘i’ front of things certainly hasn’t hurt Mr. Jobs’ revenues over the past decade.) However, don’t expect anything to stop them from injecting “cloud” into every one of their customer conversations.

In the end, before proclaiming this the decade of ‘v’, or getting to upset about Oracle’s choices one way or the other, it’s worth remembering that all of these products will be judged by whether they do what they’re supposed to – and at an acceptable price – for two other important letters: IT.

VMworld 2010: Cloud "in excess"? Some thoughts on "What You Need"

VMware threw another great VMworld event this year. If you didn’t attend, you missed another step in VMware’s evolution toward being a very mainstream, enterprise-focused software vendor. They are at that stage as a vendor where they are reaching out beyond what they grew up doing and are trying to expand into something broader and different.

Last year, in my book, was a bit light on news (aside from explaining their early plans for SpringSource) and more about describing these big ambitions. This year, however, was about trying to look the part and making sure they had credible solutions and stories to tell their enterprise customers, thanks to a few well-timed acquisitions.

Oh, and I guess I should mention the cloud. VMware certainly did.

Ironically, VMware had INXS play their big party – who ended their show that night with their song “Don’t Change.” Fellow punster Greg Schulz pointed out on his StorageIO blog that the song title may have felt diametrically opposed to the message that VMware was trying to tell everyone all week. Maybe the title should have been “It’s Time for a Change and We Call It the Cloud.”

But, actually, I think INXS had it right. For more details on why, I put together an INXS-themed list of my take-aways for customers now that they’ve left Moscone and are finding themselves back from VMworld 2010, staring at their day jobs.

Here’s some help figuring out What You Need:

New Sensation: All the talk of cloud certainly came to a head. VMware definitely talked about it “in excess” at the event. Paul Maritz had lots to say both in his keynote and in his panel of service providers about their announcements, including the much-leaked and much-anticipated vCloud Director product (formerly known as Project Redwood). Industry-watcher Bernard Golden said he saw the cloud discussion accelerate very seriously in his CIO.com blog about the show, noting that not only were VMware and its partners taking the next steps to make cloud “more consumable in real-world environments,” but also that at the show there was a “palpable feeling that cloud computing represents the next platform shift in computing…but on a different software construct that abstracts and makes agile the previous generation of hardware.”

Things to watch out for? Bernard mentioned a favorite of mine that I bring up in any Cloud 101 discussion I have: the “one thing that wasn’t discussed much was the process and organizational challenge caused by implementing a cloud computing environment.” It’s a good thing to have help with (and, yes, that reminds me that I did get a chance to meet up with several of our just-joined 4Base consulting folks during the week).

Listen Like Thieves: Or, maybe: here are some suggestions on how to foil those thieves, especially when it comes to your IT environment. VMware acknowledged an important angle that customers have been talking about for a long time: security is a big issue for both virtualization and cloud computing. They bought TriCipher and announced vShield offerings, showing their interest in delivering solutions in this space. In fact, it was an action-packed week on the security front: CA Technologies also acquired Arcot Monday as the show was getting started.

Don’t Change: Back to my comment about how much change should be a part of your IT operations theme song. Look at it this way: before heading to San Francisco last week, those of you in IT had been worried about a big, complex set of management and operations issues. Spending a week hearing about the newest virtualization and cloud deliverables doesn’t change the reality of what you go back to. Don’t toss out your view of what’s important; instead, use those requirements to evaluate everything you heard last week.

Never Tear Us Apart: There is a virtualized world of IT, but there continues to be a physical world as well. Andi Mann (from CA Technologies) commented in IT World Canada that even though IT is now deploying more new virtual servers than physical ones, companies' infrastructures are still only about 30% virtualized.

Meaning, of course, that you still need to manage and optimize both parts -- the virtual and the physical. Together. The virtual world that VMware had you looking at closely for 4 days is not the sum total of your environment, so don’t forget to consider management, automation, and control capabilities that understand that, too.

Devil Inside: VMworld continues to serve as an industry gathering about virtualization – and now cloud. That’s very much to their benefit. It does provide an excellent meeting place for customers and vendors, but one in which VMware is very much in control of the discussion and topics. My suggestion: push back. I made some suggestions before the event about how to sort through the flood of announcements coming. Now’s the time to figure out what’s real from VMware and the other vendors. Make sure you have real opportunities to get hands-on. It’s the only way you’re going to find out what’s ready for prime time. It's the only way to find out what makes good economic sense for your business model as an enterprise or a service provider. It's also the only way to find out what does and doesn’t work at this point.

No matter how you look at it, the event was a Kick. (For a good summary of the event in addition to Bernard Golden's, take a look at this Network World article from Jon Brodkin and this blog post from CA's Stephen Elliot. For a take on "Why VMworld was Underwhelming," read Derrick Harris's GigaOM Pro write up [subscription required].) I’m glad to have used the event to meet up with the San Francisco Cloud Club folks once again. It’s a very cloud-savvy and interesting crew.

And, before this year’s VMworld begins to Disappear from the view, I’ll offer a tip of the hat and add my thanks to the folks at VMworld for hosting us all. It was certainly in their best interest to put on the show, and now it’s up to the rest of us to make sure it was in ours as well.

CA snags Arcot: Another step for cloud identity & security

Not everything in the news this week is about VMworld. CA Technologies pulled in an interesting new security-related acquisition today, one that brings in solutions focused on advanced authentication and on-line fraud detection. The idea is to leverage these capabilities to help solve some of the issues in cloud computing related to one of the key concepts that needs solving: managing identity.

As those who watch this space know, security has been on the minds of folks in cloud computing since the term appeared, with the topic topping the list of cloud worries in survey after survey.

The company being acquired is Arcot Systems, Inc., a 165-person firm based in Sunnyvale, Calif., which has a pretty healthy business in this space.

Arcot will team with CA Technologies’ security group’s and on their existing focus on Identity and Access Management (something that the folks in the know on this stuff call, well, IAM). In fact, the CA security folks tell me they think this move does quite a bit to accelerate CA Technologies’ IAM cloud service offering.

Arcot has quite a bit of street cred, it seems. Currently, their solutions (which can be on-premise or cloud-based) are used to prevent fraudulent transactions for about 1 million credit card transactions a day.

“Identity is a critical area for security whether you’re talking about in-house or the cloud,” noted Arcot’s president & CEO Ram Varadarajan in the press release. They boast 120 million identities verified by their solutions today. The company has been around since 1997, has 35 patents awarded or pending, and co-invented the 3-D Secure protocol for online payment security with a little company you may have heard of called Visa.

Not too shabby. Especially on the heels of other security-related M&A activity, including Intel gobbling up McAfee, which also mentioned the cloud angle.

For more granular details, though, I’ll direct you to folks in the know on this topic. The CA Technologies cloud security strategy (articulated here) has 3 pieces to it:

· Enable organizations to extend existing on-premises IAM systems to support cloud applications and services;
· Provide IAM technology to cloud providers to secure their services – whether public, private or hybrid; and
· Enable IAM services from the cloud

And, for a bit more detail about this deal in particular, check out today’s press release, Arcot’s website, or Matthew Gardiner’s blog post.

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

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.

Despite the promise of cloud, are we treating virtual servers like physical ones?

RightScale had some great data about usage of Amazon EC2 recently that described how cloud computing is evolving, or at least how their portion of that business is progressing. At first glance, it certainly sounds as if things are maturing nicely.

However, a couple things they reported caused me to question whether this trend is as rosy as it seems initially, or if IT is actually falling into a bit of a trap in the way it's starting to use the public cloud. I’ll explain:

Cloud servers are increasing in quantity, getting bigger, and living longer, but…

The RightScale data showed that comparing June 2009 with June 2010, there are now more customers using their service and each of those customers are launching more and more EC2 servers. (I did see a contradictory comment about this from Antonio Piraino of Tier1 Research, but I’ll take the RightScale info at face value for the moment.)

Not only have the number of cloud customers increased, but customers are also using bigger servers (12% used “extra large” server sizes last June, jumping up to 56% this June) and using those servers longer (3.3% of servers were running after 30 days in June 2009, 6.3% did so this June).

CTO Thorsten von Eicken acknowledged in his post that “of course this is not an exact science because some production server arrays grow and shrink on a daily basis and some test servers are left running all the time.” However, he concluded that there is a “clear trend that shows a continued move of business critical computing to the cloud.”

These data points, and the commentary around them, were interesting enough to catch the attention of folks like analyst James Staten from Forrester and CNET blogger James Urquhart on Twitter, and Ben Kepes from GigaOM picked it up as well. IDC analyst Matt Eastwood "knowing a thing or two about the server market" (as he said) was intrigued by the thread about the growing & aging of cloud servers, too, noting that average sales prices (ASPs) are rising.

Matt's comments especially got me thinking about about what parallels the usage of cloud servers might have with the way the on-premise, physical server market progressed. If people are starting to use cloud servers longer, perhaps IT is doing what they do on physical boxes inside their four walls -- moving more constant, permanent workloads to those servers.

Sounds like proof that cloud computing is gaining traction, right? Sure, but it cause me to ask this question:

As cloud computing matures, will "rented" server usage in the cloud start to follow the usage pattern of "owned," on-premise server usage?

And, more specifically:

Despite all the promises of cloud computing, are we actually just treating virtual servers in the cloud like physical ones? Are we simply using cloud computing as another type of static outsourcing?

One potential explanation for the RightScale numbers is that we are simply in the early stages of this market and we in IT operations are doing what we know best in this new environment. In other words, now that some companies have tried using the public cloud (in this particular case, Amazon EC2) for short-term testing and development projects, they’ve moved some more “production”-style workloads to the cloud. They’re transplanting what they know into a new environment that on the surface seems to be cheaper.

These production apps, instead of being the apps that folks such as Joe Weinman from AT&T described in his Cloudonomics posts as being ideal for the cloud because of their highly variable usage patterns, have very steady demand. This, after all, matches the increase in longer-running servers that von Eicken wrote about.

And that seems like a bad thing to me.

Why?

Because moving applications that have relatively steady, consistent workloads to the cloud means that customers are missing one of the most important benefits of cloud computing: elasticity.

Elasticity is the component that makes a cloud architecture fundamentally different from just an outsourced application. It is also the component of the cloud computing concept that can have the most profound economic effect on an IT budget and, in the end, a company’s business. If you only pay for what you use and can handle big swings in demand by having additional compute resources automatically provisioned when required and decommissioned when not, you don’t need those resources sitting around doing nothing the rest of the time. Regardless of whether they are on-premise or in the cloud.

In fact, this ability to automatically add and subtract the computing resources that an application needs has been a bit of a Holy Grail for a while. It’s at the heart of Gartner’s real-time infrastructure concept and other descriptions of how infrastructure is evolving to more closely match your business.

Except that maybe the data say that it isn’t what’s actually happening.

Falling into a V=P trap?

My advice for companies trying out cloud-based services of any sort is to think about what they want out of this. Don’t fall into a V=P trap: that is, don’t think of virtual servers and physical servers the same way.

Separating servers from hardware by making them virtual, and then relocating them anywhere and everywhere into the cloud gives you new possibilities. The time, effort, and knowledge it’s going to take to simply outsource an application may seem worth it in the short term, but many of the public cloud’s benefits are simply not going to materialize if you stop there. Lower cost is probably one of those. Over the long haul a steady-state app may not actually benefit from using a public cloud. The math is the math: be sure you’ve figured out your reasoning and end game before agreeing to pay month after month after month.

Instead, I’d suggest looking for applications in need of different requirements, things you could not get from the part of your infrastructure that's siloed and static today. Even if it is being run by someone else. Definitely take a peek at the math that Joe Weinman did on the industry’s behalf or other sources as you are deciding.

Of course, who am I to argue with what customers are actually doing?

It may turn out that people aren’t actually moving production or constant-workload apps at all. There may be an as-yet-undescribed reason for what RightScale’s data show, or a still-to-be-explained use case that we’re missing.

And if there is, I'm eager to hear it. We should all be flexible and, well, elastic enough to accept that explanation, too.

Video: Time machines and other good uses for cloud computing

The folks working on our 3Tera AppLogic product revved up a short video that I thought was a good illustration of a couple ways customers are using the product to help them.

Plus, honestly, I thought the team came up with some amusing names for the not-so-amusing quandaries that customers are in – the things they are using cloud computing to solve. Add a groovy beat behind it all, and it’s certainly not the worst way to spend 3 minutes and 36 seconds on YouTube.

See if any of these sound familiar for big enterprises:

Time machine. The business needs their applications released now. Sure, they didn’t ask IT to start working on this until, well, now. What they need is a time machine. Or at least a way to help dramatically accelerate their speed to market. “Delay is not an option.” Oh, gee, thanks.

New markets/old problems. You need your applications rolled out in new places around the world. Really, this kind of replication sounds like it should be simple. I mean, they are the same applications, after all. And it is simple -- unless you’re the guy trying to help Bangalore do all this remotely from Chicago.

Full plate. Those geniuses in marketing (hey!) are throwing requirements at IT that are going to stretch the infrastructure as it is. Then they add more. It’s a big problem that needs on-demand scalability. A lot of it.

(OK, so don’t expect it to be as amusing as the conference call spoof Dave Grady did that’s going around. But that’s pretty hard to live up to.)

Here’s the video:




Hint: I don’t think I’d be giving anything away if I told you that each of these scenarios has a happy ending. That’s why we brought the 3Tera guys onboard to be part of a cloud solution for customers, after all.

Any good ones they missed? Comments welcome.