December 8, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Certified Private Clouds
December 9, 2010 at 6:26 am
Cloud computing is becoming more popular? Maybe to techies, but as one who spends a good deal of time each month with clients in some very large companies, I can tell you directly, Cloud computing is not only confusing to decision makers, but Microsoft's marketing is only adding to the confusion.
Just a couple weeks ago I was with a client who asked me about the commercial Microsoft is now running where some 'hip dude' on his laptop can't get something done, and then we hear; "To the cloud!!!". Then the voice-over says "You can share documents, [etc. etc.]..." This client said to me; "This is something we are already doing with what we have today!!! Why would I need to spend a fortune to do it a different way???"
Fact is, they don't need to spend a fortune, and as well, the investment in the Cloud would not really get them anything new or 'better'. For this particular client there was also the caveat; "Hey, these guys gave us Vista which was supposed to be 'better' - and yet we simply bypassed it..." That's not a great deal of trust in Microsoft's marketing, let alone their development and technical capability.
And that is what I am seeing a lot of in the field. High level decision makers see the cloud as another huge investment in something they already have, don't need, and only the techies are frothing at the mouth to get it - which to C-level decision makers generates some real suspicion.
If Microsoft wants people to adopt Cloud computing, they need to step out of the techie arena and start developing compelling arguments for C-level decision makers. 'Hip dudes' announcing "To the Cloud!!!" is not going to cut it.
December 9, 2010 at 8:13 am
Do not underestimate the government factor.
When you have your systems, you are responsible to the territory you operate in. Cloud providers (where you have no idea where information is kept) can be targeted by a whatever governments they, or their facilities are beholden to. Not comforting.
Even within the US, how much commitment is there? ATT & other phone companies rolled right over when the US government illegally asked for private phone records, they certainly had no enthusiasm to challenge illegal requests. When you control your data, your legal department can determine if challenges need to be made.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
December 9, 2010 at 9:08 am
blandry (12/9/2010)
Just a couple weeks ago I was with a client who asked me about the commercial Microsoft is now running where some 'hip dude' on his laptop can't get something done, and then we hear; "To the cloud!!!". Then the voice-over says "You can share documents, [etc. etc.]..." This client said to me; "This is something we are already doing with what we have today!!! Why would I need to spend a fortune to do it a different way???"
Thank you!!! That's exactly what I've been saying when those silly commercials come on. We've had that capability for years. Except it wasn't called by a cool new buzzword...it's simply been called a network...or file sharing, shared services, etc. It really seems to be the same old thing repackaged yet again.
I attended Oracle OpenWorld in September, where Larry Ellison was touting the new "cloud in a box" (called ExaLogic). It sounds like a very large server that comes with a prepackaged OS and application that allows you to allocate disk space & resources to multiple projects. To me, it sounds a whole lot like what we already use with our MS servers to create virtual servers that are all hosted on one large physical server/SAN.
I'm definitely not sold on the whole "cloud" concept - so if I'm missing something that's truly new and unique, please enlighten me! :hehe:
December 9, 2010 at 9:26 am
To me, the cloud commercials highlight the issues of sharing and not being overly dependent on a piece of hardware that can fail. It's a good thing for consumers, many of whom struggle to get things done online. Heck, I know sharing files with people can be a hassle if you can't email them.
In terms of IT, the point I was making is that private clouds make a lot of sense. Deploying to a SQL Server in the cloud, using a database name instead of worrying about ServerA or ServerB, makes a lot of sense to me.
As far as decision makers, they can say what they want. Ultimately they'll get sold something by someone. Public cloud, private, depends on who woos them the best.
December 9, 2010 at 9:52 am
Fortunately I don't think that advert has made it to the UK yet! I think the biggest problem is that no one has really decided what "The Cloud" is. There has been so much hype over the very loose concept in recent years, that every man and his dog has jumped on the bandwaggon and declared their service "in the cloud". Hell, I've seen at least one ISP market their POP3 mail service as being in the cloud... so it's in the cloud, as opposed to where exactly?
The upshot of this has been a general watering down of the whole concept, so that when something truly impressive comes along no one really pays attention as they think they've heard it all before.
For me the true meaning of the cloud is an abstraction layer between physical servers and hardware and the "servers" running on them. Essentially like some of the high end VMWare offerings but perhaps more so.
From a server admin point of view you want a server which will cope with increased demand, hardware failure, and site outages. Put your server in "the cloud" and that should just happen. No worrying about where it's physically located, how to increase capacity during busy periods, how to get the data replicted to a secondary site in case the primary goes offline, how to switch over to that secondary site etc, "The cloud" handles that.
Now, personally I'm a sys admin, so I want all that for ease of administration, but I also want to be able to control the underlying architecture as well, hell, we sell hosting to our clients using our own hardware, why would we want to rent hardware / infrastructure from someone else to do it and make less money!
Essentially there's nothing about "the cloud" that is completely new, but I do think in the case of the newer offerings they essentially package the whole thing together, but that's not how they're trying to sell it, and in my opinion that's their mistake. I'd bet most management think it's all techie rubbish, and most techies think it's marketing rubbish.
I can understand why MS are going down the certified route in a way, but I do wish there was a half way house for it. Not all of us are in a position to just replace everything, and it would be nice to have the option with a little more work to introduce some of these technologies to an existing setup.
December 9, 2010 at 2:28 pm
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, every factory had its own power plant. As utility companies grew and standards developed, much of the factory equipment that relied on these individual power systems were upgraded or converted to use the increasing reliable power sources that the electrical utility companies provided. Individual factory power plants were eventually abandoned and dismantled.
I see a similar parallel occurring with the Information Revolution. As reliability and standards develop, I believe that the server room / datacenter will eventually fall away as a requirement that every business must develop and maintain as utility solutions or commodity services providers become mainstream.
While it is comforting to think that we have control of our systems, we really don't. if someone is earning a living trying to compromise our systems, they probably have more time available to reach their goal than I have to preventing them. For most businesses It’s a cost vs risk calculation. I think that given the option, would prefer to share security resources and costs with a larger pool whenever possible as opposed to hoping that all the suggestions from experts and best practices will cover all my bases.
My career has progressed from feeling the need to review the internals of every server I installed SQL Server on, to never having seen the cities where most of the systems I manage reside. So in a way, the SQL Servers that I set up and manage in Virtual Machines, on equipment in a city I’ll probably never visit is as tangible as a cloud. In any case, I just need to be sure that I have tested plans to recover these systems when there is a failure.
Most businesses maintain backup generators for emergency lighting and to support critical operations, many businesses will still maintain some backup systems or parallel services with service providers to support many of their critical business systems.
Whatever catchy name someone wants to call it, I believe that the email, file, web, application, and database services abstraction is a natural progression in the evolution of the Information Revolution.
December 9, 2010 at 3:06 pm
An update: I found this site today, and apparently Microsoft is really going to push this forward: Microsoft Private Cloud
December 15, 2010 at 10:13 am
Keith Langmead (12/9/2010)
... I think the biggest problem is that no one has really decided what "The Cloud" is.
In the olden days, computers were very expensive so one company would buy a computer and rent cpu time and storage space to other companies. This service was called "time-sharing".
The Cloud is just time-sharing with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo added in and - just possibly - a new feature or three.
Time-sharing was discarded by organizations as computers became cheap to purchase and run.
Since they continute to get cheaper and easier to run, I'm not expecting a big move back to time-sharing.
Then again, 50% of all people are dumber than average (or is that just "mean" on my part 😎 ), so this might become popular after all.
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