The Black Liszt

Category: Cloud

Summary: Computer Data Centers and Networking

This is a summary with links to my posts on computer data centers and networks. The two subjects are intimately related because the whole point of networks is to connect computers with each other.

Like everything else in computing, fashions have a strong impact. A bit over a decade ago, the world of computing started yammering about “the cloud” and “virtualization.” These things were the hot subjects all the cool kids talked about. If you weren’t driving towards moving to the cloud, you were obsolete. The reality of course was much different.

https://blackliszt.com/2011/12/the-name-game-of-moving-to-the-cloud.html

The Cloud is just another virtue-signaling fashion word like Big Data.

https://blackliszt.com/2012/04/im-tired-of-hearing-about-big-data.html

The fact that the underlying reality hardly changes at all is way beyond the technical knowledge of the vast majority of the people who talk about it.

https://blackliszt.com/2012/05/the-cloud-and-virtualization.html

When something like “the cloud” heats up, all the vendors related to it rush to promote their products as ideally suited to the new thing.

https://blackliszt.com/2013/04/storage-vendors-in-the-cloud.html

The managers of large in-house data centers rarely know much about what they’re buying and what the alternatives could be. As a result, they often spend way more than they need to on equipment, something which competing cloud vendors are less likely to do.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/08/data-center-managers-spend-too-much-on-equipment.html

Like anything where people are involved, there are politics and fights over who should perform a given function. One of the classics is making replications of the data in DBMS’s for safety purposes. The data center people want to use their mechanism and the DBMS people want to use theirs. There is a clear right answer, but it only wins sometimes.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/03/replication-good-idea-storage-replication-nah.html

One of the key things people who write applications want is for them to “scale,” i.e., be able to handle any load without slowing down. The way some systems applications are built, based on decades-old designs, can get in the way. But there are solutions.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/02/obstacles-to-scaling-centralization.html

People also want their applications to continue to be available in the event of data center failure. For people working in data centers, there are perverse incentives at work.

https://blackliszt.com/2010/04/is-your-site-working-do-you-really-care.html

To be fair to data center managers, applications originally written decades ago expect to be able to run in modern data centers. It’s tough!

https://blackliszt.com/2010/01/paleolithic-mainframes-discovered-alive-in-data-center.html

Way back in 2015, it was clear that hardware had evolved to make dramatic improvements possible in software.

https://blackliszt.com/2015/08/the-data-center-of-the-future.html

With software people ignorantly focused on network-connected services as the way to build scalable applications, they assure that the incredible hardware power will be minimally utilized.

https://blackliszt.com/microservices/

Network neutrality was a hot topic and still comes up. The idea is that everyone should be charged the same for internet access and services. When you dig into the subject with actual knowledge of the technology, you see that the whole furor by virtue-signaling ignorance.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/11/net-neutrality-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it.html

One of the arguments made about net neutrality and legal privacy provisions was unusually divorced from reality.

https://blackliszt.com/2017/04/on-the-internet-youre-naked-and-for-sale.html

Years later, a weak form of net neutrality was repealed. There were demonstrations with US Senators making predictions about the disaster that would ensure. Here’s an analysis of the non-disaster a year later.

https://blackliszt.com/2019/06/the-aftermath-of-the-net-neutrality-disaster.html

August 31, 2023
Data Center Managers Spend too much on Equipment

There are lots of complicated IT decisions to make. Buying hardware should be one of the easy ones. Most data center managers do make it easy — for themselves. But way too expensive for their organizations.

Piles of money are spent on data center equipment

According to a recent Gartner report, more than $140 billion dollars will be spent on data center equipment this year. That sounds like a big number. It is a big number. But then when you read that IT spends more than twice that amount on enterprise software, and then three times that on IT services (nearly a trillion dollars), maybe it doesn't sound so big.

Getting back to reality, most of the companies I usually deal with don't spend billions, hundreds of millions or even tens of millions a year on equipment. But it's still a lot to them!

The Huge Spending is rarely examined

The smaller companies I'm closest to spend remarkably little time seriously questioning the huge (to them) amount of money they spend on hardware every year. Cutting the number by a significant factor can make a huge difference to them.

I see this curious lack of interest from the other side as well. Some of our companies have great equipment to sell that enables their customers to get more for less. While they love to go into details about how wonderful their stuff is and how hard it was to make it wonderful, the bottom line is simple: it delivers more and costs less. You would think this simple message would be easy to deliver, and quickly result in lines out the door to buy stuff. Not so! Getting more for less turns out to be pretty low on the priority list for most data center managers.

Bergdorf and Target

The fact is, most data center managers have no idea what they're buying, and their managers know even less. No one knows how much various things "should" cost, and it changes all the time anyway. If you claim you saved your organization money, it's hard for anyone to evaluate the truth of the claim, so you don't get much credit for it. Whereas if something goes wrong with stuff you bought, it's clear where the finger of blame will be pointing.

The situation is amazingly different than normal life. Most data center managers, in effect, shop at Bergdorf Goodman.

The Bergdorf name and high levels of service makes them feel like they'll come out looking sharp. What if they could support that new application (the new school year) at Target?

What if they could get lots of everyday things that are perfectly adequate for less there?

The trouble is that we all know about clothes. We have lots of personal experience wearing them and seeing them on others. We know what they mean and have an idea of what they cost. But when it comes to data center equipment, even most of the professionals are clueless!

The result is that they're petrified of making a mistake and taking the blame, so the default position is "buy more of what I already have." And above all, take comfort in big brands. This explains why the vast majority of data center purchases go to the computer equivalent of high-end, services-rich Bergdorf, while places like Target and Walmart remain tiny little places by comparison. The computer equivalent of Ikea, which requires assembly at home? Practically non-existent.

Computer people are supposed to be so smart!

Yes, the reputation is that computer people are smart, sophisticated folks. They deal with a deep, complex, rapidly-changing set of products and services. Their skills are increasingly at the heart of most organizations, both private and government. It certainly takes a great deal of skill to avoid embarassment with all the jargon, not to mention the realities of buying the optimal equipment at an optimal price.

There is a solution to the complexity. The buyers understand that very few people are in a position to judge how well they're doing at their jobs. So long as things don't break too often, they can spin how well they're doing. They understand that no one has a sense of what's expensive and what's cheap. The vendors get this too. They shower their clients with service and support. They're not like Target, they're like Bergdorf. They help you pick the right things, the things that will look great in your data center. If they cost five times more than you could get at one of those crappy, wander-the-aisles-you're-on-your-own stores, who cares? You come out lookin' good! And that's what matters.

It turns out the computer people are smart — at advancing their personal careers. They've figured it out and are executing well on it, and who's to say otherwise?

That's the status quo among data center managers.

Along comes the Cloud

There are storm clouds on the horizon. It's called, oddly enough, the "cloud," which is just a modern term for an outsourced data center that's easier to use than the ones usually built by data center managers. It works. It's flexible. It's cheap! Most of the people who build successful clouds make decisions that are closer to Target than Bergdorf when buying hardware. And, guess what, it works just fine.

Smart data center managers typically "embrace" the cloud, which in reality is along the lines of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer." But that's a long story for another time.

Data Center Spending

Data center managers have jobs that are as complex and challenging as they get. It's hard to learn the basics of everything they have to know, much less keep up with all the changes. Most of the ones who keep their jobs have evolved simple, effective methods for buying equipment, in collaboration (collusion?) with the leading vendors. The methods guarantee that more will be spent on data center equipment by whole-number factors, but the stuff they buy mostly works, and they get to have great careers. While the future is looking a bit "cloudy," I suspect that these resourceful people will work something out so that their own futures remain sunny.

August 12, 2014
Storage Vendors in the Cloud

When computer vendors encounter a major technology disruption, they respond the same way, with fervent claims that their products are really well suited for the new environment, when of course they are not. The response of storage vendors to the new ground-rules of the Cloud provide a timely illustration of this near-universal phenomenon.

Our Product is Definitely in Fashion

Computers
are complicated. Many people have trouble just keeping the buzzwords in
mind, much less understanding what, if anything, is behind them — much
less actually understanding things. It's particularly tough when a wave
of fashion sweeps the industry, as it so often seems to. Then everyone
but everyone immediately claims to be at the forefront of whatever that
fashion is.

This
was true years ago when the good thing to be in databases was
"relational," and suddenly every database vendor revealed that their
precious products were, in fact, "relational." At first I laughed. What
idiots these marketing people were — why anyone can tell that C's
product wasn't relational when it was built, isn't now, and probably
never will be. What a joke!

It turns out the joke was on me. Whatever the buzz-fashion-word of the moment, Industry-standard practice is to claim it. And for most people to accept the claim!

This is a big deal for the established vendors. There is a lot
of money riding on maintaining market share as the new trend takes
hold. When "relational" becomes the hot thing, and your marketing people
are any good at all, then by golly, our database is relational — because I say it is!

The Cloud — the Buzz-Fashion-Word of the Moment

Now
the Cloud is hot. Surprise, surprise — everyone's product claims to be
"cloud-ready," "Cloud-optimized" or whatever it is they think you want
to hear.

Everyone's product is just great for the Cloud. The major vendors:

and everyone else.

Inside the Marketing Department

Something like the following dialog probably happens inside each major vendor.

Bright New Kid: "I'm having real trouble producing that marketing piece about our products for the Cloud. I've read a lot about Cloud, and we just don't fit. I don't know what to do!"

Seasoned Veteran: "You're making it too hard. We make storage, right? Our storage is great, right? Cloud needs storage, just like everything else, right? So our storage is ideal for the Cloud. That's it!"

Bright New Kid: "I'm not so sure –"

Seasoned Veteran: "You're over-thinking it, kid. Our storage is great, so it's great for Cloud. Just get over yourself and write it."

What's Different about the Cloud?

There
is no cloud industry association to certify what the criteria are for
cloud appropriate. This is just as well, because the cloud is just another name for something we already do — run data centers.

But the reality is that things are different in the cloud.

The
bottom line is simple — it's the bottom line! Literally! Meaning, the
cloud is all about making things faster to implement and change; better
performing and more responsive; and less expensive. I make no secret of my preference here. But the point and my analysis would be the same even if I had no horse in the race. It's not about feature X or service Y, all of which are irrelevant or migrating up the stack in Cloud applications. It's about the bottom line, not just purchase price, but TCO.

The vast majority of data centers have been run essentially without competition. The people who pay the bills haven't been able to choose. It's the in-house data center or nothing.

With the Cloud, suddenly there's competition. Buyers compare on price and quality — and can even switch if the promises prove to be hollow ones! So things are different in the Cloud. The arm-waving is replaced by the simple measures of capacity, performance, energy and space utilization, management costs, and maintenance.

April 1, 2013
Storage For the Cloud
The massive movement to Cloud architectures puts new demands
on systems vendors that most of them are unprepared to meet, while at the same
time devaluing special features that many vendors used to differentiate their
products. Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in storage.

For years, storage has had its own silo in the data center,
SAN and/or NAS, with its own storage managers and administrators. They became
dependent on various storage-centric features of the different vendors.

The Cloud has disrupted this comfortable island of
automation.

The Cloud is all about reliable, low-cost self-service, with
tremendous automation and integration. Service, capacity and performance need
to be available on-demand, with no human intervention. Everything needs to be
able to grow and shrink as application needs change, with a sharp eye to
capacity utilization, since it’s easier than ever to switch Cloud vendors when
one stumbles or is simply no longer competitive. The same observations are true
of “private clouds.”

Virtualization is a key part of achieving Cloud goals, and
virtualization changes the rules of the systems game. Functions that were
traditionally part of storage are now performed as an integral part of
operating systems and/or virtualization software, to make them more agile.

Many companies have observed that traditional,
controller-centric, feature-rich SAN and NAS solutions are not appropriate for
the Cloud environment. They are simply using inexpensive JBOD’s for storage and
depending on massive replication by the file system to provide reliability,
typically making a minimum of 3 whole copies of the data, before backups, in
order to assure availability. If the alternative is an old-technology NAS or
SAN, this is a smart idea, which is why its use is growing so quickly.

X-IO has a whole different approach to storage. It’s not
NAS. It’s not SAN. It’s not cheap JBOD’s with a make-lots-of-copies filesystem.
It’s an intelligent storage node that not only uses, but enhances the drives from one of the major OEM
suppliers, Seagate. X-IO makes them better by a large margin, and it doesn’t do all the things that are no longer
needed in the Cloud environment. X-IO gives you more of what you do need for Cloud, and none of what you don’t need.

The X-IO approach to storage assumes you’re smart about
building your data center. You’ll take a building-block approach, with lots of
well-configured servers, network and storage blocks, with a layer of software
on top of it all to orchestrate it. You want each building block to be great at
what it does – do a lot, cost a little, and play its role in the overall system.

In the end, storage comes down to a small set of storage
components used by everyone. Rather than ignore the details of the drives and
wrap them in fancy, useless (in the Cloud) packaging like everyone else, X-IO adds value, real value, to the
drives themselves. This value persists as Seagate develops and releases new
drives – the 2 to 5X X-IO advantage over every other storage solution will ride the
waves of new drives into the future.

X-IO spent over 10 years of deep development of unique IP
(the first 5 as a Seagate division). Over that time it invented and hardened
algorithms and code and incorporated the experience from having thousands of
units in the field over many years. The results are clear, and differentiate
the X-IO storage brick approach from everyone else. Given a set of drives, X-IO
will make them:
- Perform at least twice as fast,
  often 3-4X anyone else when near capacity
- Deliver at least twice the throughput
- Fail at less than 1% the rate of
  anyone else
- Not require replacement during their
  5 year warranty
- Take much less space, often 30-50%
  less
- Require much less power, often 50%
  less
- Require less cooling
Finally, X-IO can incorporate SSD drives as required to
achieve even better performance, though this is needed much less often than
with other vendors.

In service operations, Cloud is measured on cost and SLA’s.
X-IO storage is all about cost and SLA’s. X-IO is the winning choice of
storage for Cloud.
March 25, 2013
In storage, there is X-IO, and then there are all the others…

In normal times, when there is no major technology
disruption in the market, there are two categories of storage companies.

Most storage revenue goes to the big names everyone knows
(EMC, NetApp, Etc.). These companies have comprehensive storage solutions and
services to meet nearly any need. Their products are solid and meet most
mainstream needs. They don’t innovate much and aren’t the most cost-effective,
but they work.

A good deal of attention in the storage industry goes to the
hot new companies, which are all about the latest technologies (e.g. SSD) or
features. They usually don’t do the old things as well as the established
companies. But by focusing on the hot new thing, they often do that one thing
pretty well, and so appeal to the usually tiny part of the market that feels
the corresponding pain. If they get market momentum, they are usually bought by
an established vendor.

This is the way it works. The established companies take most
of the revenue and do little innovation. There is always a flurry of new
companies trying to innovate, sometimes getting traction, and getting absorbed
by the established vendors.

Then there are technology disruptions. That’s when the rules
change. Suddenly the comprehensive product lines of the established vendors
don’t meet the needs of the emerging landscape very well (in spite of the
furious efforts of their marketing groups to claim they do), and most of the
new vendors don’t get the new situation and continue to do little but exploit
new devices or add features onto the existing pile.

Today’s Technically Disrupted World

That’s the situation we’re in today, with the combined
technology disruptions of data centers employing virtualization, moving to the
Cloud, and attempting to exploit Big Data. In addition, there is a new storage
technology, flash (SSD), which vendors are scrambling to exploit. The situation
is confusing for buyers and chaotic for vendors, since most vendors try to act
as though nothing fundamental has changed. But it has!

The Cloud is all about reliable, low-cost self-service, with
tremendous automation and integration. Service, capacity and performance need
to be available on-demand, with no human intervention. Everything needs to be
able to grow and shrink as application needs change, with a sharp eye to
capacity utilization, SLA's and costs, since it’s easier than ever to switch Cloud vendors when
one stumbles or is simply no longer competitive.

Virtualization is a key part of achieving Cloud goals, and
virtualization changes the rules of the systems game. Functions that were
traditionally part of storage are now performed as an integral part of
operating systems and/or virtualization software, to make them more agile. This
also drives the movement to software-defined networking and storage.

Big Data is the same only more so, with its emphasis on
linearly scalable arrays of compute nodes and storage nodes.

In response to this massive technology disruption, many
companies realize that brand-name vendors no longer make much sense, and are using inexpensive JBOD’s for storage and depending on
massive replication by the file system to provide reliability, typically making
a minimum of 3 whole copies of the data, before backups, in order to assure
availability. If the alternative is an old-technology NAS or SAN, this is a
smart idea, which is why its use is growing so quickly.

X-IO

And then there is X-IO. While X-IO is a storage company,
it’s different than all the others. It was built for a vision of computing that
we now call “Cloud.”

When X-IO was started about 10 years ago as the Advanced
Storage Architecture division of Seagate, its goal was to build highly compact,
efficient and reliable storage building blocks using Seagate HDD’s. While the
rest of the storage world was ignoring the details of the devices on which it
was built, piling on features and management systems that have become obsolete
in the Cloud world, the ASA group was inventing the technology of the storage
“brick,” now amounting to over 50 patents and a great deal of field-hardened
code that delivers more of what Cloud needs than any existing system, by far.

All storage vendors, whether established or emerging, use
the same drives from the same couple of leading vendors, mostly Seagate or
Western Digital (WD). All of them except X-IO package them in roughly the same
way and throw some features on top of them to “differentiate” themselves from
the other guys who use the same disks. It’s just as though all cars had one of
two different kinds of nearly-identical engines in them – each of the car
vendors would try to distract you from the engine, and try to get you to
appreciate how wonderful their steering wheels or cup holders were. That’s even
true of NAS and SAN, which seem so different, but really have the same engines
(disks) in them – it’s like one has front-wheel drive and the other rear-wheel
drive, but under most conditions, their speed, fuel efficiency, acceleration
and service frequency are identical.

The only storage vendor that is different is
X-IO, and X-IO’s difference just happens to be on all the dimensions that
matter most for the new world of Cloud, virtualization and Big Data.

X-IO’s Difference

First of all, X-IO doesn’t build feature-encrusted storage,
like a “trophy car.” It’s basic storage, a storage building block or brick,
ideal for plugging into nodes in a Cloud server farm under virtualization
control, or a Hadoop cluster.

Second, and most important, comes from its heritage as part
of Seagate. While X-IO uses the same Seagate drives that other vendors use, all
the other vendors just plug the drives in and proceed to concentrate on everything but the drive. X-IO’s technology, in sharp
contrast, is all about making that drive perform at its very best. You wouldn’t
think there would be much that could be done. But there is! X-IO reduces the
error rate of the drives so much (more than 100X) that they can be sealed in
containers, which makes them take much less space, consume less power and
generate less heat than the same drives in any other system. Then the X-IO
software actually gets more
than twice the I/O’s per
second (iops) from each drive than any other vendor.

Let’s think about a car rally. Most of the cars will vary
greatly in size, shape, color and gizmo’s. The X-IO car will be the plain one.
Imagine them in a distance race. Most of the cars will overheat or have to stop
for gas pretty often. Only the X-IO car will never overheat and get vastly
better mileage than the others. Many of the other cars will break down along
the way. X-IO won’t. Here’s the amazing thing: the X-IO car will cross the
finish line in half the time of its nearest competitor.

Now let’s think about sending an important package. Using
normal cars, you’d better send 3 identical packages by different routes to make
sure it gets there. With X-IO, you only need one car, and it will get there
faster than any other car, using less fuel.

In the world of Cloud, this translates into not having to buy expensive SSD drives to
get performance, though X-IO has them available if you need to go even faster
than X-IO normally goes. It translates into not having to over-provision to get
performance. It translates into not having to store 3 or more copies of
your data to assure it’s still there tomorrow. It translates into buying a half or third of the number of racks (or rows!) you
would normally have to buy in order to make a given amount of data available at
a given performance level. It translates into dramatically lower operating
costs for those racks, which at Cloud scale and Cloud competitive pricing can
be the difference between growing profitably and losing to the competition.

No other storage vendor offers these benefits. No one but X-IO.

Conclusion

The “cloud” as we know it today didn’t exist when the ASA
division of Seagate started inventing the deep technology that has now matured
in X-IO. But its simple mantra of getting more value out of devices was a
unique quest. No vendor has equaled it, and no one is even close. As new drives
are released, the X-IO advantage will persist as a multiplier on whatever
Seagate ships. All the other vendors will plug Seagate drives into their
systems and try to distract you, drawing your attention to “anything but” the
actual characteristics of the storage – its performance, space and power use,
reliability. These thing are old news in the old world of storage, but they’re
the only thing that matters in the new world of Cloud. Which is why there are
all the storage vendors – and then there’s X-IO.

March 18, 2013
The Cloud and Virtualization

I've long been impressed by the cancerous power technical terms have when they become fashionable. "The Cloud" and "Virtualization" appear to be setting new records for meaningless ubiquity in a crowded field.

Setting new Records

When terms like Cloud and Virtualization appear in Dilbert, it's like getting a "Best of Reality TV" award: they've made it to the rarified elite of complete vacuousness.

Technical Fashion

People throw around buzzwords all the time when talking about technology. It's necessary and unavoidable.

By some process that I understand as well as I understand clothing styles, some buzzwords descend below the level of providing a convenient short-hand for some well-understood thing and enter the hell of fashion. Starting life as useful buzzwords, they morph into buzz-fashion-words, lose any meaning they had, and become obsessions for everyone who feels they need to be touch with the latest stuff.

How the Devil Does his Work

There is usually a marketing side of Buzz-fashion-words. Perfectly useful terms don't turn to the dark side without lots of help. I would love to be able to channel C.S. Lewis and write a Screwtape Letters for Buzz-fashion-words, exposing the process of commercial interest and personal technical insecurity that leads innocent, useful words like "Virtualization" to be the "it" thing.

The Cloud

I've already talked about "The Cloud," the hottest thing in corporate data centers with the possible exceptions, of course, of "virtualization" and "Big Data."

The Cloud is an interesting case of a buzz-fashion-word that is like a magician's misdirection technique. The consumer internet has long since adopted a set of flexible, cost-effective techniques for delivering services to their customers. The people who work in corporations are also consumers, and are exposed to the ease and convenience of these techniques. They notice that consumer internet services follow different rules than the ones imposed by corporate IT, for example about the release process. They naturally wonder why they can't have the same. Over time, the wonder moves to requests which finally become demands. Corporate IT, years late, feels they have to respond. The result: "we are migrating our corporate data center to The Cloud." The Cloud, in this case, means "our name for what the consumer internet has done for years, but by giving a catchy, trendy name, we hope we'll trick you into thinking we're ahead of the curve instead of pathetically clumsy and slow." A classic case of misdirection by people who are anything but magicians.

Virtualization

Everyone knows what virtualization is. When I'm standing in front of you, I see the physical you. When I look at a picture of you, I see the virtual you. It may look real, but it's not. The latest in 3D movie technology makes such virtual reality more effective.

Computers are all about virtualization; computers are layers and layers of virtualization. The machine language of a computer is itself a phantom creation; the languages we write in all use a "virtual computer." The inexpensive part of computer storage, the physical devices, have layers of virtualization on the inside, and present an interface that the upper layers that use it like to think of as being "physical." In computing, virtualization is everywhere, and always has been.

In that context, what is this hot new trend, "Virtualization," that often appears together with "The Cloud?" I've gotten bored with torturing the people who use it by asking what they mean. Sometimes they mean a software product (for example, VMWare) or a Storage Area Network (virtualized storage) but they're trying to be fancier. Sometimes they mean "you know, that thing that everyone agrees is a good thing." You get the idea.

Technical Fashion Words

I've got to grow up. I've got to exercise discipline. Launching into lectures when buzz-fashion-words are slipped into conversation by innocent, otherwise intelligent people does no good. There is nothing to be gained by snarkiness.

I've decided to focus on the word "nice," a completely vacuous word signifying a vague, positive attitude.

From now on, when I hear a term like "the Cloud," I will translate it mentally to "nice," so that I too can smile and think positive thoughts. "We're migrating our data center to the Cloud" equals "We're making our data center nice." "We are experimenting with virtualization" equals "We're trying to be nicer and it's working well."

What's not to like? Isn't that nice?

May 25, 2012
The Name Game of “Moving to the Cloud”

The most recent in a long string of technology fashion trends, "the cloud" is hot. Like its hot technology fashion predecessors, it mostly consists of old ideas with a little spicy sauce on top and fresh packaging. If you mindlessly follow the fashion and just "go to the cloud," you are likely to end up in the same unhappy place where most mindless followers of fashion trends end up. What is "the cloud?" Simple. Clouds are belated enterprise IT implementations of the consumer internet.

What is the Cloud?
Is the "cloud" a new development? Well, it is a new name…

Ancient Clouds
I first encountered the cloud more than 40 years ago. Before that fateful meeting, my only experience with computers had been up close and personal. You had to get in the room, push buttons, flick switches, feed card decks or punched paper tape, listen to whirring sounds and watch blinking lights. Like with this computer:

But The Cloud! Ahhh, the Cloud…I remember it vividly.

Of course, things were a bit different then. We only had "fat clients," as in "takes two guys to lug it" fat. The principle was identical, however: I was in one place, with a "fat client" like this:

…and in another place was a computer like this:

…and everything worked.
Remember the importance of labelling, however: what we did 40 years ago wasn't "cloud computing," which hadn't been "invented" yet — it was merely "telecommunications."

Creating the Modern Cloud
Between then and now, lots of iterations of Moore's Law have come and gone. All the hardware has gotten smaller, cheaper and faster, while the software has gotten larger, more expensive and slower — but, fortunately for all of us, the rate of hardware evolution is greater than the rate of software devolution, giving the impression of net progress.

Where this leaves us, 40 years later, is faster remote computers talking with lighter remote clients over incredibly faster networks, all at lower cost. Sprinkle with a little extra software and drizzle with some marketing hoo-haw, and — kazaam! — you've got today's hottest technology fashion trend, Cloud Computing.

Clouds aren't always friendly
When we think of clouds, we're likely to think of this kind of cloud:

friendly, fluffy shapes floating in an otherwise sunny sky. When people think about cloud computing, this is the kind of cloud they seem to have in mind. But as we know, there are other kinds of clouds. There are dark, oppressive clouds that make everyone depressed. And there are really mean clouds, that wreck things horribly, creating the situations for which "disaster recovery plans" are made. Is this just a metaphor? Of course not. But just like financial fraud, the big, juicy examples are usually hushed up in order to protect the guilty.

OK, so What is "the Cloud"

There is a little-discussed trend that is deeply embarassing to IT professionals: there is a wide and growing gap between the use of computing technology in the consumer world and in the corporate, data center world. When the average user of corporate data systems is home, he works in a very advanced computing environment. His local machines and devices are amazingly capable and pretty easy to use. When connected to the internet, he can access a nearly limitless world of cloud computing resources — which are themselves largely run out of data centers that are remote from the people who set up and administer the software in them, and which contain an ever-evolving mix of dedicated and shared resources and services. The consumer internet has been based on a cloud computing model for a long time.

The corporate world is a whole different thing. The corporate world has been consumed with consolidating their diverse data centers. They are finally beginning to confront the extreme flexibility and ease of use that consumers enjoy every day, and are finding it increasingly difficult to explain why the computing they run with such high capital and operating costs are so cumbersome, error-prone and inflexible.

In this context, there is no way that anyone associated with corporate computing is ever going to plainly admit that what they are basically doing is trying to catch up with the consumer internet. So they must be doing something else. Oh, yeah — they're evolving to the latest, smartest trend in corporate computing, adopting the latest technologies and being really leading-edge: they're "moving to the cloud," but of course in a "smart" way, with large doses of "private cloud" technology along the way.

Summary
What's a "private cloud?" A corporate data center with a fancier name.

What's a corporation "moving to the cloud?" A corporate IT group trying to play catch-up with the consumer internet, and desperately trying to make it look like something else.

What's new about "cloud computing?" Very little; mostly naming and marketing fluff.

Is anything real happening when a corporation "moves to the cloud?" Sometimes yes! Sometimes, they really are copying a couple proven techniques of the consumer internet, slowly and at great cost and trouble, but nonetheless creeping towards a 21st century computing model.

December 1, 2011